Articles by

The recently concluded Dreamforce conference in San Francisco might have been the most successful CRM conference ever. That's not hyperbole. I have been at some major events in the last 10 years that rival this year's Dreamforce. For instance, whenever Siebel had a user conference, that was also major. But a lot has happened since the last time Siebel held an independent user event not associated with Oracle -- that was in 2005 and much has happened in the intervening six years...

...

Microsoft inched further toward the tablet world Tuesday by revealing a slew of new details about its upcoming Windows 8 operating system at its Build developers conference, being held in Anaheim, Calif., through Friday ...

California lawmakers have reached a compromise with Amazon over state sales tax, ending a back and forth battle that has raged all summer. State lawmakers approved a compromise bill that will give Amazon a one-year break from collecting state sales tax. Amazon's stock price rose nearly 5 percent on the news. Part of the compromise includes Amazon ...

AMD announced on Tuesday that it has been awarded the Guinness World Record for computer processor speed for an overclocked version of its upcoming eight-core FX desktop processor This CPU hit a top speed of 8.429 GHz with the help of specialist teams, as well as a heavy dose of liquid nitrogen and helium for cooling....

VMworld 2011 occurred a couple of weeks ago, but the energized crowd of 19,000-plus attendees and the raft of VMware and partner announcements that accompanied it make it worth revisiting. I'll start by considering VMware's central position in two of the IT industry's most dynamic sectors: virtualization and cloud computing. Virtualization and clo...

The Durbin Amendment is well-known throughout the financial services community thanks to extensive media analysis over the past year. Originally scheduled to take effect last month, the Durbin Amendment, an addition to the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, will now take effect in October. Initiated as a result of merchant concerns about their costs for accepting debit card transactions, the Durbin Amendment limits the amount a card issuer can collect for debit card interchange fees -- also called "swipe fees." ...

The break-in and theft of security certificates from a Dutch authority brought home, once again, how vulnerable Web browsers can be to hackers pretending to be who they're not The authority, DigiNotar, is one of many that issue security certificates for websites. The digital certificates tell a browser to "trust" content coming from a certain site....

After six years of debate over patent reform, the U.S. Senate last week overwhelmingly approved the America Invents Act, a sweeping overhaul of the U.S. patent system that intends to weed out unnecessary patents and put the country more on par with international patent procedures The bill, authored by Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., passed with a bipart...

AT&T announced on Monday that it would add three new 4G smartphones running Windows Phone 7.5, aka "Mango," in the fourth quarter It also pledged to update existing WinPho7 devices to Mango this fall....

H.R. 1981, a U.S. federal bill which apparently seeks to combat child pornography, has stirred up opposition from various lawmakers as well as civil rights groups The proposed law, introduced in May and now under consideration in Congress, is the joint creation of Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, chairman of the Judiciary Committee; and Rep. Debbie Wass...

At the biggest Salesforce.com event to date, Dreamforce '11, vendors had ample opportunities to strut their stuff. In fact, more than 46,000 people -- many of them very socially engaged -- registered this year. "In less than a decade, Dreamforce has become the largest conference in the enterprise software industry," Fergus Griffin, vice president ...

Carol Bartz got fired last week -- the Yahoo Board handled it badly, and she went ugly. Steve Ballmer is also seen as a failure both inside and outside Microsoft, and it is widely held that the only reason he hasn't been fired is that he and his best friend, Bill Gates, own the Microsoft Board. On an even larger scale, President Obama's approva...

More than 50 percent of e-commerce shoppers cited shipping as a reason for abandoning their shopping carts online, according to research conducted by Royal Mail, the UK equivalent of the U.S. Postal Service. Furthermore, 43 percent of consumers' retailer choices were influenced by their delivery experiences and options, the Interactive Media in R...

First it gave Apple the preliminary injunction it was seeking against Samsung's Galaxy Tab. Then it suggested it might have been at least partly mistaken. Now the Dusseldorf court that has been hearing Apple's patent suit against Samsung's Galaxy 10.1 tablet, has confirmed that yes, Samsung's German subsidiary may not sell the device in Europe. Th...

For the first time in the search engine's history, Google revealed just how much electricity it takes to power its massive computing infrastructure Google announced that for the year 2010, it used 2.6 million megawatt-hours of energy to run its data centers, search mechanisms, Gmail, YouTube and display ads globally. That number is about what it wo...

In my previous commentary in this space, I suggested that the evolution of the channel in the cloud is entering a new stage in its development. Last month's Dreamforce conference, hosted by Salesforce.com, served as a showcase for a series of new channel initiatives which clearly indicate the growing importance cloud vendors are placing on the channel for their future success...

The majority of salesforce automation software that is on the market and designed for small and medium-sized businesses has never fully felt quite right to users -- or for that matter, to JustEnough CEO Malcolm Buxton. ...

FSF's Star Turn in the Android FUDathon, Part 3 "Strike while the iron is hot" -- and the usual suspects have made Android licensing a hot issue. However, the title of the FSF article, "Android GPLv2 termination worries -- one more reason to upgrade to GPLv3," gives the game away. This is about politics, not licensing. About pushing a specific ag...

Behind the Paywall, Part 2: You Gotta Have a Gimmick Fan sites are immune from many of the Achilles' heels that plague other media outlets.