Articles by Chris Maxcer

IBM has released additional Lotus software for Research In Motion's popular BlackBerry platform, taking the set of applications further beyond the realm of simple e-mail and into the wild world of Web 2.0 social networking applications. Yes, that's social networking for the enterprise. While IBM already offers core Lotus collaboration software tha...

Powerset, a new Internet search engine company, has launched a proof-of-concept salvo in the search engine war -- a natural language processing engine that attempts to understand the meaning behind a search phrase and the text it's searching against. Instead of returning a long list of results that simply contain the key words a user enters, Powerset attempts to unlock the meaning encoded in ordinary human language...

A new type of Trojan horse malware application is hiding inside fake MP3 media files, infecting approximately 500,000 consumer PCs, McAfee Avert Labs reported. The nefarious files have been delivered primarily on peer-to-peer networks during the last several days. The trojan, known as "Downloader-UA.h," was added to McAfee's DAT files about a week...

Microsoft's Zune and NBC's downloadable television shows stand at the center of the latest digital rights management (DRM) dustup. On Wednesday, The New York Times' Saul Hansell reported that Microsoft might build a copyright manager into every Zune player, ostensibly in response to an NBC demand for copyright protections of its downloadable content...

A trio of semiconductor companies have banded together in a joint effort to push the industry into transitioning to a larger, 450mm-sized wafer by 2012. Led by Intel, Samsung and TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company), the idea is to line up the industry so that all of the required components and manufacturing needs are developed in time to benefit from the larger design.

Sun Microsystems and the OpenSolaris community it created a few years ago have officially released the Unix-based OpenSolaris operating system into the wild. The two organizations shared the news at the CommunityOne Developer Conference Monday in San Francisco. OpenSolaris is based on Sun's Solaris kernel, but it has since been transformed into a ...

Two technology industry heavyweight CEOs -- Google's Eric Schmidt and IBM's Sam Palmisano -- took the stage together at IBM's PartnerWorld conference in Los Angeles Thursday to talk up their companies' cloud computing efforts, first publicly introduced last fall, which they say are still going strong. The pair come from companies that share a comm...

Adobe Systems has assembled a group of industry leaders in an effort to put its Flash-based rich Internet solutions and content on most every screen -- PCs, mobile phones, MP3 players, televisions and any other consumer electronic device that might have a screen worthy of delivering content. The effort is called the "Open Screen Project," and it's...

AMD has announced the availability of three new triple-core x86 processors in its Phenom X3 lineup. New offerings include the 8750, the 8650 and the 8450, with power levels ranging from 2.4 to 2.1 gigahertz Appropriately enough, the triple-core X3 lineup seems to play well in the middle ground between dual-core and quad-core processors....

Google has opened up a new sandbox for developers designed to entice them into building richer social networking gadgets for iGoogle iGoogle is basically a customizable home page for individuals that uses Web-based "gadgets" to deliver content to the page. The new sandbox will let developers continue to build gadgets for individuals too, of course,...

Western Digital is now shipping the next generation of its 10,000 RPM (revolutions per minute) "Raptor" series drives. The new drive doubles the previous capacity to 300 GB and picks up a 35 percent performance increase Aimed at PC and Mac enthusiasts as well as users of professional-grade workstations that can benefit from high-performance drives,...

As consumer-focused word processing and spreadsheet applications become less expensive and more available from non-Microsoft sources like Google and Apple, Microsoft is working to ensure that it too has lower-priced, higher-value "essential software" solutions for consumers. The Redmond, Wash., software maker has been secretly working on a new service, code-named "Albany," which the company publicly acknowledged Friday...

Google has released a new version of its Google Earth application, updating it to version 4.3 by adding a more realistic, immersive set of features intended to make the virtual planet feel more like home. In addition to features like the ability to control the sun, Google Earth 4.3 also comes with a lot more real-world data, new photos and cities ready for 3-D exploring...

A handful of Google engineers has redesigned a set of video and image analysis tools to help find missing children and combat child pornography and abuse. Their effort is now being tested by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), and it stems from anti-piracy software Google developed for the company's YouTube division The ...

Microsoft Windows is collapsing under its own weight and must radically change for the sake of users, independent software vendors and Microsoft itself, according to research firm Gartner Because Microsoft Windows is so large and complex, covering 20 years of legacy code, it can no longer adequately respond to market forces, and Windows needs to be...

Blockbuster is working on a new movie-streaming and/or downloading service, according to an article in The Hollywood Reporter. The reported device apparently would let its customers view movies from a television set-top box similar to the Apple TV or an Xbox 360, both of which can download rentable movies Blockbuster has declined to comment specifi...

The United States emergency response system may be coming to a mobile phone near you. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) took a big leap Wednesday in setting up the framework necessary to use the nation's wireless carriers to transmit text message alerts, warnings and critical information to citizens via cell phones and other mobile devices during disasters or other emergencies, the FCC said...

Microsoft is continuing to make good on its promises of openness. The Redmond software behemoth posted an additional 14,000 pages of preliminary versions of technical documentation of Microsoft protocols that should help third-party developers -- including open source developers -- build more interoperable applications The latest round of protocols...

The European Commission introduced new rules Monday for mobile communications on aircrafts during flights. The new regulations give the airlines a green light to let their passengers talk on their mobile phones midair -- with a few caveats, of course The Commission, however, did not create protections for quiet passengers who might find themselves ...

Comcast is now delivering super high-speed Internet services to households in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minn. -- up to 50 Mbps (megabits per second), significantly faster than typical low-end broadband, which comes in at 1.5 Mbps or less The new speeds come courtesy of the company's next-generation Data Over Cable Service Interface Specifications (...