Spotlight Features

Text messages are intimate, to-the-point, and readable, and they bring marketing messages straight to where people spend much of their time -- their phones. Texting, it turns out, is more than just a series of LOLs or smiley faces between friends. Increasingly, it's also a savvy and effective market...

The growing consumerization of IT is turning into a security nightmare for many IT departments, but it's perhaps hitting the healthcare industry worst. "BYOD is an emerging issue in healthcare, as staff bring their latest and greatest devices and ask to use them in their work," said Christina Thiels...

Botnets represent a major security threat to e-commerce. The effectiveness of this malicious software has gone far beyond the realm of simple annoyance and inconvenience to a major global, technical and economic challenge. The botnet security issue has become so difficult that federal agencies and t...

Engaging the customer has always been fundamental to doing good business. It's just that now that engagement often starts in digital, social media realms. The trick is to figure out how to make one's content as interesting as all the other content that shows up in the newsfeed, and this is where soc...

The growth of the bring-your-own-device trend, in which employees use their personal devices in the workplace, is proving to be a huge headache for IT. Often underfunded, understaffed and overworked, IT now has to cope with a plethora of different devices running different operating systems -- or di...

A giant but unseen planet may lurk on the outer edge of our solar system, making its presence known only by disrupting the orbits of nearby celestial objects, according to Rodney Gomes, an astronomer at the National Observatory of Brazil. Astronomers have long observed that a group of small, icy bo...

The educational e-book market has grown fiercer in the last few years, raising the question of where the end game will leave educational institutions in their attempts to reduce student churn, increase productivity and radically reduce costs. As the battling e-textbook giants try to cut exclusive de...

When the SpaceX Dragon capsule blasts off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station atop the company's Falcon rocket Saturday morning, it will be doing more than just setting off on another cargo-laden trip to the International Space Station. Rather, as the very first commercial attempt ever to fly to t...

The U.S. government's pursuit of cloud-based technology has been characterized by a blizzard of policies, directives, technical studies, proposed contract vehicles and conferences. The federal "cloud first" initiative, requiring agencies to give priority consideration to cloud solutions for IT opera...

Ever since the advent of the first radios and TVs, home entertainment has been a relatively high-tech enterprise, but in the past few years, there has been a revolution in the quality of sights and sounds available. This arena continues to be an experimental space for new and improved technologies t...