News

A trademark dispute has compelled Google to rebrand its free Gmail webmail service in the United Kingdom (UK). It has dropped the "Gmail" tag from the logo and new account addresses of its service yielding to the demands of a small British company that claims the US giant has infringed its trademark. The name change, as of now, applies only to UK users. New addresses created by UK users would end...

More than any other New York Times reporter, Judith Miller took the lead with stories claiming that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Now, a few years later, she's facing heightened scrutiny in the aftermath of a pair of articles that appeared in the Times on Oct. 16 -- a lengthy investigative piece about Miller plus her own first-person account of how she got entangled in the case of the Bush...

A number of Muslim states with embassies in Denmark have complained to the government after a newspaper published cartoons of Muslim prophet Mohammed Daily newspaper Jyllands-Posten's decision to print twelve cartoons featuring Muslim prophet Mohammed has caused a stir among Muslim countries, daily newspaper Politiken reported on Thursday. A number of Muslim countries with embassies in Denmark...

At some point in the future, logging on to either MSN Messenger or Yahoo Messenger will enable a user to engage in IM sessions with registered users of both communities. Beta testing will commence later this year, with full rollout scheduled for late spring 2006. MSN and Yahoo claim a combined registered user base in excess of 275 million worldwide. The walls between the global 'big four' IM...

AS MORE and more of the world's business is conducted online, a battle royal is taking shape. The struggle is to decide which company will become the primary gateway to the internet. Three firms, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo!, are aiming to establish the world's leading internet portal–the site that most internet users rely on for everything from searching the web to sending e-mail and catching up...

Since the spread of the internet in the mid-nineties, privacy concerns have increased exponentially. Cyberspace has often been equated to Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, or to a new, digital version of George Orwell’s Big Brother, capable of seeing and controlling everything and everyone. This rather dystopic vision has rightly generated fear and distrust of the web. Recently, the thickening bonds...

The American Magazine Conference, which concluded yesterday in Puerto Rico, featured speaker after speaker presenting a positive and optimistic outlook for magazines centered on a new embrace of electronic media technologies. Meredith's Jack Griffin announced a new video-on-demand relationship between Comcast and American Baby magazine; Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia CEO Susan Lyne, joined...

MEDIA CONGLOMERATES AND smaller, traditional publishers, in a bid to counter the ascendancy of online advertising champs Yahoo (YHOO) and Google (GOOG), are snapping up online properties with abandon. The list of recent acquisitions spools out at a giddy pace: News Corp. (NWS) shelled out $1.2 billion in July for several Internet companies including Intermix Media, the proprietor of hip social...

Earnings fell by half at the New York Times Co. (NYT:NYSE - news - research - Cramer's Take) in the third quarter, held back by surging paper prices and tepid ad growth. The company turned a profit of $23.1 million, or 16 cents a share, in the quarter, compared with $48.3 million, or 33 cents a share, a year ago. The latest period included a layoffs charge of 5 cents a share and options-expensing...

Google.com, world's largest Internet search engine, deleted the words "Taiwan, a province of the People's Republic of China" on a map of Taiwan linked to its maps search engine maps.google.com. This has drawn rage from Chinese officials and the people. News reports indicate Google made the changes under pressure of extremists in Taiwan's pan-Green camp (a pro-independence alliance between the...