Articles by Erika Morphy

The House Judiciary Committee held a panel hearing on the issue of net neutrality Tuesday, hearing testimony from such diverse interests as a rock band, an abortion rights advocacy group and the Christian Coalition of America. The unlikely trio converged on the Hill to call for legislation that would ensure that cable and telco Internet service providers do not dole out broadband -- or restrict its use -- for political reasons...

TheEuropean Commission has given its long-awaited blessing to Google's proposed US$3.1 billion acquisition of online advertising company DoubleClick Coming nearly a month ahead of an established April 2 deadline, the decision rested on the EC's findings that the merger would not hurt consumers or impede competition within the European Economic Area...

There's more behind Oracle's decision toprebrief bloggers on its latest product release than a sense that the time is ripe With the launch of On Demand, version 15, the company is introducing robust new Web 2.0 functionality -- and it's sending a strong signal that more of this type of application development is on the horizon....

Bloggers -- especially those whose traffic volumes can rival a minor newspaper's -- are getting used to the royal treatment. Consumer electronic vendors, hotels, auto manufacturers -- heck, even politicians -- are reaching out to the people who have made it their avocation to blog about them. Everywhere, it would seem, except in the CRM industry V...

In Search Of: CEO to turn IT organization that operates like a terrorist group into a Microsoft-like outfit. Vision and big-picture mentality not required. Management, administrative and detail skills sorely needed. Ability to deal with a chairman who occasionally goes off reservation during press interviews a big plus That chairman would be multim...

Through a study using brain scanning technology called "functional magnetic resonance imaging," which records mental activity, neuroscientists at the University of California at Berkeley have gained greater insight into how the human brain "sees" objects The researchers used fMRI modeling of how subjects responded to various images as the basis for...

RFID, or radio frequency identification, has gained ascendancy in the corporate world more by fiat than through efforts to persuade suppliers that the technology could deliver internal returns -- at least, in the beginning. With the requirement to deploy it or lose contracts handed down by such entities as Wal-Mart and the Department of Defense, partners scrambled to comply...

Facebook has a new honcho. The Web upstart-turned-conglomerate has lured away Sheryl Sandberg, Google's ad platform guru, to join its team as chief operating officer Sandberg, who was with Google for six years, made an indelible stamp at the organization as she built out the Adsense and Adwords product lines. At Facebook, she will lead sales, busin...

PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, Siebel and a host of others succumbed to the pull of its tractor beam. Could Salesforce.com be next on Oracle's list? Though this rumor has been around for several years as idle speculation, in the last several months it's taken on new life. The tenor of the gossip has changed since a San Francisco tech publication and some ...

Ever since Microsoft made an unsolicited takeover bid for Yahoo -- a US$44.6 billion proposition -- Yahoo has been beset with distractions, which the company readily acknowledged in making its annual report The loss of key employees and the exodus of advertisers from its platform have been among the top distractions at Sunnyvale. Now, there's one m...

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Justice for not responding in a timely manner to a request it made six months ago under the Freedom of Information Act. The organization had asked for any communications between former DoJ attorney Jane Horvath and Google Horvath was named the DoJ's first chief pr...

NetSuite has introduced its own version of a development platform -- direct competition for the raft of initiatives and platforms Salesforce.com has designed to entice developers to its product line The difference between them, according to NetSuite, is that it based its new platform on open standards, while Salesforce.com chose to use proprietary ...

TheAmerican Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation,Public Citizen and twelve media groups are asking a federal court to lift an injunction against the global whistleblower Web siteWikileaks.org Two weeks ago, in the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of California, Judge Jeffrey White issued a permanent injunction again...

RightNow has updated its flagship Software as a Service CRM product with new agent desktop functionality, customer-tracking abilities, enhanced analytics and chat features The new version, which it calls "February '08," also includes a contextual workspace -- that is, a user interface for contact center service reps that changes dynamically based o...

Yahoo has launched it own version of a social media Web site -- that is, one that publishes a selection of articles from a variety of online sources every day and gives users the chance to rank them Yahoo'sBuzz is very similar to such popular sites asDigg,Del.icio.us andReddit. There are a few differences, of course, starting with the fact that it ...

The customer is always right -- except for, of course, when he or she isn't When it's inconvenient for the company, or when the customer asks for something that could negatively affect the company's revenue streams or business model, the customer is never right -- even when he or she is....

Through a joint venture with the renownedCleveland Clinic, Google is entering yet another software category: electronic personal health records The two firms last week announced plans to develop a PHR pilot program for use by a group of Cleveland Clinic patients who currently use the clinic's in-house system....

Oracle has introduced a new single-tenant option for its Siebel CRM customers In contrast to the typical multitenant architecture, Siebel's Single Tenant, Enterprise Edition gives customers a path to connectivity via a fully dedicated database, middleware and application instance of Siebel CRM On Demand. The system is hosted at Oracle's data center...

RightNow has enhanced its retail industry-specific app with chat and feedback functionality -- changes that give users more outreach options to customers using self-service channels ...

A frustrated Best Buy customer has filed a US$54 million lawsuit against the electronics retailer in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia. Her complaint? Best Buy lost the laptop she had brought in for repair; the tech staff was evasive about its whereabouts; and the store refused to compensate her fully for her loss The last straw for D....