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The last time we had a major "social networking" type of effort it was with collaboration, and theposter child for the effort was Lotus Notes. It largely failed -- not because the idea wasn't a good one,but because the company fundamentally didn't understand that the market was being made hostile tothe concept. In short, while collaboration techno...

Those who follow the exploits of Stuxnet will remember June 24, 2012, as Big Sleep day for the infamous malware. On that day, it stopped replicating "It's more like neutered, rather than dead," Eric Byres, CTO and vice president for engineering at Tofino Security Products, told TechNewsWorld. "The June 24 date stops it from replicating, but if it h...

Picture this: You're a young entrepreneur who's had that a-ha! moment that most only ever dream of. You've found your niche, built your offering, compiled an impressive team of engineers and salespeople that checkbook-wielding VCs are drooling over -- you're nearly ready to take the world by storm. The last remaining barrier to realizing a success...

In a followup to its Galaxy Note hybrid phone-cum-mini-tablet, Samsung is reportedly planning to release its successor, the Galaxy Note 2, sometime this year The Galaxy Note 2 will apparently arrive with a 5.5-inch screen -- a fifth of an inch larger than the one found on the original Galaxy Note, which is itself an enormous handset....

The world's largest book retailer today offers much more than books, just as the world's leading provider of online search is much more than just a search engine. Both Amazon and Google have seen their respective businesses grow by adapting and expanding Thus it didn't seem far-fetched when rumors intensified Friday about Amazon entering the smartp...

Amazon has acquired 3D-mapping startupUpNext, according to GigaOM, which broke the news earlier this week. Mapping functionality has become a must-have feature for mobile device makers, but that alone may not explain what Amazon is planning for UpNext Amazon's tablet, the Kindle Fire, does not sport a GPS radio, and users must download Android map...

Anywhere from 250,000 to 500,000 computers worldwide may lose Web access Monday morning if their users don't manage to remove malware called "DNSChanger" from their machines A massive public information campaign has been undertaken over the last several months to inform people about the virus and how to remove it, but thousands of computers remain...

Dell's announcement of its planned Quest Software acquisition seemed more inevitable than surprising. Quest had been in play since March, when it said investment firm Insight Venture Partners offered US$23 per share (or about $2 billion) for the company. The price jumped when an unidentified player -- many assumed it was Dell -- entered the biddin...

The List, a provider of lead generation software for media buyers and marketers, is adding CRM functionality to its line of services. This new feature set joins other new functions the company is building into its core product, such as integration with Moat.com, and a global media content database ...

ROM Manager Premium, an app from ClockworkMod, is available for US$5.99 at Google Play.If you've been getting into flashing ROMs on your devices, you're familiar with thepalava that goes with it: booting to recovery, swapping cards, adb, fastboot, renaming zipfiles, and the rest of it....

It may seem like Houdini is inside the network, because the perimeter as we have known it is disappearing. Conceptually, firewalls used to sit between the public Internet and the internal network with its servers, desktops and applications. There was a clear network perimeter separating internal resources from the outside world. However, emerging ...

An international botnet could be using infected Android handsets to send out massive amounts of spam, Microsoft antispam engineer Terry Zink said in a Thursday blog posts on MSDN Zink reportedly identified the botnet and its Google Android connection by examining the headers of spam that included the signature "Sent from Yahoo! Mail on Android." A...

Google may have to buffer its patent portfolio or start paying licensing fees to Nokia now that the search engine giant is becoming a bigger player in the tablet market Google launched the Nexus 7, its first Nexus-branded tablet device, last week. The 7-inch slate will run the latest version of the company's Android operating system and will sell f...

Verizon has filed a legal brief with the U.S. Court of Appeals against the Federal Communications Commission's Net neutrality rules, arguing that they exceed the agency's regulatory authority and violate constitutional rights protected by the First and Fifth Amendments The FCC adopted the rules in December 2010. Among other provisions, ISPs cannot...

After years of searching, particle physicists say they have all but certainly pinned down the elusive Higgs boson. Popularly known as the "God particle," this boson will help provide a better understanding of how most of the particles of nature acquire their mass, improving physicists' understanding of the universe ...

Windstream has been riding the growth Wave over the last several years. Are things starting to change? You may recall that a while back I said the company would continue to look strong as long as acquisitions continued. I asked what would happen when it slowed? That next chapter may be starting My Pick of the Week is the new Samsung Galaxy S III sm...

Travel always seems to elicit great customer service stories -- that is, great storiesfrom my perspective as a person who writes about CRM; not great as in "myexperience while traveling was wonderful, stress-free and restored my faith inhumanity." As fodder for columns, they're great. They're object lessons in how to sabotagecustomer relationships,...

If you've been accumulating redundant, carrier-locked communications hardware like phones and data cards and have been stuffing them all into a drawer likely never to be used again, you can repurpose some of it and realize some cost savings Modem data cards, sometimes called "dongles" or "data sticks," are well suited to this repurposing because ma...

This story was originally published on May 9, 2012, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series. Many people believe they can say what they want on the Internet as long as they use a pseudonym. After all, it is easy to set up an account using an anonymous alter ego. In addition to believing they can post whatever they want...

This story was originally published on April 5, 2012, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series. "The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you've got it made."