Spotlight Features

California began a series of public hearings on the SBC/AT&T merger in Oakland, Calif., this week. While the purpose is to gather public input, in reality, special interests dominate, putting the real public interest at risk. An hour before the hearing took place, the meeting room was plastered...

The majority of U.S. states are moving to end the tax-free ride for most online shoppers, a development that is facing opposition from some members of the public, businesses and a number of federal lawmakers. At present, 43 states have joined a states-led coalition called the Streamlined Sales Tax P...

Is your brand worth a billion dollars today? Maybe yes or maybe no, but it surely is worth something pretty big. At the end of the day, all the work you have put in pushing your name identity and your range of products and services in your marketplace adds up in an abstract space of the consumer's m...

Spam-fighting strategies used by ISPs and consumers might be turning the tide against unwanted e-mail. However, innovative phishing scams continue to target both corporate users and consumers. Users of file-sharing networks are particularly vulnerable to attacks, a new industry analysis warns. Accor...

Web conferencing and Web-based seminars are taking a bite out of traditional business travel and telephone conference-call budgets, with companies like WebEx, Microsoft, Raindance and Netspoke leading the revolution. Indeed, with the surge in demand around Web conferencing technologies rapidly incre...

EnterpriseDB made its official debut in May with the release of its EnterpriseDB 2005 public beta release. Built on the open-source PostgreSQL database, the company is touting it as the world's most advanced and mature open-source database. While MySQL, the open-source database leader, may have some...

Finally, after sending signals of this move ever since Steve Jobs re-took Apple's helm, the company last week announced that it will move to the x86 platform. While I had clearly anticipated this move for some time I also expected their execution, once announced, to be much more rapid than it will ...

There's a growing ground-swell of interest in many companies today around the valuation of their homegrown ERP, CRM, order capture and service applications. This issue has come to the forefront for several reasons, the two most dominant ones being many companies are looking seriously at the marketa...

British biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey spoke at Stanford University this week about the prospects for curing aging. His reasoned presentation proved a stark contrast to authors like James Hughes, Executive Director of the World Transhumanist Association, who seek to prolong the life of worn-out pol...

If you are looking to raise substantial capital for your privately held business, you need a competently prepared business plan. You must convince the lender that your business is capable of repaying the debt, through principal pay-downs and/or the issuance of publicly traded stock to the lender. He...