Articles by Erika

If Pandora had been hoping that the earlier reports of Apple exploring a streaming-radio venture were exaggerated or downright wrong, those hopes have been dashed. Last week, news surfaced that Apple is indeed serious about the advertising-backed venture and has intensified talks with major music labels. The parties are discussing how to split ad ...

Forty-seven percent of all social media users have used their networks to get customer service from a company, with usage as high as 59 percent among 18-24 year olds, according to a new study from NM Incite. Almost one in three social media users said they preferred to contact a company that way, and companies have learned to respond in kind.

With recent news of Softbank's proposed US$20.1 billion investment hovering in the background, Sprint Nextel has reported less-than-pretty earnings for the third quarter 2012. The carrier posted a net loss of $767 million, compared with a net loss of $301 million in the third quarter of 2011. It also lost about 459,000 contract customers for the q...

Some 1,000 people gathered in New York City to see the long-ballyhooed Windows 8 unveiling on Thursday, and countless others watched a live stream from the Microsoft website. "Windows 8 shatters perceptions of what a PC really is," Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told the audience. "We've truly reimagined Windows."

It is that time of year again -- namely, prediction-making season. Gartner is the first out of the gate with its top 10 strategic tech trends for 2013 and a few years beyond, released this week at its Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Orlando, Fla Following is a summary of Gartner's take on the trends to watch....

Facebook delivered a double whammy with its third-quarter earnings report: It came in slightly above Wall Street analysts' expectations, and it illustrated that, yes, it can deliver on its mobile promise Although it recorded a net loss of $59 million, revenue reached $1.26 billion, a 32 percent year-over-year increase. Best of all, though, was its ...

Compete has agreed to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that it used its Web-tracking software to collect personal data without disclosing the extent of its information-gathering activities, and failed to honor promises it made to protect the personal data it collected Under the settlement, Compete must obtain consumers' express consent befo...

Increasingly, CRM vendors are incorporating geofunctionality into their offerings. It is a must-have marketing technique for brick-and-mortar retailers competing with e-commerce providers While that use is indeed still a big driver, vendors are also beginning to view it as a technology that has multiple CRM-related uses, such as a complementary te...

Isis, a joint venture of AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon, has debuted its long-awaited mobile wallet initiative in Austin and Salt Lake City. It joins a number of other initiatives -- Square and Google Wallet, to cite just two examples -- competing in the nascent mobile payments industry. Whether Isis will gain more traction than they have, however, re...

Social media, already part and parcel of many Americans' lives, has also become a channel through which they participate in politics. Sixty-six percent of social media users -- or 39 percent of all American adults -- have engaged in some form of civic or political activity via social media, suggests a new survey conducted by the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project.

Count Microsoft among the tech companies that posted blah earnings for the three months ending Sept. 30 -- in Microsoft's case its first quarter for fiscal year 2013 It posted revenue of US$16.01 billion for the quarter, down from $17.37 billion in the same quarter a year ago. Operating income, net income, and diluted earnings per share were $5.31 ...

eBay turned in a better-than-expected profit for its third quarter -- bucking the tide of less-than-stellar financial reports coming from other tech firms this week. eBay reported revenue of US$3.4 billion, a 15 percent increase over the same period in 2011. Its Q3 net income on a GAAP basis was $597 million, or $0.45 per diluted share; non-GAAP n...

Google did not have a good day on Thursday: Its stock plunged when its unexpectedly dismal third-quarter earnings became public. Then, there was the matter of how exactly they became public. Google's financial printer, R.R. Donnelley, posted the earnings report to the Securities and Exchange Commission website without Google's final approval, acco...

IBM is often viewed as a bellwether stock for the tech industry. Its earnings points to how other companies are investing in tech -- or lately, how they are not. Earlier this week, the company announced third-quarter 2012 diluted earnings of US$3.33 per share, a year-to-year increase of 4 percent. Third-quarter net income was $3.8 billion, flat ye...

LinkedIn, the social network geared toward professionals, has unveiled a major revamp of its site design. The changes began rolling out this week and will continue throughout the next few months The new LinkedIn places a greater emphasis on photos -- they are larger, serving as focal points on the page.

It appears Google is catching flak from regulators on both sides of the Atlantic. European privacy authorities have asked Google to modify its global privacy policy in order to give users a better understanding of what personal data is being collected The move comes on the heels of rumors that the Federal Trade Commission is about to launch an anti...

Mojiva has rolled out Mojiva Tab, a new mobile ad network for tablets only, as advertisers flock to this hot piece of digital real estate. In 2011, there were an estimated 3 million tablets on Mojiva's mobile ad network. By January 2012, that number had increased to 25 million. As of June 2012, the network was boasting access to 40 million tablet ...

Microsoft is taking another stab at the digital music industry with the Tuesday launch of Xbox Music, a streaming music service that will be an update to the Xbox. It will also be released as a built-in feature on Windows 8 PCs and tablets later this month ...

It is not hard at all to find an example of a mobile B2C CRM app -- all one has to do is fire up the nearest smartphone But B2B mobile CRM? That is a qualified yes -- assuming one is willing to limit one's thinking to salesforce automation as a B2B discipline. To be sure, there is a case to be made for that argument -- consider mobile CRM apps in ...

The Federal Trade Commission is poised to launch an antitrust case against Google, according to anonymous sources cited in a Reuters report. The alleged charge is straightforward: Google has been using its search engine dominance to hurt competing firms. The rest of the details are expected to unfold in the coming weeks. The commissioners are deba...