Articles by Erika

Only weeks after its triumphant initial public offering, it appears daily deal trailblazer Groupon has fallen out of investors' good graces. Its stock price has plunged 15 percent, with shares hovering near their IPO average of US$20 or so per unit. In the months leading up to its IPO, Groupon experienced a similar slide in investor confidence as ...

Microsoft's star witness, the company's chairman and former CEO Bill Gates, took the stand in a long-brewing antitrust civil lawsuit that pits Redmond against software maker Novell The suit is based on an oft-repeated accusation against Microsoft: namely that it abused its dominant position in the market to shut a rival out. Microsoft's position ha...

Google and its hardware partners are revamping their approach to Chromebooks with a series of changes. Perhaps most interesting among these, from the consumer perspective at least, is a price cut to the current Samsung and Acer models of roughly $50 or so. Specifically, the WiFi Acer Chromebook dropped to US$299 from $349 and the Samsung WiFi fro...

The Facebook IPO guessing game has moved into high gear. The latest rumor puts the big event within several weeks, possibly as soon as December. This new timeline was reported by Business Insider, which cited an email from a source it said was close to Facebook employees Statements from CEO Mark Zuckerberg have put the rumor mill at the social net...

Results Software has rolled out the latest iteration of its longstanding CRM business suite product. In this version, it builds on its recent three-way integration with QuickBooks, Outlook and SmartVault That integration with three applications widely used by small- and medium-sized companies is what President and Founder Naseem Saab calls the appl...

The board was re-elected, company executives were questioned about corporate strategy, a proposal to create a sustainability committee was killed. All in all, it was business as usual at Microsoft's annual shareholders' meeting Tuesday, except for some uncomfortable talk -- uncomfortable from Microsoft's perspective, that is -- about whether parts of the company should be spun off...

Tech heavyweights such as Google, Facebook, Twitter and Zynga are lining up in opposition to a copyright enforcement bill that will be the subject of a hearing in the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee on Wednesday: the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA The companies sent a letter to key members of both congressional chambers calling the bi...

Google is adding 24/7 phone support for its Google Apps for Business product line -- the first time since the apps launched in 2007 It is a major step forward for Google, which has been pushing to place these apps on the desktop alongside -- or even, hopefully, in place of -- Microsoft's productivity offerings....

You have probably transacted business with Paciolan at some point in your life, even if you don't recognize the name. Perhaps you did it just by purchasing event tickets ...

Citigroup has reached an agreement to sell its music label, EMI Group, in two parts for a total of US$4.1 billion. Universal Music Group has announced it is buying EMI's recorded music division for $1.9 billion Sony/ATV, according to news reports, has nabbed -- or is poised to nab shortly -- EMI's publishing line of business, the copyrights for the...

Google has acquired a startup called Apture that provides a new type of search functionality beneficial to publishers -- or anyone, that is, who hates to see Web users leave a page's content to search out related information Apture has developed technology that displays links to related information in the content, without forcing the reader to navi...

Several cable companies and the U.S. FCC have launched a program that will assist low-income families in getting access to broadband and low-cost computers. The initiative is part of the FCC's push to increase broadband adoption across the U.S. This particular program, in which such companies as Comcast, Cox Communications, Time Warner Cable and o...

A bipartisan trio of Senators has introduced a bill that gives states the authority to collect online sales taxes. The measure, cosponsored by Senators Mike Enzi, R-Wyo., Dick Durbin, (D-Ill., and Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., carves out an exception for small businesses, one of the main objections to this issue in the past. The legislation exempts se...

Questions posed by U.S. Supreme Court Justices to attorneys making oral arguments in United States v. Jones suggest the case could have significant implications for search-and-seizure law and police practices. The justices grilled both the U.S. attorney general and the defense attorney for Antoine Jones, a former Washington nightclub owner who is ...

Accel Partners is launching a US$100 million fund to identify -- and fund -- entrepreneurs at every layer of the big data stack, in particular, those developing projects for the Apache Hadoop platform. The Accel Big Data Fund is aligned with Cloudera, which is pushing development in Hadoop.

Google has introduced Google+ Pages, an element of its Google+ social network that has been much anticipated by corporate brands. Pages provides a public placeholder on the Google+ network for any entity -- not just companies. A sports club like FC Barcelona, for example, could have its own page. Or a band -- such as alternative music group The Al...

The CRM Idols have been announced. The goal of the contest was to identify the best corporate video developed by an up-and-coming CRM company. In the Americas, the winning firm is Get Satisfaction. In the EMEA region, it is BPMonline.

Google is reportedly taking aim at one of the few digital screens and content sources it doesn't dominate -- paid television. The search engine provider is considering offering paid cable-TV services to consumers, sources have told The Wall Street Journal. This service would leverage its high-speed Internet access project under way in Kansas City,...

Before it went public, Groupon priced its stock at what turned out to be a highly conservative US$20 dollars per share. Ha! was the market's response Friday morning, the day Groupon finally debuted on Nasdaq. Trading immediately pushed the share price up to $27.96. The low of the day was $ 25.90 and the high, $31.13. ...

Google is introducing a change to its search algorithm that will impact some 35 percent of searches on the Internet. The end goal of the massive shift is to encourage publishers to keep content as fresh as possible, especially as it relates to recent news and events that are regularly updated.