Nicholas Kolakowski

Google announced March 20 that Google Voice, its new phone-based application, has the ability to block phone spam. By tagging a phone call as spam, users effectively block the caller’s number from ringing their various phones or leaving e-mails. However, the marked calls will end up in a spam folder, which can be manually filtered […]

Oracle announced on March 23 an agreement to acquire Relsys International, which offers drug safety and risk management solutions with advanced analytics for the health sciences industry. Relsys offers solutions for event reporting, risk management and data analysis in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology arenas. By acquiring Relsys, Oracle will gain the ability to deliver software […]

Palm plans on releasing its new smartphone, the Palm Pre, during the first half of 2009, and has managed to build considerable buzz for the device over the past few months. The company is betting that a blockbuster project will not only boost its revenue, but pull it out of what Ed Colligan, CEO of […]

Google has introduced a new feature to Gmail: a five-second window to “unsend” a message that the user has second thoughts about. Microsoft Outlook, with its “Recall” button, and the “Unsend” feature on AOL e-mail already allow users to take back e-mail under specific circumstances (in the latter case, for example, only when the e-mail […]

Cisco Systems announced the acquisition of Pure Digital Technologies, creator of the Flip Video device, on March 19. The agreement, which is expected to close in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2009, has Cisco paying $590 million in stock for Pure Digital, on top of another $15 million in retention-based equity incentives. The Flip Video, […]

Google, Yahoo and other search-engine companies have cornered the market on search via keywords. However, other organizations have seen opportunity in pushing their own search engines that either sift information through alternate means or focus on a narrow subset of subject matter-such as The Financial Times Group, which is rolling out Newssift.com, designed to search […]

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison feels that his company is making broad-based gains against its competitors, even as the global recession weighs down the IT industry. Analysts and industry insiders have noted that Oracle’s recent moves, including the purchase of SMB server virtualization specialist Virtual Iron Software announced on March 10, indicate the company is strong […]

Google and Sony announced that Google’s library of public-domain eBooks would now be available for free on the Sony Reader, increasing its library of titles to more than 600,000 and putting pressure on Amazon and its Kindle eBook reader, whose library totals 245,000 volumes. This marks the first time that Google has made its scanned […]

NEW YORK-Sun Microsystems used the March 18 opening of the CommunityOne open developer conference to announce its upcoming Sun Open Cloud Platform, a set of core technologies, APIs and protocols that the company intends to proliferate throughout private and public clouds in the coming years. In addition, Sun also announced the Sun Cloud, its first […]

SAP announced on March 18 the rollout of a new version of the SAP BusinessObjects Global Trade Services application, part of the SAP BusinessObjects governance, risk and compliance solutions suite. The announcement follows Oracle‘s March 9 release of Oracle Sourcing On Demand, a software-as-a-service solution intended to make strategic sourcing, the process by which companies […]

Facebook announced that it is giving its users the option of making their profiles open to total public viewing. In the old paradigm, user profiles were automatically made private, accessible only to “friends” and small networks. The site recently issued public profiles, which will allow businesses and enterprises with Facebook pages to post videos, photos […]