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CEO Satya Nadella on Tuesday took the occasion of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, to announce that Microsoft plans to donate US$1 billion worth of cloud services to serve nonprofits and university researchers over the next three years. The company's recently formed Microsoft Philanth...

Connected cars and self-driving cars are two of the hottest and fastest-growing segments in the marketplace today. However, they are often confused. Connected cars are here today. Self-driving cars are not yet, but they are coming. They both mean advancements in automotive. They both use wireless ne...

Bot fraud will cost digital advertisers $7.2 billion worldwide this year, according to a report released Tuesday by the Association of National Advertisers. For the "2015 Bot Baseline" report, 49 ANA members deployed detection tags from White Ops on their digital ads to measure bot fraud over 61 day...

The Federal Trade Commission is extending its regulatory reach to the e-commerce impact of big data. For years, the FTC has asserted vigorously its authority to apply consumer protection laws to emerging developments in the IT realm. Now it is signaling that it will apply that same vigor to big data...

Privacy advocates from around the globe have taken heart from reports that Apple CEO Tim Cook pushed hard against the Obama administration's efforts to reach a compromise on encryption during a recent Silicon Valley meeting. Cook earlier this month joined a delegation of social media and technology ...

Netflix last week announced it will crack down on members using proxies or unblockers to access titles from overseas. That follows the company's announcement at CES 2016 earlier this month of a global rollout that has it offering streaming content in 190 countries. The problem is that not all of Net...

When Amazon launched Prime Day six months ago, skeptics came out in force to criticize what they considered Jeff Bezos' desperate ploy to add members to a club that appeared to be peaking in a saturated domestic market. Gimmick or not, Prime Day worked. Amazon sold more than 34.4 million items acros...

WhatsApp on Monday announced that it would drop the annual subscription fee and allow people to use the service for free. Company founder Jan Koum announced the move at the DLD Conference in Munich. While more than 900 million people worldwide use WhatsApp to stay in touch with family and friends, t...

IDC last week reported worldwide PC shipments totaled nearly 72 million units in the fourth quarter of 2015, down 10.6 percent year over year -- the largest YoY decline ever. While shipments in Q4 were slightly higher than in Q3, 2015 was the first year since 2008 that fewer than 300 million PCs wer...

Foursquare on Thursday announced that cofounder Dennis Crowley has assumed a new executive role, and that it has raised $45 million in a new round of funding led by Union Square Ventures. Crowley has moved from his perch as CEO into the newly created position of executive chairman, which will let hi...

Apple is phasing out its iAd sales team and moving toward an automated system, according to news reports this week. Then-CEO Steve Jobs launched iAd six years ago to provide an alternative to existing mobile advertising platforms, but it never caught fire. Under the new iAd platform, publishers repo...

Cisco on Wednesday unveiled Cloud Consumption as a Service, an offering designed to help enterprises discover and continually monitor public cloud use -- aka "shadow IT" -- across their systems. Shadow IT systems in an enterprise or organization expose it to security risks and hidden costs, and may ...

Samsung Electronics on Thursday announced that it had struck a deal that will make it the sole manufacturer of Qualcomm's flagship mobile processor. Samsung last spring began mass production of a logic chip utilizing its 14-nanometer LPP (Low-Power Plus) process in its own Exynos 8 Octa processor. T...

Time Warner CEO Jeffrey Bewkes this week hinted at a meeting with investors that he might consider a sale of the company, according to a news report. Apple, which reportedly is interested in purchasing Time Warner or its media assets, is keeping a close eye on the discussions. Buying Time Warner's a...

Google on Wednesday confirmed the appointment of Clay Bavor as vice president of virtual reality, one of several indications that the company intends to get serious about competing in the emerging field. Diane Greene will take over Bavor's former role as vice president of product management. The new...