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Rock down to "Electric Avenue" at the 2010 North American International Auto Show in Detroit this week, and you might think that sales of battery-powered cars were going to take the industry higher sooner rather than later. ...

A startup developer of technology that helps publishers better connect sales with affiliate marketers has closed on seed funding from First Round Capital, Google Ventures, and such individual investors as LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman. The financing for the company, VigLink, will be used to take the product out of beta and into the general market ...

The global IT market will see better days in 2010 as signs point to the beginnings of a worldwide economic recovery, according to a report from Forrester Research. Global IT spending will grow 8.1 percent, while IT spending in the United States will climb 6.6 percent, according to the study.

Pushback against the deployment at airports of digital image scanners that show people's naked images through their clothes is gaining steam, bolstered by the Electronic Privacy Information Center's publication of government documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security papers suggest the Transp...

In this age of phishing, hacking, identity fraud, and other forms of cybercrime, answering two simple questions -- "Who are you?" and "How can you prove it?" -- is fast becoming a critical requirement for all online business activities. Moreover, solving this "identity management" challenge has become quite complex as the increasing need for cros...

SaaS and cloud solutions continue to represent key drivers in the CRM market, up from 8 percent of the CRM market in 2005 to 20 percent of the market in 2008, according to Gartner. SaaS and cloud CRM solutions spurred the evolution of computing -- with no more software installations, no infrastructure management and no more upgrades to test. With SaaS and cloud CRM solutions, development and implementation can now be accomplished in a fraction of the time required for on-premise solutions. And, users will love the new solutions, right? ...

When Google unveiled its wildly hyped Nexus One phone last week, it described the device as more than just another Android smartphone Rather, it dubbed the new handset as one of an emerging class known as "superphones" and "an exemplar of what's possible on mobile phones through Android," as vice president of product management Mario Queiroz put it...

Data leakage prevention (DLP) is a topic that has been getting a lot of attention lately. Keeping sensitive data from leaving the network has quickly risen to the top of many IT and compliance officers' lists of priorities. DLP will likely be the first thing most organizations spend their 2010 information security budgets on. ...

Just a month ago, Facebook overhauled the privacy settings for its 350 million or so users and was targeted in an FTC complaint as a result -- yet company CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Friday suggested that online privacy has faded in importance in recent years "When we got started in my dorm room at Harvard, the question a lot of people asked was, 'Why w...

The real world has finally caught up with the concept of a sex robot, something that's been immortalized in films ranging from "Westworld" to "A.I." and the fembots of "Austin Powers." And where else but the 2010 Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas would that vision be realized in the five-foot-seven, 120-pound, lingerie-clad form of Roxxxy? ...

Microsoft is asking the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit for a rehearing of its affirmation in December of a lower court's jury verdict that Microsoft infringed on patents held by a Toronto-based company, i4i While awaiting the court's decision, though, Microsoft has scrambled to comply with an injunction that went into effect Monday, ...

Alcatel-Lucent's Bell Labs on Monday launched Green Touch, a project aimed at making communications networks 1,000 times more more energy-efficient. The project's founding members include service providers such as AT&T; research labs such as the MIT Research Lab for Electronics and Bell Labs; and government and nonprofit research institutions such...

StarTech.com's new DisplayPort KVM Switch helped me solve a computingproblem I did not realize I had. The company's KVM Switch providesdirect connections to monitors and computers without using aconverter ...

In the 2002 bestseller The Rise of the Creative Class, author Richard Florida describes his theories on how creative communities grow around two groups of people: 1) artists (broadly defined), media workers, and other classically bohemian sorts of personalities; and 2) university professors, service providers, and other highly educated professionals. ...

Retailers in the U.S. are convinced that customer relationship management (CRM) is one of the most important aspects of their business. However, the sector, in general, has failed to utilize the full potential of these programs, and the industry will be striving to elevate its CRM game in the future. That's good news not only for customers but also for the providers of CRM technologies and services...

I was at CES last week, and the magic was clearly back in this show. In the past couple of years, CES has been dominated by one device -- making it more like a one-product waste of time. Two years ago, everyone was talking about the iPhone, making many of us wonder if we were at the wrong event. Last year, it was the Palm Pre, which turned out to be a bit of a flash in the pan. This year, it seemed at first that the Google/HTC Nexus One would steal the show, but there didn't appear to be any lasting buzz on that device by the end of the first day. Attention had shifted elsewhere...

Twitter, Pandora Internet radio and other popular smartphone apps are hitting the road, thanks to Ford Motor Company's Thursday announcement of forthcoming dashboard technologies that will soon be available in a wider, more affordable range of its cars ...

France's Ministry of Culture has issued a report that recommends taxing Internet advertising revenue earned by such companies as Google, Facebook, AOL, Yahoo and Microsoft, based on the use of their services in France. France would then use those supplemental tax receipts to support local online cultural content, content creators and artists. Sugg...

One year after first showing the world its Pre smartphone, Palm on Thursday announced a new generation of the device at the Consumer Electronics Show. It also unveiled an upgrade to its Pixi, a smaller smartphone that relies on the same webOS software as the Pre ...

In my last column in this space, I identified 10 important milestones and events that helped to shape the SaaS and cloud computing market in 2009. Now, I'm going to list some of the critical challenges SaaS and cloud vendors must overcome to sustain their growth in 2010, along with some exciting opportunities they can pursue to extend their market...