Matthew Hicks

In its continuing push to put AOL Instant Messenger service at the center of its communications strategy, America Online Inc. is adding contact management capabilities to AIM through a partnership with Plaxo Inc. AOL and Plaxo Inc. on Wednesday announced that they are working together to integrate Plaxos ability to import, export and synchronize contacts […]

Even as the major search engines have expanded their indexes of the Web to as many as 8 billion documents, they are increasingly acknowledging that much of the worlds information is nowhere to be found in search results. To combat that problem, search companies as large as Yahoo Inc. and Google Inc. and as small […]

AOL tuned into video search on Thursday with the launch of a service for finding and playing back streaming video. To power its video search results, America Online Inc. is tapping into an index of millions of Web video clips from Singingfish, a company AOL acquired in 2003. But AOL Video Search goes beyond Singingfishs […]

Google and Yahoo have opened a new front in their online mapping battle: winning over developers. Both companies on Wednesday released APIs into their respective online mapping services as they attempt to attract other Web sites to use their maps. While they are focusing on how developers can overlay information on maps, the companies are […]

SEATTLE—Microsofts vision for tying RSS directly into the next release of Windows drew cheers and jeers among the syndication-feed enthusiasts gathered here Friday. It drew accolades for its potential to smooth some of the user kinks in discovering and managing feed subscriptions, while it awakened fears that the Redmond, Wash., software maker is attempting to […]

Compliance issues are moving beyond e-mail as providers of other collaboration technologies begin to address the growing need for companies to store and track online communication. This week, Web conferencing was the latest to join the compliance fray. WebEx Communications Inc. on Wednesday launched a new option for its online meeting applications that allows companies […]

SAN FRANCISCO—Upcoming legislative action and an impending Supreme Court decision are reawakening the prospect of Internet regulation, and this time around, policy experts are warning that applications such as voice over IP could get caught in the crosshairs. During a policy panel here at the Supernova conference Wednesday, representatives from the telecommunications and Internet industries […]

Googles top executive confirmed on Tuesday that the company is planning to expand into broader online payment services but said it will not compete with a PayPal-like service. In a company-issued statement, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said the company does not plan to offer what he called a “person-to-person stored-value payments system.” One of the […]

Online marketplace eBay Inc. is wooing open-source developers by launching a community Web site for sharing source code to tools and applications tied to the online marketplace. The San Jose, Calif., company introduced on Tuesday the eBay Community Codebase program, which provides a collaborative forum wherein open-source developers can tap one another to create tools […]

Microsoft plans to announce its initial push into local search on Monday as it takes a step closer to launching a competitor to Googles online aerial maps. The companys Internet division is expected to release a beta version of MSN Local Search. The service, which will be added as a link from the main MSN […]

When Apple Computer Inc. CEO Steve Jobs took the stage last week at Apples major developer conference, he brought with him a message about the future of broadcasting linked inextricably to the iPod. Jobs gave the highest-profile blessing yet from a technology executive for an emerging form of audio downloads called Podcasting. He promised upcoming […]

In a spree of acquisitions, Yahoo Inc. is laying the groundwork to make its instant messaging service talk with the traditional phone networks and to play a bigger role in distributing Weblog updates. Officials with the online company confirmed two separate acquisitions on Tuesday—its purchase of Dialpad Communications Inc., a consumer Internet telephony provider, and […]