Spotlight Features

Part 1 of this series looks into the issue of PC recycling and following the course of a hypothetical laptop through the recycling process. Continuing down this path, this part will consider another situation: Laptop owner Joe Verdi doesn't own a laptop from a brand name OEM with a take-back program...

More than a decade after they first rushed to search for exit-strategy gold in the e-commerce niche, venture investors are still finding plenty of early and mid-stage companies to back in the space. Often, however, the deals are more modest in size than they were when the dot-com bubble was building...

Internet banking and stock trading was all the rage during the late 1990s. Now, two emerging areas of e-finance -- peer-to-peer lending and microfinance -- are disrupting the status quo even further and moving their markets into a new stage of development. Facilitators of peer-to-peer borrowing and ...

Change may no longer be the only constant; danger is proving omnipresent and therefore a constant variable in enterprise IT planning. "In today's world where a shooter can walk in the front door of a church and open fire, there is really no place that is safe," Henry Dewing, analyst at Forrester Res...

Considering the speed at which technology evolves, predicting even a year in advance can be a dicey proposition. Still, given key tech sector developments during 2007 and the outlook for 2008, some trends are unmistakable. It's a safe bet that social networking and Web 2.0 overall will remain a clos...

Open source software developers who were active in the late 1990s might find themselves yearning for those good old days, when venture capital flowed like wine at Napa Valley party. Maybe they forgot the hangover that settled in once the bubble burst. Paul Sterne, CFO of Open-Xchange, likes to point...

Web 2.0 applications are quickly taking over traditional activities on the Internet. Web sites are becoming interactive as they offer multiple function applications. This, in turn, is creating greater security risks for both consumers and network operators. One of the biggest concerns is the need fo...

The European broadband market is growing rapidly. At the end of Q2 2007, there were close to 100 million broadband subscribers in Europe. DSL remains the dominant access technology, with over 80 percent of the market share. Nordic countries remain the leaders in broadband penetration, with penetrati...

Running Microsoft Windows or Apple's Mac OS X gives users about the same amount of flexibility as was offered to early car buyers. They could drive any kind of car they wanted, as long as it was a Model T and as long as it was black. When the free open source Linux OS first showed up, early develope...

Hits and misses, must-haves and have-nots, blockbusters and duds. It's that time of year: time to take a close look at what technologies have established a sound foundation to become IT's hottest as the new year unfolds, and which ones may take a hit after a great deal of hype. With the ballots tall...