Spotlight Features

Many small businesses fail to fully utilize automated time-reporting tools or shy away from them altogether. However, once a business starts to reach about 30 staff members, time reporting helps them understand costs, improve efficiency, and focus on the right areas, said Journyx CEO Curt Finch. It ...

Making sure that every customer gets the personal touch may be fairly easy for the owner of a neighborhood bakery, but in a mass market of millions, making each customer feel like an individual is a formidable challenge. In the information age, tools like customer relationship management software ma...

Remember the bad old days of customer self-service? Automated systems would present you with five or more different options -- any one of which could lead to five or more other options. With touchtone systems, accidentally pressing the wrong number at a prompt could result in instant death by discon...

A rose by any other name can raise quite the stink, making the act of localizing Web sites to fit foreign cultures all the more thorny. Even if the product is as sweet as ice cream, it's possible to leave a bitter taste in consumer's mouths. "Ben and Jerry launched their 'black and tan' flavor of ic...

The current economic recession may be pummeling companies around the globe, but amid all the dire reports and grim statistics littering what can only be compared to a bloody battlefield, one oft-cited exception appears to be still standing tall: free and open source software. That's what the common ...

The greatest obstacle small business operators face in adopting business process management is themselves. That factor could account for the underutilization of BPM by small businesses -- and the reason BPM vendors have targeted the small business sector as a huge potential market. Of course, the ab...

Why is Google promoting two open source operating systems that can both be run on netbooks -- Android and Chrome? Is this part of a larger strategy, where Google will direct the two along different paths -- Chrome for netbooks and Android for the smartphone? Or could the Internet search giant just b...

What's hot, and what's not? And how does an e-commerce concern turn it into cash? Knowing Internet trend patterns is not enough. Small e-commerce companies have to be able to act on the information they obtain in order to capitalize on it. When they do not move quickly enough, they may find themsel...

Five years ago, megadeals were all the rage in the business process outsourcing (BPO) world. Global players such as IBM, Accenture, ACS and CSC were racking up billion-dollar multiyear contracts, mainly for accounting, human resource and procurement functions. Now that's changing. "What we can say i...

It wasn't all that long ago that the talk about cellphones and driving was all talk. That is, consumers, driving-safety advocates, and lawmakers debated whether using a hands-free device was enough to make talking on a cellphone safe, or whether talking on the newly ubiquitous devices while behind t...