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Do you know how much money you will lose if your e-commerce site fails for just one hour? What if your site slows down? The more tags and pixels you have on your site, the more likely you are to find out....

Skype's code has been hacked and its innards published on the Web by Efim Bushmanov, a self-described freelance researcher in the tiny Komi Republic, about 870 miles from Moscow His aim, he said, was to make Skype open source....

Maybe the "printer" part of "3D printer" is not exactly the right word, since printing has so long been thought of as a two-dimensional process of applying ink to paper. But the term, like the 3D printing process itself, seems to be here to stay 3D printers, which use a wide range of technologies to produce actual objects from digital files, are be...

On the eve of the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) Monday, Microsoft premiered a lineup of new games for the Xbox 360, including "Gears of War 3" and "Forza Motorsport 4." The company also debuted the trailer for "Halo 4" and unveiled the next installment of "Fable," by developer Peter Molyneux ...

Pop star Lady Gaga is joining with Google's Eric Schmidt to produce a new social media site called "Backplane," according to The New York Times. Tony Carter, Gaga's manager, is at the helm of the operation and is attracting capital from important backers. So far, the company has raised more than US$1 million from a group of investors including Tomorrow Ventures, headed by Google Chairman Eric Schmidt.

Who Watches the Watchmen, Part 3: Flying Headlong Into a Cloud Enterprises and other large organizations have already begun riding the wave of the consumerization of IT, and the voice of the mobile device user is being heard through the land....

A legal dispute between Oracle and erstwhile client Montclair State University illustrates that despite the steady evolution of ERP technology and implementation methodologies, these projects can still turn ugly. The two have filed suits against each other over a failed project, called the "Bell Tower Initiative." Montclair has accused Oracle of v...

Last week marked the beginning of a big experiment for me: first living and then retiring outside of the U.S. I figure there are a lot of boomers like me who are exploring this idea as we become increasingly concerned about the costs of living in our chosen country and the inability of governments to balance budgets. My wife and I looked at Cos...

Sony's security nightmare just won't end. Earlier this week, malicious hackers released a bundle of personal information on thousands of Sony customers that was stolen -- quite easily, according to the infiltrators -- from Sony's IT systems.

Gmail is not the only e-mail service whose users have been targeted by spear-phishing hackers. Users at Yahoo Mail and Hotmail are also on the email infiltrators' hit lists, according to security firm Trend Micro The attacks on the latter two email systems appear to be separately conducted, said Nart Villeneuve, senior threat researcher at Trend Mi...

Popular online coupon marketer Groupon filed for an initial public offering with the SEC on Thursday, meaning the public will soon have the chance to buy into one the world's fastest-growing companies Groupon hopes to raise US$750 million in the deal, which will be underwritten by a group of investors from Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse and Goldman ...

Planetariums may date back to the far reaches of recorded time, but the first widely known example -- an ancient cast-metal globe made by Archimedes to predict the movements of the planets -- now seems to have little in common with the technological marvels that have become widespread today Rather than focusing on planets and predictions, today's p...

LinkedIn has been a public company for roughly two weeks, but its brief history on Wall Street should give the people running other social media companies a lot to think about. The biggest question to ponder is whether they should go public now -- or as soon as they can convince an investment bank to shepherd them through the process -- or wait un...

Business Process Management provider AuraPortal has added a new module to its product lineup -- Marketing Campaigns, or MC. It is based on template-oriented pattern processes -- as all of AuraPortal's applications are -- which means it can be easily tailored by end-users. MC is able to follow up on any type of campaign, explained Scott Rich, gener...

Google has reportedly pulled several Android mobile applications that were lousy with malware from its official Android Market. This follows a report earlier this week from Lookout Mobile Security, which claimed it found dozens of apps in the market that contained malicious code....

Who Watches the Watchmen, Part 2: Uncle Sam, Are You Naked? The current U.S. presidential administration is committed to the cloud, and Washington has targeted about one quarter of its US$80 billion IT budget for potential migration to the cloud....

Microsoft began its Windows 8 publicity blitz in earnest Wednesday, previewing an operating system that appears to break from the norm in more ways than one It has a tile interface similar to that of Windows Phone 7, it will run on PCs and tablets, and it will support both touchscreen and mouse-and-keyboard interactions....

HP is trolling for partners as the computer giant attempts to build an ecosystem for webOS, the operating system it acquired last summer when it bought Palm for US$1.2 billion. CEO Leo Apotheker said that he sees webOS as a licensing opportunity. At All Things Digital's D9 conference on Wednesday, Apotheker noted that webOS is an outstanding opera...

The Gmail accounts of hundreds of high-profile individuals were hijacked through a so-called spear phishing campaign originating in China, according to Google Hackers apparently gained access to users' accounts using passwords likely obtained through malicious software and targeted phishing techniques....

In a recent article for the E-Commerce Times titled "Is the World Headed Toward a Single Global Currency?" I asked Morrison Bonpasse, the president of the Single Global Currency Association, about his thoughts on currency consolidation. Since then, I've given some thought to how the world's multi-currency financial transactions affect business. I...