Articles by Erika

Microsoft has provided "important" updates for vulnerabilities in MSN Messenger, Windows Live Messenger and Windows Services for Unix 3.0 in its monthly Patch Tuesday release. Its most important fix -- a critical vulnerability -- is in its Windows Agent animation services. This is the agent that displays animated characters for internal use, such as the Microsoft Office "talking" paper clip...

News that there may be a link between implanted RFID (radio frequency identification) chips and cancer in mice and rats sentVeriChip shares plunging by as much as 14 percent on Tuesday. The company's troubles began over the weekend when results of three studies in the United States and Europe detailing the increased risk -- which was found to range between 1 percent and 10 percent in rodents that received implanted chips -- were published by the Associated Press...

CentricCRM, a developer of open source CRM aimed at larger enterprises, is set to release an update of its flagship product, CentricCRM 5.0, next month, CEO David Richards told CRM Buyer "This will be a very significant release for us," he said, pointing to new platform-level support for third party developers including a plug-in architecture based...

Although some people are still trying to enjoy the last of the summer weather, the retail holiday shopping season has begun. With that, inevitably, comes the peak e-mail marketing season The holiday e-mail season started last year on Sept. 6 with a Christmas reference in a Sam's Club e-mail, according to a report by the Email Experience Council (EE...

Aspect Software has introduced a series of software modules under one suite aimed at optimization performance in the contact center. The modules are for workforce management, recording and quality management, performance management, campaign management and coaching and e-learning Called PerformanceEdge, the suite provides integration to most of th...

When Apple CEO Steve Jobs abruptly announced that the company was cutting the price for the 8GB iPhone from US$599 to $399, he appeared to be a bit dismissive of the product's early adopters -- many of whom stood in line for hours to acquire the coveted gadget. Some 24 hours later, though, he was trying to make amends "Even though we are making the...

Salesforce.com has signed a contract to supply 40,000 Web-delivered software subscriptions to Japan Post, bringing the total number of deployments to the company to 45,000. The contract is now the largest seat deployment for the iconic on-demand vendor to date Japan Post, which is set to be privatized in October, functions as more than just a posta...

Just in time for the start of the holiday shopping season, HP has introduced a slew of new products, including a PC specially designed for gaming Called the HP Blackbird 002, it is the first HP personal computer bearing VoodooPC's distinctive stamp after HP purchased the high-end gaming PC maker last year....

Palm has decided to cancel the current iteration of its Foleo product, an ultralight, Linux-based "mobile companion" device that had analysts scratching their heads when it was first announced In a post on the Palm blog, CEO Ed Colligan told readers that he has decided to cancel Foleo mobile "in its current configuration."

Oracle plans to acquire Netsure Telecom, a Dublin, Ireland-based company that provides networking intelligence, analytics and network data integrity software The company's typical clients include tier one operators of next generation network and service providers such as Vodafone, Cable & Wireless and Eircom. These firms essentially use Netsure's s...

Hackers associated with the Chinese government broke into the Pentagon's computer systems earlier this summer, according to a report in the Financial Times The London-based paper, which cited anonymous sources in the current and previous administrations in its article, said officials believe the People's Liberation Army were behind the incursions, ...

EarthLink has bowed out of its agreement to build a network that would provide free WiFi in San Francisco. The news follows the company's announcement this week that it is eliminating 900 jobs -- half its workforce -- and closing offices in four cities, including San Francisco. The beleaguered WiFi project in San Francisco is apparently one of the casualties...

As people head off to enjoy the last holiday weekend of the summer, few are thinking about the next stretch of holidays ahead: Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukah and New Year's. Rest assured, though -- retailers are giving the matter plenty of consideration Labor Day weekend signals the start of the holiday e-mail season, according to a new report by...

Microsoft has acquired one of the few providers of persistent, or group, chat functionality, a niche enterprise tool that is gaining rapid adoption, especially in the financial services areas The software giant boughtParlano, best known for its MindAlign application, for an undisclosed sum. Parlano provides real-time online communication and collab...

Aruba and Motorola have joined the now legion number of tech companies engaged in legal patent disputes. Motorola's subsidiary companies Symbol Technologies and Wireless Valley Communications filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Aruba Networks in the United States District Court for the District of Delaware Aruba infringed its patents relate...

SAP clearly wants an out-of-court settlement of Oracle's suit against it for intellectual property infringement, based on a joint SAP-Oracle case management conference statement filed in the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California In March, Oracle filed suit against SAP and its TomorrowNow subsidiary, alleging that over the cours...

RightNow continues to build out its multi-channel capabilities with its latest quarterly upgrade, version 8.2. New features in this release include emotion detection and other customer feedback capabilities as well as the ability to turn on certain parts of a knowledge base to the public "The overarching theme is our continued investment in multich...

Yahoo is asking a federal court to dismiss a lawsuit filed by a human rights organization that claims the Internet portal's cooperation with the Chinese government resulted in the torture and 10-year jail term of Wang Xiaoning Xiaoning had used a Yahoo account to anonymously post to the Web materials relating to the Tiananmen Square massacre. Yahoo...

SugarCRM has released a beta version of Sugar 5.0, a platform upgrade that provides new development tools and a new Ajax e-mail client, and is based on a new so-called multi-instance on-demand architecture "This is the largest release in the history of the company's open source project since we founded it three and a half years ago," John Roberts, ...

Qualcomm has repurchased and retired approximately 29 million shares of its stock during the last two months for approximately US$1.1 billion under its $3 billion stock repurchase program. Some $1.5 billion worth of shares remain authorized for repurchase in future periods, net of put options outstanding, under the stock repurchase program announced on May 22, 2007...