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The upcoming turning of the calendar to January of 2006 brings more than a new year. It also marks the start of what some say is the most sweeping demographics change to hit the American workforce since World War II. That's because during 2006, the first of the Baby Boomer generation will turn 60 years old That in turn represents the beginning of a...

Mass merchandisers are redefining what's needed to launch a product through indirect channels, and the fact that bargain-hunting prospects for many products use the high-priced channels to do research and buy online anyway is making Web product introductions a path to greater profits for manufacturers. Web-based product introductions are the strategy of choice for many manufacturers trying to control the two most critical variables in the marketing mix: products and price...

Gavin Newsom, San Francisco's controversial mayor, was in the spotlight again this week as he and his staff contemplated which lucky company will get the rights to provide WiFi access around the city. The real question is, why is government making this choice rather than market forces? To many in the communications industry, particularly cable, this is a familiar situation...

T-Mobile claims its Web'n'walk service, already available in Germany and now expanded to the UK, breaks down the walls of mobile Web surfing. Users are able to access almost any Web site -- with some exceptions -- and view it just as it would look on a computer, according to company representatives The telecommunications giant is not the first to e...

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission took action against spyware this week by asking a U.S. District Court Judge to halt an operation that allegedly plagued users who clicked for free file-sharing software with performance-slowing, private-information-gathering software that also altered search results for victims The FTC said Odysseus Marketing and p...

Shareholders of long distance provider MCI overwhelmingly approved a plan for Verizon Communications to buy the company for US$8.4 billion, one of the final hurdles for the major telecom merger MCI said 88 percent of its shareholders voted in favor of the merger, despite attempts by some investors to quash the deal. Led by Deephaven Capital Managem...

America Online this week announced new initiatives aimed at protecting its 20 million Internet service subscribers from phishing attacks. As a result, AOL said it is blocking roughly 8 million phishing attempts against its members each day Phishing is the use of fraudulent e-mail and fake Web sites to gather sensitive personal information from user...

AOL today signed a definitive agreement to acquire Weblogs, Inc AOL said the acquisition gives it a cadre of online content that ranges from music to movies, travel to tech, food to fashion, medicine to mortgages and offers online consumers new micro-communities where they can connect, debate, editorialize, comment and learn....

Dell computer has officially opened what it calls its largest, most advanced manufacturing plant in North Carolina, a move meant to underscore the company's commitment to operating in the United States but one that has already created its share of controversy Dell opened the 750,000-square-foot facility in Winston-Salem, N.C. yesterday, bringing to...

The battle over the mobile e-mail market will be heating up over the coming months, and it's a battle that BlackBerry maker Research in Motion (RIM) is destined to lose Although RIM's leadership position remains strong in the short-term, analysts say that, in the long run, it will be toppled by the Redmond, Wash. juggernaut Microsoft....

Sun Microsystems and Google Tuesday announced a multi-year deal to promote each other's software, a deal seen by many as the possible groundwork for a direct attack on Microsoft's market dominance in the desktop productivity software space Under the terms, financial terms of which were not disclosed, Google will make Sun's Java Runtime Environment ...

Whether it is software, standards or architectures, people tend to think -- and argue -- about technological openness in individual silos. Harvard University's Open ePolicy Group, in its recently released Roadmap for Open ICT Ecosystems, urges people to apply and manage openness across an entire ICT ecosystem As discussed in last week's piece, the ...

It used to be that the Hollywood portrayal of a computer virus writer -- the teenage, late night pizza-eating, underachieving genius who gets a kick out of taking down the White House Web site -- was fairly accurate. But today's malicious code creator has a variety of ways to disrupt and trespass onto consumer and corporate PCs and networks: information-stealing trojans, spyware, spamming and phishing, and more...

EarthLink will attempt to make the City of Brotherly Love the city of brotherly wireless access as well, with a deal to cover America's fifth largest city with WiFi mesh connectivity over 135 square miles, the largest municipal wireless rollout to date The undertaking, described as a lifesaver for EarthLink by industry analysts, comes as similar In...

Dell yesterday began peddling its latest PC without an operating system. The computer is designed for consumers who plan to install open-source software instead of commercial tools and platforms Dubbed the Dimension E510n PC, the computer comes with a blank hard drive and a copy of the FreeDOS operating system that customers can install....

Sprint Nextel has filed suit against Vonage Holdings and other voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) startups, claiming those companies infringed on patents the telecommunications company holds for delivering VoIP traffic across networks In addition to Vonage, the action filed by Sprint Nextel in U.S. District Court for the District of Kansas names V...

Like a film that fantasizes what would happen if the other side won the war, AOL's Netscape browser won a huge distribution deal with HP this week, putting the challenger to Microsoft's Internet Explorer on the PC giant's North American notebook and desktop computers beginning next year The deal is not fiction, though, as Netscape has emerged renew...

I had a wide-ranging conversation the other day with a software company CEO in Silicon Valley. If anyone could have insights into what's been going on lately in the software industry it would be this guy. He's a former Oracle executive -- that doesn't exactly limit the field much does it? -- and a keen observer of the front office software market. I won't use his name because we were discussing something else for background, mostly the future of the enterprise software business...

Much the same as any other open-source debate, opinions about the future of Linux on the desktop are about as varied as they come On one side you've got the Desktop Linux Consortium with its mission to advance the open-source operating system on desktops everywhere. On the other side you've got software giants adamantly opposed to its spread....

The image of teens, businessmen and virtually all kinds of consumers talking on cell phones has become common, if not ubiquitous in recent years. As the number of cell phone users in the United States has reached and passed the hundred-million mark, carriers have been hard pressed to find ways to continue expanding their businesses. Now, in search of new revenue streams, they are trying to transform a silent crowd -- machines -- into a bunch of chatterboxes...