Articles by John P. Mello Jr.

The Amazons and Wal-Marts of the Web understand the importance of a good on-site search engine, but for smaller concerns the technology can be problematic. Oftentimes those businesses don't make the connection between site search and customer satisfaction and even if they do, they don't have the money to develop a robust technology for themselves T...

A majority of Web sites fail to meet the search desires of their visitors, according to a report prepared by Cambridge, Mass.-based research firm Forrester Research "Although consumers value search as a standalone function, search functionalities within company Web sites are not delivering satisfactory results," said the report, a copy of which was...

Clipboard extenders are among the most useful applications in the Windows world. How many times have you overwritten something in the clipboard that you later wish you had available? Clipboard extenders solve that problem by saving everything you cut or copy from your screen and letting you access it when you need it There are more than a few clipb...

The four anchors of the open source world -- Linux, Apache, MySQL and Perl/PHP/Python, or the so-called LAMP stack -- proved most reliable in a study released Monday by Coverity, a San Francisco-based maker of source code analysis tools With the release of the study, which is part of an ongoing US$1.24 million project funded by the U.S. Department ...

As an industry, delivery of television programming into the home over broadband connections is barely off the ground, but it's already showing signs of consolidation A continuing series of acquisitions in the IP video market will ultimately result in a smaller number of vendors, according to a report released by ABI Research on Wednesday....

With Apple adding video to its iPod line of digital media players, the scramble is on to provide watchers with content to occupy their eyeballs One way to obtain content is to pay for it. Since the introduction of its "vidpod," Apple has been steadily adding to the video library at its iTunes store. In addition to movie trailers, music videos and P...

Broadband penetration of the nation's rural areas has more than doubled since 2003, but it still lags behind urban and suburban areas by a substantial margin, according to a survey released this week by the Pew Internet & American Life Project By the end of 2005, surveyors found, 24 percent of rural Americans had broadband Internet connections, com...

Despite some chest beating by the entertainment industry Wednesday over the shutdown of one of the biggest index servers on the eDonkey network, a raid by Belgian and Swiss police seems to have had little impact on file-sharing traffic "We have seen no effect on the eDonkey traffic levels," Andrew Parker, chief technical officer at CacheLogic, a UK...

Somewhere between no-frills Craigslist and intricate eBay lies the new e-commerce offering introduced by Santa Monica, Calif.-based TagWorld last week TagWorld, a high-energy social networking space launched last November, is combining the new service of free online classifieds, which includes images and personalized storefronts, with auction featu...

Internet companies doing business in countries that suppress civil liberties need a code of conduct to soften the controversy they're fueling by doing business with authoritarian regimes In an open letter sent to Sen. Gordon H. Smith (R-Ore.), whose Congressional subcommittee held hearings Wednesday on the conduct of Internet companies in China, th...

Nico Popp can see the day when proving who you are on the faceless Internet will be as easy as using a picture I.D. in the real world Popp is the point man for a new authentication program launched Monday by VeriSign, which runs the Net's largest domains, .com and .net, its biggest certificate validation service and the root product code database f...

If there's anything that can be called heresy in free-for-all cyberspace it's the notion that people should pay for e-mail, but that didn't stop a few heretics this week from announcing monetized e-mail initiatives Although Yahoo and AOL took the lion's share of the limelight with their "certified e-mail" proposal, a feisty start-up in the Netherla...

A maker of software to manage music CD copying has agreed to make its protection scheme less vulnerable to computer crackers. After the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) released an open letter raising security concerns about the MediaMax application, its Phoenix, Ariz.-based developer, SunnComm Technologies, announced it would take several remedial steps:...

After a slight hiatus during the holidays, malware writers returned with vigor to their malicious ways in January, creating thousands of new software nasties According to Sophos, an international malware-fighting firm with offices in Lynnfield, Mass., 2,312 pernicious programs were introduced last month. Anti-virus software maker McAfee pegs Januar...

Here's the scenario. Something ugly has happened to your computer. Irreplaceable files have been clobbered. You seek assistance from a PC pundit, but you know your files are fly food as soon as you hear, "You're supposed to back up your files, you know." Let's face it. We all have good excuses for failing to sustain a rigid maintenance regimen for ...

They were a staple of cloak-and-dagger drama, both fictional and real, during the Cold War and now they're being offered to consumers as a passive means of protecting their personal property. They're microdots DataDot Technology USA, of Redmond, Wash., introduced Monday a US$19.95 kit that allows consumers to attach unique microscopic identifiers -...

The global market for high-definition televisions (HDTV) and their ancillary products -- personal video recorders, DVD players, game consoles and set-top boxes -- will eclipse US$25 billion this year, according to a report released Wednesday by ABI Research, of Oyster Bay, N.Y As the HDTV market grows, commoditization will threaten margins and attr...

Apple Computer's introduction of its video iPod set off a big bang that will fuel phenomenal market growth for years, according to a report released Monday byABI Research While the push to video online started well before the launch of the video iPod, ABI acknowledged, Apple's announcement triggered an online video explosion that echoed throughout ...

Social networking Web sites used to be just about connections. Now they're ballooning into ecosystems where individuals can aggregate their lives. More evidence of that appeared Wednesday as an up-and-coming networking site called TagWorld added video services to its online repertoire "There are a lot of video sites out there," Evan Rifkin, preside...

A bill to place copying controls on the conversion of analog signals into digital form is coming under fire from technologists and civil libertarians The measure, filed by House Judiciary Committee Chairman F. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisc.) and his colleague John Conyers, Jr. (D-Mich.), is aimed at closing what's come to be known as the "analog hole...