Silicon Valley

Your business probably already uses Wi-Fi for wirelessly connecting laptops in your office, and employees' cell phones are replacing landlines. Now a new energy-in-a-box technology could let your business disconnect from the electrical grid as well.

For Diane Bisgeier, marking her turf with her iPhone has become as regular as morning coffee. Bisgeier "checks in" at restaurants, cafes, and theaters around San Francisco using Gowalla, a popular iPhone app that lets people broadcast their locations, find friends, and compete to see who's shown up somewhere the most.

Telefónica compra el servicio de VozIP Jajah por 145 millones de euros "exclusivamente en efectivo". El acuerdo cuenta con la autorización de la Comisión del Mercado de las Telecomunicaciones (CMT). "La compra de Jajah, con sede en Silicon Valley, California, e Israel, representa un significativo incremento de las capacidades de Telefónica para ofrecer servicios de comunicación de primer nivel a clientes online, donde, cuando y como quieran", asegura Telefónica en un comunicado.

Yahoo Inc. believes a lot of its good work has been overlooked by investors and the media so it's spending more than $100 million to get the word out to consumers directly.

The money is going toward the Internet company's most expensive marketing campaign since Stanford University graduate students Jerry Yang and David Filo started Yahoo's Web site 15 years ago. Yahoo provided a peek at the 15-month blitz Tuesday in New York.

The Internet makes it possible to check our bank balances at midnight or talk to a friend across the globe via Twitter. But the explosion in high-tech tools also means we need a passel of passwords -- and strong ones at that, because hackers get more sophisticated all the time.

If you're still logging in to all your accounts with your kid's name or your birthday as a password, CJ Romberger and Michael Fertik have some alternatives that will help keep your accounts safer.

Google handles about two-thirds of all Internet searches. It owns the largest online video site, YouTube, which is more than 10 times as popular as its nearest competitor. And last year, Google sold nearly $22 billion in advertising, more than any other media company in the world.

With all those riches and more, how is Google a relatively small company, one that is vulnerable to competition and whose luck could turn any day?

Dana Wagner is happy to explain.

The hype machine started months ago. Opening weekends are upon us. High up in executive suites, the hope is that this summer's new releases will cause lines to snake around the block.

The cell phone industry in the United States -- one of the world's largest markets -- looks a lot like the movie industry nowadays. Some highly anticipated phones -- including the Palm Pre, an updated iPhone and new phones using the Android operating system from Google -- have focused the industry's efforts on the crucial months between the Memorial Day (May 25) and Labor Day (Sept. 7) holidays.

Technology helped fuel the economic boom of the 1990s. Then the dot-com bust caught some of the blame for the recession of the early 2000s. If technology is so tied to the national economy, and the current recession started on Wall Street, not in Silicon Valley, can technology lift the tide this time?

Technology boosters argue that their sector certainly can help. And the stimulus bill is packed with funding for high-tech projects. But technology's influence on the U.S. economy is not as big as you might expect.

Being a newbie to the sphere of employee communications, I knew I was in good company at a session OPR hosted last night about the importance of clear messaging within organizations when I saw the following note on each table: “Employees are on the front line of brand and reputation creation. What they tell their friends and families and post on YouTube and Facebook can define a company more quickly and more surely than anything the CEO tells The Wall Street Journal.”

Spam is on the rise again, just in time for the holiday shopping season. Spam dropped two-thirds in November after Silicon Valley-based McColo, a major spam network, was shut down. At the time, Symantec correctly predicted little long-term effect on spam levels.

"Symantec cautions users to continue to be on guard against spam and malicious code attacks as attackers have traditionally tried to leverage festive session and topical global events to lure users into opening and responding to their messages," said Vincent Weafer, senior director of the Symantec Antivirus Research Center.