Articles by Erika

Zoho has rolled out a major update to its CRM app, completely redesigning the user interface and adding new social and productivity features. It is a massive overhaul, Zoho evangelist Raju Vegesna told CRM Buyer -- one the company plans to extend to other applications throughout its business suite of products.

Ask just about any research company that tracks online spending about this holiday season and you will get bombarded with cheer: "good," "strong," "robust," and "surprisingly strong" are among the adjectives used to describe online shopping activity this month and last. The latest indicator is a report on the holiday season-to-date: US$24.6 billio...

Best Buy's fiscal third-quarter profit fell 29 percent, surprising analysts and retail observers who had been expecting stronger results. For the quarter ended Nov. 26, the electronics retailer posted a profit of US$154 million, or 42 cents a share. In the same period a year earlier, it reported a profit of $217 million, or 54 cents a share. Its r...

Jive Software has made its debut on the Nasdaq, following on the heels of other recent tech company IPOs such as Groupon, LinkedIn and Netflix. Jive, a maker of collaborative social media software for the enterprise, doesn't have the consumer orientation of those three, but it's apparently similar enough for the market: It raised a more-than-respectable US$161 million in its initial public offering.

It was with mixed emotions that Rick Singer, CEO of GreatApps.com, bought his first .XXX domain name. As a small businessperson, he was happy that his company had progressed to the point where its brand needed to be protected. At the same time, GreatApps is, as the name suggests, a software company, not an adult entertainment operation.

Intel has informed its shareholders that its fourth-quarter results will not match its earlier outlook. The reason: a global shortage of hard disk drives, due to flooding in Thailand earlier this year. Now the company expects fourth-quarter revenue to be approximately US$13.7 billion, down from the previous estimate of roughly $14.7 billion.

Google+Photos is adding facial recognition technology that will let users be tagged automatically in photos. To pre-empt privacy concerns, Google has made the feature opt-in, said Matt Steiner, engineering lead on the Google+ Photos team. ...

A backlash is growing against an app designed to help consumers scope out products at local stores, compare them to similar goods on Amazon -- and then leave the stores empty-handed to make their actual purchases online. Critics of the app, called "Amazon Price Check," include brick-and-mortar retailers and Maine Sen. Olympia Snowe.

Twitter has updated its site and dramatically streamlined its user interface with an eye to attracting new users -- not to mention brands. ...

Radian6 Social Marketing Cloud has been released -- it's the first Radian6 product to come to market after the company's acquisition by Salesforce.com earlier this year. ...

There is good news and bad news for driver safety in the U.S.: The good news is that highway deaths fell to 32,885 in 2010, the lowest level since 1949, according to the Department of Transportation's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's updated fatality and injury data. This decline came even as drivers traveled nearly 46 billion more miles during the year, for an increase of 1.6 percent over the 2009 level...

Research In Motion appears to have decided that the battle for the name "BBX" is not worth a lengthy court fight after a federal judge in New Mexico issued a temporary restraining order to block its use for the company's operating system in its next-generation BlackBerry phones and tablets. In October, shortly after RIM announced the new brand, Ba...

Operational for just barely four months, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has received some 5,000 complaints about credit card companies. The bureau issued an interim report on the nature of the complaints, ranging from objectionable advertising and marketing practices, application processing delays and high interest rates, to identity theft, privacy intrusions, and the unsolicited issuance of cards...

SugarCRM, an open source CRM provider, has released 6.3, a new version of its flagship product line. It has also upped the ante in the cloud wars by partnering with IBM on its SmartCloud platform. The upshot, CMO Nick Halsey told CRM Buyer, is a CRM app more than able to go head to head with long-established vendors....

Samsung has scored a victory against Apple in a legal skirmish in Australia that is part of a larger, global battle between the two over their respective patent rights. An Australian appeals court overturned a preliminary injunction that barred Samsung from selling its Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet in the country. The court unanimously ruled that the jud...

Facebook has agreed to settle charges of privacy violations with the Federal Trade Commission. As part of the settlement, the social networking giant will submit to periodic independent privacy audits for the next 20 years. The company has also agreed to ask users for permission before changing the way their data is released. The agreement stems f...

Online sales for Cyber Monday increased 33 percent from the same day last year, according to IBM's Cyber Monday Benchmark. The growth surpassed that of another banner day for e-commerce, Black Friday, which saw an increase of 29.3 percent in 2011 online sales compared with 2010's performance. "We expected the holiday season to be good this year," ...

In one swoop, a Justice Department-led group of federal law enforcement agencies seized 150 domain names of commercial websites that it claims have been selling counterfeit goods. The seized domains are now under federal custody. Taking place on Cyber Monday, the timing of this raid was not likely an accident. The federal government has been targe...

By all accounts, e-commerce exceeded expectations on Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday -- and many expect a repeat performance for Cyber Monday. For the holiday season-to-date, US$12.7 billion has been spent online, for a 15-percent increase versus the corresponding days last year, comScore reported. On Black Friday alone, $800 million in online s...

EU antitrust chief Joaquin Almunia has done what few in the global patent community are willing to do: He has acknowledged the elephant in the room by questioning the motives of two multinationals -- Samsung and Apple -- as they bloody each other with patent lawsuits. "Standardization and IP rights are two instruments that, in this new IT sector, ...