Erin Joyce

As the saying goes in the news business, check the source — especially if it wants to remain anonymous. Community-driven encyclopedia Wikipedia.com needs to do more than check anonymous editors at the site’s door. Although Wikipedia recently changed its policy to no longer allow anonymous contributions to the site, it has to make more changes […]

Just in time for the holiday shopping season, Skype has signed a deal with RadioShack to distribute phones and headsets that work with Skype’s Voice over IP service. The deal, announced today, is the Luxembourg-based firm’s first partnership with a U.S. consumer electronics chain — not that it has had any trouble signing up users […]

Medical imaging is one of the biggest growth areas for deploying both grid and on-demand technologies. Take the University of Pennsylvania’s National Digital Mammography Archive (NDMA). The project, which involves medical imaging company i3 and NDMA, launched three years ago with IBM at the same time Big Blue laid out its On Demand computing strategy. […]

UPDATED: Arena Solutions is bringing supply chain supplier directories into the realm of on-demand software. The Menlo Park, Calif.-based maker of product lifecycle management (PLM) software has launched what it calls the Solutions Supplier Marketplace. But don’t call Arena a B2B market maker. Michael Topolovac, CEO of Arena Solutions, said the directory is about helping […]

We interrupt our regularly scheduled obsession with Microsoft’s response to its Web services/Google challenge to talk about other search challengers moving into bigger spotlights. Microsoft and Google would be wise to interrupt their obsessions with each other and study these companies. We’re betting they already have. On the enterprise search front, France’s Exalead has just […]

The “last mile” problem is alive and well in more than the telecommunication and broadband industry. Public companies’ efforts to comply with the Sarbanes-Oxley data retention regulations are often bedeviled by the last mile of finance, said Eric Keller, CEO of finance control software provider Movaris. He would know. As a former CFO for technology […]

It’s back to a federal district court for Research In Motion after the U.S. Supreme Court denied an emergency appeal of a patent infringement ruling against the maker of the popular BlackBerry wireless e-mail devices. The high court’s ruling today denied RIM’s emergency motion to stay a federal district court ruling that forces RIM to […]

Jim Waldo, a distinguished engineer with Sun Microsystems who teaches computer science at Harvard University, is having a magic Jini moment. Waldo was the lead architect for Jini (pronounced Genie), the distributed programming software based on Java that rolled out in 1999 to great fanfare. As software that tries to simplify the connection and sharing […]

Ask executives at NIBCO, a manufacturer of plumbing devices, about what the tech term “on demand” means to them, and they will point to China. When Chinese manufacturers can produce the same flow-control valves and devices as the 101-year-old business — at half the cost — where does NIBCO build its profits? “We compete in […]

Is Google becoming the bully that whisperers say it is? The question has come up again since Microsoft announced a major reorganization into three main business divisions, largely in order to be more nimble about innovating and delivering software over the Internet. Naturally, a big part of Microsoft’s reaction is due to the growth of […]

NEW YORK — We’re not just the company that sues companies over Linux code. We also innovate. This is the latest message from SCO Group , which just unveiled Me Inc., a new edge-processing service that helps customers access and send data from enterprises to other smartphones with ease by making smartphones behave more like […]

Of all the buzz-worthy projects and developments in the Voice over IP sector right now, by far the biggest chat generator is eBay’s acquisition last week of VoIP company Skype. The $2.6 billion deal is by itself signaling a major shift upon us in communications technology, according to a leading light on VoIP technology. “Innovation […]