The Christian Science Monitor has a great article today by Harvard KSG Professor Todd L. Pittinsky on challenges to America’s high-tech leadership.  In the article, Pittinsky urges “both [presidential] candidates [to articulate] a clear direction – excellence in math, science, and engineering education at all levels – and [specify] the resources they will dedicate to that goal. They do not need to design specific programs; they do need to show strong support for others who come up with such programs.” [...]

Yahoo!News reports that “[t]he Virginia Supreme Court declared the state's anti-spam law unconstitutional Friday and reversed the conviction of a man once considered one of the world's most prolific spammers.  The court unanimously agreed with Jeremy Jaynes' argument that the law violates the free-speech protections of the First Amendment because it does not just restrict commercial e-mails — it restricts other unsolicited messages as well. Most other states also have anti-spam laws, and there is a federal CAN-SPAM Act as [...]

RAPID, a database of press releases run by the European Union’s DG Communication, this week announced the “Practical Guide to EU funding opportunities for Research and Innovation” to help all stakeholders find their way around all the different existing EU funding mechanisms. As the RAPID press release points out, if the impact of the 7th Research Framework Program (or FP7 for short), the Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Program and the Structural & Cohesion Funds, which are meant to support research, [...]

Yahoo!News writes that “[a] thousand startups competed for the honor of launching their technology products—mostly software and web sites and applications, in the second annual TechCrunch50 event. The conference gave startups, some with no real funding to speak of, exposure to billionaire investors such as Marc Cuban and high-ranking officers of corporations like Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo.  At the end, the last company standing, deemed the ‘most likely to succeed’ and getting a good catapult from the top honor itself, [...]

The Register reports that “[t]he chair of the Antitrust Subcommittee in the Senate Judiciary Committee has written to the four largest US network operators demanding they explain why the cost of texting has doubled since 2005.  Text messages have been a nice little earner for European operators since cross-network connectivity became available, but txt is still a growing market in the US, and one on which American operators have been slow to capitalise - though the fact that texting rates [...]

“The coming few years will feature continued consolidation, financial pressures and changes to the hardware business, requiring different IT strategies for the future than what people have been using in the past.”  That’s according to IT consultancy Gartner, which made these predictions during its Hardware Insight conference in Redwood Shores, CA, on Thursday.  “In the next four years,” writes IT news website Internetnews.com, “Gartner sees continued consolidation of vendors, consolidation of servers through virtualization, a move toward green IT, an [...]