Spotlight Features

Business "intuition," popular in the days of pen, ink and paper, was the first "BI" -- keen and quick insight rooted in trading experience and utilizing heightened observation with direct perception of commercial reality, all aided by strong inferences and at least some minimal amount of basic infor...

Responding to heightened concerns about the privacy of individuals' medical and healthcare information, the federal government in 1996 introduced HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. It empowered the Department of Health and Human Services to develop and manage the methods...

As the 2008 elections approach, political mudslinging on the campaign trail has become an all-too-familiar sight. No less muddy, however -- and no less central to the democratic process -- is the battle that's currently being waged over the ballot box. How Americans cast their votes has become a sub...

When an e-commerce startup talks about upending the business model on which Amazon and eBay and other e-tail giants have built billion-dollar businesses, it's clear it doesn't lack ambition. Still, the founders of Cartfly believe the new face of the Web will eventually create a new way to sell and b...

Part 1 of this two-part series enumerates the ways in which the guest-worker visa program fails to meet the needs of American workers and the high-tech industry. Part 2 digs further into the arguments for and against the H-1B visa program, as well as the trends and motivations underlying them. "Goog...

Oh customer, so mysterious ... what have you done ... what will you do ... and what decisions should a business make to keep you or get rid of you? Seeking answers to these key questions, the commercial world has turned in a big way to analytics -- the science of logical analysis. Analytics involves...

It is difficult to think of an area where the pharmaceutical industry is not under siege these days. Regulators spawning new rules, governments putting price caps in place, safety advocates demanding more information on side effects, health maintenance plans implementing their own cost controls, and...

It seems as if everywhere I look these days, HD is there. An increasing number of TV programs come with an "available in HD" logo at the bottom of the screen, and it looks as though every consumer store that sells any form of electronics has photos of widescreen televisions plastered all over the ad...

The disconnect has never been more pronounced between the supply and demand of H-1B visas, the visa program that allows guest workers in the United States. The technology industry has been at the forefront of the H-1B visa debate, lobbying for the government to allow more foreign workers into the U....

Long before social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook set up shop online, there was a social element to playing video games. Gamers have always congregated together, extolling or deriding the merits of one game over another, participating in tournaments and broadcasting their gaming explo...