Articles by John P. Mello Jr.

In an aggressive move to entice dial-up surfers to upgrade to broadband service, BellSouth announced a deal with Napster yesterday that the Baby Bell hopes Websters will find hard to refuse Under the agreement, new subscribers to BellSouth's FastAccess DSL service will get a free 256-megabyte digital music player (DMP) and a free three-month subscr...

Online sales approached US$39 billion in the quarter ending in June, according to a report from Boston-based Forrester Research That's a 25 percent increase over a comparable period last year and a slight increase over the quarter ending in April when sales were US$38 billion....

Another sign that e-commerce has come of age appeared yesterday as JupiterResearch predicted online advertising would reach US$18.9 billion by 2010 -- almost double last year's gross of $9.6 billion Much of that revenue growth will be stoked by search engine advertising, which garnered 40 percent of online ad sales in 2004, compared to 27 percent f...

Real Simple Syndication (RSS) -- the technology used to create feeds of information directly to a user from Web sites and blogs -- is in its nascent stages of development, but it's one marketers should be taking a hard look at as a future vehicle for their wares Marketers who shun RSS now might reap unfavorable consequences in the future, according...

Sloth can be a deadly sin, or at least a potentially litigious one, and the rise of blogging on the Internet has peaked concern about this pitfall The issue arises because bloggers, many or most of them amateurs, often overdose on cut-and-paste editing, which can result in copyright violations, Paul Llewellyn, an attorney with Kaye Scholer in New Y...

At first blush, the idea seemed a little wacky to me But when drug store giant CVS announced its US$29.95 one-time-use digital video camera (DVC), I couldn't resist the temptation to check it out....

Claria Corp. makes some US$100 million a year selling pop-up advertising on the Internet, but with the launch of its PersonalWeb product this month, it's hoping to hitch a ride on a bigger gravy train With PersonalWeb, a permission-based vehicle for slotting customized advertising into Web pages, the company is diverting its focus away from the $50...

Web surfers are annoyed as hell and they're doing something about it That's the thrust of the findings in a survey to be released next week by Hostway, a Chicago-based Web site hosting service with more than 400,000 global clients....

IBM, in a move to bolster its presence in the electronic forms market, is expected to close a deal tomorrow to acquire developer PureEdge Solutions. Terms of the acquisition have not been made public PureEdge, of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, is a developer of electronic forms using open-source technology called XForms, which is based on XM...

Really Simple Syndication, or RSS, is a convenient way to funnel news to your desktop -- if you have an "always on" connection With RSS, not only can you receive up-to-the-minute feeds from heavyweight news sources, but you can plug into the blogosphere without blog-hopping on the Net....

Internet search powerhouse Google garnered 37.6 percent of all U.S. search queries on the Internet in this year's second quarter, according to comScore Networks, a Net metrics service firm. That's the largest market share that Google has had in a quarter since comScore began compiling its search reports in December 2003 Google's 5.65 billion U.S.

A report by an Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) panel on domain hijacking that was intended to raise a red flag in the Internet community about the practice has been met with mixed reaction, leaving at least one victim seeing red The Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC) report was issued last week during ICANN...

Action yesterday by the body that governs the Internet to create a .mobi domain is being touted as a major advance toward making the Web more hospitable to mobile phone users, but according to one analyst the move might be more redundant than revolutionary "The answer isn't having another extension; the answer is having more applications and more c...

RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication, but for technologists with an eye on the Internet's future, it stands for much, much more The technology provides a way for people to opt to have information delivered to their computer desktops without having to burn time surfing the Web....

E-mail authentication -- considered by many spam fighters as an important first step in reducing unsolicited correspondence on the Internet -- will be the focus of a summit conference to be held in New York City next Tuesday The day-long confab at the Marriott Marquis will be moderated by Esther Dyson, editor of Release 1.0, who will also deliver t...

Pop-up advertising on the Web might be annoying, but not as annoying as what would happen if trademark law were used to squash them, according to a federal appellate court in New York The U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals this week upended a decision by a lower court that used trademark law to block the ads of one pop-up purveyor....

Now that summer has finally arrived, you can start to train your thoughts on vacation -- and what to bring with you when you take it What do you consider essential carry-alongs? A good book? How about a laptop? Better yet, a laptop with wireless networking so you can plug into the Internet whenever you hit a WiFi hotspot in your travels....

European consumers are being driven away from online banking and commerce by fears that their identities will be stolen and their financial resources raided by information highwaymen Survey results released yesterday by Entrust, a publicly traded digital identity security firm located in Addison, Texas, showed 13 percent of consumers in the United ...

Gateway has come to the table with its 17-inch widescreen notebooks a little later than some of its competitors, but its latest offering in this category illustrates, once again, that it's capable to delivering excellent value without skimping on performance Some impressive features have been incorporated into this offering, the M680 notebook, most...

Emerging technologies could lead to a quantum leap in PC security, but the realization of that advance is still years away, industry experts say "The next quantum leap in security won't occur until there is better operating system and better hardware support for it," John Bedrick, a director of eTrust Security Management at Computer Associates, tol...