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The InformationWeek January 2008 Archive « December 2007 | Main | February 2008 » |
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VMs On The Edge
What started as a basic VM test has taken on a life of its own; it looks like we'll be walking the virtualization talk, pushing a VM host out near the edge of my production network. Wish me luck ...
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Does This Storage Make My Butt Look Big?
This is a curious link to follow if you agree that women as storage buyers:
A) Are aliens
B) Constitute a completely different species
C) Need to be spoken to like prostitutes (the "Pretty Woman" Julia Roberts kind, not that Theresa Russell sort)
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Toward Buffer Overflow Extinction
The first time a buffer overflow was used as part of an attack on information systems, at least the best I can find, was the infamous 1988 Morris worm. While the Morris worm propagated across Unix, buffer overflows have been the bane of Windows security for years. Microsoft is furthering its efforts to push this problem into the history books.
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The Coolest Thing I Saw At DEMO
Every year at Demo there's one presenter that captures my imagination and actually seems to be providing something that I will find useful. This year, while Skyfire showed off the beta of an intriguing new mobile browser and BitGravity displayed its power new network platform for high-definition video, the choice was easy: Silobreaker.
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Life After CIO
Gail Farnsley, CIO of Cummins, is leaving her post to create and oversee a new technology education effort at Purdue University. So there is life after the CIO position, after all.
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When Criminal Intent Lurks One Cube Away
The ongoing Société Général fraud story is a case study in insider threats. The costs, north of $7 billion for the French bank, are high and likely to go higher. For the rest of us, it leaves an uneasy question: Do we have a rogue in our organization? And if so, what do we do about it?
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Join Us For GridTalk With Futurist And Science-Fiction Writer Karl Schroeder
Join us in Second Life and on the Internet Friday at noon Pacific time for a live Q&A with Karl Schroeder, a futures researcher, blogger at WorldChanging.com and science-fiction writer.
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Build-A-PC Chronicles: Reviving A Dusty Old Case
Embarking on a PC construction project is the opposite of building a new relationship. With the latter, the first flush of discovery is the fun part. In contrast, gathering up all the components for the computer is an expensive drag. Nothing is less enticing than picking out a case. The difference nowadays is that the PC's enclosure used to be an afterthought. Now, with hot-running modern processors, it's critical.
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Dirty, Sexy Data Centers
Solar and wind technologies are as popular as Tom Brady and his sparkling choppers. Everybody wants some. Sadly, the green initiatives investors should be pushing for even harder are as glamorous as snaggle-toothed Nanny McPhee: data center efficiencies.
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So Open Source Is Mainstream -- Now What?
This may not be "the year of Linux on the desktop" -- and who knows, maybe it is -- but there's little to no question that this is a pivotal year for open source as a mainstream economic phenomenon in the tech world, as my colleague Charles Babcock has indicated. My big question is: what next?
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Yeehaw For Open Access! C Block Reaches $4.6B Reserve
Today, the FCC's 700-MHz auction got really interesting. The C Block, which spans the entire country in two 11-MHz pairs, met its FCC-mandated reserve price of $4.6 billion. This means that the winning bidder must provide open access on a portion of its network to any compatible device. Google gets what it wants, but is it the high bidder?
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Apple Users Are Smug Control Freaks, Says Study
Researchers from Internet ad network Mindset Media say the Mac guy in the "I'm a Mac/I'm a PC" commercial is typical of Mac users: superior, self-satisfied, control freaks, perfectionists, politically and socially liberal -- and satisfied with their purchases.
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Best Laid Plans, Or Cables...
On Tuesday night, two unrelated undersea cables in the Mediterranean were cut within hours of each other, disrupting Internet and phone service to Egypt and, more significantly, to India, the call center capital of the world.
Continue reading "Best Laid Plans, Or Cables......"
What The...?!? Garmin Enters Cell Phone Market With iPhone Look-Alike
Cell phones must really be the in technology this year. Garmin -- you know, maker of GPS hardware -- has leaped into the cell phone business from out of nowhere with the nuvifone. Announced at an event in NYC last night, this wunderdevice has it all: GPS, 3.5G, Wi-Fi, gobs of Google services, and a touch screen-based user interface.
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Dog Food Is Important, But Don't Forget The Dog
Long ago, Microsoft verbified the term "dog food" to describe the act of using its own products within Microsoft, as they are being developed. Dogfooding helps developers make sure the product really works the way it's supposed to work, on real computers with real users trying to get real work done. Yet all that focus on the dog food ignores the importance of the dogs.
Continue reading "Dog Food Is Important, But Don't Forget The Dog..."
Federal Government To Spend $30 Billion On New Security Efforts
One of the most interesting IT security news stories to hit this week is that the Bush administration is apparently proposing $6 billion (maybe this is an increase on existing spending. That's not yet clear) be invested to shore up federal network security next year, and up to $30 billion across seven years. This is good news. Maybe.
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Continuity's RecoveryGuard Reveals DR Flaws
Today's large IT environments are dynamic places; applications, volumes, and file systems are added, deleted, and reallocated on SANs on a daily basis. The disaster recovery plan, on the other hand, is updated and tested on an annual basis. As a result, most organizations think their data is better protected than it really is.
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Dell + Google = First Android Phone?
The Gphone has been resurrected and the rumor mills are running rampant with this one. The latest scuttlebutt is that Google is partnering with Dell for the first ever Android-powered handset. According to people in the know, word will be delivered from on high during the Mobile World Congress next month. Is this one for real?
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DEMO Update: The Problems With 'Me-Centric' Search
Among the presenters in the final stretch of the 2008 Demo conference were a pair of companies that are focused on search results geared specifically to the preferences, needs, and personality of the searcher. It was apparent that that's not necessarily such a great thing.
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Next-Gen Collaboration Takes Stage At DEMO
In the after-lunch lull at Demo 08, a group of companies displayed new sets of collaboration technologies that can transform the way companies connect and collaborate remotely.
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Put A Brick In It
"IT managers continue to place a premium on system reliability as they grapple with storage capacity concerns," started a press release in this morning's inbox. This was the key (and altogether unsurprising) data point of a vendor survey. Why do vendors bother with these blazing insights into the glaringly obvious?
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Web 2.0 Gone Awry: Tracking A Pizza Online?
Alert! Alert! Useless implementation of Web 2.0 Technology in progress. Alert!
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Open Source 'Movement' Becoming A Gold Rush
I see references to the open source "movement," as if it were a cohesive ideological gathering, like the Labor Movement of the 1930s or maybe the Wobblies. I agree there are certain shared values among open source developers and a favored way of doing things, but I've always doubted the political agenda. After the $1 billion Sun/MySQL deal, however, my doubts have been erased. It's clear there is a movement -- and it's headed toward the bank.
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The Four (Non) Myths Of IT Security
Some of the reports and surveys security firm Symantec has provided over the years I've found both useful and informative. This most recent report, which hit today, isn't one of them.
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Where's Your Credit Card Data?
PCI regulations require companies to protect credit card numbers. But first you have to know where they are. Here's what I've learned from retailers and PCI auditors about step one of PCI compliance.
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It's The Talent, Not Just The Technology
Something I've noted in passing about the recent spate of open-source acquisitions -- Nokia and Trolltech, Sun and MySQL AB -- deserves to be expounded on at length. What's being bought here is not the software, but the talent behind it. The software is free, or as free as this sort of thing gets. Talent is priceless. That's what's being bought and sold here.
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Are Enterprises Finally Waking Up To RSS?
It seems like yesterday I was downloading Newsgator's Outlook-friendly tool to quench my thirst for all the RSS subscriptions I could find.
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Amy Winehouse Drives A Top EPA Official 'Nuts'
The deputy EPA administrator has used his latest blog to inform the public not about global warming, alternative energy, or carbon credits. Nope, he's ranting that Amy Winehouse's "incredibly self-destructive behavior" drives him "nuts." Huh?
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AMD's Bug-Free Barcelona Is Ahead Of Schedule
System builders and end-users still troubled over the fallout from the bug in AMD's quad-core Barcelona and Phenom processors can take comfort from some good news. Sources close to AMD tell me that the new B3 stepping, which corrects the problems via a silicon fix, is ahead of schedule and things are looking good. Here are the details.
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Consumers Are Not Smart Enough For Smartphones
You have one chance to guess what the most-returned gifts were this holiday season. If you guessed smartphones, you'd be right. A new survey from Opinion Research Corp. shows that 21% of gifted smartphones were returned to the store. The reason? Inability to understand the product setup process. Perhaps smartphones aren't ready for prime time after all.
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Steve Jobs Reassures Employees After Apple Stock Slide
Apple chief executive Steve Jobs sent an e-mail to employees to reassure them that Apple investors will soon recoup their losses, and more, according to a report in AppleInsider.com. "As you can see, we have outperformed many other blue-chip tech companies, including Google," he said. "I continue to believe that our fundamentals -- our remarkable people, our clear and focused strategy, our new product pipeline, our 200+ retail stores, our $18 billion of cash in the bank with no debt, etc., will serve us well in the coming months and years."
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Intel A Green Giant
Intel is now the single largest corporate purchaser of green power in the United States, according to the EPA.
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What Matters Most About Your Job In Uncertain Times?
Do you expect your paycheck to grow much fatter this year? Maybe you're just glad you get a paycheck, especially with all the gloom and doom about the economy. If that's the case, then maybe other job traits or perks -- besides money -- are moving higher up on your priority list right now when it comes to work.
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Coming Soon: Better Mobile Linux-Powered Handsets
This year is going to be a big one for mobile Linux. There are at least two international organizations pushing it forward, and Google is providing a lot of cred to mobile Linux by choosing it as the backbone of its Android platform. Today, Azingo Mobile is the first to offer a full mobile Linux suite to handset makers and network operators that is based on the LiMo Foundation's specs.
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At DEMO, Re-Rebranded Flypaper Aims To Be The YouTube Of Online Presentations
In the process of reinventing itself, Flypaper Studio wants to reinvent the way people create online presentations. And its ambitions go beyond merely giving users the tools to do that; the company plans to host multimedia presentations for everyone to see.
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vThere: A Fine Model Mashup
Sentillion saw a business opportunity, talked to its customers, and mashed up a novel solution to a problem that already had a couple of "answers."
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When Superstars Falter
If tennis ace Roger Federer were a tech company right now, he might be VMware. Long the dominant player in his sport, he got a nasty dose of reality at last week's Australian Open. Hang on and let me torture this sports metaphor just a little longer -- likewise, VMware got knocked off its do-no-wrong perch after Monday's earnings report and its forecast about inroads by the competition.
