Microsoft announced yesterday that it had filed an action with the International Trade Commission against Primax Electronics of Taiwan over several technologies used in mice, which are sold in Best Buy under the Dynex brand name.
After reportedly attempting to "engage in meaningful licensing discussions" with Primax over the course of several years, Microsoft has resorted to filing a complaint with the International Trade Commission (ITC) for patent infringement.
Using Yahoo's Build your Own Search Service (BOSS), Yahoo Vice President of Platforms Sam Pullara built a parody of the newly-launched search engine Cuil, calling it Yuil.
Cuil launched this week with its proverbial fists swinging, claiming its search index was nearly triple the size of Google's, and promising superior privacy and zero data retention.
Mobile Broadcasting Corporation, a subsidiary of Toshiba, announced yesterday that it will be closing down in March of 2009 due to weak consumer interest.
MBCO's service MobaHo! opened in Japan in 2004 and has only managed to gain around 100,000 subscribers since that time. Toshiba expected over a million subscribers by the fourth quarter 2007.
In Garmin's second quarter earnings announcement today, the GPS company said its nuvifone that was anticipated for release this year will be delayed.
The company's iPhone-like hybrid 3G handset and GPS device was originally expected to launch in the third quarter of this year in American markets. It was then gently pushed to a fourth quarter release, which Garmin has now rescheduled for the first half of 2009.
Talk of Dell's movements in handheld technology have been at a high recently, with rumors of a smartphone from the company and now of a new digital music player to compete with Apple's iPod.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Dell has been testing a new digital music player that could be released as early as September. Details on the device are scant other than that it will have Wi-Fi, and likely capitalize on Dell's dormant Zing property that it acquired last year.
Amazon has rolled out its equivalent of PayPal and Google Checkout in two flavors: Checkout by Amazon and Amazon Simple Pay. Both services fall under the Amazon Payments banner and allow third party retailers to access Amazon user accounts for payment.
The service integrates with Amazon Marketplace as well as third party sites. A "Checkout with Amazon" button takes the user to the Amazon Payments site where they sign into their account and pay for shipping.
Two years after merging, Telecommunications company Alcatel-Lucent has not posted a single profitable quarter. Following its second quarter 2008 earnings statement, a major executive shakeup has been announced for the company.
Though revenues and sales exceeded analyst expectations, so too did the company's net losses, which amounted to €1.1 billion. Bloomberg News analysts predicted a loss of only €135 million.
HP has announced a "Limited Warranty Service Enhancement" for many of its notebooks equipped with faulty Nvidia Geforce GPUs, including a wide range of HP Pavillion and Compaq Presario notebooks.
Like Dell's recent BIOS upgrade to correct overheating GPUs, HP announced a similar fix for its HP Pavilion dv2000, HP Pavilion dv6000, HP Pavilion dv9000, Compaq Presario V3000, and Compaq Presario V6000 series notebooks which contain contain 7-series Nvidia GPUs. This defies previous assumptions that the 8-series of Nvidia products were the faulty GPUs the company did not name in the SEC filing describing the problem.
Calling it the Cloud Computing Test Bed, HP, Intel and Yahoo today announced a multi-datacenter testing environment to promote internet-scale open source collaboration.
Building upon the success of Yahoo and the Apache Software Foundation's M45 project with Carnegie Mellon University, this collaboration will go several steps further and include six test beds, with each facility offering between 1,000 and 4,000 processor cores.
Adobe has officially released Photoshop Lightroom 2, following three months of beta testing for the photo management software. It is Adobe's first product supporting 64-bit Windows Vista and OS X.
Lightroom 2 is available now for $299 USD, or $99 USD as an upgrade from the previous release. This workflow enhancing software is billed as "the professional photographer's essential toolbox," and is geared toward users working with large volumes of photos.
Dell has issued a BIOS update to prevent its notebooks equipped with faulty Nvidia graphics cards from overheating.
Notebooks equipped with certain Nvidia GPUs were reportedly failing at abnormally high rates by the graphics company itself in an SEC regulatory filing. At the time, however, the company did not list which configurations were failing, saying only that it was one sold in significant quantities.
New search engine Cuil has opened to the public, and with it, the requisite comparisons and challenges to Google, former employer of Cuil's engineering team. But the site is experiencing much downtime in its first day.
Built with $33 million in venture capital from Greylock Partners, Madrone Capital Partners, and Tugboat Ventures, Cuil is made up of an all-star team of Web technology veterans. The husband and wife founders are Tom Costello, creator of Xift, and Anna Patterson, creator of Recall, a technology now used by Google. Rounding out the team are ex-Google engineers Russell Power and Louis Monier, also the ex-CTO of AltaVista.
On Saturday, the Associated Press cited "an agency official" reporting that the majority of FCC commissioners had voted in favor of punishing Comcast for blocking subscribers from engaging in certain activities -- namely, peer-to-peer file sharing.
The likely punishments were first reported to be sanctions, but at a press conference shortly thereafter, Federal Communications Commission chairman Kevin Martin said a policy change will be the outcome.
RedLasso, a digital video re-syndication service, has closed its controversial site after threats of copyright lawsuits from NBC Universal and Fox.
The service digitized live audio and video content, which users could edit and re-arrange into embeddable clips.
Blockbuster's download-on-demand service based on Movielink is approaching readiness, as the company has pushed out a beta version to select Total Access members.
500 Total Access subscribers have been chosen to beta test Blockbuster's pay-per-view movie download service that it acquired from Movielink in 2007.