Articles by Jack M.Germain

After one year of avoiding physical stores due to the pandemic, consumers have had time to adjust to the likes and dislikes of digital stores. But if vendors hope to keep customers visiting their online wares, they had better tune in more sharply to the new wave of shoppers' attitudes toward online customer service practices Customer service platfo...

Picking the ideal Linux distribution takes research and planning. Not because Linux is a challenge. Rather, the Linux OS offers a seemingly unending selection of distributions to meet general computing as well as special needs for enterprise, SMBs, and personal use However, for enterprise and business-focused users, one popular choice has fallen in...

Kaspersky on April 26 released survey results revealing that almost one quarter (22 percent) of PCs still run the end-of-life OS Microsoft Windows 7, which stopped receiving mainstream support in January 2020. When operating systems reach end of life, vulnerabilities will remain on the system without patch updates to resolve issues, providing cybe...

A surge in online shopping sprung up over the past year due to the pandemic. The rapid adoption pushed the expected timeline for consumers to expand their online shopping forays. It also opened the door to a drone delivery industry to feed a growing demand for increased online deliveries Companies scrambling to compete with the advancing delivery c...

Red Hat on Wednesday concluded its April two-day Summit 2021 Virtual Experience with a hefty list of announcements and presentations by the company's innovative customers driving the latest open-source technologies and trends Perhaps one of the event's most significant announcements was Red Hat's plan to deliver the first functionally safe, continu...

TrovaPage, a new global open internet marketplace, helps creators and other entrepreneurs focus on marketing without detracting from their creativity Cofounder Jingming Li on Tuesday announced the marketplace's launch, though the website has been open for the last few months for entrepreneurs working in the creator industry.

Customer churn is costing mid-market companies an average of $5.5 million per year. Retailers need to avoid the costly mistakes that result in such disastrous churn, according to a recent CRM and Sales Impact Report from SugarCRM. This presents a clamorous alarm to marketers.

Some 400 million patients worldwide are affected by more than 7,000 rare diseases; yet treatments for rare genetic diseases remain an underserved area. More than 95 percent of rare diseases do not have an approved treatment, and new treatments are estimated to cost more than $1 billion Sanath Ramesh created the RareCamp project and the OpenTreatmen...

From coin shortages and curbside operations to contactless transactions, how consumers pay for their purchases has been completely transformed during the pandemic. Marketers expect that transformation to continue and expand The digital payments industry continues to mature at an accelerated pace. Shoppers will see new options with more features thi...

When I last visited the ever-changing Netrunner distribution, I said that Netrunner Linux still went its own way. That was its twentieth rebirthday upgrade over its then 10-year history in late February 2020 The same is true for Netrunner 21.01 XOXO -- now with more modern trappings. Today, the two-month-old Netrunner XOXO release is something much...

A recent study of eBay ads found that digital brand search ad effectiveness is overestimated by up to 4,100 percent. A similar analysis of Facebook ads yielded a number of 4,000 percent If those high figures make you wonder if your company is wasting far too much of its advertising dollars on targeting the wrong audience, Dr. Jorge Barraza, a profe...

The larger the Internet superhighway of information grows; the more users get run over by privacy abuses and stolen data. If only we could rebuild the Internet's infrastructure to make data's journey safer and more secure is a common cry of IT and cybersecurity experts Some efforts are underway to mitigate the privacy and data theft issues. But des...

The ominous looming deadline for filing 2020 federal income tax returns has been extended from April 15 to Monday, May 17, 2021. If your paperwork is still in the "pulling it all together phase," our conversation with a tax expert might provide you with a few tips to save money, especially if you are an entrepreneur working in research and develop...

Jonathan Cran, founder and CEO of Intrigue, a cybersecurity startup based in Austin, Texas, used his company's network security tools to compile a list of Fortune 500 companies still exposed to last month's Microsoft Exchange breach. Potentially, many of those companies may not know their networks are compromised Intrigue's tools discovered the ext...

Startup information security firm Intrigue on Tuesday announced a US$2 million seed round led by LiveOak Venture Partners for a new attack service management platform that helps secure enterprise networks. The Intrigue tools scan all public, exposed attack surfaces inside and outside a company The seed funding will also support the security and dev...

Social commerce -- selling products or services on social media platforms -- is a marketing tactic that can boost retail revenue with relatively little effort without overly adding to the advertising spend This new retail strategy is attracting the attention of marketers. Social shopping grew 35 percent last year, with U.S. sales reaching about $38...

Google is now paying developers more money to work on securing their Linux kernels this year. The gesture may well be the start of the company's bid to enforce a tighter grip on open source Google's action comes on the heels of rising threats to Linux that unfolded in the last year, as hackers pivot to new strategies like writing malware strains in...

If your business does not provide customers with self-service options, you might be encouraging potential customers to go elsewhere According to the 2020 NICE inContact Customer Experience (CX) Transformation Benchmark, Consumer Wave, eight in 10 consumers are more willing to do business with companies that offer self-service options. Yet only 61 p...

Over the course of the past year, adjusting to the challenges of the pandemic on business has made the customer relationship management system an essential tool for maintaining and growing a customer base. As a result, CRM platforms have evolved into something more than just a digital Rolodex to manage customer contacts A key aspect of succeeding i...

One of the most successful direct-to-consumer shopping outlets for China-based vendors outside of China's own Alibaba e-commerce platform is Amazon. This trend has been accelerating for years China-based sellers represented 75 percent of new sellers on Amazon in January, according to a report by Marketplace Pulse. This marks a significant increase ...