Stories about: McDonald's

Nokia continues to pursue the emerging near-field communications technology with an investment in Inside Contactless.

Mobile WiMax promises to be fast, cheap and, if Sprint Nextel keeps its word, available across the US by 2009. 3G service, while slower than mobile WiMax, is already widely available. Both technologies are designed to cover wide areas.

As an assistant information systems analyst at the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation in Corcoran, Kent splits his time between providing help desk support to 400 to 500 end users and handling IT procurement activities.

If the corporate Grim Reaper is truly knocking on the door of The SCO Group, no one seems to have told Darl McBride, the software vendor's president and CEO.

A 21-year-old California man has been arrested and charged with launching a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack against CastleCops, an online forum and Web site that specializes in rooting out Internet scams.

Making customers happy, some experts say, is the fine art of balancing experience and expectation. Based on that, the feeling of Microsoft Corp. customers is starting to edge ever so slightly towards the disappointment end of the spectrum, according to results of an annual survey by the University of Michigan released on Tuesday.

Increasing use of Firefox throughout Europe suggests that the browser battles aren't quite over, but may be headed for a slow-moving tug-of-war, according to a recent survey and analysts.

McDonald's best-kept secret may be that it offers free Wi-Fi with every meal. More than 8,000 of its restaurants provide high-speed wireless service to customers. The fast food giant has yet to fully promote the perk, but it has already attracted one group: Gamers using Nintendo DS systems currently account for 25 percent of the Wi-Fi traffic in its restaurants.

Google Inc. is on its way to becoming the McDonald's of data centers -- serving billions of bytes daily -- if it keeps up with what seems to be an extraordinary pace of building IT facilities.

Many of us thought that the great chasm that divided us into free and not free ceased to be a model of the world orderabout the time that the Berlin Wall fell. Politically, that's true, but a similar chasm is developing today in the worlds of business and IT. In fact, any IT professional who is not thinking in terms of free vs. not free is behind the times. You need to polish your strategy lens and recalibrate your business model. You need to get busy giving stuff away and getting it for free.

Wave your cell phone at a Coke machine, hit a couple of keypad keys, and moments later an ice-cold beverage tumbles into your hand. Lack of loose change (or a credit card) becomes no barrier to the pause that refreshes.