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Radio frequency identification (RFID) tags have been around since World War II, when the British Royal Air Force affixed tags to planes as a way to distinguish friend from foe, but it wasn't until 2003, when giant discount retailer Wal-Mart announced that it would require the tags on all shipments f...

Despite 2004 marketing budgets estimated at US$9.45 billion by the American Bankers Association, 93 percent of banks do not treat inbound consumer inquiries as sales opportunities. They spend money on marketing, but for what? Marketing's purpose is to sell more, to more people, more often, at highe...

Oracle announced a compromise today on its licensing fee structure for dual-core Intel or AMD processors, which moves it closer in line with other software vendors. The database vendor had originally said it would continue to calculate licensing fees for its database and middleware products based on...

The big four processor vendors -- AMD, IBM, Intel and Sun Microsystems -- rely heavily on continual innovation and speed increases to fuel their businesses. At the heart of their strategies is Moore's Law. Simply stated, Moore's Law says that transistor density on integrated circuits roughly doubl...

Last week, Germany's upper house of Parliament, The Bundesrat, approved a bill to deploy passports containing biometric data, and the government is planning to issue the new passports this fall, clearing the way for German citizens to continue to come to the U.S. without a visa. A resolution passed ...

I was on vacation when the news came out and for the life of me I could not understand why Microsoft decided to announce version 3.0 of its CRM product a few days before July 4th -- the biggest public holiday of the year -- when practically no one was looking. They weren't alone. Siebel also made a...

Loyalty schemes had been around for years before their sponsors paired them with purchase power on credit or debit cards. For any best customer program, the business running it measures its effectiveness on two levels -- the top line and the bottom line. On both levels, co-branded and proprietary c...

Service has been restored on a damaged telecommunications cable that links India and Pakistan to the West, but not before the international service outage caused widespread financial damage, most especially to the cell center industry. Service on the cable was restored on Friday. The cable was damag...

Information technology experts warn that lingering security issues are making Radio Frequency Identification, or RFID, another uncontrolled tool for identity theft. RFID is an old inventory control technology that is quietly being deployed throughout business and industry to track everything from pe...

About this time of the year, many manufacturers start believing their markets are saturated. Sales cycles are too quiet in July and August, and everyone from the CFO to the custodial staff get nervous. Too often manufacturers mistake a larger-than-normal dip in a sales cycle for market saturation....

The federal government's IT force is aging, and this year will see half of those employees retire, reports say. Additionally, the public sector has retained many of its legacy systems at the same time as private-sector industries have walked through fire and burned through considerable funds to upgr...

Microsoft is taking a bottom-up approach to customer relationship management with the second release of its CRM software, but one analyst said the software giant won't stay in the small market forever. "It makes sense to come from the bottom," Joe Wilcox, senior analyst, Jupiter Research, told CRM B...

Should radio frequency identification tags be used on identification cards? Will RFID on ID cards prevent or promote identity theft? While some are praising the technology as a great way to protect people, others deride it as a security nightmare. Jeff Schmidt, an independent security consultant ba...

Even when companies outsource some functions, they often keep control over far more than their core competencies. Unless outsourcing will deliver a cost savings with equal or better service quality, they keep it in-house. "They say, 'We want a service level, a service assurance at a price, and if yo...

Watching an otherwise relaxed executive from a CRM vendor nearly jump out of his chair this week over lunch when his BlackBerry went off instantly reminded me of one of my neighbor's boys bouncing with excitement after unwrapping a Sony Personal PlayStation (PSP) for his birthday. Then it dawned on...