Articles by

Tomorrow we start the New Year, and for those of you who aren't still in line to buy a Nintendo Wii, it is looking to be a good one I'm having my doubts about Apple though, as it would seem success is going to their head as they put Think Secret out of business, and I and a lot of others were tricked into believing they personally threaten the guy ...

Today's libraries are definitely not the same places where today's senior citizens did their homework after school. Indeed, according to the results from a study conducted by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Pew Internet & American Life Project, today's seniors -- and even many baby boomers -- probably wouldn't recognize half the resources available to patrons...

Joining Nevada and Florida, New Jersey is the latest state to enact legislation that strongly limits the rights of convicted sex offenders to use the Internet A bill, signed Thursday by New Jersey Acting Gov. Richard Codey, allows judges to impose the restrictions and also makes it easier for authorities to monitor the online activity of the offend...

Amazon.com has picked up the third major record label to let the online music retailer sell MP3 songs without digital rights management (DRM) schemes attached. Warner Music Group announced Thursday that Amazon customers can now buy and download songs from its artists, which include Matchbox Twenty, Rob Thomas, Jewel, Kid Rock, The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Big & Rich and Faith Hill...

Considering the speed at which technology evolves, predicting even a year in advance can be a dicey proposition. Still, given key tech sector developments during 2007 and the outlook for 2008, some trends are unmistakable It's a safe bet that social networking and Web 2.0 overall will remain a closely watched sector and that mobile marketing and pa...

John Roberts, chairman and CEO of SugarCRM, is no stranger to the proprietary software that delivers most of the CRM functionality in the market today The Washington, D.C.-native moved to Silicon Valley in his twenties and spent 12 years in the "trenches" as he puts it, developing products for enterprise vendors. Then, like all good open source dev...

Google raised Web surfers' hackles after a seemingly simple change linking its Google Reader service with Google Talk The move has raised concerns about privacy and highlighted the delicate balancing act that companies with vast stores of personal data have to perform as they try to improve their offerings. For Google in particular, the incident ma...

Amazon.com executives and investors had a very merry holiday season as buyers chose the online mall in huge numbers Amazon said the 2007 holiday season, its 13th, was its best ever in terms of sales. While the Seattle-based e-commerce giant did not reveal final sales figures, it noted customers ordered more than 5.4 million items on Dec. 10, its bu...

While retailers are rich in data, they are struggling to gather information from point-of-sale systems, planning systems and various other locations where customer, vendor and internal data collection take place Retailers are generally performing poorly in terms of executing analysis and utilizing their data to derive bottom-line benefit. This asse...

About 50 percent of all new businesses survive for at least five years, according to estimates by the Small Business Administration. On the flip side, that means that half of all new ventures fail in that time frame. While the e-commerce market has been growing at a rapid clip, a number of companies have not been able to take advantage of this trend and found themselves in precarious positions for a variety of reasons this year...

Now general manager of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Brad Wilson's career trajectory has allowed him to deliver CRM to the market from many different vantage points -- and levels of resources Wilson began at HP as a database software architect, moving into product management and marketing after a few years. He then moved to a startup company that was eve...

Shakespeare wrote that a rose called by any other name would still smell as sweet. Proponents of open source software and standardizing document formats might wonder whether the same sentiments apply to the poetry between the OpenDocument Format, or ODF, and the Compound Document Format, or CDF The Organization for the Advancement of Structured In...

Enterprises house vast amounts of information, the secure and timely handling of which is key to their core business -- especially as it relates to sensitive personal and financial data. As a result, an enterprise's IT developer community has transformed into the role of compliance enforcer and protector of data As most of this information is store...

Get ready for new "controlled circulation" models on the Web, ones that target you based not on your preferences for music or soft drinks -- but on what you consume in your occupation. Think of it as B2B social networking First, some set-up ... One of the great media inventions of the mid-20th century was the notion of affinity-based, controlled ci...

Mike Betzer was working for MCI several years ago when he realized that if the company could use the Internet as a front end, it could leverage the software in the data center and develop a network-based application that could be sold to other companies doing essentially the same thing that MCI did in-house As it happened MCI, in the midst of being...

Several years after the European Commission ruled in an antitrust suit in 2004 that Microsoft had to provide protocol information to its competitors, the Redmond, Wash., software giant has inked an agreement with a team behind the open source project Samba that will let them in on Microsoft's secret protocols The Samba team develops free and open s...

Cruising the Web on a smartphone is about like cruising for a date on a tricycle -- the basic concept is there, but the delivery is laughable. If you are using an iPhone, then it's more like cruising in a Volkswagen Beetle -- better, but still short of the Lamborghini speeds we're used to on the open cyber-highway Considering everyone -- from carri...

We live in a Web 2.0 world, but when it comes to fighting Internet-borne security threats, many enterprises are armed with only Web 1.0 weapons, according to a study released this week by San Jose, Calif.-based Secure Computing Web 2.0 usage is prevalent in enterprises, the study found, and as a result "the traditional boundary of external versus i...

One might argue that China and the Internet are both like high-speed trains. Both are growing at an extremely rapid pace, and both are apparently unstoppable global economic forces that are reshaping the economic landscape. Unfortunately, one might also argue that they are on a collision course "While the Chinese government has embraced the Interne...

Not too long ago, advice to keep a CRM implementation simple would have focused around due diligence for the application (you never buy a complex product unless absolutely necessary). It would have focused on negotiating the best deal with a systems integrator (these costs can add up quickly unless the contract specifies otherwise). Most of all, it would have focused on a clear needs assessment driving the application (buying too many bells and whistles when they aren't necessary is a sure path to overly complicated implementation and a frustrated user base)...