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What U.S. business wouldn't want a customer base of 37.5 million prospects? In 2008, hospitals in the U.S. registered that many admissions -- a number that equals 12 percent of the U.S. population. Yet the hospitals in the U.S. have largely underutilized the customer relationship management tools that could exploit the data in that customer base to create significant increases in business volume and more profitable operations.

Google launched its Chrome OS, which is really a copy of several products already on the market and an interesting recreation of the thin client concept that Sun and Oracle came up with over a decade ago. You could argue, however, that most successful products, like the iPod and iPhone, are simply better copies of what came before. Really, nobody cares that much -- consumers only care about whether a new offering will make their lives better. The Google Chrome OS goes directly to a primary need that mainstream PC users have had unmet since the beginning: an appliance experience. ...

I spend a good deal of my time meeting existing and potential customers, and from that, I believe two things are clear: First, the Internet is now fundamental to the operations of both public and private organizations; second, those organizations are increasingly concerned with threats and risks due to those Internet-based operations. Since the t...

This story was originally published on Sept. 28, 2009, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series. Big businesses often use big bucks to go green. Small businesses, on the other hand, haven't a dollar to spare even for a good cause like saving the environment. Shouldn't they just pass on the whole green scheme -- at least u...

This story was originally published on Oct. 2, 2009, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series. Many small businesses fail to fully utilize automated time-reporting tools or shy away from them altogether.

This story was originally published on Sept. 8, 2009, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series. Like Alice's Restaurant in the Arlo Guthrie song, the Internet lets you get anything you want -- from views on politics or science and technology or religion to recipes and gossip. Oh, and of course, news....

A manipulated image of Michelle Obama that drew headlines and controversy when it became the first result users saw when performing a Google Image search for the First Lady was pulled down Wednesday -- but not by Google. While the picture may have disappeared, questions about Google's response to so-called Googlebombs remain for the company The ima...

With the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen just a few weeks away, leading scientists on the topic probably had a lot of work they would have liked to accomplish this week That hasn't been possible, however, thanks to the recent anonymous theft of thousands of emails and documents from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Re...

Major magazine publishers are about to launch a new attempt to digitize their content, according to a recent article in the New York Observer The publishers reportedly include Conde Nast, Hearst and Time. It's said they're getting ready to form a new company that will prepare digital versions of their products that can work across multiple platform...

Fifty-nine U.S. senators are asking European antitrust regulators to conclude their review of the Oracle acquisition of Sun Microsystems. The move, led by Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., and Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, is an unusual one for the U.S. legislative body. It follows a similar action by the Department of Justice, which also urged the Commission...

You may think it's annoying when you see the same commercial repeated during a 2:30 ad break in prime time, but have no fear -- there is a method to an advertiser's madness. They simply want to make sure you are exposed to that product's branding/logo even as you're fast-forwarding past it on a digital video recorder (DVR) Google thinks there is va...

By now many of us -- even some of us who once couldn't program the clock in the VCR -- have installed a WiFi router somewhere in our homes to use a laptop on the front porch or in the back den. If you fall in this group, congratulations. Whether you know it or not, you have joined the home network revolution. Of course, for some consumers, the rev...

As we begin to wrap up development efforts for the holiday lockdown, we often get into conversations with our partners about strategies and priorities for 2010. (Yes, we'll be there before you know it!) For many retailers, 2009 has been the year of social media. According to an Internet Retailer survey conducted this summer, 54 percent of the larg...

I am still thinking about the George Soros quote from a recent posting. The billionaire financier and philanthropist was quoted in Niall Ferguson's The Ascent of Money saying that "Every bubble consists of a trend and a misconception that interact in a reflexive manner." What he meant was that trends become what we think the underlying idea is -...

While Congress debates an US$850 billion healthcare bill with questionable benefits, leaders in the technology industry are quietly creating products and services that will truly reform healthcare. This Thanksgiving, for example, Americans can be appreciative of the incredible price decline in genome sequencing, one of the most important health advances.

Google is amping up its display ad capabilities with the acquisition of startupTeracent, which has developed machine-learning algorithms that can create and customize an ad in real-time, based on user preferences and other characteristics. There are thousands of such "creative elements" that can be manipulated to create an optimal display ad, acco...

Before the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland, can begin to unlock the mysteries of the universe -- as physicists around the world hope it will -- it has to be taken for a series of test drives. Scientists on Monday did just that, driving protons into each other at energies approaching 550 billion electron volts, and the resulting successful collision is being hailed as an important first step to realizing the LHC's ultimate capabilities...

Google has rolled out a new version of its free Google Maps Navigation application that's compatible with smartphones running the Android 1.6 operating system, such as T-Mobile's myTouch 3G and its G1. When the app was introduced last month in beta, it could only be used by smartphones running Android 2.0, the latest version of the OS, such as Verizon's Droid...

Interested parties the world over anxiously wait as the U.S. top court prepares its ruling regarding the patentability of business methods. The U.S. Supreme Court recently heard arguments in the matter of Bernard Bilski and Rand Warsaw v. David Kappos in an appeal from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which upheld the United States Patent Office decision last year. ...

Let's say you're a CRM vendor. Your constant mission is to provide users with what they need, and your biggest fear is that your competitors will be better at that than you are. How do you stay in front? If you come from a traditional software background, your default answer is likely to be "new features." The addition of new features and function...