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At DEMO, The Pen Is Mightier Than The Cord
Like many people, I tend to zone out when I hear the phrase "pen-based computing." Plenty of variations on the concept have been tried, including the LeapFrog Fly, which was aimed at the "tween" market. But when Livescribe showed off its latest version at Demo this afternoon, I was impressed.
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Panic Mode: Are CIOs Being Pressured To Cut?
What's up with IT budgets? Has all the talk about recession put CEOs into panic mode and increased pressure on CIOs to cut costs? If so, what's on the chopping block?
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Full Nelson: Recommind's Enterprise Search On TechWebTV
Groupware. Portals. Enterprise search. I'm not saying they're irrelevant, I just sort of forgot about them. Like tricycles, ER, and Oasis; the use of the word "bashful." But they're all relevant in some way (except probably Oasis), especially enterprise search: Witness -- speaking of bashful -- Microsoft's recent purchase of Fast (see video below for a fun perspective from Steve Ballmer at Web 2.0 on Microsoft and search).
Continue reading "Full Nelson: Recommind's Enterprise Search On TechWebTV..."
DEMO Update: Skyfire Debuts New Mobile Browser
With all the transformation occurring in the mobile and wireless market -- with powerful new devices and established mobile browsers jostling for users' attention -- it's an interesting time for a new mobile browser to appear. That's what happened today at Demo.
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Are You SCAP Ready?
In case you missed it, about a year ago the Office of Management and Budget issued policy memorandum M-07-11, aka the Implementation of Commonly Accepted Security Configurations for Windows Operating Systems. Essentially, this mandates that all federal agency systems must adhere to the Federal Desktop Core Configuration (FDCC) by February 2008. That's this Friday.
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Old Scheduling Dog Shows DEMO A New Trick
We often hear that business technology must look and feel more like personal technology, and Demo's kick-off presentation came from a company that's moving in that direction. TimeTrade Systems, whose enterprise scheduling software is used by 300 companies, demonstrated an innovative scheduler for individual users.
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Engineering Content Management For A Web 2.0 World
If you think we're entering a recession, you wouldn't know it from talking to Alfresco's CEO John Powell.
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Green-For-Profit At DEMO '08
Can green business be good business? Two companies highlighted at Demo '08 this week are foregoing the not-for-profit model. One has unveiled a smarter charger for consumer electronics, the other tracks and shares users' energy-saving actions.
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Apple: The Most Hated Company On The Internet
I was going to post this blog about why Apple is the most hated company on the Internet first thing yesterday. But my Mac crashed and ate the post, so I spent most of the day re-doing my work. I think that might be a sign.
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Poking Cisco In The Eye
Cisco frowns on resellers of used network hardware because it doesn't get a cut of aftermarket sales. Network Hardware Resale (NHR), a prominent reseller, is going a step further by offering an alternative to Cisco's SMARTnet maintenance service -- a key revenue source for the networking giant.
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A Chat With Movable Type's Anil Dash
What with Six Apart's blogging/CMS software Movable Type now released in an open source edition, I decided to go directly to someone at the company -- namely, VP Anil Dash -- and talk to him about where his company's headed. Movable Type's become one of my personal open source case studies, partly because I use the program myself (as does InformationWeek) and because I've been curious how it would fare after releasing a fully open source iteration of its product.
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Point. Click. Phish.
Are you ready to launch your own phishing scam, but don't know where to start? Too tired from your day job to copy write your own fraudulent e-mails? Or, are you like millions of others who just don't know how to leverage Facebook or Orkut for illicit profit? These are no longer problems for you.
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Hackers Enable Over-The-Air Firmware Updates For iPhone
Once again, hackers are a step ahead of Apple and AT&T. Users of unlocked iPhones that are running firmware 1.1.1 or 1.1.2 can upgrade to 1.1.3 over the air directly through the installer.app. Maybe hacker ingenuity is why one-quarter of all iPhone users are unlocking their devices.
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Analyst: Motorola Quitting Handset Business
I've heard my fair share of wacky predictions from analysts. Though I've been hard on Motorola this past year, I think Nomura International analyst Richard Windsor is a little off the mark when he suggested that Motorola might ditch its mobile handset business rather than attempt to resurrect it. But can Motorola actually turn itself around?
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At DEMO, Microsoft Keeps A Watchful Eye
At the Demo conference this week, dozens of entrepreneurs will vie for the attention of investors, customers, and the media. Microsoft is none of those things, yet it's a platinum sponsor of the event. Why? Microsoft is looking to bring more up-and-coming companies into its fold.
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CommVault Watches Your Backups
CommVault's new Remote Operations Management Service (ROMS) will watch your backups for you, assuming, of course, you use CommVault's Galaxy backup program. And if you spring for the diamond level, a human being will even call you in the middle of the night to discuss what went wrong.
Backup administrator is a thankless job at best. People only notice when something goes wrong and then they’re breathing down your back, acting like 6-year-olds in the back seat, saying "When will we be back up?" instead of "Are we there yet?" As a result, most small and midsize IT departments stick the new guy with being "Backup Monkey."
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Press Release Roundup
Today was one of those days that makes you wonder, 'just how may PR firms are working the virtualization sector?'
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Whoops: $73 Billion In Fraudulent Trades Just Slipped By Us
While there's no hard evidence yet released on what could prove to be one of the largest frauds in financial history, some details are starting to surface. It's my hunch that this case, other than its financial magnitude, will not prove much different than previous insider frauds.
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Perplexing Nexus
If I were an IT vendor like Cisco and competing with Juniper (telecom) and Brocade (storage), a new Nexus platform and accompanying OS might make a lot of sense, splitting the difference as they do between these two backbone switching markets, each so hungry for terabyte and petabyte capacities. But if I were a storage buyer, I'd probably yawn.
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Demo Preview: Let's Get Liquid
I just touched down in windy Palm Springs for the 2008 Demo conference, which doesn't actually start up until tomorrow morning, but it's already clear that, here in the desert, the big buzzword for this year's startup showcase is "liquid."
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Bill Gates For Senate
Nostradamus I'm not. Most of my past tech-industry predictions have fallen flat: Sun Microsystems didn't buy Apple, Apple hasn't acquired Motorola, and OS/2 never beat out Windows. But here's one prognostication you can take to the bank: Sometime after he retires from Microsoft, when being a world-class philanthropist begins to get a wee bit boring, Bill Gates will run for public office.
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Best Buy Creates International CIO Position
Electronics retailer Best Buy has tapped a former Accenture consultant as the new CIO of its international division. In today's global economy, is an international CIO a necessity or a redundancy?
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Verizon Makes A Killing On Wireless Data Revenue
Verizon Wireless posted its fourth-quarter and full-year results for 2007 today. The numbers don't quite match those of AT&T, but they're not too shabby. Among the many positives is the fact that its data revenue for the year jumped 65%.
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Xsigo I/O Virtualization On TechWebTV
This is taking the virtualization thing just a bit too far! First we've got servers being virtualized, then storage, and now Xsigo, among others, (I'll come back to this) is virtualizating I/O. But that's not all: CEO Ashok Krishnamurthi was stuck in some traffic bottleneck (oh, the irony) so he left his StartupCity TV filming in the hands of marketing manager Kelly Ciccone and damn if she didn't do a great job. Virtualized interview, indeed.
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Microsoft's Financial Results Have Flash, When You Can Find Them
Last week, Microsoft announced some impressive financial results from 2007. I thought I would drill down a bit into the financials, so it seemed natural to go to Microsoft's investor page. I found a lot of interesting things there, even before I got a chance to read the annual report.
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Startup Tackles E-Mail E-Discovery
Fortiva has launched an archiving service to address e-discovery for e-mail. The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) demand that enterprises involved in litigation be able to produce relevant e-mails within prescribed time limits.
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IT Security Vs. Censorship
In a memo distributed to employees, Tribune Co. owner Sam Zell called for all of Tribune's business units to yank the use of content filters. Now, I'm not sure anyone, myself included, would list content filters among their most favorite things. Yet, I'm not so sure Zell made a good move -- at least not for Tribune's IT security.
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Nokia Snags Trolltech
The latest open source acquisition just came down the pike, and from the outside it's one of the unlikelier pairings imaginable: Mobile handset vendor Nokia just made a $150+ million offer for open source software makers Trolltech.
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Happy Data Privacy Day!
We're less than a week away from finding out whether Punxsutawney Phil predicts six more weeks of winter. While we wait for him to make his annual weather forecast, we've got time to squeeze in another holiday. You may not be as familiar with this one -- there's no parades, gift-giving or time off from work. Frankly, it's a shame we have to acknowledge it at all. But it's a testament of the kind of world we live in. Today is Data Privacy Day.
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Skyfire Mobile Browser Succeeds Where Others Fail
It looks like 2008 is shaping up to be the year for the mobile browser market to really come of age. Not only do we have Minimo in alpha stage from Mozilla, but Google is also working on a new browser for its yet-to-be-released Android platform. While work is still underway on those two mobile browsers, I was able to see a demo of Skyfire's new mobile browser. Is it any good? Let's just say Minimo and the Android browser have their work cut out for them. Oh, and Skyfire topples the iPhone's Safari browser's supremacy.
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Open Source Funding Signals CMS Shakeup
The last few years have seen a ton of movement in the open source software market. And the recent string of acquisitions are sure to shake up the business of content management.
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Full Nelson: Cisco’s Nexus -- Because They Can
Last century when Cisco started buying companies like an Orange County Housewife with a Platinum card in Silicon factory, the fool-proof way to sniff out the acquisition’s purpose was to start with the assumption that Cisco believed the acquired company would help it sell more routers.
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How To Fix The Windows Vista Bootloader
The folks over at NeoSmart Technologies have posted an interesting document on how to deal with Windows Vista's finicky bootloader.
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iPhone 1.1.3 Update Raises Text-Messaging Bug
The latest iPhone firmware update, pushed out by Apple in mid-January, is raising a raft of bug reports on Apple's own iPhone forums, with dozens of posters complaining that it messes up SMS (text message) conversations, causing them to appear out of order. The glitch is all the more vexing given that the 1.1.3 update was supposed to help iPhone users send SMS messages to multiple people. For Apple's part, it has posted a support document admitting that "SMS messages may be displayed in the wrong order," but it's not calling it a bug.
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A10 Networks Steps Up, As Juniper Steps Out
While Juniper Networks closes down its DX line of load-balancing appliances, market newcomer A10 Networks is closing deals. A10 president and CEO Lee Chen says his company has signed four new accounts in the past month.
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Recent Vista Metrics: Don't Be Fooled
Microsoft's security strategy director, Jeff Jones' recent report card bestowing high marks on the security of his employer's most recent operating system release has garnered plenty of ink. But what's it mean?
