Articles by Erika

A federal judge has ruled that an administrative office within the Executive Office of the President is not subject to the 41-year-old Freedom of Information Act. The decision is the latest hurdle blocking a many-fronted effort to determine how an alleged 10 million White House e-mails apparently disappeared. Public policy advocates who are pressi...

The online security space has been no different than any number of other software categories in its adoption of Software as a Service. However, until recently most of the offerings in this space have been targeted to e-mail protection. That is beginning to change as more and more vendors begin to roll out Web security applications in the SaaS model...

E-mail marketing has long been neglected in the larger marketing world. That's understandable -- e-mail marketing campaigns are easy to design and cheap to implement. Still, any tool worth using is worth using to its best advantage. Part of the problem is that e-mail marketers receive little to no feedback about their campaigns. Their messages are...

With more than five months remaining before the U.S. presidential election, the general campaign period is just dawning. Yet more Americans have already gone online to get political news this year than in all of 2004 To some extent, that fact -- reported in the latest Pew Internet & American Life Project survey -- can be attributed to a longer-than...

Virtually no one objects to the concept of adopting laws and policies to stem the tide of child pornography proliferating on the Internet. So, the announcement on Tuesday that Verizon, Time Warner Cable and Sprint Nextel have agreed to block access to Web sites that harbor such content was uniformly welcomed -- even if the end result will be to keep just a small percentage of child pornography offline...

Oracle has released the third in a series of small, plug-and-play Web 2.0 tools designed to enhance specific features of its customer relationship management platform Oracle Sales Prospector, previewed Monday at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston, recommends prospective leads, rating the likelihood those leads will close, and then aggregates ...

Three Internet service providers have agreed to be more proactive in policing the dissemination of child pornography across their networks. In response to some prodding by New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, Verizon, Time Warner Cable and Sprint Nextel have agreed to block access to Web sites, bulletin boards and newsgroups engaged in the prom...

As we've said here before, blogs have been an excellent leveler of the playing field for consumers. Had a poor customer service experience or are just feeling aggrieved with a service provider? Complain to management, yes, but then blog about it. While such posts are generally considered to be the realm of consumers, occasionally a practitioner in the industry takes a stand as well. Denis Pombriant, principal with Beagle Research, vented about American Airlines in his post. He didn't have a bad experience, but does have his reasons to target American...

Comcast has launched a trial this month in parts of Pennsylvania and Virginia to see how well its new approach to bandwidth management works If the pilot is successful, the Internet service provider's customers nationwide may find themselves consuming bandwidth under new business rules....

The Federal Communications Commission has decided to put off a vote on a controversial wireless spectrum auction that had been scheduled for June 12 The proposal -- which triggered a furious industry response when it was floated last year -- is to auction a 25MHz portion of spectrum in the 2155Mhz band, with a catch. ...

Jigsaw, a provider of corporate information, sales and marketing leads, is providing some of its contacts for free to customer relationship management vendors under a newly launched Open Data Initiative. Several companies are taking advantage of the open source program and have inked partnership agreements with the Web 2.0 firm, including NetSuite...

The Cluetrain Manifesto, written 10 years ago by Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls and David Weinberger, has won over a sizable number of devotees with a simple premise: As the Internet introduces new levels of communication among consumers -- and between consumers and companies -- those companies are going to have to respond with intelligent and direct communication.

Adobe has released a new version of its flagship Acrobat product -- v. 9 -- that offers native support of Flash, as well as a beta of online tools designed to enhance collaboration. The dual releases exponentially expand the company's support of Web 2.0 technologies. By embedding Flash support for the first time since Adobe's acquisition of Macrom...

There was a time when customizing enterprise software was a long, drawn-out, often painful affair. Then along came Software as a Service, recalls Dan Druker, senior vice president for Intacct, an on-demand financial management and accounting application. It was really easy for Ingres -- a provider of open source database software and one of his co...

Revision3, an entertainment network for the Web, had planned to release its two most popular shows last Friday evening in time for the Memorial Day weekend. Instead, chaos struck, and the Web 2.0 company found itself unable distribute videos or advertising or respond to clients' requests. Even its internal e-mail servers were brought down.

The patchwork system of digital commerce laws adopted in recent years is showing signs of wear as Viacom's US$1 billion suit against Google moves forward Last year, Viacom filed its complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleging that Google owed it damages for purloined content -- nearly 160,000 unauthorized co...

"Quit while you're ahead" is one nugget of conventional wisdom that few CEOs appear to heed, at least judging by the number of executives who have left companies at the behest of shareholders -- or, worse, regulators Vodafone CEO Arun Sarin, however, appears to be an exception. Sarin, who has been at the helm of the British telecom for five years n...

RightNow is adding chat to its expanding Feedback feature set. The new functionality is part of the application's May '08 update to its flagship CRM product "By adding feedback into RightNow chat, we have filled out our multichannel story," Andrew Hull, director of product marketing for RightNow, told CRM Buyer. RightNow has rolled out feedback for...

Yahoo has postponed its annual shareholders' meeting, which had been originally scheduled to take place on July 3. Now, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), that meeting will take place at the end of July in order to give regulators time to review paperwork related to the proxy challenge one of its shareholders has launched.

Salesforce.com was created during cloudy economic times, and its business model -- per-user, per-seat pricing when the market offered nothing but million-dollar enterprise-based pricing -- took off, precisely for that reason Now the company, which has since remade itself into an enterprise class vendor that is still available at moderate enough pri...