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Meet the "collaborative" consumer

The rise of social media is altering how people shop for everything from movies to food. But is that a social good?

By Jill Allyn Peterson, contributor

FORTUNE -- Collaborative consumption is a concept that can seemingly describe anything from Netflix to New York City's Park Slope Food Co-op. It has been called a "revolution" by "creative entrepreneurs who want to change the world" and while its promoters claim it is MORE

SAP has a new star

The company has been notoriously lagging in software-as-a-service. Enter one energetic and eccentric executive, Lars Dalgaard.

FORTUNE -- SAP's Lars Dalgaard has been called irrepressible, energetic and eccentric (and, according to at least one analyst, a "lunatic"). But he may be just what the stodgy company needs to give it a shot in the cloud.

As nimbler players like Salesforce (CRM) and soon-to-be-public Workday have expanded their cloud offerings and customer base, MORE

Ex-AOL exec Brad Garlinghouse becomes YouSendIt chief

FORTUNE -- More than a decade since Brad Garlinghouse helmed a start-up, the ex-AOL president is in, a way, coming full circle. Only this time, he's joining the file-sending and sharing company YouSendIt as CEO.

Though some had speculated he might go the investor route after his departure from AOL (AOL) last December -- Garlinghouse has invested in several startups over the years and served a brief stint as senior advisor at Silver MORE

How Yahoo can get its mojo back

What if the chaos that is shaking the company could make it stronger?

By Kevin Kelleher, contributor

FORTUNE – The train wreck is over. The damage has been done. Yahoo's perennially troubled board failed to vet the resume of a once-promising CEO. All the company can do now is pick up the pieces and move on. But what exactly does that mean? How does Yahoo move on from here?

Certainly, there is MORE

The PC market's last, best hope

Intel is about to launch a massive campaign touting new thin and light laptops. Will it goose sales?

FORTUNE -- Call it an Ultrabook. Call it a Sleekbook. It's still pretty much a wannabe MacBook Air. But for technology behemoths that count on computers like Intel and Hewlett-Packard, the new crop of thinner laptops are the latest attempt to electroshock demand.

Take Intel (INTC). The Santa Clara-based company is the largest supplier MORE

The other field Facebook wants to revolutionize

The social networking giant is leading a consortium aiming to make data centers cheaper and more efficient.

FORTUNE -- Facebook is known for creating the most popular social networking tool, not designing hardware. But the company has taken a do-it-yourself approach to building out its data centers and the servers and racks that fill them. The result? Data centers that are 38% more efficient and 24% cheaper than average, according to MORE

A master pitchman takes the stage to humanize Facebook

The star of Facebook's slickly produced roadshow video isn't Mark Zuckerberg or Sheryl Sandberg. It is a 29-year-old the world knows little about. That's about to change.

FORTUNE -- The Facebook IPO roadshow is in full swing this week, but most readers will not get a chance to see Mark Zuckerberg pitch his company. The roadshow is reserved for the privileged few -- investment bankers and their well-heeled clients who will MORE

$99 Xbox: Microsoft's killer move

Microsoft won't confirm if it will indeed sell its Xbox for $99 plus a subscription fee. If it did, it could upend the race to dominate the living room.

FORTUNE -- Since the Magnavox Odyssey sold for $75 in the 1970s -- the equivalent of $230 and change today -- video game consoles have been a pricey upfront investment. If a user wanted the latest cutting-edge hardware, it meant putting down MORE

The mistake advertisers are making now

Advertisers on "rogue" sites offering illicit, copyrighted material aren't the kind that tend to follow best practices.

FORTUNE -- Some ad-industry groups are warning against placing advertisements on pirate sites. The Association of National Advertisers and the American Association of Advertising Agencies released a "statement of best practices" on Thursday, which also has the support of the Interactive Advertising Bureau. Adweek declared the statement to be a "major step" in the MORE

Report: Americans still glued to their TVs

Americans spend an extraordinary amount of time watching video. They still watch most of it on "traditional TVs."

FORTUNE -- Americans, unsurprisingly, are still glued to their TVs, according to Nielsen. And when the ratings outfit says "TVs," it means just that: television sets. We're still watching an average of 5 hours of video a day -- 98% of it on a TV set connected to cable or satellite (or an MORE