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By some measures, AT&T's Q1 earnings report was lackluster, at best. The company reported a nearly 10 percent profit decline for the quarter ending March 31, compared with the same period a year ago. However, the drop was not as steep as analysts had expected. Furthermore, certain segments of AT&T's business lines -- namely its wireless and data o...

By some measures, AT&T's Q1 earnings report was lackluster, at best. The company reported a nearly 10 percent profit decline for the quarter ending March 31, compared with the same period a year ago. However, the drop was not as steep as analysts had expected. Furthermore, certain segments of AT&T's business lines -- namely its wireless and data o...

By some measures, AT&T's Q1 earnings report was lackluster, at best. The company reported a nearly 10 percent profit decline for the quarter ending March 31, compared with the same period a year ago. However, the drop was not as steep as analysts had expected. Furthermore, certain segments of AT&T's business lines -- namely its wireless and data o...

Online retailers are facing new challenges today. While more people are shopping online, there are more sites for comparison shopping, and in this difficult economy, people are spending less. Price discounting may help create sales now, but if it is the foundation of your customer acquisition and retention strategy, you may not achieve the long-term results you're after...

I have been remiss in not paying enough attention to social media monitoring software. I suppose it's understandable given that social media is at the margin of CRM -- moving to the center, but still in the outer shell -- and monitoring software is somewhere beyond that orbit in the software equivalent of the Kuiper belt. Maybe it's time to pay a little attention there, because monitoring software can be a big addition to your marketing strategy, and much of it is free...

Email was born sometime between 1965 and 1970, depending on how you define its genesis, and by 1980 it was considered by many to be the killer app. It drove the proliferation of PCs in the workplace and allowed people all over the world to work together. SMS texting and tweeting can take some credit for email's slow decline. However, it remains th...

The older bits of the world's accumulated knowledge, bound together in volumes of printedbooks and magazines, are slowly disappearing. Out-of-print renditionsoften disappear forever. Libraries with limited shelf space oftenreplace seldom-used titles with newer tomes. A far smaller portion ofprinted matter makes it to page-scanning processes for preservationin digital form...

VMware is launching what it bills as the first operating system that has been developed specifically for cloud computing. Called "vSphere 4," the virtualization platform pools and then manages an enterprise's virtual infrastructure and computing resources in its data center VMware has previewed some of this functionality in various products -- name...

If it goes through without a hitch, Oracle's purchase of Sun Microsystems, announced Monday, could fill significant gaps in the database vendor's offerings In addition to getting technologies in hot areas such as virtualization and cloud computing, Oracle will get access to patents that could prove to be cash cows....

The innovations that many Google users take advantage of -- Google News and Google Reader being just two examples -- were home brewed in the company's Google Labs division. On Monday, the search giant pulled back the curtains on that research and development department, giving Google Labs a new outward-looking focus and allowing the public to comment on all that ongoing beta activity...

The global economy is changing. For many consumers, the credit card crunch is crumbling their ability to buy things online. In many countries outside the U.S., consumers do not have credit cards but rely instead on smart cards to swipe transactions directly through their banks.

Nobody, not even Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg himself, has yet successfully produced a proven, sustainable and scalable business model that can satisfactorily monetize the vast ecosystem of the social networks -- Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. The reason for this could be rooted in the basic noncommercial nature of social networki...

"Vendor security questionnaire" -- three innocuous-sounding words that can leave security folks trembling. If you're in security -- no matter what company you're with -- there's a good chance you know exactly what I'm talking about, either because you've experienced firsthand the pain of trying to vet the information security controls of the mult...

Oracle's announcement Monday that it is buying Sun Microsystems for $7.4 billion in cash ($9.50 per share) has the potential to rock the hardware and software markets Oracle expects the deal will boost its earnings considerably over the next few years....

President Barack Obama has rounded out his panel of high-tech advisors, naming Aneesh Chopra, the state of Virginia's secretary of technology, as the chief technology officer of the U.S. While not having the heft of a cabinet-level appointment, the newly created position is still seen as pivotal to many of the Obama administration's initiatives Oba...

You may keep your computer and your TV in separate rooms in your house, but the living arrangements between the two devices are going to get a little cozier, thanks to Adobe The multimedia software company used the National Association of Broadcasters' annual meeting in Las Vegas Monday as a stage to announce it is extending its market-leading Flas...

Part 1 of this two-part series takes a look at the practical communication potential of microblogging service Twitter. Part 2 investigates how businesses use Twitter to communicate with customers In a bear market, nearly everyone is willing to put up with a little bull. Twitter is certainly full of it, in the form of mundane drivel, yet everyone se...

Around the time when Software as a Service (SaaS) was pre-empting the on-premise vendors, SugarCRM burst onto the CRM scene with its owndisruptive business mode: open source for CRM. The build-it-yourselfmodel wasn't for everybody, of course -- or so many thought at thetime. As SugarCRM continues to refine its code and product lineup, itis attract...

I was in Malta last week at the IFA 2009 conference, which is partially intended to drive interest into Malta as a technology center. This is one of the locations where people believe a new Silicon Valley might be born, and that certainly focuses us on the fact that the current Silicon Valley isn't what it once was. A few weeks ago, I was at a lunch with a large group of folks who helped found the Silicon Valley, and we discussed what killed it. ...

It's telling when a company in this market registers growth yet still comes under scrutiny because the growth wasn't as high asprevious years. Then again, this is Google we're talking about -- theuber-corporation of the Web with seemingly limitless potential and promise It still has both, of course. However, due to both a combination ofthe economy ...