Articles by Pam Baker

Many a techie is looking at the cloud and seeing the shape of the future -- but that shape is often starkly defined by the data center, leaving little room for visions of mobile. Yet the cloud will undoubtedly shape-shift mobile devices in fascinating and often unexpected ways "The cloud is the perfect ying to mobile devices yang," Oxygen Cloud CEO...

Wondering why you never get the job despite sending a flurry of resumes that you spent days -- maybe weeks -- perfecting? A little-known, behind-the-scenes hiring secret could be the problem. Search engines, not actual people, select the top job candidates from piles of resumes. That's right, the process is automated. If your resume does not contain the perfect mix of keywords, you will not make the cut.

Until recently, a phone was just a phone. Sure, it got cooler when it lost the rotary dial, the cord, the wire and its voice-only restrictions. Still, it was just a phone. Businesses knew that the sound of its ring usually meant money (for what company with silent phones is profitable?) -- but few were prepared for the darn thing to totally rule their bottom line...

U.S. broadband providers have gotten away with shoddy speeds and restricted access because Americans consumers are pretty clueless about what they're actually buying. A whopping 80 percent of broadband users in the United States do not know the speed of their own broadband connection, a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) survey found. It's no surprise, then, that the nation is stupidly happy with the suckiest broadband speeds on the planet. Even many third-worlders are rocking rich media faster than the richest American household.

Every year since 2001 has been hailed as the year of mobile. But after years of hype and over-revved anticipation, the year of mobile may never come to be. Instead, it looks as though this is the year mobile will morph into something else entirely. "We're rapidly evolving into a more mobile, always-connected, open Internet society --- moving from...

With the rise of connected devices, mobile app developers are now center stage -- but juggling all the operating systems and form factors is an increasingly difficult act to perform. The challenge is to deliver a crowd-pleasing moneymaker without tearing the tent down. "The fragmentation of the app space is only just beginning," Trevor Doerksen, C...

Empty office space litters skylines, freeways and office parks. Once-busy hives of cubicles have become empty steel and concrete caverns. Their previous occupants met with a variety of fates: Some were victims of a deep recession; others were washed away by tsunamis of cheap labor in foreign lands; still others were unleashed by virtual technologies. Only the last group of former office dwellers have freed themselves willingly. They did so by exchanging their physical presence for a virtual existence.

For the uninitiated, "Bluetooth" is a funny word for an awkward device you stick in your ear. The moniker has thus become a non-assuming general descriptor for hands-free calling. That's about to change. Bluetooth has grown into a disruptive wave that's beginning to crest over the top of more than one industry "It's the perfect storm: The technolog...

Many have already written eulogies for the virtual worlds. Dead, they claim; the avatar is dead in the corporate realm. But the truth reads like the "Star Trek" script for the "The Trouble with Tribbles" episode: just because you don't see them, doesn't mean they are not breeding like mad in a closed grain bin. Without doubt, many corporations are indeed tribbling their avatar action...

There's been much ado about social media as the latest, greatest customer service tool -- but all that ado does little to help a corporation steer the conversation around perils and toward profits. So, buzz aside, where is the leverage in a set of tools that is seemingly all talk and little substance? Talk is all social media really is. Leveraging ...

Viruses have long been the bane of the medical world. For centuries, healthcare experts have struggled to treat everything from virus-induced sniffles to lethal epidemics. At the very core of the problem is the constant emergence of new viruses and the continuous flux of old ones. It doesn't help that even the strongest antibiotics are impotent against even the weakest virus. This is why the recent discovery of a new broad spectrum antiviral treatment is nothing to sneeze at...

Heart attacks are as American as hot dogs and easily more common than fast-food joints. While changes in the nation's diet are slowly under way to pre-empt the disease, scientists are scrambling to find ways to treat or cure it, in the hope of reducing the swelling numbers added daily to the body count. "Nanoburrs," developed by researchers at the...

Every hour of TV viewing increases your chances of an early death, according to a new study by Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute in Melbourne, Australia. Every one-hour program you sit through raises your odds for dying from heart attack or stroke by 18 percent, from cancer by 9 percent, and from other health problems by 11 percent, the researchers found.

Neuroscientists at MIT have figured out how to use colored lights to temporarily quiet activity in the brain. By shining a light on a set of neurons affected by a gene-enhanced virus tool, they were able to shut those neurons down. When they turned off the lights, the neurons started right back up again. No harm, no foul ...

This story was originally published on Aug. 6, 2009, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series. There's a rumor that honor exists among thieves, but outside of Robin Hood, no one considers them a bunch of do-gooders. Yet there may be a bright side to their shadowy work, at least in terms of enterprise software. It could ve...

This story was originally published on June 25, 2009, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series. Lacing a shoestring budget with enough green to get your startup up and running takes some finagling. Still, it can be done. If you can't find investor backing right now, then turn to alternative funding routes.

This story was originally published on June 24, 2009, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series. Funny thing about economic disasters: They tend to spawn a bevy of new businesses. It's not that a recession is the best time for pie-in-the-sky thinking; rather, it's when pie-in-the-mouth issues become most pressing.

The fight against cancer is often lost before it is even waged. Too many patients get the news too late. However, the battle may soon take a turn, as advances on the nano frontier bring more sophisticated firepower to the front lines. Latest developments include nanosensors that can detect minute amounts of cancer biomarkers in human blood. Forewa...

Winning the fight against cancer may end up being more of a nano-war than a surgical strike. A team led by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has just successfully combined an antibody with single-walled nanotubes to create a precision search-and-destroy weapon that targets aggressive forms of breast cancer. These tiny dual-...

This story was originally published on Sept. 28, 2009, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series. Big businesses often use big bucks to go green. Small businesses, on the other hand, haven't a dollar to spare even for a good cause like saving the environment. Shouldn't they just pass on the whole green scheme -- at least u...