Technology Industry Archive

For all the talk about having the right product at the right time, retailers have never attained the holy grail of using location-based ads to market to people’s mobile devices — thank goodness. The main drawbacks to sending marketing messages to possible customers as they walk past a store are speed and intrusiveness. Given that missed calls are part of the mobile experience, how...

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When the economy tanks, the first thing you hear is “Cash is king.” An old business phrase, to be sure, but one that has decided impact in any industry, including high tech. It doesn’t matter what your revenues are if you don’t have enough money to pay the bills or even to capitalize on business opportunities. And according to a new study from The Hackett Group, a...

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At the Wilco concert two nights ago, I couldn’t help noticing that almost everyone in the audience was busy snapping pictures with their cell phones and quickly uploading them to Facebook. I couldn’t help noticing this because most of us were standing on the infield of Keystone Park, where the minor league Brooklyn Cyclones play their games, and my view of the band was blocked by...

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There’s a report from comScore that Microsoft remains third in search a month after the launch of its new service, Bing, and the onset of a $100 million advertising campaign. But there’s another interesting view from Compete, another web metrics company. Not only has Microsoft had a huge uptick in clickthrough on search ads, but apparently, in the U.S. at least, Yahoo leads the...

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There’s a mad scramble among Microsoft, Google, Research in Motion, Nokia, and even Verizon, to climb back into a race that Apple has all but already won. The only surprising aspect in the news out of Apple yesterday that it has sold more than 1.5 billion mobile applications for its iPhone is that it hasn’t sold even more. Apple can sell apps better than anyone because it makes it...

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Sometimes you come across a story that reads like someone’s bizarre dream. But Microsoft opening retail stores? The result of a bad case of Apple envy (which still remains king of retail store operations) is going to come back to hound the company for a long time. This is so dumb in so many ways at so many levels that it becomes difficult to stop laughing long enough to list them: ...

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Intel’s announcement of second quarter earnings — including a 12 percent rise in sequential quarterly revenue and 5.5 percent increase in margin — made a lot of people happy. But from an industry view, I think the picture may be far more mixed and suggests that Intel will have quite a task getting off its dependency on the PC market. Barron’s Tech Trader Daily lists...

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My colleague David Weir at BNET Media recently disagreed strongly with an idea presented by brothers David Marburger, a media lawyer with Baker Hostetler, and Daniel Marburger, a professor of economics at Arkansas State University. The concept is to change copyright law to allow again the use of common law — the basis for tort suits, as one example — in certain areas of the news...

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The intensely personal argument being fought in comments to my post on Microsoft’s document format is the same one at the root of every major philosophical argument underlying revolution: it’s the fight between radicals who want to wipe the slate clean and start over (Robespierre, the Bolsheviks) and pragmatists who favor reform and compromise (Danton, the Mensheviks). The radicals...

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Motorola is heavily courting developers who make applications for Google’s Android operating system so that it can present new customers with a tantalizing array of applications when it launches its next family of smartphones. This is literally do or die for the company, and Elizabeth Woyke at Forbes reports Staffers at its MOTODEV developer network have spent the past several weeks...

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