Articles by Susan B. Shor

Enterprise is far from the days when it was enough simply to have a Web presence. More and more sophisticated consumers are shopping for services based not only on what a company offers, but what it offers online and how easy it is to negotiate A recent study by Keynote Systems, which offers e-business performance management services, focused on ba...

Microsoft announced in July it was stepping full force into the small- to mid-size business (SMB) market with a customer relationship management (CRM) product designed to fit into its Office software suite At the time, analysts said Microsoft was wise to take a bottom-up approach to the CRM office since the giants of CRM, Oracle and SAP, don't scal...

Comcast, the nation's largest cable television company with 21.5 million subscribers, announced it would follow in the footsteps of No. 2 Time Warner Cable and offer a "family friendly" package of TV channels Comcast's G-rated offering bundles 16 stations, including Disney Channel, Discovery Kids, Nickelodeon/Nick Too, BS Kids Sprout, National Geog...

A Symantec security flaw discovered by an independent security consultant is unlikely to be exploited despite its rating as a high risk by Symantec itself and a very high risk by security firm Secunia, said Forrester Research senior analyst Michael Gavin The vulnerability, which could allow a hacker to take control of a machine during decompression...

Oracle has changed the formula it uses to determine the cost of software licenses for multi-core processors, the company announced. In July, it began counting each core as .75 of a whole, but it will now use different formulas based on the specific chips in use The majority of buyers purchase licenses by processor, although Oracle also offers per ...

The game lover on your holiday gift list can be the easiest person to shop for. Just pick the latest, greatest sequel game and you're set. Not so this season. That's because new releases of this generation's game consoles -- Microsoft's Xbox, Nintendo's GameCube and Sony's PlayStation 2 -- are on their way to the old school scrap heap Microsoft alr...

Yahoo has launched a service that attempts to connect those with questions to a community that might have the answers Yahoo Answers offers 23 categories in which to ask a question not easily answered by a Web search....

Sony BMG's overzealous moves to insert digital rights management into its music CDs is causing the company more trouble The Electronic Frontier Foundation, the non-profit Internet rights group, said that software Sony embedded into 27 CD titles on sale in the United States and Canada opens a hole through which hackers can take control of a PC runni...

Microsoft's latest CRM release takes a giant step from previous versions, adding several key functions to its Dynamics CRM 3.0. Although the company said the new version will be more competitive with CRM giants Oracle and SAP, one analyst said Microsoft is still playing mostly in the small and medium business (SMB) market "We will see some traction...

Microsoft Research released today a program that can help sort through e-mail so that correspondence that you're most likely to want to see ends up where you're most likely to see it SNARF (Social Network and Relationship Finder) is a free, add-on program that works with Outlook 2003 and up. It "knows" which e-mail is coming from your contacts and ...

The Grateful Dead found out this week what happens when you give and then take away: consumer uproar The Dead, a band who has always encouraged tape sharing of its multitude of live shows, a few weeks ago asked the non-profit Internet Archives to remove free downloads of their concerts from its site. Dead Heads were not pleased and showed it with a...

The agency charged with Internet oversight may give its blessing to single-letter domain names, which have been reserved since 1993. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) will decide this and other issues at a meeting in Vancouver, B.C., this weekend Single-letter domains were set aside because of technical worries about w...

While Sony (Blu-ray) and Toshiba (HD-DVD) go head-to-head with competing high-definition DVD technology, Hitachi-Maxell and InPhase Technologies are working on a disc that will hold 300GB of information, or six times what either of the other discs can store Hitachi is calling their technology a tapestry holographic disc, but the technology is gener...

Patients who want to manage their own breast health records have a new tool with which to do so MyNDMA.com, launched today by IBM and i3 Archive, is a Web portal that gives its users a place to store digital mammogram results as well as faxed-in medical documentation. But the portal is much more than that, because it is linked into i3's grid-based ...

With the holiday season and its flurry of shopping, greetings and other online activities, also comes a bump in malware production. Proof of that came early this year with the proliferation of several versions of the Sober worm "Unfortunately for us, the holidays have historically brought with them an increase in malware activity," Ed Moyle, manage...

Did video really kill the radio star, or were they just placed in suspended animation until streaming mobile services can revive them? Cingular is betting on the former Wireless carrier Cingular announced yesterday it had teamed up with MobiTV to offer MobiRadio. For US$6.99 a month plus kilobyte use fees, Cingular subscribers with radio-ready hand...

IBM's speed in the supercomputer world remains unchallenged today. The company not only maintained its hold on the top ranking spot among all supercomputers with its Blue Gene/L System, which doubled its own speed in the Top500 biannual listing of the world's fastest machines, but Big Blue built the second- and third-fastest machines as well In all...

Digital rights management (DRM) software embedded in some Sony BMG CDs has become a lightning rod for complaints against the measures the music industry is taking to prevent illegal copying Eight months after Sony incorporated the software into 20 of its CD releases, developer and author Mark Russinovich wrote in his blog that the CDs, when played ...

Hewlett-Packard announced yesterday a bundle of application modernization services designed to help large enterprises do some IT housekeeping and set a roadmap that will lead them to a service-oriented architecture (SOA) Paul Evans, worldwide director of Application Modernization Services at HP, said that companies look to become more agile, reduce...

With yet another report of declining newspaper circulation, those within the business are wondering anew how long the print world can hold on or if the fleeing of news readers to other media sources can be stopped The Audit Bureau of Circulation measured a 2.6 percent drop in weekday circulation for U.S. papers year-over-year in the six months endi...