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Twitter has made a number of moves in the past few days that have jangled the nerves of third-party developers who fear the micro-blogging site is about to make a big push into their territory. For starters, Twitter has acquired Atebits, the maker of Tweetie, a Twitter client for the iPhone. Twitter also unveiled its own BlackBerry app, developed ...

Microsoft on Monday unveiled two phones for the socialista set -- people whose lives revolve around social networking and being in constant communication with friends ...

You could be forgiven if you thought Salesforce.com was done with announcements if you attended the soiree in New York last week, but if you thought that you'd also be wrong. Kendal Collins, CMO of Salesforce, told me that there will be another announcement on April 27 in San Francisco, and according to Collins, "This will be big." That in itsel...

Dom Sagolla doesn't have to dig deep into his own Twitter profile to look back on his very first tweet. It just happened to be one of Twitter's very first tweets -- tweet #38, to be exact, appearing March 21, 2006 "Oh this is going to be addictive," it read....

Which marketplace has continued functioning consistently and effectively throughout this downturn? Walk into a room of angel investors and find the answer: Angel investing groups are still going strong throughout this downturn Although private equity financing dates back to the Sumerians, the current incarnation really began after World War II. ...

Part 1 of this series questions whether the heavy investments telecoms have been making to achieve long-term goals are the best CRM strategies or whether less-costly projects with faster paybacks might make more sense Telecom innovations have turned the entire globe into a neighborhood. The ability to carry a portable device, such as a laptop compu...

I seem to be getting an increasing number of calls asking me whether Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina have a chance as a governor or a U.S. senator respectively. Both are uniquely capable, and both have histories that suggest good management skills that would be critical in California -- a state that desperately needs them. Both are Republicans dur...

Gaming enthusiasts who gobble up every tidbit of news they can about consoles, gadgets and titles didn't have a lot to digest Thursday when Apple revealed that the new iPhone OS 4 would include Game Center, a social gaming network. The news was just one feature mentioned in the overall update for the smartphone operating system; Steve Jobs' company certainly didn't unlock any new levels in the "details" category...

Palm's share prices rallied Friday, boosted by rumors that the troubled handset maker was being pursued by prospective buyers At press time, its shares stood at US$5.16, up almost 11 percent over the previous day's close of $4.65....

Scientists on Thursday announced the discovery of a new species of hominid, thanks to fossils whose whereabouts were located with the help of Google Earth Dating back almost two million years, Australopithecus sediba was discovered in the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site in South Africa. The species appears to have had long arms, like an ape...

A year ago, I suggested that the Software as a Service and cloud computing industry was entering a new stage in which vendors would begin putting greater emphasis on expanding their sales channels to broaden the addressable market for their solutions. Anyone following the SaaS/cloud computing industry knows that this idea has become a reality, as ...

Changes impacting storage are taking place at every layer of the network architecture: Disk drives are continuing on a Moore's law-like cost/capacity curve, yet concurrently we are also seeing the growth of solid-state technology to overcome the inherent performance limitations of mechanical disk; virtualization is changing how architects think about storage, as we now have operating systems running entirely in user space within a virtual machine; and applications are choosing HTTP over FC as the preferred storage protocol...

The DC federal court of appeals didn't actually bring about the death of Net neutrality. Hopefully, all it's done is bring about the death of the phrase "Net neutrality." I write about technology, and I'm already tired of hearing those words and writing them. Not the concept behind it, mind you, or the implications for broadband development, "pipes...

Comcast's federal circuit court victory over the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) this week appears to have thrown a wide range of federal-level Internet plans into question. Only three weeks ago, the FCC announced its National Broadband Plan, with ambitious initiatives aimed at making high-speed Internet access available to all Americans, including those living in rural areas or managing on low incomes. However, the FCC may not have a say over much of what happens on the big Internet pipelines built by commercial ventures...

Salesforce.com has launched ChatterExchange, an app marketplace for Chatter, the enterprise collaboration platform it introduced earlier this year. It is built on "Cloud 2" -- the company's name for the next generation of cloud computing: social, collaborative, and capable of delivering real-time access to data and information across new mobile devices...

HP on Thursday announced that its research arm, HP Labs, has discovered that the "memristor" -- a resistor with memory -- can perform logic ...

Google has become the target of another lawsuit alleging privacy violations in connection with the February rollout of Buzz, its social networking application. The suit, Feldman v. Google, was filed in a federal court in San Jose, Calif., by New York resident Barry Feldman, who is seeking class action status.

Photographers and illustrators claim that they are not being fairly compensated by Google, alleging the search giant's book-scanning project violates their copyrights Seeking what the visual artists assert is their fair share, James J. McGuire, lead counsel for the group, filed a class action copyright infringement suit against Google Wednesday mor...

Cloud computing and SaaS are on the rise in a big way, but for some companies, there's an issue that is starting to come up in a lot of conversations with their service providers: the geographical location of their data. While it may not seem a big deal to some, conflicts with national privacy laws add one more agenda item you may have to consider...

The old cliche is that CRM is supposed to give you a 360-degree view of your customers. I debate that -- I think it gives, at best, a couple of overlapping 270-degree views, and 30 degrees will always be hidden. However, that's all geometric digression. My real point is this: Having a 360-degree view of your customers isn't worth a hill of beans u...