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Digital billboards and digital signage networks in retail are driving the rapid expansion of outdoor/out-of-home advertising, rivaling the Internet as the fastest-growing advertising medium. What's fueling this growth? The ability to reach the elusive consumers while they are out of home, and especially while they are shopping. And the ability to customize each message to audiences at any location and even at any area within a location is another unique value that it brings to marketers.

One of the hallmarks of CRM is that its footprint keeps expanding. I think part of the reason is that we have taken to lumping everything that is not a back-office application area into CRM. In fact, some people are even using front office interchangeably with CRM these days, myself included. I am of the opinion that CRM should cast a big shadow ...

Open source business intelligence (BI) firm JasperSoft on Wednesday announced its next-generation community platform at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference (OSCON). The new platform features tools to enhance community project developers as well as business users. The new JasperSoft Forge responds to the changing needs of both open source software ...

Gathering momentum and now moving swiftly, a host of companies are progressing with efforts to develop and prove so-called fourth generation, or 4G, wireless technologies Eagerly anticipated, what exactly constitutes 4G is yet to be determined. Though this process is driven in the main by international industry associations, no one group's efforts ...

Details about the massive Domain Name System (DNS) flaw revealed less than two weeks ago were made public on the Internet Monday. Halvar Flake, a reverse engineering expert, posted a hypothetical theory about the vulnerability on his blog A few hours later, a researcher at Matasano Security who knew the specifics about the bug posted a response to ...

To celebrate the 75th anniversary of Esquire magazine, the publication's editors plan to release 100,000 copies of its October 2008 edition with a cover made of electronic paper E Ink, an electronic paper developer, has taken the technology it used in devices such as the Amazon Kindle and Sony eReader to develop a version of the technology for use ...

Facebook's new look is all about the Wall, the blank space on a profile page that the social network's users can fill in with stories, photos, links and the ever-popular Status Updates. In turn, Facebook executives hope a less-cluttered Web site will eventually fill in their bank accounts with more advertising revenue The second-ranked social netwo...

The company that pioneered the concept of skipping past television commercials is now introducing a new kind of TV-based advertising. TiVo has joined forces with Amazon to create an interactive system that will let viewers buy products featured on TV shows -- right from their remotes. TiVo Product Purchase will present options on the screen and give users the opportunity to order without interrupting the program...

Money talks. So it's important for voters to know how candidates get their money, who gives it to them, and what they do with it. This information used to be buried in obscure volumes and government reports, but digital databases have changed all that. Anyone with a Web connection and the desire to do a little research can quickly learn just abou...

At US$2.4 billion, the global contact center marketplace has grown mature. However, trends in the industry are still driving much growth in the space, according to a newly released report by Gartner that looks at the market and its players These trends include a move -- after many years of analyst predictions -- to Internet protocol-based systems, ...

New adopters often see virtualization as the Holy Grail of enterprise computing. It enables consolidation of separate servers and databases to provide more economic operations. Running consolidated computers from one virtualized machine also eliminates the electrical waste spent to keep idling servers and data-processing machines running However, a...

Web 2.0 technologies are empowering enterprises in ways we could only have imagined a few years ago. They have evolved beyond consumer-grade blogs and wikis into enterprise-class solutions driving collaboration, productivity, sales and cost savings. But despite the business value they deliver, are enterprises ready to fully embrace Web 2.0 technologies?...

Streaming mobile video service Qik opened its doors to all comers Monday, moving from the invitation-only alpha it began late last year to an open beta program. The company also announced a bevy of new features, distribution partners and support for more mobile handsets With Qik (pronounced "quick") software, members can stream video directly from ...

PC users seeking an environmentally friendly desktop system can add the new CherryPal C100 desktop to the list of contenders The machine, announced Monday, was designed by green computer maker CherryPal and contains no moving parts. With 80 percent fewer components, the minimalist system uses a scant 2 watts of power.

Yahoo and activist investor Carl Icahn have reached a settlement in their bitter battle over control of the company. The two sides have agreed to keep most of the current Yahoo board on the ballot for re-election and to create three new board positions: one for Icahn and two for executives of his recommendation The decision comes less than two week...

The most widely used open source software packages for the enterprise are exposing users to significant and unnecessary business risks, according to an open source security study from security firm Fortify Software The study, released Monday, concludes that open source software (OSS) development communities have yet to adopt a secure development pr...

VKernel is a young company with its finger on the pulse of the virtual server market, one of the hottest in the software world. Buzz over virtual servers is so high-pitched, in fact, that CEO Alex Bakman sees the potential for a steady stream of new hires that will swell his company's workforce to 5,000 people over the next five years Why the posit...

Cell phone trafficking operations siphon millions of dollars from the wireless industry and its customers every year. Until recently, little could be done to fight back, but a vigorous counter-attack that has yielded several victories in federal courts across the country is beginning to turn the tide and help the wireless industry put a stop to a spreading epidemic...

I like writing about conflict because it gives you more than one dimension to a story, and there were two interesting conflicts that I ran into last week. The first, more near-term, will likely define the direction of the notebook market, and it is important because it implies an ether/or decision when most of us want both The other is the constant...

It's no secret that individual privacy has already suffered since the Internet era began, but privacy law expert Daniel Solove believes things are likely to get even worse -- much worse -- and he illustrates his vision in living color with a wealth of examples from the here and now In The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Inte...