Eric Lundquist

Microsoft’s proposed $40 billion Yahoo takeover always had the potential to turn into an ugly street fight. Steve Ballmer’s open letter to Yahoo posted on April 5 sets a date for the street fight to start. As Ballmer states in the letter, “If we have not concluded an agreement within the next three weeks, we […]

Amid ongoing corporate difficulties, General Motors has been leaning heavily on CIO Ralph Szygenda to cut waste and speed innovation through a fully outsourced approach to IT. In 2006, GM awarded $7.5 billion in outsourcing contracts, and before 2011 the company will award another $7.5 billion. That “big-bang” moment in 2006 followed a stormy relationship […]

9:30 a.m., CTIA Show, Las Vegas It is the last day of the CTIA show in Vegas and the final keynotes are due to start in a few minutes. Why do the keynote organizers always feel compelled to have blasting musicto start the day? 9:37. Steve Largent comes out. Why the politicians? Largent is pitching […]

The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission said he will recommend dismissal of a controversial petition from Skype. Speaking at the annual CTIA convention in Las Vegas, the call for dismissal by FCC Chairman Kevin J. Martin drew applause. In February, Skype petitioned the FCC to stop wireless carriers from setting limits on subscribers’ right […]

update: CNBC had an interview with Branson where he says it was no hoax. update: Google posts blog saying it all was fake Virgin founder Richard Branson and Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are funding Project Virgle, designed to offer a Noah’s Ark type one way trip to Mars. When Branson called for […]

Retailers, e-commerce developers and security vendors should be paying close attention to the data breach case unfolding around the Hannaford Brothers Cos. Unlike many data breaches in the past that fall into the “smash and grab” category, the Hannaford breach (which may affect 4.2 million credit and debit card numbers) appears to have been a […]

I met up with PGP President Phil Dunkelberger in the lobby of the Burlington (Mass.) Marriott recently as he was getting ready to head down to New York City on the Acela high-speed train. He was in town a couple weeks ahead of the big RSA security conference coming up in San Fransciso and was […]

If someone told you they wanted you to bid on something that was free and unlimited, how much would you offer? In the latest round of FCC spectrum auctions (which have been taking place since 1994) the answer this time around was about $16 billion for rights to use the 700 MHz frequency. The winners […]

Wall Street was the gold standard of technology investment. The computing systems on Wall Street had to crunch the most numbers, handle the most transactions and be more secure than those of any other industry. Those financial systems provided the backbone on which the economy depended, and the big Wall Street companies were the darlings […]

There are social networks, and then there is the real world. Where the two meet is the next emerging technology business. The problem with social networks such as Facebook and MySpace is twofold: They rely solely on advertising for revenues, and the larger the network grows, the less attractive the network becomes as spammers, schemers […]