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A vestige of the music wars at the turn of the century was shut down Wednesday by a federal district court judge in Manhattan File-sharing service LimeWire was ordered by Judge Kimba M. Wood to stop distributing its peer-to-peer software because its overwhelming use was to encourage its users to make unauthorized copies of copyrighted material....

It's often hard to maintain high visibility in the marketplace if you happen to be a private company, and for good reason. Private companies tend to be small, and they often do not attract the attention of the financial press precisely because the financial press thrives on the transparency and numbers that small companies prefer to keep to themselves.

Microsoft has been trying to crack open the enormous opportunity in the cellular industry for a decade. CEO Steve Ballmer always says the company's software is terrific, but it has never seemed to move the needle. Could that be about to change? Microsoft is about to release its newest version, Windows Phone 7, and we are about to see. This will be...

When it comes to the broad topic of "CRM failure," you often hear the same tales: a too-complicated integration, an incompetent integrator or inflexible technology. The reality is that technology is usually not the problem, nor is it integration or integrators. If you push, you'll find that the most common CRM killer is adoption failure. That is, ...

Part One of this series discussed the push toward IPv6 The drive to IPv6, the newer Internet communications protocol, appears to be driven by major networking vendors. Their contention is that we're running out of IPv4 network addresses....

Myspace announced a site redesign Wednesday as it attempts to cement its position as an entertainment niche in social networking and stem the flow of users to the exit door. The News Corp. unit is seeking to become the online destination for "social entertainment" -- a place where Gen Y'rs can share music and videos, as well as share likes and dislikes with fellow fans...

Barnes & Noble took a big swipe at Amazon's dominance of the e-reader market with the introduction Wednesday of a new color Nookreader and a program to encourage the development of apps for its devices The US$249 Nook Color is designed to appeal to readers interested in periodicals and graphic books as well as traditional text-dominated books, and ...

Dismayed by the prospect of Google acquiring a key service provider in the travel industry, online traveler providers have banded together to formalize their opposition to the deal. In July, Google announced a US$700 million agreement to acquire ITA Software, a company that provides airline travel software and counts among its clients airlines suc...

Over the last couple of years, in presentations around the U.S. about social media, I've asked audience members whether they take the time to read website terms of service (TOS), privacy policies or click wrap agreements. Very few have raised their hands. At a recent SIM (Society of Information Management) Advanced Practice Council conference, o...

Do you ever marvel at those step-by-step how-to product demos of software apps that end-users post on places like YouTube? It is often easy to spot these demo videos shot with cellphone cams or PC eye cams placed over the user's shoulder But two cool Linux apps give you a the ability to record directly to a file whatever's being shown on your compu...

The Obama administration has recently turned up the heat on moving to IPv6, the next version of the Internet protocol after the one currently in use, IPv4. Federal CIO Vivek Kundra issued a memo Sept. 28 instructing CIOs of executive departments and agencies in the federal government to take several actions, including enabling the use of native IPv6, by the end of 2012...

Citing First Amendment protections, a U.S. District Court judge in Seattle has ruled in favor of Amazon.com in its battle with North Carolina over potentially sensitive customer data the state claims it needs to calculate taxes Judge Marsha J. Pechman ruled Monday that Amazon is not obligated to provide the names, addresses and purchasing records o...

Freelance software developer Eric Butler has released Firesheep, a plug-in to the Firefox Web browser that lets anyone capture cookies from an open WiFi network and possibly steal their owners' identities Firesheep is free and open source program available for the Mac OS X and Windows platforms. Butler is working on a Linux version....

The personnel shakeup taking place at Digg offers an example of how difficult it can be for a social media site to make the transition from a popular online destination to a profitable business enterprise. In addition to losing its top sales and finance executives, Digg is reducing its total workforce from 67 to 42 people. Digg CEO Matt Williams a...

Out there on the branding battlefields, it's simply do or die, as a brand image is eitherhypervisible or mortally lost in oblivion. Commanding success for any idea on the global scene demands universal e-commerce access that is only deliverable by a cybername identity, as it's the only key to open the site. Without it, accessibility to any cyberem...

Despite advances in technology, online fraud and payment security continue to be significant issues and cost drivers for e-commerce merchants. Web applications are the leading source of data breaches and account for the majority of compromised data records. The majority of these records contain payment card data -- highly sought after because it is relatively easy for criminals to monetize. ...

Based on the findings of the Competitive Framework and interviews with end-users, Aberdeen's analysis of the Best-in-Class demonstrates that the success of the contact center strategy depends on a combination of specific capabilities and technology enablers. ...

A huge gingerbread man has been put up on the Google campus in Mountain View, Calif., suggesting that Gingerbread, the next release of Android, may be released soon. ...

When Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone at Macworld 2007, he didn't just change the way people view their phones; he changed how they view their lives. Unlike the way they used the workplace-dominant BlackBerry, consumers wanted to use their personal iPhone as an all-in-one phone that could integrate their personal and work lives. C-level executives, ...

Roughly a year after water molecules were first discovered on the moon, scientists last week announced that water is present in much greater quantities there than had originally been thought ...