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D'oh! I Should Have Made A Backup #1
I ran into a video on CNN today that is one of the clearest arguments for a good backup scheme anyone could make. As described in the report at http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/crime/2008/01/24/pkg.disgruntled.employee.wtlv, an administrative assistant at a storefront architecture firm in Jacksonville, Fla., saw a want ad for an administrative assistant with her bosses phone number listed. Thinking she was being fired, she went to the office at midnight and spent the next three hours deleting all the data from the office server. Her boss told the police the seven years of architectural drawings and other files she deleted were worth $2.5 million dollars. Even the police officer in the report realized they should have had a backup.
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Imagining A Post-Motorola World
Richard Windsor, the London-based Nomura Securities analyst who has not always been bullish on Nokia, broadcast an interesting research note this morning in which he says the world's No. 1 handset maker "has evolved into a new beast."
"Rivals have been contemptuously swept to one side," Windsor adds, "leaving Nokia as the undisputed king of the jungle." Noting that Nokia's market share has broken the 40% plateau, Windsor upgrades the stock to "buy" and forecasts a share price of $42.50, 18% above its current price.
This rave is particularly noteworthy in light of a separate analysis yesterday from John Devlin, research director for the mobile technologies group at IMS Research, who asks, "What if Motorola exits the handset business?"
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EMC Flash Move Catches Industry Offguard
Cisco executives have often said they don't need to be first to market with any technology. And we've heard EMC downplay the first-to-market advantage. Still, it's remarkably clear that EMC caught everyone flatfooted with its decision to be the first major storage vendor to add solid-state disk technology to its products.
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Connecting With InformationWeek On Twitter, Facebook, And Our Forums
InformationWeek is slopping over the edges of our Internet domain, connecting with this new-fangled "social networking" technology all the kids are talking about nowadays. We're expanding our presence on Facebook and Twitter, getting ready to beef up our forums, and making plans to connect on other social networks as well.
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Beauty, Sex, Love, And Your Mobile Phone
That’s the hook for a mobile phone virus that at least one antivirus vendor says is currently spreading in the wild.
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The Secret Life Of Cell Phones
Green technology isn't exactly filled with tales of heart-stopping adventure and miscreant behavior, but a new series of environmental videos sure makes it sound that way.
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Quest Goes All The Way With Vizioncore
Vizioncore, a startup that provides disaster recovery and backup software for virtual environments, has been bought up by Quest Software. Quest has had a controlling stake in Vizioncore since 2005.
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Open Source License Auditing Tools Still Need Someone Knowledgeable Behind The Wheel
Yesterday my colleague Charles Babcock brought us the news about HP's release of the FOSSology tool, a license-auditing application that promises to help organizations cut through the thickets of software licenses that can come with open source programs. When you get down to it, though, it's just a tool: the real decisions about software licensing have to and always must be made by warm, breathing bodies.
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AMD Won't Comment On IBM Takeover Reports
The latest chatter surrounding AMD is talk of a possible acquisition by IBM. That thread began making its way around on Wednesday, via a Reuters story quoting a Wall Street Analyst. AMD, for its part, told me it won't comment. My take is that acquisition isn't in the cards right now, but it's highly likely that AMD and IBM will expand their already existing partnership, which began in 2003 when the two joined forces on the development of 65-nm chip-fabrication technology.
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1.15 Billion Mobile Phones Sold In 2007. 2008? Not So Much
After record sales for the last few years, the growth rate of new people lining up to purchase cell phones is beginning to wane. 2007 saw a 12.4% increase in the number of handsets sold. The numbers this year and beyond likely won't be so rosy, says IDC.
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The CIO And The Consumer Effect, Part 2
The problem with a tech savvy public is that its expectations concerning immediate and direct interaction have been raised, and that puts a burden on companies to be more connected electronically with their customers, partners, and employees. But companies are slow to accommodate that trend, much less exploit it, according to the results of a new survey by Accenture.
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Dimwit Thieves Try To Steal iPhones, Get Caught
In a second major NYC mobile phone theft this week, two truck drivers tried to make off with $150,000 worth of iPhones bound for Hong Kong. They opened a box containing 300 iPhones and replaced the gadgets with pounds of paper to simulate the weight. Hong Kong airline workers noticed that one box didn't look quite right and called in the cops. Can you say, "iDummies"?
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Can Sun Make Dolphins Fly? It Probably Shouldn't
When Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz wrote the headline, "Helping Dolphins Fly," it set off a chain reaction. He was referring, of course, to Sun's acquisition of MySQL. The dolphin's image is the trademark of the open source database company. What's going to happen when MySQL is folded into Sun? SunnySQL, suggested one blogger, Evil_Work, who was no doubt inspired by Schwartz' flight of fancy. And the excess was just getting started.
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FCoE Enigma Wrapped In A Riddle
And buried inside a mystery: It's where my mind goes when the subject turns to Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE). And apparently I'm not alone.
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SunGard on Virtualization? 'Been Doing It For Years'
I spoke with Don Norbeck out of Wayne, Pa., this morning. He's director of product development for SunGard Availability Services, though a more appropriate title might be SunGard Virtualization Guru. Or Evangelist.
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Hey Joe, What Are You Doing With That Resume In Your Hand?
A buddy of mine called today. He's (we'll call him Joe) chief security officer at a fairly large public company in the health field. I hadn't spoken with Joe in a while, and he was sounding somewhat down. "What's wrong, Joe?" I asked.
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Weather Channel Mobile: Stormy Clouds Looming
The Weather Channel launched a new version of its Web site for mobile phones, and even included a site optimized for the iPhone. The generic mobile site is exactly what you need from a weather site and completely surpasses the iPhone-optimized site in usability. In fact, the iPhone site is so convoluted, it's more useful to just simply go to Weather.com. How can the optimized site fail so miserably?
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Sad Day For Radio Row As Harvey's 45th Street Store Closes
If you remember the tech world before the Internet destroyed (I mean, democratized and improved) everything, then you're probably nostalgic for the days when audio electronics was hot.
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A Windows 7 Early Arrival May Mean Vista's Early Demise
This week has brought more rumblings about the successor to Windows Vista, currently known by its "Windows 7" code name. It's still not clear what information is fact and what is fiction, but there are a few hints that it may arrive earlier than its previously expected date of 2010.
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Nokia Juggernaut Plows Forward
Can anything stop the international powerhouse that is Nokia? It posted its fourth quarter numbers, and in stark contrast with Motorola, Nokia's profits surged 44% and its worldwide market share reached 40%. It appears as though the year-long internal reorganization has paid off in spades. Nokia's mobile phone business is firing on all cylinders, and it's packing a V-16.
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An Open Source Nightmare: What If It Ain't 'Open' No More?
Most of my nightmares tend to be mundane nonsense about being late for school. Folks in the open source community have nightmares about open source products becoming closed source properties. That's nightmarish, to be sure, but I have to ask how much of the nightmare is not wholly real.
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CyberWar! Not So Much
It's looking more like the distributed denial-of-service attacks that crippled the Web site of the Estonian Reform Party last spring were not the result of grim-faced Russian warriors vigorously clicking their mice. No.
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IBM Hints At FileNet 2.0
Is it just a marketing veneer or is IBM really getting serious about integrating the social Web into its enterprise content management stack?
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Backup Appliance Replication -- Boon Or Boondoggle
Traditionally, your options for getting data off-site for disaster recovery were limited to shipping tapes or real-time data replication. Since tape shipping results in recovery point objectives (RPOs) and recovery time objectives (RTOs) of hours at best, and days in most cases, and real-time replication is expensive, there was a real lack of a middle ground.
As de-duplicating backup appliances, including those from Sepaton, Quantum, Data Domain, and FalconStor (including OEMs from Copan to EMC and Sun) started to support the replication of de-duplicated data, that middle ground may be here.
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Trusted Web Site? Not So Fast
It’s not been a great year for Web security, so far. First we learn that HackerSafe isn't so hacker safe, after all. Then we find out that hackers have found a way to automatically redirect most home routers to wherever they wish. And now it seems that so-called legitimate Web sites may not be so "legitimate" (or at least safe) after all.
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No iSCSI Love From Apple
I'm not ready to drop $200 for a Leopard-friendly iSCSI initiator for the test lab. Aside from writing our own (which won't happen) it looks like Atto Technology's Xtend SAN is the only game in town.
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Anti-Leadership Vaccine At Red Hat; Is Whitehurst The Answer?
Oracle strips out Red Hat logos and offer its own Linux? Red Hat refused to be provoked. Novell wants to cozy up to Microsoft? That's a fellow Linux distributor's affair. Microsoft has patents that govern parts of Linux? No tough rejoinder from Red Hat. Now Jim Whitehurst has arrived on the scene as the new CEO. He's an engaging and experienced manager. And he's going to need all his skills to find an antidote to Red Hat's anti-leadership vaccine.
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I Have A Bad Feeling About This
And unfortunately, it's a feeling I've learned to trust: Humor and IT do not make for the best match. Ditto sex and IT, though catch me sometime late at a tradeshow and I might be persuaded to recount the one about the desktop support guy fired by a local government entity for using up more than a quarter of the agency's server capacity with porn he'd stored.
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Music To Lead Mobile Content Uptake?
Juniper Research's latest report says music will continue to drive mobile content adoption. I have to ask, has anyone at Juniper ever used mobile music services?
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Intel Blog Warns Of Multicore Crisis
No, it's not what you think. There's no hardware problem with dual- and quad-core processors. The alarm an Intel blogger has sounded is a warning to software developers. This doesn't make it any less serious; here's the deal.
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Drive-By Pharming: This Nasty Attack Technique Looks Significant
The first time I learned of the concept of drive-by pharming was when reading about a presentation given by application security expert Jeremiah Grossman at Black Hat in mid-2006. It's a concerning attack technique, not just because it enables an attacker to do nasty things, but also because of how passively Web users can become victimized. Until very recently, this attack was merely theoretical.
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Who's Afraid Of A Little Recession?
CEOs are, according to a study by PricewaterhouseCoopers released at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Should CIOs be?
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Leaky Nuke Lab Is Poor Endorsement For A Security Product
A new startup has licensed technology from Los Alamos National Laboratory to help enterprises respond to security incidents. But does the company really want to be associated with a lab that routinely mishandles nuclear weapons secrets?
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Risking Innovation, And The Nature Of The "Should"
An article ran a couple of days ago in the New York Times (whose coverage of technology can be spotty), entitled "The Risk of Innovation: Will Anyone Embrace It?" by G. Pascal Zachary, a Stanford journalism professor. The thesis was pretty straightforward: "Great innovations have foundered over human stubbornness." Just because you build it, that doesn't mean they will come. (And should they?)
