Articles by

It's no secret that security experts don't have a lot of love for social media. Information freely available at social media sites makes it easier for net marauders to fashion targeted attacks on organizations However, social media may be undermining data security in a more profound way....

New tools are available to help with service level management, but they require a new perspective on how IT infrastructure components should be managed The key is to embrace a new ideal of managing every infrastructure component from the perspective of how it impacts end-user service levels. To do this, IT operations teams must understand the thre...

With smartphones and an increasing number of tablets becoming GPS-capable, it is easy to write off dedicated GPS players. So many seem stuck in the past -- days when devices needed a wired connection for updates and didn't seem to be aware of Web services they might be ideal for, like Yelp. With a recent California ruling making it illegal to us...

One week after the announcement that the Google Fiber network would come to Austin, Texas, Provo found out it will be the third city to get the search company's gigabit high-speed service. The Utah city, home to a much-criticized, money-losing fiber optic network, will sell it to Google for US$1, according to published reports. The announcement in...

Can I be everywhere my customers want to shop? The good news is that this rhetorical question is not all that far-fetched any longer. In its day, the Sears catalog revolutionized the consumer shopping experience and ruled the market. Decades later, it has been rendered obsolete by the ultimate, innovative consumer shopping medium -- the Internet -...

Google released a quarterly earnings report Thursday that beat estimates and also showed the company may be coming to grips with the problem of monetizing its mobile platform The tech giant reported net income of US$3.35 billion, or $9.94 per share during the first three months of the year, a 16 percent jump from the same time a year ago. Google's ...

The Boston suburbs were in lockdown on Friday, following a deadly shootout Thursday night with two men suspected of setting off bombs at the Boston Marathon on Monday. ...

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have developed a super-dense battery that measures only a few millimeters, but can both store and release a lot of power, resolving a problem that has long plagued consumers and electronics manufacturers. ...

The Hidden Risks of Mobile CRM, Part 1 Mobile marketing may just be in its infancy, but it already has ushered in a world of new risks -- or rather, existing risks that have been repackaged.

Sprint recently presented a mock-up Emergency Response Team deployment of its technology at the Los Angeles International Airport, LAX. Its gear is oriented toward widespread natural disaster communications failures rather than short-term outages or network congestion like that experienced after the Boston explosions. Sprint staged its demonstrati...

Long before a tweet was a 140-character post on Twitter, it was a component of birdsong. Now the microblogging site is singing the praises of its new Twitter #Music, an app that will help users find tunes they'll like, based on their current preferences and songs' popularity on Twitter. The app utilizes Twitter activity, including tweets and other...

Before knocking boots, knock phones Three software engineers at the University of Iceland have designed an app to alert people if a casual encounter might in fact be casual incest....

eBay posted solid first-quarter earnings on Wednesday, but the company underperformed based on projections by Wall Street. eBay then delivered guidance that did not meet the mark, doubling investors' disappointment As a result, they are casting worried eyes toward eBay's future. ...

Apple's stock took another hit on Thursday, sinking to a dismal US$392.25 by the closing bell. Fears have been mounting about Apple's place in the world, and they were heightened earlier this week by a report from a key supplier, Cirrus Logic, which posted a disappointing revenue forecast.

The Federal Trade Commission filed a suit against Wise Media this week, accusing the company of slipping unauthorized charges into consumer cellphone bills Wise Media allegedly charged cellphone users fees for services to which they'd never subscribed, a practice referred to as "cramming." The company used short codes, which have legitimate purpose...

The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), which faces a vote in the U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday, may end up vetoed by President Obama CISPA encourages private companies to share security information among themselves and with the government....

Facebook may soon be adding video ads, a key step in the development of an advertising platform that needs to draw interest from brands that may have previously questioned its return on investment Video ads could start to run on Facebook as early as June or July, according to a report in AdAge. Ad slots will be capped at 15 seconds, and users might...

Yahoo's latest earnings report was a mixed bag, and Wall Street didn't seem to know how it should react. Following Tuesday's report, the company's stock dropped slightly on Wednesday, then rose slightly and ended the day a tiny bit ahead. On Thursday, Yahoo shares were off by about 2 percent mid-day, in sync with the market overall That sound you h...

Internet advertising experienced double-digit growth in 2012 for a record US$37 billion in revenue, according to a report this week from the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) and Pricewaterhouse Coopers. The largest increase was in the second half of the year, where both the third and fourth quarters topped previous records. Interactive ad revenue...

Thanks to countless conversations with reporters, I have developed a crystal clear idea of why Dish Network and SoftBank want to acquire Sprint Nextel. It has less to do with wireless carrier ambitions, and much more to do with the future -- being leaders in a new space that's still largely under the radar. When wireless took off, it is was all a...