Articles by John P. Mello Jr.

Online marketplace eBay paid too much for the Internet phone service Skype, but its head was in the right place when it made the buy, according to a report released Tuesday by a major technology research firm "eBay's September 2005 acquisition of telephony vendor Skype was overpriced by any direct measure: technology value, user base and revenue," ...

With all the social networking and photo-sharing Web sites out there, few teenagers are taken by surprise when they find that pictures they posed for have been posted online by their friends. However, few expect to see their likeness then featured, without their permission, on a billboard advertisement for a major telecommunications company Virgin ...

We live in a Web 2.0 world, but when it comes to fighting Internet-borne security threats, many enterprises are armed with only Web 1.0 weapons, according to a study released this week by San Jose, Calif.-based Secure Computing Web 2.0 usage is prevalent in enterprises, the study found, and as a result "the traditional boundary of external versus i...

Avid Technology has long had a sterling reputation among videoprofessionals for its editing systems. However, while widely respected withthe pro set, its consumer offerings have been at worst ornery and atbest, disappointing. Then the company acquired Pinnacle Pinnacle's heritage in consumer video on a PC stretched back to the daysof low-octane com...

Given the penchant of online scammers to exploit high-visibility events for their own malignant purposes, security experts were unsurprised this week to learn that Myanmar has became a vehicle for planting malware on unsuspecting users of personal computers The e-mail scam publicized by endpoint security and control firm Sophos uses a Microsoft Wor...

Only a few companies can afford to spend millions of dollars onresearching and developing new technologies for their product lines, butthat doesn't necessarily exclude smaller businesses from getting theirhands on cutting-edge innovation Each year, thousands of discoveries aremade at universities, and many of them are left on the shelf because they...

Only a few companies can afford to spend millions of dollars onresearching and developing new technologies for their product lines, butthat doesn't necessarily exclude smaller businesses from getting theirhands on cutting-edge innovation Each year, thousands of discoveries aremade at universities, and many of them are left on the shelf because they...

Only a few companies can afford to spend millions of dollars onresearching and developing new technologies for their product lines, butthat doesn't necessarily exclude smaller businesses from getting theirhands on cutting-edge innovation Each year, thousands of discoveries aremade at universities, and many of them are left on the shelf because they...

America's "third screen" -- that is, the mobile market -- is at a crossroads. The direction it will go is anyone's guess, but IDC is advocating that Internet powerhouse Google should take a leading role in determining its path Conditions are ripe for a strong player like Google to transform the third screen, which is drawing viewers for entertainme...

Consumers are beginning to embrace digital video recorders (DVRs) as they once did VCRs A scant two years ago, only one American household in 13 had one of the gadgets. Now they're in one in five homes, according to the latest figures from the Leichtman Research Group (LRG), of Durham, N.H....

E-mail greeting card scams popular during the summer months seem to have lost their luster for information highwaymen "We've seen an awful lot of greeting card malware in the last couple of months, but scammers have moved on to new techniques, simply because there was so much of it about that it stopped being a very effective way to infect people,"...

Although I'm a hopelessly U.S.-centric person, I still find it engaging from time to time to gauge the opinions of those outside Uncle Sam's borders about what they consider stellar products. One indicator of those opinions is awards like those bestowed in August by the European Imaging and Sound Association (EISA) Among the association's top produ...

The whipping that lenders have taken in the subprime mortgage market could prove beneficial to the nation's technology sector, according to a venture capitalist-turned-professor Howard Anderson, a founder of the Yankee Group, as well as two venture capital companies, and now a professor at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institu...

There are an estimated 44 million Baby Boomers roaming the Net, and legions of marketers looking for ways to reach them. That's because, as a target market, Boomers have what it takes to make hucksters salivate: money "It's a generation with wealth -- (US)$2 trillion in disposable income -- and they have an incredible appetitive to keep connecting,...

While watching "Who Wants to Be a Super Hero" with my six-year-old the other night, I became intrigued by the way the show segued to commercials. It froze the video and transformed the freeze frame into comic book art That kind of metamorphosis can be performed on digital photos, too. Some photo editing programs include "art" filters that let you c...

Online advertising by the pharmaceutical and the health care industry will reach US$2.2 billion by 2011, but the sector's approach to the Web leaves something to be desired, according to a market research report released last week "The pharmaceutical industry is in a state of flux or siege, depending on your point of view," maintains the report fro...

E-mail attachments are no longer used as frequently as before to infect PCs with malicious software, according to a report released Tuesday by malware fighter Sophos, of Burlington, Mass The monthly report reveals that in August, on average, one in every 1,000 e-mails had an infected attachment. That compares with one in 322 for the first six month...

When it comes to online target markets, males between the ages of 18 and 34 are a juicy lot for advertisers. However, getting those males in the cross hairs of their messages these days is becoming increasing problematic for marketers "The expanding but elusive segment of U.S. men age 18 to 34 accounted for nearly 27 percent of the total male Inter...

With outlets like Flickr, Shutterfly and Photobucket -- just to name a few -- there's been a considerable decrease in demand for programs for creating photo albums that can be uploaded to personal Web space Still, if you have an account with an internet service provider (ISP), you likely have megabytes of Web space begging to be used for something,...

Electronic Arts (EA) -- the world's largest video game publisher by sales -- made a statement in June when it announced it was forming a casual gaming division. Last month, the Redwood, Calif., company punctuated that statement with an exclamation mark by cutting a licensing deal with Hasbro, whose real-world gaming portfolio contains monster brands like Monopoly, Scrabble and Yahtzee...