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Musical tastes are not easy to classify with just a few tags. What gets one person's foot tapping and their heart thumping is not going to win over their cousin necessarily. Moods also swing or swoon to a fickle beat, and the music you may want to match or detach your mood can't be easily conjured from a rudimentary playlist or a limited catalog It...

Master data management (MDM) is a new approach to an old problem in companies: Merge all of the disparate, often conflicting and redundant records on customers and transactions into one authenticated master file Industry analyst firm IDC is predicting the master data management market to grow to US$10.4 billion by the year 2009, with a compound ann...

As the five versions of Microsoft Windows' new Vista operating system sit on store shelves, current Windows users are taking their time deciding if they will upgrade from Windows XP or buy new computers with Vista installed. The push for buying Windows Vista follows an epidemic of computer viruses, spyware and adware intrusions and carries the promise of a more secure computing environment...

Advances in technology, particularly customer resource management (CRM) software, are driving e-commerce these days. In some cases, they're driving the industry down a strange road that, like a "Twilight Zone" episode, ends up in Smalltown USA, circa 1950 It's a road that has companies adopting some of the most sophisticated and dazzling methods fo...

Verint Systems has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Witness Systems for US$27.50 per share in an all-cash deal that will total roughly $1 billion The transaction is expected to close in the second quarter, pending approval by regulators and Witness Systems stockholders....

Web analytics and personalization of Web sites have surfaced as key development initiatives for online merchants, according to a new benchmark report from Aberdeen Group, "Clicks to Customers: The Real ROI in B2C eCommerce." More than 44 percent of firms currently use Web analytics to evaluate customer behavior, researchers found. Fifty-nine percen...

Against the backdrop of the 3GSM World Congress wireless trade show in Barcelona, Spain, Research In Motion on Monday unveiled the latest in its BlackBerry line of e-mail phone devices The BlackBerry 8800 smartphone is the slimmest BlackBerry yet, and comes equipped with a variety of consumer-style features familiar to many from the BlackBerry Pear...

Researchers at Intel unveiled an experimental 80-core microchip Monday at the International Solid States Circuit Conference in San Francisco. Known as a "Teraflop research chip," it is the first programmable microprocessor capable of delivering performance formerly associated only with supercomputers, according to Intel If successful, Intel's resea...

Microsoft unveiled three new Windows Live services in conjunction with the official launch of the latest version of its operating system for smartphones, in an effort to cut deeper inroads into the mobile device market Although details of Windows Mobile 6 were leaked to the press last week, the OS upgrade made its official debut at the 3GSM World C...

MySpace has launched a pilot project that will help the popular social networking site identify uploaded content that may infringe on someone's copyright Its new content management and antipiracy system, which it licensed from Audible Magic, can recognize certain uploaded copyrighted content, match the appropriate business rules to that particular ...

IBM is billing its new Open Client Solution as an "alternative to vendor lock-in" for user desktop operating systems The Open Client Solution has two basic goals. One is to let organizations replace Microsoft Windows-based PCs in favor of Linux or Mac OS X-based desktops. The other is to let businesses more easily run a mix of Windows, Linux and Ma...

Yahoo on Monday broadened the nascent world of cell phone advertising by launching a mobile ad platform in 19 countries. The service, which was first offered in the United States in November, allows companies to run interactive advertisements on the Yahoo Mobile Web home page The company said it signed agreements with "major global advertisers" inc...

About 51 percent of organizations contacted for a recent study by Nucleus Research and KnowledgeStorm are using at least one on-demand application This finding was not surprising to Rebecca Wettemann, Nucleus Research's vice president, because even though the technology has been around for only a short period of time, "interest in it has exploded,"...

Sun Microsystems is an industry leader in network security. It offers its own open source operating system, Solaris, and a Java desktop system Sun's influence with network encryption and security solutions permeates the computer industry. TechNewsWorld discussed security issues with Dr. Vipul Gupta, Sun distinguished engineer, Sun Labs....

The Internet has presented previously unimaginable opportunities for enterprises of all types, including financial services institutions. Online transactions are at an all-time high as enterprises enthusiastically cultivate the Internet as a vital sales channel Careful examination of consumer behavior, however, may reveal the first signs of troubl...

AlterPoint is a network configuration management provider that recently joined the open source ranks with the launch of its ZipTie community -- and are now members of the Open Management Consortium The goal of ZipTie is to create a community that will advance network management beyond the limitations imposed by proprietary, vendor provided device m...

Unless you were sleeping last week, you saw Bill Gates get really upset when asked about the Mac vs. PC campaign that Apple is putting on. I'm not sure it is wise to piss off someone like Bill personally in this way, and the campaign does seem to over-stereotype both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs ...

2006 was a pivotal year for the smartphone industry, with significant technological developments and changes in industry practices and operation Handset manufacturers continued to accessorize the smartphone and churned out a seemingly limitless variety of models and styles, showing off cutting edge advances such as the delivery of text and multimed...

Xerox's legendary Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) said Friday it would license Internet search technology to Powerset, a relatively young startup that aims to build a better search engine than Google PARC holds an almost sacred place in technology lore, with claims to some of the most important inventions of the digital era, including Ethernet, la...

Computers can now be trained better than ever before to be able to predict what a human being plans to do, according to a new study published Thursday Using a combination of technologies including pattern recognition software and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the authors of the study investigated whether a computer could predict ahe...