Edward Cone

Thousands of businesses from around the world outsource their e-mail management chores to Webmail.us Inc., a Blacksburg, Va., company that deals with everything from maintaining mail programs to filtering spam and squishing viruses for clients. Webmail.us runs its own operations on a couple of hundred servers at data centers in Virginia and Texas owned by […]

Scott Rosenberg has written an important and entertaining book about the way software projects work—or don’t. Dreaming In Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software (Crown, 2007), chronicles an open-source effort to build a better personal information manager. Published this month, the book also delves into the history […]

Larry Sanger, cofounder of Wikipedia, is not satisfied with the way the enormously popular, collaborative online encyclopedia has turned out. Too many errors, too many agendas—and too few adults in charge. “Wikipedia has failed in certain ways,” says Sanger. “I want to supplement it with something better in the sense of being more reliable, and […]

Business is steady on an early december afternoon at the iSold It consignment store on Skeet Club Road in High Point, N.C., as customers drop off items to be sold on eBay. Bikes, electronics, power tools—a steady flow of stuff, forming a tributary to the nearly $50 billion flood of goods and services that will […]

Businesses are in business to make money, not to save the planet. But when environmentally conscious policies make good business sense—when being green yields green—everyone wins. You can only win, though, if you play the game. Yet a surprising number of business people, including an unacceptably large contingent of corporate-tech pooh-bahs, are still sitting on […]

Personal weblogs are the ultimate digital word of mouth. That’s what makes them so tempting, and dangerous, for marketers. Done wrong, a blog is more like a digital foot in the mouth. A blogger’s praise for a product or service carries weight if it’s seen as honest and unsolicited; it carries far, too, given the […]

Click to the Coca-Cola Web site, and check out the growing collection of video clips and musical podcasts available via links on the front page. This is “The Coke Show,” the online centerpiece of the soft-drink giant’s newest global marketing campaign, driven by the slogan, “Welcome to the Coke side of life.” The video files […]

Take some truisms about IT workers’ lack of interpersonal skills, mix in the multicultural realities of the modern workplace, and you’ve got a recipe for a communications breakdown. But Stan Kurpiel, global CIO at Pergo AB, the $390 million flooring company, thought he could do better. He wanted to help staffers understand their own personality […]

In early 2004, Chris Anderson, editor of Wired magazine, was asked to estimate how many of the 10,000 albums accessible via a Web-connected digital jukebox had at least one track played at least once per quarter. Sensing that traditional sales metrics, which would indicate an answer of about 20 percent, didn’t apply to this Internet-enabled […]

At first glance, the Department of Homeland Security’s US-VISIT programmay seem an unlikely model for future government information-technology projects. That may be true on second glance, too. But beyond the project’s very real shortcomings lies a possible template for smarter, faster work on important public-sector jobs. Steven Cooper, the founding chief information officer of DHS, […]

It feels like déjà vu all over again: Google’s $1.6 billion purchase of YouTube has people chattering about a new tech-sector bubble. “Dot-Com Boom Echoed in Deal to Buy YouTube,” declared a New York Times headline on October 10; the first paragraph of the article uses phrases like “profitless Web site,” and “paper millionaires,” along […]

There are few businesses more elemental than hauling junk: Send a truck, get the stuff and drive away. Do those simple things more efficiently than the competition, and you can make some serious money. That’s the formula at 1-800-GOT-JUNK? llc, a fast-growing Vancouver franchiser that built its business around information technology. The junk-hauling part remains […]