Articles by John P. Mello Jr.

The next time you make a shopping trip to Amazon.com, you may be in for a surprise. The Net's largest retailer will be rolling out significant design changes to its online store -- changes that some say make the site more tablet friendly The new design is airier than the old one. There's more white space on the home page. The navigation bar on the ...

Sprint Nextel filed a lawsuit Tuesday to block the proposed US$39 billion merger of rival wireless carriers AT&T and T-Mobile. The move by Sprint appears to be a tactical one aimed at protecting the company's options should the deal be approved by the federal government Sprint's lawsuit was filed less than a week after the U.S. Department of Justic...

Nokia revealed a bold move Wednesday as it announced its North American operations will stop selling cellphones based on its Symbian operating system and introduce from now on only smartphones based on Microsoft Windows Phone 7 The head of Nokia's U.S. subsidiary, Chris Weber, broke the news in an interview with the Wall Street Journal's AllThingsD...

Almost lost in the hoopla over the announcement of Google's Android Honeycomb operating system for tablets was the search giant's unveiling of a new online store for apps for its mobile operating system The outlet allows consumers to hunt for Android apps through any Web browser running on any device. Previously, that could only be done through a d...

Facebook announced new measures Wednesday aimed at improving users' security when visiting the site. The news came with an intriguing twist: Mere hours prior to the announcement, it was revealed that the Facebook fan page of the company's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, was compromised by a hacker While some online skeptics linked Facebook's new security fea...

The Computer History Museum has come a long way since its start in a closet at the Digital Equipment Corporation in 1975, as is evidenced by the institution's US$19 million renovated facility opening its doors to the public Thursday ...

Amazon came a step closer to opening its Android Appstore Wednesday by opening a portal for developers. The portal allows app makers to submit their wares to the Internet's largest online retailer so they can be part of the outlet's offerings when its virtual doors open later this year Amazon is launching the Android Appstore as a service to its cu...

Critics of Fox News' coverage of climate change issues were given a rich vein to mine in an email from a top editor to his staffers, which was made public recently In the email dated Dec. 8 and made public Wednesday by Media Matters for America, Fox News Washington managing editor Bill Sammon instructed staffers to "refrain from asserting that the...

Cyberattacks this week by supporters of Wikileaks on the home sites of Visa and MasterCard may have been designed to grab headlines rather than actually disrupt the companies' financial operations The wave of electronic assaults, referred to as "Operation Payback" by the activists mounting the attacks, were aimed at the home sites of the credit car...

The bones of a plan to balance consumer privacy and businesses' need to gather data online was aired yesterday by the Federal Trade Commission and was greeted with both praise and criticism In a 122-page preliminary report, the agency called for any company collecting or using consumer data that can be linked to a specific consumer, computer or dev...

Apple's iPad has had the tablet market to itself for eight months now, but that's about to change. Leading the charge on the electronic slate's logy perch is the Samsung Galaxy Tab, a seven-inch tablet running Google's Android operating system Rather than take on the iPad head-to-head, Samsung decided to set its tablet apart from Apple's by making ...

Social networking began as a fascination of the young on college campuses, but it has grown to embrace all age groups all over the world. It's a phenomenon with a potential that's barely been scratched, especially in business. Barry Libert, though, would like to see that change, and he's ready to show companies how to do it ...

Shopping for clothes online has always been challenging for shoppers, but Google thinks it can make it less so with its new Boutiques offering Boutiques uses a combination of cutting-edge search technology and expert opinion to enable apparel shoppers -- right now, limited to women -- to create customized boutiques for putting together just the rig...

Given the dominance of the major players in the browser market, any press release announcing a new one might as well be a suicide note. That hasn't discouraged developers from introducing new browsers. Some of those browsers have even been able to spark some initial buzz -- although the kind of buzz volume surrounding RockMelt hasn't been heard in browser circles in some time...

Facebook pulled the wraps off its new mobile platform Wednesday at a special event held at its headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif. The offerings in the platform were designed to appeal to consumers, businesses and developers and to expand the reach of the social network's geolocation technology, Places For many of the social network's fans and follow...

A vestige of the music wars at the turn of the century was shut down Wednesday by a federal district court judge in Manhattan File-sharing service LimeWire was ordered by Judge Kimba M. Wood to stop distributing its peer-to-peer software because its overwhelming use was to encourage its users to make unauthorized copies of copyrighted material....

By mixing and matching the elements of its competitors' mobile ecosystems, Microsoft hopes its new smartphone software will succeed where its past efforts failed Windows Phone 7 will have a walled app store and interface with computers through desktop software created for Microsoft's Zune media player -- practices similar to Apple's iPhone busines...

AOL went on a buying binge this week It made headlines with the purchase of the TechCrunch blog network, but on the same day it also bought two promising startups -- Thing Labs and 5min Media....

Once more, with feeling Microsoft has launched a program to reward users of its search engine, Bing. The program awards points for searches conducted with the engine. The points can be later traded for products, services or charitable contributions....

A "significant compromise" of U.S. military networks has been acknowledged by the Pentagon two years after the breach was reported in the press "In 2008, the U.S. Department of Defense suffered a significant compromise of its classified military computer networks," Deputy Secretary of Defense William S. Lynn III wrote in an article in the September...