Articles by

In this business climate, the road to striking a venture capital deal is difficult for both funder and fundee. Small startups with big ideas obviously have a harder time finding VC firms willing to take a chance on them, but those VC firms themselves are under added pressure to make the correct decisions regarding where to put their limited resources...

What is Red Hat up to with its launch this week of the opensource.com Web page? This replaces the "Truth Happens" page, which ran articles and videos on open source, intellectual property, transparency, and other issues....

The more I see devices like the new Apple iPad, the more I come to appreciate Steven Spielberg's 2002 sci-fi spectacular "Minority Report." It was the first thing I thought of when I saw video of the company's newest "magical" creation and executives demonstrating its New York Times app The app seamlessly integrated video content with the usual Gre...

Google promoted its Social Search experiment to beta status on Wednesday Social Search adds information and images from users' public pages tothe results of online searches conducted by members of their socialnetwork....

Jammie Thomas-Rasset, the Minnesota woman who was twice found liable for copyright infringement for sharing two dozen songs using an online file-sharing application, has turned down an offer to settle her US$54,000 penalty for less than half that amount. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) gave Thomas-Rasset the option of settling...

Oracle says it will focus strongly on customer service and support forcustomers of both its products and those of Sun Microsystems, whoseacquisition it completed on Wednesday "We believe our customers deserve the best level of support and it'sour job to make that extremely compelling," Juergen Rottler, executivevice president of Oracle global custo...

As the U.S. federal government moves ahead with its cloud computing strategy, it may find that the real bugbear won't be technology but politics. What else would expect on the Hill? Other problems could pop up in the government's approach to security and a lack of adequately qualified staff....

Aberdeen Group's September 2009 report "Enterprise Search - Discover the Next Opportunity for Growth" investigated the strategies and tactics companies have used to drive productivity and improve customer service using enterprise search. In that report, Aberdeen used four key performance criteria to distinguish Best-in-Class companies -- the 20 percent of companies that achieved the stronger gains in productivity and reduced customer support costs, when compared to all other companies.

In case you missed it, seven long years of wrangling have come to an end: 802.11n has now been officially ratified by the IEEE. Super-fast WiFi is here. The 802.11n standard ushers in increased network throughput and range that will change wireless access, services and applications. With this final blessing, any hesitancy that existed within many ...

The Chinese government won't block the use of Google's Android operating system on mobile phones in the country as long as the operating system abides by Chinese laws, a key government official said on Wednesday. "As long as it complies with Chinese laws and regulations, and as long as it has good cooperation with operators ... their use of the sy...

Microsoft SharePoint Server is an incredibly versatile tool for setting up portals and Web sites that facilitate communication and collaboration within a company, between companies, and with Internet users at large ...

One of the reasons that sustainability is such a big issue for all of us is the way the marketplace has shaped up in the last few years. A telltale sign is the initial public offering (IPO) market. The once-vibrant activity of bringing new companies to the stock markets has shriveled up, and with it you have a graphic description of a relative lack of innovation in the economy...

Screenlets bring a collection of fun things and useful apps to addfunctional eye candy to the Linux desktop with little or no resourcedrain on the computer ...

The Personalized Medicine World Conference in Silicon Valley last week showcased huge opportunities for new advances in medicine and personalized health. What remained unclear was who will take the lead, what techniques or products will win, and whether the medical establishment will go along or stand in the way Folks in Silicon Valley are used to...

It could be the next service announced by your car's GPS feature when you drive from state to state: letting you know what highway exit to take -- and warning you about whether texting/phoning while driving in that state is legal Tuesday's move by the Department of Transportation to outlaw texting while driving for interstate commercial traffic mak...

The Department of Justice has cleared the path for Live Nation and Ticketmaster to merge -- but with several conditions attached, including significant support to companies that will be formed to provide competition. The two firms, which announced the possibility of a merger a year ago, have agreed to the conditions, setting the stage for the crea...

The online poker scene was set on its ear with the arrival of the Swedish phenom known only by his Tolkien-esque moniker of "Isildur1." Isildur1 burst onto the scene in September 2009 and soon began to frequent the nosebleed seats of US$1000/$2000 Pot Limit Omaha reserved for the true high stakes gamer. In terms of high stakes action, according to Pokertableratings.com, within four months of playing at the second largest online poker site Full Tilt Poker, Isildur1 had been involved with the 12 largest pots ever played online, the largest being a staggering $1.3M pot. At his peak, Isildur1 amassed over $5M in winnings within two months of playing at Full Tilt. ...

It often seems that an agile development environment will always be at odds with the structure and constraints of the project management office (PMO). Yet it does not have to be this way. Creating an agile PMO that bridges the gap between these two very important groups can help organizations to prioritize projects and allocate resources much more effectively.

Linux inched ahead in the operating-system arena during the final month of 2009, even as Windows and Mac gave up some ground That's according to research firm Net Applications, which recently released its Market Share report covering operating systems in December....

TV viewers who can't bear to be without access to news and programs from their local television stations will this year have new ways to be connected wherever they go. New devices that will carry local TV broadcasts will hit the market later this year. Some of these new mobile digital television (mobile DTV) devices debuted at the Consumer Electro...