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36,000 T-Mobile Phones Pull A Houdini
Over the weekend some less-than-legal entrepreneurs raided a warehouse where T-Mobile stores some of its mobile phones. According to T-Mobile, they bandits made off with about $8.2 million worth of Sidekick messaging devices. T-Mobile is pursuing the thieves aggressively.
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Bank Failure Spawns New Regulations
Few may have noticed, but during the real-world summer stock slump Ginko Financial, a bank within Second Life, went bust. And ever since its failure, Second Life citizen complaints of interest-rate scams seem to have soared. "Since the collapse of Ginko Financial in August 2007, Linden Lab has received complaints about several in-world "banks" defaulting on their promises. These banks often promise unusually high rates of L$ return, reaching 20%, 40%, or even 60% annualized, reads a recent blog post from the virtual world operator, Linden Lab.
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EMC Takes Mozy To The Enterprise
It seemed like a strange fit when enterprise storage giant EMC bought Berkeley Data Systems, operators of the Mozy consumer online backup service. After all, many, if not most, of Mozy's users were taking advantage of the free plan that allowed them to backup up to 2 GB of data. These obviously aren't the same people that make multimillion dollar investments in Symmetrix.
Today it starts to make sense as EMC announced that MozyEnterprise will run on its storage-as-a-service platform EMC Fortress.
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SaaS: Diamond Or Dud?
Why rent when you can buy? Why lease when you can own? My accountant's smacked me around pretty good on both these questions over the years. Luckily we're not the target market for EMC's new online backup service, or other offerings envisioned under its newly formed software-as-a-service division.
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Microsoft To Startups: Join Us
Microsoft added more than 30 companies to its Startup Accelerator Program this week. Which is kind of like the Federal Reserve's three-quarters of a percent cut in a key interest rates Tuesday ... some might think it's too little too late.
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InformationWeek Adds First Facebook Apps
You've asked for it; you've been waiting for it. Well, even if that's not true, we've got some new -- and possibly even useful -- apps for all you dedicated Facebook time-wasters out there. Our first two Facebook apps are the InformationWeek Blog Update and the InformationWeek News Update.
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A Virtual Windows Garden Of Eden
Yesterday brought quite a bit of virtualization news on both the consumer and business fronts. Microsoft finally decriminalized the use of Windows Vista Home products in a virtual machine, and made a major push for virtualization in the corporate world. Apple got into the act by supporting 64-bit windows in its Boot Camp product. Yet there are still a few things you can't virtualize.
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In Davos, YouTube Is On The Agenda
What do Robert Scoble, Bono, and the prime minister of Hungary have in common? They might all be watching you on YouTube before the week is out.
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DirecTV Enables Remote DVR Scheduling From Mobile Phones
In this hyper-connected age, smartphones are becoming the universal remote for everything in life, both professional and personal. DirecTV subscribers can now use their mobile phone to schedule their DVR if they forgot to set it up before leaving the house. Is there anything mobile phones can't do?
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Vote. Get Your Identity Stolen
Fortunately, the stolen notebook was recovered. Unfortunately, it's now up to the forensics experts to determine if any of the data, including the names and Social Security numbers of register voters, was accessed or tampered with. I'm talking about the notebook that was allegedly stolen from the Election Commission in the Nashville area last month. According to this report, the notebook held the names and Social Security numbers for 337,000 registered voters.
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OS/2 To Stay Closed, Says IBM
Well, you can't say they didn't try. After one of the more prominent online OS/2 communities (OS2 World) delivered a politely worded petition with 11,000 signatures to IBM to make OS/2 into an open source product, the word has come back from IBM: Sorry, but no. Not happening.
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New BlackBerry Software: Now With 20% More 'Easy'
Research In Motion announced updates to the BlackBerry platform today. What will IT admins and users get out of the deal? According to RIM, admins get easier management, better security, and better application support. Users get more messaging and collaboration features. Here's the real story.
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How Web 2.0 Affects Content Management
You can't turn your back these days without a Web 2.0 or enterprise 2.0 service provider sneaking up on your content management infrastructure.
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Rackspace Says 'Yes' to Virtualization
Leveraging the ESX experience of subsidiary Mosso, Rackspace is moving beyond 1x1 hosting solutions.
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Can You Restore A 6-Year-Old Backup?
Some things, like sneezes, just seem to come in threes. Last week I got the third call in the past year asking for help restoring an oddball tape. In each case, a midsize company tried to satisfy its data-retention policy by putting end-of-month backup tapes on the shelf just in case the data on them would be needed in the future. Then when that time came, each was missing a tape drive or application to read them.
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Protecting Bob In Accounting, From Himself
Of the hundreds of data loss incidents in 2007, it seems the majority involved some type of lost storage media or notebook. If only the companies had used, or were certain that encryption had been in place, then the customers of GE Money, Accenture, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and too many others to list would be sleeping better. It's a problem that's only going to get worse as more data is held on portable storage devices, such as USB devices, smartphones, and even MP3 players.
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Windows Server 2008: Less Is More
IT departments are conservative by nature, and with good reason. Change for change's sake just adds more trouble to the endless supply of troubles that IT departments have to manage. The new Windows Server 2008 has the potential to remove some of that trouble by offering fewer things to break. Certainly there are new features in Windows Server 2008, and those will be useful to many customers. However, I'm even more interested in what they are letting users leave out.
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RIAA Attacked: The SQL
The Recording Industry of America's (RIAA) Web site was attacked -- again -- over the weekend. According to numerous breaking news stories, it seems a lack of proper security controls enabled some to take parts of the site down, and tweak its pages. Get serious.
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AT&T Makes The Enterprise iPhone Official
IT admins beware. AT&T has officially created iPhone plans for business users. The plans cost more than consumer accounts, and some international roaming plans are available, but still no Exchange support.
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Big Surprise: Mobile TV Ain't Burning Up The Airwaves
Qualcomm, owner of mobile TV technology MediaFLO, issued a proxy statement that revealed some details about the company's costs and revenues--or lack thereof--to date. I don't think it's much of a shocker to learn that the mobile TV business is off to a slow start.
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It's Hard To Beat Free - Open-E Gives Away NAS/iSCSI
From now till Jan. 31, Germany's Open-E is giving away its Data Storage Solution Lite as a free download. After you've downloaded it and installed it on a USB memory key you have a bootable drive that turns any PC or server you run from it into a NAS appliance with iSCSI and Fibre Channel target functionality. Not just any iSCSI target -- DSS-Lite even supports copy on write snapshots and replication.
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5 MacBook (Hot) Air Alternatives
The MacBook (Hot) Air is the usual triumph of wannabe coolness over value. But once we get away from the self-congratulatory Apple polishers, who pat themselves on the back for recognizing how "insanely great" Steve Jobs is -- while conspicuously advertising they've got the dough to purchase another toy, one without a DVD drive, yet -- most of us want a computer we can live with for business and leisure. That means a Windows machine. Fortunately, there are some nice ultra-portables out there.
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Led By Software, VC Investing Hits Six-Year High
U.S.-based venture capital firms invested $29.4 billion in 2007, the highest level of investment since 2001, according to a new report from PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association. The IT sector, led by software companies, was the biggest single area of funding. The fastest growing: clean tech.
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Hackers Threaten Power Grid. FERC Strengthens Security Standards
While I enjoyed the first two Bruce Willis Die Hard movies, Live Free or Die Hard was a different story. The coordinated, near simultaneous cyberattacks of the power grid, financial systems, government databases, and media satellites was so over-the-top that I couldn't suspend my disbelief long enough to enjoy the movie. Maybe that's because I've long been suspicious of the terms cyberterrorism and cyberwarfare. In fact, the threats of thunderstorms, tornadoes, and overgrown trees are a greater threat to the daily delivery of your electricity fix than hackers. So are strategically placed explosives.
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News Of What's New
Between the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and the flood of press releases timed to the show, there is news about several of the subjects and companies I've written about over the past year. Some updates are in order. Eye-Fi continutes to be a big winner, HSUPA comes to laptops, and more.
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Virtualized Stock-Option Dates?
Stay with me for a minute. I was going to write on topic about storage options for virtualized environments but got led astray by current events.
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Storage Insulation
Oil prices hit new highs daily. Federal aid to boost the economy. Whispers of inflation at every turn. It's economic doldrums, except here in Storageville, one of the few sectors of the economy (and IT) that appears relatively insulated from it all.
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Analyst: Google Not Serious About Spectrum Auction
An analyst over at Sanford Bernstein says Google will bid in next week's FCC 700 MHz spectrum auction, but doesn't intend to actually win any spectrum. Why? It already got what it wanted.
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IT's 'Self-Fulfilling Prophecy'
Whether or not we're already mired in a tech talent shortage, the United States needs to commit itself to producing a deeply knowledgeable and highly motivated IT workforce or we will find ourselves without the expertise needed to keep our tech industry competitive, says Stevens Institute's Jerry Luftman.
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Yahoo Users Get OpenID: No Game Changer
There seems to be plenty of buzz surrounding Yahoo's decision to choose OpenID as a way to enable users to sign on once and seamlessly access all of their Yahoo services, as well as any other Web site that supports the OpenID Web authentication standard. It's not going to change much.
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Review: Iqua Solar-Powered Bluetooth Headset
If you're looking for a Bluetooth headset with virtually unlimited stand-by time and ages of talk time, the Iqua 603 Sun is the one for you. It features a solar panel that basks in light from any source and converts it to usable power. The solid sound quality and easy pairing don't hurt, either.
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ODF Vs. OOXML: Someone Is, Indeed, Writing A Book
The other day, when talking about Microsoft's adventures with the OOXML standard it drafted, I said something to the effect that someone could easily write a book about that escapade. As it turns out, someone is.
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Boeing 777 Near-Disaster: Can Anyone On Board Fly This Thing?
It's every passenger's worst nightmare: You're cruising along at 30,000 feet when the lights suddenly go out and the engines quit. The cockpit crew has been struck down by food poisoning. A terrified stewardess (sorry, "flight attendant") yells out: "Is there a pilot on board?" OK, that's a bad movie plot. But what happened in London on Thursday is actually scarier, and would've been a huge disaster, if not for the hero pilot.
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LeftHand Helps Spin Straw Into Gold
Alright, no actual transmutation occurs, but LeftHand Networks can help customers repurpose existing x86 storage into iSCSI SANs with its Virtual SAN Appliance (VSA) for ESX.
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The Overwriting Issue
This isn't a partisan screed -- you've got plenty of places across the blogosphere to click for that sort of thing. So here goes: Why is the White House getting a free pass where overwriting the same backup tapes is concerned?
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Don’t Do As Bruce Does
I’m talking about encryption and security expert, speaker, book author, and restaurant critic Bruce Schneier. Don’t follow his security advice. At least when it comes to securing home wireless networks.
