Spotlight Features

The Internet highway is just a free medium, like the roads and all the highways. Somehow there are those who walk on the roads and those who run, some drive taxis, others drive Ferraris or race tractor-trailers. To each his own, they are all free, and so are the maps. Thank heaven. This brings us to...

As database services become increasingly commoditized, the value of databases depends more and more upon advanced consumer analytics. The technology exists both for aggregating data to input into analyses and for acting on results of such analyses in a multitude of ways and through a variety of chan...

E-mail is like having a brilliant friend who is somewhat crazy, not well socialized, and occasionally self-destructive. They can help you. However, they can also get you into big trouble. While we might not have the capability to moderate the behavior of a crazy friend, it is well within our capabil...

As more corporate users add instant messaging to their arsenal of communications tools, IT and security experts face the challenge of managing, securing and archiving this data. More than one-quarter of the 4,510 people polled use instant messaging in the office, according to a survey conducted over...

On December 27, 2004, President Bush did something that made Microsoft -- and probably every other software maker in the world -- very happy. Bush signed into law the Anti-Counterfeiting Amendments Act of 2003, also known as H.R. 3632. The new law criminalizes the distribution of genuine authenticat...

Two weeks ago, I asked for reader aid in getting documentation on early 1990s System VR4 Unix to help understand what things can be done with Linux today but could not be done with AT&T System VR4. The question was naive and I need more help (and aspirin) in struggling toward a better answer tha...

Global competition, legal issues, technological advances, changes in manufacturing and tracking their constantly evolving target markets are more than enough challenges for many companies to deal with. Add to them internal requirements -- human resources, accounting, information technology -- and th...

Every corporation has a face, captured by its name identity and its image, including the overall image delivery system to push that name in the marketplace. Whether you like it or not, your corporate image is out there and is fully exposed. Following are the Five Faces of Corporate Image. The questi...

The Internet revolution has had the unintended effect of decreasing the use of oral communication and increasing the importance of text -- particularly e-mails -- as the primary means of business communications. Why has e-mail become so popular? Why use e-mails instead of phone calls? It is harder t...

Analysts predicted that online shopping would increase 20 percent over the last holiday season. Don't they know that you should never underestimate the (spending) power of a woman? There is no denying that female shoppers are flexing a lot more monetary muscle on the Internet these days. E-commerce ...