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The federal government has launched Apps.Gov, an online app store for federal agencies and workers, in the hope of reducing the US$75 billion a year it spends on IT. Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra introduced the site Tuesdayin a speech at the NASA Ames Research Center, as well as in a White House blog post ...

GroundWork Open Source, a provider of commercial open source systems and network management software, has launched MonitoringForge, a hub for IT administrators and developers interested in open source monitoring tools. ...

Microsoft has added new functionality to its Bing search engine. Visual Search, an add-on based on its Silverlight plug-in, made its debut Tuesday at the TechCrunch50 industry event being held in San Francisco. ...

The focus of a U.S. Senate hearing Monday afternoon is the potential danger of cellphone use -- specifically, the risk of brain cancer. That link was suggested as long ago as last decade, when cellphones were slightly smaller than a shoebox and just beginning to become part of the everyday landscape. ...

The Department of Justice has asked Yahoo and Microsoft to supply it with more information about its proposed search advertising tie-up that the duo announced earlier this summer. Both companies have said they are cooperating with the inquiry. Indeed, they all but predicted this would happen when their partnership was first announced. ...

Remember the bad old days of customer self-service? Automated systems would present you with five or more different options -- any one of which could lead to five or more other options. With touchtone systems, accidentally pressing the wrong number at a prompt could result in instant death by disconnection. Then came the speech-recognition systems, with their own specific tortures: creepily cheery voices reciting five or more options; systems that went into lockdown if you sneezed into the phone. Let's not even talk about systems that couldn't understand your accent, whether you were from another country or just another region.

In this second installment in the E-Commerce Times' series ontravel-planning Web sites, I'll review the strengths and weaknesses of Expedia, a top aggregator. ...

Dell is expanding its electronic medical records offerings with a new hardware, software and service bundle designed to help hospitals ease the transition from paper to digital records. ...

Palm is expanding its line of WebOS smartphones -- and ratcheting up competition with Apple -- with the introduction of a new mobile device called the "Pixi." ...

Open Invention Network announced Tuesday that it acquired 22 Linux-related patents that Microsoft recently sold to the Allied Security Trust. OIN consists of a group of companies -- including Microsoft rivals IBM, Sony, Red Hat and Google -- that have been girding themselves for a legal fight over Linux. ...

Google has proposed modifying its proposed digital books deal with publishers and authors in an effort to tamp down growing opposition to the project. The changes would limit the number of out-of-print books it places online. ...

This story was originally published on May 19, 2009, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series. ...

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has temporarily stayed an injunction against the sale of Microsoft Word that had been set to go into effect next month. ...

Travel Web sites were among the first category of e-commerce ventures to actually make a buck a decade or so ago. It is astounding, therefore, that recent industry reports show a deep dissatisfaction among many users of these portals. In particular, Forrester Research recently reported on the failings of several of these sites, both in terms of tools and customer service.

Congress should enact strict controls on how online advertisers can monitor and track consumers' behavior, according to 10 privacy groups that formed a coalition to lobby for the cause: theCenter for Digital Democracy; theConsumer Federation of America; Consumers Union; Consumer Watchdog; theElectronic Frontier Foundation; Privacy Lives; thePrivacy Rights Clearinghouse; Privacy Times; theU.S. Public Interest Research Group; and the World Privacy Forum.

IBM is rolling out a public desktop cloud offering that it claims is the first subscription service of its kind. ...

Wikipedia plans to roll out a new feature with the goal of enhancing the site's credibility. ...

Intel has boosted its sales forecast for Q3, providing an injection of confidence to the tech sector, where it's viewed as an industry bellwether ...

Facebook will be overhauling its privacy policy following an investigation by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, which concluded that the social networking site's policies posed significant risks. The changes will affect Facebook's entire global user base. ...

Do you have a video that has the potential to really go viral, like the wedding entrance dance or David after the dentist? Post it on YouTube -- notonly for the notoriety, but also for the cold hard cash. At least that is the offer Google, YouTube's corporate parent, is extending to users ...