Spotlight Features

Saturday, Nov. 8, 6:15 p.m. The Wheaton, Md., Metrorail stop in greater Washington, D.C. I am meeting a friend at 7, and I'm later than I wanted to be getting to the Metro. Unfortunately, I'm a bit off my stride. I forgot to get dollar bills and now have to scrounge through my purse looking for eno...

Google arguably is the granddaddy of cloud computing, at least in its current incarnation. So, whenever the Googleplex develops a new feature or capability -- or service offering -- the rest of the industry takes notice. That was the case last month when Google rolled out a service level agreement t...

Lost in the furious run-up to the November elections was a Kentucky court ruling that could unravel a long-established legal argument supporting basic e-commerce activity: namely, that local or state governments cannot extend their reach into cyberspace to impose their own laws on a Web site. Becaus...

There have been a number of attempts to size the cloud computing market. The most eye-popping figure, arguably, is from Merrill Lynch. It has famously said that by 2011, the cloud computing market will reach $160 billion. Whether or not this is a realistic projection -- and there are many who conten...

Increasingly, consumers are connecting their stereos, plasma TVs, DVRs, PCs, laptops and gaming systems to intelligent entertainment systems designed to record, store and share media across devices throughout the home. As the home networking market continues to gain traction, what devices will they ...

Simplify. That, at its heart, is the purpose of XBRL -- extensible business reporting language. XBRL employs a common set of tags for financial terms, making reports more searchable and transparent to everyone who uses them. Designed to provide information to investors and anyone else researching fi...

Pity the Patent and Trademark Office examining attorney who gave Dell the green light propelling its trademark application for the term "cloud computing" toward the home stretch this summer. That particular individual was obviously unaware that the phrase had become, over the course of a year, one...

For those who are hungry for some good economic news, venture capitalists apparently are seeing green in clean technology. Indeed, so-called green technology -- everything from eco-friendly auto parts to alternative fuels to smart buildings to streamlined manufacturing processes -- appears to be blo...

Anyone who's used popular P2P applications such as BitTorrent, Gnutella or Limewire has probably been plagued by network slowdowns that make sharing heavy media files a time-consuming endeavor. However, a consortium of technologists at the Distributed Computing Industry Association has found a way t...

Immigration is becoming as nettlesome to high-tech companies as it has long been in the agriculture and construction businesses. Although technology firms don't reach into the same labor pool as do ag comglomerates or building contractors, their problems are converging. The challenge, advocates of i...