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QTel is one of the largest telecommunications firms in New York. With a customer base of 10,000 companies, the firm provides small and medium-sized businesses with a comprehensive array of communications products and services, such as fully integrated broadband data and voice services....

Lately I have been working on a keynote speech that I need to deliver in a few weeks, and in the process of doing my research, I came across some very interesting ideas that fit in well with my research focus. In the last half of the 20th century, a number of thinkers became increasingly dissatisfied with the classical model of economics and began looking for an explanation that better represented the facts that they saw daily...

Despite their discovery of a direct link to the funding sources behind the infamous Storm Virus, IronPort Systems researchers are doubtful law enforcement will ever nail the perpetrators. Still, improving technologies may help to block its continuing spread In its latest Security Trends Report, released Wednesday, Cisco-owned IronPort exposes links...

Wiki and social software firm Socialtext has put its own spin on the spreadsheet. The new offering, SocialCalc, is a multi-user, wiki-based spreadsheet program intended to simplfy version control, reduce errors and increase productivity, Socialtext said SocialCalc joins offerings from Google and others as an alternative to Microsoft's Excel, aimed ...

Three Internet service providers have agreed to be more proactive in policing the dissemination of child pornography across their networks. In response to some prodding by New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, Verizon, Time Warner Cable and Sprint Nextel have agreed to block access to Web sites, bulletin boards and newsgroups engaged in the prom...

HP kicked off the summer with a slew of new and revamped products at its Connecting Your World conference in Berlin Tuesday. Among the 50 products that will soon make their way onto store shelves is HP's TouchSmart all-in-one desktop PC, an ultra-thin laptop from Voodoo PC, a one-billion color monitor and 16 other notebook computers....

Six of technology's biggest names are joining forces to make wired connections a thing of the past. Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco Systems, Clearwire, Intel, Samsung and Sprint Nextel announced an agreement this week to form the Open Patent Alliance to help companies develop cutting-edge WiMax devices at a reasonable cost The concept driving the Open Patent...

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...

An IT career is once again one with a lot of long-term potential. While the market now does not resemble the halcyon times of the dot-com boom, demand is expected to remain steady in the short term and the future looks bright. "From all of the companies that we work with, the message now is, 'full speed ahead,'" John Estes, a vice president with R...

As we've said here before, blogs have been an excellent leveler of the playing field for consumers. Had a poor customer service experience or are just feeling aggrieved with a service provider? Complain to management, yes, but then blog about it. While such posts are generally considered to be the realm of consumers, occasionally a practitioner in the industry takes a stand as well. Denis Pombriant, principal with Beagle Research, vented about American Airlines in his post. He didn't have a bad experience, but does have his reasons to target American...

Mobile innovation -- not long ago mired in a tangle of "walled-garden" business models, closed networks, proprietary technologies and fierce litigation -- is at last in high gear Collaborative source development is lowering the barriers to participation in mobile innovation and yielding new, promising software solutions. Established, major players ...

The Netflix Player by Roku, a television set-top box that streams play-on-demand videos and movies from mail order DVD rental titan Netflix, launched late last month to generally wide acclaim. In fact, Roku reportedly sold out two weeks after its launch, though the company has said it has shipments coming in from China weekly....

Signaling JetBlue Airways' belief that travelers want to stay connected at all times, its LiveTV unit has agreed to buy Verizon's Airfone business, a move that will enable the discount carrier to offer a bundle of communications services during flight A JetBlue LiveTV spokesperson who asked not to be named told the E-Commerce Times that a deal has ...

Comcast has launched a trial this month in parts of Pennsylvania and Virginia to see how well its new approach to bandwidth management works If the pilot is successful, the Internet service provider's customers nationwide may find themselves consuming bandwidth under new business rules....

Apple's new iPhone 3G may have made the biggest splash in the smartphone pond on Monday, but it wasn't the only splash. Earlier in the day, Samsung Electronics debuted its Omnia, a device seen as an iPhone contender Samsung's Omnia features the Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional operating system, a wide 3.2-inch WQVGA (wide quarter video graphics arra...

Microsoft and Kaiser Permanente announced plans for a pilot program that would exchange health information between the insurer's My Health Manager service and the HealthVault personal health records service The partnership comes amid a push to give people greater control of and access to their medical records. The move by technology companies inclu...

The Supreme Court on Monday continued its trend toward restricting patent rights with its ruling in the Quanta Computer v. LG Electronics case. In the unanimous opinion written by Justice Clarence Thomas, the Court addressed a seemingly simple principle called "patent exhaustion." In other words, what restrictions can patent holders place on products that are sold?...

Four months after Starbucks named AT&T as its new WiFi provider, T-Mobile has filed a lawsuit against Starbucks, saying the chain is causing the carrier financial harm by giving away access on its networking infrastructure T-Mobile is claiming that Starbucks engaged in "willful breach of contract and unfair competition" by launching a free WiFi pro...

IBM has designed a new US$100 million supercomputer, called "Roadrunnner," that's powerful enough to operate at 1 petaflop -- a cool 1 thousand trillion calculations per second. That's twice as fast as the next closest supercomputer -- the IBM Blue Gene system -- and nearly three times as fast as other top supercomputers in the world. For those wh...

A new company is working to index the real world. Sense Networks officially launched its CitySense and MacroSense activity-tracking services Monday The services use a combination of cell phone data, WiFi activity and vehicle GPS (Global Positioning System) locations to measure where crowds are -- and then put the information to use in a number of w...