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Most health insurance companies have plowed resources into self-service Web sites for their policyholders -- Web site portals that display page after page of details on coverage. A handful even provide systems for maintaining electronic health records. Yet the general perception, even among many industry insiders, is that health insurance provider...

I'm often fascinated by mergers, or I should say I'm fascinated by how often they are attempted and how rarely they succeed While it may appear that smaller mergers are more successful than larger ones, the reality is smaller merger failures are vastly easier to cover up. Very few mergers actually deliver the benefits that were promised by their ad...

In a challenging economy, you must find new ways to make marketing work more effectively, get more out of marketing investments, and measure and account for marketing decisions. In short, you must make changes. Doing the same things in an uncertain economic environment and expecting the same results is, at worst, a definition of marketing insanity...

Typically, new technologies tend to promise more than they deliver. That has not been the case with Web services, which are being integrated into just about every new e-commerce application "Support for Web services has come from application vendors, application development tool suppliers, and middleware vendors," said Jason Bloomberg, a managing p...

The state of Texas may be the latest to take a bite out of Amazon's bottom line by assessing sales taxes on past purchases by state residents Texas tax officials are reviewing the taxable status of Amazon purchases after an inquiry from the Dallas Morning News, which asked why the e-tailer appeared not to be collecting sales taxes from Lone Star St...

MySpace has forged agreements with other popular Internet sites -- Yahoo, eBay, Photobucket and Twitter -- to permit MySpace users to migrate their data. Profiles, videos and friend networks are among the content that can be ported. They can then access the partner sites using their MySpace user names and passwords. For example, MySpace users who...

The long-running debate over net neutrality took another turn Thursday when two lawmakers introduced a bill that would make it a violation of antitrust law for broadband providers to discriminate against different types of content in routing traffic on their networks John Conyers Jr., a Democrat from Michigan who is also chairman of the House Judic...

Electronics retailer Circuit City Stores will allow Blockbuster and its largest shareholder, Carl Icahn, to look into the company's finances in connection with the video rental company's proposed buyout offer Circuit City also revealed that it has hired Goldman Sachs to help the company look into strategic alternatives to build its shareholder valu...

Attention! We're listening! Seeking competitive advantage and profitability through good relations with the social media, the B2B (business-to-business) world has energetically embraced the grand online colloquy known as the two-way talk-back "conversation." ...

If you could clone your best agent hundreds or thousands of times over, you could ensure that each and every customer calling your contact center receives the same high-quality, friendly and informed response. In reality, natural language speech self-service is probably the closest and best alternative to delivering cost-effective and customer-fri...

Taking on the likes of Adobe and Microsoft, Sun Microsystems on Tuesday unveiled its new JavaFX family of products for building rich Internet applications Based on Sun's longstanding Java platform, JavaFX includes a runtime and a tools suite that Web scripters, designers and developers can use to quickly build and deliver rich interactive applicati...

A new type of Trojan horse malware application is hiding inside fake MP3 media files, infecting approximately 500,000 consumer PCs, McAfee Avert Labs reported. The nefarious files have been delivered primarily on peer-to-peer networks during the last several days. The trojan, known as "Downloader-UA.h," was added to McAfee's DAT files about a week...

In a move sure to renew debate over how broadband access should be sold, Comcast is reportedly mulling a cap on how much data a customer buying its basic high-speed Internet access package can use each month Comcast, the No. 2 provider of high-speed Web access in the U.S., would establish a preset monthly data usage level and then charge a fee for ...

Verizon announced the latest addition to its line of touch-screen mobile phones Thursday. The Glyde from Samsung, available Friday, offers many features that have gained popularity following the introduction of Apple's iPhone The Glyde joins the LG Voyager and Venus and the Samsung Instinct in a growing list of handsets with more user-friendly touc...

The Internet Archive revealed Wednesday that the FBI dropped an effort to secretly obtain information about the online activities of one of the digital library's users The Archive revealed that it had been served a National Security Letter by the FBI last year about one of its patrons. The San Francisco-based nonprofit organization prevailed after ...

Microsoft's Zune and NBC's downloadable television shows stand at the center of the latest digital rights management (DRM) dustup. On Wednesday, The New York Times' Saul Hansell reported that Microsoft might build a copyright manager into every Zune player, ostensibly in response to an NBC demand for copyright protections of its downloadable content...

A federal judge in Los Angeles has awarded the Motion Picture Association of America US$110 million in compensation from Valence Media, operator of the now-defunct file-sharing Web site TorrentSpy U.S. District Judge Florence-Marie Cooper ordered Valence Media to pay $30,000 for each copyright infringement of nearly 3,700 movies and television prog...

In early 2002, the founders of Azul Systems wagered that Java was going to become a prominent enterprise platform. If that happened, they suspected enterprise customers of Java would soon need relief from the pain points caused by poor scaling and disappointing deployment costs Azul Systems CEO and President Scott Sellers, along with two longtime b...

Traditionally, the contact center has been a cost center. However, with the contact center transforming into a profit center, the selling of products and services has emerged as an opportunity for the contact center to improve agent and customer interaction. Yet the challenge will be balancing customer satisfaction goals and driving profits. Sixty...

Second Life is no place for kids, a Republican congressman declared Monday U.S. Representative Mark Kirk (R.-Ill.) has sent a letter to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) requesting a consumer alert warning about the dangers of Second Life, which he charges could expose kids to child predators and registered sex offenders....