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Two privacy flaws in Facebook were quickly patched Wednesday, but for security experts the breaches are just signs of what may be chronic problems with the social network's ability to preserve the sensitive data of its more than 400 million members The flaws were linked to a feature that's part of Facebook's new -- and controversial -- privacy sett...

A new attempt to offer regulations for Internet privacy may be a so-called discussion draft, but so far the discussion has been anything but promising for Virginia Congressman Rick Boucher, a man who cosponsored the 2005 Consumer Privacy Protection Act The Democrat released the draft legislation on Tuesday along with its cosponsor, Florida Republic...

In the post-Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) world, board members face multiple challenges that they must address if they are to fulfill their fiduciary duties. Having a former top corporate executive and experienced board member address these challenges provides a wonderful window of opportunity for current and prospective board members. Recently, I was able...

Several years ago analysts began trumpeting the finding that operational costs had surpassed capital costs as the dominant source of expense in IT infrastructure. Despite evidence supporting this claim, many IT managers for a time continued to focus primarily on capex. However, over the past few years, server virtualization and other data center consolidation efforts have squeezed costs from the capex side of the equation, resulting in a broader awareness of operational costs along with a greater impetus to address the problem...

CRM is not a technology; it's a discipline that encompasses people, processes and technology. How many times have you heard that truism? How many times have you heard it from a CRM vendor? Many times, I'd imagine -- but internalizing that concept is not as simple as it seems. Practicing a truly complete CRM approach is a company-wide endeavor. Impl...

Starting your own blog does not have to be an arduous endeavor "You just do it! There is way too much anxiety over blogging," said Lorrie Thomas, chief executive officer of Web Marketing Therapy....

Looking to improve its ability to integrate across various cloud ecosystems, IBM on Monday bought integration services provider Cast Iron Systems The latest addition to IBM's infrastructure portfolio comes amid a rolling thunder of acquisitions in the technology space, a result of confidence that the economy is improving and a validation that new s...

On the heels of news that the Google Chrome Web browser is gaining market share while Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser is losing ground, both companies took the wraps off faster, next-generation browsers Wednesday Google released a new beta of its Chrome browser which is much faster than the previous version and has several new features....

Google's impending launch of an e-bookstore could make it easier for consumers to get digital books, but it's difficult to tell how this development will impact the competitive landscape in this suddenly booming market The market for e-book readers is poised to catch fire, the Yankee Group predicted in January, jumping from US$1.3 billion in revenu...

Skype on Wednesday announced that it is launching subscription plans to more than 170 countries with substantial savings over the company's standard rates for calling mobile phones and landlines Starting Thursday, Skype's range of calling subscriptions will start from as little as US$1.09 per month and offer effective rates as low as $.01 per minut...

Where's the fault in making "share" the default setting on Facebook? After all, people who have read 10 years' worth of scary headlines about email viruses, Internet scams featuring Nigerian princes and phishing websites seem eager to give up their likes, dislikes, kids' names, embarrassing photos and vital statistics to an audience of a half-billion on the world's largest social network...

International e-commerce is poised for explosive growth in the months and years ahead. Demand for U.S. products overseas is booming due to vast selection, high-quality specialty goods and unbelievable values. The Internet is bringing all of this value, selection and convenience directly to consumers all over the world. In fact, worldwide Internet usage has already surpassed 1.5 billion and is rapidly approaching the two billion mark, according to Plunkett Research.

I had the pleasure of attending two events last week: Microsoft Convergence 2010 in Atlanta and the Salesforce-VMware VMforce.com announcement in San Francisco. Each event was useful and informative in its own way, and I am pleased to have witnessed each first-hand. I have written exhaustively -- at least I'm tired -- about each of these, so rather than another recitation of events, I want to spend this piece drilling into one aspect...

Rhythmbox, anintegrated music management application, was originally inspired byApple's iTunes. This open source app works on the GnomeDesktop and is based on the powerful GStreamer media framework ...

HP has announced a spring product rollout that includes 14 notebooks powered by AMD. The PCs span all user categories from enterprise to consumer Although Intel does have a presence, AMD is the star of the show. This is "the largest single introduction of HP and AMD notebooks on one day," said Mike Hockey, spokesperson for HP business notebooks, HP...

Twitter is rolling out a new tool for embedding tweets directly into third-party websites. It will provide a snippet of HTML code for the purpose, the micro-blogging site announced on Tuesday While any number of users will likely be interested in embedding tweets in their online content -- corporate websites or even government agencies, for example...

The Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox Web browsers are gaining market share at the expense of Microsoft's dominant Internet Explorer Statistics from NetApplications.com show that Chrome had 6.73 percent of the browser market in April. Firefox had nearly 25 percent, and Internet Explorer continued the decline it's experienced over the last few years...

A newly rechristened Cloud.com on Tuesday unveiled its CloudStack Platform, an integrated software solution that lets enterprises and service providers quickly and easily build, manage and deploy Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud computing solutions. Formerly known as "VMOps," Cloud.com focuses on helping users deliver virtual data centers ...

Last week, VMware and Salesforce.com announced a new partnership around VMforce, a Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering aimed at enterprise Java developers. The companies' CEOs Paul Maritz (VMware) and Marc Benioff (Salesforce) described VMforce as an enterprise cloud designed to serve the needs of more than six million enterprise Java developers, including some two million who are using the Spring framework VMware acquired last August when it purchased SpringSource.

Siemens Enterprise Communications has announced an upgrade of its OpenScape Contact Center. The V8 release will be generally available May 18, Ross Sedgewick, senior director with Siemens' large enterprise solutions group, told CRM Buyer. The new version will provide virtualization from both the server and client directions Virtualized servers will...