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This story was originally published on Nov. 2, 2009, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has developed technology that could help fight blindness. It's aimed at the millions of people impacted by two of the major causes of blindness: age-related macular degeneration (A...

This story was originally published on Aug. 6, 2009, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series. There's a rumor that honor exists among thieves, but outside of Robin Hood, no one considers them a bunch of do-gooders. Yet there may be a bright side to their shadowy work, at least in terms of enterprise software. It could ve...

More shoppers went online to retailers' Web sites this holiday season, and overall they were happier with their visits than they were in 2008, a survey by ForeSee Results found. For the second straight year, Amazon.com led ForeSee's pack of top 40 U.S. e-retailers in terms of customer satisfaction. Netflix and QVC took second and third places, res...

Google will be introducing its Nexus One smartphone device next Tuesday, it appears certain. Not that Google has said as much: All the the company has announced is that it will hold an "Android related" press conference on Jan. 5, a day identified in prior rumor accounts as the Google phone's launch date. The expectation of a Nexus One announcemen...

The recent lull in smart meter deployments and smart grid projects has come to an end with an announcement from the Obama administration last month. The Department of Energy (DOE) announced over US$3 billion in funding for smart grid projects, which will be matched by private-sector funding to push the total amount of investment in smart grid project over $8 billion...

Enterprises expend considerable effort to understand their customers and provide a superior experience and enhanced services to them, but still, they see an enormous difference between their understanding of customers' requirements and their customers' actual expectations This difference might be due to targeting the wrong customers, failing to und...

In 2010, application developers will continue to be asked to do more with less. During the global financial meltdown of the past year, the amount of work didn't change while resources were dramatically pared back. The result was that new projects suffered. Talking with application development leaders today, there is more optimism. While new p...

Data mining is becoming a crowded field filled with software providers using similar strategies. Their basic goal is always the same. The analytics platforms are designed to slice and dice data to make sales trends and buying opportunities more evident The firms that can deliver this product more accurately and more rapidly grow their reputations a...

Google's plan to acquire mobile ad network AdMob in a US$750 million deal announced last month is under fire from two consumer groups,Consumer Watchdog and the Center for Digital Democracy. The two have asked the Federal Trade Commission to block the deal, arguing that it would substantially lessen competition in the mobile advertising market, harming consumers, advertisers and application developers, among others. ...

Hackers have once again demonstrated that the GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) standard, the most widely used mobile phone standard in the world, can be hacked. The GSM Association (GSMA) has acknowledged the technology's flaw, but it said the weakness is not a serious threat and that hackers have not been able to create a practical a...

Back in early October -- nearly three months before Umar Abdulmutallab tried to blow up a jetliner bound for Detroit -- the Transportation Security Administration's blog cheerily announced it had received US$355 million of Recovery Act money for "a lot of really nifty improvements to aviation security." [*Correction - Jan. 4, 2010] ...

As netbook sales continue to grow, hardware and software vendors are battling to exploit this relatively new market. Intel released a beta software development kit (SDK) in early December for developers who create applications for netbooks based on its Atom chip. These apps will run in the Microsoft Windows and Moblin operating systems. Meanwhile,...

SaaS has become an increasingly popular model for cloud computing adoption, with 68 percent of U.S. respondents in a recent study from Avanade reporting adoption of SaaS at some level, and 62 percent of global respondents reporting plans to move toward SaaS in the next year. SaaS and cloud computing represent a clear evolutionary shift in applica...

Insurers constantly caution seniors that their Medicare Advantage perks such as hearing aids, dental payments and even gym memberships will fizzle if Democrats get their way and cut government subsidies for them However, tens of billions of Medicare dollars funneled through insurers also pay for extras that never reach beneficiaries: multimillion-d...

Chinese-language consumers unwilling or unable to pay the cost of a legitimate copy of Microsoft's Windows XP now have a new alternative: a clone of the operating system that's based on Ubuntu Dubbed "Ylmf OS," the software is available from Rain Forest Wind Guangdong Computer Technology as a free download on a dedicated Web site....

Amazon's Kindle is on a roll: On Christmas day, Customers purchased more e-books than physical books for the first time ever, according to the e-tailer. November marked the Kindle's best sales month ever, according to the company, which announced that milestone even before Cyber Monday purchases were tallied.

When Google opened up the source code for its Chrome operating system last month, third-party hardware manufacturers lined up plans to build Chrome-based netbooks, with availability expected in late 2010. Could Google also be cooking up plans to sell its own, Google-branded Chrome netbook at around the same time? The blogosphere's rumor mill is hum...

Entering a physical facility should be just as secure as logging onto a PC. Security professionals often find themselves hard-pressed to secure both physical and logical assets (as well as comply with stringent government mandates). So why are so many organizations behind the curve when it comes to managing physical and logical access?...

Hope was a slogan and a sentiment that played a major role in the U.S.presidential election of 2008, and hope continues to be the mindset of technology advocates pushing for cloud computing in the public sector. As a former government employee with a long history in the intelligence field, I can easily see how cloud computing can contribute to the country's security and prosperity...

From a technology perspective, this decade -- with Apple and Google being exceptions -- sucked. There were some interesting things that happened that set us up for the teen decade, though, and that fuel anticipation for the 20s, which a hundred years ago, was actually a decade of wonder and excitement (and had a better name). Rather than focusin...