Matthew Hicks

SANTA CLARA, Calif.—General Motors Corp. is seeking to simplify IT sourcing, even as the systems that run the company and powers its cars become ever more complex. During a keynote Tuesday at the SoftSummit conference here, GMs chief technology officer, Tony Scott, offered a roadmap for how the worlds largest automaker plans to buy and […]

The Mozilla Foundation is getting ready to take the browser wars to a new front: the advertising pages of The New York Times. The open-source development group on Tuesday plans to launch an online campaign to raise money to fund the ad, along with other marketing initiatives for the November launch of its Firefox Web […]

While the hype around social networking technology may be dying down, the number of companies entering the space and expanding their services is only heating up. This week alone, Lycos Inc. entered the social-networking fray with the launch of its Lycos Circles service, LinkedIn Ltd. grabbed another $10 million in funding, and InterActiveCorps ZeroDegrees moved […]

PayPal on Thursday reported that it had restored its online payment services after facing intermittent outages for more than five days. PayPal, owned by eBay Inc., said its full functionality had returned to normal for all users. A day earlier, the service began to improve, though the company said delays persisted for some users. The […]

Google Inc. upped the ante Thursday in the growing desktop search battle, introducing an application that combines Web results with those from a users hard drive. In its beta release, Google Desktop Search supports only the most common file formats and applications. But Google plans in future releases to open access to application developers through […]

After months of debate and negotiations, the overseer of the Internets domain-name system has gained approval for a budget that doubles its spending. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers announced Tuesday that its $15.8 million budget for fiscal year 2004-05 had garnered the necessary support from the 359 registrars who are authorized to […]

Sporadic outages at PayPal stretched into a fifth day on Tuesday, though the company late in the day reported that access had returned to normal for most users. Even as access appeared to be improving, the effect of the payment services troubles was rippling among sellers and buyers who had lost sales and begun questioning […]

After nearly five days of sporadic outages, PayPals online payment service appeared to be back to normal on Wednesday. PayPal officials said that aside from occasional delays for a small percentage of users, the service was working properly. Web-performance monitoring companies also reported that the PayPal Web site had returned to normal uptime. “In general, […]

SAN FRANCISCO—Yahoo Inc. wants to join the advertising market for XML syndication feeds, a top company executive said here on Wednesday, raising the prospect for a greater adoption of sponsored links within news feeds. During a question-and-answer session at the Web 2.0 conference, Yahoo chief operating officer Dan Rosensweig said the company plans to offer […]

SAN FRANCISCO—Google Inc. on Thursday gave a preview of its next steps to improve Web search, and clustering technology played a leading role. During a panel discussion of research lab leaders at the Web 2.0 conference here, one of Googles top researchers previewed the search companys work in clustering both entities and words as a […]

SAN FRANCISCO—Bill Gross, the man behind Overture Services and the Idealab incubator, wants to reinvent Web search. During the Web 2.0 conference here on Tuesday, Gross unveiled search-engine Snap, which has combined terabytes of click-stream data and advertising conversions rates to remodel search-result relevancy. Gross said that Snap, available in a public beta, is focused […]

SAN FRANCISCO—The co-founders of early search engine and portal Excite.com are bringing a new concept to the Web: the wiki as an application development platform. JotSpot Inc., the brainchild of Joe Kraus and Graham Spencer, was unveiled here on Wednesday during the Web 2.0 conference and began offering invitation-only access to a beta of its […]