Miscellaneous

The rollercoaster stock market threatens to change the landscape for at least a couple of tech titans.

Case in point: Yahoo could have been sold for $33 per share to Microsoft in the spring; in midweek, it was trading at less than $12. No doubt, most tech companies are getting pummeled on Wall Street, but Yahoo's drop has to be particularly galling, given how much more Microsoft was willing to pay for the company just months ago.

Yahoo closed at $11.75 a share on Wednesday, down 7.1 percent, during regular trading. That gave the Internet search pioneer … Read more

Companies lobbying the Federal Communications Commission to access unused spectrum known as "white spaces" won a big victory on Wednesday when Chairman Kevin Martin threw his weight behind the proposal citing findings in an FCC report that was also issued Wednesday.

Martin held a press conference with reporters early in the day in which he pledged his support for the use of the white space spectrum and announced that the issue would be up for vote at the FCC's next open meeting on November 4. Martin has long been in favor of opening up additional spectrum that … Read more

Guest post: Christopher Lochhead, the retired chief marketing officer at Scient and Mercury, offers some turnaround strategies (learned the hard way) for weathering the economic storm.

Economic downturns require extraordinary leadership. They require brutal honesty. They require action. If your market and company are truly in trouble, here are some turnaround strategies (learned the hard way) to weather the storm so you can live to fight another day.

1. There Is No Such Thing As One Bad Quarter

When your markets get weak and/or you really screw up, fixing it will take a lot longer than you think it … Read more

The financial markets may be in turmoil, but business goes on. How exactly it's going on is a central theme at the Gartner Symposium ITxpo in Florida this week, as ZDNet Editor in Chief of ZDNet Larry Dignan reports

Analysts have already explained why they think the Internet is radically altering the economics of the media landscape. Now, Gartner's Mark Stahlman and Michael McGuire say in a "maverick" presentation, healthcare and the financial services industry could well be next.

It's a point well taken, Dignan says, but--

One technology more than any other has stood out as a success story for the U.S. military in Iraq: unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs.

The best-known of the UAVs, the MQ-1 Predator, has evolved from its early use as simply a reconnaissance and surveillance aircraft to become a highly valued weapon in its own right. Armed with Hellfire missiles, it can both track enemy combatants and fire on them. A more recent version of the Predator, called the MQ-9 Reaper, was specifically put into service as a "hunter-killer" drone.

The Pentagon has been so impressed with the … Read more

The blogosphere has been up in arms over the past 24 hours as news spread that Verizon Wireless is planning to increase the per-message fee it charges companies that send text alerts.

On Thursday RCR WirelessN News published a story citing a letter that OpenMarket, a direct to consumer messaging service that sends alerts for companies like Google or Orbitz, was sending to its clients explaining that it would have to tack on an additional three cents for every text message that is terminated on Verizon Wireless network.

"Effective Nov. 1, 2008, Verizon will assess a transaction fee of $… Read more

China Mobile, China's largest cell phone operator, plans to establish a research and development facility in Silicon Valley in 2009, according to a report from ChinaTechNews.com.

This is the first overseas research and development facility that China Mobile has set up, the news site reported.

Like mobile operators throughout the world, China Mobile is looking to add new data services to its offerings. The president of China Mobile's Institute of Research, Huang Xiaoqing, told the news site that it sees most of its revenue today coming from voice services, but the company recognizes that data services are … Read more

Intel-backed start-up ZPower may be the first to introduce an alternative to the ubiquitous lithium-ion laptop battery, with a silver-zinc technology the company says will make its debut with a large laptop maker in 2009.

The company promises up to 40 percent more run time than current lithium-ion batteries, and says its batteries are 95 percent recyclable.

ZPower made the announcement ahead of the Batteries 2008 conference in Nice, France, which began Wednesday, and where ZPower's chief executive, Ross Dueber, will be presenting ZPower's take on silver-zinc technology, also known as silver-oxide.

Silver-zinc batteries were initially developed for … Read more

Apple's iPhone has revolutionized Web browsing on a mobile device, but some users of the breakthrough phone are still frustrated with their experience when surfing certain sites, like Yahoo.

Keynote Systems, which provides testing tools to help companies improve their mobile experience, found in a study released Thursday that satisfaction rates of iPhone users using certain sites were low and only a small percentage of users clicked through on advertising. The results suggest that the usability of many mobile Web sites still needs improvement. It also suggests that advertisers might have to adjust their practices on the mobile Web.… Read more