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"Claiming itself to be a next-generation publisher, WEbook has successfully roped in venture capitalists to invest in their business," Deepak Thakur, senior research analyst in ICT Practice at Frost & Sullivan, told the E-Commerce Times. If the dot-com burst and the more recent Wall Street fiasco have taught us anything, it is that investor confidence is not necessarily a harbinger of success. So if being flush in venture capital funding isn't the benchmark or the bookmark, what makes WEbook a startup to watch?...

Social media may be hailed as the savior of sagging sales these days, but few have figured out what social media are, much less how to wield them. Even fewer realize that games are the first, and arguably the most viable and sustainable, social medium in the mix. Unlike newcomers MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn and -- gasp -- even Twitter, the gaming communities are solid and stable, the camaraderie real and rooted deep, and the cash flow is, well, flowing.

In this age when an Internet eon is roughly the equivalent of a calendar year and any given company titan can flicker out of existence in a flash, few companies, especially those solely Internet-based, are seen as enduring and solid and fated for perpetuity. Among these rarities, the world's largest online auction company, eBay, certainly holds it own. Even so, eBay too can be gobbled up by the times (or, as novelist Stephen King would describe it, the Langoliers) if it stands still even for a minute.

In Internet time, it's been an eon since "smart appliances" were said to be stocked on the near horizon, but many sunsets later (eight years, actually), the futuristic devices are still, well, in the future. One would think the green movement, among other things, would have pushed this concept along ...

WiFi was supposed to effortlessly connect us to the world on the run ...

Despite the overwhelming success of e-commerce, there are still consumers out there too terrified to click their cart through a virtual checkout ...

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 transactional data. In the eyes of the likes of Harrah's and its competitors, knowing the sinner is far more profitable than simply making a record of his sins...

Despite repeated pleas of "Do you hear me now?" from customers the world over, few companies have done much more than turn a deaf ear. As a result, consumer frustration is at an all-time high while brand loyalty has hit an all-time low ...

E-books are still plugging along, not quite an afterthought in the publishing industry but not the hailed champion either. Like their newspaper cousins, book publishers are at a crossroads but completely stumped as to which way to turn, so they are largely sitting around just talking about it. At some level, they all know something digital this way comes and they are OK with that -- it's the silence of the cash registers they have a problem with...

The power of community is grossly underestimated in this country. Current collaborative trends on the Internet, from Web 2.0 to Wikipedia models, are seen as merely social or arguably informative in nature. That's a bit like saying the U.S. Constitution, another collaborative work, is a fetching flight of fancy thoroughly detached from real world application. Such a claim may be attempted, but it doesn't make a dent in the enduring truth of a multigenerational community commitment.

Despite some impressive showings in robotics lately, the accolades are slow to come from industry outsiders. We, the general public, watch Honda's Asimo slowly make its way down a few steps, for example, and unfairly compare it to the glib and golden C-3PO of science fiction, and thus blind ourselves to the miracle before us. ...

Part 1 of this two-part series explores the ways in which governments are attempting to use CRM technologies to improve services ...

The fact that we pay the taxes that support the costs of government ought to make us the customers of the government, right? That seems logical, but often taxpayers and constituents (or drivers, in the case of the DMV) are treated more like an annoyance than a valued customer ...

Call center reps get a bad rap. They're expected to be constantly nice in the face of increasingly not-nice customer interactions, field the blunt of management's never-ending drive for increased performance, and solve every problem that randomly hits their line. It's no wonder the industry faces a lightning-fast turnover rate ...

Despite the overwhelming success of e-commerce, there are still consumers out there too terrified to click their cart through a virtual checkout ...

A big bugaboo standing in the way of making m-commerce a bankable asset is about to be squashed ...

WiFi was supposed to effortlessly connect us to the world on the run ...

In the beginning, man adapted to the environment; shortly thereafter, the environment adapted to man. Al Gore's "inconvenient truth" is fast becoming an uncomfortable reality, and the race is on to find new ways to cope before nature hands us the ultimate eviction notice ...

For decades, sci-fi writers have painted a picture of utopia as a crystal-domed city appointed with shiny-steel accents, ultra-modern furniture and gadgets ranging from food replicators to floor-hugging maintenance drones. Tranquility and efficiency extend from work to sex, and the human aging process is "curable," as is every other form of disease...

Change may no longer be the only constant; danger is proving omnipresent and therefore a constant variable in enterprise IT planning ...