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This story was originally published on Jan. 20, 2010, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series. "Sustainability" has been the key issue capturing my attention this year, so it makes sense to tease apart just what that term means for CRM. To me, sustainability is about business processes that are repeatable and, more to t...

Part 1 of this three-part series addresses the way technology has made prisoners of office workers, who spend large parts of their lives confined to spaces much smaller than the typical jail cell The very nature of humanity has been changed by the nature of modern work. Where once workers were lean, muscled and tan, now they are pudgy, stooped and ...

Planet Gliese 581g, the so-called Goldilocks planet whose discovery was announced earlier this week, may help prove Earth is not the only habitable planet in the universe ...

From fragile early wax recordings to today's podcasts, the nation's audio heritage is at peril, a report from the Library of Congress has concluded The report, an outgrowth of a 2000 law mandating the Library of Congress to put together a national media preservation plan, found that efforts to preserve sound recordings are a haphazard patchwork thr...

SugarCRM has rolled out OEM Platform Edition, a new product for its software vendor anddistribution channel. The release doesn't further SugarCRM's opensource-based functionality. Rather, the company is repackaging the latestversion of Sugar 6, which came out this summer, ina format and with tools that will allow partners to enhance itwith their own customizations, white label it, and then resell it...

A study conducted jointly by Penn State University, Duke University and Intel Labs has found that some Android apps surreptitiously send user information to remote servers at ad networks and analytics firms Some of the apps send users' geographic locations to remote ad networks; others send a unique hardware identifier and, in some cases, the phone...

Congress is unlikely to pass legislation regulating the activities of broadband Internet service providers this year. And it's not clear when -- or if -- such rules will be enacted Democratic California Congressman Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, pulled a bill that was supposed to enforce the concept of Net ne...

AOL went on a buying binge this week It made headlines with the purchase of the TechCrunch blog network, but on the same day it also bought two promising startups -- Thing Labs and 5min Media....

I first met Dan Hesse, the CEO of Sprint, back in the mid 1990s and have since followed both his and Sprint's journey. Let me tell you the backstory of the battle Hesse is fighting to bring Sprint back to life. I will also share a few thoughts about where it is today in its recovery, and what we can expect going forward. When I met Dan Hesse, he w...

We all like to say our businesses are "customer-centric." It's the de rigueur thing to say these days, and it's the only smart way to describe yourself to your customer audience. It's also something many of us are eager to believe. But how many companies really revolve around the customer? Not many, and for realistic reasons. For instance, your bu...

Google CEO Eric Schmidt sees mobile devices augmenting our human existence in the future Speaking at the TechCrunch Disrupt event this week, he outlined a vision in which mobile phones will autonomously conduct searches for us, and we'll never be lonely or bored because we'll always be able to get in touch with friends or access content or entertai...

With the announcement of its PlayBook device, Research In Motion this week joined the ever-growing list of companies rushing to bring out tablets of their very own The company seems to be focusing on the enterprise, with the hope that corporate users will love their PlayBooks so much that it will spur consumer demand, much like what happened with t...

Facebook and Skype will soon announce a partnership, according to All Things Digital. The two companies will integrate a number of functions to enhance the user experience: Users will be able to call and SMS Facebook friends from Skype; Skype will integrate Facebook Connect into its system; and users will be able to video chat with Facebook friends.

The many laws enacted by states to ban textingwhile driving appear to be for naught, suggest findings from anew study by the Highway Loss Data Institute.It found no reductions in crashes after theselaws took effect. In fact, the bans were associated with a slightincrease in the frequency of auto insurance claims: Crash reports were upin three of the four states studied for the project after the bans wereinstituted...

Part 1 of this three-part series looks at a real-world case of IT transformation breakdown and explores the causes for the failure There are 10 basic principles that can have a substantial influence on the successful implementation of a large IT transformation program. These recommendations, or "10 Commandments," will help direct energies toward th...

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 those needs. However, the procurement landscape may change significantly with the latest breakthrough in IT -- cloud computing.

A lot went down at Oracle OpenWorld. Some very good reporting and analysis has come out of it all, and you can easily find it online if you wish. I was impressed with several things that Oracle did, including making strides in sales and marketing software and in introducing two new lines of compute servers. First off, the company said it was be...

One of the best productivity tools I had when I used Microsoft Windows was a collection of portable applications. I missed those tools when I migrated to Linux. Now several open source projects could make portable apps available to mainstream Linux users Three websites are trying to create that functionality. But the efforts might need more work be...

By all accounts, cloud computing is the future. The market will grow at five times the rate of traditional IT products, IDC has predicted, estimating it will be worth US$55.5 billion by 2014. While the future should be rosy, some policy groups are warning that without proper protections, the sector could stumble hard The problem is a law -- the E...

AOL on Tuesday confirmed it has agreed to acquire technologyblog TechCrunch, following a crescendo of rumors surrounding thepossible deal News of the deal was released on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt, a gathering being held inSan Francisco through Wednesday....