Articles by

Microsoft on Monday announced it is purchasing Nuance Communications, a natural language to computer processing company, in a deal valued at $19.7 billion In the all-cash transaction, Microsoft will acquire all of Nuance's outstanding stock for US$56 a share, a 23 percent premium over the share price at the close of the market last Friday. The deal...

Recently, I took an interest in poking at Gentoo a bit. In the eyes of many desktop Linux users, it's considered a rite of passage to install this historically significant distribution. I've scaled Mt. Arch, so Gentoo Peak is next in my Linux mountaineering Before I started sinking time into it, though, I wanted to see just what I would gain from t...

In the beginning, social media promised to connect us to existing friends, help us form new relationships, and as a result help make us find happier lives. Facebook, initially, was just a way for new students to meet new friends, Quora was a way to get crowdsourced answers, and Twitter sort of a way to alert friends about things they might find interesting. ...

I saw a report the other day about the future of commerce that made me smile It was unambiguously positive of the future of digital commerce and did its best to nail the brick-and-mortar coffin. The change had already occurred, it's time to mop up, the report implied.

Social commerce -- selling products or services on social media platforms -- is a marketing tactic that can boost retail revenue with relatively little effort without overly adding to the advertising spend This new retail strategy is attracting the attention of marketers. Social shopping grew 35 percent last year, with U.S. sales reaching about $38...

Businesses fearful their workers may be targeted by fraudsters will want to take a look at the free Tax Scam Awareness Kit offered by Proofpoint, a data protection company in Sunnyvale, Calif The kit, for both Windows and macOS, includes materials for an employee education campaign about tax fraud, three educational videos, an infographic, answers ...

Google is now paying developers more money to work on securing their Linux kernels this year. The gesture may well be the start of the company's bid to enforce a tighter grip on open source Google's action comes on the heels of rising threats to Linux that unfolded in the last year, as hackers pivot to new strategies like writing malware strains in...

A rich cache of data on some 533 million Facebook users was posted to a hacker forum over the weekend and is available to download for practically free. The information is from a data breach that occurred in 2019, but hasn't been widely available until now The data was posted to an English-speaking cybercriminal forum called RaidForums by a hacker ...

If your business does not provide customers with self-service options, you might be encouraging potential customers to go elsewhere According to the 2020 NICE inContact Customer Experience (CX) Transformation Benchmark, Consumer Wave, eight in 10 consumers are more willing to do business with companies that offer self-service options. Yet only 61 p...

As is often the case when technology is advancing very rapidly, the leading providers of an evolving class of products are on very different pages. I'm talking about Cisco and Microsoft -- and while neither's approach is wrong, neither is complete -- and together they can build a comprehensive picture of what is needed for our hybrid workplace future...

Engaging in disaster recovery requires a company to think about many things, but despite the long checklists that are created to accomplish DR, there are some areas that frequently get overlooked in business continuity and disaster recovery planning. For example, those exploring disaster recovery often get singularly focused on protecting their se...

Over the course of the past year, adjusting to the challenges of the pandemic on business has made the customer relationship management system an essential tool for maintaining and growing a customer base. As a result, CRM platforms have evolved into something more than just a digital Rolodex to manage customer contacts A key aspect of succeeding i...

Major information technology providers opposed to the broadening of class action litigation related to consumer protections have taken their case to the U.S. Supreme Court The companies are hoping the court will strike down a lower court ruling which makes it easier for consumers to file class action suits. The tech companies may not have to wait t...

Online businesses are losing potential customers and substantial amounts of revenue because they're dependent on traditional password systems and outdated customer authentication models, says a report released Tuesday by an access and identity management company Lost customers and revenues are caused by password sharing and friction created at webs...

One of the most successful direct-to-consumer shopping outlets for China-based vendors outside of China's own Alibaba e-commerce platform is Amazon. This trend has been accelerating for years China-based sellers represented 75 percent of new sellers on Amazon in January, according to a report by Marketplace Pulse. This marks a significant increase ...

If the United States wants to out-compete China in key technology markets, Congress and the Biden Administration must act now, maintained a Washington, D.C. think tank in a report released Monday "With the rise of China, the U.S. economic and technology environment has fundamentally and inexorably changed," explained the report by the Information T...

Collaboration between employees, teams, and clients is more important than ever before, and there are a variety of new technologies and platforms available to facilitate communication and group work The E-Commerce Times spoke with several experts in the field of collaboration software and technologies to get their take on the many ways that people ...

As we slowly climb out of the Covid anis horribilis, advocates of the new normal (whatever that is) may wish to temper their prognostications about working from home or working from anywhere While those are good ideas, and the new crop of CRM apps that support such hybrid work lives are genuinely cool, they might only demonstrate the deep functiona...

MakuluLinux is an unusually creative operating system that developer Jacque Montague Raymer is constantly changing with each major upgrade. Some of these changes are radical and innovative This distro has long been one of my favorite Linux offerings. Many of its features do not merely mimic those in other Linux distributions; they combine and impro...

For nearly two decades I've firmly believed that Pat Gelsinger should be the guy uniquely suited to run Intel. Last week he did Intel proud with the most effective, for the time, corporate pep talk I've yet seen Now, I've heard lots of pep talks; most take a very aggressive stance about beating the competition and do an excellent job getting peopl...