Deborah Gage

Rising from the pile of dead dot-coms is a set of new companies trying to fix things that are wrong with the Internet. To what extent they will create new problems remains to be seen, but it is interesting to watch them attack the same problems that their predecessors have attacked again and again—problems that […]

Sun Microsystems is recruiting iPlanet head Mark Tolliver to be its Web-services “czar,” as part of a plan to catch up with its rivals on the path to the future of computing. Tolliver, the president of iPlanet, a Sun-America Online joint venture, will oversee Suns efforts to deliver a Web-services platform that can compete with […]

Sun ONE bears a strong resemblance to SunConnect, a cross-platform framework that Sun developed in the late 1990s to evangelize Java and attack Microsoft in vertical markets such as financial services. Sun partners say Suns commitment to SunConnect was problematic, but Sun ONE has a champion in Anne Thomas Manes, a highly regarded Java analyst […]

Steve Pieczko got laid off in January. He was working for a security company that was acquired by Ameritech, and middle managers were the first to go. But did he sit around and brood? No. Figuring that there were many people in his position, he launched www.igotlaidoff.com, a site that matches the laid-off with recruiters […]

After months of politicking, the peer-to-peer working group is finally getting down to work, although living up to its name will not be easy. Attendance has plummeted since the groups first meeting in October, which attracted more than 300 people, and key companies—including IBM, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems—have so far refused to join. Intel formed […]

Kevin Wiggen and Barry Lind sat out the dot-com boom, but they sure look smart now. While colleagues and even competitors were raising hundreds of millions of dollars in venture money, Wiggen and Lind passed on the opportunity and bootstrapped their company, Xythos, on credit cards. “We wanted to build a software company, not a […]

Microsoft is stepping up its efforts to push its .Net strategy through ASPs and is starting to negotiate licensing deals that allow service providers to charge for software on a pay-as-you-go basis, as opposed to a monthly fee. That licensing scheme, which basically charges for software usage the way utilities currently charge for electricity and […]

John Mcintyre, chairman and CEO of Affinity Internet, considers trust to be the toughest stripe to earn in this industry. Earning that recognition from solutions providers, is a challenge he is set on meeting. Affinity Internet is a managed hosting service provider, a new breed of company within the data center and Web hosting arena […]

Manufacturing cars without knowing whether customers will want to buy them does not seem like a formula for business success. But that was the situation at American Honda in Torrance, Calif., and in the rest of the auto industry in the mid-1990s. Hondas plants produced “pretty much what they wanted,” says Honda VP Dan Bonawitz, […]

In my last column, I promised to tell you about Yuval Davidor, the scholar and computer scientist whose algorithms solve intractable problems. Davidors company, Schema, is helping wireless carriers maximize the use of their networks, but thats just its latest incarnation. Davidor founded Schema in 1994. Its focus on wireless—which began in 1998—is potentially lucrative, […]

Model N, the B2B software company led by industry veteran Zack Rinat, came out of stealth mode last week after a nine-month delay. Model Ns software allows companies to establish a private network with customers and partners so that business processes like order management and contract management can be automated. Competitors include Ariba, which acquired […]

Office workers in San Francisco have another reason to stay alert. Consumer groups are protesting against PG&E, Californias largest provider of electricity, and that has made other companies nervous. Consumers took a dim view of PG&Es recent bankruptcy filing, figuring the utility will use it as an excuse to raise rates. And Bechtel, which is […]