Spotlight Features

With all the games people play with Internet company names, it's quite possible that someday no one will be able to spell anything correctly ever again. Perhaps it's already happening. Ever wonder how many times gross misspellings like "Del.icio.us" or "Flickr" show up on eighth-grade spelling tests...

As the world watched the progress of the space shuttle Endeavour's mission to the international space station and back last month, it was hard not to suffer from flashbacks to past space disasters. The presence of Mission Specialist Barbara Morgan, for one, evoked memories of the 1986 space shuttle ...

Mayors and city governments around the U.S. bought into citywide WiFi project plans, which often included unsupportable performance claims and grossly inflated forecasts for the numbers of users they would attract. Those decisions have come back to haunt them and have led to some abrupt reversals of...

The familiar adage that the consumer is always right has taken on a new meaning in the Internet age. Rather than talk with a store manager, consumers are now making their feelings about different products known on message boards and blogs. "Many companies tried to ignore the online forums, but most ...

In their eagerness to bring the benefits of wireless internetworking to their cities, mayors in Chicago, Houston, San Francisco and other U.S. cities have bought into untested, inflated claims. Now, they are revising their plans to roll out municipal WiFi networks. Last month, Chicago began backing ...

Search engines have taken on the role of parents doling out rewards as well as punishment to companies building Web sites. The punishment comes from two sources. The search engines are flawed, often unable to work with various types of information. "At one time, search engines could not make sense o...

In the ultimate game of bait-and-switch, several Web sites try to pass off a bot as a bod. That is to say that Live Chat is offered to users, but there's no flesh-and-blood person on the line, there's only a chat bot making a robotic guess at what the user might want to know. Few are fooled by the s...

Cruising the Web on a smartphone is about like cruising for a date on a tricycle -- the basic concept is there, but the delivery is laughable. If you are using an iPhone, then it's more like cruising in a Volkswagen Beetle -- better, but still short of the Lamborghini speeds we're used to on the ope...

As evidenced by the phenomenal success of Google, search has evolved from an interesting sideline into a primary function for many, if not most, Internet users. Consequently, more and more companies are putting content up on their Web sites to attract the attention of search engines. "You can have r...

One might argue that China and the Internet are both like high-speed trains. Both are growing at an extremely rapid pace, and both are apparently unstoppable global economic forces that are reshaping the economic landscape. Unfortunately, one might also argue that they are on a collision course. "Wh...