Articles by Erika

Dating website Match.com has announced it will shortly begin checking existing and new members against public sex offender registries. The move follows on the heels of a lawsuit filed by a woman who says she was sexually assaulted by a sex offender -- a man she met through Match.com The move is a departure for Match.com -- as it would be for other ...

Investors met Google's earnings for the first quarter with a near universal sigh of disappointment. The next sound was the dumping of Google's shares, which fell by some 7 percent in the aftermath. The company reported an adjusted profit of US$8.08 a share -- which missed analyst expectations of $8.11 a share. Digging deeper into the numbers, a cu...

Management troubles! Foolish business decisions! Still no monetization platform of note! All of this is old news about Twitter, but it seems as though reports about these issues have been proliferating lately, both in volume and in detail. The latest barrage started with an article published in BusinessInsider describing the company's early tumult...

CDC Software has upgraded its sales module, Pivotal Sales Force Automation, with enhancements that the company developed by borrowing from the best practices it observed in its clients, Ehab Samy, director of product management for CRM applications, told CRM Buyer. In addition, it rolled out these upgrades through the lens of the end-user. That ha...

This week Cisco pulled the plug on the Flip camera, a pocket-sized video camera. It was an abrupt and surprising reversal, given the popularity of the camera and the fact that Cisco acquired it from Pure Digital just a few years ago for US$590 million. Cisco's explanation: It is realigning its operations to focus on core -- that is, corporate and ...

Sony Entertainment has reached a settlement with George Hotz, aka "GeoHot," the hacker who jailbroke Sony's PlayStation 3 gaming console. The settlement was reached on March 31, according to a Sony blog post. The terms were not fully disclosed, but Hotz has apparently agreed to a permanent injunction This is hardly the end of the matter, though -- ...

Time Warner Cable and Viacom are countersuing each other over whether Time Warner Cable has the right to live stream Viacom content to its Apple iPad app, which it released in March. In short, Time Warner Cable says the rights it already obtained from Viacom entitle it to distribute the content in this fashion. Viacom, for its part, says, no, it g...

A different type of deployment for near field communications will be rolled out in Salt Lake City in early to mid 2012 -- different that is, from the projects rumored to be under way at Apple, Google and Amazon. Officials of the city and Isis, a mobile commerce joint venture between AT&T Mobility, T-Mobile USA and Verizon Wireless, announced they ...

The state of Web security has never been pretty, and a new report from Symantec discussing current and future threats only highlights just how risky the Internet environment has become. The daily volume of Web-based attacks increased an eye-popping 93 percent from 2009 to 2010, the report says -- and that's a particularly significant increase give...

It appears that Sony is definitely planning to join the tablet wars: Its CEO Howard Stringer told the Nikkei newspaper that the company was planning to deliver a Honeycomb-based tablet no later than the end of the year, and possibly, according to some versions of his comments, as soon as this summer. If accurate, a Sony tablet -- especially one ge...

There are several investors positioning themselves to snap up Blockbuster at its bankruptcy auction, scheduled for Monday. They are lining up in competition against Cobalt Video, a venture formed by some of Blockbuster's bondholders, which made an opening bid, or stalking horse offer, of US$290 million in February.

Recently, a customer was using the Navy Federal Credit Union ATM and encountered some difficulty with his account. Concerned, he whipped out his mobile device and tweeted to the world that he was having problems. If you have been paying attention to the new ways customer service organizations have been using social media, you can probably guess wh...

Google has launched what many see as its answer to the growing phenomenon of social search in general and Facebook's "Like" button in particular: the +1 button. It is similar in concept, although in Google's case it will eventually be included in search results. When users see something they like on a Google property such as YouTube or a search ad...

Amazon surprised the music world this week with the rollout of several products that will allow consumers to store and access their digital music in the cloud. Perhaps no one was more surprised, though, than the music studios, who appeared to have learned the details of the offering shortly before they were publicly unveiled. They were not, to put...

Google is working to let Android users make purchases using their mobile devices at retail points of sale, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. The company is said to be collaborating with MasterCard, Citigroup and VeriFone on the system, which would be based on near-field communications technology, according to the Journal's anonymous sources.

Last week, at the HP Summit 2011 in San Francisco, the tech industry waited with bated breath for HP CEO Leo Apotheker's first presentation as CEO. Surely, the theory went, he would make a startling pronouncement describing a twist in the company's strategy -- say, a greater focus on developing its own integrated software stack, as opposed to its current strategy of relying on partners.

Social shopping site Groupon clearly had bigger aspirations in mind when it spurned Google's US$6 billion acquisition offer last year. The company is in discussions with Goldman Sachs about going public -- at a $25 billion valuation -- according to a Bloomberg article citing unnamed sources in the know. The plans are not final, and Groupon could d...

Oracle CRM On Demand for Partner Relationship Management has integrated a social application that gives users a sense of what customers, partners and employees are saying about a particular sale or activity or client -- and in an orderly fashion. The challenge Accept360 addresses with its application, according to Senior Product Manager Brian Glov...

Google has enhanced its Google Docs product with a next-generation commenting system it is calling "Discussions." The new feature builds on Google's already strong collaboration bona fides and brings a small level of credibility to its otherwise dubious social media creds. Discussions builds on the overhaul of Google Docs last April, when the sear...

The National Federation of the Blind has filed a civil rights violation complaint with the Department of Justice, asking it to investigate the adoption of Google Apps by New York University and Northwestern University, as well as some schools in the state of Oregon. The use of Google Apps in an educational setting is discriminatory to the blind, t...