Spotlight Features

M-commerce, or mobile commerce, is poised to grow into a multibillion dollar market over the next decade. Phone handset makers, telecoms and content providers are pushing the technologies that will enable users with m-commerce-enabled devices to easily purchase products and services via the phone. W...

Databases have been a tool for business and research analysis since computers replaced typewriters in the workplace. Once the domain of proprietary database management programs, database development is now seeing more influence from open source programming. Several industry surveys show a trend amon...

As voice, data, wired and wireless telecommunications converge, conditions are ripening for the extension of e-commerce to mobile, or m-commerce, in markets around the world. Juniper Research estimates that global m-commerce revenue will exceed $88 billion by 2009, a $69 billion increase from year-e...

Software programmers, developers, analysts, engineers and architects are facing an ever-widening range of job roles and expectations. Organizations worldwide are asking more of these professionals, in ways rarely seen only a decade ago. "One of the things I've seen over the last three years is a dec...

Some 90 percent of brand owners outsource at least some of their manufacturing, according to AMR Research. In addition, more than half of them expect to increase their use of contract outsourcing over the next two years. While it's been shown that outsourcing adds significant value -- and jobs -- to...

How do you suppose a professor of computer science and engineering might use Web 2.0 tools? Assisting students to manage an intramural sports league online is probably not the first thing that would come to mind. That, though, is exactly what Yannis Papakonstantinou, a professor at the University o...

How do SOA and Web 2.0 services come together? Are we entering an era where a variety of business services from a spectrum of sources contribute to and perhaps dominate new business process aggregation? If so, won't that require a level of governance to protect enterprises from flighty Web-based ser...

Especially as Earth Day 2007 approaches, working to mitigate the effects of global warming and greenhouse gases, as well as protecting the environment, are topics on everyone's lips these days. While lawmakers around the world wrangle over car and factory emissions, international treaties, fossil fu...

Web services and underlying SOAs offer organizations a heretofore unattainable capacity to capture information from disparate information resources by directly representing and linking these assets, making them available selectively across their information systems environments. Given their scale, s...

You don't have to be a Democrat to scoff at the White House's recent assertion that some e-mails related to the recent firing of eight U.S. attorneys may be permanently lost. You just have to know something about networking and computers. "To truly lose an e-mail to the point that it is unrecoverabl...