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The starting gun has just been fired. The new Amazon Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet have entered the tablet space, preparded to compete with the Apple iPad. That means this new industry segment will quickly change and evolve into a completely new and different model. The problem is, no one is educating us as consumers and investors about this change. We have decisions and choices to make...

When the so-called experts dispense advice about CRM implementations, whether they're first-timers or replacements of old systems, they always include a caveat about the future. You need to solve today's problems with the new system, but you also need a way to "future-proof" your investment so that the next set of problems to present themselves don't force you back into the CRM selection process...

Losing a laptop may be less painful now than it used to be because the cost of replacing the physical device has trickled downward recently. You can now pick up a decent workhorse for three or four hundred dollars at a big-box retailer. Big deal if you lose it. What hasn't become less valuable, though, is the data held within. In fact, the data ha...

HP on Wednesday announced its first ultrabook for the business sector, as well as new additions to its Envy and Pavilion notebook lines The ultrabook, called the "HP Folio 13," claims up to nine hours of battery life, the longest on the market....

Windows 8 will change the way Microsoft's flagship operating system will deal with updates, the company recently announced. Windows Update will consolidate all restarts released over each month to synchronize with Patch Tuesday This means users' PCs will only restart when security updates are installed and require a restart....

The TV world may soon go the way of the phone and the music industry: a complete deconstruction thanks to the Internet. The next step may come from Sony. The company is experimenting with an online TV service according to a recent Wall Street Journal report. Sony has reportedly reached out to several large media companies, including NBC, News Corp...

Although computers have been called "thinking machines," their internal operations have very little to do with how the original thinking machine -- the human brain -- actually works. That's changing, however, as some researchers at MIT and the University of Texas Medical School have demonstrated in a new computer chip that mimics how the brain learns as it receives new information...

The board was re-elected, company executives were questioned about corporate strategy, a proposal to create a sustainability committee was killed. All in all, it was business as usual at Microsoft's annual shareholders' meeting Tuesday, except for some uncomfortable talk -- uncomfortable from Microsoft's perspective, that is -- about whether parts of the company should be spun off...

Turkey hotlines revolutionized the way home cooks dealt with kitchen emergencies during Thanksgiving. Now, hotlines are being joined by social media, videos, apps and other twenty-first century ways of solving bird problems ...

There was a guest post on the Forbes Magazine blog last month that I can't get out of my head: "For Enterprise IT, Time to Move Beyond SAP." For the record, I am an ERP dilatant -- I know about it but don't follow it with the same passion that I follow CRM. And as far as SAP is concerned, I have rarely met a bunch of smarter business people who ar...

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Something as simple and common as using an online pseudonym could technically be a violation of the law if the United States Department of Justice gets what it wants The DoJ on Tuesday asked Congress to impose harsher penalties on various types of cyberactivities, including cybercrime....

Tech heavyweights such as Google, Facebook, Twitter and Zynga are lining up in opposition to a copyright enforcement bill that will be the subject of a hearing in the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee on Wednesday: the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA The companies sent a letter to key members of both congressional chambers calling the bi...

Many Facebook users have complained recently about a spam flood of a most unsavory nature Some say pornographic images and images depicting extreme violence -- sometimes both -- are showing up in their News Feeds without their consent. Others say their accounts are being used to send friends links to explicit videos and other messages....

Research In Motion announced on Tuesday two new smartphones based on the BlackBerry 7 OS, the BlackBerry Bold 9790 and BlackBerry Curve 9380. RIM calls the Bold 9790 a compact, fully-loaded, high-performance smartphone. The model boasts a high-resolution touch display and a highly tactile keyboard. The Bold packs 8 GB of on-board memory with an expandable memory slot of up to 32 GB...

Researchers at Northwestern University say they've made significant progress in research that could lead to longer life for the rechargeable batteries found in electronic gadgets A team of engineers working on a lithium-ion battery said that by taking a chemical engineering approach, they've made a power cell that not only lasts longer, but can als...

Google is adding 24/7 phone support for its Google Apps for Business product line -- the first time since the apps launched in 2007 It is a major step forward for Google, which has been pushing to place these apps on the desktop alongside -- or even, hopefully, in place of -- Microsoft's productivity offerings....

For U.S.-based retailers, running a successful global e-commerce business takes the right balance of strong local marketing and effective operations. While it is essential that retailers cater to local customer experience expectations, it is also critically important to abide by local laws and regulations Following are six recommendations on how t...

The U.S. government's plan to shift major chunks of existing and future information technology programs to cloud-based systems has proven to be easy to say but harder to do. Technical, cultural and financial issues are frequently raised by agency managers as barriers to adopting cloud technology Various initiatives have been launched to encourage c...

Open source and innovation are locked in a dynamic and symbiotic relationship. Open source, community-based development evolved to meet developer needs for access and openness. While early open source represented innovation in development processes -- and, of course, was enabled by the emergence of the Internet and Web search -- it did not always...