Amazon: Game Downloads, Webinars, Positioned to Attack Google

Back in August, I suggested that Amazon was strategically pushing far past its retailing business model. If you include any sort of electronic retailing, some new business areas that the company is undertaking provide additional support of the view. Two of the latest are downloadable games and selling webinars. But it also seems logical to ask if be long before the natural outcome of Amazon's cloud activities and massive information on consumers is a set of crosshairs on Google.

• Mar 16, 2009

Big Business Fighting Top-Level Domain Change

The next big Internet land-grab is about to begin, and the fight between big business fearing trademark infringement and new companies poised to exploit virgin territory is heating up. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is planning to issue new top-level domains (TLDs...

• Mar 13, 2009

Tim Armstrong's No-Lose Proposition as Chief of AOL

AOL's new soon-to-be CEO Tim Armstrong will be in for quite a sea change from his previous gig at Google. The lingering question: Why would you leave Google for AOL? It's an interesting question raised by Sam Diaz offline. For all the talk (Techmeme) about Armstrong's enthusiasm about a "...

• Mar 13, 2009

Google Gunning For eBay, PayPal

Google is going after Skype, eBay's voice-over-IP (VoIP) phone service and, more importantly, PayPal, its online payment business. Google announced that it's releasing Google Voice to registered users of Grand Central, the VoIP company it acquired in June 2007, and will release it to the general ...

• Mar 12, 2009

Is EMC Searching For Search?

EMC could be in the market for an enterprise search company. As opposed to Web search, enterprise search is used by companies internally to help comply with legal discovery requirements, identify documents that can be archived in inexpensive storage devices, and increasingly, to improve productiv...

• Mar 13, 2009

Information: the Real Cloud Computing

With all the talk of cloud computing from this vendor and that analyst, it is easy to naturally confuse the cloud with a series of scalable technologies interconnected via the Internet. But that really misses the point. Technology is just the miss. The real thunder and lightning comes from the information, and how companies put that together. Just look at MediaCloud, a project of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University in cooperation with Calais, a semantic Web tool from Thomson Reuters.

• Mar 12, 2009

EMC, VMware Share Data Center Dreams

From the looks of things, rumors that EMC was considering a sale of its 84% stake in server virtualization market leader VMware were wrong. If the companies' leaders are to be believed--and there's no reason to doubt them at this point--they see the fates of their companies as being inextricably ...

• Mar 11, 2009

Will Google Behavioral Ads Increase Criticism and Danger?

Google has announced that it will enter the world of behavioral advertising. Although the company is trying to frame the move as "making ads more interesting," chances are that the driving factor is trying to shore up revenue at an uncertain time. The big question is, even with assurances of the ability to opt out, whether this will only add fuel to the fire of criticism that has been following the company.

• Mar 11, 2009

Cisco, Nortel, Avaya, Microsoft and... Shoretel?

Cisco, Microsoft, Avaya and Nortel are familiar names, but John Combs would like to make sure people keep Shoretel in mind as well, even if he has to throw a few sharp elbows to get a seat at the table. Combs is the chairman and CEO of Shortel, which makes IP-based unified communications (UC) sys...

• Mar 10, 2009

HP: Earnings, Product Revenue, R&D All Drop Year to Year

Hewlett-Packard's latest 10-Q, for the first fiscal 2009 quarter that ended January 31, 2009, shows the continued march of the company away from product sales and toward services. Net revenue was flat for the period, with the quarter in 2008 showing $28.5 billion and, in 2009, $28.8 billion. The big difference is in the revenue split between products and services â€" and a big drop in some other numbers

• Mar 10, 2009

Is Apple Turning Its Back on the Enterprise?

There's been another round of churning in news about Apple. First, Valleywag reports a layoff of 50 salespeople from the enterprise group. Then Apple denied the rumors. Yesterday, Tom Krazit at CNET said that additional sources had confirmed the layoffs, despite Apple's public statement to the contrary. The immediate reaction has been speculation on whether Apple might be lying and what, if anything, this could mean about its business. I think the real question is whether Apple is performing one of its periodic strategic adjustments that in this case will essentially write off interest in corporate sales and continue its move toward becoming a virtually pure-play consumer electronics company.

• Mar 10, 2009

Femtocells May Help Avoid Wireless Price War

Femtocells, a technology little-known outside the wireless world, promise better indoor cellular service and a new way for wireless carriers to reduce costs and increase revenues without having to resort to price wars. Femtocells are devices connected to broadband Internet connections that allow ...

• Mar 9, 2009

Tech Law: Mac Clones (Still); Psion Counters, Red Hat and JBoss, More

Apple and Psystar get closer to discovery; TMI countersues Audiovox for alleged patent infringement; Psion countersues Intel over netbook trademark; Software Tree latest to sue Red Hat over JBoss; RIM recording employee phone calls to protect IP

• Mar 9, 2009

Expect SAP To Play Off IBM, Microsoft: Analyst

IBM got a leg up on Microsoft this week at the CeBIT show in Hanover, Germany, when it performed a "groundbreaking technology demonstration," moving a live SAP application from one cloud-based server to another. This would hardly be considered groundbreaking in the context of an on-premise data c...

• Mar 6, 2009

Microsoft: Windows 7 About Business, Not Features

Microsoft's Windows 7 will introduce far fewer features (beefed up security and improved mobility behind the firewall just about sums it up) than one might expect from a new operating system. The new OS also ditches the concept of "Ultimate Extras," a poorly-executed effort to up-sell users to th...

• Mar 5, 2009

Show More