Articles by Erika

Of all the groups that have hurt the movie studios' financials through illegal file-sharing and piracy, college students have been the most egregious offenders, the Motion Picture Association of America has long maintained. In fact, it provided statistics two years ago that blamed college students for more than 40 percent of the film industry's losses...

Prior to Tuesday, there were still a few investors optimistic that tech stocks would remain the proverbial safe haven. It was a reasonable stance, given that the focus of responsibility for the mounting economic troubles in the U.S. has been the housing market Then Apple -- which routinely surpasses analyst expectations -- released its sobering out...

European approval of Google's US$3.1 billion acquisition of DoubleClick may be in doubt as privacy hearings held by the European Commission get underway. The hearings are focusing on whether Internet protocol, or IP, addresses should be considered personally identifiable information (PII) The risk to the pending deal, which has been approved in the...

Optimizing the value of customer data and respecting customers' privacy are two immutable and opposing forces that companies always try to balance -- usually unsuccessfully. Few for-profit firms have proven themselves able to avoid challenging the privacy boundary when captivated by the lure of data monetization Some consumer advocates have put up ...

Alltel has joined the ranks of service providers offeringmobile customer relationship management functionality to their business customers. The wirelesscompany has introduced SalesNOW, a contact,activity and deal management Web app designed for the BlackBerry mobile device Most of the application's features relate to contact managementor productivi...

Step aside, boob tube. Online videos are becoming the primary form of media entertainment for many people. Web surfers spent about an hour more per month watching videos in November compared with January, according to the latest comScore Video Metrix Specifically, they watched an average of 3.25 hours, or 195 minutes, of online video during the mon...

New stats confirm what many holiday shoppers already knew: Nintendo's Wii was the most popular game console of the season, with 1.35 million flying off shelves. Its popularity provided a huge boost to the industry, said theNPD Group, which issued the report In 2007, the video game industry hauled in a record US$17.9 billion in sales, 43 percent hig...

On the heels of Oracle's successful bid to acquire BEA Systems, SAP has provided the market and its customers with the first wave of products -- nine in total -- developed through its own US$6.78 billion acquisition of Business Objects last year. It has also revealed more details about its plans to integrate its product suite with the French business intelligence vendor's applications...

Salesforce.com has introduced a set of new tools with a pricing model designed to encourage adoption of its Force.com Platform as a Service product introduced last year One of the new entries is Force.com Cloud Computing architecture, which can be purchased on a per-login basis. "Cloud computing" refers to the distributed computing model in which m...

On Feb. 16, BizAutomation.com is planning a launch of an on-demand business suite that will include e-commerce, CRM, accounting and other back- and front-office features. There are other similar products on the market -- namely NetSuite -- but none, insists CEO Carl Zaldivar, that are geared specifically to the small and medium-sized business (SMB)...

Extol International, a business-to-business integration provider, has introduced a middleware application aimed at the upper midmarket. Business Extenders, a subset of its main product line, Extol Business Integrator, is designed to address a one-off pain point in the IT environment Such one-off integration glitches, to cite a few examples, could b...

Three months after BEA Systems rejected its first unsolicited offer of US$6.7 billion, Oracle announced that it will be acquiring the middleware and business process management vendor after all -- for $8.5 billion, or $19.38 per share. That's a 14 percent premium over its first bid and a 24 percent premium over BEA's closing share price of $15.58 B...

MySpace has introduced aggressive new measures to protect users -- particularly children and adolescents -- against sexual predators. Up until now the social networking site has made incremental changes to its policies, usually in response to parental or congressional outcry. This latest set of steps, however, are arguably the most aggressive the popular site has taken thus far...

CRM is all about the front office and those processes that affect or touch the customer. After 15-plus years of software development aimed at this space, you might think that there's nothing left to be said -- or, more precisely, done. You'd be wrong Dick Lee, principal of High-Yield Methods and writer of the blogCustomer Alignment, has been on th...

Outsourcing phenom Infosys Technologies posted mixed third quarter results, causing its stock valuations to drop by some 5.6 percent midday Friday. It also reignited speculation that the Indian-based conglomerate's fortunes may be too closely linked to the U.S. economy For the quarter, Infosys posted earnings of 52 US cents a share, topping analyst...

Oracle's steady march to integrate its string of multimillion-dollar acquisitions continues. Its latest meld is the PeopleSoft Enterprise CRM 9 application with the Oracle Customer Hub, with Fusion middleware serving as the common platform The end result is a CRM enterprise suite with master data management features, explained Oracle Vice President...

The Federal Communications Commission will investigate claims made late last year that Comcast blocked customers from using file-sharing services, specifically BitTorrent. FCC Chairman Kevin Martin made the announcement at the Consumer Electronics Show currently underway in Las Vegas The move came in response to a petition several consumer advocacy...

The annual Consumer Electronics Show, now in progress in Las Vegas, not only highlights the must-have consumer products for the upcoming year, but also provides a forum for tech execs to share their philosophical musings on the future of their industry This year is no exception. On the second day of the show, Intel CEO Paul Otellini described his v...

Comcast and Panasonic are upping their strike capabilities in the consumer entertainment tech wars with the introduction of the AnyPlay portable digital video recorder. With a standard-definition, 60-gigabyte hard drive and DVD/CD player, AnyPlay gives consumers more flexibility in how they watch TV shows and movies The portable device records and ...

On New Year's Eve, Richard Rabins, cofounder of Alpha Software, posted a thank-you to readers on his blog "Your suggestions, advice, criticisms, peer support and sweat equity were crucial to expanding the Alpha Five universe in 2007," he wrote. "Every new application you deployed, every peer you supported in the Alpha Forum, every feature you reque...