Articles by Erika Morphy

Best Buy is rolling out a pilot program for a new product category: electronic bicycles, scooters and Segways. The company has announced it will be selling these vehicles in 20 stores in Washington, Oregon and California, with electric motorcycles to join the mix later this summer. There had been expectations that Best Buy would be dipping its toe...

It is has been a roller-coaster year for E2open CEO Mark Woodward, mainly because that is how long he has been at the helm of the Software as a Service provider of supply-and-demand chain, procurement, and B2B integration applications. Over the past twelve months at E2open, the erstwhile senior advisor to Blackstone Private Equity Group oversaw a ...

It's been four months since Google announced it would This story was originally published on March 10, 2009, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series. guarantee 99.9 percent system accessibility for users of its Google Apps Premier Edition -- a cloud-based productivity suite of business-oriented messaging and collaboratio...

The final day of reckoning in the four-year battle between TiVo and EchoStar has been pushed out a little further. Late Wednesday evening, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit granted EchoStar's request to stay a contempt order imposed by the U.S. District Court the day before, until its appeal can be heard. The two companies have bee...

China reversed itself Tuesday, lifting the mandate to install Web-filtering software on all personal computers sold in the country. The Green Dam-Youth Escort software -- ostensibly a means to stem the flow of pornography -- was to be installed on all computers shipped into China beginning July 1. The government's announcement of the requirement,...

Mozilla has released Firefox 3.5, the latest edition of its open source browser, one year after its release of Firefox 3. The update went through four betas, incorporating JavaScript fine-tuning and other improvements, resulting in the fastest version yet, according to Mozilla.

The universe of enterprise resource planning providers is huge; ditto for open source. The space where twain meet? Not so much. xTuple is an open source ERP provider, and CEO Ned Lilly says there are few fellow travelers on his company's path. In this tanking economy, the company has been leveraging both its open source bona fides and the fundamen...

Microsoft is the target of yet another legal challenge -- this time from the online travel Web site Kayak, which has sent the software giant a letter noting similarities between its own site and Bing's travel service. It has asked Microsoft to take steps to address the matter "Our concern is about confusion from consumers and suppliers," Kayak Chi...

Right now, Microsoft is focusing on the consumer market by getting Windows 7 out in time for the holiday season and announcing price points compatible with recession-era budgets. However, an even bigger constituency is the business community -- and after the debacle that was Vista, it is understandable to wonder how eagerly it will embrace Windows...

A beta version of Microsoft's free computer security software is now out. Microsoft Security Essentials, or SE, aka "Morro," replaces Redmond's OneCare subscription service Features in SE are designed to preempt such typical malware activities as stealing passwords or turning a PC into a zombie bot.

Microsoft has announced price points for its highly anticipated Windows 7 operating system, which is expected to be generally available on Oct. 22. OEMs will start shipping new machines with Windows 7 on Oct. 2 Regular buyers of Windows will not see a significant change from the Windows Vista price schedule. On average, the new OS will cost about 1...

Social networking pioneer MySpace is planning to close at least four offices in overseas markets, as well as eliminate two-thirds of its staff outside the U.S. Specifically, it is going to cut 300 of the 450 jobs that are based in global markets. To be sure, MySpace is feeling the squeeze from the recession. Online advertising dropped sharply this...

Nortel Networks has agreed to sell its two advanced wireless technology business units to Nokia Siemens for US$650 million. The companies hope to close the sale by Q3 of this year. It is an ignominious end for the telco, which at one time was one of the dominant players in the global marketplace. In January, however, the Toronto-based company file...

Jammie Thomas-Rasset, the Minnesota mom who has been at the center of the RIAA's legal battle against music piracy, has been found liable for illegal file-sharing in the retrial of Capitol Records v. Thomas-Rasset She now faces a US$1.92 million penalty, or $80,000 for each of 24 songs she made available online through the Kazaa file-sharing networ...

Microsoft has initiated a civil lawsuit in the Western District of Seattle seeking US$750,000 in damages from three individuals in Vancouver, British Columbia, for committing click fraud. The three alleged fraudsters are two brothers and a mother -- Eric Lam, Gordon Lam and Melanie Suen -- who, according to Microsoft, have deployed botnets to drive up clicks at Web sites that compete with theirs.

IBM had added a new service-and-hardware offering to its cloud computing repertoire. The bundle targets users seeking a single jumping-off point for deployment of a cloud environment focused on a discrete task, such as a test bed for application development IBM CloudBurst is a set of preintegrated hardware, storage, virtualization and networking to...

If there is any one characteristic of the current economy that stands out, it is that people are just not buying. From billionaires to budget shoppers, frugal is in. Enter Marketo, a startup whose raisond'etre is to get people to buy.

It looks as though the Southern District of New York has opened a new front in the war on Internet gambling. Federal prosecutors have asked Citibank, Wells Fargo and two smaller banks to freeze funds in accounts belonging to two companies that process payouts on behalf of four offshore poker sites, including PokerStars.com and FullTiltPoker.com, a...

Computers are the cause of a surprising number of serious injuries every year -- usually to children. The number of acute computer-related injuries increased by 732 percent -- from nearly 1,300 to approximately 9,300 injuries per year -- according to a study conducted by the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Children's Hospital from 1994-2006...

China is stepping up the monitoring of its citizens' Internet activity. A new directive requires PC makers selling products in the country to include software that can filter out pornography and other online content the government deems inappropriate. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology order, which reportedly has caught PC makers ...