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This is the final installment in a four-part series. Part 1 examines how companies can use business intelligence to their strategic advantage. Part 2 looks at the features and functionality of various systems. Part 3 offers insights into the total cost of ownership While most believe that knowledge is indeed power and that knowing where one stands ...

In a sagging economy, doing business as usual is rarely prudent and usually disastrous. Companies often must change the course of strategies, or in some cases accelerate them After a spate of business meetings during the marathon that is Mobile World Congress, one takeaway is the acceleration in the mobile handset market of operators moving to open...

An October 2008 DLA Piper Technology Leaders Forecast survey talks about the impact of the financial and economic crisis within IT circles. Overall, the survey found that while industry leaders have a host of concerns, they are fundamentally optimistic about future opportunities within technology As further validation, during a PSVillage event in ...

There are reports that Cox and AT&T have begun cooperating with theRecording Industry Association of America's new antipiracy strategy --first announced in December -- of targeting illegal file-sharing activities through Internet service providers instead of through the courts. Once the RIAA identifies someone downloading or uploading copyrighted...

Dell on Wednesday announced a slew of products and services to underscore its thrust into the data center market. These include servers and workstations, lifecycle and system management software, storage, virtualization, and data center consulting services It is offering 11th-generation PowerEdge servers and its Precision workstations, both based o...

Social networking startup Twitter has announced its intention to start making money through the introduction of premium business accounts sometime this year The San Francisco-based company provides users with a free service that lets them post 140-character notifications, or "tweets." ...

If you took part in Thursday's live online presidential town-hall meeting, you had the chance to submit your questions to President Obama via text or video. Then you got to vote on the popularity of the questions, effectively ranking them for the president's staff to consider So some might think somebody was blowing smoke when it turned out that th...

It's Game Developers Conference (GDC) time, and that means plenty of news -- some good; some great. Thus far, the most eye-catching announcements out of GDC '09 have come from two upstart hardware makers -- one trying to bring console gaming to users around the globe, the other aiming to take the console out of the gaming equation altogether Also, ...

The dismal state of the economy is causing companies everywhere to reassess their marketing budgets to ensure that they're allocating their limited marketing funds in the most productive ways possible. In many cases, this means curtailing, postponing or even eliminating previously planned marketing expenditures. In other cases, companies are actually investing more aggressively in various types of marketing programs, sensing an opportunity to capitalize on the grim economic headlines.

Virtualization is an essential component for any IT outfit looking torun an efficient, manageable, waste-not-want-not shop. It's not justa tool for large call centers with big server farms. Evensmall- to medium-sized businesses with growing computer demands canbenefit from virtualization Why? Virtualization reduces costs by lowering hardware needs ...

China reportedly has blocked access to YouTube without providing Google, which owns the video-sharing site, with any official explanation -- or even confirmation that it has indeed turned the site dark. It's suspected that the government objected to recently uploaded videos of Chinese police beating Tibetan monks during last year's uprising. China...

Spark Capital, one of the early investors in Twitter, Akamai Technologies and Novatel Wireless, has launched a new seed fund for technology entrepreneurs, specifically in the Boston and New York City areas. Called "Start@Spark," the program will provide up to US$250,000 in seed money to business starters Spark focuses on the convergence of media, e...

Blockbuster and TiVo have joined forces to deliver Blockbuster's vast library of digital video to owners of the TiVo television set-top box "We are excited to be teaming with TiVo, the company that created the DVR, to make Blockbuster's entertainment content readily available to their millions of subscribers," said Jim Keyes, Blockbuster Chairman a...

In just a few years, Software as a Service (SaaS) has gone from a curiosity to a mission-critical application, accelerating into mainstream adoption. Faced with a dire financial situation, most businesses are taking advantage of the tremendous economies of scale that SaaS brings. Yet that's only the beginning. The reality is that businesses have just barely begun to leverage the real power of SaaS to transform the way they work, compete and survive. For it is not just in the applications they currently provide, but with thousands of companies using the same solution every day, SaaS companies are using their data and best practices to develop new applications and intelligence solutions that would be impossible to deliver in a software or managed service environment...

Two of the biggest names in CRM had trade shows recently. Oracle and Microsoft each held customer conventions in the same week, but the two could not have been more different. Microsoft attracted thousands of customers, partners, employees and press to New Orleans for Convergence, one of its big annual events. In a departure from convention, Oracle held a day-long exposition promoting its front and back office solutions on the Internet...

Having recently completed the second issue of Hackett and Bankwell, I have been taking inventory of my accomplishments and lessons learned Two years ago, I was working two jobs, writing Web software by day and configuring Linux servers by night. One job was a corporate situation where a lot of the work had been automated, leaving mostly maintenance...

Over the past year or so, e-readers have suddenly become a must-have gadget. Amazon's Kindle e-reader was even named one of talk show host Oprah Winfrey's favorite things in 2008. With the recent release of the second iteration of the Kindle, electronic books and their accompanying devices are back in the news However, in these tough economic times...

Failed efforts to reach a licensing agreement with Warner Music have led YouTube to unceremoniously yank thousands of user-created videos from the site. YouTube is required to follow intellectual property rights laws, of course. However, critics of the move contend the creators' use of content in many of the videos is allowable under the so-called fair use doctrine, which has made a regular appearance in digital content lawsuits over the last decade. ...

The first tech media darling has already blasted its way through the clutter at the annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco -- OnLive, the new company to come from longtime serial tech entrepreneur Steve Perlman Phrases like "game changer" are being tossed about to describe OnLive's technology, which essentially creates the new category ...

Taking aim at the next generation of computing -- virtualization and the cloud -- Novell on Tuesday unveiled Suse Linux Enterprise 11 Suse Linux Enterprise 11 has been optimized for the major hypervisors -- VMware ESX, Microsoft Hyper-V and Xen. It runs on the x86, Itanium, IBM Power and IBM System z platforms, all of which are used in IT infrastru...