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Circuit City has filed for reorganization relief in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of Virginia in Richmond. The retailer -- the second largest in the electronics goods space after Best Buy -- has clearly been struggling for the last several months. In November alone, it slashed its workforce by 20 percent and announced plans to close 155 stores...

VMware, a provider of virtualization solutions for PCs and servers, wants to get into mobile phones, carve up their software and create virtual operating units -- much like the company's products already do with servers in enterprise data centers. The company announced its intentions Monday regarding its nascent VMware Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP), which uses technology it acquired from Trango Virtual Processors last month.

Search and databases often have troubled relationships. Web-based search utilities have become essential business tools. The database is the lifeblood of many a business' record-keeping system. Both are vital -- just don't try to put the two together or integrate spreadsheets and other documents with them For example, searching just doesn't exist w...

While online business owners have become more aware of tactics for driving traffic to their Web sites, it is easy to overlook the more basic methods amidst the rise of new Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques involving the content and HTML coding of Web sites. Search engine traffic can be inconsistent -- search engine algorithms can change, and search engines don't get paid by the organic traffic they create. Online businesses should invest in opening multiple channels of traffic toward their Web site, and one of the most time-tested yet little-known sources of traffic is called "direct navigation traffic."

Avaya is targeting unmet pockets of user demand in the telecom industry with the release of three new offerings this week. Kevin Kennedy, who will be taking over as CEO in January, is appearing at VoiceCon on Monday to unveil the new products: a contact center product focused on outbound messaging and self-service, a speech-to-text application, and a unified communications package that bundles licenses of various products...

I am breathing a long sigh of relief this week now that the election is over and it appears, for once, the most qualified candidate actually got the job. This seems to rarely happen, and my only remaining hope is Apple gets a clue from McCain's loss and switches off the negative advertising and instead works on improving its own products Speaking o...

When's the last time you heard an online retailer complain that their banner ads were too well targeted? How about an online publisher lamenting the torrent of accurate user data they were able to capture, or for that matter a user who just wanted more of the ads they were getting to be irrelevant to them? Based on what I expect are some pretty spa...

More is better, right? Wrong. In The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less, Barry Schwartz explains how too many options actually cause more psychological distress than good. And nowhere is the overabundance of choice more prevalent than the Internet, where any given Web site can present us with an overwhelming number of alternatives at once The solu...

Someone is trying to extort money from a company that handles drug prescription benefits for 50 million Americans in what could be one of the more damaging cases of data loss on record. The incident may raise red flags for industry hopes of putting more health care information online in an effort to control costs The FBI is looking into the extorti...

It seems like every month or so another video site rolls out online. There's YouTube, Joost, Jaman, iTunes, Miro, PluggedIn and Yahoo, not to mention offerings from ABC, Cartoon Network, ESPN Fox, Hulu and Spike, just to name a few. As the choices for Internet TV viewers multiply, a need has arisen for firms and utilities that bring order to the c...

Chief marketing officers (CMOs) are given the unenviable, almost contradictory, task of catching marketing lightning in a bottle on a consistent basis. The problem is that turbulent economic conditions, like the ones we've experience recently, have historically stymied marketing innovation and forced CMOs to focus their budget on "tried-and-true" tactics rather than experimental ones...

Enterprise organizations often think of customer service as an unavoidable fact of business, a necessary expense. Rethink customer service, however, and it can become a strategic weapon that fosters growth and competitive advantage Some common steps can turn customer service into a strategic weapon that can be especially valuable during difficult e...

Web developers have many options for the servlet containers they use to host Java apps. Included in these choices are both classic proprietary and a host of open source containers. For the typical Java application developer, the container that holds one or more Java applications together is fairly transparent From a non-techy's perspective, servlet...

CNN reporter Jessica Yellin has probably heard a lot of compliments during her career, which has included stints at ABC and MSNBC. But I'm guessing anchor Wolf Blitzer's closing comment to her following her live report from Chicago early Tuesday evening was a new one for her "Alright Jessica, you're a terrific hologram," Blitzer told Yellin, as her...

More details about Microsoft's upcoming Windows 7 operating system emerged Wednesday. The OS will have a shorter boot time; offer greater reliability; more efficient memory usage and improved battery life for laptops, according to Microsoft's Jon DeVaan, Steven Sinofsky and Mike Anguilo, who spoke at the Windows Hardware Engineering conference....

It seems as though the wide-open door for the Google Android-based T-Mobile G1 wasn't nearly wide enough. Intrepid hackers have blown the door right off the hinges and shined a big spotlight inside the smartphone software. What did they find? Full root privileges to the G1 file system Breaking into a G1 is in some ways easier and in other ways hard...

SanDisk unveiled new technology Wednesday that it said could increase solid-state drive (SSD) performance by up to 100 times in computers running Windows Vista Dubbed "Extreme FFS," the next-generation flash management system is an advanced file system for SSDs that accelerates performance and reliability for computing applications, according to Sa...

Cisco reduced its revenue guidance and posted weak earnings, or net income, for its fiscal first quarter, worrying both its own shareholders and those who view the computer networking manufacturer as a bellwether for the tech space. The networking giant turned in an essentially flat performance for the quarter, with earnings registering US$2.2 bil...

It appears that Silicon Valley will hold Barack Obama to his promise to consider naming a national technology czar/chief technology officer for his administration, and industry observers already have a few suggestions for the president-elect Google CEO Eric Schmidt has been mentioned as a contender, largely due to his public support for Obama, whic...

In what's become the equivalent of watching a fish flop around outside of water, Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang has now come forward with a new plea for Microsoft to purchase his struggling company. Just hours after Google announced it was pulling out of its planned search advertising partnership with Yahoo, Yang spoke at a Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco and displayed what's widely being interpreted as a new level of desperation...