Articles by

Crafting an Online Strategy, Part 1: Which Wares Should You Sell? You're making soap or jewelry or handcrafted leather bags, and you want to sell them online. Where do you go? What spaces work best? How do you decide where to sell your wares?...

Hello, one and all, and welcome to the latest edition of Gadget Dreams and Nightmares, the column that occasionally takes a break from watching '50s French melodramas to delve into the latest gadget announcements. ...

Amazon on Wednesday launched the Kindle Oasis -- the latest upgrade to its popular line of e-readers. Along with features that are arguably revolutionary, it comes with a price point that may shock more than a few customers. The Oasis is the thinnest and lightest e-reader it has ever produced, Amazon said. Without the cover, it weighs in at just 4...

There's an interesting connection between customer relationships in subscription businesses and loyalty, according to a recentarticle by Zuora CEO Tien Tzuo. It had particular resonance for me, since I just wrote a (soon-to-be-available) book about customer loyalty myself My research is full of old-style approaches to customer loyalty that aren't r...

Facebook on Tuesday unveiled a high-quality 360-degree 3D camera suitable for creating virtual reality content The Facebook Surround 360 system, which made its debut at the F8 developers conference, includes a production-ready camera -- which costs about US$30,000 to build and looks like a flying saucer from a science fiction movie -- and software ...

Chariot for Women, a ride-sharing service that excludes males 13 and older, reportedly has postponed its launch to sometime this summer due to heavier-than-anticipated demand. The company originally had planned to debut the service in Boston next week Chariot for Women is open to all women, including transgender women. Children, including boys unde...

Chinese authorities have issued censorship instructions to the media following the release of thePanama Papers, according to news reports published last week The leaked documents reportedly listed several top Chinese officials who used Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca to set up offshore companies....

Most of the changes in the next version of the Apple Watch will be on the inside and not the outside of the case, according to an investors note issued Monday by Ming-Chi Kuo of KGI Securities While he was short on details about what the internal changes for the watch might be, the analyst's comments are consistent with rumors circulating last summ...

Expanding on Facebook's embrace of video and communication as a transformative tool, CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday launched the company's new Messenger platform beta at its annual F8 conference for developers. The Messenger announcement was the first major initiative in the long-term vision he presented Zuckerberg outlined a major push to incorpor...

Marketing will shape the customer experience by 2020, based on a recent Marketo study of nearly 500 chief marketing officers and senior marketing executives worldwide. The Economist Intelligence Unit conducted the research on behalf of Marketo Eighty-percent of the respondents believed their departments would exercise significant influence over bus...

Another federal agency has entered the arena for regulating e-commerce companies regarding the protection of consumer data The federalConsumer Financial Protection Bureau has closed its first and so far only privacy case with a consent agreement between itself and an online payments processor. The case has raised questions about the legal approach ...

Samsung has been granted a patent for a smart contact lens, according to news reports published last week The lens is equipped with a tiny display, a camera, an antenna, and several sensors that detect movement and eye blinks. Eye blinks would provide the input, and a smartphone would be needed to process the images....

SoftMaker's FreeOffice Linux office suite is a LibreOffice look-alike that provides strong performance compatibility with Microsoft Office documents....

The parent company of British tabloid the Daily Mail apparently has entered what's shaping up as frenzied round robin bidding war for Yahoo, a firm that long has worn the mantle of a technology relic incapable of exciting interest. The Daily Mail & General Trust on Monday confirmed a report that it has approached private equity companies on a pos...

A group of newspaper publishers last week sent what amounted to a cease-and-desist letter toBrave Software, which offers the HTTPS Brave browser with built-in ad blocking and tracking protection Brave has offered to let publishers make money off blocked ads by partnering with them "for a lower fee than they pay their third-party data-tracking partn...

Ford on Monday revealed that it has been testing its Fusion Hybrid autonomous research vehicle with no headlights on remote desert roads at night While such a task would be quite perilous for a human driver, it was an important step in developing a fully autonomous vehicle, the company said....

Adobe last week issued an emergency security patch to fix a vulnerability in Flash that could leave users vulnerable to a ransomware attack The vulnerability exists in Adobe Flash Player 21.0.0.197 and earlier versions for Windows, Macintosh, Linux and Chrome operating systems. It can cause a crash and leave the computer vulnerable to attackers, th...

At Nvidia's GTC, GPU Technology Conference last week, I saw a variety of new technologies showcased. From deep learning systems -- computers that arguably are smarter than we are -- to self-driving cars that can drive better than we can, the technological advances on display made me feel just a tad inadequate. One way to get over my sudden concer...

A dozen trucks utilizing an autonomous driving system arrived Wednesday in Rotterdam, Netherlands, after traveling across Europe in the European Truck Platooning Challenge The Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and the Environment, along with the Directorate General Rijkswaterstaat, the Netherlands Vehicle Authority and the Conference of European Dir...

Verizon reportedly is planning to make a formal first-round bid for the core assets of Yahoo when the company begins fielding offers on Monday Verizon, whose CEO last month confirmed his company's interest, reportedly is working with executives of its AOL subsidiary and three financial advisors to put together a bid by the April 11 deadline.