Articles by

Many companies are facing the toughest economic landscape in generations. Driven by the housing market landslide and seizure of the global credit markets, economies the world over have slipped into retrenchment and recession. Even the most positive economic forecasts predict continued retraction through 2009, with best-case scenarios describing a slow-but-steady recovery for 2010 and beyond...

Amazon's announcement of the Kindle DX on Wednesday -- hot on the heels of the Kindle 2's emergence earlier this year -- appears to have injected new life into the e-reader industry, which has been languishing for about 10 years ...

Someone has made a tragic mistake and handed me the keys to a major TV station group. I've been told I can take it for a spin, provided my buddies and I don't trash the leather seats. I have to make sure it's got plenty of gas when I bring it back -- dent-free, or it's my ass. This scenario is playing out only in the multiplex of my mind and is on...

Citrix Systems is revamping its certification processes for engineers and architects to focus more on virtualization and provide an easier path to upgrade preexisting certifications. The updated certifications are Citrix Certified Enterprise Engineer for Virtualization (CCEE) and CitrixCertified Integration Architect for Virtualization (CCIA); in many respects, they are a continuation of the company's Administrator-level certifications...

Those who are looking for Twitter to finally hit a revenue-generating home run may have to settle for a series of singles and line-drives instead. The microblogging service keeps rolling out new features that may eventually add up to a business model -- the latest examples being the ability to search Web pages through links embedded in tweets, and to rank results based on reputation...

Over a dozen technology companies announced Thursday their participationin the Wireless Gigabit (WiGig) Alliance, an organization formed toestablish a unified specification for 60 gigahertz (GHz) wirelesstechnology. The new wireless alliance has been working behind closeddoors for more than a year The collection of semiconductor makers and digital ...

The report came out right before the economy nose-dived, before ad revenues started to shrink, before even online display advertising started feeling the recession's pinch. A February 2007 report from the Audit Bureau of Circulations -- the keepers of media buying/selling trends and standards for publishers and advertisers -- highlighted the opportunities and the challenges for the then-still-hot online advertising space...

Wasting no time in bringing a needed cohesion across its products and solutions, IBM on Monday at its IMPACT 2009 event in Las Vegas unveiled a cloud-based business process modeling (BPM) service, tighter alignment with Amazon, better complex event processing (CEP) integration, reintroduced a WebSphere private cloud appliance and double-downed on a slew of its industry framework solutions...

Given the unpredictable nature of today's market climate, many software-oriented companies are scrambling to cut costs and streamline their application development processes. For organizations utilizing Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 (VB6) as their primary development environment, the difficulty of achieving this agility was magnified by the April 8, 2008, termination of all support for VB6.

Virtualization and cloud computing specialist Citrix wants to do for its IT customers what Apple does for users of its App Store. Instead of selling programs like games or restaurant finders for the iPhone or iPod touch, however, Citrix's new Dazzle service will provide on-demand business applications Citrix announced its Dazzle online storefront s...

Following the arrest of the accused Boston-area 'Craigslist killer' Philip Markoff, Craigslist has come under fire for its "casual encounters" section on the site, which allegedly contains de facto advertisements for prostitution. Craigslist, like other Web 2.0 sites, such as social network MySpace -- has attracted the attention of authorities in ...

Amazon on Wednesday unveiled the new Kindle DX, a larger version of its Kindle e-reader, during a press conference at Pace University. Amazon heads were accompanied at the event by executives from the device's two major target markets -- the newspaper and publishing industries. ...

In the world of IT, it's important to maintain an open mind and be willing to consider new approaches to addressing problems. People often have a tendency to get locked into a particular approach and hold onto it long past the point at which it has ceased being a best practice. On the other hand, it's also important to maintain a certain level of skepticism, and a key trait many IT veterans have developed -- out of necessity -- is the innate ability to apply a "reality filter" to vendor technology claims. ...

I wanted to write a piece about the wisdom of crowds for a long time, but I needed a clip from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" to make it work. After a lot of procrastinating, I went to YouTube, did the hard work of reviewing all of the Python clips and found the right one. There is no limit to the effort I will make to write a piece -- this research was physically demanding and my sides still ache...

Google's right to use the word "Android" for its mobile phone operating system is being challenged by Erich Specht, who acquired a trademark for the name "Android Data" in 2002. Google attempted to gain the right to use "Android" for its OS last year, as it happens, but the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office denied its petition due to possible prod...

It's no secret that the business world is going mobile. Companies are beginning to move to a virtual environment -- especially sales teams who have to be on the road more often. The trend of telecommuting is also starting to catch on. With this in mind, IT managers are faced with a new headache: managing what they can't see. Companies are struggling to create and understand mobile IT strategy.

Six days after unveiling a Windows 7 release candidate (RC) to techies on the MSDN Network and TechNet, Microsoft has released the operating system to the general public However, this version is perhaps best left to serious techies and professionals rather than everyday users hoping to snag a next-generation OS for free -- Microsoft will not provid...

Google and Apple are both wildly successful Web 2.0 companies that can be considered market makers in their respective fields. Another similarity that is less obvious -- but apparently very compelling to the Federal Trade Commission -- is their taste in corporate leadership. Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Genentech CEO Arthur Levinson sit on both of the companies' boards of directors...

There are thousands of forums on the Web relating to any subject imaginable. Forums are a collection of people interested in specific subjects collaborating with one another. Forums even have top experts in their fields answering questions and offering advice at no cost. Forums allow for user interaction through question-and-answer boards. These boards have moderators to prevent spammers from ruining the forums' goals...

Cloud computing has been a central subject and strategy for IT vendors of every sort, but the actual meaning of "cloud" remains hazy. For Web-based information aggregators like Google and Yahoo, the cloud offers a mechanism for delivering advertising-driven content and services.