The Australian online search ad market is continuing to grow strongly but showing signs of slowing down, and stalling in the case of the online directories segment, Frost & Sullivan estimates. [ + ]

Backup and business continuity services provider Plan B chose Schneider Electric to build its SXDC Tier 2+ Data Centre in Tawa in New Zealand, enabling niche data centre network solutions to safeguard business data. [ + ]

US court orders Symantec to pay US$17m for violating patents, CSIRO's digital unit and NICTA could join forces and Erez Yarkoni is Telstra's new CIO. [ + ]

60% of organisations surveyed by Gartner expect the Internet of Things to present major new revenue or cost-saving opportunities, but less than a quarter have established clear IoT leadership. [ + ]

Cloud-based MYOB services now account for 67% of the company's new customer registrations across Australia and New Zealand, according to CEO Tim Reed. [ + ]

In our new Tech Insights series, we speak with industry leaders to get their views of what the year ahead holds for the IT world. Today's expert is Alec Gardner, general manager, advanced analytics for Teradata. [ + ]

Vodafone plans to become one of the first operators in Australia to launch voice over LTE (VoLTE) for the operator's 4G customers. [ + ]

Recent research has found that two-thirds of organisations underestimate their true mobile cost of ownership, with support and operations costs being more than twice that of hardware costs. [ + ]

Nearly a third of Android mobile apps access and share private information, but many Australian mobile users are ignorant or unconcerned about the risks, a Symantec survey shows. [ + ]

The second annual ACI Connect event in April will include the inaugural Future Networks Forum, where industry experts will ponder the future of industrial networks in the IoT era. [ + ]

Organisations can achieve significant savings and dramatically boost efficiency and collaborative effort by upgrading to a unified communications system. We spoke to three that have made the switch. [ + ]

Trend Micro said it has discovered a new zero-day vulnerability in Adobe Flash, the third such exploit uncovered since Adobe's last Patch Tuesday. [ + ]

IBM rejects reports of job cuts, BMW tackles a flaw that could have allowed hackers to unlock car doors and Australian cyberattacks outed. [ + ]

The frequency and scale of DDoS attacks grew sharply in Q4 as DDoS-for-hire and multivector attacks increased in popularity, an Akamai report shows. [ + ]

Microsoft has revealed plans to start offering its flagship OS as a service, starting with offering Windows 10 for free to users of Windows 7 or newer for the first year after launch. [ + ]