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Sage Software owned the CRM vendor conference spotlight this week, with Insights 2008, held in suburban Washington, D.C. Sage updated attendees on its product road map and better acquainted users and partners with the new CEO Sue Swenson. She is not a software person, writesBeagle Research Managing Principal Denis Pombriant in his blog post Insig...

Part 1 of this two-part series enumerates the ways in which the guest-worker visa program fails to meet the needs of American workers and the high-tech industry. Part 2 digs further into the arguments for and against the H-1B visa program, as well as the trends and motivations underlying them "Google and other American companies are in a fierce com...

Law enforcement authorities in two countries on Monday charged 38 people in the U.S. and Romania with taking part in two different phishing-related fraud schemes that authorities say were tied to organized crime worldwide The United States Department of Justice and the Prosecutor General of Romania announced the charges Monday, stemming from an inv...

Atlantic hurricanes will be fewer in number but more intense as a result of global warming, a new study predicts In the study, which was conducted by scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, N.J., researchers performed hurricane simulations using a new model that they sa...

It's heartening to see that Mark Zuckerberg is following my advice and seeking a sit-down with Google to hammer out their differences over this Friend Connect thing Last week, Facebook unceremoniously blocked Friend Connect from accessing its data stream. Whether Facebook was on board or aware of Google's plan beforehand depends on whom you ask....

The never-ending Microhoo saga has left many investors feeling downright whipsawed as they watched events careen from one extreme to the other -- and that was after the merger was supposedly dead in the water Since Microsoft walked away from the deal, 1) Yahoo has hinted that it maybe, possibly would like to be acquired if the price were right; 2) ...

Nintendo's Wii Fit came to the U.S. on Monday. Wii Fit is a game and accompanying controller for the popular Wii video game system that enables the user to play games focused on exercise and use their feet to control it The new offering is an extension of what has made the Wii so popular among mainstream gamers -- getting folks up and moving....

Mozilla is creeping ever closer to dropping the final version of the much-anticipated Firefox 3 Web browser. The latest build is the first Release Candidate for Firefox 3 (RC1), which means it's gone beyond the beta stage and is picking up a couple of last-minute polishes before it's offered up live to the whole world as a completed browser Most an...

Chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has announced an initiative designed to give gamers a clearer picture of what systems will and will not match their needs when buying a PC Nearly 66 percent of PCs sold in 2007 included only the bare minimum of functionality, according to findings from Jon Peddie Research. These systems did not have the abilit...

AOL has closed its US$850 million acquisition of Bebo, and the portal will use the social network as the basis for a new People Networks business unit Bebo Chief Executive Officer Joanna Shields will serve as executive vice president of AOL and president of the People Networks division, which will combine Bebo and AOL's two chat platforms -- AIM an...

Oh customer, so mysterious ... what have you done ... what will you do ... and what decisions should a business make to keep you or get rid of you? Seeking answers to these key questions, the commercial world has turned in a big way to analytics -- the science of logical analysis. Analytics involves the extensive use of data, statistical and qua...

For decades, both manufacturers and retailers have practiced and refined the art of merchandising products. From simple steps like packaging, product shelf placement and signage to sales rep training days and the stopping power of endcap displays, retailers and their vendors have traditionally worked together because they recognized consumer shopping dynamics and shared a common motivation to drive sales by presenting shoppers with a compelling story of features, benefits and value.

It is difficult to think of an area where the pharmaceutical industry is not under siege these days. Regulators spawning new rules, governments putting price caps in place, safety advocates demanding more information on side effects, health maintenance plans implementing their own cost controls, and expiration dates on patents coming around -- all are putting the squeeze on Big Pharma, and it has been reflected in industry earnings.

I used to run a post-merger clean-up team for IBM years ago, and have since spent a great deal of time thinking about and dealing with major mergers that clients have undertaken. In a market like this, consolidation and acquisition are inevitable, and knowing how to play in what will likely be the kind of massive change that occurs after a merger can be a critical personal survival skill.

In 2008, the challenges e-tailers face seem to have risen to new heights: carrier rate hikes, major postal code changes, exploding fuel costs, heightened multinational shipping expectations and uncertain consumer demand in an uncertain economy. This spring, businesses need to re-evaluate their warehousing and shipping strategy to effectively plan for the holiday rush...

It seems as if everywhere I look these days, HD (high-definition) is there. An increasing number of TV programs come with an "available in HD" logo at the bottom of the screen, and it looks as though every consumer store that sells any form of electronics has photos of widescreen televisions plastered all over the advertisements they jam into the Sunday newspaper. Step into any of these stores and the new HDTVs easily outnumber traditional television sets in both number and the real estate taken up by their seductive flickering images...

For the past five years, the Recording Industry Association of America has been prosecuting people -- and threatening to prosecute many more -- for sharing copyrighted content online without authorization. Its lawsuits have been based primarily on two legal arguments: downloading copyrighted content from unauthorized sources such as peer-to-peer (...

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project and Microsoft have come together to make the software company's Windows XP operating system available on the OLPC's low-cost laptops, the XO. Sugar, a Linux-based user interface, will also be offered on XO computers Although OLPC had hoped to ship millions of the low-cost computers to schoolchildren in develo...

Google and Facebook have been at each other's throats in recent days over Friend Connect, Google's platform for mirroring your social networking data around the Web. Apparently, Facebook doesn't like the fact that Friend Connect does exactly what it's designed to do.

Verizon Business has won a massive government contract to deploy and manage a global IP network for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The contract is for a cool US$678.5 million over 10 years, and to bank the bucks, Verizon will act as the primary service provider under the DHS OneNet program, an advanced next-generation network effort designed to consolidate multiple legacy networks into a new, secure IP network.