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Oracle Captures A Key Component To Its ECM Strategy
When I noticed Oracle's Captovation purchase, it brought back some of my own experiences in the capture software market. So bear with me for a moment, I promise to get back to the acquisition.
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Will AT&T Offer The iPhone To Business Customers?
Earlier today my colleague, Eric Zeman, reported that IBM is ready to extend Notes access to the iPhone. Now one rumor claims that AT&T will offer the iPhone to its business customers. Who said the iPhone was not ready for the enterprise?
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Microsoft Looks To New CIO To 'Share Best Practices'
As expected, Microsoft named Tony Scott, former Disney CIO and GM CTO, as its new CIO today. What does Scott, an IT veteran, bring to the table that Microsoft might be looking for? Perhaps an ability to connect with other CIOs.
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Wal-Mart Breathes New Life Into RFID
If you thought Wal-Mart was backing off from its big RFID plans, think again. Wal-Mart recently notified, in writing, suppliers of its Sam's Club warehouse stores that it will charge a $2 service fee for pallets of goods that aren't tagged with RFID starting Jan. 30. Suppliers of Wal-Mart stores shouldn't be surprised if they get a letter with some sort of financial incentive to comply with RFID, too.
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Microsoft To Name New CIO
Microsoft is expected to name a new CIO today, according to sources both of the blog and word-of-mouth variety. He's Tony Scott, most recently CIO of Disney.
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What Will Mobile Phones Be Like In 10 Years?
Strategy Analytics has peered into its crystal ball and is offering up predictions on what mobile phones will be like in the year 2018. The biggest changes will be in the user interface. And every phone will be a smartphone.
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Identity Theft Is A Drag For Everyone
There’s yet more evidence that privacy and security concerns, when it comes to online shopping, are on the rise. This time it's from a phone survey, released today, conducted by the University of Southern California's Center for the Digital Future.
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Going Green Merits Yellow Light
The green rush is in full swing. But like overzealous forty-niners soiling themselves over a chunk of pyrite, companies are discovering there's a lot of fool's green mixed in with the good stuff.
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Microsoft Executive Exits Could Provide Opportunities
In the past few months, Microsoft has announced several high-profile retirements or departures from the executive ranks. The list includes Rob Short, Jeff Raikes, Bruce Jaffe, and Bill Gates. This could be an excellent opportunity for the new leaders to take the company in a different direction.
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Microsoft 'Opens' Its Office Binary Formats
If there's one document format out there that's been a de facto standard that defines de facto standards, it's the Microsoft Office .DOC format (vintage 1997-2003), which has the double whammy of being binary and proprietary, despite also being heavily reverse-engineered. Now Microsoft has decided to kick off an open source translation project to convert binary Office documents to ... Open Office XML. Eh, it's a step.
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The Open Source Freeloader Phenomenon
After the filing of the Verizon / BusyBox suit, and after reading about any number of other, similar incidents where a company showed what could only be seen as flagrant disregard for the GPL, I had to ask myself: Why do people do this? Are companies really that naive about the GPL, or do they just think they can get away with anything?
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Lotus Notes Coming To iPhone
Enterprise users of IBM's e-mail program may have reason to cheer as early as next week. According to the Associated Press, IBM will be releasing a version of Lotus Notes e-mail for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Hooah! Can Apple take down RIM?
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Oracle’s BEA Acquisition Makes Things Interesting
If you’ve been following the BEA/Oracle saga over the last few months, Wednesday’s announcement that Oracle finally bought BEA probably wasn't surprising.
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Solid State Will Require Deep Pockets
EMC's trying to break some new ground by adding flash-based, solid-state drives (SSDs) to its high-end Symmetrix arrays. The thinking is that these high performance drives can be used for especially processing-intensive applications (think database backup and replication) or for data that's frequently accessed.
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Easy Backup For The Masses: Time Machine Comes Close
Well, it's been years since my whole family switched from Windows to Macintosh, giving up free tech support from yours truly as I insisted that "I don't no nothin' about birthin' no Macs" when they called. When the time to buy a new laptop came, I bought a MacBook Pro and immediately set up Boot Camp and VMware Fusion so I could still run my Windows apps.
With OS X Leopard, Apple's gotten much of the user backup problem right. Plug a USB or Firewire hard drive into your Mac and, with just a few minutes of setup, Time Machine will start making hourly backups to the external drive, storing a daily backup until the disk is full and then killing off the oldest backups as it needs space.
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The $50 Billion Health IT Project
If there's one thing most presidential candidates agree on, it's that many more doctors must deploy e-health systems to reduce health care costs and improve care in the United States. But one candidate is proposing a whopping $50 billion, five-year investment to make that happen. That would be an enormous shift from what the feds have spent so far on these programs.
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More Clarity On Dealmaker Media L.A.
It's not every day I get accused of "pimping" for a former Hollywood super-agent, but that's what happened (in a good-natured way, mind you) after my story on Dealmaker Media's L.A. venture appeared on Monday.
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Web 2.0 And Social Networks Ripening Targets For Hackers And Fraudsters
We’re on the verge of an upswing in Web 2.0 and social networking security attacks and fraudulent scams. Just yesterday, Thomas Claburn reported on a serious Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) vulnerability that can be exploited through malicious SWF (Flash) files on Web sites. Successful attacks can be used to sidestep firewalls, access Web router admin pages, and alter network settings.
When you combine threats like that with social networks, you have a problem.
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Jobs: Android Hurts Google More Than It Helps
Never one to hide his opinions, Apple's Steve Jobs yesterday sat down with John Markoff of The New York Times Bits blog to share his thoughts on a number of topics including Google's Android. Guess what? Steveorino doesn't think Android is such a good idea.
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Sun And MySQL: Happy Together
Sun's open source strategy has just ratcheted up a notch: they've purchased MySQL AB, the makers of one of the most widely-used open source database solutions. So, is this a good thing or a bad thing? My take: It ought to be a good thing.
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Sony Ericsson Targets Motorola
Sony Ericsson released its fourth quarter earnings today and the numbers paint an interesting picture. Despite a downturn in revenue, increased handset sales point to growing presence in the market ... and Sony Ericsson's desire to kick Motorola while it's down.
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Windows Home Server: A Good Idea But A Tough Sell
In the past month there has been serious concern regarding data loss in Microsoft's brand-new Windows Home Server. The problem has yet to be completely explained or resolved, but no doubt it will be fixed and the vendors will wipe egg off their faces. The big problem remaining for Microsoft and its partners is how to sell these home servers.
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Hackers Targeting Microsoft Zero-Day Excel Flaw: Microsoft Offers Kludgey Fix
Late yesterday, Microsoft confirmed in a security advisory (947563) that hackers are targeting a significant vulnerability in multiple versions of Excel. The vulnerability appears to be a previously unknown zero-day, and a successful attack could result in various levels of control over the affected system -- depending on how user rights have been configured.
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Finally, 1.1.3. Here's What's Great And Here's What's Not
At long last, Apple finally got around to providing the iPhone faithful with the next firmware update, bringing new functionality to the device. Was it worth the long wait?
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Top 5 Content Management Trends For 2008
I'm excited to be a part of InformationWeek's blogging community and hope you'll join me as I explore the world of content management.
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AMD Quad-Core Barcelona Gets Big Boost From Little-Known Benchmarks
Amid the battering AMD has taken in recent months, ranging from processor bugs to sagging finances, I've discovered what's sure to be some welcome news: A bunch of under-the-radar benchmark tests run by a respected tech guy, which puts AMD's quad-core Opteron (aka Barcelona) processor in a great light. Moreover, he gives AMD's new native-quad architecture a rave review, identifying what he believes are the technical reasons for its strong performance.
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A Trinity Of Presentation Software: Video, Music, And HTML (Amen To That!)
Freepath, spun off last year from a company that specializes in software for houses of worship, has secured $1.5 million in Series A funding. Its software can be used to create multimedia business presentations in conjunction with--or as a potential alternative to--Microsoft's PowerPoint.
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IBM Buys Arsenal Digital - Everyone Gets In The Act
Like every other professional geek, I get more than my share of friends, family, and friends of friends asking for technical advice and support. At the top of my list of recommendations is that the SOHO crowd, which for my money includes anyone that doesn't have an IT department, should get an account with an on-line backup service.
Apparently enough people have been taking my advice for the big boys of the storage business to take notice. Iron Mountain now owns Connected Corp. and LiveVault, Seagate's acquired EVault, EMC snapped up Berkeley Data Systems, who ran Mozy, and last month IBM announced it was picking up Arsenal Data Solutions.
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A New Kind Of Apple Store
Even with Macworld in full swing this week, the confluence of Apple and storage isn't one of the more prominent threads emanating from the show. But this bit about using an iPhone to manage servers makes me think Apple may have missed the storage boat.
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The FBI Doesn't Want Your Data. Really.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is not after your personal information, the agency insists. If you've received e-mail seeking personal information that appears to be from FBI Director Robert Mueller or another FBI official, it's fake, the agency warned Tuesday.
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Where WAS Microsoft -- And Vista -- At CES?
Watching Steve Jobs do it again at Macworld Tuesday, whipping up tech enthusiasm (even though the MacBook Air doesn't give him as much to work with as the iPhone did a year ago), I was struck by the comparison with Microsoft at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week. Bill Gates booked in on his Final Farewell Tour, but even with that, the giant software company seemed to barely bother to show up.
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Are You A Snob When You Hire?
Who would be a better match for your IT organization -- a job candidate with some tech skills and a bachelor's degree in history, or an individual who has an associate's degree in a technology-related field? Maybe the answer is neither. Perhaps you'd throw out both résumés. But exactly how important is any degree on paper versus hands-on experience?
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The Time Is Now (Better Yet, Yesterday) For A Federal Data Breach Disclosure Law
It'll soon be five years since the California data breach disclosure law, better known as SB 1386, went into effect. So far the law has had some success. But we need a federal standard.
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HP CEO Mark Hurd: 'Aligning IT With The Business Is Hard'
Hewlett-Packard is attempting a radical makeover of its IT infrastructure and processes. The tech vendor's hard-charging chief executive is totally supportive of it. Indeed, he helped conceive the project, along with his handpicked CIO, Randy Mott, and he's counting on it to lower the company's cost structure. But even Hurd admits a project of this magnitude is easier said than done.
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Apple's New Ultralight Is Neither Ultra Nor Light Enough
The MacBook Air is a marvel, but it weighs three pounds. For something claiming to be an ultraportable, that's half a pound too much. It could also pack more of a punch in the processor, hard drive, and port departments.
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Does Steve Jobs Hate 3G?
