eWEEK EDITORS

Imagine youre stuck with 1,200 legacy system experts, scattered all over the world. Granted, theyve been your enterprises backbone, developing legacy systems for finance, warehousing and purchasing, but, still, they dont exactly form a cutting-edge e-business work force. You cant fire them; that would be both ungrateful and politically suicidal. So what do you do? […]

With plenty of fanfare, big industry players introduced online marketplaces for everything from planes and automobiles to hotel rooms last year. But months later, many dont have much to show. Major air carriers American Airlines, Continental Airlines, Delta Air Lines, Northwest Airlines and United Airlines announced plans to launch T2, now known as Orbitz, a […]

As manager at a radio station, Ken Freedman gets plenty of feedback from listeners. Last year, he got a smattering of comments from people who were clearly sick of Internet hype. This one was typical: “I wish your DJs would shut up about the Internet already.” Freedman, station manager at WFMU in Jersey City, N.J., […]

The days of the free phone ride appear to be numbered. Companies have been dropping — or at least rethinking — the provision of free calls over the Internet from personal computers to standard telephones. The market conditions causing well-established Internet telephony companies such as Deltathree, Net2Phone and PhoneFree.com to re-evaluate their offerings also led […]

The new chief executive chosen to lead the body charged with managing the Internets domain name system walks into the job as somewhat of an unknown quantity, an attribute some say is needed. An apparent outsider to the politics surrounding the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, M. Stuart Lynn, 63, will formally succeed […]

Everybody loves mobility. Employees love the freedom of being unshackled from their desks. Employers love reducing travel-related disruption. Vendors and their partners love the expansion of new specialized markets. Crooks love the opportunity to get at your hardware. Even as companies begin to recognize the need to defend their networks, they often miss the new […]

Online music has an image problem that would give a marketing director headaches. If one were to watch MTV or leaf through any mainstream publication, an image would emerge of a goofball college student, probably male, probably white, probably downloading music using a big fat T1 (1.5-megabit-per-second) dormitory pipe between paused sessions of Tomb Raider. […]

A European Parliament Committee is expected to vote this week on key legislation outlining which protections copyrighted works produced in digital formats will enjoy under European law. The controversial measure has been moving through the European Unions legislative process for three years. The parliaments legal affairs committee will consider the measure Monday, and is expected […]

The music lovers dream of a digital “Celestial Jukebox” has turned into an entrepreneurs nightmare, and critics maintain major record companies are to blame. Using aggressive lawsuits, outrageous licensing demands and strong-arm tactics that range from refusals to share promotional materials to monopolistic threats, Internet music executives said the powerful recording industry has made it […]

Amid the tangled legal wranglings of MP3.com and Napster, the vision behind digital music has been forgotten. The best use of digital music isnt to listen to your favorite songs on your computer. Nor is it to trade your treasured albums with friends over the Internet. In fact, the best use of digital music doesnt […]

The world of digital music flowing over the Internet is a confusing jumble of technical standards, mathematical constructions, file formats with strange names and a good amount of legal wrangling. The good news is that while the legal storm continues, the technical aspects of online digital music are becoming easier to understand and utilize. All […]

To many, the fight between the record companies and the Napster-loving, music-swapping public looks like a battle to the death. While these two sides fight it out in court, another group of technologists is developing a compromise known as the digital watermark. If it works as planned, rights holders will be able to collect their […]