Articles by

Have you ever heard of the Cullinan diamond? If you haven't, it was the largest diamond ever discovered: a 3106 carat diamond found in 1905 in South Africa. What's interesting about the Cullinan diamond (at least to me) isn't so much the discovery of the stone itself but what happened afterward: specifically, the cutting of the diamond. The Cul...

Amazon on Tuesday announced Amazon Business, lifting its 3-year-old Amazon Supply business-to-business marketplace from beta status to full functionality with new features and benefits, and a massively increased product selection Amazon Business offers customers everything from IT and lab equipment to traffic signs, industrial deep fryers and 55-ga...

Last year's breach of unclassified White House computer systems was far more intrusive than initially thought and included the theft of some presidential correspondence, The New York Times reported Friday No classified systems were compromised in the attack, including the servers that control the message traffic from President Obama's BlackBerry mo...

Tesla Motors founder and CEO Elon Musk almost sold his electric car company to Google, Bloomberg recently reported. Tesla was on the verge of bankruptcy, and Musk had all but signed the documents that would have handed over the company, according to an excerpt from the upcoming Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for the Fantastic Future. The ...

Google on Monday announced it will open an experimental portal to purchase patents from their holders between May 8 and May 22. The move is widely seen as an attempt to shut off patent trolls Patent holders have to set the price at which they're willing to sell their IP, and they will be told by June 26 whether Google wants to buy....

Roll up, roll up for another installment of Gadget Dreams and Nightmares, the column that guides you through the hall of mirrors of terrible gadget announcements to the fun house of vastly more glorious joys ...

Marketing continues to heat up as the next big thing in CRM. It's so big, in fact, that I can see it splintering in multiple ways to accommodate all the permutations that are suddenly possible, thanks to big data, analytics, and a determination to get beyond using marketing technology as a glorified accounting system designed to limit a business' "losses" due to marketing...

VMware last week released details about two new open source projects that aim to bridge the divide between the company's virtualization software and other vendors' containers. Both projects integrate into VMware's unified platform for the hybrid cloud, allowing the company to create a consistent environment for cloud-native and traditional applications...

Activision on Monday announced the launch date for Call of Duty: Black Ops III -- Friday, Nov. 6. The company is departing from its tradition of Tuesday releases. Instead of conflicting with school and work schedules, the Friday release will give players the weekend to dive into the sci-fi shooter and get a feel for the new gameplay mechanics ...

Nokia has kinda, sorta asserted that it's not returning to the smartphone business, in the wake of persistent reports that it's been eyeing a comeback Nokia "currently has no plans to manufacture or sell consumer handsets," reads a company statement. "The reports are false, and include comments incorrectly attributed to a Nokia Networks executive."

Valve last week announced that it was allowing players to sell video game mods on its digital distribution platform, Steam, starting with mods of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, but the policing of the marketplace and the percentage of revenue shared with creators have become points of contention Video game mods, one of the perks of PC gaming, encompa...

Microsoft is holding its Build event this week, marking the beginning of its major push to launch Windows 10. Build is in San Francisco this year, which effectively puts it right in the back yard of both Apple and Google -- a nice "in your face" move. I was the featured launch analyst for Windows 95 two decades ago and there, even though the post launch was hardly flawless, Microsoft ripped Apple a new rear orifice, wounding the company so badly that one of the founders eventually had to return to save it. ...

The day Apple initially picked to launch the Apple Watch was in some respects a dud The device was not available for sale in Apple Stores on Friday as previously scheduled, although it was available at some high-end fashion boutiques. Confusion reigned over shipments, with Apple earlier having announced that deliveries would be pushed back to June,...

In our high-powered, win-at-all-costs business environment, the word "empathy" often evokes derision and scorn. Who has time to be a squishy, touchy-feely wimp overflowing with empathy? We're all busy closing deals and kicking butt! Kicking, closing, etc., is great and all -- but empathy has genuine business value. Don't forget that CRM has "relat...

Coinciding with the official Apple Watch launch on Friday, a slew of apps and games are making their debuts. One of the early hopefuls is WayForward, which last week unveiled its Watch Quest, hoping to get a jump on the competition Some developers have been awaiting the opening of the WatchKit application programming interfaces in full before they...

Two cybersecurity bills approved this week by the U.S. House of Representatives pose a threat to citizens' privacy, according to opponents of the measures Both bills, H.R. 1560 and H.R. 1731, aim to improve sharing of cybersecurity information between businesses and government agencies.

Comcast has decided to abandon its plan to merge with Time Warner Cable, according to multiple press reports based on briefings with people familiar with the matter. The company is expected to make a formal announcement on Friday About a week after reports emerged indicating the U.S. Department of Justice was leaning against Comcast's US$45.2 billi...

While Apple is known for fantastic product design, it's not known for customization. For instance, the first iPhone hit the world nearly eight years ago, and yet our "customizable" home screen options are limited to the organization of app icons and some wallpaper choices that can produce color tints through translucent layers With this in mind, al...

YouTube on Thursday celebrated its first full decade in business. It was 10 years ago to the day that cofounder Jawed Karim uploaded the site's first video. It was a humble beginning: a 19-second clip of elephants, with Karim declaring that the pachyderms have "really, really long trunks." ...

Automated telephone calls, also known as "robocalls," used to drive me crazy. Then they stopped, and life was quiet, peaceful and beautiful once again, but just for a few short years. Those disturbing calls have started once again, and now they are worse than ever. Why? And how can we stop them? Robocalls typically are for telemarketing purposes. T...