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Despite what you've heard, the online version of Office 2010 announced by Microsoft earlier this week won't be free to corporate users, and isn't a threat to the likes of Google, Adobe, or even Zoho, which sells online productivity software to small and medium-sized businesses. It's true that Mic...
We've all seen IBM's 'Smarter Planet' ads, which leave no doubt that Big Blue is angling for a much stimulus money as it can get. Conveniently, IBM can lean on former CTO and current wise-man emeritus Irving Wladawsky-Berger, to take urban planning out of the realm of politics and into purely tech...
So you thought little services like Google Voice might come without a price to pay, eh? Not so fast. A patent application published today gives one idea how the company can find new ways to deliver advertising. A hint: they've got your number and they're not afraid to use it to deliver audio ads when you least expect them.
Many managers tune out at technical details, but this is one time that they shouldn't, particularly if they work at companies that distribute and update software. Google's Chrome team announced a new compression algorithm (via Slashdot.org) that it expects to keep updates small. To consider the importance, think of the last time you had to download a Windows or Mac OS update. Not fun. Apparently Google has found a new way to shrink what actually has to be sent -- in at least one case by a factor of ten to one.
For all the talk about having the right product at the right time, retailers have never attained the holy grail of using location-based ads to market to people's mobile devices -- thank goodness. The main drawbacks to sending marketing messages to possible customers as they walk past a store are ...
When the economy tanks, the first thing you hear is "Cash is king." An old business phrase, to be sure, but one that has decided impact in any industry, including high tech. It doesn't matter what your revenues are if you don't have enough money to pay the bills or even to capitalize on business opportunities. And according to a new study from The Hackett Group, a strategic business consultancy, and the National Association of Corporate Treasurers, only about one Global 1000 company in five can forecast cash flows two to three months out within five percent accuracy.
At the Wilco concert two nights ago, I couldn't help noticing that almost everyone in the audience was busy snapping pictures with their cell phones and quickly uploading them to Facebook. I couldn't help noticing this because most of us were standing on the infield of Keystone Park, where the minor...
There's a report from comScore that Microsoft remains third in search a month after the launch of its new service, Bing, and the onset of a $100 million advertising campaign. But there's another interesting view from Compete, another web metrics company. Not only has Microsoft had a huge uptick in clickthrough on search ads, but apparently, in the U.S. at least, Yahoo leads the traditional search triumverate in paid clickthrough, with Google in second place.
There's a mad scramble among Microsoft, Google, Research in Motion, Nokia, and even Verizon, to climb back into a race that Apple has all but already won. The only surprising aspect in the news out of Apple yesterday that it has sold more than 1.5 billion mobile applications for its iPhone is tha...
Sometimes you come across a story that reads like someone's bizarre dream. But Microsoft opening retail stores? The result of a bad case of Apple envy (which still remains king of retail store operations) is going to come back to hound the company for a long time. This is so dumb in so many ways at so many levels that it becomes difficult to stop laughing long enough to list them:
Intel's announcement of second quarter earnings -- including a 12 percent rise in sequential quarterly revenue and 5.5 percent increase in margin -- made a lot of people happy. But from an industry view, I think the picture may be far more mixed and suggests that Intel will have quite a task getting off its dependency on the PC market.
My colleague David Weir at BNET Media recently disagreed strongly with an idea presented by brothers David Marburger, a media lawyer with Baker Hostetler, and Daniel Marburger, a professor of economics at Arkansas State University. The concept is to change copyright law to allow again the use of common law -- the basis for tort suits, as one example -- in certain areas of the news business. Specifically, they point to certain types of aggregators as businesses that drain part of the economic viability of news creation and distribution, because they can gain full financial benefit of the results without undertaking any of the costs to create the content. I spoke with David Marburger (who gave his permission to make this paper available to BNET readers) about the concept.
The intensely personal argument being fought in comments to my post on Microsoft's document format is the same one at the root of every major philosophical argument underlying revolution: it's the fight between radicals who want to wipe the slate clean and start over (Robespierre, the Bolsheviks) an...
Motorola is heavily courting developers who make applications for Google's Android operating system so that it can present new customers with a tantalizing array of applications when it launches its next family of smartphones. This is literally do or die for the company, and Elizabeth Woyke at Forbe...
Initial demand for Microsoft's new Windows 7 operating system is higher than expected, but that good news is tempered by the fact that the unexpected traffic jolt brought down the company's e-commerce servers. Bad timing, as Microsoft has just announced availability of its Azure infrastructure in th...
