For a few days now, the news about the PRISM program (involving data collection from the US National Security Agency) has terrified us and delivered the confirmation of some long-held suspicions. Suspicions that we in the M2M industry have mostly repressed.

At first glance, PRISM revolves around a comprehensive monitoring of communications between people, and therefore really shouldn’t involve M2M – or machines – at all.

Verizon Communications Inc's chances of buying the 45-percent stake in Verizon Wireless owned by the UK's Vodafone Group Plc will hinge, at least in part, on the quality of tax advice it is getting.

Verizon (New York City, NY, USA), the No. 2 U.S. telecommunications company, may have found a way to structure a purchase of the stake so that Vodafone (Newbury, UK) can avoid a multi-billion dollar U.S. capital gains tax bill, sources familiar with Verizon's plans said. The possibility of a huge tax bill has previously been regarded by analysts as a big hurdle to any such deal.

Chinese telecom operators will start awarding contracts for super-fast mobile networks this year, kicking off the third wave of a global investment cycle that is reshaping the competitive landscape among telecom equipment makers.

China, the world's biggest mobile market with 1.1 billion subscribers, is likely to further alter the picture at the expense of European suppliers by giving a huge boost to Huawei (Shenzhen, China) and its smaller Chinese rival ZTE (Shenzhen, China).

PayPal will soon be ubiquitous in U.S. retail stores, but just being there may not be enough.

The online payment service will take a giant step beyond its Internet roots on April 19, when a partnership with Discover Financial Services (Riverwoods, IL, USA) officially kicks in. The deal means that, by the end of this year, PayPal will be accepted as a payment option in roughly 2 million retail stores that already take Discover credit cards.

Investors may be puzzled why billionaire Mikhail Fridman seemed to be bidding against himself for a telecoms company that is no longer for sale.

Fridman is linked with two bids for the Russian unit of Nordic operator Tele2 (Stockholm, Sweden) - one from his A1 vehicle and the other, at a higher price, from MTS (Moscow, Russia) and Vimpelcom (Moscow, Russia), in which he is a leading investor.

Apple Inc's shareholders have been hit by one of the bloodiest weeks in the history of the stock, but wider fallout from such weakness might be more important to the long-term value of their investments.

While Apple's iPhones, iPads and Macs remain gold standards, signs the company is losing some of its edge in the smartphone market suggest its clout with business partners could wane.

Recent comments from executives at phone carriers and component suppliers show they see room for at least some shift in the balance of power.

Sirius XM Radio Inc's grip on drivers is under an increasing threat as the availability of Internet connections in more cars is helping Pandora Media Inc counter some of its rival's big selling points.

In a sign of how important drivers are to the two companies, each of their top executives made the trek to Las Vegas this week to court automakers at the annual Consumer Electronics Show.

When Amazon.com Inc CEO Jeff Bezos got word of a project at Google Inc to scan and digitize product catalogs a decade ago, the seeds of a burgeoning rivalry were planted.

The news was a "wake-up" call to Bezos, an early investor in Google (Mountain View, USA). He saw it as a warning that the Web search engine could encroach upon his online retail empire, according to a former Amazon (Seattle, USA) executive.

Ofcom will not reveal the approved bidders until later this year or early next, but the registration process for the UK regulatory authority’s ‘4G’ auction is officially closed after prospective applicants were given just a six-hour window to submit their details earlier this week. In his recent statement on the economy, George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, said he expected the sale of airwaves to raise as much as £3.5 billion ($5.6 billion) for the public-sector purse. But this could be another case of wishful thinking by UK authorities.