Spotlight Features

Most people ignore state public utilities commissions, but this week the California PUC released a well-written report that deserves attention. "Broadband Deployment in California" contains a wealth of facts and identifies key policy problems responsible for slowing broadband rollout and economic gr...

Recently, while replying to e-mails from readers of my book, The Design of Sites, I came across a comment from a designer who claimed that my recommendation to use pop-ups was hopelessly out of date. Did this reader not understand me, my recommendation -- to use pop-ups primarily in situations when ...

The University of Calgary is at it again. The Canadian school gained some notoriety two years ago when its computer science department launched a course on computer viruses, which included, as part of the coursework, writing a virus. This week, the brains behind the virus course, Assistant Professor...

What do New York and Nigeria have in common? Something far more serious than beginning with the letter "n." Both of these regions have earned the dubious distinction of ranking among the riskiest places in the world for e-commerce, according to a survey by CyberSource Corporation. The Big Apple was ...

There are three common myths about corporate image and name identity: Big money will buy you a big image, customers are just sheep, and constant bombardment will bring constant sales. Corporate image and name identity form the backbone of any business. Without them there will be no growth, no IPOs,...

Efforts to harmonize international copyright laws have been in progress since the late 19th century, but the rise of the digital medium has thrust the movement back into the limelight recently. More than any other medium, the Internet has taken the copyright and intellectual property environment and...

We've come a long way, baby! Indeed, e-commerce has evolved from online billboards to a fully functional, personalized shopping experience over the past decade. While there were admittedly a few bumps along the road, the path from 1994 through the 2004 holiday shopping season is full of crucial mile...

This year will see many important battles in the communications industry, one of which is currently playing out in the Virginia state legislature. On one side are cable companies and on the other telecommunications firms, but both sides should realize they have a common goal. If they do, and work t...

Well, we have yet another definition to add to our technology lexicon: click hijacking. With the advent of powerful and profitable search engines, like Google, Internet schemers have come up with yet another way to illegally make a buck. This article looks at this new phenomenon, what gave rise to ...

Some friends of mine are considering setting up a new company around an e-commerce idea and asked me to research the cost of the IT infrastructure needed. As part of that, I went Web shopping for a low end server to get them started, and found some surprises. Note that all pricing data shown below i...