Roy Mark

The Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice gave the green light Aug. 24 to Sprint Nextel’s proposed $483 million acquisition of Virgin Mobile USA. The agencies’ reviews of the deal, announced July 28, covered the antitrust aspects of the transaction.The merger still needs Federal Communications Commission approval since Virgin Mobile holds international spectrum […]

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has issued new regulations requiring health care providers, health plans and other entities covered by HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) to notify individuals when their health information is breached. The breach notifications were part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 passed earlier […]

HP said Aug. 24 it landed a new Air Force contract to provide new HP Workstation and desktop PCs as part of its enterprise IT purchase program. The award is part of the Air Force’s DLS (desktop, laptop and servers) Quarterly Enterprise Buy (QEB). The QEB award will include the HP xw4600 Workstation, which combines […]

BlackBerry maker RIM (Research in Motion) acquired mobile Web browser developer Torch Mobile Aug. 24 for an undisclosed sum. Torch Mobile, based in Toronto, developed the Iris mobile browser using WebKit, the same open-source code that underlies many of today’s browers, including Apple’s iPhone, Palm’s Pre and Google’s Android phones. “Our team of developers will […]

Fueling of the space shuttle Discovery continued Aug. 24 with NASA predicting an 80 percent chance of good weather for a 1:36 a.m. Aug. 26 blastoff to the International Space Station. The launch marks the 128th mission in shuttle program history and the 30th shuttle visit to the ISS.Unlike previous missions, which have focused on […]

It started as a joke and will end up at the International Space Station. After comedian Stephen Colbert discovered NASA was soliciting names for Node 3 of the ISS in an online poll, the host of Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report” urged his viewers to ignore NASA’s suggestion of “Serenity” and suggested his own. Colbert […]

The great debate of August will be long remembered for the furor over health care reform. Over time, though, the summer of 2009 may well be better noted as when America got serious about converting to electronic medical records. As a part of the stimulus package President Obama signed into law in February, the White […]

As required by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, aka the stimulus package, the Federal Communications Commission has until February 2010 to develop a national broadband plan to be presented to Congress. With an emphasis on an open dialogue with all stakeholders through a series of public workshops, the FCC is busily compiling a public […]

While broadband penetration is much higher in metropolitan areas, over the last two years broadband has experienced the most significant gains in rural areas, according to a new study by comScore. Rural markets (defined as having a population less than 10,000) in the United States experienced a 16-percentage point increase in broadband penetration from Q2 […]

Wireless devices that monitor patients’ condition and report the data to health care providers are expected to show a 77 percent compound annual growth rate resulting in global revenue of almost $950 million by 2014, according to a new study from ABI Research. The report notes that the variety of sensors for measuring a growing […]