Spotlight Features

Mega e-tailers have harnessed the Internet with such finesse that their Web sites seem to run on magic. However, the trade is a tricky business, and the options are few. "It's the transactional piece that's the roadblock," says Gartner Research Vice President Gene Alvarez. That is why there are "no ...

Last week, I got into the idea of evolution as it relates to the technology market and used Microsoft and Salesforce.com to illustrate the need to keep multiple plans percolating so that a company can take advantage of a move in the market. Evolution is an important filter through which I view the w...

In recent years, identity fraud has been researched and quantified possibly more than any other societal issue. However, all measurements of identity fraud have, to date, relied on victim accounts, whether recorded by Gartner or Javelin in consumer surveys or as reported to the Federal Trade Commiss...

Just when directors thought that no more could possibly be expected of them -- especially after the enactment of Sarbanes-Oxley -- they are now confronted with a new acronym: ERM, or enterprise risk management. Directors are now expected to conduct oversight of their company's enterprise risk, when ...

Salesforce.com on Tuesday announced its latest acquisition to the world. CEO Marc Benioff said that document management is a core element of the company's platform strategy. That strategy has been rolling out in bits and pieces since the company announced its Apex platform last year. However, it ...

Historically, a Web service has been understood to be a software piece that enabled machines to interact over a network. That network may have been a closed-loop enterprise system or the Internet. However, in recent years the term has taken on new meaning. It is frequently applied to online business...

Although virtualization seems to be the newest catch phrase, the concept has actually been around since the '60s when IBM created a research system that was designed to explore new computing concepts focused on resource time sharing and hard drive partitioning. Today, businesses are increasingly tur...

Welcome to the new frontier of Web 2.0. Imagine sitting in your living room and pulling up a favorite TV show to watch online. Easily distracted -- who isn't these days -- you simultaneously begin a chat with dear friends you've never met in person who live across the country. One tells you about a ...

Right now, music fans around the world can choose from some 10,000 Internet radio stations, each one streaming a unique mix of music. Some of those stations are operated by industry titans; others are the Internet arms of traditional terrestrial radio; and many more are tiny operations feeding their...

John Edwards' campaign has stood out from the others for some time now for the fact that it has embraced the online game "Second Life" and set up a campaign headquarters in the game's virtual world. The French National Party was the first political organization to establish a presence in "Second Lif...