Tim Gray

The Internet continued to grow as a marketplace last year with consumer spending on online content increasing 14 percent to $1.8 billion, according to a published report. The biggest increases in 2004 came in spending for entertainment, which soared 90 percent in 2004 to $413.5 million from $217.6 million in 2003, according to the Online […]

Microsoft had more than just the gamers talking this week at the Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco when the company released details of its next-generation Xbox video game system. The revamped system is catching the eye of enterprise customers as the next-generation of the platform will fuse hardware, software and services to enhance gaming […]

Onelink4travel announced it has signed processing and referral agreements with PayPal that will allow the company to offer easier payment services to consumers worldwide. The San Francisco-based company, a provider of integrated global distribution and financial settlement services to the travel and tourism industry, said it will now offer now PayPal as a payment option […]

An Internet company that provides shopping cart software to thousands of online businesses agreed Thursday to settle Federal Trade Commission (FTC) charges that it rented personal consumer information to marketers despite several promises from merchants to consumers that it wouldn’t. CartManager International, a Utah-based software company, collected the personal data of nearly one million people […]

Online auctioneer eBay has launched an international network of free classified-ad Web sites in six countries, after acquiring a number of similar sites over the course of the past year. The latest brand from the San Jose-based company, launched in Canada, China, France, Germany, Italy and Japan, will operate under the name Kijiji, which means […]

Wireless communications technology maker Qualcomm Tuesday named Paul E. Jacobs its new chief executive officer. Jacobs, 42, who joined the company full-time in 1990, will succeed his father Irwin Mark Jacobs as CEO on July 1 under the company’s management succession plan. He will also join the company’s board of directors at the same time. […]

The battle for the rights to protect small businesses from computer viruses continued to heat up this week, as McAfee released an enhanced version of its Managed VirusScan. The Web-based solution is geared toward small businesses that may lack the expertise and personnel to implement and manage an anti-virus solution for their desktops and servers, […]

Television may still be the king of America’s information kingdom, but the Internet is the crown prince. Research shows that more Americans are logging on to the Internet for their primary source of political news, while shunning traditional media outlets like newspapers and radio. According to a telephone-based survey from the Pew Research Center for […]

Security experts say they have detected the first mobile phone virus that replicates via Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) and Bluetooth could spread around the world in a matter of minutes. The malicious code, dubbed CommWarrior, moves through the Symbian Series 60 smartphone operating system and can spread via multimedia messages that include an image, audio […]

The spam-fighting crusaders of the Spamhaus Project have bestowed a note of recognition to Global Crossing. It was recognized for its aggressive removal of known spam operations from its MPLS-TE network, enabling customers access to a secure network environment, the organization said. “In our work we focus so much on spam villains that we seldom […]

Digital media company RealNetworks rolled out patches for a highly critical security flaw discovered in RealPlayer and other RealNetworks software, according to the company. The vulnerability is a boundary error that could potentially allow the execution of malicious code, according to Danish security firm Secunia. It can be exploited by specially written WAV or SMIL […]

Google jockeyed for position in the local search game this week when it announced the official release of Google Maps, an enhancement to Google Local. The new feature, launched as a beta version last month, enables users in the United States and Canada to find location information, navigate maps and get directions to neighborhood businesses, […]