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With the weather barely permitting, the U.S. space exploration program reached another milestone on Friday: Atlantis blasted off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center on what will be the final space shuttle mission. The flight caps 30 years of achievements including the construction of the International Space Station. Atlantis will dock with the statio...

Electronics mega-retailer Best Buy will carry the Toshiba Thrive Android tablet at its online and brick-and-mortar stores this weekend ...

Comcast, Cablevision, Verizon, AT&T and Time Warner Cable have promised to be more proactive in alerting possible copyright violators using their networks in a voluntary agreement with the music and film industries. The antipiracy model they've adopted has been pushed for some time by the Recording Industry Association of America and Motion Pictur...

I am not now -- nor have I ever been -- an online gamer. I've never even thought about sitting down in front of a Sony PlayStation, Microsoft Xbox or any other game console. And until a few days ago, I considered the idea of paying real money to buy virtual goods to spruce up ones surroundings in imaginary worlds like "FarmVille" and "CityVille" just plain dumb...

Google's recent decision to abandon its Google Health program has raised new questions about how far the healthcare industry is willing to go down the cloud computing path. The reality is that Google's decision was not a reflection of the healthcare industry's resistance toward cloud computing, but simply a change in Google's corporate priorities. There is plenty of evidence that the healthcare industry is becoming more and more comfortable utilizing the cloud...

A year or so after it rolled out v.7.0, Sage CRM has updated its application with social media functionality, more interactivity, and tighter integration with email marketing, including a subscription-based service for managing email marketing campaigns. The latter, in particular, is of high value to customers, many of whom are small businesses th...

As Facebook announced on Wednesday that its subscribers will be able to launch video chats from its site using Skype technology, one sentence -- written by Philip Su, an engineer on Facebook's video calling team -- stood out in particular "Video chat has been around for years now, but it's still not an everyday activity for most people," Su wrote....

Amazon has announced three enhancements to its Cloud Drive and Cloud Player services, which launched earlier this year: a storage plan with unlimited space for music; free storage for all Amazon MP3 purchases; and iPad support for Cloud Player for Web. The Cloud Drive allows users to upload files to a digital drive that can be accessed from a rang...

Verizon on Thursday marched out its latest Android smartphone, the Droid 3 from Motorola. ...

Most businesses with which I am familiar, especially those of small to medium-size, are so caught up in day-to-day challenges that the only time they take a good look at the health of their business and the timeliness of the filing and payment of certain taxes and levies is when they review their annual statements with their accountants The way I a...

I recently heard a couple of very interesting interviews on the radio -- both with Bernie Marcus, one of the original founders of The Home Depot. They turned out to be two of the most interesting and important interviews I have heard. Marcus said that government regulation has grown so out of control that it would make starting and succeeding with...

A business that's succeeding at CRM (and that means the discipline of CRM, not the technology) will have come to some realizations. First off, even though the business no longer controls the conversation with the customer, that conversation has never been more important to pay attention to and to respond to in a coherent and, when possible, personalized way.

As we round the bend into the second half of 2011, enterprises face a triple threat on the IT security front. These threats won't be easily addressed merely by updating anti-virus programs. Some attacks will be capable of reaching even the security-minded users Here are three main threats that will dominate over the next six months....

There was much speculation leading up to Facebook's product rollout announcement on Wednesday -- and for once, it was right on the money. Facebook announced it will be integrating the popular video chat service Skype into its social network, with the rollout taking place over the next several weeks Facebook also announced improvements to its text c...

Microsoft has reportedly trained its Android patent guns on Samsung Electronics, demanding US$15 for every Android-based handset the Korean manufacturer produces If true, this could be the highest fee demanded by Redmond for its Android patents so far....

A major round of funding from private investors for social networking site Twitter has raised the valuation of the company to more than US$7 billion, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal That's almost double from December, when it raised $200 million in a round of funding led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers which at the time put the...

Retailers aren't investing seriously in mobile platforms right now, and who can blame them? Despite the lofty percentage growth cited by mobile shopping advocates, retailers privately lament anemic mobile conversion rates and report total revenue figures that can kindly be described as "modest." Enterprise e-commerce software solution providers ad...

If you are a regular reader, you know that from time to time I write about things that appear to be tangentially related to CRM -- at best. My favorite alternative to straight ahead research and reporting on CRM is a strange sounding thing called "peak oil." For those of you not familiar with the idea, peak oil refers to a not-so-hypothetical ceil...

When it comes to image viewers, one app is not always hands-down better than others. It is rare to find an image viewing tool that has every feature stockpiled on your wish list. So having a collection of go-to viewing tools to meet a variety of graphics needs is a better strategy. That said, the Geeqie Image Viewer goes a long way in keeping that...

It's difficult enough for most humans to grasp the idea that our planet is just one of countless others in our galaxy -- and a pretty small one, at that Then, of course, there's the concept that our galaxy is just one of billions of others in the universe -- sure to compound any confusion considerably....