Michael Hickins

The White House has just issued a report, the National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza, that outlines steps businesses and local governments should take to prepare for the Avian Flu. But corporate America hasn’t been waiting for a presidential edict to get started. In preparation for the next time Mother Nature attacks, most companies have established […]

Reporter’s Notebook: China’s eleventh five-year plan puts a particular emphasis on technology, and folks are paying attention. When China President Hu Jintao visited Microsoft earlier this month, political and industry observers were quick to note that the Chinese president sat down to dinner with Microsoft CEO Bill Gates before meeting with U.S. President George W. […]

Salesforce.com may not have deep enough pockets to get into the venture capital business the way rival SAP did last week, but it has found a way to leverage venture capital indirectly on its behalf. The provider of on-demand customer relationship management (CRM) software today announced AppExchange OEM Edition, a way for independent software vendors […]

NEW YORK — Forget about the magic bullets of either taxonomies or user-generated tags. Information architects will have to roll up their sleeves if users are to ever believe they can search corporate intranets with any sense of confidence, said two keynote speakers at the Enterprise Search Forum here today. Peter Morville, an information architect […]

Call it enlightened self interest. Microsoft has unveiled a pay-as-you-go model of personal computer ownership, spearheading a drive to narrow the digital divide between industrialized and developing nations. The initiative allows consumers to purchase full-featured PCs by paying only a third of the cost up-front. They can then pay off the remainder by purchasing pre-paid […]

IBM today introduced Dynamic Inventory Optimization Solution, a tool that promises to help retailers reduce inventory levels by 30 percent while maintaining or improving out-of-stock levels. The tool was designed to help retailers walk the tightrope between having enough items on their shelves when customers want to buy them, and carrying too much inventory. The […]

UPDATED: SAP wants more independent software vendors (ISVs) to build applications on NetWeaver. The $125 million venture fund it announced should help lure them in. The company already has 1,000 ISVs building applications on its proprietary NetWeaver platform, with more than 1,500 such apps already on the market. But SAP is hoping the venture fund […]

NEW YORK — Want to get your developers on the stick about service oriented architecture ? Money might help. At least one bank is, well, banking on bonuses as one way to get developers on the SOA express train. At the SOA Executive Forum here, Tony Bishop, svp for Wachovia’s corporate investment banking technology group, […]

NEW YORK –- MTV’s got an urge to upend the music industry’s business model. And why not take Apple’s iTunes Music Store along for the ride? Launched today, Urge is a digital music store that competes with Apple’s iTunes Music Store. It will sell individual songs for $0.99. But unlike iTunes, Urge will also offer […]

SAP threw another blow at the body of rival software vendor Oracle, announcing that is offering technical support and a conversion roadmap for customers running Siebel software. On the eve of its Sapphire user conference beginning tomorrow in Orlando, Fla., SAP said that it was offering succor to Oracle customers confused and uncertain about the […]

A surprisingly high percentage of sponsored links returned by major search engines raised red flags in a new study published today by McAfee SiteAdvisor. The study, which tested results of popular keyword searches on Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL and Ask.com, showed that on average, 8.5 percent of sponsored links led users to “risky” sites. By […]

Microsoft today gave developers attending its Mobile & Embedded DevCon conference in Las Vegas a sneak peek at the beta version of Windows CE 6.0. The tools provided in the latest mobile platform are intended to help developers bring more highly differentiated products to market faster and at a lower cost than before. It will […]