Articles by Kimberly Hill

You're the manager of a Hilton Garden Inn, and it's the height of family vacation season. The lobby is abuzz with kids toting skateboards and moms pushing strollers; your front desk agents are overloaded with check-ins. In the middle of all this, a harried business traveler calls to the front desk for extra towels. Quick, what do you do? This isn't...

Employers long have viewed instant messaging with a wary eye. Because it started as a tool primarily for personal use, the technology was slow to make its way into the workplace. Much like mobile phone text-messaging of today, IM had many detractors, who insisted that the tool created just another way for employees to waste work time on personal conversations...

In its latest salvo in the battle for platform dominance on specialized devices, Microsoft has released its newest Windows Embedded operating system to developers. At its Tech-Ed North America Developer Conference in Orlando, Fla., Microsoft Wednesday announced the availability of Windows Embedded Standard in preview or beta form, and said it will...

As the television-watching world continues to suffer through re-runs and a new crop of hastily concocted reality shows, Hollywood screenwriters and producers continue their standoff. The writers say they deserve additional payments for their work. The producers say they can't afford to make those payments. From the outside, it looks like a typical labor dispute...

Part 1 of this two-part feature looks at how virtual worlds such as Second Life are making an impact on how companies conduct employee recruiting and workforce management activities. According to an ever-growing group of experts and companies in the employment business, that impact has the potential to be profound and far-reaching Not everyone, tho...

It's a dream scenario: A candidate aspiring to a pivotal job in the culinary arts field enters the virtual world Second Life, having never been an online gamer before. He attends an online job fair held by recruiting company TMP Worldwide and is interviewed by major food and operations services company Sodexho. As a result, he lands a job as an executive chef with the firm...

I own an iPod. Do you? If so, do we have anything in common? Apple is hoping that we do, and it's providing plenty of room for us to find out at the iTunes Store. There, music lovers can write and read reviews of artists' recent, and not-so-recent, releases. Perhaps more commercially important, they can provide recommended playlists to each other and those seeking good music can buy one track or an entire playlist in a dizzying array of categories. Maybe you like Fergie? You can buy a collection of her 11 favorite songs by other artists...

When the last of the ribbons float to the ground and the mountain of wrapping paper is folded up for recycling, chances are that most households will have at least a couple of gift items that don't quite fit the bill Many gift recipients will be among the mob that hits the malls in the days after Christmas, looking to exchange their white elephants...

We all know the pun on the BlackBerry name, likening the smartphone to a very addictive and destructive drug. Bad taste and moral issues aside, though, recent research shows that today's workers are indeed extremely attached to their mobile devices, especially the ones that let users access e-mail and perform other desktop tasks. Plus, workers aren't using them just on the road anymore...

One of the most complex areas of online advertising -- what happens when a prospective customer clicks on an ad -- ironically happens almost entirely outside of the customer's awareness The ubiquitous dancing Santa, robot or alien that we see on so many mortgage refinancing ads actually is only the tip of the iceberg. Once clicked on, that ad must ...

The world of commercial radio is getting ever more homogenized, as media giants are running thousands of stations in hundreds of markets with remarkably similar formats and playlists. On the other hand, specialized radio services have begun offering increasingly particular formats and programming options. On satellite service XM Radio, for instance, users can listen to one channel that plays only the music of classic rockers like Led Zeppelin and another that focuses on bluegrass...

A Russian court acquitted Denis Kvasov, chief of now-closed music site AllofMP3.com, of copyright violations in a case widely seen as a test of Russia's commitment to protecting intellectual property under global agreements The site sold individual music tracks at below market value without the permission of copyright owners, according to plaintiff...

In the race for message storage space among Web-based e-mail providers, Microsoft's Hotmail has just leapfrogged Google's Gmail Customers with a free Hotmail account now will have 5 GB of storage; those with a paid account will have 10 GB, according to a posting on the Microsoft Live Hotmail community blog by Ellie Powers-Boyle, program manager....

Internet users spend nearly half of their time online viewing content, according to a study by the Online Publishers Association. That's up from just over a third of online time spent with content in 2003, according to the group's Internet Activity Index Overall, Internet users are spending more time online, which means more minutes dedicated to al...

What should the virtual world do when a neighborhood becomes a den of iniquity? The only appropriate response is to dive in and clean it up, according to Jesuit scholar Antonio Spadaro In an article in the Catholic journal La Civilt Cattolica, Spadaro writes that Second Life and sites like it should be considered locations for mission work, just as...

Web content aggregator Digg and Microsoft announced a deal in which Microsoft will be the exclusive provider of display and contextual advertising on the Digg site The three-year agreement will allow Digg to focus less on advertising infrastructure and more on pursuing innovation, said Digg CEO Jay Adelson....

Networking hardware and software maker Cisco announced an array of data center products gathered under the umbrella moniker Data Center 3.0 The vision for Data Center 3.0, says the company, entails the real-time, dynamic orchestration of infrastructure services from shared pools of virtualized server, storage and network resources....

TiVo will introduce a new DVR device in mid-August that will retail for US$299, about $500 less than its higher-end Series 3 released last fall In addition to being more affordable than its predecessor, the device, TiVo HD, will have the capability to replace the box through which users currently access their cable TV service....

Trick question: When taking a look at an open source content management application, companies chose to test that application using which operating system? If you guessed Microsoft Windows, you're right. That's according to the findings of a recent survey conducted by Alfresco Software. The company, which makes enterprise content management applica...

Mobile communications service provider Verizon and semiconductor maker Broadcom have announced a licensing agreement allowing Verizon to sell a group of mobile devices currently in legal dispute Under the licensing terms, Verizon will pay Broadcom US$200 million -- at increments of $6 per device -- for rights to continue to sell mobile handsets, PD...