Stories by: Thomas Wailgum

At what point in a fledgling company's existence does purchasing an ERP system make financial, operational and technological sense?

All too often, it seems like there's a full moon out when it comes to Twitter: People who use the microblogging service do some very strange things.

Yesterday, coffee-purveyor Starbucks reversed course on its long-standing in-store Wi-Fi policy by announcing that starting July 1, Wi-Fi would be free in all its U.S. establishments.

CIOs have been talking about enterprise application integration for as long as they've been talking about business-IT alignment or proving the value of the IT function. That is to say,for decades.

SAP's annual Sapphire conference is over, and here's a round-up of some of the important news, announcements and high-tech happenings that came out of the show.

Coming up with a great technology product or service is only half the battle these days. Creating a name for said product that is at once cool but not too cool or exclusionary, marketable to both early adopters and a broader audience, and, of course, isn't already in use and protected by various trademarks and copyright laws is difficult--to say the least.

Wal-Mart's super-streamlined retail supply chain fantasy is still just that, but there's good news on the RFID front. Tag technology has improved, and a number of companies now successfully use RFID to track high-value IT assets in house or on campus -- exactly where RFID makes the most sense.

There's been an explosion in growth of Wi-Fi hotspots during the last several years. Best-guess estimates range from 33,000 WLAN hotspots worldwide to more than 250,000 at present.