Matthew Hicks

Microsoft Corp. will announce on Wednesday that its Office 2004 for Mac has reached store shelves. As planned, the Redmond, Wash., software maker is releasing its Mac productivity suite in the third week of this month, following its unveiling in January during the Macworld Conference & Expo. While the standard and the student and teacher […]

The e-mail storage race appeared to have reached a new height this week when test users of Googles free Gmail service noticed having not just 1 gigabyte of storage, but 1 terabyte. But the appearance of the “1000000 MB” ticker at the bottom of their Gmail inboxes was no more than a system bug that […]

ScanSoft Inc. on Tuesday announced its newest speech-recognition engine—a product that, for the first time, combines into a single product the engines the company acquired last year. ScanSoft, of Peabody, Mass., launched OpenSpeech Recognizer 3.0, the first major update to the platform that it acquired after its merger last year with SpeechWorks International Inc. Along […]

A federal judge on Tuesday dismissed the main antitrust claim in VeriSign Inc.s lawsuit against the nonprofit that oversees the Internets Web-addressing system. The judge did leave VeriSign with an opportunity to reinstate it, however. The judge ruled on the first claim in the case, one of six that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names […]

The technology at the heart of one of the most popular Web-logging tools is about to go open source. On Monday, the founder of UserLand Software Inc. said an open-source release of the Frontier platform, which serves as the underlying engine and runtime for the Manila and Radio UserLand blog-publishing tools, would become available within […]

Apple is seeking a patent on a method for rendering translucent-appearing windows, technology that appears similar to features Microsoft has been previewing for its next major Windows release. Apple Computer Inc.s patent application, which dates back to November 2003, was published Thursday on the U.S. Patent and Trademark Offices Web site. By law, most patent […]

The effort among Atom supporters to create a standard XML syndication format took a new turn this week as the Webs leading standards body suggested a new route. The World Wide Web Consortium invited the Atom community to form a working group under its auspices, rather than within the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Atom […]

In launching the next version of its Movable Type Weblogging software, Six Apart also has unleashed a blogger flame war. The target: its decision to formally charge users for software licenses. Movable Type 3.0 went out Thursday as a developer edition with a more extensive set of APIs that allow developers and IT departments to […]

In another sign of the intensifying competition in Web search, CNN.com has switched to Yahoo Inc.s search technology for results on its major news and information sites. The switched occurred Wednesday but was announced last month as part of an expanded deal between CNN.com and Yahoo subsidiary Overture Services Inc., which provides search-based advertising. Overture […]

Google Inc., known for spurning large, graphical ads on its own Web site, is expanding into the banner advertising market. The Mountain View, Calif., company late on Wednesday started a beta test of what it calls image ads for its popular AdWords program, company officials said. The image ads, though, will not appear on Googles […]