Articles by Pam Baker

Nothing is as heart-wrenching to an e-tailer as watching a customer abandon a full cart just seconds before consummating the deal. To be so close yet so cashless is more than frustrating; it's harmful to an e-tailer's health. A virtual armory of tools are in use to woo, cajole, prompt and push consumers to make the buy -- but are they working, or are they turning even more customers away?...

Part 1 of this two-part series takes a look at the practical communication potential of microblogging service Twitter. Part 2 investigates how businesses use Twitter to communicate with customers In a bear market, nearly everyone is willing to put up with a little bull. Twitter is certainly full of it, in the form of mundane drivel, yet everyone se...

The entire world, it seems, is all aflitter about Twitter. Everywhere you turn, from Bill O'Reilly trashing the world of tweets on The View to Rick Sanchez praising it on CNN, someone's got something to say about Twitter. Is there something to this tweet-fest or are we all drowning in a sea of self-fascination? "It has become fashionable to castiga...

This is the final installment in a four-part series. Part 1 examines how companies can use business intelligence to their strategic advantage. Part 2 looks at the features and functionality of various systems. Part 3 offers insights into the total cost of ownership While most believe that knowledge is indeed power and that knowing where one stands ...

This is the third installment in a four-part series. Part 1 examines how companies can use business intelligence to their strategic advantage. Part 2 looks at the features and functionality of various systems Once upon a time, business was done smartly and logically. New initiatives were part of long-term plans and all new ideas had to pass muster....

This is the second in a three-part series. Part 1 examines how companies can use business intelligence to their strategic advantage. Here, we look at the features and functionality of various systems Knowledge is power, but without context and imagination, it's just bytes of data, every bit as dark and useless as ignorance itself. "One bank CIO rec...

As a former senior executive of Swiss Reinsurance, the world's largest reinsurer of life-health and property-casualty risks, Donna Childs was well versed in both the need and the practice of disaster data recovery. Her experience proved critical when she returned to the United States to start her own small business -- in the area subsequently designated "Zone 1" of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.

It may be as sexy as grandma's underpants, but data is the foundation upon which everything else is layered. Without the right support underneath, the fat will roll over your margins, creating an unsightly, unseemly, unprofitable business bulge "While it sounds a little boring, managing data as the key strategic asset has become a corporate imperat...

It's no secret that customers aren't buying much these days. The economic engines have locked and stalled, leaving businesses everywhere in freefall. While companies around the globe are jettisoning anything they can to slow the descent, none are ditching CRM. In fact, CRM may be the last remaining parachute: a fact realized during earlier turbulence...

In an almost surreal scene, unprecedented numbers of euphoric people are mobbing America's capital city to celebrate a new hope for a beleaguered nation. It is a celebration so huge that the bounds of reality cannot hold it in. For the very first time, the inauguration of a new president will be trumpeted in this world and another; in life and in Second Life.

This article was originally published on July 17, 2008, and is brought to you as part of our Best of ECT News series In Internet time, it's been an eon since "smart appliances" were said to be stocked on the near horizon, but many sunsets later (eight years, actually), the futuristic devices are still, well, in the future. One would think the green...

Part 1 of this two-part series examines the virtues of virtual worlds as research environments. This final part looks at some of the types of experiments that are being conducted in the metaverse Universities and government agencies, even a few private corporations, are going all "mad scientist" on us in the realm of virtual worlds. But why are the...

Universities and government agencies are conducting all kinds of research, both scientific and sociological, in virtual worlds -- but is this merely a newfangled boondoggle or is the research really real? "My general perspective is that virtual worlds are at least as real as many parts of the so-called real world," William Sims Bainbridge, program ...

This story was originally published on July 17, 2008, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series In Internet time, it's been an eon since "smart appliances" were said to be stocked on the near horizon, but many sunsets later (eight years, actually), the futuristic devices are still, well, in the future. One would think the g...

The money trail of big tech pay-offs began with voice, then moved to text and now is headed squarely to image data. No longer are businesses or individuals satisfied with words on a page peppered with flat and lifeless 2-D images. Today's big data boost is far more colorful and dynamic than that In the beginning days of image processing, art and ph...

Among dreamy startups and salty e-commerce veterans alike, Zappos.com appears to be the golden grail -- certainly one blessed, at least, with heavenly rewards. "Zappos is the Amazon of the shoe business, and its model is extremely difficult to mimic," Gene Alvarez, vice president of research at Gartner (and former employee of shoe-biz powerhouse, Nine West Group), told the E-Commerce Times...

"Claiming itself to be a next-generation publisher, WEbook has successfully roped in venture capitalists to invest in their business," Deepak Thakur, senior research analyst in ICT Practice at Frost & Sullivan, told the E-Commerce Times. If the dot-com burst and the more recent Wall Street fiasco have taught us anything, it is that investor confidence is not necessarily a harbinger of success. So if being flush in venture capital funding isn't the benchmark or the bookmark, what makes WEbook a startup to watch?...

Social media may be hailed as the savior of sagging sales these days, but few have figured out what social media are, much less how to wield them. Even fewer realize that games are the first, and arguably the most viable and sustainable, social medium in the mix. Unlike newcomers MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn and -- gasp -- even Twitter, the gaming communities are solid and stable, the camaraderie real and rooted deep, and the cash flow is, well, flowing.

In this age when an Internet eon is roughly the equivalent of a calendar year and any given company titan can flicker out of existence in a flash, few companies, especially those solely Internet-based, are seen as enduring and solid and fated for perpetuity. Among these rarities, the world's largest online auction company, eBay, certainly holds it own. Even so, eBay too can be gobbled up by the times (or, as novelist Stephen King would describe it, the Langoliers) if it stands still even for a minute.

In Internet time, it's been an eon since "smart appliances" were said to be stocked on the near horizon, but many sunsets later (eight years, actually), the futuristic devices are still, well, in the future. One would think the green movement, among other things, would have pushed this concept along "During the tech boom and the push to Interent-iz...