Articles by John P. Mello Jr

Competitors lusting for a slice of Apple's iPod market need to rethink their current strategy, according to an analyst at Forrester Research Ted Schadler, who authored a report released last week on youth and online music, told TechNewsWorld that iPod competitors have been ignoring a key attitude uncovered in Forrester's survey....

Sunglasses and cool have always had an intimate relationship so it's not surprising that gadget makers have started grafting the coolest way to listen to music to the fashionable accoutrement Until recently, though, you had to pay a pretty penny for haut hip. Oakley -- the king of shades for tony active types like professional baseball players -- b...

In a deal harking back to the days of dot-com euphoria, online e-commerce powerhouse eBay announced a US$2.6 billion deal to acquire Luxembourg-based Skype, a pioneer in free Voice over IP (VoIP) services on the Internet The mega-sale drew fire from some quarters and praise from others....

Consumer satisfaction with wireless phone service providers has slipped significantly over the last year, according to an annual study released by J.D. Power and Associates yesterday Overall, satisfaction fell 10 percent compared to 2004. That's the largest year-over-year change in satisfaction since the survey's inception in 1995, the company said...

Online merchants selling digital products for small sums of money will find it easier to do so through the Internet's best known online payment service, PayPal That's because the company has announced a new "micropayments" pricing scheme to make selling low-priced goods through PayPal -- especially those sold for less than US$2 -- more attractive....

News syndication and Web logs are two of the hottest technologies on the Internet today Syndication commonly referred to as RSS or Atom, has become a significant vehicle for delivering news and analysis directly to information hounds and for sharing intelligence within corporations....

Some 72 percent of the businesses evaluated by a Boston-based research firm scored poorly on their policies for re-using their customers' personal data for marketing purposes, but the researchers maintain that more companies are sensitive to privacy issues than ever before and are acting on that awareness Other findings in the report prepared by Th...

A pact between chip king Intel and Research in Motion (RIM), Canadian maker of the Blackberry mobile communication device, appears less imminent than originally reported Rumors of a technology exchange deal between the companies spread like an airborne virus on Monday following a CNBC report predicting an agreement would be announced at the Pentium...

Some pundits contend that if Microsoft's Media Center Edition of Windows XP is going to break through the barrier between the living room and the home office, it's going to have to do it on the notebook platform. Toshiba is taking that notion seriously with its new line of Qosmio portables The latest edition of the notebook with the name that looks...

Personal computer shipments this year and next will grow by double digits, but that won't translate into the big revenue gains for PC makers, according to a preliminary forecast released yesterday by Gartner, of Stamford, Conn Compared on a year-to-year basis, Gartner predicted worldwide PC shipments would increase 12.7 percent in 2005, to 206.6 mi...

Renting entertainment could be the wave of the future, and Microsoft isn't about to miss it The company that brought us "Janus," the digital rights management (DRM) scheme that allows subscription music services like Napster On The Go to exist, has announced a deal with Exent, of Bethesda, Md., a provider of "games on demand" technology....

If you've ever owned an SLR camera, you can probably remember the first time you held it in your hands. I do Here, I thought, many years ago when I picked up my Minolta X7, is something of substance. Weighty, certainly, but also beautifully balanced -- an inanimate object capable of animating its beholder....

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....