Spotlight Features

The loss of personal data on an estimated 26.5 million U.S. military veterans, up to 2.2 million current service members and an unquantified number of spouses continues to generate public controversy. It also provides lessons for how the private sector could prevent and respond to the loss of perso...

Disaster recovery planning is becoming a core part of business. Yet even when companies prepare for the worst, unexpected circumstances are bound to occur when a disaster actually hits. After such an incident, companies must shift modes -- from bracing for the calamity to planning for business conti...

Executive coaching has become very popular over the last few years. In fact, a great deal has been written about it, and quite a few coaching companies have sprouted up across the country. Some of these companies are even franchised, hoping to sell their "formula" to would-be coaches. Many businesse...

The question for marketers today is not whether to make online communities part of the marketing mix, it's how to tap them and what kind to create. Communispace is creating private online communities designed to uncover valuable research metrics to stimulate marketing efforts, while also serving as ...

Last year, in the path of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, thousands of businesses realized too late how vulnerable their data was. Many businesses found themselves down for days, and some never recovered from the data loss. With the 2006 hurricane season under way, company executives who remember the d...

Most of us have a subtle, almost subconscious, awareness that the dollar is vulnerable to a currency crisis. Why? Because we realize that our US$4.8 trillion national debt is growing, due to our yearly deficits that have been running in the hundreds of billions. What has kept our dollar strong so fa...

Choosing an e-commerce software system from among the wide variety of vendor offerings available in today's marketplace can be tricky. Once you've settled on a particular application, application package or enterprise system, choosing the form and function that best suits your business needs and org...

E-commerce is alive and well. Holiday shopping sales were through the virtual roof last season and analysts predict continued growth in the online channel in 2006. There's only one problem: Security threats seem to be rising almost as quickly as e-shopping revenues. From phishing to pharming to hack...

It's fun to think about how far we've come with technology and what the future might look like. For example, consider the Mark series of computers created at Harvard University in 1944 and you'll get some sense of how miniaturized computers have become. The MARK series was 55 feet long and 8 feet h...

From enterprise search to Web search, technology is rapidly advancing the ability of users to find information faster and with more accuracy than ever. While millions of dollars are being made on search, there's a strong case to be made that e-commerce search offers the most direct return on investm...

It is both simpler and more complicated, easier and more difficult to make it in the music business these days. Take the Internet radio market, for instance. Digital recording and music broadcasting once required making rather large investments of capital for systems that could only be operated by e...

In the evolution of social networking, the purchase of MySpace.com by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. in the summer of 2005 is considered a key turning point. "Murdoch made a huge bet on MySpace and it's been headline-worthy ever since," Chuck Richard, vice president and lead analyst with interactive ma...

Would you like to ramp up your e-commerce capabilities? Increase the amount of business you're doing over the Internet? Bring new digital channels into your sales and marketing mix? Or perhaps you would like to better tailor your e-commerce platform to match your business needs and order management ...

The music industry isn't what it used to be. The rapid advent of new digital audio technologies has created a wealth of options and opportunities -- as well as panic, consternation and sometimes radical change -- for recording companies, broadcasters and musicians, not to mention the listening audie...

Many of us are aware that the United States has a large trade imbalance with China. We also realize that a significant part of this trade imbalance has to do with the enormous amount of textiles that China is exporting to us. The fact is, we shouldn't blithely think that China's exports to us might ...