Articles by Erika

Another front may be opening in the battle for mobile platform supremacy. Microsoft is rumored to be planning to launch its own mobile application store -- a rumor that began after some bloggers, including Mike Elgan at ComputerWorld, talked up an ad Microsoft apparently ran seeking talent to assist in the endeavor The ad was eventually taken down,...

Google is adding a video-sharing application called "Google Video for Business" to its Google Apps suite. It is designed to be a channel for companies to communicate internally with their employees. There are a number of use cases for the Software as a Service application, according to Google: It can be used for training; for making corporate anno...

For the past five years, the Recording Industry Association of America has been prosecuting people -- and threatening to prosecute many more -- for sharing copyrighted content online without authorization. Its lawsuits have been based primarily on two legal arguments: downloading copyrighted content from unauthorized sources such as peer-to-peer (...

After Best Buy lost the laptop Raelyn Campbell had brought in for repair, the D.C. residentfiled a lawsuit demanding US$54 million from the company. That eye-popping claim -- and the publicity it engendered -- was the culmination of a long blog campaign during which Campbellrelated her frustration with Best Buy's evasive behavior and enlisted friends and family to contact the retailer on her behalf...

Comcast has announced that it will impose a monthly cap of 250 GB on customers' Internet usage. The company acknowledged it has been evaluating a specific monthly data usage or bandwidth threshold for its Comcast High-Speed Internet residential customers for some time....

No one can say what 27-year-old Kevin Cogill expected when he apparently posted nine songs from an unreleased and long-awaited Guns N' Roses album called "Chinese Democracy" to his Web site earlier this summer. It could have been anything from monetary gain to a desire to be the first to distribute the long-anticipated songs. However, he likely di...

Two-year-old Demandbase has planted its own stake in the rapidly emerging next-gen lead generation and lead conversion space with the introduction this week of Demandbase Central. A Software as a Service platform, Demandbase Central consists of sales and marketing applications, as well as a search, scoring and transaction engine that identifies qu...

Qik, a company that has developed live video streaming services for certain smartphones, has received a boost in its financial backing from Netscape veterans Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. The duo, which have made a "significant investment" in the company, are also joining Qik's board of advisors Bhaskar Roy, cofounder of Qik, declined to tell t...

With the release of its August '08 version, RightNow Technologies continues to shift both its platform and its lineup of products and features to Web 2.0 This latest upgrade includes a customer portal that offers widgets, video, forums and blogs. Its studio development environment now allows users to integrate the application with Adobe Dreamweaver...

Some of your employees have a blog -- approved, of course -- as do some of your customers. In addition, your employees have been posting videos from the latest trade show on your Web site, as well as on some of your partner Web sites. Your latest project is the funneling of customer comments from your forums into your product development pipeline.

Talisma has introduced version 8.1 of its Knowledgebase application. The point release represents a significant shift in the company's approach to enterprise search, Bob Perry, director of Knowledgebase product management, told CRM Buyer....

Some two weeks after the Federal Communications Commission rebuked Comcast for its network management practices, the government agency has spelled out details of the cable provider's marching orders in a 67-page supplement. Within the next 30 days, Comcast must make a full disclosure to the FCC of the behavior that lowered the regulatory oversight...

eBay has instituted a fee schedule that allows sellers of fixed-price items to list a product for 30 days -- in many cases, multiple quantities of that product -- for just 35 US cents. In the past, sellers had to pay up to $4 per item per week. As of mid-September, sellers able to maintain large inventories of a product will find it easier and che...

Salesforce.com has acquired InStranet for US$31.5 million, a transaction that includes the assumption of $4.2 million in cash on InStranet's balance sheet. This deal is grander in scale than any of Salesforce.com's previous acquisitions; the company's past purchases have been small one-off technology providers in niche areas.

To the surprise of few, Dell is losing its preliminary approval to trademark the phrase "cloud computing." The Patent and Trademark Office has sent the company a "non-final" refusal of its application to own the term. Dell has six months to submit counter-arguments or the PTO will abandon the application.

It's rare to see Google command anything less than a large presence in just about any given e-business study these days, and the latest annual American Customer Satisfaction Index (ASCI) from the University of Michigan is no exception: ACSI scores for e-business rose 5.5 percent to 79.3 on ACSI's 100-point scale. That jump can largely be attributed to Google's own 10 percent climb to a score of 86...

Do loyal customers translate into steady sales or profits? Intuitively, the answer should be yes -- and indeed, customer loyalty is a significant metric by which companies rate their performance. However, there a few problems with the concept of customer loyalty and a corporate strategy to develop it, according to Esteban Kolsky, practice leader with eVergance...

Although it is not officially scheduled to be released until 2010, Microsoft is starting to talk up Windows 7, its next OS To that end, it has started a blog hosted by the two senior engineering managers for the Windows 7 product, Jon DeVaan and Steven Sinofsky, and is promising to release in-depth technical specs in October, first at the Professio...

Facebook continues to feel the ramifications of its controversial Beacon advertising platform, which for a short while last year broadcast information about the social networking site's users' activities without their express permission A class action lawsuit has been filed against Facebook as well as several partners that participated in the progr...

eBay is looking to expand its overseas reach with plans to acquire a minority stake in the South Korean online e-commerce market Gmarket The company has issued a statement that it is in discussions about a possible acquisition of Inter Park and Ki Hyung Lee's interests in the company....