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Originally positioned as a small company application, Microsoft Dynamics CRM is clearly gunning for the enterprise with its latest release, rolled out in December The company announced Tuesday that it has made additional inroads into that end of the market, citing customer wins including H&R Block, which has deployed 2,000 seats of Microsoft CRM an...

Shining new light on the issue of wireless privacy, the state of California has filed a US$10 million lawsuit against a firm that sells cell phone numbers State officials filed suit Tuesday in San Diego Superior Court against Florida-based Data Trace USA, claiming the company misrepresented how it would use the data it purchased from telecom compan...

Red Hat on Tuesday announced details of its integrated virtualization strategy. The timing is a preemptive strike against rival Novell, which comes only a week before that company's annual Brainshare conference Red Hat plans to work with AMD, Intel, Network Appliance and XenSource to make virtualization technology a mainstay of the Linux market thi...

More than half of American high school students say they have at least one symptom of hearing loss, and many of their problems are directly attributable to the use of iPods and other portable music players, says a new study Teenagers aren't the only ones at risk, however....

For years, the vast majority of purchases made from e-commerce sites have relied on the same technology to keep them safe and protect consumers from identity theft Secure socket layer, or SSL, has helped complete millions of Web transactions, often working without consumers knowing it. When an SSL connection is made, most browsers show a closed loc...

Let me set the record straight. I've never been a fan of tablet computers. If the urge to write on an LCD strikes me, I've always found my Palm Tungsten handheld sufficient for that desire. Nevertheless, when Motion Computing of Austin, Texas, introduced the LS800 tablet, it tantalized me For one thing, it's a real tablet, not a laptop with a swive...

Continuing to develop its verticalization strategy, NetSuite has launched "NetSuite Software Company Edition," an application for the software industry. Not surprisingly, its design was based in part on NetSuite's own experiences, the company said "Running a software company is complex -- especially in the new world of Software as a Service, combin...

An error made by security software provider McAfee on Friday has caused user systems to delete or quarantine a number of executable files, including some Microsoft Excel documents, that had never been infected by a virus The error occurred when McAfee released a new virus definition file with code targeting the W95/CTX virus. This is a common proce...

VeriSign on Monday declared its entrance into the broadband content services market, announcing its US$62 million acquisition of Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Kontiki to help establish its presence in the field VeriSign plans to provide rich digital media over IP networks and has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Kontiki, a provider of managed pee...

With the timeframe for its PlayStation 3 release already being questioned by some, Sony was dealt another setback this week when it lost a bid to appeal a ruling that it violated a smaller firm's gaming patent Sony had hoped to be able to appeal the ruling that found it had infringed on the patent held by Immersion for technology included in the Du...

The battle over the next generation of DVD players just got another entrant: the virtual multilayer disc (VMD). VMD is a high quality format with built-in copyright protection designed for next-generation optical media New Medium Enterprises demonstrated its VMD technology at the CeBIT trade show in Germany. The 20GB high definition VMD uses red l...

The showdown between Google and the Department of Justice (DoJ) over the search engine's refusal to turn over search records heads to court on Tuesday, with Google planning to argue that the right to privacy outweighs the government's need for the information The two sides were scheduled to make arguments before a U.S. District Court judge in San J...

The Amazons and Wal-Marts of the Web understand the importance of a good on-site search engine, but for smaller concerns the technology can be problematic. Oftentimes those businesses don't make the connection between site search and customer satisfaction and even if they do, they don't have the money to develop a robust technology for themselves T...

The Web analytics market is heating up, as evidenced by at least two recent high-profile business deals in this area. Google entered the picture with a successful US$30 million bid for Urchin last spring, and NetIQ sold WebTrends to a group of company executives for more than $90 million. The name of the game in e-commerce environments is in increasing conversions, and Web analytics plays a key role in measuring initiatives...

Higher data rates and sophisticated features such as digital cameras, mobile video and advanced gaming mean that more on-the-go functionality is now available to cell phone users. These advances come with a dark side, however, as consumers are struggling to make sure that their phones have enough battery power to support these functions adequately ...

New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer has agreed to a US$1.1 million settlement from an interactive marketing firm that he said reused e-mail addresses and other consumer information without authorization Spitzer described the case involving Datran Media as being possibly "the largest breach of privacy in Internet history" with e-mail addresses a...

South Korean electronics giantSamsung announced that it will mass produce DDR2 DRAM memory using the smaller-scale, 80-nanometer (nm) manufacturing process. The move promises to boost efficiency both for Samsung and its DDR2 customers, who use the computer memory mainly in PCs The shift comes as the demand for DDR2 increases, Samsung said, driven ...

Motorola's popular Razr phones are cutting off some callers. Now, the company's stock prices are taking a slashing Cingular Wireless and T-Mobile last week stopped selling the Motorola model because of a defect in some handsets that causes calls to disconnect when the flip phones are opened. The glitch is due to a faulty component from one supplie...

Japan's Livedoor, the company that took the country's Internet sector by storm only to have its business practices called into question, finds itself facing new threats to the survival of its business this week The Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE) said Monday it would delist the stocks of both Livedoor and its subsidiary Livedoor Marketing from its Mothe...

Google has gobbled up yet another Web 2.0 startup. The search giant has acquired Upstartle, maker of Writely, software that allows you to edit documents online, then publish them online via blogs and other Web sites Writely users can upload Microsoft Word, OpenOffice, RTF, HTML or text documents, or create a document from scratch. A WYSIWYG editor ...