Articles by Erika Morphy

The Federal Trade Commission released its updated Dot Com Disclosures guidance on Tuesday, emphasizing the requirements for advertisers targeting mobile devices. In short, the rules that apply to ads in newspapers, radio and television also apply to mobile devices and social media. The update is the first since the guidelines were released in 200...

Google has settled its Street View privacy case with 38 states and the District of Columbia. As part of the settlement, the company will destroy the personal information it collected under the project, train its employees on privacy issues for a 10-year period, launch a campaign to educate consumers on WiFi security, and pay a US$7 million fine. ...

It is possible to predict intimate personal characteristics such as sexual orientation by studying a person's Facebook Likes, according to findings released Monday by University of Cambridge researchers Just by studying Likes, the team was able to determine a person's race, age, IQ, personality type, level of substance use and political views....

FirstRain has debuted FirstRain for Touch, an enterprise customer intelligence application built for the Salesforce Touch Platform. "What we did was create a component version of our application that was then easily dropped into the Salesforce.com Touch platform using their SDK," Penny Herscher, CEO of FirstRain, told CRM Buyer.

Carl Icahn has been pushing back against Dell's proposal to go private in a US$24.4 billion deal. Dell finally gave way -- a little -- and is allowing Icahn to examine the company's confidential information. Icahn Enterprises made the announcement in a brief, two-sentence release made public over the weekend. ...

Avaya unveiled the latest iteration of its customer experience management platform last week, introducing new analytics functionality and a multichannel focus on communication. ...

CRM will be a top spending focus for enterprises this year and next, according to a Gartner report. What's more, CRM will be THE top spending focus -- edging past the behemoth category of enterprise resource planning -- based on a newly released survey of IT investment priorities for 2013 and 2014. Following CRM are ERP and office and personal productivity tools...

The T-Mobile-MetroPCS merger has moved one step closer to the finish line now that the Department of Justice has signaled it doesn't oppose the deal. The department allowed a required waiting period to pass without objection, T-Mobile parent Deutsche Telekom said Wednesday, bringing the deal to an "important staging post."

Google is planning to broaden its reach into the e-commerce space with Google Shopping Express, a service similar to Amazon Prime, according to TechCrunch. The subscription fee would be US$10-$15 cheaper, and another draw would be same-day shipping from brick-and-mortar stores, an anonymous source told the publication....

Facebook has flatly denied the suggestion by a New York Times columnist that it might be gaming its own system -- that is, that the way it pumps up views of fee-based promoted posts could be by limiting the sharing of ordinary posts "There have been recent claims suggesting that our News Feed algorithm suppresses organic distribution of posts in fa...

Kim Dotcom experienced a legal setback late last week when the New Zealand Court of Appeal overturned a lower court ruling that had required the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation to disclose all of its evidence against him However, his fight to avoid extradition is nowhere near closure. Nor has the legal battle curbed his entrepreneurial activit...

There is a long-standing debate in the email marketing community about timing -- that is, whether time of day makes a difference in open and click-through rates. In other words, will an email marketing message sent early Monday morning be more likely to be opened than one sent Wednesday around noon or one delivered late on a Friday afternoon in July?...

U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh on Friday struck more than US$450 million from the damages a jury awarded to Apple in last summer's blockbuster verdict against Samsung. The jury found that Samsung had willfully copied a number of Apple's design and software patents for the iPhone and ruled that it should pay more than $1 billion in damages. Based on Koh's latest decision, Samsung now owes Apple close to $599 million in damages...

Demandbase has incorporated a new filter in its Demandbase Company-Targeted Advertising platform. The filter, called "Technology Targeting," lets users target and personalize display ads based on the technology they use. In other words, users can now include the specific criteria of 'technologies used' as part of their campaign targeting requirements with the Demandbase platform...

It has been about a week since a bombshell internal memo from CEO Marissa Mayer was leaked to the world: Yahoo employees will no longer be allowed to telecommute, effective this June. The goal of the new policy is to foster creativity and better productivity, Mayer said....

A day after posting disappointing quarterly earnings, Groupon ousted its founder and CEO Andrew Mason. The company's stock jumped 4 percent in after-hours trading as the news became public "I've decided that I'd like to spend more time with my family. Just kidding -- I was fired today. If you're wondering why... you haven't been paying attention," ...

The Center for Copyright Information is ready to start implementing the Copyright Alert System, it said Monday Under the system, content partners, such as music and movie producers, will alert participating ISPs of alleged P2P copyright infringement by their customers. The ISPs will then forward those copyright alerts to the supposed offenders....

Salesforce.com on Tuesday unveiled Salesforce Service Cloud Mobile, the first of a number of mobile computing initiatives planned for this year Salesforce.com is stepping up its focus on mobile in 2013, Michael Peachey, senior director of solutions marketing, told CRM Buyer. "We will be making a number of mobile offerings -- starting with this one...

The Federal Trade Commission last week reached a settlement with HTC America over charges the company failed to take reasonable steps to secure the software in its smartphones and tablet computers. The security flaws could have compromised the privacy of millions of consumers, the agency said....

Did you hear? McDonald's has just acquired Burger King! Also, someone at the company apparently has a potty mouth. Another unusual and unexpected corporate trade also happened last week -- Cadillac acquired Jeep. These events, of course, didn't really happen. In both instances, hackers gained control of the brands' Twitter accounts and began sendi...