Spotlight Features

A while back, someone convinced businesses that if they outsourced work overseas, costs would fall off a cliff. The Wall Street lemmings jumped, believing they could fly, but instead plummeted to the depths of a global recession. Many of them are still falling, yet they continue to outsource their w...

Google and Yahoo used to compete mightily in the site search category, but now the two have turned their focus toward search advertising, which makes them more money. Dozens of smaller players have emerged to fill the void -- and to make money. Other site search solutions may have looked like diminu...

Nothing is as heart-wrenching to an e-tailer as watching a customer abandon a full cart just seconds before consummating the deal. To be so close yet so cashless is more than frustrating; it's harmful to an e-tailer's health. A virtual armory of tools are in use to woo, cajole, prompt and push consu...

It's been nearly a decade since the Internet bubble burst in 2001, and the intervening years have seen the rise of powerhouse companies such as Google, MySpace and Facebook, which have helped broaden the scope of what was once referred to as the "Information Superhighway." The Internet was once limi...

Job insecurity combined with financial fear-mongering has consumers slashing their budgets. Cell phone and premium TV services look like easy items to eliminate. Typically, however, those services tie users to contracts as well as three ugly words: early termination fees. Can customers break those c...

In Italy, Biesse Systems is a manufacturer of substantial size; its American subsidiary, though, is by any measure a small business, with under 200 employees. Still, Biesse America's communication needs rivaled that of a large enterprise. It needed to communicate with its parent in Italy regularly, ...

"With great power comes great responsibility" is an oft-quoted line from the first "Spider-Man" film. Without torturing the "web" metaphor beyond its breaking point, it also applies to your friendly neighborhood Internet service provider. A maze of legislation, regulations and business practices dat...

On paper, the affiliate market appears to be among the most lucrative marketing channels. At its core, it is a revenue-sharing model among a network of Web sites or partners that receive a cut of the sales of any products that they promote. In reality, though, using an affiliate network to drive sal...

Shrinking client pools, lack of access to credit and competition from offshore destinations are squeezing some business process outsourcing service providers in the United States. With declining revenues come cheaper valuations. This creates opportunities for other entrepreneurs seeking to expand th...

The year-long U.S. recession hasn't brought spending on advertising to a screeching halt, but it has forced a shift in the way advertisers engage their audiences. With marketing budgets shrinking by the day, advertisers are turning to the Internet as an alternative to more traditional media such as ...

Small businesses have been reluctant to spend precious resources on a marketing medium that traditionally has not delivered -- at least to them -- on its promise. That medium is search engine marketing. However, they will find it worthwhile to take another look at this particular tactic. A lot of lo...

For a long time, small businesses were reluctant to embrace the latest in search engine marketing and other online advertising tactics. The SEM industry was unable to deliver to this group of typically local-interest, cost-conscious companies what they wanted the most: a means to assess how their in...

IBM received nearly 4,200 patents in 2008 from the United States Patent & Trademark Office, making Big Blue the undisputed king of the intellectual property game for the 16th year running. A closer look at U.S. patent numbers collated by IFI Patent Intelligence reveals something else: More and m...

For anybody who is trying to spend a little less money, a visit to Freecycle may be just the ticket. The concept is a simple one: You sign up for a group based on your ZIP code. Then, if you have something, anything really, you don't want -- a desk, a flowerpot, a printer, even a used Halloween mask...

Lower total cost of ownership and little or no IT infrastructure to maintain are good starting arguments for moving to the cloud. While such concepts are easy to understand in the abstract, considering cloud computing on an industry-specific basis drives home some surprising limitations on this hot ...