Articles by Nancy Cohen

Canonical, the Europe-based commercial Ubuntu vendor, has released an optimized version of Ubuntu for VMware virtual appliances. It's called "Ubuntu JeOS edition" -- the JeOS refers to the VMware concept of Just Enough Operating System, a no-overhead, pared-down version of an OS ideal for virtual appliances Ready to Go...

Siemens and BMW are the latest enterprise-scale customers stepping up to the Microsoft-Novell alliance plate Under the Microsoft-Novell alliance, business customers pay Microsoft for certificates that get them Novell Suse Linux and services....

IBM has announced that it is moving closer than it has ever been to the OpenOffice.org community with stepped-up support in its Lotus product line of collaborative software and a commitment to contribute code The announcement suggests a win-win for IBM and OpenOffice.org, a seven-year-old project created by Sun Microsystems and widely recognized as...

A survey by the investment banking and securities firm UBS found that fewer CIOs will deploy Linux than in the past, but the results are being met with shrugs in the Linux community According to UBS, more than 90 percent of CIOs who are not Linux users said they would not deploy Linux in the calendar year, up from 60 percent in 2006. Expect Linux s...

Microsoft on Wednesday announced that its cross-browser plug-in, Silverlight will eventually appear on Linux Silverlight, a challenge to Adobe's Flash, means Microsoft will have to convince Web users they can really "light up the Web," with Silverlight, as the ad copy states, and view high-quality video....

Microsoft's Office Open Extensible Markup Language (OOXML) document format on Tuesday failed to win enough votes among members of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) to become an international standard. The vote, however, may not be the final chapter in the politically charged fight over standardized document file formats The F...

Mobile devices are increasingly working their way into our everyday lives, and market research suggests that the operating systems driving these devices are often Linux-based Technology research firm ABI Research forecasts that Linux will be the fastest growing smartphone operating system over the next five years....

Targeting small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), Zmanda on Wednesday introduced an advanced enterprise-class release of its open source backup software called "Amanda." Proprietary backup and recovery software vendors haven't had to worry much about open source competition up to now. After all, they could argue, where's the training, where's the...

Mozilla's Firefox now has a campus edition, according to a Tuesday announcement by Mozilla The Firefox Campus Edition gives students access to music, lyrics, cover art, videos, photos and more, with add-ons FoxyTunes, StumbleUpon and Zotero....

Collaborative wiki technology is making its way into the small and medium-sized business, offering SMBs (small and medium-sized businesses) a way to foster collaboration among employees and interaction with the public One company, Des-Moines, Iowa-based CustomerVision, on Aug. 17 released RapidWiki, which is designed to get SMBs up and running with...

The world of technology contact centers is going to get a little more engaging IBM, forever scrambling to stay ahead of the game in customer interaction models, announced Thursday that a virtual IBM Business Center is open for business in Asia....

Ingres on Wednesday announced the launch of its Icebreaker BI Appliance, a solution for business intelligence (BI)customers The Icebreaker BI Appliance is actually a tightly woven combo of the Ingres database integrated with Linux business intelligence software from open source-based JasperSoft, and Linux-enabling technology from application builde...

Cepstral, a speech technology company, has decided to open its Media Resource Control Protocol (MRCP) library to the developer community The move is designed to free telephony application developers from the protocol grindstone and lead to greater inroads in software innovation, Cepstral's CEO said....

Canonical, the commercial sponsor of the Linux distribution Ubuntu, asserted there has to be some decisive Ubuntu community action to make sure it doesn't suffer another outage Canonical had to shut down five of eight servers in order to avert potential hacker attacks earlier this month....

E-mail marketers anxious to see that their opt-in mailings are not mistaken for spam are finally seeing brighter days, new research suggests. While the journey to the customer's inbox is getting easier, however, passive marketers will face tough challenges from smart competitors who are quickly learning how to use e-mail tracking, metrics and customization for high returns...

U.S. advertisers have turned the practice of "product placement" into a lucrative market. This advertising phenomenon makes possible the insertion of an advertiser's product into a film, television program or video game The estimated value of the total product-placement industry in 2005 -- when you include other creative arrangements such as barter...

If corporate managers have Sarbanes-Oxley compliance to blame for late nights and lost sleep, those in the livestock and poultry industries have plenty of compliance worries of their own, triggered by NAIS, which stands for the National Animal Identification System NAIS is a multi-year, phased-in project that the U.S. Department of Agriculture is d...

Whether you call it "Voice over Internet Protocol," or a trendier "Voyp" you're joining a widening group of vendors, industry watchers and analysts who see VoIP as SMBs' telephony technology of the future The key reason most businesses are so interested in VoIP is the cost savings that come from communicating over an Internet connection, and that i...

Somewhere in America, a parent turns out the lights with a silent prayer: "Please give me another day where my 15-year old shows no signs of dying his hair purple, piercing his ears, shrinking his wardrobe down to black socks and a raincoat, and gunning down Milton, the ice-cream man. Oh, and please make tomorrow another day where our rules are obeyed: no video games."

When Eric Lituchy and wife Gina Ezratty first started talking in the late 1990s about a new dot-com business, the business idea seemed straightforward enough. Sell specialty products over the Internet. Satisfy gift-givers who want to honor life's milestones for special someones. Top off birthdays, engagements, graduations, and homecomings with delightful deliveries, from marzipan, to filets, to towers of fruit, made possible through a select network of suppliers...