Edward Cone

Robert Scoble has earned a place in the history of corporate communications. Starting at Microsoft Corp. in 2003, he became the first high-profile blogger within a large business, ushering in a new era of interaction among companies, customers, critics and the general public. Using his blog, called Scobleizer, and now-familiar tools such as podcasts, RSS […]

Kids today. Sometimes they aren’t what they seem to be…. Take lonelygirl15, the YouTube phenomenon who captivated viewers with her ruminations on life as a smart teen, but turns out to have been an actress playing the part. So many possible lessons for marketers here…. On the one hand, faking it in a so-real medium […]

Hunting down phishers, pharmers and other online bad guys can be frustrating work for financial firms—so Commerce Bancorp Inc. decided to bring in some hired muscle. The $43 billion (assets) parent of Commerce Bank, based in Cherry Hill, N.J., is using services from RSA Security Inc. to target malefactors who attempt to fool banking customers […]

The thief walked into the jewelry store at Mohegan Sun and asked to see an item in a display case, then reached across the counter to snatch a chain while the clerk bent down to help him. He quickly disappeared into the crowd milling around the concourse area of the sprawling casino, made it to […]

Every afternoon as he leaves the executive offices at the sprawling Mohegan Sun Casino and Hotel complex in Uncasville, Conn., chief information officer Dan Garrow hands his briefcase over to a security guard for inspection. Nobody thinks twice about it—neither the uniformed hourly worker who diligently searches the case, nor the high-powered senior executive in […]

If the lawyer won’t go to the information, bring the information to the lawyer. Last year, Toronto law firm Goodman & Carr LLC created a Web portal that centralized and organized internal news, documents and proprietary information from sources like LexisNexis. But attorneys ended up spending far too much time combing the site for relevant […]

Healthy democracies require informed citizens, but getting people to focus on complex issues can be a tough sell. Now the French government is using a populist medium to lure people into the minutiae of financial policy: le videogame. Introduced in May by budget minister Jean-François Copé, an online game called Cyber-Budget allows users to manipulate […]

What’s the greenest big-company data center? It may be the Urbana, Md., facility opened by Fannie Mae in August 2005. The building was the first of its kind to earn certification for energy and environmental design from the U.S. Green Building Council. It is designed to consume 20 percent less energy than a comparable facility, […]

Where does doing good for its own sake end and doing good to do well begin? Businesses are supposed to make money, and many of the arguments in favor of Green IT are straightforward business propositions: Cut your power bills, avoid regulatory hassles, appeal to customers. Yet the underlying environmental issues remain important to people […]

Andrea Moffat interacts with lots of people in her job as director of corporate outreach for Ceres, a Boston-based network of investment funds and public-interest groups that promotes environmentally conscious policies in the business world. It might be the chief executive who discusses “green” issues with Moffat at one company, the head of investor relations […]

The major telecommunications companies spend billions of dollars each year on advertising, and millions more on political lobbying. So imagine their shock when a low-budget campaign led by a motley coalition of bloggers and techies helped throw into doubt their cherished plans for making more money on the Internet. That the coalition perpetrated its revolt […]

Learning to Live With SOX It seems like a straightforward enough question: is SOX working? Two years after the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (also called the Public Company Accounting Reform and Investor Protection Act of 2002) went into effect, there is a mounting supply of data on hand to throw at the query. But like so many […]