Spotlight Features

Job insecurity combined with financial fear-mongering has consumers slashing their budgets. Cell phone and premium TV services look like easy items to eliminate. Typically, however, those services tie users to contracts as well as three ugly words: early termination fees. Can customers break those c...

In Italy, Biesse Systems is a manufacturer of substantial size; its American subsidiary, though, is by any measure a small business, with under 200 employees. Still, Biesse America's communication needs rivaled that of a large enterprise. It needed to communicate with its parent in Italy regularly, ...

"With great power comes great responsibility" is an oft-quoted line from the first "Spider-Man" film. Without torturing the "web" metaphor beyond its breaking point, it also applies to your friendly neighborhood Internet service provider. A maze of legislation, regulations and business practices dat...

On paper, the affiliate market appears to be among the most lucrative marketing channels. At its core, it is a revenue-sharing model among a network of Web sites or partners that receive a cut of the sales of any products that they promote. In reality, though, using an affiliate network to drive sal...

Shrinking client pools, lack of access to credit and competition from offshore destinations are squeezing some business process outsourcing service providers in the United States. With declining revenues come cheaper valuations. This creates opportunities for other entrepreneurs seeking to expand th...

The year-long U.S. recession hasn't brought spending on advertising to a screeching halt, but it has forced a shift in the way advertisers engage their audiences. With marketing budgets shrinking by the day, advertisers are turning to the Internet as an alternative to more traditional media such as ...

Small businesses have been reluctant to spend precious resources on a marketing medium that traditionally has not delivered -- at least to them -- on its promise. That medium is search engine marketing. However, they will find it worthwhile to take another look at this particular tactic. A lot of lo...

For a long time, small businesses were reluctant to embrace the latest in search engine marketing and other online advertising tactics. The SEM industry was unable to deliver to this group of typically local-interest, cost-conscious companies what they wanted the most: a means to assess how their in...

IBM received nearly 4,200 patents in 2008 from the United States Patent & Trademark Office, making Big Blue the undisputed king of the intellectual property game for the 16th year running. A closer look at U.S. patent numbers collated by IFI Patent Intelligence reveals something else: More and m...

For anybody who is trying to spend a little less money, a visit to Freecycle may be just the ticket. The concept is a simple one: You sign up for a group based on your ZIP code. Then, if you have something, anything really, you don't want -- a desk, a flowerpot, a printer, even a used Halloween mask...

Lower total cost of ownership and little or no IT infrastructure to maintain are good starting arguments for moving to the cloud. While such concepts are easy to understand in the abstract, considering cloud computing on an industry-specific basis drives home some surprising limitations on this hot ...

There are plenty of figures to show the efficiencies and cost savings that cloud computing can deliver, but here's one you're unlikely to hear during a sales pitch: The benefits of cloud computing are not linear with a project's progress. That means if you only complete about 80 percent of the proje...

Merrill Lynch once forecast that the cloud computing market would reach an eye-popping $160 billion by 2011, a prediction that mostly drew skepticism. While sizing up the expectations for a nascent tech market is equal parts art and science, there are growing indications that $160 billion may indeed...

Cloud computing may still be in its infancy, but Google, Amazon and IBM -- as well as other large vendors -- have rolled out cloud services at almost breathtaking speed. Indeed, it might appear these tier one vendors already have the multibillion dollar industry sewn up. That is not true, of course....

Warren Royal sells bobblehead dolls over the Internet. It's a specific product that demands a specific address for Internet shoppers. So, when Royal decided to get into the burgeoning bobblehead business, he decided the best way to break through the clutter of online bobblehead buyers and sellers wo...