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What is it about customer service that drove three major CRM companies to make announcements about their service products within days of each other last week? Oracle and Salesforce.com each announced new or completed development of functionality, and RightNow said it bought HiveLive, a social networking solution provider. In fact, every company's announcement had something to do with social media...

GroundWork Open Source, a provider of commercial open source systems and network management software, has launched MonitoringForge, a hub for IT administrators and developers interested in open source monitoring tools. The new site aims to encompass the monitoring space as a whole, as opposed to focusing on specific products or applications, said ...

Part 1 of this series discusses the history of cybercrime The current threatscape, as with any landscape, can be viewed as endless vistas of changing complexities and unfathomable permutations of technologies, network topologies, risk scenarios and user requirements. It's the white noise of this dizzying array of technologies -- built upon an opera...

Microsoft has added new functionality to its Bing search engine. Visual Search, an add-on based on its Silverlight plug-in, made its debut Tuesday at the TechCrunch50 industry event being held in San Francisco. Introduced as a beta, Visual Search will become available to users on a rolling basis over the month, with general availability expected b...

Chasing down rumors in the video game blogosphere can be as risky as a Bowser boss battle in "Super Mario Galaxy." That's the caveat for reports that an image of a retail advertisement announcing a US$50 price cut for Nintendo's Wii console had been captured in the wild by a Kotaku reader Unfortunately, there are no cheat codes for this kind of thi...

It's not perfect, and it won't solve the advertising crisis in traditional publishing, but Google's Fast Flip news-viewing product may represent a small step toward helping pen-and-paper publishers make a profitable leap to the digital age Google rolled out Fast Flip on Monday as an experimental Labs product. It allows users to slide through tiled ...

Lenovo on Tuesday unveiled two new computers with multi-touch capabilities that let users employ four fingers on the screen The new PCs are the ThinkPad T400s laptop and the X200 tablet PC....

The growing popularity of online video has become the tipping point for advanced CE (consumer electronics) in the home. Consumer interest and demand for this content -- from user-generated videos of stealthy cats to streams of classic 1980s shows like "Airwolf" -- have prompted service providers and CE manufacturers to expand outward on the possibilities once video is tied and intertwined with other signals coming into the home...

Small projects, though often overlooked, can make up the bulk of the portfolio and are crucial to a company's success. They might not involve large sums of money, but the fact is that if managed improperly, these small projects can add up to some major costs in the long run. The good news is that project managers need only apply standard best pr...

When Motorola announced its Android-powered Cliq late last week, it took what many view as a critical step toward regaining its former prominence in the mobile phone arena ...

Over the holiday weekend, a family friend (whose husband is a contractor) introduced us to a great concept we hadn't heard before: The concept of "visual yield." It's a concept that I think anybody who's ever been involved in a home improvement project can understand and appreciate -- and it has more to do with information security (and technology in general) than you might think at first blush...

The focus of a U.S. Senate hearing Monday afternoon is the potential danger of cellphone use -- specifically, the risk of brain cancer. That link was suggested as long ago as last decade, when cellphones were slightly smaller than a shoebox and just beginning to become part of the everyday landscape. As cellphone use became ubiquitous and research...

The graph that accompanies a Pew Research Center survey on media credibility released Monday shows blue lines heading south: Now just 29 percent of Americans surveyed believe the media gets the facts right, and a scant 18 percent think news organizations are truly objective While "Public Evaluations of the News Media, 1985-2009" does not focus on t...

The parent company of T-Mobile, the fourth-largest U.S. wireless company, is considering a bid for Sprint Nextel, the carrier just north of it on the size chart, according to a British newspaper.Citing anonymous sources, The Sunday Telegraph reported Sunday that Deutsche Telekom could make the offer within the next few weeks T-Mobile USA referred ...

The Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) focuses on the gaming industry and its media, and the Game Developers Conference revolves around ... well, developers. However, the Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle is all about those who, in the words of one PAX official, "pay the salaries." Gamers really do rule at PAX. Despite a recession that has started slash...

Just as the evolution of the speed-skating boot set new standards for the sport, innovation in today's constantly evolving e-commerce landscape has worked as a catalyst to move it forward. E-commerce practitioners from all industries need to be ready to step up and embrace innovation as a means of staying ahead of the game. For retailers looking t...

Making sure that every customer gets the personal touch may be fairly easy for the owner of a neighborhood bakery, but in a mass market of millions, making each customer feel like an individual is a formidable challenge. In the information age, tools like customer relationship management software make it possible for companies to apply a personal touch to the mass market -- and that's golden...

You couldn't help but feel for the U.S. president last week as he tried to sell an unpopular health plan. Sometimes you have to realize the foundation of something is just so bad that no amount of patching or selling will fix it, and while it looks like you are close to done, you'd actually get done more quickly if you started over properly. The...

The Department of Justice has asked Yahoo and Microsoft to supply it with more information about its proposed search advertising tie-up that the duo announced earlier this summer. Both companies have said they are cooperating with the inquiry. Indeed, they all but predicted this would happen when their partnership was first announced. "As expected...

The world's largest social network -- stuffed to the brim with 250 million members -- is checking itself out in the mirror, wondering how it would look in a slimmed-down version. However, it may also be putting on some weight by adding a feature that's popular with a certain much-hyped short messaging service that employs a fat little blue bird as its logo...