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Pegasystems will demonstrate examples of simple integration between its BPM applications and the CRM functionality it will inherit from Chordiant at its upcoming trade show. Then, in the May/June time frame, the company will announce a detailed road map for integration of the two applications, according to comments made by Pega CEO Alan Trefler du...

Why go into a Barnes & Noble, find a comfy chair and flip through the pages of a physical book when you can go into a Barnes & Noble, find a comfy chair and flip through the pages of a virtual book on the Nook e-reader? ...

Most security companies are big fans of the doom-and-gloom scenario of information security. However, when it comes down to brass tacks, security is nothing more than a business function -- specifically, a business function of measuring and mitigating risk. The key motivator behind information security is the management of business risk, and regardless of whether that risk is financial or not, organizations mitigate vulnerabilities in the enterprise to reduce the threat to both reputation and customers.

Businesses are extending their reach across multiple channels of commerce -- from stores, call centers and kiosks to the Web 2.0 reality of social networking sites and blogs -- to maximize sales opportunities. As customers get more demanding in this competitive environment, it pays to listen to them. The consumers of your products and services hav...

The market is in a planning cycle, and analysts are being asked to take a look in their crystal balls and describe what 2013 will look like. Clearly, we will have more bandwidth, 3-D TV will be ramping, and most of us will either be using tablet devices for something or moving to the next big thing. I'm going to look out to 2013 and make some ...

Twenty years ago Saturday, the Hubble Space Telescope was launched into low Earth orbit, beginning its journey to become NASA's best-recognized, longest-lived and most prolific space observatory To celebrate the milestone, NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) released on Thursday a stunning new pho...

Rumors about contenders for troubled smartphone maker Palm continue to circulate -- fueled in part by comments from Palm's CEO. HTC and Huawei -- two companies that were rumored to be interested in acquiring Palm -- have opted not to go forward, according to Reuters.

IBM researchers in Switzerland said they've come up with a patterning technique that lets them create structures as small as 15 nanometers ...

In the rush to win over office productivity software users, Microsoft's FUSE Labs has lobbed one at Google with the launch of its Docs service. CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the beta project during his keynote at Facebook's f8 developers' conference this week, but it has received little fanfare so far Docs will let users create and share Microsoft ...

Two months after the launch of NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, its first images are now arriving back on Earth with more detail about the sun than has ever been seen before Some of the images from the spacecraft reveal in new clarity the material streaming outward and away from sunspots. Others show extreme close-ups of activity on the sun's sur...

If you're low on cash it doesn't mean you can't get what you want or need. "You can barter literally anything," said Karen Hoffman, who along with former business journalist Shera Dalin authored the new book The Art of Barter: How to Trade for Almost Anything. The book outlines how individuals and business can trade in person, on websites, and thr...

As sales organizations endeavor to escape the constricted economy of the 2009 recession, one of their most significant barriers is stagnant progress regarding bringing their sales cycle under control. ...

Taking its relationship with Drupal to the next level, the Obama administration announced on Wednesday that it has released to the public some of the custom code it's developed for the Whitehouse.gov website "This code is available for anyone to review, use, or modify," wrote Dave Cole, senior advisor to the CIO of the executive office of the pres...

Yes, here we go, another Apple column. Another chance to vent about a company that's morphed into something else. Another chance to decry its PR strategies, its capricious App Store policies, its famously mercurial founder Yet because this column is coming on the heels of so many others who have taken Apple to task in recent weeks, I feel the need ...

Streaming video provider Hulu may be moving to a subscription model. That's according to a report in the Los Angeles Times and a host of online rumors. The plan, which reportedly would be rolled out at about US$10 per month, would cover episodes of television shows older than the last five -- an archive charge, essentially. "The trend says that if...

Dell has plans to release five smartphones and two tablet-style PC devices, according to detailed specs and photos of the products that have been leaked to Engadget. The specs for the devices are thrilling the industry in a way that Dell's endeavors thus far -- primarily its Android-based Dell Mini 3 -- have yet to manage. That excitement, of cour...

Things are looking bleak for McAfee after the security software company sent a bad virus definition to its users Wednesday The file was created to combat a new threat, but once it was distributed, it caused thousands of PCs running Windows XP Service Pack 3 worldwide to crash....

Microsoft announced a new revision of its SQL server software Wednesday, a version that the software maker is hailing as the "most complete information platform for managing, accessing and delivering information" in the corporate environment "It's definitely a complete platform because it gets them to the scale that they wanted to get to in terms o...

Accountability is essential for any company that wants to be successful. Without it, there is no way to know whether what you're doing is working or could be done better. In the competitive world of Internet retailing, razor-thin margins and fickle consumers make it even more important to ensure that every effort is contributing to the bottom line...

One of the great things about CRM is that it allows you to discover who your best customers are -- and not just who the best ones are on a regular basis, but who are best over time. Knowing this allows you to focus your sales and marketing efforts more precisely and ensure the loyalty of these customers over the long haul It also allows you to figu...