Archive

The entire United States is debating whether the country is in the midst of an economic slowdown. Some of the signs are fairly explicit: steadily rising gas prices and their cascading effects on the average consumer, unemployment rate bumps and the continued fallout from the housing market bubble. I...

Microsoft is offering some of its most popular acquisitions via cloud computing with the rollout of Microsoft Online Services. Like many vendors adopting this delivery mode, Microsoft is seeking to exploit companies' eagerness to downsize their internal IT and computing infrastructures to the greate...

On June 30, data security standards set by the Payment Card Industry became mandatory for organizations that handle online credit card payments. This is a significant milestone in the ongoing push to strengthen online security as these important standards have moved from recommendations to hard and ...

Microsoft is taking a bold stance in its seemingly endless Yahoo talks, now saying no further negotiations will take place unless a new board is elected. A public statement issued Monday by Microsoft references recent meetings with billionaire Yahoo investor Carl Icahn, who issued a letter of his ow...

Google and privacy advocates will continue to fight a war over the search giant's use and retention of personal information, but it appears the two sides declared an end to hostilities over the July Fourth holiday weekend regarding the company's privacy policy. Google now will directly link to its p...

The Internet is the greatest technical development of the 20th century, and its open competition model has been the envy of other market sectors. Internet advances are being crushed by monopolistic carriers who are more concerned with censoring content than delivering services to customers. Those di...

Despite the overwhelming success of e-commerce, there are still consumers out there too terrified to click their cart through a virtual checkout. Are they just a silly-nilly group, nutty as a bunch of conspiracy theorists? Or are the rest of us just too naive to get it? Neither, it turns out. "There...

Depending on which set of criteria you reference, ID fraud either is on a significant decline or will be a lingering threat for several more years. The general trend points downward. Overall, 2007 saw a 12 percent drop in ID fraud incidences to $6 billion, according to Javelin Strategy & Researc...

A new ruling in Viacom's $1 billion lawsuit against Google has privacy advocates fretting that the case may further erode privacy online, even if it's eventually settled. Judge Louis Stanton of the U.S. District Court for Southern New York ruled that Google must provide Viacom with information from ...

These days, I'm often asked about the health of the technology sector. Granted, some people say the economy of the San Francisco Bay Area doesn't reflect the rest of the country, but indications point to the fact that technology industries appear to be relatively unscathed by the economic downturn. ...

Microsoft may now be looking at a team-based approach to buying Yahoo. The company has talked with other media corporations about partnering up to split Yahoo's assets, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal, which cited sources close to the discussions. Microsoft could buy Yahoo's search ...

Now you can buy any domain with any suffix. If a dot-com is gone, so what? For a cost, you can create your own suffix using any letters and any name. Domain names are made of three parts. The www, the "name" and the suffix like .com. With ICANN's latest decision, you now have full creative control o...

Recently, I've observed a wave of articles, product releases and even analyst reports that describe solutions for companies looking to "get into" master data management or "try out" an MDM project. Other reports claim that companies have been successful at MDM without having an MDM infrastructure in...

Following its failed effort to curb youngsters' access to video games with "Mature" or "Adults Only" ratings by fining kids for obtaining them, the state of Minnesota on Monday was the one paying. The state paid the Entertainment Software Association $65,000, reimbursing the organization for attorne...

Sprint may be seeing a resurgence in the mobile market. The company's stock climbed 13 percent last week following reports of a Verizon exec telling investors Sprint had started "doing better." The industry has since seen intense speculation that fewer Sprint subscribers are defecting to the top two...