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Verizon Wireless has agreed to a $21 million payout to settle lawsuits alleging that the wireless carrier's early termination fees were too high and unfair to consumers. While Verizon has not admitted any wrongdoing in the case, the multi-million dollar settlement covers not only a California-based ...

Earlier this year, a careless employee at an investment firm learned a painful lesson: Sharing files through peer-to-peer Web sites like LimeWire can easily expose internal data in a corporate network. In this case, the employee worked for Washington-based Wagner Resource Group, which counts several...

Ease of use and software simplicity have been mainstay messages in CRM for many years. I have watched as this messaging has alternated with financial benefits for a long time, and I am not sure if it's random alternation or if there might be economic undertones, but it seems like we're trading theme...

Merrill Lynch has predicted that the cloud computing market could reach $160 billion by 2011. By any measure, in any industry, that's a huge number -- it's astronomical for one that can only be described as "nascent." To be sure, the potential for cloud computing is immense. Still, Merrill Lynch may...

Even in a recession -- if in fact we've crossed that line -- there is still significant economic activity. For example, according to the most recent data I can find, the U.S. economy generated about $13.13 trillion in activity in 2006. That's also known as the "GDP" or gross domestic product. Absent...

A frustrated Best Buy customer has filed a $54 million lawsuit against the electronics retailer in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia. Her complaint? Best Buy lost the laptop she had brought in for repair; the tech staff was evasive about its whereabouts; and the store refused to compens...

The two largest electronic prescription networks have decided to merge. By joining together their two platforms, RxHub and SureScripts maintain that both doctors and patients will benefit. Having one integrated system gives doctors more information about patients' health insurance plans as well as r...

Lyris has upgraded its flagship product and rolled out a new application for the marketing and advertising industry. The enhancements to Lyris HQ pave the way for a steady addition of collaboration and social networking tools this year. Lyris HQ for Agencies, meanwhile, will provide an inroad into a...

You're the manager of a Hilton Garden Inn, and it's the height of family vacation season. The lobby is abuzz with kids toting skateboards and moms pushing strollers; your front desk agents are overloaded with check-ins. In the middle of all this, a harried business traveler calls to the front desk f...

Over the past year, the business intelligence landscape has transformed drastically. Formerly, this market was comprised of a vast collection of solution providers, but it has evolved to just four major players -- IBM, SAP, Oracle and Microsoft. These BI titans have expanded through acquisition, sna...

Google and Microsoft have teamed with Intuit, WebMD and a consortium of more than 100 healthcare providers, insurers and consumer and privacy groups to develop a framework of practices governing online personal health record services. Under the leadership of the Markle Foundation, the Connecting for...

On-demand business-to-business marketing vendor Genius.com has developed a new collaborative e-mail marketing module that focuses on lead qualification and prioritization. MarketingGenius brings together the sales and marketing departments. To a certain extent, it adds a service element, as the pros...

Contact center managers for years have been using tried-and-true efficiency-oriented key performance indicators to measure contact center success, such as average call handling time and cost-per-call. Aberdeen completed a benchmark survey in May that examines the trend of Fortune 100 Best-in-Class c...

Casinos have been on a roll when it comes to customer relationships. The house has learned it always wins when it places its bets on the fact that humans are creatures of habit. Unlike other industries, however, the gambling lot does not leave the odds to a stack of faceless data mirroring only tran...

LucidEra, a provider of on-demand analytics for sales professionals and managers, is bringing marketing into its fold with the addition of LucidEra Lead Insight. This is an analytics application with more than 65 prebuilt metrics focused on marketing performance -- specifically, how effective the ma...