Spotlight Features

Amazon.com has filed for a patent involving online advertising, stoking the ire of many industry watchers. The company wants to stake its claim to a method of allocating online ad space via real-time auctions. But many are questioning whether this concept originated with Amazon, noting that the idea...

Just as important as backing up your most valuable documents is ensuring they are not zapped by a malicious virus, consumed by fire or accidentally erased. So far, though, most software and hardware vendors that sell storage products to the Fortune 500 have had little or nothing to say -- let alone ...

You hear it all the time: "You can't make money off free software." Actually, companies are making quite a bit of money from free software. IBM and HP, for example, have reaped billions of dollars in revenue from Linux. True, they are doing so by bundling open source software with servers and suppor...

When PayPal filed for its successful IPO last year, it listed a slew of competitors in the online payment arena. But those rivals, including Citibank, Wells Fargo, Yahoo, Microsoft and the U.S. Postal Service, barely sport as much market share combined as PayPal commands on its own. There are signs ...

When it comes to choosing a server to boost e-business efficiency, technology buyers have no shortage of options. Because of intense competition in the marketplace, the best server technologies -- and what is best for a particular enterprise -- may change rapidly. Even amid all of this upheaval, how...

Despite a lack of promotion and low to zero name recognition, it is becoming clear that vendors of white-box (unbranded) machines are an important part of the personal computer ecosystem. In fact, IDC has estimated that last year, about 31 percent of the 35 million desktop PCs sold in the United Sta...

The hype surrounding Web services, a technology that many once thought was destined to revive the Internet economy, has faded. But believers say this is still a true disruptive technology, one that will change the way enterprises interact with customers and with each other. In other words, the revol...

AMD entered 2003 with more to lose than ever before. The company commands a healthy share of the desktop and notebook chip market, with just under 20 percent -- the best figure it has enjoyed in the last few years. Now, AMD plans a slew of new product releases that could sway its fortunes for good o...

Lured by promises of increased security, lower costs or simply the chance to align themselves with a company other than Microsoft, many enterprises are turning to Linux systems. More often than not, that means tapping Linux vendor Red Hat, which has come to dominate the market and has made its name ...

Amid an overall high-tech slump, the unglamorous yet vital data storage sector has fared strikingly well. Even as IT buyers have struggled with meager budgets and analysts have forecast scant growth, storage giant EMC's stock price has doubled. Recently, though, a prominent name in the field, Storag...