Articles by

The bizarre and controversial case of a Missouri teenager who killed herself after being bullied through MySpace, allegedly by the parent of a peer, has reportedly shifted to California, where the social networking site is based A federal grand jury in Los Angeles has issued a subpoena to MySpace, according to the Los Angeles Times. This is apparen...

Ever notice that Microsoft -- with cash to burn, apparently -- waits for the obvious to become inevitable and then ends up paying huge premiums for companies in order to catch up to reality? We saw it with aQuantive, Softricity and Groove Networks It's happened again with Tuesday's US$1.2 billion bid by Microsoft for Norway's Fast Search and Transf...

In today's highly competitive and increasingly globalized technology market, business process outsourcing (BPO) has become one of the hottest trends in organizational structuring. Leading countries like India and Mexico and newcomers like Brazil, China, and Eastern Europe have emerged as important outsourcing centers Additionally, the line between ...

Financial services organizations that are unable to update and enforce internal policies and controls in line with regulatory change are exposing themselves to the risk of censure, investigation, loss of professional reputation and severe legal repercussions To understand why, it's first essential to get to grips with the process of regulatory chan...

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...

Part 1 of this series looks into the issue of PC recycling and following the course of a hypothetical laptop through the recycling process. Continuing down this path, this part will consider another situation: Laptop owner Joe Verdi doesn't own a laptop from a brand name OEM with a take-back program He wants to recycle it and he gets lucky, or is c...

The Federal Communications Commission will investigate claims made late last year that Comcast blocked customers from using file-sharing services, specifically BitTorrent. FCC Chairman Kevin Martin made the announcement at the Consumer Electronics Show currently underway in Las Vegas The move came in response to a petition several consumer advocacy...

When the Federal Communications Commission's much-anticipated auction of 700MHz wireless spectrum begins later this month, at least one planned participant will be conspicuously absent: startup Frontline Wireless, which apparently shut its doors this week "Frontline is closed for business at this time," company spokesperson Mary Greczyn told the E-...

Dell and storage manufacturing partner EMC launched new entry-level storage area network (SAN) solutions aimed at small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) Tuesday branded for each hardware maker EMC's CLARiiON AX4 and Dell's AX4-5 are intended to meet the growing demand for storage capacity driven by both SMBs and satellite offices of larger enterp...

A federal judge has sentenced a former systems administrator for Medco Health Solutions to 30 months in prison Tuesday for planting a "logic bomb" in Medco's computer systems that was designed to wipe out critical data on more than 70 servers, U.S. Attorney Christopher J. Christie announced A programming error prevented the bomb from detonating, bu...

The strained relationship between the One Laptop Per Child organization and Intel has come to an inglorious end with Intel resigning and OLPC claiming the chipmaker "contributed nothing of value." Intel and OLPC announced in July they would work together "to bring the benefits of technology to the developing world through synergy of their respectiv...

A couple of developments in the mobile applications space have my head spinning. First, the LiMo Foundation announced it has increased its membership by adding six new members. Then, Yahoo introduced its mobile developer platform at CES, taking pains to point out that its apps will be compatible with pretty much any mobile platform -- including Android...

More than a decade after they first rushed to search for exit-strategy gold in the e-commerce niche, venture investors are still finding plenty of early and mid-stage companies to back in the space Often, however, the deals are more modest in size than they were when the dot-com bubble was building and the businesses themselves are being built in a...

B. Joseph (Joe) Pine II has been interested in the vendor-customer relationship for a long time Pine and his partner, James H. Gilmore, have written numerous books and articles that lie at the heart of the CRM approach to business. Together they have written The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre & Every Business a Stage (Harvard Business School...

In this series of articles, we highlight two industry experts who have differing views of what it means to be a commercial open source business and how to be successful. Bernard Golden, CEO of Navica, an open source consultancy, and Michael Grove, CEO of OpenITWorks, which focuses on helping IT organizations collaborate, are both recognized as industry experts and thought leaders...

The annual Consumer Electronics Show, now in progress in Las Vegas, not only highlights the must-have consumer products for the upcoming year, but also provides a forum for tech execs to share their philosophical musings on the future of their industry This year is no exception. On the second day of the show, Intel CEO Paul Otellini described his v...

The battle between Blu-ray and HD DVD may be settling down at last, but in the mobile TV arena another competition is just getting under way Two different mobile digital television technologies will enter testing this year, each backed by a different set of vendors. In one camp, there's the A-VSB platform developed by Samsung Electronics and Rohde ...

The latest salvo in the war between the Blu-ray and HD DVD camps over which high definition format will replace the ubiquitous DVD may be little more than pop and flash -- but effective nonetheless. Sony's Blu-ray and Toshiba's HD DVD formats have various technology industry supporters behind them, but the biggest backers come in the form of the Hollywood studios...

Comcast is launching an online video hub that will connect users with content in a variety of formats. With this effort, Comcast is joining a crush of companies aiming to leverage the Web to provide the ultimate on-demand experience The cable giant's Fancast site will be the first such destination meant to connect users with content -- whether it's...

Microsoft is moving to buy Norway-based enterprise search specialist Fast Search and Transfer for approximately US$1.2 billion, a purchase that would instantly grow the software giant's business search footprint Redmond is offering Fast shareholders 19 Norwegian kroner ($3.50) per share, a 42 percent premium to the company's trading price last week...