Articles by John P. Mello Jr

International business travelers will be able to access the Internet for a flat monthly fee through more than 100,000 wireless hotspots around the world under a new service announced Monday by Boingo Wireless Boingo, a Santa Monica, Calif.-based aggregator of WiFi networks, said its new service will cost 29 euros, or US$39, per month for unlimited ...

There are lots of disk defraggers in the market, but Raxco PerfectDisk is one of the best that I've seen to date. Now the Gaithersburg, Md., company is expanding the scope of its flagship product to further improve computer performance and security Raxco's new product, PerfectDisk Rx Suite (US$39.95), is built around five components: a disk optimiz...

A promising technology that involves controlling light with magnets could improve the speed and reduce the juice requirements of future computer chips The technology, developed by researchers at the U.S. Navy Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., and the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, combines knowledge from two budding research fiel...

A bane of shutterbugs everywhere is the question of what to do with their photos after shooting them In the days when film was king, it wasn't unusual to find closets with shoeboxes stuffed with prints or boxes of slides....

Call centers for PC companies placed dead last in customer satisfaction in a survey released Tuesday by an international consulting group The Ann Arbor, Mich.-based CFI Group found PC call centers scored a 64, the lowest customer satisfaction score of all the industries surveyed, which included catalog sales, banking, cell phone service and cable a...

Banks looking to increase opportunities to cross-sell products to their online customers will turn in the coming years to Web-based personal finance management tools to do so, according to a research report released Tuesday "With the online banking market maturing, banks are seeking ways to engage their customers on their Web site[s] beyond just ch...

If there's one thing Windows users share -- other than their conflicted emotions toward Microsoft -- it's an insatiable yearning to boost the performance of their computers Windows, despite all its warts, gives them a dizzying number of ways to to do that -- with the right tools....

Worldwide revenues from standalone open source software will reach US$5.8 billion by 2011, according to a report released last week by IDC Revenue from open source software will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 26 percent from 2006 to 2011, according to predictions from the Framingham, Mass.-based research firm....

Video rental purveyor Netflix and TV shopping channel QVC led a customer satisfaction index of the top 100 online retailers released Friday by ForeSee Results, of Ann Arbor, Mich The index, calculated twice a year by the firm, ranked the Web sites of Netflix and QVC, with scores of 85, as the kings of customer satisfaction among Internet retail's t...

As the market for online banking matures, competition is heating up for a group of consumers no longer loyal to their primary financial institution Some 31 percent of online consumers who have a checking or savings account are "switchers" -- people who can be enticed to desert their primary bank with promotional offers like high interest rates on d...

A new installment of Mozilla's sterling e-mail program, Thunderbird, has been released, and while this new variant doesn't blow the doors off its predecessor, version 1.5, it has some tantalizing enhancements that spurred me to upgrade to the new edition without hesitation A major change in the application that immediately attracted me to it was it...

Social networking Web sites such as MySpace and Facebook provide a means for people to share their lives with others, but are these sites turning their subscribers' free content into economic gain -- a new form of sharecropping? It certainly seems that way, according to Nicholas G. Carr, author of Does IT Matter....

Social networking is popular on the Web. So is shopping. Imagine, then, the potential of Net shops that combine the two into a package called "social shopping." Until recently, most designers of e-commerce sites have concentrated on catering to individual shoppers -- what the research firm Gartner calls the "solo hunter."

Hard-core gadgeteers never need a rationalization to buy a new piece of hardware, but for those who need at least a tissue of temperance whenseeking new tech, the introduction of Microsoft's new operating system,Vista, is an invitation to splurge Where should you start your shopping? How about a new laptop? Toshibarecently released a new series of ...

A tiff between the world's largest chipmaker and an organization selling low-priced laptops to the developing world will ultimately benefit poor kids, according to one tech aid expert "I think it's wonderful that Intel and OLPC [One Laptop Per Child] are now competing," Wayan Vota told LinuxInsider. Vota is editor of OLPC News and director of Geekc...

With e-mail's value as a malware delivery agent on the decline, writers of malicious software have boosted their efforts to infect Web sites with their nasty payloads Thousands of malicious Web sites are created on a daily basis to steal information from unsuspecting visitors or plant insidious software on their computers without their knowledge, a...

Consumer electronics will become an exploding market over the next six years for chipmakers who incorporate security features into their silicon, according to a research report released last week While hardware's role in protecting content on consumer devices is small today, that won't be the case in the coming years, according to technology resear...

Tightening controls over distribution of commercial satellite photos may not be in the best interest of the nation, according to academic and industry experts on the subject "It is sometimes more advantageous for our military to have satellite imaging broadly available, especially if you're in a situation with allies, like Iraq," Christopher Simpso...

For years now, Microsoft Word has become synonymous with word processing. Nevertheless, the folks in Redmond, Wash., with the latest release of their word cruncher, have shown they're unafraid to take a daring turn with the program Veteran users will barely recognize Microsoft Word 2007 (US$175 to $230) as their venerable word processor of choice.

For most newspapers, there's a clear line of demarcation between their print and Web operations. Although that line gets fuzzier and fuzzier every day, nowhere has it gotten fuzzier than at BostonNow BostonNow, a free newspaper handed out around Boston to some 85,000 commuters five days a week, publishes blog items beside its news stories as well a...