Articles by Erika Morphy

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....

A new ruling in Viacom's US$1 billion lawsuit against Google has privacy advocates fretting that the case may further erode privacy online, even if it's eventually settled Judge Louis Stanton of the U.S. District Court for Southern New York ruled that Google must provide Viacom with information from its database, including users' YouTube login IDs,...

The two largest electronic prescription networks have decided to merge. By joining together their two platforms, RxHub and SureScripts maintain that both doctors and patients will benefit Having one integrated system gives doctors more information about patients' health insurance plans as well as related medical history, Robin Cronin, a spokesperso...

It already dominates the Internet -- why not the TV? Probably Google wasn't thinking exactly in those terms when it conceived the idea for Google Media Server, its latest addition to a ballooning product line. But planting a foothold in a medium in which it so far only dabbles is clearly the driver behind this release. Google Media Server is the c...

Lyris has upgraded its flagship product and rolled out a new application for the marketing and advertising industry. The enhancements to Lyris HQ pave the way for a steady addition of collaboration and social networking tools this year.

Two associations representing complementary interests have agreed to merge their resources to develop a stronger ecosystem around Linux mobile development The Linux Phone Standards Forum, or LiPS, has been working toward a formal standard for mobile Linux since its formation at the end of 2005. Nearly a year later, the Linux Mobile Foundation, aka ...

Amir Khan, an IT consultant from Fremont, Calif., and a U.S. citizen, has been subjected to U.S. Customs questioning for a total of more than 20 hours after returning to this country from a number of trips abroad, according to the San Francisco-based Asian Law Caucus. Customs officials have searched Khan's laptop computer, books, personal notebooks and cell phone. Despite filing several complaints, he has never received an explanation for why he has repeatedly been singled out...

On-demand business-to-business marketing vendor Genius.com has developed a new collaborative e-mail marketing module that focuses on lead qualification and prioritization. MarketingGenius brings together the sales and marketing departments. To a certain extent, it adds a service element, as the prospective lead receives personalized attention from...

LucidEra, a provider of on-demand analytics for sales professionals and managers, is bringing marketing into its fold with the addition of LucidEra Lead Insight. This is an analytics application with more than 65 prebuilt metrics focused on marketing performance -- specifically, how effective the marketer is in converting leads into sales opportun...

A few years ago, it became clear that Google was gunning for a big chunk of Microsoft's empire. Now, the undisputed king of search is targeting another online category with the release of Ad Planner, a package of free Web analytics, research and media-planning tools. Ad Planner essentially helps advertisers find appropriate Web sites for their mes...

Google and Salesforce.com have rolled out a Force.com toolkit for Google Data application programming interfaces that's designed to help developers integrate Google Apps data and content with Force.com's database, logic and workflow capabilities. These open source tools and services, which are modeled after the Java Client library for Google Data,...

The Google-Salesforce.com partnership grows ever more intertwined. The latest development occurred Monday when Salesforce.com released a Google Data client library for the Force.com platform that provides access to the full suite of Google Data application programming interfaces using Apex code, allowing developers to integrate their Force.com applications with Google Apps.

Though the ink has hardly dried on the ad partnership deal between Google and Yahoo, Congress is already setting its investigative machinery in motion to determine whether the tie-up might violate antitrust or privacy laws The U.S. House Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection had already scheduled hearings this summer to examine on...

The infamous Internet bully implicated in the suicide of a 13-year-old girl may get some comeuppance in a California courtroom, but it will probably not be enough to quell the fury of her many detractors Lori Drew, the Missouri woman accused of setting up a MySpace page to lure Megan Meier into revealing what she thought of Drew's daughter, has ple...

At one point in the U.S.'s development, there were 1,400 or so railroads. Today, there are three major lines. Admittedly, it is a leap -- but not a big one -- for Jeff Bates, cofounder of Slashdot, to apply that history to what is happening on the Internet today. "If the Internet has taught us anything in the last 10 years, it is that the timing o...

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission reportedly is expected to rule against Verizon in a complaint filed by three cable companies against the telco. The FCC plans to tell Verizon it cannot try to talk phone service customers into staying instead of switching to a cable competitor, according to a press account that leaked the pending decision...

A ruling by a three-judge panel in the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has established new privacy rights for employees who use employer-issued cell phones, pagers and computers to send personal text messages. The judges upheld the verdict in Quon v. Arch Wireless, which determined that if an employer contracts with an outside provider for mes...

The launch of Healthline Networks'HealthSTAT last week is one more indication that the Internet ad platform wars are far from over. To be sure, Google remains the giant to beat -- and it looks as though it's settling into its role as the long-term dominant player. However, HealthSTAT may be on the vanguard in the next significant skirmish within t...

Amdocs and IBM have entered into an original equipment manufacturer agreement in which Amdocs will embed the IBM DB2 Data Server and the IBM Optim Data Growth application in its CRM product line. It is the first OEM agreement IBM has inked involving Optim, Steve Tallant, senior manager of product line management with IBM, told CRM Buyer The Optim p...

A federal judge has ruled that an administrative office within the Executive Office of the President is not subject to the 41-year-old Freedom of Information Act. The decision is the latest hurdle blocking a many-fronted effort to determine how an alleged 10 million White House e-mails apparently disappeared. Public policy advocates who are pressi...