Articles by Erika

Facebook has tweaked its home page once again -- this time offering users two different feeds: The News Feed features updates ranked according to what Facebook determines to be the most enjoyable or important content posted by a user's friends. The Live Feed, which consists of all of the real-time updates from the user's network, includes a larger assortment of information, such as notifications when friends add friends.

Sales force automation -- nimble, lightweight and usually mobile -- seems to have little in common with its staid parent, enterprise resource planning. Until you consider this: After years of widespread adoption, SFA has also become mature -- but in its own way. For starters, it is now almost always consumed as Software as a Service, Jereme LeBla...

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., has introduced the Internet Freedom Act of 2009, legislation that would negate many of the principles underlying the concept of Net neutrality, which aims to ensure that Internet users have equal and unfettered access to all services available on the Web. The McCain bill calls for continued unfettered competition for Int...

As I got ready to jump off at the next stop on my whirlwind tour oftravel-planning Web sites, I found myself in the grip of something close to excitement. All the sites I previously visited for this E-Commerce Times review series were virgin territory for me, except for one that I hadn't used in more than a year.

Earlier this week, Windows 7 became the highest grossing pre-order product in Amazon UK history, topping those of J.K. Rowling's book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, according to media reports. The reason for making the correlation between a much-anticipated OS and a very popular book, presumably, was to demonstrate that even before its much-hyped Thursday launch, Windows 7 was already a success.

Oracle's US$7.4 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems appears threatened by recent developments, starting with difficulties in gaining regulatory approval in the EU and ending with a startlingly decline at Sun Microsystems -- a company that was on a downward trajectory long before Oracle made its play for it. Sun Microsystems plans to lay off u...

Public betas of Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 and Office 2010 will become available in November, CEO Steve Ballmer told the crowd attending Microsoft's SharePoint conference in Las Vegas on Monday Touting SharePoint Server 2010 as the biggest and most important release of SharePoint to date, Ballmer pointed to some of the collaboration platform'...

Sprint Nextel is acquiring iPCS, an affiliate that sells its branded products, in a deal that will put an end to a number of legal clashes between the two. It will also bring an additional 710,000 subscribers under the Sprint Nextel corporate umbrella The acquisition means that Sprint will not have to divest its iDEN network in certain iPCS territo...

The tech industry is getting a boost from Google's 7 percent revenue jump from the year-ago quarter, as well as from better-than-expected earnings reports from IBM and, earlier this week, Intel Google is apparently feeling confident enough about the economy and its own near-term prospects that it's contemplating one or more acquisitions. CEO Eric S...

Continuing my tour of travel-planning Web sites for the E-Commerce Times, I moseyed over to Hotwire this week. Hotwire is a discount site that sells off unsold inventory by masking the identity of the hotel or rental car service or airline until the purchase is complete. I have to confess the concept never appealed to me that much -- it conjured u...

T-Mobile and Microsoft susidiary Danger have restored the data Sidekick customers lost when Danger experienced a massive server failure last week. The company announced the news via an online forum used to keep customers apprised of developments. The companies also provided a few sparse details about the meltdowns. The system failure caused data t...

Acer has announced details surrounding two hotly anticipated mobile devices running Google's Android mobile operating system: the Liquid A1 touchscreen smartphone, which Acer first said it was developing when it joined the Open Handset Alliance earlier this year; and the Aspire One netbook, which is available for preorder at Amazon for US$349.99 As...

HP has released a slew of new PCs -- both desktop and notebooks -- that leverage its growing investment in touchscreen technology ahead of Microsoft's Windows 7 release The products target just about every buying constituency there is, from college students seeking affordable notebooks to businesses interested in upgrading to high-end desktops and ...

Service is now largely restored to Sidekick users, but T-Mobile is apparently still struggling to retrieve content and data lost due to a server malfunction over the weekend. At the same time, the carrier is piling on the mea culpas to its customers, many of whom are furious about the incident. Its most recent overture to those who permanently los...

Dell and Salesforce.com have added another tie that binds -- a service offering Salesforce.com's flagship CRM applications to Dell's SMB customers. Data integration and quality control are among the value-add features Dell is bringing to the table through its integration services division. This initiative stand out from the myriad collaborations ...

Users of T-Mobile's smartphone, the Sidekick, suddenly found themselves without address books, calendars, to-do lists and photos -- data that the carrier had been maintaining through a subsidiary of Microsoft called "Danger," which hosts back-end services for mobile companies T-Mobile is assessing the situation to see what content, if any, can be r...

Google and Microsoft are reportedly in separate talks with Twitter with the goal of licensing the microblogging site's rich store of data. The talks were first reported on the Wall Street Journal's All Things Digital Web site. The three companies did not return calls from the E-Commerce Times in time for publication.

Clutter, clutter, clutter -- will they never learn? Well into our survey of travel-planning Web sites, a common design theme continues to predominate: a crowded user interface that detracts from the supposed utilitarian purpose of the site. Bookit.com is no exception, although it is not as bad as some. I recently gave it a test run....

Dell is reportedly building an Android smartphone for AT&T. If the rumor, first reported in the Wall Street Journal, should prove true, it would mean significant advances for both companies It would be AT&T's first offering built on the open source mobile operating system developed by Google. Android made a strong start out of the gate, and it is p...

Search engine Ask.com has introduced a new feature that allows users to search for coupons and product discounts. The feature is embedded in the Ask.com front page, where visitors find an everyday-type picture -- in today's case, a man holding a camera and wearing a watch; a couple holding a computer box, and so on. Next to the items, are hyperlinked "deal" tags consumers can click on to find bargains.