Articles by John P. Mello Jr

Browser usage numbers for 2006 are beginning to appear on the Web, and for the first time in many moons the market share of Microsoft's dominant offering, Internet Explorer, has dipped below 80 percent While Internet Explorer's star was sinking, its chief competitor's, Mozilla Firefox, was ascending. Its market share climbed from 9.50 percent in Ja...

High-tech employment made a strong showing in 2006. Average salaries were on the rise and demand for IT professionals was robust, according to a salary survey released Wednesday by Dice.com, a Web site for high-tech employment opportunities "2006 has been our first full year of strong demand," John Estes, vice president of Robert Half Technology in...

Meet Alexandra, the commercial says. She likes her computer. After she plants a smooch on her computer's display, a caption adds, maybe too much Suddenly, Alexandra is called away from her office. Enter Ulf, a "Silent Bob" type. People think he may be responsible for computer problems in the office, we're warned....

It is is a dream come true for energy seekers: a portable energy source that outperforms the best lithium-ion batteries on the market and produces 10 times the power of lead-acid batteries at half the cost -- and without the need for toxic materials or chemicals Is the technology being developed by EEStor the future of vehicle power or another unde...

Everywhere you turn these days, someone is pushing video -- on the Internet, on portable media players, even on cell phones. What's omitted by many enthusiastic purveyors of this electronic marvel, though, is that the digital video scene is a jungle of befuddling and confusing formats, a system more conducive to frustration than elation That jungle...

Traffic to blog pages at the top 10 newspaper sites jumped 210 percent in December compared to the same month in 2005 Moreover, blogs garnered 13 percent of all traffic to the sites during the month, compared to only 4 percent in December 2005, according to findings released Wednesday by Nielsen//NetRatings, a media and market research firm based i...

Monitor size is like real estate. You can never get enough of it. That's what I thought until I got a gander at Gateway's mammoth 24-inch HD LCD flat-panel display. Working with this monitor is like computing on a billboard Once I got my bearings -- I'm used to using a 17-inch LCD, so the transition to this behemoth was like being plopped in the mi...

More job seekers than ever descended on employment Web sites during the first week of the new year, according to an online competitive intelligence service Visits to electronic emporiums for employment climbed 31 percent during the week of January 6 compared to the same period a year ago, Hitwise reported last week....

Network neutrality -- an issue that created a firestorm of controversy on Capitol Hill last year -- will be on the congressional agenda again in 2007 thanks to Senators Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) and Byron Dorgan (D-ND) Those legislators filed this week what they're calling "The Internet Freedom Preservation Act," which they say will ensure all conten...

There are pundits who say loyalty was stillborn on the Internet, but Keynote Systems isn't one of them The San Mateo, Calif., provider of on-demand test and measurement products for gauging mobile and online performance reports that loyalty to big Net brands solidified last year, as did those brand's market share....

When Apple introduces a new version of a product, it's usually undertaken with some buzz-inducing design flair that fires up the imagination and whets the appetite for consumption. That iss not the case with its new MacBook offerings Instead of fiddling with the good looks of the MacBook, the 1 Infinite Loop crew have focused their desire to excel ...

Within five years, cable and satellite television providers will be facing a formidable competitor in their market: the Internet By 2011, TV programming delivered over consumer broadband connections will be a "viable alternative to cable," according to a report released Wednesday by Forrester Research....

The proverb "he who hesitates is lost" may be true if you're a member of the Danish aristocracy, but if you've been sitting on the fence about making a move from a point-and-shoot digital camera to a DSLR (digital single lens reflex) model, your hesitation may be rewarded Nikon has introduced a sweet DSLR unit, the Model D40, aimed at consumers wh...

Missing its self-proclaimed deadline to implement its audio anti-piracy software won't immediately hurt YouTube's goodwill with the entertainment industry As New Year's Eve approached last weekend, YouTube, which was purchased in October by Google for US$1.65 billion in stock, acknowledged it would not be able to meet its Jan. 1 deadline for rollin...

When many consumers are asked about receiving advertising on their cell phones, they react as if they've bitten into a sour apple. Nevertheless, the mobile universe has begun ripening nicely for marketers, according to a report released last week The report by Forrester Research noted: "In 2003, Forrester said that U.S. mobile marketing was only fo...

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....

Let's face it, most software that's packaged with Windows PCs is junk. It's either too feeble to do much of anything or a try-me version that, should you use it in earnest, will hold your data hostage when its trial period expires One program that I've found to be an exception to that rule, though, is WinDVD. In fact, when I bought a computer for m...

Social networking is going mobile and is poised for spectacular growth over the next five years, according to a research report released Monday The report from ABI Research predicts that mobile social communities will be attracting members in swarms, more than tripling in size worldwide from some 50 million this year to 174 million by 2011....

Tagging a computer with the Ferrari label may seem a tad pretentious to some minds. Whether you're of that mind or not, one thing is for sure -- any product saddled with a prestigious name like that has mighty tall boots to fill. Actually, it's more like filling hip-waders Nevertheless, since the introduction of its first Ferrari notebook three yea...

Most consumers wouldn't think of paying for an item and leaving a store without it, but that is essentially what is happening with about 10 percent of the gift cards sold each year to the public "We estimate the overall raw volume in gift cards this year to be (US)$80 billion," Brian Riley, senior analyst for bank cards with the Tower Group, told t...