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Last week, IBM announced the new Smart Analytics System, a fine-tuned solution for analyzing both structured information in databases and unstructured, often incompatible data from sources such as blogs, emails, information archives, podcasts, videos, Web sites and wikis. The Smart Analytics System can solve complex business problems as much as th...

Jimmy Wales, cofounder of Wikipedia, recently attempted to pressure ECT News Network into killing or drastically revising an article that was not to his liking. In an illuminating series of no fewer than 17 email messages, Wales demanded, threatened, wheeled, and implored in a dogged effort to accomplish one thing: to get us to change our story Iro...

Fooling with hackers is generally a very bad idea, but the scammers responsible for an apparent ATM grift in Las Vegas may not have been aware of that particular rule of thumb The ATM scam happened during the Black Hat and Defcon security conferences last week, during which time the Las Vegas Strip was heavily populated with hackers well-versed in ...

The numbers in two recent copyright infringement lawsuits involving downloaded music are enough to get tongues wagging. Is a song really worth US$22,500? Or even $80,000? Juries in Massachusetts and Minnesota, respectively, ordered those awards to the recording industry this year in cases involving defendants alleged to have illegally downloaded mu...

Only about five miles separate Apple's Cupertino, Calif., campus from the Googleplex in Mountain View in Northern California's Silicon Valley. Yet the distance between the two tech giants grew a little wider in other ways Monday with the news that Google CEO Eric Schmidt would be stepping down from Apple's board of directors Schmidt served three ye...

There are always niche vendors developing new applications around functionality that doesn't quite fit into a defined software category. When the analyst community takes note -- and then decides to give the category a name -- a bona fide trend is established. That is happening to SpringCM -- a Software as a Service provider of functionality that h...

Boy, just when you think it's safe to sleep in, Microsoft and Yahoo decide to hitch up and slap Google upside the head. I'm guessing that this really screwed up the party in the Google 767 flying palace last week. For Google, which lately seems to have the attention span of a 3-year-old after getting into the sugar jar, this could be a good thing --this could force Google to focus. It certainly is good for Microsoft and Yahoo, even though it suggests a potential breakup that could be the mother of all divorces. ...

Could something as simple as an SMS text message turn your own smartphone against you, allowing a hacker to listen in on your private conversations or direct you to a malicious Web site? It can be done, according to security experts presenting their findings Thursday at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas.

Joel Tenenbaum's fate was probably already sealed before he went to trial for the copyright infringement of 30 songs by Nirvana, Green Day and the Smashing Pumpkins, but the 25-year-old college student made sure of it on Thursday when he admitted on the stand that he did in fact download and share the songs. The next day, the federal judge overs...

The proliferation of smartphones, alongside the growth in number of subscribers of 3G network data plans (or newer wireless services), is having a ripple effect on multiple markets, from mobile apps to hardware enhancements. As media becomes increasingly fragmented, advertisers are focused on multiplatform media strategies in order to capture and retain consumer attention...

Driven by competitive pressure to improve the customer experience, organizations are moving toward an online self-service model that pushes the boundaries of electronic information presentation, or e-presentment. Yet as they embrace this model, new challenges await, including how to ensure customers have seamless online access to relevant and accurate information in the format they want...

Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories have laid the groundwork for an unprecedented simulation of a large-scale botnet after booting up 1 million Linux kernels as virtual machines ...

There's no point in wasting any more time -- or text characters. I'm making it official and declaring this season the Summer of Twitter You can thank me later....

A proposed national ban on text messaging while driving, introduced in the U.S. Senate on Wednesday, is already drawing criticism that it doesn't go far enough and is unlikely to be effective without stringent enforcement and radical attitude shifts in the driving public "The real safety problem is not just texting, but all cellphone use while driv...

Yet more Web security flaws have emerged to threaten Internet users, who are already bedeviled by the likes of drive-by attacks, SQL injections and spam At the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, researchers reportedly demonstrated serious flaws in the Secure Sockets Layer encryption protocol, a commonly used method of protecting communicat...

Now that Microsoft and Yahoo have finally come to terms on how they will work together to gain turf in the search advertising market, they must convince antitrust regulatory authorities both in the U.S. and in Europe that their union will create more competition -- not less. That will be no easy task -- a fact that executives from both companies h...

Sensitive data in unstructured formats (e.g., in documents and file systems) poses a distinct problem to security- and compliance-minded organizations, a problem exacerbated by the ubiquity of Web-based portals and collaborative tools such as Microsoft SharePoint. Based on the responses of more than 160 companies in the June 2009 benchmark study, ...

Microsoft and Yahoo have inked an Internet search advertising agreement, finally entering a partnership that seemed to die more than one death over the past two years. In broad terms, the deal gives Microsoft access to Yahoo's content and advertisers, with its AdCenter platform serving as the interface. Yahoo will be the front-end face of the part...

Today's revenue cycle is broken. Sales reps spend half their time cold-calling leads instead of interacting with interested prospects, while marketing invests its shrinking budget on costly programs and prospect lists that yield low conversion rates. The two departments seemingly operate in separate silos, interacting only when a lead is handed off from marketing to sales, and this lack of teamwork results in 80 percent of the leads ultimately being wasted. In a tough economy, we can't afford to waste a single lead, but today we are discarding them by the truckload...

In the latest phase of an ongoing battle with computer makers over the allegedly eco-unfriendly nature of materials they use in manufacturing, environmental activist group Greenpeace on Tuesday hit HP's Palo Alto, Calif., global headquarters ...