A competition has been launched to find better ways of exchanging information between copyright holders and end users, giving companies in the UK the chance to win up to £37,000, to bring their ideas to life.

Japan's largest mobile operator is prepping an elaborate testing centre, with hundreds of handsets monitored by streaming web cameras, to help software developers debug their apps on the growing morass of Android devices and software versions.

Momentum is building for the Graal project, an implementation of a dynamic compiler in Java to produce excellent code quality without compromising compile time and memory usage in the Java Virtual Machine.

Cloudscaling plans to introduce on Monday an OpenStack-based platform that enterprises can use to build private clouds.

AVG Internet Security 2012 (£40 for one year and one PC) does a very good job of keeping a PC safe, but unfortunately some of the other 2012 internet security products do an astounding job.

Start-up companies should focus more on their customers than on raising finance, the CEO of British computer chip designer ARM has said.

Oracle is buying cloud-based talent management and employee recruitment software vendor Taleo for roughly US$1.9 billion, the company announced Thursday. The move comes shortly after SAP's move to acquire SuccessFactors, a close competitor of Taleo, for US$3.4 billion in a deal that has yet to close.

Windows 8 is stingy doling out power to applications, particularly what Microsoft calls Metro-style applications written specifically for the operating system, all in an effort to prolong battery life.

Chrome for Android will not run Flash Player, the popular software that Apple has famously banned, Adobe confirmed.

G Data InternetSecurity 2012 (£34.95 for a one-year, single-PC licence) is the best of the 2012 crop of security suites. Although its interface isn't terribly friendly to beginners, G Data's suite put up some of the best malware detection and blocking scores in the history of our testing.

Pinterest has been accused of secretly embedding code in user content to generate revenue just as the new social networking site is enjoying a surge in popularity.

Microsoft is looking at creating a bridge between Lync, its enterprise IM, voice and video communications product, and Skype as part of its broader initiative to extend the Office platform, a company executive said on Wednesday.

Facebook has tweaked its photo viewer interface, making it look a lot like its counterpart on Google . The new widescreen photo viewer is now live for most Facebook users, who dont have scroll down anymore to see the comments for a certain photo.

Enterprise coders can now use an open source web application that lets them consolidate software vulnerability data from a range of scanning and test tools. With a centralised view and reporting and management tools, ThreadFix speeds the work needed to fix software bugs and vulnerabilities, including those in proliferating mobile apps.

Word, Excel and PowerPoint may get all the attention, but OneNote has quickly become the gem of the Microsoft Office suite. Microsoft is now extending the reach of OneNote with an app for Android smartphones and tablets.

Demos, like appearances, can be deceiving. At the recent Consumer Electronics Show, one of the media hits was OnLive Desktop, a service that provisions a Windows 7 desktop environment that includes Microsoft Office 2010 to the iPad over an Internet connection. For many, the idea of being able to run the full Office suite is very appealing, given some of the limitations of the iPad's native office productivity tools such as Apple iWork suite (Pages, Keynote, and Numbers), Quickoffice, and Documents to Go.

Online dating sites such as Match.com and eHarmony may not be offering potential mates chosen through rigorous scientific methods despite their marketing claims, a group of psychologists and sociologists have charged.

With the ongoing rollout of Facebook's Timeline feature, security and privacy have never been more important to your digital life. The new layout presents all of your current and past activities on Facebook - posts, photos, comments, likes and so on - in a handy timeline format to anyone with access to your profile, which may include friends of friends, colleagues, executives at your company, a potential future boss ... well, you get the idea.

Enhancements to IBM's XIV Storage System include an SSD caching option that can increase system performance by up to three times.

If you’re new to web hosting, the bevy of plans available from many providers may confuse you. Here’s a quick primer on what’s what in the world of web hosting.

Adobe next plans to tackle Microsoft's Internet Explorer in its ongoing work to "sandbox" its popular Flash Player within browsers, Adobe's head of security said today.

Oracle is hoping to carve out a prominent place in the world of R, the open source statistical modelling language with roots in academia but an increasingly high profile in enterprise IT shops. It has announced a new Advanced Analytics product that ties R to its database and family of software/hardware appliances.

UK-based mobile billing and analytics company Bango has signed an agreement to provide payment services to the world's biggest social network, Facebook. The terms of the deal have not been disclosed.

MongoDB shines with broad programming language support, SQL-like queries and out-of-the-box scaling.

A research firm that measures the security effectiveness of browsers noticed something it thought might be fishy with the way Chrome was doing things. Turns out, there may currently be a privacy concern about Google's use of end user IP addresses as part of its Safe Browsing API.

Microsoft and others have already adopted this technology to extend JavaScript beyond the browser, but it has limits developers must beware.

Apple has warned iOS developers not to use services that manipulate App Store rankings to make their iPhone and iPad apps seem more popular than they really are.

Facebook users today are complaining that the social network and its mobile app are running very slowly.

Serious technical problems that have delayed the rollout of an upgrade to SAP's community portal are persisting, to the point where the company is no longer specifying a launch date.

I have two computers and one smartphone that I use regularly. And while that's more devices than I relied on just a few years ago, it's likely fewer than many of you use. Still, I sometimes have trouble finding the documents and data I need, wondering if I last viewed that video on my phone, or whether I saved that spreadsheet to my laptop. And accessing my files is just half the battle: I also need to back everything up, keeping all of my data secure in case of a lost or malfunctioning device.

A free account from beloved file-sharing and -storage service Dropbox nets you 2GB of space. Want to boost that to 7GB? You can, and it won't cost you a dime extra.

Lync Online, the instant messaging, online meeting and PC-to-PC voice and video communications tool in Office 365, will gain interoperability with non-Microsoft IM networks.

Cloudyn is launching a hosted service on Monday that aims to monitor a company's cloud usage and recommend ways to optimise that usage in order to cut costs.

Google Chrome has been recommended to Windows 7 users by Germany's cybersecurity agency because of the browser's sandbox and auto-update features.

McAfee Internet Security 2012 ($80 for one year, three PCs as of January 29, 2012) finished 14th in our 2012 roundup of Internet security suites. Despite its low ranking, it performed well in some areas; its overall uneven showing, however, proved to be its undoing in this year's extremely competitive batch of suites.

If you can tolerate some sluggishness, F-Secure Internet Security 2012 (£39.95 for one year and three PCs) will protect your PC pretty well.

Fragmentation is often held up as one of Android's biggest problems, posing all kinds of challenges for developers and users alike.

Panda Internet Security 2012 (£50.99 for one year) is an acceptable package for detecting and blocking malware, but its abysmal scan speeds - along with other speed issues - make it a poor alternative to its rivals.

Google has been ordered to pay a fine and damages to a French mapping company after a court ruled that the search giant was guilty of unfair competition and "undercutting competitors" by making its Google Maps program free.

Internet giant VeriSign suffered a series of data breaches in 2010 and even now senior executives are not sure exactly what was compromised, the company has admitted in a filing made to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).