Stories about: Wells Fargo

IBM, LexisNexis and the Secret Service are among a group of corporations, government agencies and academic institutions that has formed to study and help solve identity management challenges around cybercrime, terrorism and narcotics trafficking.

Qantas, whose brand has come under some hammering of late, took to an online forum on Sunday to reach out to its customers and spruik the arrival of its first Airbus A380 aeroplane.

There you are, sipping your latte while banging out code in Django, Drupal, and Ruby, and feeling pretty cutting-edge. Sure, those are the hot skills of the moment, and they'll probably help you land your next job. But take a minute to think about the guys who came before you and the tools, particularly COBOL, they used. And give 'em some respect. They deserve it.

You may have noticed this has been a slow week in Cringeville. Well now the truth can be told. For the past five days I've been held captive in Amsterdam by a small group of mad Dutchmen. They locked me in the tower of a Swiss hotel, trundled me into a van with three other captives, drove us around the Dutch countryside until we were disoriented, and forced us to consume vast quantities of rich foods delivered in thimble-sized portions accompanied by heroic volumes of tangy Teutonic wine. It was Hell.

For Tracy Mooney, a married mother of three in the US, the decision to abandon cyber-sense and invite e-mail spam into her life for a month by participating in a McAfee experiment was a bit of a lark.

When Anthony McCloud graduated from Graceland University in 2000, he didn't have a smidgen of business experience. He didn't know the first thing about business processes, customer service, or the quirks and habits of business workers.

Name a department at Wells Fargo & Company, and it's likely that Avid Modjtabai has held a senior position in it. From online personal finance services to human resources and consumer deposits, Modjtabai has been there, done that in her 14-year tenure at the company. Her experience has not gone unnoticed; in addition to being named one of the "most powerful women in banking" by U.S. Banker, she also received accolades from the San Francisco Business Times as of one of the "100 most influential women in Bay Area business." Elizabeth Garone spoke to Modjtabai about her career and the benefit of moving across functions. Edited excerpts follow.

The only way the corporations that formed the Blog Council on Monday could have further incensed the blogging community would be to have placed the word "Official" in its name.

Executives from 12 large companies, including The Coca-Cola Co., Wells Fargo & Co., Kaiser Permanente, General Motors and Dell, have jointly formed a Blog Council aimed at promoting corporate blogging best practices - a plan that has already elicited skepticism from many in the blogosphere.

Heather Carver faced major dilemmas when she became the IT director at Windsor Unified School District in California one year ago. There was no virus protection, no data backup, and upgrading to current Microsoft technologies would have cost more than US$100,000, half of the district's IT budget. Buying security from Trend Micro to cover all seven schools would have cost US$200,000 a year.

Green computing is a hot-button issue right now, but not all the ideas out there are practical for data centers. "It's 90% hype," says Ben Stewart, senior vice president of facilities planning at Terremark Worldwide. He's dubious about solar and wind power, for example. But Stewart says 10% of the ideas are win-win: Done right, certain green initiatives can increase energy efficiency, reduce carbon emissions and yield savings.