Clint Boulton

Many folks are speculating about what merger and acquisition activity will be like in 2009. Corporate buyers are holding the key cards, according to new research from The 451 Group, which polled 75 respondents from public and private concerns.Corporate development executives said they plan to leverage the sagging economy in buyout negotiations in 2009, snapping […]

Is Google‘s hunger for more Internet users biting it in the behind? That’s the question lurking in my mind today as I mull Microsoft’s win of Verizon and Dell as new distributors for Live Search, deals Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced at the Consumer Electronics Show yesterday, Jan. 7. That comes almost two months after […]

The rumors proved true, as Verizon Wireless picked Microsoft over Google and Yahoo to provide Web search and mobile display advertising services to customers on its devices for the next five years.The deal, announced at the Consumer Electronics Show and rumored to be worth $500 million, begins in the first half of this year. It […]

We’ve become so comfortable with and accustomed to (some might say unnerved by) Google’s many search algorithm tweaks these days that it has become customary to keep our eyes peeled for the next big thing. For some search watchers, that would be semantic search, which uses XML and RDF data from semantic networks to disambiguate […]

Google today, Jan. 7, tweaked its servers to make its Google Maps for Mobile application more intuitive by removing ambiguity around local business searches. Google Maps for Mobile, which determines users’ current location to help them get driving, walking and transit directions, Street Views, and phone numbers and addresses for businesses, now makes it easier […]

While companies struggle with keeping costs down during the recession, programmers tired of being bound by social networks and other walled destination sites will have their heads down building tools to make our Web browsing experience more intuitive and efficient.Welcome to the contextual Web, a world in which technologies sit in, bolt on or plug […]

Salesforce.com’s reliable reputation as a software-as-a-service provider was tested Jan. 6 after thousands of business users were left without access to their enterprise applications for roughly 38 minutes, according to numerous reports on Twitter.Salesforce.com, which hosts CRM and other enterprise applications over the Internet for thousands of companies, said on its Trust.salesforce.com community site that […]

Let us now welcome Apple to the cloud computing arms race, according to the numerous reports out of the Steve Jobs-less Macworld, where company officials unveiled a hosted version of iWork.com that includes the Keynote presentation, Pages word processing and Numbers spreadsheet applications hosted on the Internet, aka the cloud. But rather than positioning this […]

Long relegated as a parlor trick for small businesses, hosted or SAAS (software as a service) e-mail systems from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo Zimbra, Cisco PostPath and others have become more viable in the low-end of large enterprises.SAAS or cloud-based e-mail systems are cost effective for companies or divisions up to 15,000 users, determined Forrester Research […]

Apple continues to answer the question of whether its iPhone is enterprise-ready. At Macworld on Jan. 6, Apple and Cisco Systems said they have enabled the Cisco WebEx Meeting Center collaboration application to run on Apple’s iPhone 3G smart phone and the iPod Touch.Available for free in Apple’s App Store, the new Cisco WebEx iPhone […]

IBM’s Lotus Notes 8.5 enterprise e-mail application is now available for Apple computers running the Mac OS X Leopard operating system, months after rolling out to Windows and Linux users.Key to Lotus Notes 8.5 for Macs is an integrated user interface that lets users access and manage e-mail, team rooms, instant messaging, to-do lists, calendar, […]

Evidence of more universal search tools from Google continue to be found in the wild, triggered by certain search queries. Searches for “book of revelation,” “Thomas Jefferson” and “Albert Einstein” produce timeline views on Google, showing up as bar graphs that let you narrow down the years for your search. Users can see a historical […]