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Using teleconferencing technology has lately become an obvious and financially practical choice to offset rising business travel expenses. Yet sometimes simple chatting doesn't cut it. There has been growing interest in the notion of online conferencing with a "virtual presence" emphasis, which enables people to share information and their very selves with one another with a stronger sense of near-tangible "face time."

Now that the government has pledged US$700 billion to bail out the financial banking industry and is considering lending $25 billion to help the auto industry avoid bankruptcy, many tech companies may be wondering where to get their hands on government bailout cash. While tech companies may not have the same level of clout among Washington policy makers as AIG or General Motors, some of the industry's biggest players have been hit hard times in recent months and could certainly use a health infusion of cash to help them right their ships. Here's our take on the five biggest tech companies that are most in need of a helping government bail out.

IT infrastructure and services are not the first things to come to mind when you think of Danone Group, the US$3.5 billion company known for its Evian water and Dannon and Stonyfield yogurt brands. But when it comes to packaging and delivering water and yogurt, IT services and the automation they provide are indispensable.

Visa is looking for a few good people to run its next-generation data centers.

Saving money is of paramount importance for CIOs in today's economy, and renegotiating contracts with IT vendors may be one of the best ways to chop expenses.

Last week, Microsoft announced its cloud-computing effort, called Azure. Fitting between Google's and Amazon.com's current offerings, it represents a very big step toward moving applications off the desktop and out of a corporation's own datacenters. Whether or not it will have any traction with corporate IT developers remains to be seen.

In what may be a low-tech answer to a high-tech issue, US election officials say early voting across the nation may have led to fewer Election Day e-voting problems in many states this year.

Despite reports all day long about an assortment of e-voting machine problems in several US states, no massive systemic meltdown occurred.

When the computer industry buys into a buzzword, it's like getting a pop song stuck in your head. It's all you hear. Worse, the same half-dozen questions about the hyped trend are incessantly paraded out, with responses that succeed mainly in revealing how poorly understood the buzzword actually is.

Pamela Smith, a longtime critic of electronic voting machines, is worried more about long lines on Tuesday, election day in the US.

Until September, the US tech industry appeared insulated from the year-long economic slowdown. Most of the 20 largest US tech firms reported solid second-quarter earnings in July and August, and they were projecting continued growth in sales through the year-end. Then Wall Street crashed. Here's the latest word from tech executives about current market conditions and the outlook for the rest of this year.