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Consumers will get a break from having to wrestle with tough-to-open parcels this holiday season with the advent of "frustration-free" packaging from Amazon.com The online retail giant will try to cut down on the sheer volume of packaging materials used to ship purchases from the site. The effort begins with products from 19 manufacturers, includin...

Salesforce.com continues to push its cloud computing functionality into the enterprise, with the introduction of a new tool that allows users to harness the applications available on Force.com and apply them to corporate Web sites. Force.com Sites, part of the company's Force.com cloud computing platform, allows customers to run their Web sites in...

Microsoft on Monday released its Security Intelligence Report (MSIR), which covers the first half of 2008. The report, according to the software maker, is an in-depth look at the overall software security threat environment. It's based on data received from hundreds of millions of computers around the globe During the first half of 2008, the report...

As the U.S. presidential election season winds down, a handful of political polls that include mobile phone users show Democrat Barack Obama beating Republican John McCain by a substantially wider margin than polls that do not include cell phone users In polls that extended to cell phones, Obama beat McCain by an average of 10 points versus just 5 ...

The same credit problems that have hit many a home mortgage holder are also threatening to unplug troubled electronics big-box store Circuit City. The nation's second-largest seller of consumer electronics said Monday it will close 155 stores, lay off up to 17 percent of its 43,000-employee U.S. workforce, and consider all options to restructure its business...

MySpace, MTV Networks and online ad platform Auditude are teaming up to try and squeeze money out of pirated video -- content distributed online without the permission of the rights holder The trio's plan is to identify online pirated video clips, slap an ad overlay on top of them as they play, and monetize their use, returning a portion of the pro...

Putting Iolo Technologies' System Mechanic 8.0 throughits paces was a long-overdue reunion with an old friend of sorts. Ihad used a much earlier version when it was a different label yearsago. I had forgotten how adept the program's design was even back thenat rooting out the hundreds of glitches and clutter that fall into thedeep recesses of the Windows operating system...

The old-school approach to order fulfillment doesn't fly for many Internet retailers. Warehousing, packing, shipping and return-order processing are labor-intensive and time-consuming. This has led to a growing trend among online sellers -- the use of Web technologies to automate order fulfillment I'm talking about e-commerce fulfillment providers ...

Anyone who has reviewed their 401(k) statements lately has received a very personal and immediate measure of just how the last four weeks of financial turmoil have affected them Take that urgency you may have felt about wanting to catch up as quickly as possible, multiply it by the number of companies that use distribution channels, and you get a s...

In the current US election, I would argue the winner actually will benefit from the excessive negative campaigning done by his opponent, who sacrificed trust and in many cases implied the U.S. voter was too stupid to go to the Web and look things up The well-executed Mac vs. Windows ads, while at least funny and entertaining, drifted from solid hit...

There's little room for error if your company decides to make the transition from a provider of on-premise solutions to a service provider via cloud computing. If you don't take the time to develop reliable services that match the reliability of your on-premise offerings, your credibility will suffer -- and customers will lose faith in your ability to deliver on your service promises...

On occasion, Google's Gmail service has gone dark, in some cases for hours at a time. Predictably, users of the free service flipped out and took to the Web to sound off. Google's response, up to now, has merely been to issue apologies and get the system up and running again. However, for users of its Google Apps Premier Edition -- a cloud-based s...

An online ad-sharing deal between Google and Yahoo may be on the verge of collapse Talks between the two Internet search powerhouses and the U.S. Department of Justice have stalled, prompting Google and Yahoo to consider walking away from the proposed agreement, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday....

Sony issued a recall Friday for roughly 100,000 notebook batteries. Conducted in partnership with the U.S. Consumer Product and Safety Commission (USCPSC), the recall affects laptop users worldwide. The lithium-ion batteries can overheat and pose a fire and burn hazard to users There have been 19 reports of batteries overheating, including 17 insta...

Yahoo has rolled out a platform for third-party developers to build applications and widgets for its portal. Called "Y!OS," it is part of Yahoo's larger Open Strategy -- a go-to-market approach the company unveiled earlier this year with the goal of becoming a more inclusive -- and more trafficked -- Web site "We're officially cutting the ribbon fo...

This column is dedicated to the intersection of technology and traditional news media. With less than a week to go before America elects a new president, that intersection is looking more and more like the scene of a multi-vehicle pileup The victims: democracy, the average voter, my patience....

Just one day after notifying an Internet registrar notorious for allowing massive spamming that it would terminate its registrar accreditation, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers has given the registrar a temporary stay of execution ICANN sent a letter to EstDomains on Tuesday, informing the company that its ICANN accreditation...

We are all painfully aware of what is happening on Wall Street. In fact, I think that it might take several years for the stock market to regain the value that it has lost in the past year (approximately 35 percent). No doubt, there is plenty of blame to go around as to who is primarily responsible for this financial debacle. However, most experts...

Ask most people what they like about working with small marketing firms and you'll hear answers such as "their personal approach" or "I'm not just a customer number to them" or "I get to work with the heavy hitters instead of some trainee just out of school." Yes, those are the things they say when things are going well. But should the perceived s...

It's been called the "rapture of the nerds," but such derision didn't stop an estimated 500 enthusiasts from showing up to the Singularity Institute's conference in San Jose, Calif., last weekend to discuss the possibility of artificial intelligence overtaking that of humans That's the concept of technological singularity, popularized by author and...