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Competition has been increasing in the cable television world in recent years, and we have been expecting prices to come down, but they haven't. I have been scratching my head wondering why competition from satellite and telephone companies wasn't working. Well, it's taken years, but apparently the wait is over. The cable television industry has f...

This story was originally published on Aug. 25, 2010, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series. I feel like social CRM has become a burger joint. "You want fries with that?" is the traditional up-sell question made famous in skits and jokes, but now I feel like we need to ask something akin in social CRM. The revised qu...

So Turkey Day has come and gone for another year here in the good old U-S-of-A, but what comes next might be even better -- at least from a geek's perspective That's right, it's Black Friday once again, and the tech shopping deals are ripe for the picking.

It's often useful to interview customers to understand their perspectives about their suppliers. In these discussions, open-ended questions about supplier "success stories" and "horror stories" can prompt enlightening replies. Answers in the latter category invariably connect to some supplier failure to deliver, an implementation problem that had implications for the customer's business. And a surprising number of these problems were traced by the customer to some change in the supplier's IT and business systems that rippled through to impact on the customer organization. ...

This story was originally published on Aug. 27, 2010, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) -- enacted in the waning days of the 20th century -- contains provisions designed to make it evolve over time. The idea was that as technology fostered new ways of creating and distribu...

This story was originally published on Aug. 11, 2010, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series Last week in New York, I began some field research in social CRM that will result in a longer paper later this fall. One of the things that interested me was the level of frustration and, well, anger that some customers have for...

This story was originally published on Aug. 24, 2010, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series. Many a techie is looking at the cloud and seeing the shape of the future -- but that shape is often starkly defined by the data center, leaving little room for visions of mobile. Yet the cloud will undoubtedly shape-shift mobil...

Motorola announced Wednesday that it will develop a hands-free wireless computing headset with micro-display specialists at Kopin -- a move reminiscent of previous attempts to create wearable computers and communications devices The device will offer voice, audio and PC capabilities on a virtual reality-style 15-inch monitor that will also support...

Acer on Tuesday entered the tablet PC market, announcing that it will launch two Android tablets and a third running Windows 7 in early 2011 One Android tablet will have a 7-inch screen; the other will have a 10.1-inch screen. The Windows tablet will also have a 10.1-inch screen. The company has also unveiled a dual-screen tablet concept called the...

Look for an overall bigger holiday spending pie with e-commerce grabbing a bigger slice. ComScore has forecast that Internet retailers will enjoy an 11-percent gain over last year's holiday billing. The firm expects e-commerce spending to total US$32.4 billion during the November-through-December period, much stronger than 2009's 4 percent increase...

With more than 500 million people around the globe spending 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook, there is no question that it is the most important and pervasive social ecosystem in the world. It's no wonder that brands of all shapes, sizes and offerings are leveraging the user base to connect with customers and prospects alike. However, whi...

Dreamforce, Salesforce.com's annual user meeting and thought leadership confab, is two weeks away, and the anticipation for this event is palpable. In a tough economy, people are looking for the company to do some magic and lift our spirits The company did a smart thing by turning on its new collaboration product, Chatter, for any attendee wanting...

New app choices have a habit of getting in the way of older favorites. Sometimes, a new approach or design can tempt you to give up one approach to solving a computing need by replacing it with another. That is the case with personal information manager (PIM) apps ...

With Black Friday fast approaching, I've been thinking a lot about how various forms of technology have become ingrained into our everyday lives You may be wondering exactly what the busiest shopping day of the year has to do with the spread of new technology. That's a fair question. The answer -- at least for me -- is everything....

Shares of HP moved up Tuesday -- while most tech stocks were down -- after the company posted strong results. The message boards were upbeat on CEO Leo Apotheker's first earnings call. The drama of Larry Ellison's attempt to subpoena Apotheker for the Oracle vs. SAP trial seems to have left little dust on HP The company reported net revenue of...

Links to malware-infested sites and other threats lurk in many Facebook users' news feeds, according to research from security vendor BitDefender. Among approximately 14,000 Facebook users who installed BitDefender's Safego security and privacy app, about one in five has malware in his or her news feed....

With a catchy title -- "Broadband NextGen 911" -- U.S. Federal Communications Commission and Department of Transportation officials want to bring emergency services into the age of technology with more than just a three-number telephone call. "Today's 9-1-1 system doesn't support the communication tools of tomorrow," FCC Chairman Julius Genachowsk...

The New Zealand High Court recently ruled that a former cricketer accused of match-fixing over Twitter can pursue his Twitter libel case Lalit Modi, a cricketing administrator, took to Twitter to accuse Chris Cairns, a former cricketer, of match-fixing on Twitter. Cairns in turn filed a lawsuit, claiming that Modi's tweet was libelous.

Total cost of ownership is a financial estimate that helps enterprise managers determine direct and indirect costs of a system. TCO goes beyond the initial purchase price or implementation cost to consider the full cost of an asset over its useful life. TCO and ROI, or return on investment, are frequently confused and misused, but they actually mu...

Part 1 of this two-part series takes a look at some of the reasons government agencies are turning to open source to get more IT bang for their dwindling bucks The marketing stars appear to be coming into alignment for the vendors of open source offerings who are targeting the U.S. government. Significant barriers to adopting open source technology...