Founded in 2005 by automotive and IT industry veterans, Skoots provides a unique, web-based service for auto dealers and their customers—all based on the Microsoft .NET Framework and other technologies, including Silverlight. Consumers can find the new or used vehicle they want, eNegotiate with a dealer in real time, and lock in a deal without ...

One of my favorite quotes from the book Fooled by Randomness is Wittgenstein's Rule: Unless you have confidence in the ruler's reliability, if you use a ruler to measure a table, you may as well be using the table to measure the ruler. I believe that we are in the very early phases of the migration of enterprise IT infrastructure into the cloud. ...

Golf is an activity that requires a tremendous amount of overhead. Aside from actually learning how to swing, aspiring players also have to set aside continuous time blocks of 4 hours, gain membership at a suitable course, acquire an expensive bouquet of clubs & assorted paraphernalia and plow through an arcane set of rules. Soccer, on ...

Despite energetic community efforts and the blooming of a thousand identity initiatives, the path to profits for online consumer identity services has proved remarkably elusive. Sxip Identity, one of the best-known identity startups and helmed by identerati extraordinaire Dick_Hardt of the Identity 2.0 Slideshow, has not succeeded in raising any ...

Jeff Fisher from Desktone has posted some thoughts on desktop virtualization. One interesting scenario he paints is a future where employees will be expected to provide their own physical PCs that corporate IT departments will simply stream a virtual PC desktop to. While it’s not uncommon today in certain industry verticals, ...

  HyperQuality, Inc SEATTLE, WASHINGTONwww.hyperquality.com   Customers seem to hate them—and corporations love them. Like it or not, call centers are a fact of life. Viewed as a necessary evil rather than an opportunity to build relationships, businesses continually seek to slash service costs—which frequently ...

    Voltage Security, Inc. PALO ALTO, CALIFORNIAwww.voltage.com   400 Customers, Positive Cash Flow, and Positioned in Visionaries Quadrant by Gartner Here’s what customers are saying about Voltage Security’s information encryption solutions: “It just works.” The company is continuously bringing innovative new ...

Not too long ago, a China-based VC told me that nearly all the startups he was seeing were of the “Copy To Asia” or C2A variety. Each pitch inexorably led to the goal of becoming the “Google of China” or “Facebook of China” or “YouTube of China” etc. I believe that 2008 will be the year where home-grown startup innovation takes root in the Middle ...

As a young techie, it was hard to resist the temptation of looking for space aliens with my PC. And so I became an early adopter of SETI@Home, a project that now counts 3 million users who contribute their spare PC processing power to scanning radio-telescope data for signs of extraterrestrial life. SETI@Home turned out to be the first of a ...

How do you know if it’s a real human trying to sign up for an account on your website or posting a comment on your blog, or whether it’s simply a software bot leaching your resources? The most common way today is to subject the alleged human to a CAPTCHA test, which requires he or she to type a string of letters or numbers from an obfuscated ...