Earlier today I was sitting around in a design-induced stupor as I gazed longingly at online pictures of Apple's latest killer product: MacBook Air. For all of its amazing design, the MacBook Air is missing one important technology: 3G. Why doesn't Apple build 3G into its notebooks?
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MySpace Child Protections Have Fatal Flaw
Kudos to MySpace for making an honest attempt to police itself and protect its underage users. There's just one problem -- the plan has a hole you could drive a virtual truck through.
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A Couple More Things Apple Needs To Do To Become IT (Security) Friendly
As Macworld kicks off, more companies, especially SMBs, are bound to be eyeing the possibility of displacing Microsoft in favor of Apple. And there are plenty of good reasons why: Vista has been a disappointment, and OS X is simply more elegant and easier to use than anything Microsoft has to offer. And if my personal experience with OS X is any indicator, OS X is a lot more stable. But when it comes to security, Apple has some work to do.
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Classic Games, Open Sourced: SimCity
Not all open source software is Serious Business. A project that caught my attention in the last couple of days is a port of the classic Infogrames / EA title SimCity -- released for just about every platform known to man -- into an open source implementation named Micropolis.
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VMware Acquires Thinstall And 'Aligns' With Foedus
VMware buys Thinstall and acquires services side of Foedus.
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Coming Soon: In-Call Advertising
Say what?!? If you thought your phone calls were the last sanctity of life not encroached upon with advertising, you thought wrong. A number of companies are testing systems right now that will allow them to place advertisements in your phone calls. All I can do is shake my head in dismay.
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Microsoft Slashes Prices For Home Versions Of Office 2008 For Mac
Put away your varsity jackets and cheerleader outfits -- you don't have to lie about being a student anymore to get access to Microsoft Office for the Mac for the lowest price. With Office 2008 for Mac, being introduced Tuesday, Microsoft is replacing the student and teacher edition of Office, priced at $149, with a home and student edition, priced at $149.95.
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Virtualization Blogging For Fun And Profit
I’ve had a number of recent requests for additional virtualization sites and resources. While I’m reluctant to admit that one might need to look outside of Network Computing or InformationWeek, I'm including some of my favorite bloggers and vendor sites on the topic. Feel free to fire up your favorite RSS reader (as long as you subscribe to NWC.com's feed first!) Enjoy.
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Mark Zuckerberg Is Not An Insufferable Little Jerk, He Just Plays One On TV
Since his ascent to the top of the under-30 Web-entreprenuer ranks, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has become well-known for two things: invariably wearing open-toed Adidas sandals and saying, in front of audiences of analysts, investors, and the press, almost nothing of interest.
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Why Apple Won't Release A WiMax-Powered Subnotebook
Every now and then, Apple leads the charge with new technology. It was one of the first manufacturers to make Wi-Fi a standard option on some of its laptops. One of the products reported to be making its debut at tomorrow's Macworld keynote is a subnotebook or ultraportable laptop with WiMax built in. I say no way.
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Microsoft's Beta Download Center: Bigger, Prettier, And Slower
Last week, I took a look at the reasons behind Microsoft's MSDN site being slow. Looking around the rest of the Microsoft site since then, I fear that Microsoft may be making many of these changes to showcase its latest technologies at the expense of speed and usability.
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Study: NYC Retailers Not Protecting Wireless Networks
Security company AirDefense recently surveyed the retail scene in all five NYC boroughs and determined that wireless security is lax just about everywhere. Fully 39% of access points in retail environments were completely unprotected, and 29% use only WEP encryption. That's your data that's not being protected. Listen up, NYC retailers: If you want my business, protect my info.
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Now Lenovo Loads Linux, Too
When IBM sold its personal computer division to Chinese PC maker Lenovo, one of the flagship products that went along on that sale was its invaluable ThinkPad notebook line, home of some of the best engineering I've seen in notebook PCs in the entire time they've been on the market. Now Lenovo is preparing to take the ThinkPad a step ahead and ship them with SUSE Linux preinstalled.
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Google Makes iGoogle Available On The iPhone
Google has made yet another one of its services available on the iPhone, this time the popular iGoogle customizable Web page. I decided to take it for a quick spin. Is it worth checking out? It is and it isn't. Here's why.
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CES Wrap Up: All's Quiet On The Mobile Front
This year's CES was exceptionally quiet with respect to new mobile technology. The two biggest announcements of the week came from Sprint and Yahoo, and neither was all that exciting. The one refrain I heard over and over all week long: Wait for CTIA.
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Is Podcasting Dead?
Podcasting was famously born in 2000, with Tristan Louis, Dave Winer, and former MTV veejay and legend in his own mind Adam Curry variously crystallizing the concept and creating a market for audio files encapsulated in RSS feeds. Now, it's 2008 and time to admit that the actual uptake of podcasts by users hasn't, and never will, come close to the hype.
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Giving Active Directory The Finger
Do you know who has permission to reset passwords, create accounts, and elevate permissions in your organization? Sanjay Tandon, a former Microsoft program manager of Active Directory, bets the answer will surprise -- and dismay -- your security and compliance officers.
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Hard Facts To Fuel The IT Talent Shortage Debate
We've got a great debate posted with two top researchers over whether there's a U.S. IT talent shortage. If you're keen on fear-mongering and histrionics, this package isn't for you. If you want two serious scholars making succinct arguments backed up with facts, read on.
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The Junk E-Mail Epidemic
Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson got so fed up with unsolicited e-mail that he blacklisted dozens of PR professionals from his in-box. Barracuda Networks CEO Dean Drako has contemplated removing the e-mail address from his business card. Extreme measures? Not to those of us swamped with quasi-spam.
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Displays Were A Bright Spot At CES
The Consumer Electronics Show felt a little short on big technology news this year, but one bright spot (pun intended) was displays. And the most interesting news of all was Texas Instruments' demonstration of DualView on displays that use its DLP projection technology. DualView puts two different full-screen video signals displayed on the same screen at the same time.
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HP CIO Randy Mott: Incremental IT 'Just Doesn't Work'
Architected IT is the only way to achieve the most return on your technology investment, and a radical makeover is the only way to get to that rationalized approach to running a company's technology infrastructure, Hewlett-Packard CIO Mott told a group of rapt technology managers yesterday in Austin, Texas.
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Sony's Sudden Outbreak Of Common Sense
Wow, that didn't take long. Barely days after Sony's announcement about its peculiar plan to sell unprotected MP3s through a brick-and-mortar-store gift card system, it's relented and announced that it will begin selling portions of its music catalog as unprotected MP3s through -- who else? -- Amazon.com.
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Who Deserves Blame For Microsoft's Slow Site?
Yesterday I had a brief oh-that-would-explain-it moment when I read Windows Server 2008 Behind 'Slow' Microsoft.com. I spend a lot of time on Microsoft's sites, and they have been horribly slow the past few months. But after further investigation, I don't think the problem is Windows Server 2008. Or, at least it's not the main problem.
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What If Mobile Search Doesn't Use Text Input?
Everyone knows that Google is prepared to conquer the mobile Web. Prompting all these initiatives is Google's drive to dominate the mobile search and ad markets. I have one issue with Google's strategy: It assumes that mobile search will operate like desktop search, using text input. What happens if mobile search doesn't work the same way as search on the desktop?
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Clinton And McCain On Globalization, Technology
The morning after the Iowa caucus results, I shared with you what Mike Huckabee and Barack Obama are saying about technology and globalization. The focus has shifted over to Hillary Clinton and John McCain after the results in New Hampshire's primary. Here's what those presidential candidates have to say about those topics.
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CES: Nokia Plans Avalanche Of New Phones For U.S.
Nokia said it will introduce between six to 12 new phones specifically for the U.S. market during 2008 in an attempt to regain market share. The recently announced U.S. version of the N95 8GB is just the tip of the ice berg.
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Brit Posts Bank Account Number, Gets Hacked
The world is filled with daredevils: bungee jumpers, mountain climbers, those crazy guys who get chased by bulls in Spain. However, none of those thrill-seekers hold a candle to British columnist/TV celebrity Jeremy Clarkson. Fearless to the core, Mr. Clarkson decided to publish his own personal bank account number in the paper, confident that no one would be able to do anything with it.
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Nokia Prepares Onslaught Of Mobile Location Applications
Nokia is busily preparing a slew of new location-based applications designed to take advantage of its acquisition of Navteq. Here is a sneak peak at one of these new applications.
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CES: Spotted, First Possible Android Smartphone
A Chinese OEM was showing off a smartphone that will be running Android by March and could be for sale as soon as the second quarter. Also, hackers have forged Android-powered ultraportable computers.
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Will The Open Web Destroy The ARPU Model For Carriers?
A few months ago I questioned the value of the existing business model for wireless service providers. Now other bloggers are joining the call to end ARPU's (average revenue per user) reign over the wireless world.
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Spammers Up To New Tricks
Salesforce.com users are targets of a phishing attack that employs malware disguised as Salesforce's Identity Confirmation feature. It's just one of several new techniques being used by spammers.
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Why Shouldn't Wikia Search Stink (At First)?
After Jimmy Wales took the wrapping off the first version of his Wikia Search system, many people agreed with his warning: yes, it does indeed suck. The search results are spotty, not always properly relevant, and sometimes just inexplicable. But really, is there any way for someone to make something new in as well-heeled a field as Internet search engines without falling flat on their face a few times?
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Are Young Techies Spoiled Brats?
Who has pickier job expectations, young people entering the tech field, or the employers who hire them? A new report released today says tech executives think millennials -- people between the ages of 18 and 31 -- are too fussy about pay and perks, and are the most difficult to manage.
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Transport Dreams For Foot-Weary CES Walkers
The Consumer Electronics Show is not a journey for the faint-hearted. You can walk miles on the show floors. So it's no surprise that after a couple of days of footsore product-spotting, the products that began to look most interesting were transportation-related -- like the motorized snowshoes and the 13-mph beer cooler.
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Everex Jumps Into The UMPC Market
Everex, the Taiwanese PC maker that sells a $199 Linux PC through Wal-Mart, is showing a $399 ultra-mobile PC, the CloudBook, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The tiny notebook is intended to compete with the Asus Eee PC.
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Vista Ultimate Extras: Ultimately Disappointing
Most of the time, blogs are about things that recently happened in the news. This blog is about something that hasn't happened. Microsoft promised to deliver more Vista Ultimate Extras last year but hasn't done or said anything about them in nearly three months, and may not deliver anything soon.
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CES: Now That ClickFree Is Out, You Have No Excuse For Not Backing Up Your Data
The #1 reason people probably don't back their computers up is that it's too much of a hassle. Now that Storage Appliance Corp. is offering ClickFree, we're going to have to find another excuse. It's that simple.
