Matthew Hicks

Microsofts victory in a U.S. Court of Appeals ruling Wednesday largely ends the Department of Justices 6-year-old antitrust case against the software maker and removes a major financial barrier for the company. Wednesdays ruling struck down Massachusetts appeal of a 2001 settlement between Microsoft Corp. and the DOJ. Massachusetts was seeking stronger remedies against the […]

TuVox has launched an updated version of its call center speech platform that can voice-enable information retrieved from databases and Web services. TuVox CVR 4.0, announced Monday, expands a technology the company calls “SmartGen” to build speech dialogs, prompts and grammars in order to navigate data from SQL databases and Web services, said Steve Pollock, […]

Overture Services Inc. jumped into the local search advertising space this week with a new program that lets advertisers target sponsored listings to a specific geography. Overture, a division of Yahoo Inc., on Monday launched Local Match and announced that local search ads had begun appearing on Yahoo and the MyCity.com site. Local Match allows […]

By giving its blessing to XML syndication, Apple is joining the trend of browser makers embracing Web news feeds and potentially bringing the technology to the masses. Apple Computer Inc. CEO Steve Jobs on Monday previewed the companys next version of its Web browser, dubbed Safari RSS. RSS refers to the acronym for Really Simple […]

SANTA CLARA, Calif.—At what point do more people joining an online social network or using a social software tool cause more harm than good? While the answer may be elusive, panelists at the Supernova 2004 conference here agreed that the social dynamics around the use of burgeoning collaboration tools such as online social networking services, […]

SANTA CLARA, Calif.—Document management vendor NextPage Corp. is testing a new application to help individuals better track their iterations of Microsoft Office documents. During the Supernova 2004 conference here this week, the Draper, Utah, company demonstrated what it is calling “document management for the masses.” The service is code-named Project Chrome and uses embedded metadata […]

Fresh from acquiring a series of portal sites, Ask Jeeves also is jumping into the Web-based e-mail storage race. The Emeryville, Calif., company on Thursday will announce its plans to expand the free e-mail storage limits on portal sites My Way, Excite and iWon to 125 megabytes. Ask Jeeves Inc. gained those sites with its […]

Microsoft on Thursday will make official its plans to join the Web-based e-mail storage wars by increasing storage for users of its MSN Hotmail service. Free MSN Hotmail users will be gaining 250 megabytes of storage, up from 2MB today, while premium users, for $19.95 a year, will be receiving 2 gigabytes of storage, MSN […]

A small online ad player is taking contextual online advertising vertical. Quigo Technologies Inc. on Monday launched a new content-targeted ad platform called AdSonar Exchange that focuses on matching advertisers to specific niche audiences. The company is providing an alternative to the sponsored listings offered by major search-advertising players Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc.s Overture […]

Ask Jeeves has launched a Web search feature that lets users preview a Web page before clicking a link. The Emeryville, Calif., company on Monday unveiled a beta of the site-preview feature, which it calls “Binoculars.” When users click over a binoculars icon appearing next to search results, they can view a thumbnail of the […]