Articles by Erika Morphy

Not that long ago, the outsourcing of customer service to home-based agents was a small niche category, viewed as not quite on par with a bricks-and-mortar call center operation. For a number of reasons, that perception is changing -- starting with the lower costs involved in using a home-based agent network, and ending with the growing number of quality providers that have highly qualified staffs on hand.

The Federal Trade Commission has shut down an ISP that it painted as the worst of the worst in cyberspace. Pricewert, which has done business under a variety of names including "3FN" and "APS Telecom," is accused of actively partnering with criminals seeking to distribute illegal -- and downright stomach-turning -- electronic content including chi...

Two nonprofit groups are protesting the Obama administration's pending appointment of Andrew McLaughlin to the post of U.S. deputy chief technology officer. McLaughlin's background as director of Google's global public policy constitutes a major conflict of interest with the government role he would be assuming, the groups contend. In a joint lett...

U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker on Wednesday dismissed dozens of lawsuits against telecommunication companies that cooperated with the Bush administration's so-called warrantless wiretapping activities several years ago. The once-secret program allowed government agents to listen in on U.S. citizens' telephone conversations without having to get a warrant as required by law.

The U.S. Department of Justice has launched an investigation into the hiring practices of high-tech firms to determine whether they are colluding with one another, according to a report in The Washington Post, which cites unnamed sources. DoJ reportedly has the largest of the tech companies -- Apple, Google and Yahoo -- in its sights at the moment...

Last month, the Pentagon began using a newly opened Twitter account to deliver on-the-ground news of events in Afghanistan, and the channel has begun to pick up traction. Like all Twitter messages, the military dispatches are short and to the point. A recent tweet, for instance, reported that "Afghan, coalition forces kill four militants, detain t...

In a departure from what it did with Windows XP and Windows Vista, Microsoft has decided to give users of Window 7 Starter on small notebook PCs -- netbooks -- the ability to run as many applications simultaneously as they would like. The original plan had been to limit users of the Windows 7 Starter edition to three simultaneous applications, excluding background processes such as antivirus applications, wireless and Bluetooth, and system tools like Explorer and Control Panel.

Business Intelligence has evolved considerably in the last several years. At one time the domain of PhDs or other highly trained employees, it has become accessible to the masses. Indeed, one of the competitive differentiators among the vendors in the market -- from the huge stack players to the small best-of-breed providers -- is not whether, but...

President Barack Obama held a press conference on Friday to announce the creation of a new White House office of cybersecurity, helmed by a chief who will report to the National Security Council and the National Economic Council. That person has not yet been named, but speculation is rampant that it will be Melissa Hathaway, who led a recent two-m...

Fidelitone Logistics, a third-party logistics provider based near Chicago, works with retailers like Best Buy, Black & Decker and Aero Bed International to manage their inventories and ship consumer goods worldwide. Mike Schoenfeld, an executive VP at Fidelitone, recently gave a group of executives from a venture capital firm a tour of the company...

Time Warner is officially releasing AOL from its parentage. A year after announcing its intention to separate from the struggling unit, Time Warner said Thursday the time had come The company, which owns 95 percent of AOL, will buy out the 5 percent stake that Google owns -- and has said it wants to sell -- for an undisclosed amount.

There are more signs that the unveiling of Microsoft's revamped Live Search -- codenamed "Kumo" during its development phase -- is at hand. It's been widely speculated that Steve Ballmer will introduce it this week at the Wall Street Journal's D: All Things Digital conference Rumors about the launch have been filtering into the public domain. The ...

Earlier this year, HP rolled out a new offering to help companies manage the operations and applications they're putting in the cloud. Called "HP Cloud Assure," it's a -- what else? -- a SaaS (Software as a Service) tool that monitors security and performance. The number of management tools developed for the cloud environment is growing, and HP's ...

Microsoft has withdrawn its request for an oral hearing over the latest antitrust charges levied against it by the European Commission. An oral hearing in the case is voluntary, and whether one is held should, theoretically, not impact its outcome. However, the EC's apparent inflexibility in accommodating Microsoft's request for a date change does not bode well for the company.

After weeks of striking a conciliatory and cooperative tone, Craigslist is going on the offensive in the controversy over its erotic services section Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster filed a complaint in a federal court in South Carolina, seeking declaratory relief and a restraining order against the state's attorney general, Henry McMaster, who has t...

Part 1 of this two-part series takes a look at the increasing use of robotics systems to "man" the supply chain, along with some of the benefits and challenges this operational shift entails Recent developments in robotics are promising to reshape supply chainfundamentals. Specifically, robotic devices are improving warehouse operations to a degree...

It's difficult to imagine Google -- the market maker and breaker of allthings online-search related -- ever being dislodged from its perch as king ofthe hill. If there were a company that could do so, it would most likely beanother market maker -- say, Microsoft To be sure, Microsoft has made a number of attempts to crack thesearch market, to limit...

Facebook is adding support for OpenID to its Web site, allowing usersaccess to the social media sign-on platform. Facebook is the standard's largest relaying party -- that is, the largest Web site accepting log-ins from OpenID The move is beneficial to Facebook because a great many of its users arelikely active on other social media sites, Sterling...

Zappos, online shoe emporium extraordinaire, has been expanding itsline of merchandise in recent years -- offering clothes, watches and otherjewelry, and even housewares. For the consumer, the shift has appearedeffortless -- just more categories to explore on the Web site.Behind the scenes, though, Zappos had to realign its warehouseoperations to accommodate the new items. Specifically, thesophisticated automated conveyor-based technology that routed the shoepurchases so well didn't work so well for anything else...

AT&T is expanding its cloud computing product line with a storage play aimed at enterprise users who want to access data via their laptops, smartphones and other Web-accessible devices. Called "Synaptic Storage as a Service AT&T," it is a joint offering with EMC. Synaptic Storage as a Service gives users access to the AT&T network cloud to store, ...