David Needle

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Hartmut Esslinger, who helped design the original Macintosh 25 years ago, says many tech companies still don’t get one of the keys to Apple’s success. “Design doesn’t stand alone, it’s a coordinated profession. People think it’s about beauty, but it’s really about connected technology, science, people and business. A lot of […]

From the “There’s no such as multitasking” files, part two. Multitasking may be fun or stimulating, but it’s not an effective way to get things done or retain information, according to a study released by Stanford University researchers this week. “We kept looking for what they’re better at and we didn’t find it,” said Eyal […]

Are Twitter users at risk of having their accounts taken over by evildoers? That’s the contention of Web developer James Slater, who wrote a blog post about the issue on site of U.K.-based search optimization expert Dave Naylor. The blog post describes a “massive Twitter cross-site scripting vulnerability.” He said hackers could exploit the vulnerability […]

Tranxition is set to release a solution it says will make desktop virtualization more flexible and cost-effective. The ten-year-old virtualization provider plans to debut its AdaptivePersona software at next week’s VMworld 2009 conference in San Francisco. The cost savings comes by virtualizing a user’s desktop. Tranxition says that AdaptivePersona creates a kind of protective bubble […]

There’s an old joke about a company that’s losing money on every sale declaring, “we’ll make it up in volume.” That’s probably not Google’s (NASDAQ: GOOG) strategy, but the search giant just announced a revenue-sharing plan that may greatly expand the number of videos on the video site, which has yet to turn a profit […]

Remember Terry Childs? He was the system administrator of San Francisco’s fiber-optic wide area network (WAN) arrested last year for [illegal tampering with the city’s network ](/security/article.php/3796346/Rogue+SF+Sysadmin+Contests+Charges.htm)and then locking it down so authorized administrators couldn’t access it. He’s been held on four felony charges since July, 2008, related to the network tampering, but now the […]

SUNNYVALE, Calif. — Even after striking its multiyear, multibillion-dollar deal to outsource its search engine to Microsoft, Yahoo still plans to remain a player in search. During a media briefing here at the company’s headquarters today, Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO) executives took pains to clarify the implications of its high-profile search deal with Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), […]

The Internet radio service LAUNCHcast can play on without paying licensing fees. A federal appeals court in New York issued a ruling Friday in favor of Yahoo’s (NASDAQ: YHOO) Launch Media division and its the LAUNCHcast Webcasting service, which provides individualized music streams to Web users. In its ruling, the U.S. Second Circuit Court of […]

An Apple-branded TV? It might seem laughable, if it weren’t for the fact that the iconic Silicon Valley company has already entered more than one consumer market with big, established players and rewritten the rules of the game — think portable music players and smartphones. Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster wrote in a note to […]

News flash — someone was slandered in a blog post. Granted, this goes on every day, but model Liskula Cohen, who has appeared on the cover of Vogue and elsewhere, decided to do something about it. “Why should I let it go? Why? Why should I just ignore it? I couldn’t find one reason to […]

There are more than 65,000 applications on the iPhone App Store, but the small business market, which totals hundreds of thousands of companies in the U.S., has barely been scratched. Sweb Apps thinks it can help change that. San Antonio, Texas-based Sweb Apps this week launched a service for the iPhone that’s designed to let […]

SAN FRANCISCO — If everyone, as the saying goes, has at least one book in them, most have more excuses as to why it will never be written. Enter FastPencil, a self-publishing system that aims to help remove some of those excuses. The system simplifies publishing traditional bound books or even digital versions for the […]