Edward Cone

Ready. Set. Go. You’ve got three months to build a decent-sized manufacturing and distribution company from scratch, complete with financial and IT departments, a call center, a customer relationship management and enterprise resource planning system, and a brand-new warehouse and the software to run it. What’s your first step? That was the problem facing Precious […]

Spam is the cockroach of the advertising world, adaptable to many environments. Weblogs are inexpensive to produce, and show up well on the big search engines. Thus the inevitable birth of the spam blog, a.k.a. splog, an automated Web site that mimics the appearance of a weblog in order to lure traffic. It’s a problem […]

It was a busy summer for proponents of national ID cards. Terrorism fears have propelled several controversial efforts in countries around the world, making ID cards a global security trend that is gaining momentum, even here in the United States. Plans for a national identity card got a boost in the U.K. and Australia after […]

The Los Angeles Police Department, under orders from a federal court, is rolling out a series of applications to automate the systems it uses to track its 13,000 officers and other personnel. The $35 million Teams II system (Training, Evaluation and Management) came about as the result of a Justice Department investigation into alleged abuse […]

Ira Winkler can play up the cloak and dagger when it suits him. His latest book, Spies Among Us(Wiley, 2005), even includes an author bio that compares him to James Bond. Winkler knows that his background at the secretive National Security Agency gives him a certain cachet as an information security consultant, and, hey, it […]

Personalization at most Web sites today is the equivalent of knowing someone well enough to wave to them on the street, says Jeff Flemings, senior vice president for account planning at online marketing firm Digitas. Future sites will know customers much better, he says—and may even begin to understand them. CIO Insight: What does the […]

Andrew Peterson knows pretty much everything there is to know about a select group of customers at Sovereign Bank. “We have their age, location and education level,” he says. “We know their personality types.” In fact, Peterson, vice president for the Internet and emerging technology at Sovereign, a Philadelphia-based financial services company with $59 billion […]

If you really want to get to know people, travel with them. That’s true for imaginary people, too, says Adam Lavelle, vice president of corporate strategy at Agency.com Ltd., where the stories devised for personas that the firm creates are growing ever more complex and dynamic. “We are mapping out the journey the customer takes,” […]

Summer had not yet arrived this year at the Vermont headquarters of Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Inc., but already the ice-cream maker had a good idea of the season’s most popular new flavor. By early June, customers were clamoring for a concoction called Chocolate Therapy, a mixture of chocolate ice cream, chocolate cookies and chocolate […]

More than two decades after the end of AT&T’s regulated monopoly, and nearly ten years since the landmark Telecommunications Act of 1996, government remains a powerful force in the telecom industry. Telecom services are taxed more in the U.S. than anything other than gasoline, cigarettes and liquor, says economist Jeffrey Eisenach, and additional taxes on […]

Marvin Maynard feels the telecom industry’s pain, and sometimes it feels pretty good. “Every time I do a new contract I get a lower unit cost, or a new service, or better reliability,” says the chief information officer of Jefferson-Pilot Corp., a $4 billion insurer headquartered in Greensboro, N.C. But the roiling telecom industry is […]

Besides all the megamergers and regulatory changes that have redefined the telecom business, the convergence of services, devices and networks also depends on smaller chips and smarter computers. “Life becomes easier as the technology matures,” says Dean Douglas, a telecom industry expert with IBM Global Services in Armonk, N.Y. “There will be a great deal […]