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Online video has come a long way in a short period of time. In the last year alone, the use of video on websites has moved from an interesting anomaly to a critical feature that boosts search engine result standings, increases stickiness and improves conversion rates. The number of companies making the most of the video opportunity, however, remai...

Admit it: You never think about data storage any more. We used to, quite a bit. Long before the storage glut that exists today, there was already too much of it, and it was hard to find places to store it. When we built software, it was with an eye toward maximizing our limited storage capacities, we looked after computer memory the way thirsty...

Xfce is a niche desktop environment. But given the moves developers are making with changes to KDE 4 and Gnome 3, not to mention Ubuntu's new Unity desktop, Xfce may be just the ticket to take you to a calmer, more satisfying computing environment while staying with your favorite Linux distro....

Data center Quality of Service (QoS) and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) has a major impact on an enterprise's business growth and profits. IT departments and application developers seek architectures and deployments providing high service availability and resilient performance scalability to meet rising service demand while controlling capital and operating expenses...

Researchers in Japan are working on a device that has managed to intrigue -- or at least amuse -- public relations executives, social scientists and even the patent holders of a sanitizer for computer keyboards and other peripherals: an Internet-based kissing machine Yes....

The Obama administration has come up with a proposal for both improving and simplifying identity protection for consumers using the Internet, computers, and mobile devices. The plan would greatly reduce the need for consumers to use and remember multiple passwords or fill out separate privacy forms for multiple online accounts The administration's ...

The closer you look, the uglier it gets. More evidence about the Sony hacking has emerged. Apparently, Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) was part of the target when the Sony PlayStation Network was hacked. SOE handles online multilayer games. The SOE hacking was part of the Sony breach in mid-April that left the PlayStation Network down for the pas...

2011: The Year to Date, Part 1 In contrast to Apple's stunning success, the first calendar quarter of 2011 was a revolving door for other Silicon Valley companies and executives. There were management shifts, shakeups and ousters at AMD, Google, HP and Microsoft. They were variously aimed at jump-starting product momentum (AMD, Microsoft), polish...

The buzz around cloud computing has been so steady for so long that industry observers should be forgiven if they were lulled to sleep. But events of the past couple of weeks served as a cold water wake-up call that may have obscured cloud's supposedly bright future The first was an unplanned outage at an Amazon Web Services (AWS) datacenter in Nor...

Gartner's Business Intelligence Summit 2011 kicked off on Monday in Los Angeles. It is the sister conference to one held in the beginning of the year in London. While the keynote speakers and participating companies vary, the general themes running through both conferences are the same. One is that with every passing year, business intelligence te...

Enterprise mobility has matured past the point of early market penetration and the prototypical early adopters. ...

It's hard to believe, but the first quarter of 2011 is now a memory and we're well into spring. The tone for the year in high technology was set in early January: fast, bold, aggressive action and sweeping management changes. In the first four months of the year, high-tech vendors moved quickly and decisively to seize opportunities in established ...

Research In Motion announced two new BlackBerry Bold smartphones as well as version 7 of its BlackBerry operating system Monday at the BlackBerry World conference, being held in Orlando, Fla., through Wednesday ...

Today's business has come to rely on mobility. Employees take their laptops home, work on tablets and collaborate anywhere via the Web. Unfortunately, these productivity advancements have paved the way for new cyber-vulnerabilities against an organization's private data and intellectual property (IP). Can mobility continue to be a business benefit...

There is this debate going on in the analyst community with most arguing that the tablet market is like the PC market was, and Apple will once again be overwhelmed -- in this case largely by Google and Android. But a few of us, mostly me, are arguing that it is behaving much more like the iPod market, and Apple will emerge preeminent unless something big changes. Let's see who is right. ...

In today's information- and technology-driven economy, with its increased emphasis on specialized areas of technology like engineering, computer science and the life sciences, companies are increasingly reliant on the cross-border flow of information and labor. Part 1 of this three-part series briefly traces the intellectual property implications that may arise from such mobility, while Parts 2 and 3 examine U.S. and Canadian immigration law in a bit more depth...

In the big scheme of things, Microsoft's third fiscal quarter for 2011 was pretty good -- until, that is, one drills down and sees that its core product, Windows, delivered a disappointing performance, while recent computing developments, especially the consumer craze for tablets, are not exactly trending Microsoft's way. In general, sales and pr...

Hackers are reportedly attempting to sell 2.2 million credit card numbers stolen from the PlayStation Network database between April 17 and 19. Sony posted a blog on Wednesday stating that customers' personal data was encrypted, and there was no evidence at that time that credit card data was stolen; however, the company could not rule out the possibility...

Talk about your anti-climatic endings. Thirteen years after the Sturm und Drang that was the government prosecution of Microsoft on antitrust grounds, the mammoth, multi-million dollar case has ended with a straightforward, run-of-the-mill legal proceeding The case will end on May 12 without any further oversight hearings, Judge Colleen Kollar-Kote...

A long list of companies -- including big names such as Amazon, Dish Network, Wal-Mart, Best Buy and YouTube -- appear to be gearing up to enter the online video rental business. Of course, they all have visions of eventually overtaking the current market leader Netflix It makes sense. Streaming video is the future of home entertainment, and surely...