After threatening to limit print-on-demand sales to books printed by its very own print-on-demand printer, Amazon is facing an anti-trust lawsuit. Earlier this year, as we reported here at The Reg, the world's largest e-tailer told many print-on-demand publishers it would destroy their Amazon "Buy" buttons if they didn't start using BookSurge, the POD printer it purchased back in 2005. Amazon says

Google has added image ads to its Image Search engine. Earlier this month, in a radio interview with Bloomberg, Google indicated that image-happy ads were on the way, and they officially arrived this morning, during a press event at the company’s headquarters. "What we’re announcing today is a new suite of image-related experiments [in which we're] pairing display ads with image search," said R.J.

Google wants to make darn sure that when Verizon opens up its wireless network, it actually opens up its wireless network. In a new petition (PDF) to the US Federal Communications Commission, the world's largest search engine questions whether Verizon is planning to sidestep the commission's new open access rules, urging Kevin Martin and crew to put an extra clamp on the mega telco. Thanks to some

Microsoft today abandoned its attempt to buy Yahoo!, after a short weekend of negotiations in which it raised its $44.6bn offer by $5bn. Microsoft thinks the deal still makes sense, if not at the price - another $5bn - that the Yahoo! board wants. But it won't go hostile - as Yahoo! would engage in scorched earth tactics, it says. So what next? Yahoo!'s share price will go down, probably a lot. Mi

Interop 2008 We've seen more than enough folks all atwitter and wetting their shorts over cloud computing at Interop 2008 Las Vegas. So it was a bit of a surprise to catch a panel at the show with Google and Amazon reps discussing what keeps businesses from embracing the technology. The four-man panel, moderated by BitCurrent analyst Alistair Croll, took a much more grounded approach to the subjec

Nearly a decade ago, Google unveiled an algorithm called PageRank, reinventing the way we search for web pages. Now, the company says, it has a technology that can do much the same for online image search. Last week, at the International World Wide Web Conference in Beijing, two Google-affiliated researchers presented a paper called "PageRank for Product Image Search," trumpeting a fledging algori

Apple gets into mine-sweeping, missiles and storage Apple CEO Steve Jobs may need to order up a camouflage version of that infamous mock turtleneck. His company bought chip start-up PA Semi this week - a move which results in Apple inheriting a business that stretches from storage systems to missiles. PA Semi's version of the PowerPC processor became popular for such an eclectic array of kit thank

Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer yesterday dropped the biggest hint yet that Redmond could turn its back on rival Yahoo! if its hostile bid to buy the internet search engine is rejected. The Wall Street Journal reports that Ballmer, speaking after a conference in Milan, said: “We know what Yahoo! is worth to us. We offered a lot of money: $44 billion. If their board thinks that’s fair, great. If not,

Microsoft has officially unveiled a preview of Live Mesh, the web services platform seen as a key plank of the company's aggressive software plus services strategy. Chief software architect Ray Ozzie, who has been evangelising the project for some time, lifted the skirt on Microsoft’s Live Mesh last night. The service will initially provide file sharing and folder synchronisation for Windows XP an

The rest of the server world can play with their piddling 2-3GHz chips. IBM, meanwhile, is prepared to deal in the 5GHz realm. The hardware maker has unveiled a Power6-based version of its highest-end Unix server - the Power 595. The box runs on 32 dual-core 5GHz Power6 processors, making it a true performance beast. This big box completes a protracted roll out of the Power6 chip across IBM's Unix

Google has opened its cloud to outside developers. Last night, while eating S'mores at an intimate developer gathering dubbed Campfire One, the world's largest ad broker unveiled App Engine, a free service that lets anyone build and run web apps on Google's very own distributed infrastructure. The cool kids call this cloud computing. "The goal is to make it easy to get started with a new web app,

Er, will someone please get Scott McNealy on the horn? This Sun Microsystems and Microsoft love-in is getting ridiculous. Sun Chairman McNealy used to hit us with the "It's Mankind versus Microsoft" shots as the two companies squabbled over anti-trust issues, run-times and, well, the nature of innovation. These barbs against Microsoft went so far as to include McNealy saying, "I can't leave my kid