Consumer Watchdog, a privacy advocacy group, is running a 15-second spot on a 540-square foot digital display in Times Square to promote a longer video the group made highlighting what it perceives to be Google's intrusions on privacy. Both the 15-second spot and the longer video feature a ghoulish caricature of Eric Schmidt driving an ice cream truck, offering"free ice cream"to children.

Investors maintain the week's momentum

Facebook has reportedly shut off access to its friend search feature for subscribers to Apple's newly introduced Ping social music service. The social networking apparently giant did this by denying Ping access to its application programming interfaces, AllThingsD reported.

TSX almost flat at midday

U.S. employment data offer pleasant surprise

For a growing number of businesses, maintaining fail-safe website availability is a matter of business-critical importance, and not just for the e-commerce industry. Certainly for the e-tail trade, website downtime equates to lost business, but beyond the online sales realm, Web availability is paramount for organizations of all sorts and sizes.

Like it not, we live in the Information Age. As such, we're almost always researching something. Which means we're almost always looking for some place to stash our research where we can find it again. Papers will give you that place on the iPad. Papers is a vertical app targeted at scientific and academic researchers, but it can be valuable to anyone doing any kind of research.

Toshiba has announced its own entrant into the tablet market with the Folio 100, which will run on the Android 2.2 operating system. Sporting a screen just over 10 inches, the device will be larger than other early competitors to Apple's iPad tablet computer, such as the Dell Streak. The Folio will debut in late October in Europe as a standalone device with WiFi capability.

Microsoft has released the code for its latest mobile operating system to manufacturers. That means U.S. consumers should be able to purchase smartphones running Windows Phone 7 during the upcoming holiday shopping season, while European consumers could have those new devices in their hands as early as next month. The question now is how many consumers actually will want a new Windows-based smartphone?

An upward trend, but not yet a market rally