Archive

Consumer online spending habits continue to evolve, and as average shoppers look for new ways to stretch their budgets during tough economic times, online coupon usage has grown. In fact, online searches for coupons and offers have increased by 58 percent over the past year. Savvy shoppers are beco...

It's official: Comcast has engineered what appears to be the biggest media joint venture of the year -- a multibillion-dollar merger that will combine General Electric's NBC Universal with Comcast's own cable networks. Once complete, Comcast will take majority ownership of NBC, ending GE's 20 year c...

Frequently, clients and friends ask my opinion about the economic stimulus package. Is it really working? Does it make any economic sense? Aren't we digging a deeper hole for our children, our grandchildren and ourselves? These are understandable concerns, and they reflect the anxiety of the America...

A turf war is going on in the mobile applications market as various companies try to carve out a foothold. The players include handset vendors such as RIM, Palm, Apple, LG and Samsung; mobile operating system developers like Google with its Android platform; software vendors such as Microsoft; and w...

Did someone just blink in the great Google vs. News Corp. paid content smackdown? The latest round of digital brinksmanship involving how the search giant aggregates news stories behind paywalls got more interesting Tuesday when Google announced a couple of measures to placate publishers, including ...

As we approach the end of 2009, the hands-down winner of the hot IT trends award continues to be cloud computing. Yet the reality is that for many, cloud deployment strategies remain somewhat ethereal -- part theoretical, part vendor/marketing hype, and part vaguely defined future model. At the sam...

Online sales were up almost 14 percent year over year for 2009's Cyber Monday, the first Monday after Thanksgiving and traditionally a big selling day for online retailers. Shoppers spent over 38 percent more per order compared to 2008's figures, and they bought nearly 10 percent more items per orde...

IBM's recent Connect 2009 analyst conference provided fascinating insights into one of the company's most valuable assets -- its software group organization. IBM has long been recognized as a purveyor of enterprise-class computing systems, but during the past decade, the company's global services or...

Online shoppers took to their computers in droves on Black Friday, spending 11 percent more than they did a year ago and buoying e-tailers' hopes for a bountiful holiday season. That's according to a report released Sunday by market research firm comScore, which counted $595 million in online sales ...

Amazon's e-reader device, the Kindle, experienced its best sales month ever in November, according to the company, which made the announcement even before Cyber Monday purchases were tallied. Amazon did not release any actual numbers to back up its claim, however. It is unclear whether Amazon was ta...

It's clear the way we work is rapidly changing. Organizations and teams are becoming more geographically dispersed with the increased globalization of business. Networks of employees, partners, and customers are spanning the globe as industry becomes more interdependent. This means information excha...

Big businesses often use big bucks to go green. Small businesses, on the other hand, haven't a dollar to spare even for a good cause like saving the environment. Shouldn't they just pass on the whole green scheme -- at least until the economy improves? Not necessarily. "Effective power management is...

Major magazine publishers are about to launch a new attempt to digitize their content, according to a recent article in the New York Observer. The publishers reportedly include Conde Nast, Hearst and Time. It's said they're getting ready to form a new company that will prepare digital versions of th...

Fifty-nine U.S. senators are asking European antitrust regulators to conclude their review of the Oracle acquisition of Sun Microsystems. The move, led by Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., and Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, is an unusual one for the U.S. legislative body. It follows a similar action by the Depar...

You may think it's annoying when you see the same commercial repeated during a 2:30 ad break in prime time, but have no fear -- there is a method to an advertiser's madness. They simply want to make sure you are exposed to that product's branding/logo even as you're fast-forwarding past it on a digi...