retail

The Gap company's stores have hardly been the hottest spots at the mall in recent months -- or even years.

In a market where most retailers are posting single-digit monthly losses, its brands -- Gap, Old Navy and Banana Republic -- had a combined double-digit drop in September, and Old Navy's sales that month were down a startlingly bad 24 percent.

The Verizon Business Risk Team reviewed more than 500 corporate data breaches between 2004 and 2007 and found that 87 percent could have been prevented -- if only the companies had the proper security measures in place at the time of the breach. After four years of forensic research involving more than 230 million records, the "2008 Data Breach Investigations Report" found that 73 percent of breaches resulted from external sources, while 18 percent were caused by insiders.

The rise in fuel costs has far-reaching implications, even in the contact center industry. While this phenomenon has been attributed to the rise in home-based agents, it is also causing a rise in contact center interactions as a result of an increase in Internet use among rural residents.
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Jerry Seinfeld is signing off again, this time from Microsoft's television commercial series with Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates. The popular comedian's work for the software behemoth is complete, and the next phase of the multiyear, $300 million Windows marketing campaign to reconnect with customers is beginning.

According to Microsoft, the next ads will celebrate the diversity and passion of consumers around the world who use Windows to stay in touch with people, information and ideas that they care about.

A new beta software development kit is out for Android, the open-source mobile operating system backed by Google. Version 0.9 of the SDK was announced Monday on the Android Developers Blog.

An early version was released in November and, although some developers praised it, many said they found it buggy.

First Step Toward 1.0

Nearly a year and a half after the return of Michael Dell to the helm of the company he founded, the PC maker finally appears to be on the verge of making a comeback. According to Gartner, Dell's worldwide PC shipments increasing a robust 21.9 percent in the second quarter, fueled by the company's ambitious expansion into retail and other indirect channels.

Jacada is a provider of unified desktop and process optimization solutions for customer service operations. The company's solutions, Jacada WorkSpace and Jacada Fusion, are designed to simplify, automate and optimize a call center's work processes across disparate business systems, eliminating inefficiencies and boosting productivity. I recently got a chance to catch up with the company by chatting with Jacada's CEO Paul O'Callaghan.

RT: So how was business in 2007?

Tech junkies looking to pinch pennies in today's economy can scour the Web for a bounty of free software -- for word-processing and photo-editing, online storage and more.

Dozens of downloadable or online-only applications are available at no charge. While many are scaled-down versions of paid programs, you'd be surprised at how feature-rich these freebies can be.

The catch? Some of these applications may be ad-supported and won't offer extensive tech support, if any.

An old name in retail was hit by a modern scourge -- a hack of its customers' credit card numbers -- but didn't inform the consumers, revealing how data breaches might be heavily undercounted even with new notification laws.

Rumors are floating around that Microsoft is considering retail stores, like Apple's, to showcase its products. The problem is, there's nothing to showcase, and while Apple understands the retail store paradigm and has products to back it up, Microsoft does not.