David Needle

HALF MOON BAY, Calif. — Bill Morrison had the best of intentions. The chief Internet analyst for ThinkPanmure was set to introduce Web legend Marc Andreessen before a group of tech savvy venture capitalists at the ThinkTomorrow –Today Summit this week at the posh Ritz Carlton here. Morrisson said he was struggling to come up […]

Source: Smalltown SAN MATEO, Calif. — You might think “everyone” is on the Web, but when it comes to small businesses that’s often not the case. Much as they might appreciate the benefits of having an online presence to reach more customers, the truly small mom-and-pop operations often don’t have the time, resources or expertise […]

Marc Andreessen Source: ThinkPanmure HALF MOON BAY, Calif. – Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen had some words of advice for Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO) and others who’d like to take on Google in search: Try something different. Speaking at ThinkPanmure’s ThinkTomorrow venture capital summit, Andreessen responded to a question about whether Google’s dominant position […]

Entering a market dominated by well-established, well-funded players can be a daunting task. But one startup thinks there are advantages to challenging the likes of WebEx, the popular collaboration and conferencing tool bought by Cisco last year for over $3 billion. “The more people know what’s out there, the better it is for us,” Bob […]

What’s it take to build a supercomputer these days? One way is to first buy a whole lot of Dell computers and set aside a day, that’s right, just a day, to set it all up. That’s what Purdue University did this week with 812 Dell PowerEdge 1950 dual quad-core computer nodes. More than 200 […]

The hotly competitive virtualization market has a new entrant, with ClearCube today spinning off its software business as a separate company, called VDIworks. Austin, Texas-based ClearCube, a player in centralized desktop solutions based around its PC blades, will continue its core offerings — although it now will be licensing VDIworks software, becoming its first OEM […]

Google’s Search Appliance offering for businesses may get a leg up in the enterprise thanks to the addition to a suite of add-ons that promise to greatly extend the scope of its searches. The Google Search Appliance (GSA) can search deeper into different types of enterprise content with the addition of new Consulting company Adhere […]

The new e-commerce site you launched looks great and you got great comments from beta testers. So why isn’t it getting the traffic you expected? One issue might be the site, or certain pages, are not as easily accessible to as many customers as you assumed. There are many Web site performance measurement tools, but […]

Is the iPhone ready to mix you up a healthy beverage? Hardly, but one developer plans to tap the device’s graphics and motion detector technology to let consumers do some virtual mixing. SiiTE Interactive, a New York-based creative marketing agency, said it’s developing a range of iPhone applications for clients and just for experimentation. One […]

SAN FRANCISCO — BlackBerry users may find their mobile searches go a bit easier now with an assist from, of all companies, Microsoft subsidiary TellMe. The voice-recognition feature is specifically focused on finding local services such as a restaurant, movie or other business listing as well as traffic and weather conditions and driving directions. “This […]

IBM beefed up its financial transactions portfolio with today’s announcement that it’s purchased privately-held InfoDyne. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Park Ridge, Illinois-based InfoDyne will now be part of IBM’s WebSphere division with its 14 employees, including founder and CEO Guy Tagliavia, reporting to Tom Rosamilia, general manager of WebSphere. InfoDyne provides high-speed […]

SAN FRANCISCO – What does zapping aliens have to do selling more phone services, computers or even books? Plenty, according to Lyle Fong, co-founder and CEO of Lithium Technologies. In a session at the Web 2.0 conference here, Fong described how hardcore customers share many of the same characteristics of hardcore gamers. Fong knows a […]