Edward Cone

About

Senior Writer and author of the Know It All blogEd Cone has worked as a contributing editor at Wired, a staff writer at Forbes, a senior writer for Ziff Davis with Baseline and Interactive Week, and as a freelancer based in Paris and then North Carolina for a wide variety of magazines and papers including the International Herald Tribune, Texas Monthly, and Playboy. He writes an opinion column in his hometown paper, the Greensboro News & Record, and publishes the semi-popular EdCone.com weblog. He lives in North Carolina with his wife, Lisa, two kids, and a dog.

The Marketing of the President 2004

In 1960, television revolutionized national politics. Now, the internet promises to do the same. By moving quickly to embrace web technologies, former vermont governor howard dean has empowered his supporters, raised money and taken the lead over his rivals. Other candidates—and companies—will have to learn to do the same, to win votes or dollars. Zephyr […]

Blogging Down: Not All Sites Catch Fire

Internet campaigning is a bipartisan issue. While Howard Dean is setting the pace online in his quest for the Democratic nomination, Republicans are also active at the electronic grass roots. But the most influential conservative sites are driven more by issues and the party itself than by individual candidates. One of the more effective online […]

Evaluating Software: Proprietary Versus Open Source

TrueLink CTO Scott Metzger created a calculator similar to the downloadable interactive tool on this page to assess whether it would be more valuable to use proprietary software to develop new applications rather than an open-source development language such as Java. The key concern: The lines of new code his staff would have to create […]

Are You Ready to Love Blogging?

The most powerful piece of software inside Microsoft may be a $40 application from a tiny vendor called Userland that Robert Scoble uses to write his weblog. Scoble, part of the Windows marketing team, publishes his personal observations at the “Scobleizer Weblog” http://radio. weblogs.com/0001011. His unedited daily ramblings give the world a window into Microsoft, […]

Microsofts Blog: The Scobleizer

The most powerful piece of software inside Microsoft may be the $40 application from a tiny vendor called Userland that Robert Scoble uses to write his weblog. Scoble, part of the Windows marketing team, publishes his personal observations at the Scobleizer Weblog . His daily ramblings, unedited by corporate brass or media handlers, give the […]

WD-40: Systems Transformation and Brand Expansion

Mike Freemans job was to fix something that wasnt broken. WD-40 Co., where Freeman is president of North American operations, makes WD-40 lubricant spray. For decades, that was all it made, and the San Diego company was expert at getting those iconic blue-and-yellow cans onto its retail customers shelves. But when WD-40 embarked on an […]

Dallas Mavericks: Customer Management

Ken Bonzon keeps a serenity prayer by St. Teresa of Avila taped to his computer monitor. “Let nothing frighten you,” it counsels, which is good advice when your boss is Mark Cuban. As chief information officer of the NBAs Dallas Mavericks, Bonzon works for a technology visionary who is outspoken—and notoriously demanding. “You learn his […]

California Vote Faces Security Flaws

The voting machines that almost derailed the Oct. 7 California recall election are all being replaced. But controversy over voting technology is far from finished in the Golden State—or the rest of the country. For local officials in charge of election systems, the headaches are just beginning. The absence of a clear, unshakable policy on […]

CRM as a Service Comes of Age

Siemens Power Transmission & Distribution was getting nowhere in its search for customer relationship management software. “The investment dollars required for Siebel [Systems] or another large system were a problem,” says Mike Bauer, vice president of sales and marketing of Siemens PT&D, a recently formed unit of the $73 billion German company. “We were stagnant.” […]

Smart Outsourcing

It was the week before Valentines Day — always a crucial time in the flower business — when Web florist Proflowers.com saw that it would need more roses and tulips to meet the orders it expected to get in the hours ahead. “We had to reroute a freight airplane based on what we saw coming,” […]