John Taschek

I knew Comdex had changed forever when my cell phone worked and, surprisingly, never stopped working—I received calls and called others without fail. My success rate at previous Comdex shows was 1 in 5 calls at best. But the lack of crowds left hotels with vacancies, restaurants open, taxi companies with a huge loss of […]

Whatever happened to data mining? Three years ago, it was the hottest thing since VisiCalc. IBM posted TV ads showing how companies could target their customers with pinpoint accuracy by knowing what type of fruit they ate. Statistics companies rebranded themselves as data mining companies, and new ones sprang forth, all claiming to be the […]

As biometric security goes, fingerprint recognition systems may be less expensive, but the eyes have it. The iris is the most unique identifier on the human body, but it has been the focus of few biometric efforts. The reason: Iris scanning systems have been expensive, slow and often cant work easily in networked environments. The […]

Contrary to popular opinion, IT is not in a meltdown. There are fewer companies out there to do IT buying and all of our egos may have been fractured, but were still doing all right—or we will be fairly soon. Thats the news from Techtel (www.techtel.com), a company that for 17 years has surveyed what […]

Sun quietly rolled out Sun One a couple of weeks ago. The Sun Open Net Environment comprises Suns software products, professional services, education practice and at least some marketing. In concept, its similar to Microsofts .Net. There was little fanfare, though, perhaps because the official launch of Sun ONE occurred after a series of unofficial […]

With the Sun ONE Starter Kit, Sun has officially kicked off the companys answer to Web services development, the Microsoft Developer Network and Microsofts .Net. Included in the kit are full-fledged versions of heavy-duty software, including Forte for Java Enterprise Edition (which costs some $2,000 for the licensed version) and all the iPlanet products, such […]

The web services “war” has largely been a series of battles between Microsoft and Sun. The Sun ONE initiative attempts to indoctrinate all Java programmers into the Web services model. Meanwhile, Microsoft is attempting to preach openness with .Net and, if nothing else, is doing a good job giving a multitude of programming languages new […]

Evergreen Technologies spectra and performa processor upgrades add new life to old PCs without a lot of pain—either installationwise or out of pocket. Evergreen has been doing this for years, but now that Windows XP is out and cost cutting abounds, the Evergreen chips look pretty good. The Performa line replaces Slot 1 processors, and […]

Does a sour economy lead vendors to lower costs? In the enterprise space, theres a good chance it does, although theres little proof until its time to sign a contract. Take CRM, for instance. Every CRM vendor is hurting badly. Back in April, Tom Siebel called the economic situation a complete “global economic recession,” and […]

Siebel, the uncontested but lately battered leader of the CRM market, finally entered the 21st century. It did so with the launch of Siebel 7, a revamping of the application suite that helped Siebel earn nearly $1 billion a year. The release signifies the end of one trend and the beginning of another. The ending […]

Theres never been a worse time to implement CRM packages. Theres also never been a better time. Customer relationship management has been hit by a double whammy: Bad economic times have forced companies into a major spending retrenchment, compelling them to put projects that dont have an immediate and obvious return on investment on the […]

With all the hype over wireless and the 802.11b WiFi standard, one might think weve evolved beyond the numerous implementation problems with the first rounds of the products. Alas, theres still work to be done. Take Dlinks DP-313 wireless print server (more on why theres a need for such a device later). Dlinks products are […]