Archive

Last year's online shopping season surpassed $29 billion in sales, up a full 20 percent from the previous holiday. More consumers did their shopping online than any holiday season before, due to the convenience and increasing popularity of the Internet as a way to get too many things done in too lit...

Cyber Monday, once considered the No. 1 shopping day for e-commerce and retail Web sites, has become the official kickoff to the holiday season and a key marketing event for the online community. As with any economic marker, it is vulnerable to credit crunches and significant financial tide changes....

All companies have similar problems, with one of the biggest being the ongoing challenge of growing their revenues. In today's declining economy, companies are seeking new ideas, new solutions, and proven advice to fight off competition and stay above water. The most successful organizations are not...

Sometimes you walk away from a user group meeting concluding that the company didn't introduce much that was really new. You might get the usual product announcements or the dot-version releases and you may take a course that makes you a little smarter about the fine points of some esoteric feature...

Recovering from an identity theft case can be more than a burden on your time and pocketbook. It can also be emotionally draining. Victims frequently feel the same anger and vulnerability suffered by victims of violent crime. Yet diligently working through the steps recommended by identity theft pre...

Oracle introduced a new collaborative platform called "Beehive" at OpenWorld last week. To be sure, it was hardly the only announcement the enterprise software vendor made -- but it did serve as grist for many bloggers. Oracle is basically jumping on a bandwagon in the collaboration space, said Davi...

So it's happened. Someone's stolen your identity and now you've got a collection agency on your case, demanding payment for a car you didn't buy or a credit card you didn't take out. What to do? The first thing is not to panic, said Jay Foley, executive director of the Identity Theft Resource Center...

With so many companies tightening their budgets in the midst of the tough, uncertain economic climate, there's a tendency to look at social networking as the new, free panacea. I've seen a few financial services and insurance companies start social networking strategies, promising to be open and rea...

Imagine getting a $45 billion bill without knowing exactly how you ended up with such a big tab. That's exactly the situation facing Americans struck by identity fraud. In 2007, the misuse of lost and stolen identity information cost $45 billion, an average of $5,574 per incident, according to Javel...

When it comes to security software, who really knows what lurks in the minds of today's users? It appears that most people seem to choose their security products based on a lot of other factors beyond their ability to protect their computers from the malicious forces at work. Whatever the label on t...

As Wall Street unwound last week, RightNow CEO Greg Gianforte watched from a vantage point an ocean away. He was in London, making a stop on his self-assigned global tour to visit the company's top 50 users. Like many people, Gianforte is viewing the events with a combination of uncertainty and cau...

The other day I had a conversation with some nice people from the market research company Coleman Parkes Research. They wanted to tell me about a study they have recently concluded about social networking. I have to say it was pretty interesting stuff. I will leave it to you to search for them and t...

Oracle OpenWorld wasn't a day old before Twitter-like blog posts began peppering the Internet. Mike Gotta from the Burton Group posted notes encapsulating his essential gleanings from Charles Phillip's keynote. Paul Greenberg was equally terse in his posts, which numbered at least five by the middle...

Mobile application developers are a busy lot these days as organizations look to put the latest applications in the hands of mobile employees. However, as organizations' networks extend ever outward and "over the air," data and application security are primary concerns. Enterprise networks are a po...

As the advent of new customer-facing technologies such as social media platforms changes the way consumers gather information about a particular company's products or services, sales representatives are challenged to sell to a customer base that better understands the competitive landscape. As a res...