Articles by Erika

Tech leaders representing Google, Wikipedia and the Center for Democracy and Technology testified Tuesday before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, which is mulling reauthorization of theE-Government Act. Signed into law five years ago, it requires government agencies make information more accessible electronically Ma...

Pluris, a provider of multichannel marketing applications, has added a fourth product to its lineup with the release of its Marketing Optimization and Recommendation Engine (MORE) MORE packages advanced analytics, a recommendation engine and an optimization engine that allows users to make tailored product recommendations, optimized offers -- a pri...

On Wednesday, open source CRM software developer CentricCRM will announce it is rebranding its application after revamping it and adding new functionality. The company also is changing its name to "Concursive." Now called "Concourse," suite 5.0 offers an integrated CRM, Web site creation, content management and enterprise 2.0 technologies on either...

TheSoftware Freedom Law Center is challenging Verizon's use ofBusyBox open source code in the wireless routers provided to its FiOS customers SFLC has filed suit against Verizon in the U.S. District Court of New York on behalf of BusyBox developers Erik Andersen and Rob Landley, alleging that the carrier has violated the terms of the GNU General Pu...

Salesforce.com has rolled out a service for its customers that allows them to share data, sources and leads in a social network. The Salesforce to Salesforce service, which the company is not making available commercially, is a cross between a partner relationship management portal -- which Salesforce.com offers commercially -- and the consumer-to-consumer social networking sites such as Facebook...

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has apologized to the social networking site's user base in response to a rising crescendo of complaints that its advertising platform, Beacon, is too intrusive More importantly, Facebook is now letting users opt out of the service -- a step that it has clearly been reluctant to take....

SAP rolled out a new version of its SAP CRM application -- its first major release in a year Significant changes to the platform include a new user interface that allows business managers to make changes that previously would have required more extensive customization and new functionality in a number of areas, such as trade promotions, real time o...

Facebook has modified its Beacon ad program by making its off-site broadcasting capabilities more obvious to users and easier to opt out of -- at least, in some cases. However, that adjustment hasn't quelled privacy concerns on the part of users and at least one security vendor Facebook has been tracking user actions on affiliate sites, claims a CA...

Amdocs has rolled out Smart Agent Desktop, a new product that gives contact center agents visibility into back-end applications and provides guidance on decision making processes related to calls It is the combination of both factors in one product that makes this rollout unique in the industry, Hollie Halpin, senior product marketing manager for A...

Organized criminal activity will continue to be a big risk on the Internet next year, but the growing tumors of cyber espionage and cyber warfare could metastasize, suggests security firm McAfee In fact, it predicts that the rise in international cyber spying will pose the single biggest security threat in 2008, based on findings from its annual cy...

The Software as a Service (SaaS) concept is rapidly spreading to touch almost every functional area in the IT stack. The latest example is security vendor Webroot's acquisition of Email Systems, a SaaS security provider Primarily focused on consumer and SMB (small and medium-sized business) markets prior to this merger, Webroot's newly acquired Saa...

Why can't tech companies go green? With such luminaries as Google, IBM and HP forming the vanguard of the clean tech movement, it may seem a silly question to ask. Headlines trumpeting these companies' initiatives -- not to mention the nonstop announcements of new energy-saving IT products -- would seem to suggest the tech industry is green all over...

Oncontact Software released version 6.1 of its CRM application, which caters to the growing demand among users for software delivered through the Internet. For the first time, with this release the vendor is providing users with Web extensibility along with its traditional client server access What this means to end users is that the application an...

Eight contenders for the Republican presidential nomination will be debating each other Wednesday night, courtesy of YouTube and CNN. To be sure, the debate itself will be quite telling, with some pundits already laying odds that front-runner Rudy Giuliani may be dislodged from his perch by the evening's end Aside from the candidates' jostling for ...

The trend toward environmentally friendly, or green, business practices is permeating just about every industry and, at a more granular level, specific operations within particular segments -- from high-tech server options to green building The supply chain is no exception, according to a new survey conducted byEyefortransport in June and July....

French company Seanodes has introduced software architecture that it says allows companies to leverage unused processing power in its storage infrastructure to create a virtual storage pool The introduction of this application, the firm claims, has in effect created a new category in the storage space that it is calling "Shared Internal Storage."

ABC wants to increase its network news viewers by tapping Facebook's constituency -- a younger crowd, for the most part, than the usual audience for its evening news program The social networking site is always on the prowl for new features to keep its 56-million and growing user base happy -- and sticky....

Nokia Siemens Networks is introducing environmentally friendly products that offer end users not only a sustainable business model but also bottom-line savings Taking aim at the largest source of energy consumption in a typical telecom network environment -- the wireless network's base station site -- Nokia Siemens Networks has rolled out its so-c...

SAP may be putting TomorrowNow on the block. SAP acquired the company, which services Oracle subsidiaries PeopleSoft and JD Edwards, a few years ago as part of a larger drive to build out an independent stream of support and maintenance revenue Relying on third party service and maintenance is a well established strategy among enterprise vendors, R...

RightNow is leveraging two of its competitive strengths -- self-service and knowledge management -- to deliver a syndication widget in its November 07 release The feature allows companies to syndicate and then distribute content, such as pricing or warranty information, across several Web sites that are not necessarily directly owned or linked to t...