Articles by Erika Morphy

For the second time since its acquisition of Siebel, Oracle is rolling out a major upgrade of the iconic on-premise suite. Version 8.1.1 has rehabbed many of its features -- as well as lavished a great deal of attention on the loyalty functions The company is also introducing Oracle CRM Gadgets for Sales -- five mini-applications that provide enter...

Lost in the furious run-up to the November elections was a Kentucky court ruling that could unravel a long-established legal argument supporting basic e-commerce activity: namely, that local or state governments cannot extend their reach into cyberspace to impose their own laws on a Web site Because that precept is considered so fundamental to e-co...

After some back-and-forth in the medical community, it has generally been decided that iPods and MP3 players do not seriously interfere with pacemaker functions However, a study points to an entirely new concept of the risk involved with these devices. It is not the music player itself that can cause disruption. Rather, say researchers at Beth Isra...

Circuit City has filed for reorganization relief in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of Virginia in Richmond. The retailer -- the second largest in the electronics goods space after Best Buy -- has clearly been struggling for the last several months. In November alone, it slashed its workforce by 20 percent and announced plans to close 155 stores...

Avaya is targeting unmet pockets of user demand in the telecom industry with the release of three new offerings this week. Kevin Kennedy, who will be taking over as CEO in January, is appearing at VoiceCon on Monday to unveil the new products: a contact center product focused on outbound messaging and self-service, a speech-to-text application, and a unified communications package that bundles licenses of various products...

Cisco reduced its revenue guidance and posted weak earnings, or net income, for its fiscal first quarter, worrying both its own shareholders and those who view the computer networking manufacturer as a bellwether for the tech space. The networking giant turned in an essentially flat performance for the quarter, with earnings registering US$2.2 bil...

A new business advocacy group has launched in New Orleans -- a city that three years out from Hurricane Katrina is still trying to entice all of its former residents to move back home. Called "504ward," a play on the New Orleans' area code of 504, the group's main goal is to help the city attract and retain a key worker and consumer constituency: the 21-to-35 year old age group.

Part 1 of this three-part series discusses the fuzziness -- or the flexibility, depending on one's point of view -- of the definition of "cloud computing." There have been a number of attempts to size the cloud computing market. The most eye-popping figure, arguably, is from Merrill Lynch. It has famously said that by 2011, the cloud computing mark...

Despite dissent in some quarters of the television and cable broadcasting community, the Federal Communications Commission on Tuesday voted to allow the use of open broadcast television spectrum to provide broadband data and other services to consumers and businesses However, the wireless devices needed to implement those services are not yet avail...

The Federal Communications Commission is scheduled to vote Tuesday on a controversial proposal to open up vacant "white spaces" spectrum for unlicensed use for broadband Internet access. The vote is the culmination of an idea that was first proposed by FCC Chairman Kevin Martin more than four years ago. The proposal hit several speed bumps along t...

Salesforce.com continues to push its cloud computing functionality into the enterprise, with the introduction of a new tool that allows users to harness the applications available on Force.com and apply them to corporate Web sites. Force.com Sites, part of the company's Force.com cloud computing platform, allows customers to run their Web sites in...

On occasion, Google's Gmail service has gone dark, in some cases for hours at a time. Predictably, users of the free service flipped out and took to the Web to sound off. Google's response, up to now, has merely been to issue apologies and get the system up and running again. However, for users of its Google Apps Premier Edition -- a cloud-based s...

Yahoo has rolled out a platform for third-party developers to build applications and widgets for its portal. Called "Y!OS," it is part of Yahoo's larger Open Strategy -- a go-to-market approach the company unveiled earlier this year with the goal of becoming a more inclusive -- and more trafficked -- Web site "We're officially cutting the ribbon fo...

Pity the Patent and Trademark Office examining attorney who gave Dell the green light propelling its trademark application for the term "cloud computing" toward the home stretch this summer. That particular individual was obviously unaware that the phrase had become, over the course of a year, one of the hottest buzzwords in the tech industry. Not...

LinkedIn has added a bundle of new productivity tools to its network. The goal of the nine apps -- all built on the LinkedIn Intelligent Applications, or InApps, platform -- is to facilitate file-sharing, scheduling and other business-oriented activities Applications from Amazon, Box.net, Google, Huddle, Six Apart, SlideShare, Tripit and WordPress ...

Just a few more days. Yes, the U.S. presidential election is a mere week away, but there's another countdown going on. Ubuntu 8.10 Desktop Edition, the Intrepid Ibex release, is set to go live on Thursday The beta has excited both users and potential users of the popular distro because of its rich mobility functionality, including 3G support and th...

Samsung reported a steep drop in Q3 profits with the release of its quarterly earnings report. Profits fell 44.4 percent compared with a year earlier -- a number that, not surprisingly, sent the company's share price tumbling by 14 percent. Net income for the quarter was 1.22 trillion won, or US$863 million. Although some product lines performed r...

Rackspace Hosting has significantly expanded its cloud computing offering with the acquisition of two companies and the inking of two new partnership deals. These moves have fundamentally reshaped Rackspace's cloud computing capabilities, prompting the company to rebrand its existing hosting and storage services. Slicehost and Jungle Disk are the ...

In an era when people routinely deliver life-changing news via text and e-mail -- "I want a divorce," "I'm pregnant," "You're fired" -- it is perhaps inevitable that a service offering to automate and anonymize a personal, painful message is gaining traction inSpot, a peer-to-peer, Web-based system developed by the nonprofit Internet Sexuality Inf...

As Yahoo shareholders and employees await Tuesday's official release of the company's third-quarter financial report, neither constituency has much to be cheerful about: There are unsubstantiated reports that Yahoo will be cutting some 1,000 employees from its payroll. Its earnings are also expected to be lackluster, at best, given the economic climate of the last several months...