Articles by Rob Spiegel

Not so fast, AT&T. A Federal Communications Commission (FCC) official has addressed the challenges that AT&T faces in pursuing its US$39 billion acquisition of T-Mobile. Both FCC and Department of Justice (DOJ) regulators will have to approve of the merger first, and the transaction will not get a rubber stamp, an FCC official told The Wall Street Journal.

Not so fast, AT&T. A Federal Communications Commission (FCC) official has addressed the challenges that AT&T faces in pursuing its US$39 billion acquisition of T-Mobile. Both FCC and Department of Justice (DOJ) regulators will have to approve of the merger first, and the transaction will not get a rubber stamp, an FCC official told The Wall Street Journal.

Not so fast, AT&T. A Federal Communications Commission (FCC) official has addressed the challenges that AT&T faces in pursuing its US$39 billion acquisition of T-Mobile. Both FCC and Department of Justice (DOJ) regulators will have to approve of the merger first, and the transaction will not get a rubber stamp, an FCC official told The Wall Street Journal.

Red Hat has by all measures hit the big time, providing validation of the open source business model that even the harshest critics will have a hard time brushing aside. In its fourth quarter, Red Hat's revenue reached US$245 million, up 25 percent from last year. The Linux distribution vendor's fourth quarter subscription revenue was $209 millio...

A major 2008 settlement between Google Books, authors and publishers has been rejected by a New York federal Judge. Judge Denny Chin of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the US$125 million settlement because he said it would give Google too much power in the search market The 2008 settlement included the Author's Guild and Association of...

Amazon launched its own Android app store Tuesday, an event immediately followed by the introduction of a lawsuit filed by Apple, according to Bloomberg. The suit claims trademark infringement and unfair competition on usage of the term "app store." ...

AT&T announced a deal Sunday that will make it the largest cellphone company in the U.S., surpassing Verizon. AT&T reached an agreement to acquire T-Mobile from Deutsche Telekom for about US$39 billion. The deal will need approval from the Federal Communications Commission and the Department of Justice to verify it would not violate antitrust laws. If approved, it could close in about a year.

AT&T announced a deal Sunday that will make it the largest cellphone company in the U.S., surpassing Verizon. AT&T reached an agreement to acquire T-Mobile from Deutsche Telekom for about US$39 billion. The deal will need approval from the Federal Communications Commission and the Department of Justice to verify it would not violate antitrust laws. If approved, it could close in about a year.

AT&T announced a deal Sunday that will make it the largest cellphone company in the U.S., surpassing Verizon. AT&T reached an agreement to acquire T-Mobile from Deutsche Telekom for about US$39 billion. The deal will need approval from the Federal Communications Commission and the Department of Justice to verify it would not violate antitrust laws. If approved, it could close in about a year.

Microsoft and federal law enforcement agents have taken down the Rustock botnet, which had about a million infected computers under its control. The botnet was officially considered offline on Wednesday, according to Microsoft. A botnet consists of an infrastructure of computers that have been hacked to send out large amounts of spam. The takedown...

It appears Netflix is getting ready to begin schlepping content, which would position the video rental and streaming company as a content creator. The move is reminiscent of HBO's emergence a premium content producer in the early days of cable Netflix is in advanced talks about pumping out an original TV series, inside sources told The Wall Street ...

Monday was a big day for old-line tech companies: IBM discovered e-commerce and HP discovered cloud computing. HP CEO Leo Apotheker outlined the company's strategy at the HP Summit 2011 in San Francisco on Monday, emphasizing cloud computing, Internet-connected hardware, and its goal to plant webOS in PCs, printers, tablets and smartphones....

IBM unveiled a new service on Monday that will help companies market and sell their products online. The new division, called "Smarter Commerce," offers IBM customers real-time marketing analytics and brand assessment tools for Facebook and Twitter. Smarter Commerce also offers consumer-behavior analytics capabilities for other online vehicles, in...

Microsoft's search engine, Bing, launched a new daily deals aggregator on Thursday. The service, called "Bing deals," compiles offers from Groupon, LivingSocial, Restaurant.com and more through a partnership with The DealMap, another daily deal aggregator. Bing deals is able to sort by location based on the user's mobile device, allowing people to...

Word on the street about Twitter in recent weeks has pointed to a company looking for new dollars. The latest buzz: It wants to sell out to Facebook or Google; or JP Morgan is about to make a significant investment. Cofounder Biz Stone has been dispelling those rumors, but it's possible, of course, that Twitter is deliberately fanning the flames t...

Google removed a slew of apps containing malware from the Android Market on Tuesday. At least 21 of the tainted apps appear to have come from publisher called "Myournet," which copied apps developed by others and modified them to include a Trojan horse before re-uploading them, according to an Android Police blog post by Aaron Gingrich.

E-commerce is growing, but it's no longer on fire. Forrester Research released two new forecast reports on Monday. The reports project online retail in the U.S. and Europe will grow at a rate of 10 percent per year from 2010 to 2015. The report expects 2015 online retail to reach US$279 billion in the U.S. and 134 billion euros in Europe. The forecasts are comprised of business-to-consumer sales without travel and financial services. The European forecast includes 17 Western European countries and a summary by category of each of their markets...

Android users can now purchase e-books from the Android Market using a new feature that allows them to tap into Google's ebookstore for Android-ready reading Google launched its ebookstore last December. Users can search its database by genre, and in addition to books for sale, it offers a section for free books. Books can be viewed on the Web or ...

Microsoft's search engine, Bing, added a Facebook integration feature on Thursday that will let searchers see which results their Facebook friends have liked. After users connect Bing with their Facebook account, pictures of friends will appear below any relevant results generated in a search. They also have the option of disabling the feature wit...

Google has released a plug-in that connects Microsoft Office with Google Docs. Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office became available for download worldwide on Thursday. The plug-in brings multi-person collaboration through Google accounts to Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel The plug-in syncs to Google's cloud so that multiple people can ma...