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For the past few decades, checks, ACH, credit cards and debit cards have been the primary means of payments for consumers These payment methods have been successful because consumers can pay for their purchases without carrying cash, merchants can increase sales by reaching a wider consumer base, and banks are able to establish themselves as truste...

This year, companies seeking to invest further -- or for the first time -- in a CRM software system will find not only a wide array of vendors, but also a large selection of computing platforms to support the application. These can range from Software as a Service offerings typified by the standard-bearer Salesforce.com to newer cloud platforms such as Google Apps...

Windows 7 is coming, and even major Apple fans like Walt Mossberg are saying some rather surprising things about it. With the layoffs and financial results that Microsoft announced last week, you have to wonder whether it will be enough to light a fire under the market like Windows 95 did. A lot has changed, and I'm beginning to wonder if, like it was in the '80s, the market is getting ready to move to something else...

You may be thinking "who needs another open source High Availability (HA) project?" Or, in fact, "why do we need any open source HA project?" For those who do not know, OpenSAF is the latest in a line of open source HA projects that is specifically designed to address high availability and clustering. First we'll look at what OpenSAF is and then some of the previous open source HA projects to make comparisons. We will look at some of the unique characteristics of the OpenSAF project that make it different from earlier HA projects -- and more like successful open source examples such as Eclipse or Apache.

HTC on Friday unveiled the Touch Cruise, a handset featuring built-in GPS and accompanying software. The new smartphone, an update to a similarly named HTC device released in January 2008, offers consumers a more compact form factor as well as new features The handset is the first to include a new photograph-tagging application from HTC, called "Fo...

Candidate Barack Obama promised to lift Bush Administration restrictions on embryonic stem cell research. Two days after he became President Obama, the government gave its approval for the first-ever human trials using therapies derived from this controversial area of science Geron, a Menlo Park, Calif.-based biotechnology firm, was given the go-ah...

Search engine powerhouse Google reported stronger-than-expected fourth-quarter financial results Thursday that sent the company's stock soaring nearly 6 percent to US$323.88 per share in mid-day trading on Friday The news comes on the heels of sobering developments in the broader technology sector. Microsoft announced 5,000 layoffs, its first signi...

Part 1 looks at essential elements of a business Web site. Part 2 offers basic site design guidelines. Part 3 tackles some advanced design issues When it comes to Web 2.0 tools and your business Web site, there's a time and a place for everything. Web master wannabes with businesses to run often go overboard with the plethora of social networking t...

Arlen Parsa is about to get his degree in documentary film from Chicago's Columbia College. Yet he seems to have already graduated cum laude from the unofficial School of Blogs Thanks to his mashup of old-school reporting and new media-fueled advocacy, a major consumer electronics company is reeling from scandal, traditional media is following his ...

Part 1 of this two-part series started a conversation with ubExact.com CEO Wilhelmina Stephenson. Part 2 continues the discussion When ubExact.com's CEO Wilhelmina Stephenson started work on her innovative beta platform last year for a new search engine concept, she had every reason to believe consumers would gravitate to the new search technology ...

It's no secret that customers aren't buying much these days. The economic engines have locked and stalled, leaving businesses everywhere in freefall. While companies around the globe are jettisoning anything they can to slow the descent, none are ditching CRM. In fact, CRM may be the last remaining parachute: a fact realized during earlier turbulence...

Harvesting, querying, delivering, enriching and analyzing data is at the heart of every business. However, most organizations are saddled with high-priced commercial databases as a result of continual departmental investments in new database projects, business intelligence (BI) projects, and the addition of new database projects through the merger and acquisition process. Consequently, IT budgets are increasing. To help reduce the costs of developing and maintaining data-driven business-critical applications, many businesses are turning to open source database (OSDB) solutions...

When Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th President of the United States this week, he promised that his administration would "restore science to its rightful place." Whether reality will fit the rhetoric remains to be seen, and there are reasons to be both optimistic and a little wary In his inaugural speech, the president devoted a decent 130 ou...

Chip giant Intel announced Wednesday that it will shutter four of its semiconductor factories and lay off as many as 6,000 employees by the end of 2009 The news follows on the heels of media speculation that Intel could suffer its first quarterly loss since Q4 of 1986. Intel said last week that it earned US$234 million during the fourth quarter, a ...

New York City has unveiled a new state-of-the-art information center designed to help both residents and tourists explore New York City through interactive maps and 3-D views of the city's five boroughs. Designed with Google Maps, the interactive facility is focused on cultural events, museums, dining, entertainment and lodging. "Our city's travel...

Microsoft startled Wall Street -- as well as the tech community -- with earnings that point to at least two quarters of declining profit and revenue, as well as plans to slash its workforce by 5,000 The rapidly declining economy, of course, is at the root of Microsoft's financial situation, which even Redmond admits it cannot yet fully comprehend.

Just days after his inauguration, Barack Obama will apparently be the first U.S. president to use a smartphone while in office White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters Thursday that the new president will use a BlackBerry to stay in contact with a circle of senior staffers and close friends, despite concerns expressed earlier by the ...

The serious objections by U.S. Department of Commerce to ICANN's new policies on creating unlimited domain suffixes are primarily based on old domain name thinking and continued fear of losing control of the Internet The comments lack understanding of global business naming problems surrounded by international demands of multiple-cyber-branding pla...

What started out on Sept. 2, 2008, as a potential innovation in the search engine space ended this month as the latest technology sacrifice to the economic gods ubExact.com went out of business, unable to sustain enough financial traction to make the innovation viable. ubExact spent much of its beta and post-launch endeavors designing the search pl...

As a result of having little to no visibility into business processes, many companies have turned to the integration capabilities of Business Process Management (BPM) tools. In the Aberdeen Group benchmark report "BPM and Beyond: The Human Factor of Process Management," Best-in-Class companies are working to build an information culture around BPM usage.