Expert Advice

The new Internet is full of extraordinary companies that looked at the market from a different angle and created entirely new approaches to the changing Web. Zynga, Amazon, Netflix, Facebook and 1-800-Flowers.com have all seen and seized the massive opportunity of a new Internet driven by social net...

The mobile commerce revolution promises an "anywhere experience" that boasts the ultimate in convenience. U.S. mobile commerce sales hit $1.20 billion in 2009 and will grow to $2.42 billion this year, according to Coda research consultancy. This is great news for online retailers that are prepared ...

With the explosive amounts of electronic information being generated daily, it's no wonder many companies are considering alternative storage options. None of these options has generated more interest than cloud-based systems. Companies are looking to cloud computing to ease the burden of informati...

Shopping continues to shift to the Web. With all the growth in e-commerce, retailers are focusing their efforts on better online merchandising, cross-channel integration and personalization to fine tune their sites for better conversion rates. In addition, many of the best e-commerce retailers are t...

Recent events have added further credence (if more was needed) to the growing body of evidence that -- despite the boundless hype -- cloud computing is a game-changing phenomenon that is having an impact on how people think about enterprise storage. VMWorld 2010 brought an estimated 17,000 people t...

So, you're an entrepreneur with a great idea? Too bad your inspiration arrived in the worst economy since the Great Depression, complete with a meltdown of the venture capital industry. What's left on the charred landscape? The fact is that no one gets boatloads of seed capital anymore -- especially...

Mobile operators are facing a revenue dilemma these days. The numbers may vary according to which research you read, but the conclusion is the same: Data revenues are not even close to meeting escalating usage patterns. By way of example, AT&T estimates that mobile data traffic grew 50-fold betw...

Several years ago, I discovered Nirvana: the ability to point and click on a website and have pretty much anything I wanted shipped right to my door, sometimes at a cheaper price than at any store in my city. What bliss! Ah -- in the good ole days of online shopping, we were so happily ignorant. Bac...

Today's consumers are more connected than ever with mobile devices in hand. Mobile solves many problems, with its high reach and in-the-moment communication. A well-designed app can place flashy content in the hands of the consumer. SMS provides the consumer with valuable tidbits of information. SMS...

As the summer comes to an end, most people are thinking about the back-to-school season, but retailers around the world are already focusing on the winter holiday season ahead. They're assessing inventory and developing marketing strategies, aiming to steer more traffic to their e-commerce sites. Th...

Delivering and managing IT continues to be complex. Application demand continues to grow, while the maintenance and support of old applications, as well as the processes involved with new applications, lead to a frustrating user experience and constraints on flexibility and business agility. Many or...

As companies battered by the recession have begun emerging from their cautionary stances, many are re-evaluating their IT security budgets and looking to solve the age-old question: "What should drive our strategy, security or compliance?" Now is the perfect time for companies to consider the right ...

Not very long ago, both social media and e-commerce were new and innovative. Now, they're simply elements of today's marketing mix -- part of the fabric of how you reach your customer engagement and revenue objectives. During the slow economic recovery, it has become business-critical to conduct mor...

As e-commerce continues to evolve at a record pace, websites must keep up with the ever-changing demands of increasingly knowledgeable and sophisticated online shoppers. Companies need to enhance their online presence by applying modern techniques and technologies -- from dynamic personalization, so...

While financial cybercrime against card-not-present retailers has many forms, "friendly fraud" has emerged as a particularly painful thorn in the side of e-commerce merchants. Defined as a situation in which a customer disputes a legitimate credit card transaction, falsely claiming fraud or non-del...