InternetNews Staff

Information technology giants are teaming up in defense against potential patent-infringement lawsuits, the Wall Street Journal said on Sunday, citing people familiar with the matter. The companies plan to buy up key intellectual property before it falls into the hands of parties that could use it against them, the paper said. The paper’s sources said […]

Digital music seller Rhapsody is launching a $50 million marketing assault on Apple’s iTunes, offering songs online and via partners including Yahoo and Verizon Wireless, Rhapsody said on Monday. The songs will be sold in MP3 format, which means users of the Rhapsody service will be able to play them on iPods. Before now Rhapsody, […]

PARIS — A court in France ordered eBay Inc to pay 38.6 million euros (US $61 million) to luxury goods group LVMH for allowing the sale of counterfeit goods on its online auction site. Monday’s decision, a month after eBay was ordered by another French court to pay handbag maker Hermes 20,000 euros for allowing […]

A portfolio manager at Legg Mason Capital Management, Yahoo’s (NASDAQ: YHOO) third-largest shareholder, said on Friday he is not sure if he will support activist investor Carl Icahn’s board slate. Icahn has nominated a slate of directors to replace Yahoo’s board at an Aug. 1 shareholders meeting and is seeking to oust Yahoo Co-founder and […]

Since social networking site Facebook expanded from English-only to 15 new languages in recent months, personal pronoun errors in automated messages have proliferated. “We’ve gotten feedback from translators and users in other countries that translations wind up being too confusing when people have not specified a sex on their profiles,” Naomi Gleit, Facebook’s product manager, […]

Damages sought by software maker Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) could top $1 billion in an intellectual property lawsuit it has brought against archrival SAP (NYSE: SAP), according to a court filing. Oracle is suing TomorrowNow, a U.S. subsidiary of SAP, for corporate theft and alleges it illegally downloaded masses of Oracle customer service materials and passed […]

P>Internet regulators on Thursday voted to relax rules on domain names like .com or .edu, which could pave the way for companies or individuals to create an array of new addresses for the Web. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or Icann, also approved measures that will allow top-level domain names to be […]

Intel, the world’s biggest chipmaker and a decades-long business partner of Microsoft, has no immediate plans to roll out the software giant’s Windows Vista operating system to all its employees. “We’re in a refresh cycle now and there are a number of factors considered before we select software,” an Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) spokesman explained without […]

A major consumer group, insurers, Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) said on Wednesday they have agreed to standards intended to speed adoption of personal electronic health records. The electronic medical record field remains in its infancy. While U.S. privacy laws govern actions by medical providers such as doctors, there is little in the […]

Source: Reuters Sensing the start of a personal computer revolution, Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard University in 1975 to start Microsoft and pursue a vision of a computer on every desk and in every home. Three decades later, Gates is set to step down on Friday from what is now the world’s largest software […]

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison Source: Reuters Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL), the world’s third-largest software maker, reported on Wednesday that quarterly profit rose 27 percent, beating Wall Street estimates, on strong new software license revenue. Net income increased to $2.04 billion, or 39 cents per share, in Oracle’s fiscal fourth quarter ended May 31, which is its […]

Source: Reuters Research In Motion (NASDAQ: RIMM) reported a higher first-quarter profit on Wednesday as it continued to sign up subscribers for its BlackBerry smartphones at a rapid clip. Still, its shares dropped 8 percent in late trading, as the results and outlook fell short of analyst expectations. RIM said it earned $482.5 million, or […]