David Needle

“He throws up a prayer — and it’s answered!” Play-by-play announcers are already busy this month making the big calls in the annual “March Madness” NCAA basketball tournament. And that means lots of fun for basketball junkies and bracket-betting fans. But does IT have a prayer of reining in these non-essential uses of network bandwidth? […]

Google’s already released its first phone, the Nexus One, and now Google’s reportedly set its sights on the television. It’s not exactly a Google TV, but an auxiliary device to get Internet content and applications on TV screens. It wouldn’t be the first such effort. Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL), for instance, offers something similar with its […]

It’s not exactly the Oscars, but the Gomez Web Performance Awards give companies significant bragging rights for having a top Web site in their market segment. Gomez, a division of Compuware (NASDAQ: CPWR), said Web site awards were given for three main criteria: best performance on average for 2009, response time (including how fast pages […]

PALO ALTO, Calif. – SAP’s recently appointed co-CEOs had a coming-out party of sorts here at a media event at the enterprise software giant’s Silicon Valley offices. Former SAP CEO Leo Apotheker resigned unexpectedly last month after only nine months in the top spot. Apotheker’s replacements, co-CEOs Bill McDermott and Jim Hagemann Snabe (based in […]

Twenty-five years ago today, Symbolics.com was registered as the world’s first .com domain. The growth since then has been staggering. The Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF), a Washington think tank, on Monday issued a report on the .com’s impact, arguing that the birth of the commercial Web was a breakthrough with few rivals throughout […]

Say this about Twitter, the company and its army of outside developers keep finding ways to maximize the content you can pack into the 140-character limit assigned to every tweet. For example, hash tags (#) make your tweets more easily found by Twitter search engines, while URL link shorteners, like Bit.ly, TinyURL and a host […]

Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, MySpace … the list of social networking sites companies hope to use to reach customers is growing and, along with it, so is the complexity of managing the process. Enter Awareness, an on-demand provider of social marketing software. Awareness’s Social Marketing Hub (SMH) a dashboard for managing social networks, will be […]

Google is continuing its aggressive efforts to grow its role in the productivity applications space. But now, it’s snapping up DocVerseand its cloud-based collaboration add-on for archrival Microsoft Office. That might seem like a counterintuitive acquisition for Google, which has long been pushing its own Google Apps suite as an alternative to Microsoft’s (NASDAQ: MSFT) […]

Google is revealing more information about how the company secures information for users of its Google Apps suite, specifically its ability to handle outages — with claims of uptime and failover performance that could make any enterprise IT manager jealous. “Will you be ready when disaster strikes?” Rajen Sheth, Google’s (NASDAQ: GOOG) senior product manager […]

PALO ALTO, Calif. — Socialtext’s latest release continues to expand the features of its enterprise social software platform. Version 4.0 is being sent out to registered users Wednesday; the company also offers enterprises an on-premises appliance version that can also be updated. The company is one of several enterprise software firms pushing tools to tap […]