Stories about: United Parcel Service

As an undercover agent with the US Drug Enforcement Administration and the Food and Drug Administration, Aaron Graham saw firsthand how counterfeit drugs can slip into the pharmaceutical supply chain. Graham, now VP and chief security officer for Purdue Pharma, once posed as the manager of an "institutional pharmacy" selling drugs at a discount to secondary wholesalers who were then supposed to sell them to nursing homes. Soon after he began, his phone started ringing. Dozens of smaller pharmaceutical wholesale companies were calling, desperate to buy his drugs. These secondary or "grey market" wholesalers scour the country and the world for low-price drugs they can sell back to major wholesalers for a profit. In addition to trawling for institutional pharmacies, some secondary wholesalers have been known to purchase counterfeit drugs from criminal organizations in places such as China, Thailand or Colombia.

In the hands of these pioneers, wireless technology is breaking new ground in every sector of the economy, with applications that range from the everyday to the extraordinary

David Drew used to have his own supergroup for IT decision making at 3M: the Information Systems Steering Committee. He had all six business division chiefs in there, along with the top functional leaders, meeting together six times a year to do nothing but jam on IT strategy, endorse IT projects of more than $US1 million and prioritise IT resources

In mid-May this year the local arm of US firm United Parcel Service (UPS) ordered up a solution to a difficult business problem from Australian software developer Eagle Datamation International (EDI) - a long-time provider for UPS. Head office required the UPS Australian operation to alter its billing and other critical internal customer service processes, and the branch needed the solution delivered and operable by July 15.

Mail Boxes Etc. spent US$25 million to position itself as the real world's shipping partner to the virtual e-tail space. One problem: The technology doesn't work.

No standards. Few vendors. Skeptical users. Early adopters of wireless technology had it tough.

While its definitely time to get moving on wireless, it makes sense to take it slow.

There's plenty of hype about chief privacy officers, but some say their main function is PR. Is that such a bad thing?

Nagaraja Srivatsan, vice president of global delivery and head of the mobile enablement practice for Edison, N.J.-based SeraNova, answered readers' questions on CIO.com about how companies can best integrate smart phones, PDAs and pagers into the enterprise

If there's one trait all great Web ventures share, it's this: They make it easy, pleasant, even downright enjoyable for customers to do business with them. Sounds painfully obvious, doesn't it? But, like common sense, it's not all that common. As Patricia Seybold notes in Customers.Com: How to Create a Profitable Business Strategy for the Internet and Beyond (Random House , 1998), too many online businesses still squander too much time and money on everything but providing the ultimate experience for their current and potential customers.

There's a right way and a wrong way to do everything - but that can change from place to place, especially in China.