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This story was originally published on Dec. 22, 2010, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series. In the rush to Facebook, marketers are discovering that different kinds of content drive different kinds of results -- and different social networks respond in different ways. It was not that long ago that the experts warned th...

This story was originally published on Dec. 7, 2010, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series. Companies spend a lot of money to drive traffic to their websites. Reactive live chat implementations, while highly beneficial, are similar to search engine optimization -- "the more impressions, the better." However, placing a...

This story was originally published on Dec. 2, 2010, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series. With a much-anticipated NASA announcement Thursday, "The Devil in the Dark" is no longer the name of actor William Shatner's favorite original "Star Trek" episode, about a man-eating subterranean monster made ofcells based on si...

This story was originally published on Sept. 29, 2010, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series. Government information technology procurement has been largely conducted on an independent basis, with each federal agency determining its own needs and acquiring the infrastructure -- both hardware and software -- to meet tho...

One of the sad rumors to break last week was that Steve Jobs may have six weeks to live. I've had several people close to me die of cancer. One stepmother was given a few months, but she actually lived more than a year and did a number of amazing things. Another stepmother died two days after the initial diagnosis, and my uncle died ugly in three months. ...

Bold claim: Search-based applications (SBAs) are the next generation of search technology to enhance productivity and customer value for specific business processes by streamlining delivery of critical information. Skeptical response: Yeah, but don't most enterprises already have enterprise search, BI and production reporting technologies along w...

Security guards at the 2011 RSA conference in San Francisco had a little surprise in store for reporters queuing up to attend former President Bill Clinton's keynote speech on Friday ...

Twenty years from now, semiconductor chips will cost a penny apiece and will be in everything -- our clothing, our sunglasses, our contact lenses and even our toilets -- physicist Michio Kaku told an audience Thursday at the RSA 2011 convention They'll revolutionize warfare, manufacturing and the medical field, said Kaku, one of the co-founders of ...

Fresh from a super-sized "Jeopardy" victory where it looked suspiciously like President Obama's ubiquitous teleprompter, IBM supercomputer Watson is about to become Dr. Watson, M.D. assistant. ...

Following on the heels of the explosive growth of social media phenomena like Facebook, Wikipedia and Twitter, companies are exploring whether they can leverage the "wisdom of the crowds" to solve the problem of connecting the bits of information that can lead to innovative products and improved service. Instead of a process-based technology (like...

Zendesk, a Web-based help desk software provider, has not shied away from the mobile market, despite the traditional view of a help desk or customer service rep working at a desktop. It has introduced applications for the iPhone, BlackBerry and Android and now, the iPad. This application is the best yet because of extra screen space the device pro...

As IBM celebrates its centennial this year, the company is building technologies to take us into the future IBM's Watson computer has pounded its human opponents on the game show "Jeopardy," signaling huge improvements in the development of artificial intelligence and cognitive computing....

Motorola Mobility CEO Sanjay Jha provided more details about his company's new tablet, the Xoom, in a speech Thursday at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. Jha confirmed the Xoom's price will be US$799 when it launches on Verizon Wireless, and the WiFi version will be $600, according to press reports Jha also reportedly let it slip that...

Three solar flares will hit the Earth Thursday and Friday, according to scientists, possibly triggering a bigger show of the Aurora Borealis, also known as the northern lights They may also impact the Earth's magnetic field to some degree, depending on the direction of the magnetic field accompanying them....

Late last year, an online battle erupted when Wikileaks supporters attacked the websites of businesses that had attempted to sever ties with the online leak depository following Wikileaks' release of thousands of secret U.S. State Department cables. Is it fair to call the dust-up to first cyberwar? And are we facing more cyberwars now? ...

Ten-4. Back to you. Over. On a radio or over the TV airwaves, speakers have to rely on back-and-forth communications because radio traffic only flows in one direction at a time on a frequency. Or so said scientific conventional wisdom, until Stanford researchers developed so-called "full duplex" radios that can send and receive signals at the ...

As I prepare to attend the CTIA show in Orlando, Fla., next month, I am getting calls and emails from healthcare companies wanting to meet with me. That is amazing. The lines that separated healthcare and wireless are blurring. We are in the early stages of the healthcare industry working with the wireless and telecom industry to create an entirely new business segment with loads of new opportunities, risks and challenges.

Every corporation has a face. Imagery, shine and style are interlayered into a skin that appears as a mask; uplift captured by a distinct name identity poises it to reach the upper stratosphere of stardom. Corporate masks are just like real people: Some are exciting and some boring; some you remember and some you forget; some you like, and some yo...

One of the misconceptions that has bedeviled CRM has been the idea that it is simply a technology you buy and implement, thus solving your problems. Technology is a part of scaling your processes for managing customer relationships, to be sure, but in reality it's a link in a chain of decisions and activities that form your business' discipline around CRM. Any weak links will cause the whole chain to fail...

Part 1 of this series explores the markets and industries surrounding polymers in computing. Part 2 investigates electroactive polymers. Part 3 details the development of organic polymer memory devices Nurdles. Aglets. Bakelite. Cellophane....