Technology Industry Archive

You’d think that the first rule of business would be to understand what your customers want so you can make them and your accountants happy. But looking at the data from a recent Accenture study, you quickly come to the conclusion that in some basic ways, telecom carriers are largely out of touch with the interests of their large enterprise customers when it comes to something as basic as...

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Canadian mobile device manufacturer Psion Teklogix has been making a bit of a splash, having their lawyers send letters to makers of netbooks, warning them that the company had a trademark on the term. Now Dell has filed a petition with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office asking that the trademark be cancelled. And if Dell’s charge is accurate, that may happen a whole lot faster than you...

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Facebook’s recent collision with user sentiments over changing its terms of service (TOS) only got as much press as it did because it was so public. But there are lessons to be learned by any tech company that potentially might welcome online interaction with customers – which, these days, seems like virtually all of them. Unfortunately, Facebook wouldn’t make anyone available for an...

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Perot Systems, a technology systems integrator, says provisions of the new stimulus package are creating an unusual paradox for its health care-provider customers. While the bill promises hospitals roughly $11 million apiece, exactly how to qualify for the money remains a bit unclear. And taking time to sort that out could cost providers some of that bounty. The new federal program is designed...

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Broadband, healthcare and energy are the obvious winners on the Obama stimulus sweepstakes, but there’s another sector of the IT industry that may be primed to benefit as well: Makers of project-management software. According to Forrester Research analyst Ray Wang, vendors like Deltek, Lawson and Primavera (acquired by Oracle in October 2008), are well-positioned to swoop in on the myriad...

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IBM is moving to assert itself as the dominant player in cloud computing, and is articulating a strategy that is starting to make tangible what has previously been little more than a ubiquitous catchphrase. The company aims to use its array of distributed data centers, deep software expertise and humongous services organization to turn cloud computing into an a-la-carte outsourcing of...

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Did Google blink first? Will Palm? — A report claims that Google omitted multi-touch features from the Android interface at Apple’s request. In the meantime, Palm says it is more focused on finishing the Pre than a potential patent fight. [Source: AppleInsider on Google, and Palm] Microsoft has antitrust defender — A U.S. antitrust expert calls the new EU investigation into...

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I’m on a private patent email list run by Foley & Lardner partner and George Washington University Law School Professor Harold Wegner. He was recently digging through patent application statistics from various countries and found that China has pulled far ahead of the rest of the world in patent applications filed. According to his annualized estimate based on China Patent &...

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In 1998, patent attorney Cheryl Milone had an idea: create a business that would make money by debunking patents using the wisdom of crowds. Unfortunately for her, Jeff Bezos and Tim O’Reilly got there first with BountyQuest. Milone went to work for that company for a year, though it eventually closed down. (Perhaps trying to invalidate Amazon’sone-click patent didn’t engender...

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SAP last week rolled the drums for its introduction of “Business Suite 7,” the first major upgrade of its flagship corporate-operations support software in almost three years. But the company has failed to come up with a convincing plan for surviving a determined push by more modern and flexible rivals that threaten to knock it into oblivion — much less an aggressive growth...

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