Cynthia Flash

More than a year after the service was introduced, companies with mobile workers are finally starting to embrace the Wi-Fi technology that’s available in some coffee shops, book stores and other public places. Employees equipped with Wi-Fi-enabled laptop computers or personal digital assistants are using these Wi-Fi “hotspots” as virtual offices, stopping in to check […]

Lawyers are having a field day sifting through electronic documents in their attempts to unearth evidence of corporate scandals. They’ve had considerable success, as can be seen by the recent corporate black eyes or maimings given to executives at companies like Enron, Arthur Andersen LLP and WorldCom, Inc. In most cases involving corporate fraud or […]

BioPay makes fingerprint security systems for retailers that cash checks. Some 200 merchants use the Herndon, Va., company’s biometrics fingerprint scanners to verify a check casher’s identity in an attempt to reduce fraud. But just because BioPay sells biometrics systems doesn’t mean its employees use one. BioPay has neither an external biometrics system that secures […]

Add “Chief Security Officer” to the list of must-have C-level positions at large corporations. That’s the advice of information security analysts who are telling clients to hire a top executive to oversee their company’s IT security. Slowly, they are seeing companies move in that direction. Companies began to focus on security even before the Sept. […]

In the area of information security, companies didn’t need the Sept. 11 wakeup call to realize they need to devote more resources to securing corporate networks and customer data. Hackers who stole credit card numbers and embarrassing security holes found in newly released operating systems grabbed headlines well before companies worried about terrorist attacks on […]

Practically every day the Eastside Journal prints stories about Microsoft – the main employer in the journal’s circulation area that includes Redmond, Wash. While the daily news stories say “Microsoft, Microsoft, Microsoft,” the paper’s Web site in a quiet, not-so-subtle way has thumbed its nose at the huge software company. The Web site runs on […]

In the competitive hotel business, where prices on the same room can vary from day to day and huge blocks of rooms can become available within seconds, data at the hands of managers is like cash in their pockets. If they know immediately how many rooms are available and at what price, they can make […]

Dell Computer Corp of Austin, Texas, pioneered direct marketing of personal computers (PCs) to consumers, first using telesales and then through the Web. Now, it is also leading in the movement toward private trading exchanges, a more successful alternative to public trading and consortium exchanges. Private exchanges require a password and allow one company to […]

The stock rooms that used to hold boxes of parts no longer exist in Dell Computer Corp.’s six factories. The Austin, Texas, computer maker has such an efficient supply chain that on Feb. 2, at the end of last quarter, it had only five days of inventory on hand, the lowest in its 17-year history. […]

Protecting corporate information from intruders and keeping it secure when employees access it remotely are key security concerns of information technology managers. To deal with such concerns, they voted LiveSecurity System 4.1 from WatchGuard Technologies Inc. of Seattle, as the Datamation Product of the Year for Security in 2000. LiveSecurity System 4.1 combines a hardware […]