Technology Industry Archive

One of the lemming-like constants of business is that when times turn bad, many companies immediately figure that since they aren’t making much anyway, they’ll drop their prices. It sounds crazy when you state it so simply, but if you’ve been around for longer than a couple of business cycles, you’ve seen it. But experts in pricing strategy — a topic poorly...

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Apple wants to network you No, not your computer — you. One of its more recent patent applications (which means that it was filed upwards of 18 months ago) is titled Personal area network systems and devices and methods for use thereof, which apparently means using RF modules to keep devices in constant connection with each other and with larger devices that could provide additional...

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The fourth quarter for e-commerce will be very telling. Will online sales continue to grow even if the consumer is strapped? Or will e-commerce increasingly look like the rest of the retail sector? To wit: Amazon’s fourth quarter outlook, which had a range so large that you wonder why the company bothered to give guidance, indicates the company has no idea whether consumers will show up in...

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Amazon Web Services EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) service has dropped the beta tag, added a service level agreement and launched Windows and SQL betas and plans a management console. Add it up and it appears that Amazon is giving prospective enterprise customers most of the things they need to take the e-tailer-turned-cloud player seriously. Amazon CTO Werner Vogels details the interest in the...

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US looking to outsource for India– Life has a strong sense of irony, and we’re seeing it in full force as various U.S. states compete to get India’s Tata Consultancy Services to set up a campus in their location. This isn’t the first time an Indian company has put a facility in this country. For example, there was a funny situation where one company outsourced its call...

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Yahoo almost hits numbers, employees to hit street — Yahoo’sthird quarter earnings fell just below analyst expectations, but even if they hadn’t they would be nothing to write home about. Revenue was up one percent from the same time last year, otherwise known as the third consecutive quarter of falling revenue. Operating income of $70 million was a 53 percent drop from last...

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Google puts breaks on hiring — It’s not a hiring freeze, but when your headcount has been growing at 15 percent per quarter like at Google, any throttling back is obvious. Rather than one to two thousand extra bodies a quarter, the company is down to quarterly growth of about 500. In the third quarter of this year, Google added about 2.6 percent, hitting 20,123 employees. Those who...

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In the ongoing arm-wrestling match between Washington politicians and Silicon Valley techies, chalk one up for Washington. A New York Times story about the fate of the Google-Yahoo ad deal takes note of Google’s continued schooling in the ways of Washington. There have been earlier warnings that Google’s California spirit alone wasn’t going to charm the folks on Capitol Hill. Things are...

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Almost a month has passed since technology demand fell off dramatically; the stock markets tanked and worry about the credit crisis moved from Wall Street to Main Street to your company. Despite this perfect storm it’s hard to generalize the enterprise technology economy. Simply put, it’s not all gloom and doom. And technology executives seem calm–in IT there’s no panic. But there is a...

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A Wired.com reporter’s question was apparently the straw that broke the Twitter camel’s back the other day. Hearing what has become the inevitable question — When is the company going to make money and how? — Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures, generally level-headed, based on what I’ve seen from his blogging, snapped, “It’s like the stupidest question in the...

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