Expert Advice

Having an actively engaged, independent board is a must for the long-term viability of any corporation. Unfortunately, there are still many management teams that feel that their prospects for long-term employment, as well as generous salaries and perks, are dependent upon a "friendly" board of direc...

PCI DSS has evolved substantially since the five major credit card holders got together to publish a consolidated security standard in 2006. The standard has been updated regularly with the most recent version, PCI DSS 2.0, released in October 2010. PCI is here to stay, and the requirements are only...

With more than 500 million people around the globe spending 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook, there is no question that it is the most important and pervasive social ecosystem in the world. It's no wonder that brands of all shapes, sizes and offerings are leveraging the user base to connect...

The Apple iTunes App Store has generated revenue of more than $400 million revenue since its launch, according to analyst firm Piper Jaffray. Aside from being a successful online e-commerce solution for customers, the App Store has spurred tremendous innovation by Apple's development partners, which...

This year's holiday shopping season is poised to break e-commerce records as consumers accelerate their spending online. More consumers are very likely to purchase their holiday gifts online (58 percent) than at brick-and-mortar stores (41 percent) this year, according to Channel Advisor. And more t...

According to the Small Business Administration, fewer than 30 percent of startups are still in business after 10 years. This is a pretty startling failure rate -- over 70 percent. Let's take a look at some of the causes of startup failure and what can be done to improve your chances of making your n...

Information Technology managers often find themselves between a rock and hard place when it comes to IT budgets. Spend too much and they come under scrutiny; spend too little and they find themselves at the center of frustration and dissatisfaction. Unfortunately, Information Technology is a beast...

Since the early 1990s, companies have moved applications development and maintenance work to lower labor-cost countries, to varying degrees. Often referred to as "offshoring" or "outsourcing," this labor arbitrage has had an important effect on businesses' ability to reduce costs of ADM. Although co...

If you're responsible for supporting product sales through the retail channel for your client, there is no doubt you're experienced in search engine optimization, search engine marketing, keywords, SERPs, ad banners, click-through rates and more. Most search activities involve either driving a cons...

E-commerce continues to experience significant growth. In fact, in 2009, e-commerce sales grew by 5.5 percent to $205 billion. Online retail sales are expected to increase by another 12.7 percent in 2010, according to Javelin Research. While the research proves that e-commerce sales will continue to...

Out there on the branding battlefields, it's simply do or die, as a brand image is either hypervisible or mortally lost in oblivion. Commanding success for any idea on the global scene demands universal e-commerce access that is only deliverable by a cybername identity, as it's the only key to o...

Despite advances in technology, online fraud and payment security continue to be significant issues and cost drivers for e-commerce merchants. Web applications are the leading source of data breaches and account for the majority of compromised data records. The majority of these records contain pa...

In the holiday selling season, the most frantic and exciting time of the year, it's a good time to put aside your marketing plan and your email strategy and just blast out mailings to everyone you've ever had on any list you've ever put together. Right? Wrong. What we just described is a mistake tha...

It's been more than a decade since the publication of the The Clue Train Manifesto -- a business classic, well ahead of its time. Rich with both insight and foresight, it still amazes me that it was written before Twitter, Facebook and YouTube -- and, as business leaders, as marketers and as technol...

As companies turn to cloud computing for its benefits -- including economies of scale and increased productivity -- concerns often arise around security. The idea of storing critical business data on a third-party server to which multiple tenants have access could be fraught with danger if not prope...