Microsoft announced Monday that it plans to acquire business analytics software developer ProClarity, a third party Microsoft developer, ProClarity to increase its presence in the business intelligence market.

Proclarity has business analytics that work with such Microsoft products as SQL Server 2005, Microsoft Office Business Scorecard Manager 2005 and Microsoft Office Excel.

The total number of Web searches in February jumped by more than a third, driven in part by people looking for photos on social-networking sites, a Web research firm said.
 
Overall searches in February increased by 38 percent to 5.3 billion, compared with 3.8 billion in the same month a

European Union regulators have given clearance to Japan-based Sony and NEC to set up an optical disk drive joint venture, according to an Associated Press report.
 
The two Japanese electronics companies reportedly want the new venture to start making DVD drives and CD drives for use in PCs and other electronics

Online video site YouTube.com has been busy distinguishing itself from its rivals with a recent high-profile partnership and a new piracy-blocking initiative.
 
YouTube, a site just barely a year old, has developed a name for itself as a service that lets users upload video clips and share them with others,

Intel Corp. on Friday (March 31) announced its so-called "Discover the PC" initiative in an effort to propel the computer in developing nations.

As part of the initiative, Intel President and CEO Paul Otellini introduced in Mexico a low-cost desktop PC platform available to first time computer users. Intel and Telmex will

The world's largest electronics firms have decided to use Bluetooth wireless technology to send high quality video between devices in the home, two industry associations said this week.

The decision is expected to determine how hundreds of millions of televisions, video recorders and personal computers will be connected without wires by the

Third-party companies are stepping in to offer patches for software from major vendors like Microsoft and Oracle. That's making life more complicated for beleaguered security managers.

Installing the most recent patches on PCs and servers is widely seen as the last line of defense against the swarm of security threats attacking businesses

Hawking Technologies, a manufacturer of connectivity solutions now testing the home automation market, is preparing to take the wraps off one of the first home-control solutions based on the ZigBee wireless standard.
 
Hawking's HomeRemote solution, expected to ship later this spring, uses ZigBee technology, which provides low- bandwidth wireless connections at

Tens of thousands of Internet Explorer users aren't waiting for Microsoft Corp. to provide a patch for the critical bug in their browser, and have instead installed unsanctioned fixes from security companies.

On Thursday, a spokesperson for eEye Digital Security said that its workaround had been downloaded by more than 94,000 users,

Addressing the British court that's hearing the case of Beatles license holder Apple Corps versus Apple Computer, Apple's attorney claimed that the company's ability to distribute music electronically was "within our field of use" and did not violate the terms of a 1991 licensing agreement.
 
The two companies squared off