Matthew Hicks

Google Inc. on Tuesday upped the ante in the increasingly competitive search-engine market, announcing that it has increased its venerable Web index to 6 billion Web pages, images and other documents. In its core search area, Web sites, Google said that it had increased the number of Web pages in its index to 4.28 billion, […]

With portions of Microsoft Windows NT and 2000 source code running wild on the Internet, programmers are battling the temptation to peek at the operating systems code. Doing so, legal experts warn, could thrust developers and their software projects into a legal hotbed. “Theres no legitimate reason to look at it,” said Phil Albert, a […]

SAN DIEGO—A startup companys online multiplayer game has spawned a new way to share and collaborate on the Web that melds elements of instant messaging, group chat and social networking. Ludicorp Research & Development Ltd. unveiled its Web collaboration application, called Flickr, during a preview this week for attendees of the OReilly Emerging Technology Conference […]

SAN DIEGO—Microsoft Corp.s Research organization is preparing to publicly release in a few weeks the client application for its Aura research project, a researcher told attendees of the OReilly Emerging Technology Conference here. Research Sociologist Marc Smith, demonstrating Aura during his keynote presentation, explained that the project uses mobile devices to interact with physical objects […]

SAN DIEGO—eBay Inc. is expanding its developer program to support more Web services protocols and programming languages, the company announced on Tuesday during the OReilly Emerging Technology Conference being held here. eBays announcement meshed with one of the key themes outlined during the opening day of the conference: That major Web players such as eBay, […]

Opera Software ASA, an Oslo, Norway, maker of Web browser software, is planning to go public next month. Opera announced on Monday that its board of directors has decided to apply for a public listing on the Oslo Stock Exchange. The news came as the company reported a 54 percent increase in earnings for 2003 […]

Macromedia Inc. on Monday announced plans to bolster its Web conferencing software with new collaboration features and greater integration with enterprise applications. The San Francisco-based company said it will release an update to the online meeting platform, Breeze 4.0, in March. It marks Macromedias latest push into an increasingly competitive market against leaders WebEx Communications […]

The Mozilla Foundation on Monday renamed its standalone Web browser to avoid confusion with another open-source development project. Mozilla, of Mountain View, Calif., announced that it changed the browsers name from Mozilla Firebird to Mozilla Firefox. At the same time, the open-source project released updates to Firefox as well as its standalone e-mail application, named […]

Microsoft Corp. this week released a follow-on update to its earlier patch for an Internet Explorer spoofing vulnerability. The new update, released in a series of service packs on Thursday, fixes Microsoft Extensible Markup Language (MSXML) functionality so that it can work properly with the changes made in the IE security bulletin that Microsoft released […]

RealNetworks Inc. recently released a security update to plug a series of vulnerabilities in its media players that could open a users machine to malicious code. Security researchers at British-based NGSSoftware Ltd., which issued an advisory on Wednesday, discovered the security holes in December and informed Real Networks of the vulnerabilities. The Seattle-based Real Networks […]

AOL Instant Messenger is entering the world of video chat and joining hands with Mac OS X users in the process. America Online Inc. on Thursday launched AIM version 5.5 for Windows with a new streaming video chat feature that includes compatibility with Apple Computer Inc.s iChat AV video conferencing application. Along with AOLs AIM […]

Nuance Communications Inc. on Tuesday rolled out updated versions of its speech recognition engine and voice authentication software with a focus on improved accuracy and performance. With Nuance 8.5, the speech vendors latest version of its namesake speech recognition engine, Nuance is promising a 50 percent reduction in errors in recognizing spoken commands and phrases. […]