Articles by Katherine Noyes

Continuing an ongoing string of acquisitions, Microsoft on Wednesday announced that it acquired Multimap, a leading UK-based provider of location and mapping services The acquisition gives Microsoft powerful new location and mapping technology to complement its existing Virtual Earth, Live Search, Windows Live services and MSN, along with the aQuan...

The Linux Phone Standards (LiPS) Forum has announced the completion of its LiPS Release 1.0 specifications aimed at fostering interoperability across the Linux-based mobile phone market In June, LiPS rolled out the first installment of Release 1.0, including a reference model, address book and voice call enabler, as well as user interface services ...

Sun Microsystems on Tuesday made good on its promise to deliver its OpenSPARC T2 register transfer level (RTL) processor design to the free and open source community using the GNU General Public License (GPL) The OpenSPARC T2 is the open version of Sun's UltraSPARC T2, a processor that features eight cores and eight threads per core running the Sol...

Widget syndication firm Clearspring on Monday launched an ad network to give publishers a way to monetize the content within their widgets The Widget Ad Network, which is built on Adify's Build Your Own Network (BYON) platform, provides six different in-widget advertising formats for an easy and scalable solution for monetizing digital content acro...

Following in the footsteps of Facebook and MySpace, professional network LinkedIn announced on Monday a platform that gives third-party developers access to its application programming interfaces (APIs) The set of APIs and widgets in LinkedIn's Intelligent Application Platform -- dubbed "InApps," for short -- allows partners to build LinkedIn featu...

It's not too often the public schools figure prominently in the Linux blogs, but sure enough, this week they drew a surprising amount of discussion on a few different sites Specifically, news broke on Tuesday that the mayor of Birmingham, Ala., has signed a purchase agreement for 15,000 laptops from One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), making the city's sc...

Passengers on JetBlue will soon be able to use e-mail and instant messaging, thanks to a new onboard wireless network the airline will begin testing next week Details won't be officially announced until Tuesday, but JetBlue has outfitted one of its Airbus A320 planes -- now dubbed "BetaBlue" -- with an air-to-ground system featuring wireless hotspo...

Looking back over the course of 2007, it's clear the technology industry's landscape has shifted since the year began. Not only have market forces lifted some companies up while pushing others down, but a series of mergers and acquisitions have reshaped competitors' territories "We've certainly seen a lot of M&A activity this year, as well as the c...

Looking back over the course of 2007, it's clear the technology industry's landscape has shifted since the year began. Not only have market forces lifted some companies up while pushing others down, but a series of mergers and acquisitions have reshaped competitors' territories "We've certainly seen a lot of M&A activity this year, as well as the c...

Looking back over the course of 2007, it's clear the technology industry's landscape has shifted since the year began. Not only have market forces lifted some companies up while pushing others down, but a series of mergers and acquisitions have reshaped competitors' territories "We've certainly seen a lot of M&A activity this year, as well as the c...

The U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday rushed through a bill that puts increased responsibility on the shoulders of Internet service providers (ISPs) to police the Web for child pornography H.R. 3791, the Securing Adolescents From Exploitation-Online Act, requires that anyone providing Internet access -- apparently including coffee shops, h...

Novell announced Wednesday that it has decided to postpone the release of its fourth quarter and full-year 2007 earnings reports, both of which were scheduled for Thursday The cause, it said, was an inquiry from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), with which Novell has had a series of exchanges regarding some of its recent filings....

Nielsen and Digimarc on Wednesday announced a new service designed to let media companies, social networks, peer-to-peer services and user-generated content sites monitor and manage the distribution of media content The Nielsen Digital Media Manager, slated to be available in mid-2008, will use digital watermarking and fingerprinting to provide a m...

A U.S. Senate subcommittee on Tuesday hauled credit card companies onto the mat for their practice of using credit scores to increase the interest rates cardholders must pay "Credit card companies go too far when they hike the interest rates of consumers who are faithfully paying their credit card bills, just to squeeze more finance charges from th...

Yahoo revealed its top searches of 2007 on Monday, but rather than presenting another year dominated by Britney Spears, it focused instead on topic categories, taking the spotlight off overall leaders Britney still leads the list of celebrity searches, to be sure, but Yahoo sliced and diced the data a little differently this year to allow other lea...

NASA launch crews were making final preparations Monday for this week's launch of the space shuttle Atlantis, which will install the European Columbus science laboratory on the international space station (ISS) Mission STS-122 is slated to lift off at 4:31 p.m. EST Thursday from Launch Pad 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center. Countdown is scheduled ...

With all the buzz about Android starting to settle down, and the respite from it all afforded by Thanksgiving, the last few weeks have felt a little more mellow in the Linux blogs One topic that did generate some passionate attention, however, was the question of whether Asus' new eeePC subnotebook might violate the GNU General Public License (GPL)...

Google is readying its application to participate in the Federal Communications Commission's January auction of 700 MHz wireless spectrum, the company announced Friday, but it is acting alone, without any partners The company will file its application on Monday, after which FCC rules prevent it from discussing the matter further until the auction e...

Adobe and Yahoo jointly launched the beta version of a new advertising service Thursday designed to allow PDF publishers to earn advertising revenue for their content Dubbed "Ads for Adobe PDF Powered by Yahoo," the opt-in service enables online commercial publishers to include timely contextual ads next to Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF)-base...

xTuple, a startup maker of open source enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, announced Wednesday that it has certified its OpenMFG and PostBooks software products for use on Apple's new Mac OS X Leopard operating system The products are advanced ERP software solutions built with open source components, such as the PostgreSQL database, the Qt...