Job insecurity combined with financial fear-mongering has consumers slashing their budgets. Cellphone and premium TV services look like easy items to eliminate. Typically, however, those services tie users to contracts as well as three ugly words: early termination fees. Can customers break those co...

Google and Yahoo used to compete mightily in the site search category, but now the two have turned their focus toward search advertising, which makes them more money. Dozens of smaller players have emerged to fill the void -- and to make money. Other site search solutions may have looked like diminu...

Email was born sometime between 1965 and 1970, depending on how you define its genesis, and by 1980 it was considered by many to be the killer app. It drove the proliferation of PCs in the workplace and allowed people all over the world to work together. SMS texting and tweeting can take some credit...

Job insecurity combined with financial fear-mongering has consumers slashing their budgets. Cell phone and premium TV services look like easy items to eliminate. Typically, however, those services tie users to contracts as well as three ugly words: early termination fees. Can customers break those c...

What do the most successful CRM implementations have in common? In a global survey designed to find out, IBM Business Consulting Services (BCS) learned that the factors that most impact a project's success are not necessarily the obvious, big-ticket items. The survey, which identified the 16 most cr...

It's an age-old slogan for companies: "We value your business." Thanks to customer relationship management (CRM) systems, many enterprises now can place a highly specific value on the worth of each customer's business. Like it or not, CRM systems allow companies to identify customer segments, or "ti...

Ahhh-choo! Ahh, lucky you. Every time you are exposed to a virus, your immune system builds resistance to that particular bug. So, why can't we build computers that do the same thing? "If our bodies functioned like computers, we'd be extinct," said Steve Hofmeyr, founder and chief scientist of Sana ...

It's official: Web services technology has gone mainstream. The technology -- which consists mainly of software designed to let business systems communicate with each other across the Internet without human intervention -- is already making a huge impact on how companies share information and conduc...

U.S. schools will spend nearly $6 billion on technology before the 2003-2004 school year is over, much of it on wireless PDAs. Why do small screens have such a big impact on K-12 students and their teachers? For one thing, they're just the right size, said Elliot Soloway, a professor of education an...

In the ever-expanding arena of large-display technology, is plasma here to stay? "Plasma displays, I think, are a very awkward technology," James Jaskie, chief scientist at Motorola's Microelectronics and Physical Sciences Laboratory, told TechNewsWorld. Plasma display panels use emissive technology...

Technology's global impact is hardly limited to Internet communication and speedier business cycles. One uncelebrated truth about the information age is that hundreds of thousands of electronic items are disposed of daily -- and not always properly. Unfortunately, in spite of growing awareness regar...

The universal shortage of nurses in particular and healthcare workers in general is getting worse. Meanwhile, baby boomers are moving like a tidal wave toward assisted-living homes. Soon, patients could face the choice of being cared for by a robotic nurse or no nurse at all. When Pearl, a robotic n...

It's official: Web services technology has gone mainstream. The technology -- which consists mainly of software designed to let business systems communicate with each other across the Internet without human intervention -- is already making a huge impact on how companies share information and conduc...