Spotlight Features

Small businesses have been reluctant to spend precious resources on a marketing medium that traditionally has not delivered -- at least to them -- on its promise. That medium is search engine marketing. However, they will find it worthwhile to take another look at this particular tactic. A lot of lo...

For a long time, small businesses were reluctant to embrace the latest in search engine marketing and other online advertising tactics. The SEM industry was unable to deliver to this group of typically local-interest, cost-conscious companies what they wanted the most: a means to assess how their in...

"Not to beat about the bush, but the budgeting process at most companies has to be the most ineffective practice in management. It sucks the energy, time, fun and big dreams out of an organization. In fact, when companies win, in most cases it is despite their budgets, not because of them." These a...

IBM received nearly 4,200 patents in 2008 from the United States Patent & Trademark Office, making Big Blue the undisputed king of the intellectual property game for the 16th year running. A closer look at U.S. patent numbers collated by IFI Patent Intelligence reveals something else: More and m...

Gone are the days when "fringe technologies" meant things like solar energy and wind power. Those and other alternative energy approaches have all gone mainstream, to one degree or another, and they're gaining more steam. However, the fringe is still out there -- so-called alternative-alternative en...

When it comes to Web 2.0 tools and your business Web site, there's a time and a place for everything. Web master wannabes with businesses to run often go overboard with the plethora of social networking tools at their disposal and end up wasting a lot of time and effort on frivolous undertakings. "I...

For anybody who is trying to spend a little less money, a visit to Freecycle may be just the ticket. The concept is a simple one: You sign up for a group based on your ZIP code. Then, if you have something, anything really, you don't want -- a desk, a flowerpot, a printer, even a used Halloween mask...

The Web 2.0 revolution has spawned hundreds of cover stories, thousands of companies, and millions of words of hype. But there's one thing it hasn't brought: Profits. With the coming of the credit crunch and the global recession, hype won't pay the bills. That's why the next wave of Web 2.0 will be ...

Lower total cost of ownership and little or no IT infrastructure to maintain are good starting arguments for moving to the cloud. While such concepts are easy to understand in the abstract, considering cloud computing on an industry-specific basis drives home some surprising limitations on this hot ...

There are plenty of figures to show the efficiencies and cost savings that cloud computing can deliver, but here's one you're unlikely to hear during a sales pitch: The benefits of cloud computing are not linear with a project's progress. That means if you only complete about 80 percent of the proje...