Articles by Rachelle Dragani

eBay may expand its customer base by opening the site to online shoppers under the age of 18. The etailer is considering plans that would allow users between the ages of 13 and 17 to buy and sell eBay's offerings online. Children under the age of 13 are protected under the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). The legislation dictates ...

Twitter is back in action after a data center failure caused worldwide outages for many of its users Thursday Starting around 8:30 a.m. PT, Twitter users who tried to access the site were greeted with a partially coded message that read, "Twitter is currently down." It appeared that the note was supposed to let users know the reason for the outage ...

Zynga reported second-quarter earnings lower than expected Wednesday, sending its stock sinking as much as 40 percent Thursday morning The maker of popular social games such as "FarmVille" and "Words With Friends" reported a net loss of more than US$22.8 billion, or 3 cents per share....

Nintendo reported a loss that was less than expected Wednesday, as video game hardware sales continue to decline It posted a net loss of 17.23 billion yen, or about US$220 million, compared to losses of 25.5 billion yen a year ago.

The European Commission and Google could be nearing an agreement after the search giant offered new concessions Tuesday to help resolve the EU's antitrust concerns. A representative from the EU did not divulge what Google proposed, but said that technical discussions would follow, according to Reuters.

NTP, the patent-holding company that won US$612.5 million in a 2006 case against RIM, announced Monday it has reached a settlement with 13 of the biggest players in the tech industry. Since NTP held eight U.S. patents relating to wireless email delivery, it battled most of the major smartphone manufacturers, vendors and the providers that transfer...

Former Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson will be the new leader of ShopRunner, taking over the e-commerce site about two months after he left Yahoo amid a scandal ShopRunner announced the hire on Monday; former CEO Mike Golden will remain at the company as president....

Digg is being rebuilt from the bottom up and will launch again on Aug. 1, just six weeks after Betaworks bought the social news aggregator A team of 10 engineers, designers and editors from Betaworks' News.me aggregation app said they're hard at work in an "adrenaline and caffeine-fueled six weeks" to redesign the site and restore it as an online s...

Microsoft reported its first loss in more than two decades Thursday as an accounting adjustment and low PC sales hurt the software maker's numbers. However, the company remained optimistic that consumer demand will regain momentum when various upcoming products hit the market later this year. Before the company released its quarterly earnings Thur...

Verizon proved Wall Street right Thursday, just meeting expectations for its second fiscal quarter and bringing in a net income gain of 13 percent thanks to higher-than-expected wireless subscriptions The wireless provider earned US$1.83 billion, or 64 cents per share on the quarter, up from $1.61 billion, or 57 cents per share, from the same perio...

Smartphone customers in the U.S. want bigger screens on their devices, according to a study from T-Mobile The phone provider, along with Kelton, polled more than 1,000 U.S. consumers starting last May and found that 77 percent of smartphone users prefer a device that has a 4.5-inch or larger screen over a smaller display.

Yahoo's Q2 earnings, which were publicly released Tuesday, underscore the challenges that new CEO Marissa Mayer will face as she takes over the struggling Internet company Yahoo brought in US$227 million in its second quarter, down from the $237 million it reported for the same time a year ago. Earnings per share were the same as last year at 18 ce...

Symantec has determined that combining the newest version of its antivirus software with the decade-old Windows XP operating system can cause users' PCs to freeze up with the dreaded Blue Screen of Death After Symantec analyzed the problem, it revealed that the incompatibility hit machines running a combination of the nearly 11-year-old Windows XP ...

A recent report from Baird Equity Research claims mobile developers are fleeing from Research In Motion in a mass exodus. However, RIM's fighting back. The report's findings are far from the truth, according to Alec Saunders, the vice president of developer relations for the BlackBerry maker.

Once-prominent social news aggregator Digg has announced its sale to Betaworks, which will fold Digg into its News.me daily briefing service After Digg's startup launch in 2004, it quickly became one of the most popular social sites on the Web by letting users collect their own assortment of digital news and content and vote on their favorites. But...

Personal computer sales are down across the industry as consumers turn toward newer devices such as smartphones and tablets and await the arrival of system upgrades like Windows 8, according to reports from Gartner and IDC PC sales for the second quarter in the U.S. were down between 6 and 11 percent compared to the same period last year, the firms...

Google introduced a pilot program Wednesday to allow more e-commerce merchants to add Search as You Type results to their product search tools Search as You Type works within a retailer's existing search system but adds Google's predictive text, spelling suggestions and product photos and information. The added suggestions will help improve sales b...

Salesforce.com experienced a global outage early Tuesday, the second major outage in two weeks for the CRM company Salesforce.com customers in the company's NA1, NA5, NA6, CS0, CS3, CS1 and CS12 regions lost access starting just before 1 a.m. Pacific time on Tuesday. Access was restored gradually, returning to full online status by about 10:30 a.m....

Andreessen Horowitz is investing US$100 million in GitHub, the San Francisco startup that provides online resources for software programmers. It's the largest investment the venture capital firm has ever made. Github's acceptance of the cash is notable. Unlike many startups, the company has been profitable since its 2008 beginnings, and it's turne...

Twitter has given its site an overhaul designed to simplify its search functions and provide users with suggestions when they're unsure of an exact handle or hashtag The site's upgraded search results will now more closely resemble those of a Google search. Now when users begin typing a search term, they will see an autocomplete dropdown box of sug...