David Needle

If social networks are a numbers game, count MySpace and Facebook as among the big winners. These upstarts have attracted millions of users to their online communities. But the bigger, come-one-come-all approach these sites employ isn’t the solution every would-be online group wants. At least that’s the thinking of Affinity Circles, a Mountain View, Calif.-based […]

Sony announced it’s going to give its PlayStation 3 (PS3) users the ability to help medical research. In cooperation with Stanford University’s Folding@Home program, the entertainment giant said it will participate in a distributed computing system that already borrows compute cycles from PCs and other computer architectures. The aim is to help support Folding@Home, a […]

Microsoft has scored a big customer for its Windows Live online service. Lenovo announced today that it plans to make the Live.com portal the default home page and include the Windows Live Toolbar on all its computers worldwide. Peter Gaucher, executive director for strategic alliances at Lenovo, said the company considered alternatives, but ultimately decided […]

Sun announced a fine tuning of its grid strategy today, with an emphasis on ready-to-use applications. Network.com, Sun’s online compute utility, will house a catalog of software from Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and open source development communities. The idea is to provide high performance computing applications online and deliver them as services to users. One […]

Microsoft showed off its plans to increase the reach of its Dynamics product portfolio with the introduction of several new products today at its annual Convergence 2007 conference in San Diego. The announcements included the release of Microsoft Dynamics Sure Step, a new tool set for implementation, migration and upgrades and Microsoft Dynamics Client for […]

AMD charged that Intel CEO Paul Otellini and other top execs did not proactively retain e-mail records as part of a compliance agreement in AMD’s antitrust lawsuit against the chip giant. However it’s not clear whether any of the missing documents are irretrievably lost. While Intel  had already admitted earlier this month to numerous glitches […]

I’m pretty sure this column is too late. I’m swimming against the tide, spittin’ into the wind, fighting that proverbial uphill battle. But I want to get on the record with this. Technology-enabled distraction is fast-becoming a dangerous dark side to the benefits of faster communication and computing. From the multi-billion dollar ring tone industry, […]

Press 1 to continue reading this article. Press 2 to make another selection … The above instructions aren’t real, but may be familiar to anyone who’s experienced the voice menu hell of trying to navigate automated phone systems. The VoiceObjects alternative is a more personalized customer-service experience that the company says currently serves some 500 […]

Ready to click “Accept” on the shopping cart, customer X leaves the site altogether instead. What happened? Tealeaf said it can help figure out the answer to this and other questions related to customer’s Web site experiences. San Francisco-based Tealeaf said this week’s release of a new product, Tealeaf cxView, builds on its family of […]

The AMD-Intel antitrust case exploded in controversy this week when Intel  admitted it is missing an unknown number of e-mails and documents that AMD requested. Despite what Intel said was a massive effort to comply with AMD’s requests for documents, including tape back ups of over a 1,000 of its employees’ correspondence, the chip giant […]

Apple released version 7.1.5 Update to its QuickTime media player software to address security vulnerabilities. The release can be downloaded at Apple’s Web site. QuickTime is part of Apple’s popular iTunes software. As reported by the U.S. Computer Readiness Team (CERT), the QuickTime 7.1.5 release resolves a number of vulnerabilities in the way different types […]

If YouTube and reality television haven’t already given most folks the 15 minutes of fame predicted by Andy Warhol, perhaps izimi will do the trick. The startup is launching what it calls a free “Peer-to-Web” service today that let’s any user self-publish “any” file: music, text, photos, video, blog pages, etc. The Web site doesn’t […]