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One of the great promises of the Social CRM revolution was -- at least in my mind -- the opportunity for quick, creative, smaller companies to develop the same sort of customer relationships that larger companies could afford to create. There's a gulf between small businesses, which may speak or even see their customers in a one-to-one scenario, a...

It seems that every time we turn around, another major security breach has occurred The latest was the data breach at Epsilon, which manages customer databases and provides third-party email marketing services to 2,500 corporate clients, including some of America's biggest firms....

Experiments conducted at the Tevatron particle accelerator at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois seem to indicate that a new particle has been found A paper posted on the laboratory's website Monday brought out this point....

Flick through your TV guide -- soon enough you'll find 20 new YouTube channels. That's a lot of laughing babies Google is planning to spend as much as US$100 million to produce 20 new YouTube channels offering a combination of original new Internet-only content and content already on the site, according to a Wall Street Journal article.

A different type of deployment for near field communications will be rolled out in Salt Lake City in early to mid 2012 -- different that is, from the projects rumored to be under way at Apple, Google and Amazon. Officials of the city and Isis, a mobile commerce joint venture between AT&T Mobility, T-Mobile USA and Verizon Wireless, announced they ...

Many economists, including Paul Krugman and Nouriel Roubini, have argued that the European Monetary Union is in trouble because of the fiscal difficulties of a few of its member countries. Some have predicted that the euro will fail. Because the prospects for a future single global currency depend upon the continued success of the euro and the c...

New technology may be cool, but it can also be a double-edged sword. Different industries are starting to overlap, and even though the blending of different technologies can be very exciting, it can also be very confusing. One example is how cable television companies have been starting to use the Apple iPad and other tablet computers as a super-p...

The mumbling and fiddling with equipment as SugarCRM prepared to brief analysts and the media in the Napa events room at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco on Monday pretty much set the tone for things to come The Windows XP laptop shut down during the setup. "Why do we buy crappy XP boxes?" growled SugarCRM CEO Larry Augustin....

Space may be the final frontier in many senses of the word, but it's by no means the only one facing mankind. Targeting one of the great mysteries that still exist here on Earth, entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson on Tuesday announced his plans to begin a series of deep-sea explorations through Virgin Oceanic, a brand-new initiative In fact, Virgin O...

AMD has begun shipping production units of its 32nm quad-core "Llano" A-series accelerated processor units (APUs) with discrete-level graphics, it announced Wednesday That's well behind Intel, which began working on the 32nm process in 2009 and began shipping 32nm processors in 2010....

Blockbuster -- once the king of video rentals -- has reached an ignoble end. The carcass of the once-sterling company has been snatched up for nothing, for its bones Dish Network announced on Wednesday that it was the winning bidder in the bankruptcy court auction for the assets of Blockbuster. The satellite company's winning bid was approximately ...

The state of Web security has never been pretty, and a new report from Symantec discussing current and future threats only highlights just how risky the Internet environment has become. The daily volume of Web-based attacks increased an eye-popping 93 percent from 2009 to 2010, the report says -- and that's a particularly significant increase give...

There is a not-so-subtle shift taking place in the world of IT, and the culprit is cloud computing. For the past two years, media and vendors alike have proclaimed the cloud to be the next wave of IT -- promising to change computing as we know it. The reactions of many IT veterans who have lived through similar marketing barrages in the past have ranged from a cautious wait-and-see attitude to out-and-out skepticism. ...

Zuora and Salesforce.com have announced a new offering that highlights the strengths of each company and delivers new functionality to the telecommunications industry. Zuora for the Communications Industry is a solution based on the Force.com platform that handles billing, payments and customer care for telco and related industries' customers This...

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Last week, media giants including the Associated Press, The Washington Post, and Dow Jones sent a cease-and-desist letter targeting the iPad app Zite, which aggregates news based on a user's Twitter and Google Reader activity. It may not be legal or fair for apps like Zite to collect content and present it absent the originator's advertisements, but many observers argue that this is where the industry is headed, whether anyone likes it or not...

A federal grand jury has subpoenaed Pandora to produce documents in what could be an industry-wide investigation of smartphone apps In an SEC filing, Pandora said the subpoena was served early 2011, and it was told it wasn't a specific target of the probe....

Texas Instruments announced on Tuesday that it has signed an agreement to acquire its rival, National Semiconductor, in an all-cash transaction totaling US$6.5 billion. This will merge two leading analog semiconductor companies. National's shareholders will receive $25 a share, 78 percent higher than its most recent closing price of $14.07. Both c...

In yet another step binding it closer to IBM, SugarCRM has acquired iExtensions, the CRM solution for Lotus Notes A big part of our business is international," SugarCRM CEO Larry Augustin announced to an audience of analysts and reporters at SugarCon in San Francisco on Monday. "Quite a number of our big customers in Europe are on Notes and need No...

The U.S. Department of Transportation not only wants to construct highways, subways, railroads and airports for the traveling public, but also wants to build bridges to information technology vendors and providers The department has just launched a program to engage vendors and help educate DoT employees about available information technologies. Du...