"Don DePalma has provided us with the most comprehensive guide for corporations to compete in the era of globalization. Business Without Borders is an outstanding contribution to managing in the global era, with practical information on the skills and knowledge needed to become an effective...

As night settled on April 20, 2010, a series of explosions rocked Deepwater Horizon, the immense semisubmersible drilling platform leased by British Petroleum, located 40 miles off the Louisiana coast. The ensuing inferno claimed 11 lives, and it would rage uncontained for two days, until its wreckage sank to a final resting place nearly a...

In a city where fog lovers, strippers, and people with short attention spans all lay claim to their own fi lm festivals, and where starting your day with a potent Irish coffee is not considered anything out of the ordinary, it’s pretty much guaranteed you’ll have a great time. Where else in the world is it considered good, clean...

Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) is the next version of the protocol that is used for communication among devices of all types on the Internet. IPv6 has been in existence for many years, but recently the deployment of IPv6 has accelerated greatly in the enterprise. IPv6 has been under continuous development and is maturing as real-world...

In the field of IT, the markets, business activities, needs and requirements of internal and external service providers and customers are changing in ever-shortening cycles. This forces companies to increase their organizational flexibility not only as far as their structure is concerned but also with regard to established business...

Welcome to the proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Scientific and Statistical Database Management held in Portland, Oregon, where it celebrated its 30th birthday. The first incarnation of SSDBM (then called the Workshop on Statistical Database Management) took place in Menlo Park, California, in December 1981. Since...

This volume contains the papers presented at the 14th International Workshop on Approximation Algorithms for Combinatorial Optimization Problems (APPROX 2011) and the 15th International Workshop on Randomization and Computation (RANDOM 2011), which took place concurrently in Princeton University, USA, during August 17–19,...

While this second edition was being written, Microsoft and Nokia formally announced their partnership and...

Unified Communications and Collaboration is on the so-called “Hot List” in any forum wherein people are discussing communications and ways to better stay in touch. This book is aimed at explaining the concepts, ideas, and capabilities behind Presence, which is likely one of the least understood and most underestimated features in...

The primary goal of this book is to present to the scientific and management communities a selection of applications using more recent Soft Computing (SC) and Computing with Words and Perceptions (CWP) models and techniques meant to solve the economics and financial problems. The selected examples could also serve as a starting point...

In the last decade, multi-agent systems have both become widely applied and also increasingly complex. The applications include the use of agents as automous decision makers in often safety-critical, dangerous, or high impact scenarios (traffic control, autonomous satellites, computational markets). The complexity arises from the fact...

One of the most debated consequences regarding the increased availability and use of information and communication technologies (ICTs), especially since the early 1990s, have been their impact on economic growth. Generally speaking, ICT can serve to reduce transaction costs at all levels of a commercial transaction. With the emergence...