David Needle

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Does making search a more natural process and getting relevant results quicker sound life changing? Experts from different search companies were, well, all over the site map on this question during a panel called “Semantic Search: How Will It Change Our Lives?” at the Search Engine Strategies (SES) conference here Monday. […]

Alternative search engine Cuil has Google in its sights. MENLO PARK, Calif. — Ironic? It’s certainly a lot easier to find hot Web startup Cuil on the Web than the company behind it. Nestled off a side road in this Silicon Valley suburb, the latest Google challenger is very much still in startup mode, not […]

MENLO PARK, Calif. – A panel of tech startups at an event here Monday night were mostly bullish about the prospects for success, even in the face of a faltering economy. Perhaps one good sign; these were not a lot of me-too social network wannabes, but a diverse set of product and service offerings. The […]

Google confirmed “many Gmail users” were unable to access the email service since about 2 p.m. Pacific Time after receiving a “502 Error” message which would seem to indicate a system overload of some kind for the popular service. Whatever the issue, it appears to have been identified and fixed. A Google spokesman said the […]

Verisign is taking a new approach to the battle against so-called “pump and dump” schemes that artificially hype stocks. A new module for the company’s VIP Fraud Detection Service, set for release this Friday, features a “self-learning” behavioral engine designed to help brokerages spot and avoid pump and dump activity. The system works by weighing […]

Ah the thrills and spills of Web 2.0. Facebook reported this week it had blocked links to malicious Web sites that affected a small percentage (the company said .002 percent) of its users. The perpetrators left messages on the posting area or “walls” of Facebook users, urging visitors to view a video purported to be […]

Microsoft sold more than 18 million licenses in fiscal year 2008 for its Windows Mobile software. Internationally, the company saw triple digit gains in France, Latin America, Central and Eastern Europe, Japan and India. Apple’s much-publicized App Store is closing in on having a thousand applications available for download, while Microsoft says there are now […]

Source: Google Google announced a major upgrade to its Search Appliance hardware and many more features to the related software that current owners of the system can get for free. The current Search Appliance (Model GB-1001) can search up to 3 million documents. Google said the latest version (Model GB-7007), available next month, can handle […]

SAN FRANCISCO – Can “China” and “India” get along? That may seem a strange question for a technology panel to address, but it was one of the more interesting points raised here at the Mobile LinuxWorld conference today. In fact, the reference was really a metaphor for competing visions of how to create the best […]

UPDATED: SAN JOSE, Calif. — TV cameras and other media massed outside the Fairmont hotel before the start of Yahoo’s shareholder meeting here today. But they weren’t huddled around embattled CEO Jerry Yang or other Yahoo officials. Rather, it was maverick shareholder Eric Jackson who was holding court, detailing his displeasure with current management and […]

These days, vendors of all stripes want to tout their “openness” to developers. But one analyst thinks two of the bigger players need to take their open platform ambitions a step further and merge. Jack Gold, who heads J. Gold Associates, posits the inevitability of a merger between Google’s Android and Nokia’s Symbian mobile operating […]

Is there gold in them thar clouds? Yahoo, Intel and HP seem to think so. The trio of tech titans announced an ambitious research initiative today focused on studying the software, hardware and datacenter management issues surrounding cloud computing. The group’s new Cloud Computing Test Bed is aimed at creating a large, globally distributed testing […]