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Amazon has announced a dramatic upswing in e-book sales. For the first half of 2010 it sold three times as many Kindle books as it did in the first half of 2009. For the full second quarter, it reported sales of 143 Kindle books for every 100 hardcover books sold. Over the past month, it sold 180 Ki...

Motorola will sell the majority of its network equipment business to Nokia Siemens Networks in a $1.2 billion deal that is generally seen as a positive move for both companies as they pursue their respective business strategies. Motorola gets a much-needed infusion of cash, plus the freedom to focus...

U.S. sales of gaming hardware, software and accessories experienced a slump in the month of June with such transactions down by 6 percent compared to a year earlier, to $1.1 billion, according to NPD Group. Within that category, hardware -- in particular, Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Sony's PlayStation ...

eBay has been slammed with a lawsuit alleging that the e-commerce giant infringes on six patents with its PayPal, Bill Me Later, Shopping.com and StubHub services. The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court in Delaware by XPRT Ventures, veers from the typical pattern of patent disputes. For starters...

Facebook has been blindsided by a lawsuit that could have triggered an upheaval in its ownership structure, or at least a massive legal fight -- if it had been filed a few months ago, that is. Still, the modicum of legal uncertainty created by the case must be giving top executives at the social net...

Google has reportedly invested a significant sum of money -- between US$100 million and $200 million -- in social games company Zynga in order to build out a Google Games offering for the search engine giant. The investment, which was reportedly made by Google and not Google Ventures, is a highly st...

China has renewed Google's Internet Content Provider license, according to David Drummond, the company's senior vice president of corporate development and chief legal officer. With this step behind it now, Google will be able to continue to provide Web search and local products to users in China. T...

Comcast's pending acquisition of General Electric's NBC Universal was put under the microscope again Thursday as the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and The Internet of the House Energy and Commerce Committee held a field hearing to investigate the proposed d...

In May, TheFind reached a notable milestone: It overtook Yahoo Shopping to become the No. 2 search engine for retail queries, according to comScore. Google holds the No. 1 slot. A relative newcomer, TheFind has posted remarkable growth in a short period of time. In April, for example, it grew 175 ...

Borders is expanding its reach into the e-book market with the launch of its e-bookstore, a site that holds 1.5 million titles and is powered by powered by Canadian company Kobo. Borders acquired a stake in the firm last year and sells the Kobo eReader at the online store, as well as the Sony Reader...

Netflix has expanded its library of streaming movie titles -- and will be making them available to customers much faster -- through a new agreement it has inked with distribution house Relativity Media. As part of the deal, Relativity's movies can be streamed to Netflix's customer base months after ...

Google has announced plans to buy ITA Software, a major provider of airline travel software, for $700 million. ITA is a prominent player in its space -- it counts among its clients virtually all of the major Web travel information and booking providers, including such airlines as American and Contin...

Google will no longer redirect mainland China Internet users to its Hong Kong site at Google.com.hk. Instead, it will display a link to the uncensored Hong Kong site on its Google.cn landing page. The Hong Kong page also gives mainland users access to such services as music and text translation. Th...

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled in a patent case that has held the software industry and patent attorneys in suspense for much of the last year. However, the decision, which came down on the last day of the court's term, was worth the wait for advocates in favor of the patentability of business pro...

U.S. President Barack Obama has signed a memorandum that proposes the government to provide 500 MHz worth of additional broadband spectrum for auction -- spectrum that is now controlled by the federal government and private companies. The goal of the proposal is to provide more wireless space for th...

Microsoft has introduced several changes to the design and content of its entertainment results on Bing, including ways to link searches to the content they're looking for more directly. The changes are ultimately intended to make this portion of its search engine far stickier. That, of course, is h...

Salesforce.com has made its latest product, Salesforce.com Chatter, generally available for its 77,300 customers. First unveiled as a private beta earlier this year, Chatter is a real-time social collaboration application and platform for the enterprise. It allows employees to send feeds and status ...

There will be half a billion personal computers sold to U.S. consumers between now and 2015, according to Forrester Research, which includes desktops, notebooks and laptops, tablets and netbooks in the PC category. That is a big jump from current levels -- a 52 percent increase -- Forrester noted in...

AOL has found a buyer for its social networking site Bebo. Although the sale price is undisclosed, it is rumored that Los Angeles-based private equity fund Criterion Capital Partners snapped up the site for $10 million. If true, that price represents a steep drop from what AOL paid for it two years ...

San Francisco's Board of Supervisors has voted 10-1 to approve a law requiring cellphone retailers and vendors to post how much radiation their devices emit. The measure calls upon stores to display the "specific absorption rates" next to the devices. SAR -- that is, the amount of radio frequency en...