Spotlight Features

Corporate America is outsourcing an increasing number and variety of jobs to foreign shores, a trend that few industry experts predict will slow, let alone reverse, in coming months and years. Recently, the AFL-CIO -- citing a report by Gartner -- reported that by the end of next year, one out of ev...

Last week, Apple's iTunes Music Store sold five times as many songs as the newly reborn Napster service. According to SoundScan, iTunes accounted for about 80 percent of all legally downloaded music files during the week. And at an analyst meeting Wednesday night, Apple CEO Steve Jobs commented that...

Although everyday use of a corporate name likely means the company has achieved significant success, if a company name becomes a verb or a popular dictionary word, it enters the public domain and the company loses its intellectual property rights -- witness Kleenex, Fridge and Hoover, to name just a...

I'm an experienced software engineer, not a Microsoft apologist. Moreover, my company makes a living patching the holes in Microsoft operating systems. In a manner of speaking, their lemons are my lemonade. But the pile-on occurring in the press and the software community is neither justified nor sm...

Although a stereotype exists that the political sector is slow to change, once it embraces a new approach, it does so wholeheartedly. The presidential primary race of 2003 is a prime example of this full-speed-ahead mentality: Politicians have discovered the Internet. The best example to date of the...

In part 1 of this article, "The High-Stakes World of Online Gambling," the E-Commerce Times looked at the state of the Internet betting industry and its remarkable popularity. Roughly half of the industry's revenues come from U.S. residents. Even with the potential for anti-gambling laws on the hori...

Just as Las Vegas pioneer Bugsy Siegel imagined a city of dice games and slot machines in the middle of the desert, entrepreneurs looked at the Web a few years ago and saw an audience hungry for online gaming. They were right to suspect there was gold in all those clicks. A December 2002 report by t...

So you want to be the boss -- the head technology honcho with the CIO title. But when you shake off that daydream, you look around and see the cubicle of a low- to mid-level IT manager. How can a garden-variety IT professional break into the ranks of C-level management? According to executives who w...

In part 1 of this story, "Inside the Hidden World of Motherboard Manufacturers," we examined the inner workings of the motherboard industry. Overall, the sector is healthy, but there are several challenges facing it as well. Jeremy Smith, a spokesperson for motherboard maker ABIT, told the E-Commerc...

As chips are inserted into all manner of everyday appliances, from refrigerators to phones, the semiconductor industry is not the only one that will heat up. The market for motherboards, which link all the components of a computing device, including processors, chipsets, memory and peripheral cards,...

Consumers finally are gaining more widespread access to WiFi high-speed wireless networks as vendors install this technology in airports, hotels and restaurants across the United States. The main challenge faced by these vendors is economic, rather than technical, in nature. The consumer market is n...

In Part 1 of this story, The Mac Observer publisher Bryan Chaffin told the E-Commerce Times that the market standing of Apple's iPod will play a critical role in determining iTunes' success. However, the iPod faces increasing competition. Dell recently announced a new hard drive-based music player, ...

Before the year is out, Apple plans to launch a Windows version of its well-received iTunes Music Store. However, iTunes' success thus far -- Apple has sold 10 million songs through the Mac-only version -- has galvanized other sellers of digital music, which are launching Windows-based services at a...

Web developers differ in their approach to site creation and maintenance. Some rush to adopt software that helps them build graphically intense Web sites with point-and-click ease. Others view such tools skeptically or even scornfully. Web development programs have evolved to reflect this dichotomy:...

Although worms can create media furor and disrupt business, to date they have adhered to a strange dichotomy: A given worm may spread rapidly or deliver a destructive payload -- but no worm has accomplished both tasks with equal aplomb. August 2003 was the worst-ever month for malware attacks, than...