[Software News] Top Issues For IT Pros: The War, Terrorism, Internet Regulation, Privacy
[Software News] Facebook settles text-messaging suit
SAN JOSE, Calif. - Pressured by a lawsuit, Internet social network Facebook Inc. will adopt new measures to prevent its 58 million members from sending text messages to recycled cell phone numbers. The settlement was announced Tuesday by attorneys for an Indiana woman who claimed Palo Alto-based Facebook had been profiting from text messages sent by its members after the intended recipients had give...
[Software News] MPAA wins copyright case against TorrentSpy
San Francisco - The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has won a lawsuit against the operators of TorrentSpy.com, with the judge ruling in favor of the MPAA because the Web site operators tampered with evidence. In a ruling that could have implications for the privacy of Web site users, Judge Florence-Marie Cooper of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, rule...
[Software News] China anti-graft Web site felled by "too many hits"
BEIJING (Reuters) - A Chinese government Web site encouraging citizens to report corruption crashed on its first day under the weight of too many hits. China's National Bureau of Corruption Prevention, formed in September after a string of high-profile scandals involving government officials, launched its official Web site (yfj.mos.gov.cn) on Tuesday. By the afternoon, the Web site cou...
[Software News] Ask an Expert: Web ads are an amazing marketing tool
Q: One thing we want to do next year is more online advertising, but I don't know much really about how that works. Could you explain? - Steve A. One of the best things that has ever happened to small business insofar as marketing goes is the Internet. For almost ever, if a small business wanted to attract customers using the media, it had to cast a wide net. That is, the small business needed t...
[Software News] Frustrated Saudi youth take a shine to YouTube
RIYADH (Reuters) - Illegal stunts in cars, joyriding, bullying and political dissent -- video-sharing Web site YouTube has taken off in Saudi Arabia. The site owned by search engine giant Google Inc has seen tens of thousands in the conservative Saudi kingdom upload and download a broad range of thrill-seeking, political and just downright bizarre video clips in a surge of expression. Much...
[Software News] Exec: Google is a 'Native Web Speaker'
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.— Sometimes it's the little things in life that lead to great epiphanies. Vic Gundotra, a vice president of engineering, has one such story to tell, and his daughter to thank, for his joining Google. It happened at a dinner party. When one of his friends asked him a question he didn't know the answer to, Gundotra's four-year-old daughter, Tiger, asked where h...
[Software News] US to compensate EU, others for online gambling ban
WASHINGTON (AFP) - The United States said Monday it would widen access to some of its services to compensate the European Union, Japan and Canada to settle a WTO dispute over the US ban on online gambling. A spokeswoman for the US Trade Representative's office (USTR) confirmed an earlier report from a European official, and noted that Japan and Canada were also included in the agreement sett...
[Software News] Google Knol: 'Brilliant Web Marketing Strategy'
Google is developing an online publishing system that many are saying could rival Wikipedia. Google's system will display content penned by folks who have knowledge about various subjects. Google is calling the project "knol," which the company says stands for a unit of knowledge. Currently in the invitation-only beta stage, knol will allow people to develop Web pages oriented on...
[Software News] U.S. makes deals on Internet gambling
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States has reached a deal with the European Union, Japan and Canada to keep its Internet gambling market closed to foreign companies, but is continuing talks with India, Antigua and Barbuda, Macau and Costa Rica, U.S. trade officials said on Monday. "We are pleased to confirm that the United States has reached agreement ... with Canada, the EU and Japan...
[Software News] Growth Slows For Online Holiday Spending
Online holiday spending is failing to meet expectations, as the economy takes its toll on consumers' gift budgets, a research firm said Monday. From Nov. 1 to Dec. 14, spending was 18.4% more than the same period a year ago, which was substantially less than the 26% growth during the six-week period in 2006 over 2005, ComScore said. The researcher defines the holiday shopping season as the mo...
[Software News] EU worries about privacy in Google deal
BRUSSELS, Belgium - European lawmakers plan to take the unusual step of pressing antitrust regulators next month to look at privacy concerns raised by Google Inc.'s intended takeover of online ad tracker DoubleClick. The $3.1 billion deal has spurred rivals and consumer advocates to complain about the control they say it would give Google, the world's most popular search engine, over Internet advert...
[Software News] Americans Googling Themselves More
A report released Sunday by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that growing numbers of Americans are searching for information about themselves and others on the Internet. According to "Digital Footprints," nearly 50 percent of Americans have searched for themselves online, more than double the number who reported doing so in 2002. Even more people -- 53 percent of those ...
[Software News] Joost launches NBA channel
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Joost on Monday launched a National Basketball Association channel on its online video service that will offer highlights from the past and present. The deal comes months after a similar partnership with Major League Baseball. Joost, created by the founders of eBay Inc's Skype Internet phone service and file-sharing service Kazaa, also offers a channel from the Nat...
[Software News] Startup Ribbit Unveils New Web Telephony Platform
Silicon Valley startup Ribbit has taken the wraps off a new open telephony platform that promises to give Web sites a whole new set of voice capabilities. "The world doesn't need another phone company," said Ribbit cofounder and CEO Ted Griggs. "What it needs is a new kind of phone company, one that liberates voice from its current confines -- devices, plans, and business mo...
[Software News] Amazon Launching Database-as-a-Service
Having made book-buying easier, Amazon.com is now seeking to do the same thing for databases. Developers can sign up now for Amazon SimpleDB, a Web service for running queries on structured data, that will be available as a beta within several weeks. The database access, in conjunction with Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) application hosting, provides se...
[Software News] OpenOffice Online Now Available For Beta Testing
In the latest challenge to Microsoft's dominance of the productivity software market, a group of Linux developers has begun testing an online version of a free office applications suite. Developers at online software provider Ulteo said in a message posted on their Web site site that a hosted version of OpenOffice.org 2.3 that they plan to offer is now available for public beta testing. The...
[Software News] U.S. Adults Too Busy Googling Each Other to Worry Much About Privacy
While the media and lawmakers question future prospects for privacy if Google's planned acquisition of DoubleClick is allowed to proceed, the majority of U.S. adults appear to be unconcerned about the proliferation of personal information online. That may be because people like being able to find out about one another. Some 53% of adult Internet users have searched for information about frie...
[Software News] Cognos' Mobile BI Product Extended To Nokia And Microsoft Smartphones
With Cognos' announcements Monday that it has extended its Cognos 8 Go! Mobile BI offering to support Windows Mobile 6 smartphones as well as Nokia's Eseries and Nseries families, it became more evident why IBM is paying $5 billion to acquire Cognos. With the enterprise mobility market expected to grow by 30% a year through 2011, according to market researcher Gartner, Cognos is expected ...
[Software News] Match.com comes to Facebook
NEW YORK - Match.com, an old standby of online dating, wants to make some new connections among the fast-growing number of Facebook users worldwide. Dating Web site Match.com, owned by media mogul Barry Diller's InterActiveCorp conglomerate, plans to launch two new features this week that bring greater social networking capabilities to its more than 15 million Match members and to the roughly 58 mil...