Articles by

It's not every brand new operating system that gets open sourced a year before it hits the retail shelves. Then again, Chrome OS isn't just any OS, and Google isn't just any company Indeed, that's just what Google did last week, making its brand new Chrome OS freely available for download by developers far and wide. Devices running the new operatin...

Thanks to Twitter's open API, applications that enhance the tweeting experience have proliferated. From TweetDeck to Tweetie, there's an app for everyone and for every purpose. This diverse world of Twitter apps, however, remains a mystery to some of the site's users "When you go and buy a car, no one tells you that you need to fill it up with fu...

Thousands of emails and documents were stolen from a prominent climate research center in the UK recently and posted online, firing up a fresh controversy over global warming More than 1,000 emails and several thousand documents were apparently included in the hack attack on the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU), which is ded...

Roku is making additional types of content available via its set-top players with the introduction of the Roku Channel Store. Participants so far include Pandora, Facebook Photos, Revision3, Mediafly, TWiT, blip.tv, Flickr, FrameChannel, Motionbox and MobileTribe Other providers are developing apps for the Roku Channel Store; as they are ready, the...

Call it the "New Moon" strategy at Microsoft. Team Google and Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. are having a lovers' quarrel over search aggregation of news content; Murdoch claims Team Google is nothing but a bloodthirsty vampire draining potential ad revenue So like a hunky werewolf in a certain blockbuster movie, here comes Team Bing to try and steal ...

Let's put this simply: If you want to stream free, professional videos online, Clicker makes finding the video easier than most other solutions I've seen. In fact, it's one of the few online television and video search guides that I've felt compelled to create an account with. Why? Easy. It targets the content I want -- full episodes of network tel...

While retailers are facing increased competition, many have recognized that the way to thrive today is to invest in new ways to engage and serve their customers. Many are taking a fresh look at one of the cornerstones of the online experience: site search. Good site search can enable more personal and transparent shopping and, in this way, play a...

Companies considering CRM systems often view them as a way to improve customer satisfaction and retention, boost sales and accelerate employee productivity. However, as with many technology-enabled business process, success is a complicated and interdependent proposition When companies are winning -- demonstrating growth and gaining market share -...

Cybersecurity is a young and immature field, but it cannot remain so for much longer. We are at a point in time when it is clear that the future will be dramatically different just on basis of technologies that are already in the pipeline. Faster communications, faster computers, mobility with smarter devices, cloud computing, massive data stores, and many other technology trends are not science fiction but reality already being played out. ...

The early indicators that Windows 7 is doing well seem to be piling up. CEO Steve Ballmer gave that perception a boost at the company's annual shareholders meeting on Thursday, announcing that Microsoft "has already sold twice as many units of Windows 7 than any other operating system ever launched in a comparable time." Ballmer's claim follows NPD...

Many companies would give up their right to right-click to be able to duplicate Apple's success with iTunes. However, only one actually has the pieces already in place to do that, and its executives announced their intentions Thursday to take on Steve Jobs' company with its own online content service Sony executives used a management meeting in Tok...

On Friday, Cloud Engines launched a bigger, shinier version of its Pogoplug USB file-sharing device/service. ...

Google just keeps invading new territories, and its latest target is your computer's operating system. It's officially released the open source code for its Chrome OS, an operating system that will turn up in third-party vendors' netbooks. Those devices should start selling next year With Chrome, Google takes a very different approach than major OS...

It's fitting that the last stop on my tour of travel-planning Web sites for the E-Commerce Times was American Airlines. The site illustrates all of the problems that spurred this special look at travel sites in the first place. Travel sites have developed a reputation for being hard to navigate and poorly designed with cluttered user interfaces. N...

Part 1 of this two-part series addresses the reasons CRM has lagged in the health insurance industry and suggests that change is imminent "The health insurance industry, in general, is one of those sectors where there's been a reluctance to make comprehensive investments in technology compared with other sectors. Generally, the firms in the sector ...

What the hell happened to the sort of man who reads Playboy? How could he let the Internet develop into the world's strip club -- and worse -- without taking Hugh Hefner's company along for the ride? There's no long tail for the Playboy bunny, judging from the rumored impending sale of Hefner's company for around US$300 million to Iconix, collector...

Google on Thursday opened the source code for its fledgling Chrome operating system to developers This means "Google developers will be working on the same tree as external developers, and we're looking forward to working with the open source community," said Sunder Pichai, vice president of product management at Google....

Salesforce.com is marrying its cloud computing bona fides with its growing expertise in collaboration in Salesforce Chatter, a new application and development platform. The company introduced the product at its Dreamforce tradeshow and conference under way in San Francisco. Salesforce Chatter, which borrows from the social networking models made p...

From high-flying Internet pioneer to movie punchline: AOL's nadir may have come when Nicole Kidman's character in the 2004 remake of "The Stepford Wives" asks a group of husbands of robotic spouses where they work. "AOL," answers one man....

IBM's revelation at SC09 created quite a stir and immediately brought forth visions of Cylons and Hal 9000. The cognitive computing team at IBM Research has moved significantly forward in creating a large-scale cortical simulation and a new algorithm that synthesizes neurological data -- two major milestones on the path to a cognitive computing ch...