David F. Carr

See our slideshows on Solr and a related project, Hadoop. The open source Solr search engine is emerging as the standard for new and revamped websites launched by MTV Networks and is already powering the search on key properties such as TheDailyShow.com, ColbertNation.com, and SouthParkStudios.com. “We have about 15 sites on Solr and more coming […]

Fred Taylor Jr.’s job at Southwest Airlines is to head customer service problems off at the pass. Ideally, he presents customers with a range of solutions before they even know that they have an issue – for example, by calling them to let them know a flight has been delayed or cancelled before they’ve left […]

UPDATE: eBay plans to spin off Skype in an IPO. Skype has begun testing a connection to corporate Voice Over Internet Protocol systems, which is something that enterprises have been asking for years. Although Skype and corporate VOIP systems share the goal of avoiding phone company toll charges by routing voice and video calls over […]

The most important information technology initiative at automotive industry supplier Ogihara America Corporation is one the company couldn’t afford at all right now if not for the economic edge it gets from using open source software. Part of Japan’s Ogihara Corp. family of companies, manufacturers stamped body parts for U.S. carmakers. That’s a tough business […]

Our phones are getting smarter, helping us manage our e-mail and calendars, as well as enabling us to make and receive calls. The latest smart phones come with multiple gigabytes of memory and storage–most of which are probably underutilized for business purposes. For many busy executives, the BlackBerry is by far a more important communication […]

Craig Kaufman studied videoconferencing vendors for years without ever being tempted to buy one of their products for his own firm, Kaufman Bros., a research-based investment bank and brokerage that specializes in the communications, media and technology industries. CEO Kaufman, who holds undergraduate degrees in computer science and mathematics, in addition to an MBA, describes […]

For an overview of enterprise video, here are some descriptions from a Gartner report: Video streaming: Non-real-time streaming broadcasts have become one of the most common and cost-effective applications of enterprise video for training, demonstrations and executive announcements. Webcasting: Streaming of live events is less common within the enterprise, with market penetration at about 1 […]

CIOs at some companies have been responsible for supporting video broadcasts and conferences for years. But in the YouTube era, users and executives expect video to be far easier to create and more ubiquitous than ever before. Since specially equipped conference rooms can cater to a limited number of participants in a videoconference session, the […]

CRISIS AND OPPORTUNITY If the pitch for application networking or application delivery networking sounds familiar, that’s because you’ve heard it before: A few years ago, these technologies were marketed under the banners of load balancing, Web caching, proxy services, wide-area network (WAN) acceleration or quality of service (QOS) network traffic prioritization. Today, however, they are […]

Although much of the excitement about virtualization has focused on the cost-cutting it enables, the real value comes from business agility, according to participants at the Ziff Davis Enterprise 2007 Virtualization Summit. “When management says, ‘Can IT do this?’ you want the answer to be yes,” said Barb Goldworm, founder, president, and chief analyst of […]

Maybe I’m behind the times, but I still think of Yahoo as one of the Web’s great success stories. And, until recently, I also thought of it as setting the standard in Web site operations. When I was writing a cover story on MySpace and noticed the large number of errors I came across there, […]

Every year, thousands of information technologists gather in Orlando to hear Gartner Inc. analysts tell them that information technology should be aligned with business. Gartner always comes up with a new twist on the message, but the message never goes away. At the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo conference going on this week in Orlando, some 6,000 attendees […]