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CES: CallPod Shows Off A 100-Meter Capable 'Class 1' Bluetooth Headset
Today, we finally made it over to the Consumer Electronics Show's New to Market Pavilion where a bunch of startups are showing some innovative products. Three of those products are the Chargepod, the Bluetooth-based Dragon, and the Bluetooth-based Phoenix. The Dragon (a headset) and the Phoenix (a voice conferencing solution) are rated as Class 1 Bluetooth products, which means that their range is 100 meters instead of 30 feet or so.
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CES: Fujitsu Shows A Corn PC And Concept Designs With Digital Paper
Here at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, in addition to showing off its full complement of systems and notebooks (as so many system vendors are) and UMPCs like the LifeBook U810, Fujitsu also is showing off some futuristic systems and concepts (none of which are available in the United States).
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CES: Neonode N2 Possibly The Best Of Show For Mobile
Neonode is a European company that makes the N2 mobile phone. It's been available in Europe for a few months, but should be available in the U.S. soon. That's good news, because it is probably the best touchscreen phone I've seen all week.
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Oops, Look At That Phoenix, Rising From The Ashes
In a story headlined, Open Source Code Contains Security Holes, I referred recently to the Firebird database project as "somewhat moribund." So imagine my surprise when a reader pointed out it was named project of the month in December by SourceForge, the dominant host of open source projects. Geez. Then there was the case of the supposedly "inactive" FreeBSD Unix.
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CES: Sony Tackles Bluetooth, NFC And UWB With Its Own Tech
Just what the world needs, another wireless transfer protocol. Combining the best of Bluetooth 3.0, near-field communications, and ultra wideband, Sony offered up TransferJet at CES. Simply touch two TransferJet devices together and transfer video, picture, or audio content between the two at 560 Mbps.
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Sprint Moves Ahead With WiMax Service. Will Anyone Pay For It?
Hillary Clinton wasn't the only one who had a comeback this week. After years of waiting, it looks like Sprint is finally ready to commercially launch its mobile WiMax service, Xohm, in April this year. Will Xohm flop or should I get ready to eat some crow?
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World's Smallest PC? Part 2
Chinese company Tsinghua Tongfang, maker of the LimePC line, is showing a brand-new tiny computer at the Consumer Electronics Show -- not as small as the MTube project's design, but a whole lot closer to being a real product -- and a really interesting one, at that.
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Coming: More Ways To Turn Vinyl LPs Into Digital Files
ION Audio scored big last year with digital turntable equipment that connected to your PC to rip vinyl LPs to MP3 files. This year at CES in Las Vegas, the company has pushed the product line even further, announcing three new models. One will rip an LP directly to your iPod, another records to an SD card or flash drive, and a third includes an optical drive to automatically burn a CD.
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CES: Samsung Adds More Power To Latest Rev Of Q1 Ultra Mobile
Having been one of the system vendors to pioneer the ultramobile PC space more than a year ago, Samsung is now onto the third generation of its Q1 UMPC: the Q1 Ultra Premium. Compared with its predecessors (the Q1 and the Q1 Ultra), the "premium" has more processing power, more battery life, a better keyboard, and more expandability on the RAM front.
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NewsGator Frees NetNewsWire, FeedDemon
NewsGator is going to stop charging money for the popular -- and terrific -- NetNewsWire RSS reader for the Mac and FeedDemon for Windows, as well as its other services, including the Web-based RSS reader, and NewsGator Go for Windows Mobile and the BlackBerry. Greg Reinacker, founder and CTO of NewsGator Technologies, says the company is freeing its consumer services to build demand for its enterprise products.
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Have You Been Victimized By Malware?
Crime reporting often includes the victim's side of the story. This seems to be less common with cybercrime reporting. There are several reasons: Many of those with computer viruses are unaware that they've been victimized, and IT workers don't want the world to know that their systems have been compromised.
I'm hoping some of you, anonymously or not, will be willing to e-mail me (or post here if you prefer) and share your experience with malware.
With news of ever-more-sophisticated cybercrime, what is the real-world impact of malware? Does it mean longer hours for security professionals? Does it mean being fired for mistakes? Is it nothing to be concerned about? Has it changed your outlook?
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Is Tech Talent Getting Harder To Find?
There were almost 300,000 new IT jobs last year, according to the latest figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And that doesn’t surprise Bob Keefe, new president of the Society for Information Management. He says talent issues are the top challenge these days for his fellow CIOs.
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Fujitsu's U810 May Be One Of The Most Feature Complete UMPCs At CES
Road warriors looking for the most PC in the smallest package will probably not have to look any further than Fujitsu's U810. It is quite possibly the most feature-complete Ultra Mobile PC (UMPC) I have ever seen. In fact, it probably shouldn't even be called a UMPC since it's a convertible that switches between a traditional notebook mode and a tablet mode. Call it an Ultra Mobile Tablet, or UMT.
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Parallels Server Public Beta
Mac admins rejoice. Others may want to read, too. Trust me.
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Folly, Thy Name Is Sony (Again)
Leave it to Sony to come up with a way to screw something up in a way that almost no one else has before. Amidst the rush of news flooding out from CES, they announced their plan to sell music from their catalog without DRM -- and it sounds almost as dumb as DRM itself.
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Barracuda Plans Broader Line Of Appliances
Barracuda Networks was founded five years ago as an anti-spam specialist. The company grew last year through acquisition and by selling appliances outside its sweet spot. Look for Barracuda to expand its line further in 2008 and push deeper into international markets.
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New Features, And Controversy, Coming To MP3tunes.com
If you have a music locker on MP3tunes.com, you'll probably be glad to hear that the Web-based music storage service is adding some new features. If you are a recording company, you'll probably be upset. And if you're Michael Robertson, MP3tunes CEO, you'll regard it as one more small battle in an effort to build a business on helping music buyers control what they bought.
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And Now For A UMPC That's Completely Different
E-Lead, a Taiwanese maker of automotive "infotainment" systems, showed up at the Lunch@Piero's event at CES Tuesday with an ultra-mobile PC that doesn't look or work like any PC you've ever seen.
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CES: Neonode Claims Better Accuracy, Durability For Its Touch Screen Tech
To hear Neonode's director of marketing Daniel Stalbo talk about his company's patented infrared light grid technology reminds me of what it takes to be an art thief who doesn't disrupt the cross-thatched beams of light used to protect multimillion-dollar works of art. In principle, its a similar grid of light beams that's behind Neonode's claim that its touch screen technology is better than the rest.
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CES: As Google Zigs On Mobile, Yahoo Zags With 'Go 3.0'
Yahoo often likes to tout its home page as the place where more Internet users start their Internet experience than anywhere else. Here at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, with version 3.0 of Yahoo Go, Yahoo is clearly looking to establish Yahoo as the starting "place" of choice for mobile users too. A key part of the Go 3.0 strategy (and perhaps a shot across Google's bow) is how the platform has been opened to developers.
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CES: Garmin Packs GPS, Time, Speed, Distance, Heart Rate, And More Into A Wristwatch
In addition to the technologies from DisplayLink and the Picture Porter Elite from Digital Foci, Garmin's Forerunner 405 ranks as one my favorite finds here at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Because of the way it uses GPS to offer distance and speed features in addition to its heart rate and mapping capabilties, the Forerunner is the ultimate accessory for runners and cyclists.
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CES: New Intel Mobile Internet Platform To Challenge Nokia, Apple, Sony, Etc.
All one has to do is look at the success and buzz that Apple's iTouch (and iPhone), Nokia's 810, and Sony's PSP are getting for their lightweight wireless Internet browsing capabilities to know that there's an opportunity for Intel to sell some prefabricated guts to system vendors that want in. Here at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Intel showed just that in its new mobile Internet platform.
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CES: One Pound Spare Battery From Xantrex Proves Futility Of U.S. DOT's New Policy
The U.S. Department of Transportation has a new rule about bringing spare lithium ion batteries onto an airplane. For it to be effective, though, both consumers and Transportation Security Administration agents at airport security checkpoints must be able to determine how much lithium is in a battery. But there's one problem.
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iPhone Gets A Trojan
According to reports, the iPhone is no longer a virgin. The first Trojan targeting the iPhone has been spotted. It appears that only iPhones living on the wild side (a.k.a., unlocked iPhones) are subject to catching the Trojan, which can cause brain damage and embarrassing blemishes on the antenna module. (OK, I made that last part up.)
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CES: Allworx' Low-Cost VoIP Switch For SMBs Integrates Mobile Phones
Finding business solutions at a event called the Consumer Electronics Show can sometimes be tricky. But they are here. One of those solutions is Allworx' 6X Voice-over-IP (VoIP) "switch" for small-to-medium sized businesses. One of the 6X's coolest features is how, if you don't answer an incoming call, the call gets pushed out to your cell phone. If you don't answer your cell phone, the 6X pulls the call back for pickup by its own voice mail system.
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The CIO And The Consumer Effect
The chief technology officer of Washington, D.C., just got back from the Consumer Electronics Show and he's fired up. "Why is it that consumers have better technology in their hands than the enterprise space?" he asks.
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CES: Hands On With OpenMoko Linux Handset
Today at CES I was able to spend a few moments playing with the OpenMoko Neo FreeRunner mobile phone. It was not fully functional, but the features that did work on this open source Linux phone looked really great. Read on for more first impressions.
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Yahoo's 'New' Mobile Strategy Is Neither New Nor A Strategy. Discuss.
Yahoo helped to kick off the mobile Web hype at CES yesterday by unveiling its new mobile Web strategy, which includes an upgrade of the company's mobile content and services platform, Yahoo Go 3.0, and a plan for mobile advertising services. Unfortunately for Yahoo, there's nothing new in its mobile strategy, or anything truly strategic.
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Firefox Makes A Liar Out Of Me
Wouldn't you know it? I installed the new Firefox beta, and took two days to explore it and write a review. During those two days, Firefox crashed three or four times on my Mac, so I dutifully reported that Firefox beta 2 was less stable than beta 1. We posted the review a couple of days ago -- and Firefox hasn't crashed on me since.
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The Startup Makeover?
NAC vendor Vernier Networks is apparently reinventing itself as a startup, despite being founded almost seven years ago. The company will rename itself Autonomic Networks and brand itself a Series A startup. It's an odd strategy, given that the company already has raised at least $35 million through A, B, and C funding rounds.
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CES: Digital Foci's Portable Media Player Sucks Content Directly Off CF & SD Cards And Memory Sticks
DisplayLink may have one of the most killer technologies to be on display here in Las Vegas at the Consumer Electronics Show. But one of the killer products is Digital Foci's Picture Porter Elite. It's a hard drive-based portable digital media player for digital photos, videos, and music. So what you say? Everyone has something like that? What is really remarkable about the Picture Porter Elite is how it totally eliminates the need for a PC to copy content from something like your digital camera's CF or SD card onto its hard drive.
