Spotlight Features

In five years, the number of mobile phone subscribers is expected to increase by almost two billion -- at that point, the way people purchase goods and services could be forever changed. For now, text-messaging, or short message service, is chiefly used for communication, but businesses hip to m-com...

It may be against the law for U.S. consumers to import prescription drugs into the United States, but that isn't stopping the growth in rogue Internet pharmacies. In fact, the number of such sites is skyrocketing: The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University found a to...

Originally established as part of a series of the global system for mobile communications standards in 1985, short message service, or SMS, has come to play a pivotal role not only in the evolution of personal mobile communications but in the development of m-commerce as well. In 2006, SMS -- aka "t...

In theory, Internet pharmacies have the potential to offer consumers considerable benefits over their brick-and-mortar counterparts. Convenience and lower prices, in particular, are two of the big ones proponents frequently cite. Unfortunately, the current reality reveals a very different potential....

The great Internet TV race is on, and the field is crowded -- and getting more crowded all the time. The biggest names in U.S. TV broadcasting want to make sure they stay in the middle of things. Cable TV broadcasters such as Cablevision, Comcast and Time Warner got an early jump on their broadcast ...

Nearly a century has passed since the first commercial radio broadcast went out over the airwaves. Aside from the invention of frequency modulation in the early 1930s and advances in recording and music playback devices, radio technology had remained much the same -- that is, until the late 1990s, w...

There's a new wave of changes headed for the TV and film industries: Television viewers can choose what they watch, when and how they view programs, and where they catch up on their favorite shows. That's just the beginning. The interactivity of the Internet, the emergence of DVR technologies, easie...

Television once represented the Holy Grail for advertisers. As millions of consumers tuned in to watch their favorite dramas and sitcoms, it presented advertisers with unprecedented opportunities to reach millions of target customers quickly and easily. As technology has advanced, television's grip ...

M-commerce, or mobile commerce, is poised to grow into a multibillion dollar market over the next decade. Phone handset makers, telecoms and content providers are pushing the technologies that will enable users with m-commerce-enabled devices to easily purchase products and services via the phone. W...

As voice, data, wired and wireless telecommunications converge, conditions are ripening for the extension of e-commerce to mobile, or m-commerce, in markets around the world. Juniper Research estimates that global m-commerce revenue will exceed $88 billion by 2009, a $69 billion increase from year-e...

How do you suppose a professor of computer science and engineering might use Web 2.0 tools? Assisting students to manage an intramural sports league online is probably not the first thing that would come to mind. That, though, is exactly what Yannis Papakonstantinou, a professor at the University o...

Web services and underlying SOAs offer organizations a heretofore unattainable capacity to capture information from disparate information resources by directly representing and linking these assets, making them available selectively across their information systems environments. Given their scale, s...

Mega e-tailers have harnessed the Internet with such finesse that their Web sites seem to run on magic. However, the trade is a tricky business, and the options are few. "It's the transactional piece that's the roadblock," says Gartner Research Vice President Gene Alvarez. That is why there are "no ...

Just when directors thought that no more could possibly be expected of them -- especially after the enactment of Sarbanes-Oxley -- they are now confronted with a new acronym: ERM, or enterprise risk management. Directors are now expected to conduct oversight of their company's enterprise risk, when ...

Historically, a Web service has been understood to be a software piece that enabled machines to interact over a network. That network may have been a closed-loop enterprise system or the Internet. However, in recent years the term has taken on new meaning. It is frequently applied to online business...