Spotlight Features

On Tuesday, government officials in India rejected an offer to participate in a much-hyped project to distribute laptops costing US$100 each to the world's impoverished children. A closer look reveals this scheme to be little more than open source evangelism in the Third World. The laptop project i...

In a market where most registrars have positioned themselves as full-service hosting firms, BulkRegister kept focusing on its original business model. The competitive advantage that it enjoyed by undercutting prices during its growth spurt in 2000 has been neutralized by the evolving business pract...

As senior director of product marketing for the identity practice at Sun Microsystems, Rob Beauchamp remembers -- and it was not that long ago -- when integration was considered a tactical process with the objective of knitting together systems and applications as quickly as possible. To be sure, th...

For technology dependent companies, risk comes in many forms. While the traditional information security risks are often the first that spring to mind, businesses with extensive collections of software face additional risks, especially when those applications become numerous. Guy Hoffman, chief exec...

Now that it has cooled off in California, or at least it had until my wife saw our power bill for the month of July, it seems like it might be a good time to talk conservation, and touch on some of the technologies that can be used to reduce our use of fossil fuels as well as keep our power bills fr...

There's no doubt about it, starting a business is no easy task. One of the first hurdles that you have to overcome is obtaining the necessary capital to get your company to the cash-flowing stage. Why are many lenders and investors so difficult to convince when it comes to obtaining loans or capita...

For many companies, there is an uncomfortable truth that even with CRM systems in place, one big gaping hole comes up again and again in customer experience: it's the nagging issue of saving customers time. Does your CRM system really respect your customer's time, rather than your sales person's tim...

Say the name "Intel," and the first thing that comes to most people's minds is chips and computer components. Yet the company is increasing its focus on another side of its business, the storage systems space, and the industry is beginning to watch its progress in that area more intensely. In July, ...

Small businesses have their share of difficulties, but do they have any chance of succeeding in a world dominated by eBay, Amazon and the like? The short answer is yes -- if they combine the right mix of technology, marketing and customer service. "The goliaths of the online world are everywhere. Th...

For many people in the biofuels movement, it is inspiring to witness and play even a small part in the huge amount of grass roots-driven, Web-based activity the energy issue is presently generating in the U.S. All this concern and activity raises a crucial question: To what degree is all this activi...