Trailblazers

John Roberts, chairman and CEO of SugarCRM, is no stranger to the proprietary software that delivers most of the CRM functionality in the market today. The Washington, D.C.-native moved to Silicon Valley in his twenties and spent 12 years in the "trenches" as he puts it, developing products for ente...

Considering the speed at which technology evolves, predicting even a year in advance can be a dicey proposition. Still, given key tech sector developments during 2007 and the outlook for 2008, some trends are unmistakable. It's a safe bet that social networking and Web 2.0 overall will remain a clos...

Mike Betzer was working for MCI several years ago when he realized that if the company could use the Internet as a front end, it could leverage the software in the data center and develop a network-based application that could be sold to other companies doing essentially the same thing that MCI did ...

Channel partner opportunity management firm BlueRoads announced on Sept. 17 a new lead referral module designed to help vendors gain strategic insight into the management of better sales channel yield. The new software module captures new referrals from a vendor's extended partner community and harn...

Once again, technology entrepreneurs played a prominent role in the Forbes 400, the annual list of the wealthiest Americans, with Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin breaking the top 10 for the first time, though the arrival of several hedge fund billionaires helped dilute the impact of tec...

E-mail and other forms of electronic communications have become pervasive and essential to business growth and operational productivity. Today, with more than 170 billion e-mails and 580 billion IMs exchanged daily, companies have seen a 334 percent annual increase in bandwidth, processing and stora...

Last week, the train officially pulled into the station; we got a call from Tranquility Base -- choose your metaphor. Salesforce.com announced availability of Summer '07 which included final delivery of the long-awaited Apex programming language -- the last piece of the developer platform. From here...

Jim Stickley, CTO of TraceSecurity makes his living sneaking into other peoples' businesses and leaving with their data. Stickley robs banks, but unlike conventional thieves, he is not after what is locked inside the vault. Instead, he steals personally identifiable information such as names, addres...

AlterPoint is a network configuration management provider that recently joined the open source ranks with the launch of its ZipTie community and are now members of the Open Management Consortium. The goal of ZipTie is to create a community that will advance network management beyond the limitations ...

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates took center stage at International CES Sunday night in Las Vegas, kicking off the computer industry's largest annual convention with a keynote speech that described what he called the "Digital Decade." Gates was quick to cite plenty of stats to back up his assertions: m...