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Belgian open source application vendor OpenERP has set up its first overseas business office in San Jose, Calif. Traditionally, the company has worked with reseller partners in the United States and 54 other countries worldwide. After four years, though, OpenERP has begun an aggressive expansion. It...

In May, TheFind reached a notable milestone: It overtook Yahoo Shopping to become the No. 2 search engine for retail queries, according to comScore. Google holds the No. 1 slot. A relative newcomer, TheFind has posted remarkable growth in a short period of time. In April, for example, it grew 175 ...

Coverity cut its startup teeth seven years ago trying to figure out how to commercialize static analysis and software code integrity. The company, whose software developer tools are used by some of the biggest firms in the industry, released in November Coverity 5, a completely reengineered software...

In 2004, KnowledgeTree CEO Daniel Chalef had no idea his interest in developing an open source document management product would thrust his South African company into prominence. That's the time a government agency there approached him to help the Medical Research Council retain control of its docum...

In the U.S., consumers are accustomed to paying for merchandise with checks, credit cards and debit cards. Online shopping and banking transactions are dependent on electronic money transfers between vendors and their customers' financial institutions. That experience, however, is not universal. Con...

SourceForge, a media services and e-commerce company that provides open source software downloads and development, is enjoying the best of both business worlds. It is one of the largest open source software repositories -- the SourceForge Web site has more than 30 million unique visitors per month -...

The economy is still broken, and businesses are scampering to save money and entice back lost customers. Don't remind Brett Caine, though. As president of Citrix Online, he's too busy growing the company's customer base into a $100 million business that a few years ago didn't exist. As a young start...

It seemed like a simple enough idea when FixYa.com CEO and founder Yaniv Bensadon sought a solution for consumers caught in the maze of tech support that encompassed nearly every piece of consumer electronics equipment and household appliance on the market. Why not offer a community-based service, n...

Part 1 of this two-part series on five of the boldest decisions made by technology companies this year explores the launch of Hulu and Amazon.com's decision to go DRM-free with its Amazon MP3 store. Now, for the three remaining genius strokes in the E-Commerce Times' lineup of bold decisions that ch...

Five years ago, Mark Goldstein and three partners recognized that loyalty programs were becoming a cottage industry. Coming up with the right way to manage those programs, he believed, would be a neat trick. So would finding an effective way to lure in customers. "The toughest part of the business i...

Personalization -- the purported long-sought Holy Grail of Web content management -- just might have finally arrived via Web applications that make Web sites responsive in real-time to the unique needs of individual visitors. At the heart of recommendation and personalization technologies are active...

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 Gart...

Why sell somebody else's product line when you can do a better job offering your own? That was the question that ultimately pushed Jan Hichert, CEO of Astaro, and two other cofounders to develop their own Internet security solutions for a market they viewed as needy of attention -- the small- to med...

The larger the business or government agency is, the bigger the volume of data it deals with. That translates into massive efforts to manage that data to meet ever-increasing compliance regulations for adequately maintaining electronic records. Any software company that can figure out how to manage ...

Bronto is no dinosaur. Founded by former Red Hat executives and launched in 2002, the e-mail marketing software provider has certainly seen its industry and marketplace evolve and change dramatically around it. While questions are often raised about whether e-mail can remain an effective marketing c...