Brian Livingston

The Democratic National Committee is rolling out this week a Web 2.0-like service that may grow into something akin to MySpace for the party faithful. PartyBuilder is the name of the Democrats’ new tool. With party organizers waxing optimistic about their chances of reclaiming the U.S. House of Representatives this fall, the online networking service […]

Another Web service has decided that success in business requires the company’s primary offering to be given away for free, to be financed by advertising. No, it’s not AOL (although that company is embarking on a conversion to free but ad-supported content). It’s a service known as Clip & Copy, which is launching its so-called […]

Farecast, the slick new site that predicts whether air fares between particular cities will go up or down, has expanded its service to cover more than 55 U.S. airports. When I first wrote about Farecast on June 27, the service made predictions only on flights originating from two airports: Boston and Seattle. At that time, […]

I admit it — I’m a chart junkie. I just love to take rows and columns of business data and turn them into graphs that show exactly which products are doing well and which ones need help. Actually, I think my fervor is shared by practically every sales and marketing honcho out there. I’ve never […]

Scientists at Carnegie Mellon University, working with federal grant monies, have discovered that phishing e-mails are decidedly different from most other spam — so much so that the fraudulent messages can almost entirely be detected and filtered out. CMU researchers state that their analysis catches 92.65 percent of phishing attempts. Only 0.12 percent of legitimate […]

The streaming news feeds known as RSS (Really Simple Syndication) may get a dramatic boost if Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7.0 supports feeds when it’s released later this year. But the stimulus for the new technology will be hindered if IE is unable to handle what’s known as “secure RSS.” It now appears that IE 7.0 […]

Once upon a time, different Web browsers supported different forms of HTML markup or “tags.” It was difficult or impossible to make a Web site look good in different browsers. Beginning a few years ago, fortunately, browsers started adopting some common markup styles, loosely known as “Web standards.” Web sites now look roughly the same […]

You know about travel search engines that display the lowest fares airlines are offering today. Now there’s a travel engine that can read the airlines’ minds. Farecast.com not only shows you which fares are currently the cheapest, it uses advanced mathematics to predict whether those fares are likely to go up or down in the […]

Click fraud has become so large that it’s setting records, and not in a good way. “We’ve seen indications that the overall losses due to click fraud could equal more than $1 billion” each year, according to a financial expert quoted Feb. 27 in Business Week. That figure is “larger than the total magnitude of […]

If your company buys pay-per-click ads in search engines, and you’re concerned that you’re paying for click fraud, you’ve got new tools to fight it — and they’re absolutely free. Click Sentinel, a commercial antifraud application that’s been on sale for more than a year, has just been converted to a free-software model. In addition, […]