Business

A shortage of tech workers? Not so fast

Until now, the assumption has been that the infusion of a talented cohort of IT workers from overseas is good for the U.S. economy. But is it possible to have too much of a good thing?

For years, Silicon Valley has bemoaned a shortage of skilled domestic labor, the complaint being that the pool of quality technical talent in the U.S. has atrophied to the point where a failing educational system has left companies with no other choice except to import more skilled IT help from abroad. Recently, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and LinkedIn's Reid Hoffman came … Read more

Mark Zuckerberg launches FWD.us political action group

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has launched a new political action group, FWD.us, to focus on immigration reform.

Zuckerberg, who announced the move through an editorial in The Washington Post, called U.S. immigration policy "strange" for a nation of immigrants and "unfit for today's world."

As a result, a deep roster of tech executives have banded to together to push a bipartisan policy agenda to change how the U.S. approaches immigration. The group has vowed to work with members of Congress from both parties, the administration, and state and local officials. It plans … Read more

Michael Dell promises greater investment in PCs and tablets

Michael Dell has revealed more details about his plans for the company if and when it goes private.

A memo from the Dell CEO to employees was included yesterday in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission and outlined a slew of costly promises for a restructured Dell.

One such promise is to invest more in PCs and tablets. Like many PC makers, Dell has tried to carve out a large chunk of the corporate market with servers, network gear, and other IT products. Michael Dell noted last year that the company has become more focused on IT services.… Read more

Senate embraces Internet taxes

The U.S. Senate voted overwhelmingly today to endorse levying Internet sales taxes on American shoppers, despite warnings from a handful of senators that the proposal is antibusiness, harmful to taxpayers, and will be a "bureaucratic nightmare."

By a vote of 75 to 24, senators adopted an amendment to a Democratic budget resolution that, by allowing states to "collect taxes on remote sales," is intended to eventually usher in the first national Internet sales tax.

The vote follows a week of fierce lobbying from the National Retail Federation and the Retail Industry Leaders Association, which represent … Read more

WarrantyLife building online shoebox for warranties

The hard drive in my MacBook died last week. It was a Seagate drive I bought about a year ago after I outgrew the drive the laptop came with. I think it's still covered under warranty, but I'm not sure. Should I do the research to find out, and then try to deal with finding the receipt to get it replaced, or just suck it up and get on with my life?

With a new service, WarrantyLife, I might be able to make that decision based on actual information, instead of just taking the lazy route and throwing … Read more

Warning: Coupons make you spend more

I've said before, and not too long ago, that only people with poor impulse control buy things at retail prices. But I've recently come to understand that deal-seekers, people who habitually try to save money by using social-shopping sites like Groupon or coupon directories like RetailMeNot, may actually be even more valuable to the retail industry than people who buy stuff at list price. Because they spend more.

Cotter Cunningham, CEO of WhaleShark Media, which runs RetailMeNot, explained to me recently why his straightforward coupon site is working well, and how the Internet is changing how pricing and consumer marketing is done.

Affiliate marketing--paid links to commercial destinations--is the third-most efficient way for consumer goods and services companies to get online business, after e-mailing existing customers and doing good SEO. Coupons make for very effective and trackable affiliate links, because users have to click on them to get the deal, not just visit the site selling the product they want.

And coupon sites succeed because the business of aggregating coupons is very strong: each link is a CPA, or cost-per-action link, which pays out at a much higher rate than CPC, or cost-per-click advertising links.

The goal is to become the big site with the most coupons, as getting into that position makes for a virtuous SEO cycle: the more coupons you have, the more people link to and visit the site, and the higher you rise in the search engines. RetailMeNot pursues this strategy by including even nonaffiliate coupon deals in its listings. Unlike some of the original coupon sites, where each coupon has an affiliate or CPA link attached to it, RetailMeNot encourages its users to submit coupon codes they find around the Internet. These coupons don't generate direct revenue for the site (although pages they're on do serve ads), but they do serve the incredibly important function of improving RetailMeNot's depth and thus its SEO juice and its traffic, making its paid links bigger revenue drivers. … Read more

CES: Optimism back as economic worries fade

LAS VEGAS--Few tech industry professionals truly relish the annual trip here each January for the ritual that has become CES, the largest and most important event on the tech calendar. But this year, for the first time in awhile, they were able to get back to complaining about long cab lines and bad food rather than layoffs and budget cuts during their week in the desert.

"Double the energy and enthusiasm at CES compared with last two years," said NPD Group analyst Samir Bhavnani on his Twitter account Friday, summing up a week that lacked a signature announcement … Read more

Google pitches Exchange backup with Postini

Google continued to remind enterprise IT managers today that it wants to provide alternatives to Microsoft's e-mail products.

With the launch of Google Message Continuity, an e-mail backup service, Google wants to get a toehold in companies that run Microsoft Exchange servers for e-mail by offering themselves up as a backup solution should something go wrong with those servers. The idea is that in the event of an Exchange outage, workers could sign into Google accounts and get their regular work e-mail as usual through Google's interface.

The real idea, of course, is to convince more and more … Read more

Google's DocVerse links Office with Google Docs

Google is putting its DocVerse team to use, unleashing a new plug-in for Google Docs that lets offline Microsoft Word documents talk to Web-based Google Docs files.

DocVerse, acquired by Google earlier this year, has ported its software onto Google's network and is ready to let early testers get a crack at Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office. The software lets Microsoft Office users who also have Google Apps accounts sync their documents with Google without having to work within the Google Docs Web interface, creating a Web-based copy of that native document for sharing and collaboration.

Google's been trying for several years … Read more