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A few features will be conspicuously absent from Microsoft's upcoming Windows Phone 7 Series platform. These include copy and paste functions, full multitasking, and support for user-replaceable memory cards. WinPho7 will also require that all apps be installed from the Windows Phone marketplace....

Facebook, thanks to its 400 million status-updating, link-sharing, asparagus-farming, party picture-posting denizens, has risen to the top of the Internet heap once again, surpassing -- at least according to one ranking -- search giant Google in total U.S. visitors for the third time this year Facebook accounted for 7.07 percent of all U.S. Interne...

I recently read Tribes by Seth Godin and I think it might hold some clues to the future of CRM. Godin is a business blogger and author of more than a dozen books with titles like Permission Marketing and Purple Cow. He's not about the status quo, he's all over change and leadership like a junkyard dog. One of Godin's points -- something that I h...

The Linux OS offers users a variety of applications for taking notesand keeping information accessible in one place. Two popular choices,Tomboy Notes and Xpad, provide quick and easy ways to coral a stampedeof wild notes and information ...

A day doesn't seem to go by without one software developer or another announcing the launch of a new smartphone application. Everyone seems to be getting into the mobile app game -- but is anyone actually making any money doing it? The consensus is yes -- but there is more than one way to make money....

Twitter has announced it will be rolling out @anywhere, a new platform that will allow certain partner Web sites -- including Amazon, Bing, Citysearch, Digg and eBay -- to link to Twitter. The new service will let Twitter users send and receive messages while they are on a partner site. It will also allow users to follow a string of related tweet...

Following the the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) release of a detailed plan for giving Americans better access to broadband Internet connections, the blueprint is drawing reactions across a wide range of observers and interested parties "This may be one of the most important projects the government has undertaken since the national freew...

Business process management vendor Pegasystems will be acquiring CRM company Chordiant for US$161.5 million, or $5 per share. Subject to customary conditions, the deal is expected to close in Q2 2010. Under the new purchase accounting rules, transactional costs are now expensed rather than included in the calculation of goodwill, according to Pega...

Intel is stirring up the marketplace for digital storage with the introduction of a lower-cost, solid-state drive aimed at the value segment of netbooks and laptops The Intel X25 Value SATA SSD has 40 GB of storage and is priced at US$125, adding to the giant chip maker's storage line of 80 GB and 160 GB SSDs....

The "trickling down" of enterprise computing features to smaller businesses has long been a part of life in an IT universe governed by Moore's Law. In many cases, this is largely seen in the data center, where SMBs have access to server and storage performance once exclusively reserved for enterprises. ...

Part 1 of this series on getting started with CRM addresses factors to consider when deciding whether the time is right to take the plunge.Part 2 offers advice on how to choose the right CRM tool.Part 3 provides some guidance on preparing for contract negotiations.Part 4 tackles the all-important step of embarking on an implementation A successful ...

Sun Microsystems' loss was Google's gain on Monday, as former Sun guru Tim Bray announced that he's joined Google's Android push in the role of Developer Advocate. "Google and I have been a plausible match for a long time," Bray wrote in a blog post announcing the decision. "Web-centric, check. Search, check. Open-source, check. The list goes on."

Over the past few years, it seems like there's one technology that almost everyone is deploying: laptop encryption. All over the industry, in nearly every vertical, it seems like everybody has either just deployed, is deploying, or is about to deploy some type of encryption technology to protect laptop data. When you think about it, it really isn...

It now appears almost certain that Google and the Chinese government will not reach an accord over Internet censorship policies and that Google will begin pulling out of the country in the near future. Among the increasing number of signs pointing in that direction are warnings the Chinese government gave to Google's Web partners that they must co...

The Federal Communications Commission is set to deliver a much-anticipated report to the U.S. Congress on Thursday. Among other things, "The National Broadband Plan" proposes to have an additional 100 million households connected to high-speed Internet service within the next 10 years An Executive Summary of the plan released Monday points to a ser...

Microsoft has thrown the doors open to developers interested in working on the upcoming Windows Phone 7 Series platform, announcing new developer tools and offering the deepest look yet at the Silverlight-based architecture during keynote sessions Monday at the MIX10 conference in Las Vegas The new tools include updates to Microsoft Visual Studio 2...

It's a good bet that when "The Daily Show's" Jon Stewart spends six minutes making uber-ironic fun of a particular trend or topic, it's pretty much arrived as a legitimate Mainstream Media Phenomenon. Such was the case recently with Stewart's hilarious deconstruction of Chatroulette, the Web site that facilitates random video chat conversations, at least half of which apparently involve men engaging in some kind of sexual activity -- judging, that is, from all the print and broadcast coverage...

Millions of consumers have switched their bill-paying practices from tedious sessions with a stack of statements and checkbooks to streamlined, paperless payments through a variety of online channels. However, the movement to electronic payments still has a long way to go, based on recent reports, and a huge majority of consumers have not yet been weaned away from their checkbook chores and welcomed to the world of paperless payments...

Throughout the economic downtown, business managers heard virtually every cost-cutting measure, from furlough days to reducing IT investment. As we see shoots of recovery, we are reminded that no company can cost-cut its way to excellence; without some focus on the customer, eventually service starts to dwindle, products are shoddy and the company is no longer competitive. Those that persevere through both economic booms and busts incorporate a long-term view of quality and cost measures into their strategic business functions.

I've been struggling with the Google model, which survived the dot-com mess, but its success seems based largely on the belief that advertising can fund everything. If the users are unhappy, well it doesn't really matter. In fact, Google's customers (the folks paying them money) and the folks they actually serve are quiet different, causing me to question the viability of many of their non-search efforts. Often we look at Microsoft's struggle to expand out of Windows and Office and find the result troubling, but if we look at Google's ...