Articles by John P. Mello Jr

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...

The Electronic Frontier (EFF) on Wednesday issued a report critical of the music industry's litigation campaign to reduce digital piracy "Today, downloading from P2P (peer-to-peer) networks is more popular than ever, despite the widespread public awareness of lawsuits," the report declared. "At the same time, the lawsuit campaign has enriched only ...

When ripping and playing digitized music was a novelty, media players basked in the hot software limelight. There were articles about the merits of one over another, about "wars" among vendors and lots of noise when a new version of a player arrived in the market Today, though, new releases of media players barely cause a ripple in the electronic e...

Would you like a portable power source that could run your laptop five times longer than your current batteries? How about 10 times longer? Those kinds of run times are being dangled by the fuel cell industry before a public parched for longer-lasting power for an ever-expanding assortment of small electronic devices....

Dubious pharmacies abound on the Internet, and they're posing a threat to both pharmaceutical companies and consumers That's the main finding in brand-protector MarkMonitor's summer edition of its Brandjacking Index, released this week....

Mind mapping software is hot From freeware like FreeMind to elaborate corporate planning tools like MindManager to Web 2.0 offerings like Bubbl.us, Mindomo, Kayuda and MindMeister, software developers are busily introducing new mind mapping variations or updating old ones....

A data theft revealed over the weekend of some 1.6 million records from Monster.com does not raise issues of identity theft, the employment Web site asserted "[T]here have been reports of this as an issue of 'identify theft,'" Monster Vice President of Compliance and Fraud Prevention Patrick W. Manzo said. "We are not aware of any cases of identity...

Fears that traffic demands on the Internet are outstripping the Net's capacity to handle them may be premature, though continuous Net growth will necessitate new networking techniques and technologies in the future Much of the fear that traffic would overwhelm capacity can be linked to growth figures in recent times....

Portable hard disk drives aren't the sexiest computer peripherals in the world. They're pretty much a small box with an LED or two on them Most disk makers have been content staying inside that box when they design their drives, but not SimpleTech....