Articles by Walaika Haskins

Cisco will invest nearly US$1.6 billion on information and communications technology in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) over the course of the next five years, the company announced Monday. The network vendor will open a new regional headquarters in Dubai in April with a second office set to open in Abu Dhabi in June "This investment demonstrates ou...

A new technology using silicon nanowires boosts the ability of rechargeable lithium-ion batteries to store a charge by as much as a factor of 10, according to research conducted at Stanford University. The findings are published in the December 2007 issue of Nature Nanotechnology The technology could significantly extend the running time of battery...

Computer manufacturers had cause for good cheer in the fourth quarter of 2007 with PC shipments increasing a little more than 15 percent worldwide and nearly 9 percent in the U.S., according toIDC's Worldwide Quarterly PC Tracker report However, the pending recession in the U.S. could led to slower growth in the next few years, the research firm pr...

Legions of Oprah Winfrey fans will have access to the talk show megastar 24/7 on "OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network," Winfrey and Discovery Communications President and CEO David Zaslav announced Tuesday. The joint venture will enable Discovery to repurpose its less-than-successful Discovery Health channel with Oprah's brand "Fifteen years ago, I wrot...

A little more than two weeks into 2008, cyber-criminals are up to their same old tricks -- stealing users' private data -- but they have concocted a far more advanced and sophisticated method. They are now embedding their malicious code into legitimate Web sites using Web-hosting servers, according to a report released Monday byFinjan Software, a provider of secure web gateway products...

Windows Vista users who have been chomping at the bit to join the beta test of its first service pack (SP1) can now download the software thanks to an apparent reversal late last week by Microsoft After initially offering the latest beta version, known as "Vista SP1 RC Refresh," to its 15,000 beta testers last Wednesday, the company reportedly deci...

While apparel, department and specialty stores bemoan a 2007 less-than-stellar holiday sales season, consumer electronics retailer Best Buy announced Friday that its total revenue for the fiscal month ending Jan. 5 rose 11 percent to US$7.3 billion, meeting the company's expectations. That increase was due in part to the net addition of 127 new stores during the past 12 months. For the same period ending Dec. 30, 2006, the electronics giant reported total revenue of $6.6 billion...

An announcement by Dutch game developer Engine Software that its first WiiWare game, "Project Bang," had the gaming blogosphere buzzing Wednesday about a March 2008 launch date for Nintendo's WiiWare, a game development and download portal, in Europe and possibly the U.S ...

Dell and storage manufacturing partner EMC launched new entry-level storage area network (SAN) solutions aimed at small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) Tuesday branded for each hardware maker EMC's CLARiiON AX4 and Dell's AX4-5 are intended to meet the growing demand for storage capacity driven by both SMBs and satellite offices of larger enterp...

As sales numbers for the holiday season begin to surface, it appears the video game console industry sustained the heavy momentum it enjoyed throughout 2007 Releases put out in the last week from both Microsoft and Sony point to a solid season for the Xbox 360 and PS3. While Nintendo has not released any sales totals for the Wii, estimates indicate...

Meraki, a wireless mesh network startup with dreams of bringing Internet access to developing countries, announced Friday that it will expand its "Free the Net" program, currently available in a few San Francisco neighborhoods, to cover the entire city and create a free municipal WiFi network The Mountain View, Calif.-based company also announced t...

Lenovo, maker of ThinkPad notebooks and ThinkCentre desktops for businesses, on Thursday announced its first globally available line of notebook PCs aimed at consumers, the IdeaPad Y510, Y710 and U110 "Given that the consumer market represents over 40 percent of the opportunity worldwide, this is obviously a very big opportunity for Lenovo to conti...

While brick-and-mortar retailers assess the damage from what could be the worst holiday shopping season since 2002, online retailers are celebrating a banner year. For the 2007 holiday season, online shopping reached nearly US$28 billion, according to a report released by comScore. That represents a 19 percent gain for e-tailers during the 57 days the study regards as the holiday season -- Nov. 1 through Dec. 27 -- over a similar time period in 2006...

Consumers hoping to safeguard their holiday memories by storing pictures on their Windows Home Servers (WHS) may instead want to save those files on their PCs' hard drives. A post made on Microsoft's WHS blog warns users that WHS contains a heretofore undiscovered file corruption bug Although engineers are busily trying to solve the problem, Micros...

Google raised Web surfers' hackles after a seemingly simple change linking its Google Reader service with Google Talk The move has raised concerns about privacy and highlighted the delicate balancing act that companies with vast stores of personal data have to perform as they try to improve their offerings. For Google in particular, the incident ma...

Heavy e-mail users sometimes have trouble finding the needle of information they need in the haystacks of old missives lingering in their in-boxes. That's the sort of user IBM has targeted with its new OmniFind Personal E-Mail Search (IOPES) tool Rolled out Thursday, IOPES is a free, semantics-based search tool designed to make searching the "vast ...

The next iteration of Microsoft's Web browser, Internet Explorer 8 (IE 8), will roll out in beta form early next year, the company said Wednesday. The long-awaited news comes just days after the earlier-than-expected launch of the second beta version of Mozilla's Firefox 3 Web browser The eighth version of the browser won't be hamstrung with the di...

IBM has teamed with ACI Worldwide, an electronic paymentsoftware company, to develop a payment system powered by IBM'sopen standardsbased System Z platform. The new offering will include IBM's DB2 database,WebSphere middleware and Tivoli management software as well as itsCrypto-chiptechnology. It will also run a specially optimized version of AIC's payment processingsoftware...

Amazon has added a new component to its Amazon Web Services (AWS), the online retailer announced Thursday. SimpleDB, a new Web-based service for running queries on structured data in real time, joins Amazon's other offerings, Simple Storage Service (S3) and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), as a computing solution for individual developers and small companies with big ideas and undersized budgets...

Back-to-back announcements -- first from Facebook and then Bebo -- have upped the ante in the social network application development game. Facebook, which launched its Facebook Platform for developers last May, will make its developer platform architecture available to other social networking sites as a model and through licensing deals Soon therea...