Articles by

An American's first impressions of India often include images of alternate approaches to trash management, intermittent electrical power supplies and issues of environmental sustainability In this interview with Trudy Heller, those approaches are seen from the perspective of Heller's work designing products for environmental sustainability and prov...

An American's first impressions of India often include images of alternate approaches to trash management, intermittent electrical power supplies and issues of environmental sustainability In this interview with Trudy Heller, those approaches are seen from the perspective of Heller's work designing products for environmental sustainability and prov...

Part 1 of this two-part series on the tech job landscape points to some of the areas least affected by the glacier overrunning other sectors of the U.S. economy If history were a reliable guide, a job hunter would stay as far away from the telecom field as possible. Ten years ago, telecoms could not hire enough people to keep up with the demand. Th...

The mobile Internet device (MID) is the most exciting new device category to hit the market since the smartphone. A MID is a handheld device that delivers high-speed wireless Internet and multimedia services, typically with a 4- to 7-inch screen form factor. Most MIDs will be based on the Linux operating system (OS) and at less than half the cost of an average laptop, MIDs are an appealing new alternative...

The drawback with using most search engines is they all seem to give similarresults and generally all have the same look and feel. They lackpersonalization and offer a mostly boring environment "Most people select the first few results on Google, even thoughYahoo and Microsoft Live give better business results for specificinformation. And Live is m...

AT&T and Verizon shares were hit hard Monday after being downgraded by Bernstein Research The firm downgraded Verizon from market perform to underperform and AT&T from outperform to market perform....

Netflix is coming to a high-definition LG Electronics television near you The two companies on Monday announced an extension of an existing partnership whereby LG will sell Internet-ready TVs capable of streaming content from a catalog of 12,000 Netflix movies. The service is already available on one of LG's Blu-ray disc players....

The Chinese government is starting 2009 with a crusade to make the Internet safe for its young population to surf without encountering pornography. While Beijing has previously tried to crack down on obscenity, this time government officials are using some of their harshest language yet, threatening actions against 19 Internet companies -- including China's most popular search engine, Baidu, and Google. Both Baidu and Google also offer blogging services that the government said had been used to distribute obscene content...

Freescale Semiconductor has launched a new low-cost processor, the i.MX515, that's designed to power what Freescale hopes will be new lines of Linux-based netbooks retailing for less than US$200. There are lots of interesting angles to Freescale's efforts -- the lower price point, the technology behind the i.MX515, and a new path for Linux into th...

As gadget makers gear up to show their wares at the 2009 Consumer Electronics Shows (CES) in Las Vegas, Chinese hardware maker Lenovo debuted a host of new laptop PCs, the most striking of which offers users a dual-screen configuration The ThinkPad W700ds features a 17-inch primary screen with a 10.6-inch slide-out secondary screen. It is the first...

Just three and a half years after Christina Lampe-Onnerud founded Boston-Power to bring new battery technology to devices large and small, her company forged a deal with PC maker HP, which will be the first computer maker to offer laptops with the new Sonata battery. The Sonata can be charged and recharged about 1,000 times, compared to the maximu...

High-tech job seekers should take heart. Despite the daily onslaught of grim economic news, the need for skilled information technology staff remains stable, according to the Robert Half Technology IT Hiring Index and Skills Report, released earlier this month. Twelve percent of chief information officers polled in the survey said they planned to ...

Well, this is CES week, and I am eagerly waiting to fly to Las Vegas, participate in the Tiger Build Your Own PC race, and spend the following three weeks relearning how to walk. This year should be interesting because I'm getting weekly notices that the hotels are lowering room rates, and one of the vendors is letting me use one of its pre-paid rooms for free...

Given the many options out there, someone in the market for a portable computer may have a hard time deciding whether to go with an ultra-small netbook or a small-but-not-THAT-small notebook computer. If you want a netbook, you've got another choice ahead of you: Would you like that with Linux or Windows? While it's no surprise to see the latter o...

Growth of the mobile broadband market happens along two major dimensions: subscribers (adoption rate) and traffic (use rate). Specific growth drivers for both of these categories vary by geographic region, but in general, drivers can be divided into three major categories that are applicable to all the regions: Evolution of useful mobile applicatio...

The global financial marketplace has recently become quite volatile, as fears of an American recession affect economies all over the world. Such fears can be especially dangerous for businesses. In times like these, many top managers panic and make unwise decisions such as firing quality employees and slashing important programs This might seem lik...

I recently carried out a personal quest for a netbook computer.Relying on a bit of insider snobbery since I write about computertechnology almost daily, I was not expecting a big problem in making aselection It's not that I really needed another computer. My home office is wellstocked with two desktops running Windows XP and a third formerWindows b...

I'm writing this on Tuesday evening Pacific Time, Dec. 30, 2008. It will be published early Friday morning, Jan. 2. So right now I can't tell you if I was able to keep my first New Year's resolution: to use the extra "leap second" we all got just before midnight New Year's Eve in a wise, productive and clever fashion The additional tick of the cloc...

This article was originally published on July 18, 2008, and is brought to you as part of our Best of ECT News series Working from home has become an acceptable option for a wide range of professionals, including salespeople and lawyers. Until recently, this option, dubbed "homeshoring," was unpopular in the call center, although that perception has...

This article was originally published on Aug. 6, 2008, and is brought to you as part of our Best of ECT News series It's no fun shopping alone. That's the theory behind social shopping, a trend that combines social networking with e-commerce. It's a trend that's coming into its own as increasing numbers of online shoppers turn to the sites for fu...