Spotlight Features

Gavin Newsom, San Francisco's controversial mayor, was in the spotlight again this week as he and his staff contemplated which lucky company will get the rights to provide WiFi access around the city. The real question is, why is government making this choice rather than market forces? To many in t...

Whether it is software, standards or architectures, people tend to think -- and argue -- about technological openness in individual silos. Harvard University's Open ePolicy Group, in its recently released Roadmap for Open ICT Ecosystems urges people to apply and manage openness across an entire ICT...

Much the same as any other open-source debate, opinions about the future of Linux on the desktop are about as varied as they come. On one side you've got the Desktop Linux Consortium with its mission to advance the open-source operating system on desktops everywhere. On the other side you've got sof...

Whoever controls the basic customer information controls the front office. In order to have the customer information, you need to have a data schema that can support it. That means a schema that supports things like products, invoices, purchase orders and much more. If you think this is beginning...

In the Wireless LAN (WLAN) market, thin is in. Faced with declining unit growth and falling product prices in the consumer market, vendors have focused on boosting their sales to enterprises. While this strategy has merit, it has meant that they have had to redesign their wares. Consumers are conten...

Two historic events occurred last week that have the potential to change the future of personal computing. The first, and probably the most dramatic, was Palm adopting the Windows Mobile platform for its market-leading Treo communicator. The second, while less dramatic, is nearly as powerful: that...

The 9th Annual Gilder/Forbes Telecom Conference took place this week at Lake Tahoe. Officially, the theme was "the Singularity," an artificial intelligence term denoting the emergence of transformative technological change. But the main meme revolved around a slightly less sexy idea: kiosks. Kiosks...

At the heart of any customer relationship is trust. Knowing how healthy that trust is in your company and its execution starts with knowing the expectations your prospects and customers have.

In today's marketplace, the word "solution" appears beside the word "software" so frequently that we unconsciously stutter the pair of words rather than one or the other when talking about new purchases or shopping for something to aid our businesses. This is marketing genius. Somewhere, the standar...

Recently, I've made several trips to Geneva, Switzerland, the home of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). I've seen firsthand how this once-sleepy organization of patent attorneys and intellectual property technicians has become ground zero for an assault on the economies of the ind...