Nicholas Kolakowski

Microsoft’s Bing search engine saw its U.S. market share dip from 9.62 percent to 9.43 percent in the period between March and April 2010, according to Experian Hitwise. However, Bing also saw continued strong growth in verticals, reflecting on a strategy that focuses on targeted search categories such as shopping in lieu of traditional keyword […]

Apple’s iPad may cannibalize sales of related devices, including notebooks and the iPod Touch, according to a March survey by Alphawise, Morgan Stanley’s specialized internal research team. Some 44 percent of iPad owners surveyed said they would forgo purchasing a notebook, while 24 percent said MacBooks and 20 percent said PCs. “U.S. consumer PC, and […]

News organizations ranging from the Associated Press to Bloomberg News have joined a court filing to unseal the search warrant affidavit that backed the April 23 raid of Gizmodo Editor Jason Chen’s California home, after the tech blog publicly dissected what it called a next-generation iPhone prototype. According to a May 5 article in the […]

Microsoft revealed Spindex, a Web service designed to aggregate its users’ various social-networking feeds onto a single screen, on May 4. The application is a product of Microsoft’s FUSE Labs, a Microsoft division devoted to building software with a social connectivity focus. “As you increasingly tweet, post to Facebook, and capture ideas with tools like […]

Former Microsoft executive Bill Veghte has been selected as executive vice president of Hewlett-Packard’s Software and Solutions Business, where he will oversee the development and launch of enterprise software products. The appointment is effective May 17, HP said in a news release May 5. HP’s business offerings include management and business intelligence software, as well […]

Microsoft indicated its opinions on the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 during Congressional testimony on May 5, arguing that the legislation must be revised to more effectively guard users’ privacy in the era of cloud computing. “From our vantage point, we have seen the full arc of how online services have evolved over the […]

Microsoft and Nokia announced the launch of Microsoft Communicator Mobile for Nokia devices, touted by both companies as the first release from their mobile-productivity alliance, on May 5. The application serves as a unified communications client that links an enterprise’s communications systems, allowing users of Nokia Eseries smartphones to check on colleagues’ availability and then […]

Microsoft formally announced that its upcoming Kin One and Kin Two phones will be available online for preorder starting May 6, with a Verizon in-store rollout to follow on May 13. That comes days after a leaked internal report from Verizon suggested those dates for the launch. The Kin One will retail for $49.99, after […]

Apple may alter the language of its controversial developer agreement to avoid a potential federal antitrust investigation, according to unnamed sources quoted in The Wall Street Journal. In addition, the article indicated that the Federal Trade Commission has “taken an interest” in iAd, Apple’s upcoming mobile application advertising platform, in the context of potentially unfair […]

Microsoft will start closing the more than 4,200 public and private newsgroups related to its products and programs, beginning in June, and porting those discussions to Microsoft forums such as Microsoft Answers, TechNet and MSDN. Microsoft argued that the newsgroups run on “an outdated and discontinued forum that is no longer supported,” and are thus […]

Former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates suggested during a television interview that rumors of the company’s death in the tablet PC space were, at best, premature. His comments followed a week in which Microsoft announced the death of its long-rumored Courier project, which centered on a dual-touch-screen device in a folding book-like format, and in which […]

A new proposal by U.S. Sens. Harry Reid, D-Nev., Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., and Bob Menendez, D-N.J., would see a stiffening of the regulations surrounding H-1B and L-1 visas, including restricting the number of H-1B and L-1 employees that U.S. companies of a certain size could hire. While the plan currently circulating on Capitol Hill is […]