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Blogs and online review sites have proliferated in recent years, as ostensibly "with-it" influencers offer "independent" reviews, endorsements and testimonials that increasingly drive consumer traffic to a wide variety of product sellers. However, as consumers are learning with great disappointment, many of those serving up rave online comments -- including coveted Mommy bloggers -- are being compensated by the marketers whose goods and services they're reviewing, either in direct fees or in the form of perks, discounts, giveaways and other rewards that constitute sponsorships of the content...

SourceForge, a media services and e-commerce company that provides open source software downloads and development, is enjoying the best of both business worlds. It is one of the largest open source software repositories -- the SourceForge Web site has more than 30 million unique visitors permonth -- and it reported more than US$40 million in earnings for its last quarter, with no outstanding debt...

Some positive reviews and a humorous (and expensive) TV ad campaign have helped, but online measurement service comScore is providing Microsoft's new search engine even more wind beneath its Bing with new statistics indicating gains in Microsoft search sites' penetration and their share of search results pages ComScore's search penetration figures ...

Less than three months after announcing a slew of products and services to propel its thrust into the data center market, Dell on Wednesday released several out-of-the-box virtualization solutions targeting both enterprises and SMBs. These are aimed at simplifying virtualization and helping customers cut their costs....

Using Software as a Service (SaaS) or cloud computing to outsource otherwise costly infrastructure -- such as human resources, call centers and automated payroll -- has allowed many savvy small businesses to improve efficiencies, grow profits and maintain their business focus by buying services on demand. The benefits of the on-demand model, such as low- or no-cost resources on demand, and paying only for services used are now being applied to previously cloudless business practices. ...

Back in January, friends of Seattle, Wash., resident Bryan Rutberg were stunned when they read e-mails from his Facebook account accompanied by his photo. In the messages, Bryan appeared to claim he was in big trouble and that he needed their help At least one friend wired him money. However, Rutberg wasn't really in trouble and was in no need of a...

MySpace on Tuesday announced it will lay off 420 staffers, or nearly 30 percent of its 1,420-strong workforce MySpace and parent company News Corp. both said, in effect, that the cuts would result in a more efficient and innovative company....

The recession may indeed be forcing you to cut back on some cellphone and cable television services, but apparently it will only get your high-speed Internet access when it pries your computer mouse from your cold, dead hands. The latest Pew Internet and American Life Project study, released Wednesday, shows broadband adoption growing in the face ...

The products that fueled first-generation e-commerce -- books, software and music, to name a few -- are all simple to understand items that can be easily shipped to consumers. Today, we are at the outset of a second wave of online growth, as consumers push beyond these simple transactions to research and purchase more complex products online. Th...

What do these things have in common? Maybe nothing other than that the movie has a sequel and the two-dot-oh suffix is a sequel. Also, the start of blockbuster movie sequel season overlaps with trade shows like Sales 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0. Sales 2.0 was held in Boston a couple of weeks ago, Enterprise 2.0 is coming next week, and I can't wait....

Wind River on Tuesday announced the availability of a high-performance Type-1 hypervisor as the latest addition to its VxWorks product portfolio. The Wind River Hypervisor Multicore Software Solution for device development supports virtualization on single and multicore processors....

Nearly half of the large organizations that participated in a recent security survey conducted by Infonetics said they relied solely on the security offered by their smartphone operating system. Even the BlackBerry OS, which is considered comparatively robust, "won't necessarily cover Internet threats including email and Web-borne malware," according to the report...

Research In Motion announced on Tuesday that its new BlackBerry 9630 Tour world phone will hit the shelves this summer What's really new about it is that it supports 3G EV-DO networks in North America, as well as 3G UMTS/HSPA and quad-band EDGE/GPRS/GSM networks abroad....

Microsoft has initiated a civil lawsuit in the Western District of Seattle seeking US$750,000 in damages from three individuals in Vancouver, British Columbia, for committing click fraud. The three alleged fraudsters are two brothers and a mother -- Eric Lam, Gordon Lam and Melanie Suen -- who, according to Microsoft, have deployed botnets to drive up clicks at Web sites that compete with theirs.

Norway-based Opera Software opened access Tuesday to what it described as a "revolutionary" technology that allows average computer users to set up browser-based servers to share files and photos, stream music and chat "Unite," as the service is called, is included in a beta release of the company's Opera browser, which ranks a distant third behind...

"The whole world is watching" was one of the loudest rallying cries of Vietnam protesters gathered in the streets of Chicago outside the Democratic convention in 1968. Forty-one years later, the same slogan still applies and is even more relevant in the chaotic streets of Tehran. Thanks to Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and other social media technologies, the whole world is indeed watching Iranian citizens rise up against suspect presidential election results...

EnterpriseDB, which has commercialized the PostgreSQL open source database, announced on Tuesday the fifth version of its Postgres Plus Advanced Server This latest version of EnterpriseDB's relational database management system (RDBMS) is designed to let users easily migrate more Oracle applications in order to cut costs....

In the midst of the U.S. economic crisis, cautious spending and downsizing have left the retail industry in dire straits. The Commerce department recently reported that retail sales continued to fall in March -- down 1.1 percent from February's sales figures. March 2009 saw a 9 percent decline compared with March 2008. Even as retail numbers drop,...

We all know that some things are easier to do than others. In fact, what separates an average manager from a great one is the ability to balance decisions based on two almost totally unrelated sets of criteria: ease of accomplishment on the one hand vs. value to the organization on the other. Think about it this way: A manager that only focuses ...

IBM had added a new service-and-hardware offering to its cloud computing repertoire. The bundle targets users seeking a single jumping-off point for deployment of a cloud environment focused on a discrete task, such as a test bed for application development IBM CloudBurst is a set of preintegrated hardware, storage, virtualization and networking to...