Articles by Erika

A compromised Marin County, Calif., Web site apparently prompted the U.S. government to temporarily shut down all of the state government's Internet sites this week Last month, the Marin County transportation authority Web site was reportedly hacked to redirect traffic to a porn site. Following several unsuccessful attempts to remedy the situation ...

Microsoft has introduced HealthVault, a portal for consumers in which they can store their health data -- either manually or by uploading data from, say, a heart monitor -- as well as search for related healthcare information The portal includes an online component and client software called the "HealthVault Connection Center" -- a utility that com...

Silicon Valley venture capitalists Bay Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners have pooled resources with Salesforce.com to roll out a fund that will invest in companies' development activities on Salesforce.com's platform Typical investments will equal about US$500,000 each, totaling $25 million over the next three years....

The big news when Saleforce.com released its latest version of what is hot in the CRM space -- Winter '08 -- was Force.com. The immediately understood subtext was that Salesforce.com had officially begun its migration to a platform on-demand company, launching the first salvo in what Denis Pombriant, managing principal of the Beagle Research Group, wrote could be the next platform wars...

Google has added functionality from Postini -- its recently acquired on-demand security provider -- to Google Apps Premier Edition, further leveraging its ambitious acquisition and development platform Google acquired Postini last month for US$625 million in cash. The privately held company services about 35,000 firms, for a total of roughly 10 mil...

IBM made several developments in its RFID (radio frequency identification) partner and product platform that should make software and hardware integration of the technology easier for firms, the company said For starters, standards organization GS1 EPCglobal certified the IBM WebSphere RFID Information Center as fully compliant with its EPCIS (Elec...

Less than a year after its much-ballyhooed rollout of Vista, Microsoft is giving in to the demands of manufacturers and business users who want to switch back to the XP operating system Some manufacturers, such as Dell, are already offering customers a choice of OSes in response to a groundswell of client demand. Dell reportedly began offering cust...

Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway, and Steve Perlman, who developed Apple's QuickTime video technology and WebTV, were among the people who descended upon Capitol Hill to protest the Patent Reform Act passed by the House of Representatives at the beginning of September Kamen and Perlman are perhaps two of the more iconic representatives of a grou...

SAS added a new application to its lineup of customer service analytical offerings. SAS Real Time Decision Manager embeds analytically driven decision logic at every customer interaction The Decision Manager tool was introduced during Gartner's CRM conference this week, along with an updated version of its Marketing Optimization application. The pr...

Transit Wireless, a joint venture that includes Nab Construction, Q-Wireless, Dianet Communications and Transit Technologies, won the right to wire for cell phone use New York City Transit's 277 subway stations in a 10-year contract valued at US$46.8 million, according to news accounts of the closely watched bidding As part of the project, Transit ...

SAP, which has developed and acquired a number of applications for small and medium-sized companies, added yet another to its line up. SAP Business ByDesign is an on-demand enterprise suite aimed at companies with 100 to 500 employees that do not have strong internal IT support The application provides functionality in several areas, ranging from C...

Analytic software provider Verint released the first update of its Audiolog application since its acquisition of Mercom last year A call recording and monitoring application designed for small and medium-sized business (SMB) contact centers, Audiolog incorporates enterprise-level features that have been part of Verint's traditional product line....

MySpace is tapping into its rich universe of content -- that is, its users' profiles -- to bulk up its advertising platform The ubiquitous social networking Web site will be matching ads to people's profiles so that visitors to, say, a music aficionado's page will see adds for music Web sites....

Google has added the third leg to its online suite of office applications. The new addition, dubbed "Presentations," is analogous to Microsoft PowerPoint. Now that Google has a full-fledged productivity suite, it has shortened its name from "Google Docs and Spreadsheet" to simply "Google Docs." After logging in to access the suite, users will find ...

Salesforce.com added two functional areas to its CRM and introduced its Force.com platform with the rollout of its Winter '08 release The new product lines are Salesforce.com Content and Salesforce.com Ideas, which provide content management and a Web 2.0 environment for collaboration in the enterprise, respectively. Force.com allows users to devel...

A software tool is released with a performance guarantee and the promise of periodic updates. Another commercial application for the market? Not quite. Rather, this is emblematic of how malware writers are doing business these days "We definitely see much of the illegal online activity becoming more professional and adopting behavior and practices ...

Google -- the company that championed the concept that no piece of information was too small not to be indexed for public consumption -- is calling for the development of a global privacy standard The Internet has been leveraged in countries that have no such policies, said Google Global Privacy Counsel Peter Fleischer in an address to aUnited Nati...

Bank of America has quietly raised ATM fees it charges noncustomers to $3. The bank has more than 16,000 national branch location machines; of these, some 6,000 are located in such public places as malls, movie theaters and stadiums. Fees to use these ATMs will remain $2 The bank raised its fee to pay for upgrades to its ATM network, it said....

MySpaceTV will relaunch "Quarterlife," a network television pilot about a group of recent college graduates that aired briefly on ABC in 2005. Accompanying the show's Nov. 11 resurrection will be a social networking site for fans, complete with the usual Web-related content, such as character profiles. The television show's reappearance on the Internet is unusual, in that most original online entertainment content is presented with an eye to making the leap to network television or general theatrical release...

A CRM consultancy will be launching what it describes as the first CRM Web 2.0 portal for executive recruitment and career development in this industry Located at myCRMcareer.com, the Web site will be managed by Bruce Culbert, Ted Hartley, and Paul Greenberg, principals at BPT Partners....