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World's Smallest PC?
It's not exactly a product. You can't buy it. You can barely even see it. But a team from National Taiwan University is at CES showing off an ultra-small PC and looking for commercialization partners.
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CES: Via Text-to-Speech, BlueAnt's Bluetooth-Based SuperTooth 3 Says Who's Calling
At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, BlueAnt Wireless announced the SuperTooth 3 -- a hands-free Bluetooth device that mounts on your car's visor and that uses text-to-speech technology to tell you who is calling on the phone (so you don't have to look at a display to figure that out -- potentially causing an accident). It works in a whole bunch of of languages, too (English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, etc.).
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CES: Duracell Power Brick Charges Laptops, Cell Phones Simultaneously
For road warriors looking to lighten their load, one option could be Battery Biz's Universal Power Adapter. Battery Biz manufactures the replacement power brick for Duracell. Unlike the power bricks that come with most notebook computers today, the Universal Power Adapter has two power outputs: one for a notebook computer (different tips are included for most popular AC ports) and a USB output for simultaneously charging another device like a cell phone or iPod.
CES: 'Link Theater' Links LAN-Based HD Content To Home Theater Setups
Like Apple's AppleTV, which can distribute PC-based content to your home entertainment center, Buffalo Technologies' Link Theater High Definition Media Player can play videos, digital photos, and music found on LAN-based PCs and network attached storage (NAS) devices through a home theater setup. Here at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Buffalo Technologies product manager Oliver Kavens gave me a guided tour of the device.
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CES: Ford, Microsoft's Attempt To Compete With GM On Safety Falls Short
The Sync system in 2008 Ford autos, co-developed with Microsoft, certainly has that cool factor, my favorite being the ability to tell your iPod what song to play (wish I had that in my 2007 Ford, which just has the built-in media port). Bill Gates announced at CES that Sync will soon offer a safety feature, yet it doesn't appear to be nearly as extensive as what GM offers with OnStar.
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Making FOSS 'Sticky'
There was a lot of intriguing feedback from my last post, about the MakeTheMove.Net campaign to get people to switch to Linux. Most of it revolved around the issue I'd touched on with my own discussion: Amongst nontechnical users, Linux (and probably open source in general) has a bit of a PR problem, and the people doing the advocating often have no idea what that problem really is.
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Small Clues To The Future
The Consumer Electronics Show is very good at big. It has halls of tradeshow booths as big as football fields, exhibitors showing off monster trucks with megawatt sound systems. But if you want to know what the future looks like, you can often learn more from the little things -- like the International Commerce Center, where small Taiwanese and Chinese manufacturers show their wares in a couple of hotel ballrooms as crowded and busy as a Hong Kong back street.
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Gates To Leave Microsoft, How Will He Be Remembered?
Bill Gates showed a hilarious film and gave his retirement keynote this week at the Consumer Electronics show. After mid-2008, he'll retain the title of chairman and dabble in a few pet projects. Yet I am starting to wonder if, 100 years from now, the world will even associate the Gates name with computers.
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CES: BlueAnt Bluetooth Headsets Get Voice Controls
BlueAnt already is the little company making big waves in the Bluetooth space with stylish headsets that include cool features such as noise-cancellation technologies. Here at CES in Las Vegas, the company is releasing a new Bluetooth headset -- the V1 -- that is voice activated. This is different from issuing voice commands to your phone. This is where you're replacing presses-of-buttons on the headset (depressions that result in something like the pick-up of a call) with voice commands.
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CES: Will ZigBee Be The Next Wireless Tech To Take Off?
You've heard about all the other hot wireless technologies such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, WiMax, and wireless USB (all of which are plentiful at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas). But have you ever heard of ZigBee? Here at the show, I caught up with the ZigBee Alliance's VP of marketing and business development Brent Hodges, who pointed out that ZigBee radios already are in tens of millions of devices and that by the year 2010, that statistic will rise to hundreds of millions.
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CES: Horizon Turns Ordinary Tap Water Into Electricity
Given the attention that green technologies got last year, "green" will very likely be a hot (if not the hottest,.. no pun intended) theme of 2008. In recognition of that trend, the Consumer Electronics Show has established a sustainable technologies pavilion where solution providers like the Singapore-based Horizon Fuel Cell Technologies are stationed showing off innovations such as a pair of fuel cells that turn ordinary tap water into electricity. How is it done?
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CES: Solar Luggage That Keeps Your Mobile Tech Charged-Up
At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Voltaic Systems is showing off a variety of luggage (backpacks and shoulder bags) with solar cells on them that can keep everything from iPods to cell phones to your notebook computer charged up. The luggage ranges in price from $199 to $249 (pricing for the one that keeps your notebook charged wasn't available yet). Here at the show, I caught up with the company's COO, Jeff Crystal, to get a tour of the gear (which also includes a bunch of little adapters to ensure compatibility with all your devices).
DisplayLink Is One Of The Killer Technologies At CES 2008
If you were to take a walk around the show floor at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, you'd probably think that big flat panels and wireless distribution of audio and video are the big stories of this year's show (also, wireless in general). But behind the scenes, DisplayLink is showing off what could be the most killer technology of all because of how practical it is: a multidisplay system for PCs and Macs that works off of USB. In other words, the video from your PC can be distributed across as many as six displays with little more than one USB cable from your system. Shown also: the target displays, some of which have DisplayLink's firmware built-in, also can use the USB cable as their power source.
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Searching For IT At CES
At CES, there are two fairly huge floors devoted to what would generally be thought of as information technology. Video producer Fritz Nelson and I made the rounds and found some great new technology.
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Privacy Skeptic Gets Robbed Online And Recants
Not everyone believes privacy matters.
Take U.K. journalist and TV presenter Jeremy Clarkson, who hosts a show called Top Gear.
Clarkson, according to the BBC, believed that the furor over the U.K. government's loss of optical discs containing the personal information of more than 25 million U.K. citizens was much ado about nothing.
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CES: Lenovo Launches Stylized "IdeaPads" For Multimedia Hungry Consumers
Having fully weened itself off the IBM brand name ahead of when it was originally scheduled to do so, Lenovo is here at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas showing off three brand new and uniquely stylized multimedia notebook PCs under the brand name "IdeaPad." One of them -- the U110 -- is a 2.3-pound subnotebook with an 11-inch display that looks like a fashion accessory as much as it does a thin and slim notebook. The U110 literally showed up from China while our behind-the-scenes briefing from Lenovo was taking place. The others two systems -- the 15-inch Y510 and the Y710 (a 17-inch whopper of a multimedia system) -- also have stylized finishes (although they don't come in the variety of colors that the U110 comes in).
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The CIO Agenda, 2008
What are the technology factors shaping the CIO agenda for 2008? Cost-cutting, again. More efficient technology and processes, like virtualization and third-party services. But what do these trends translate to in terms of CIOs' personal and professional goals? Two words: shape shifting.
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CES: Holy SanDisk 12-Gbyte microSD Card, Batman!
Looking to continue what's turning out to be an annual tradition of driving a leadership stake into the ground at the Consumer Electronics Show, SanDisk today announced that it has managed to squeeze 12 Gbytes onto a microSD card. The announcement comes at a time when SanDisk's competitors are just bringing 4-Gbyte cards to the market.
Already, SanDisk sells an 8-Gbyte microSD card for $129.99. SanDisk also announced its Titanium USB drive (and claims it to be nearly indestructible). Between its ability to take a good deal of punishment and the way SanDisk lets users tie it directly to an online storage service, the 4-Gbyte thumb drive is designed as a low-friction, highly fault-tolerant solution for backing up important data from a hard drive (or network).
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Microsoft Shifts Vista Marketing Strategy
"That was just a moment in time," Microsoft's Neil Charney, general manager of Windows marketing, says when I ask him why the company's "Wow" campaign around Windows Vista didn't have the desired effect.
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CES: More Device Makers Embed Skype's Chat/Voice Techs Out Of The Box
Although eBay is having a tough time getting a good return on its investment in Skype, the VoIP provider's star continues to rise on the OEM front where more and more gear makers are including Skype's technology in their wares before shipping to them to the market. Some of the newer devices with Skype inside that the company is showing here at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas include Nokia's 810 wireless Internet tablet, a cell phone from Hutchison 3 (the GSM-based mobile carrier that operates in Europe and Asia-Pacific), and a desktop Skype phone (hardwired) from Belkin.
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To Disconnect Or Not To Disconnect, That Is The Question
This Saturday, my wife and our twins and I head off for a week in the most magical place on earth. No, not Tijuana -- I'm talking about Disney World. As we start to pack the suitcases, I find myself debating whether or not to pack something else which I've come to consider very important -- my connectivity.
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Privacy Lawsuit Against Sears Is Ridiculous
Usually I support lawsuits against big corporations that expose sensitive customer information. Most corporations only take privacy seriously when you whack them on the nose. But a $5 million suit recently filed against Sears for exposing customer purchases is more about cashing in than redressing harm.
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Dear Mr. Jobs: Please May I Have A Mac On A Stick?
For Mac users traveling without a laptop, it's a cold and lonely world out there. You're forced to rely on the kindness of others for access to computers, and those others -- hotel business centers, family members -- are usually running Windows. Wouldn't it be great if you could run a cut-down version of Mac OS X on a USB drive? Then you could have access to your favorite Mac programs wherever you go.
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Join Us For GridTalk Tuesday With Intel's Stephen Fischer
Join us in Second Life or on the Web for a live talk with Intel's Stephen Fischer, senior principal engineer, Intel Corp. Fischer will talk about Intel's desktop processor strategy and technology, including the brand-new Penryn processor.
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New Products From . . . Amiga?
LAS VEGAS -- At CES, scouting for new products, 0ne of the names you definitely don’t expect to hear is Amiga. Surely that's ancient history, a footnote in the family tree of the PC. Yeah but don't say that around Bill McEwen. He's president of Amiga and he's announcing a new write-once-run-anywhere development platform, AmigaAnywhere 2. And even better -- or more bizarre – he says he's got new Amiga hardware coming, too.
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MakeTheMove.Net: Campaigning For Linux
Never underestimate the power of a clever ad campaign. Love them or hate them, the white-studio Apple ads have made the Mac that much more visible and enticing an option to PC users. Now a cadre of Canberra Linux Users group folks have crafted a simple Web site to compel Windows and closed-source software uses to switch to Linux/FOSS: Make The Move. It's a great idea, but as much as I hate to admit it, I think the delivery needs work.
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CES Mobile Phone Round Up, Dullsville Edition
It is after 9 AM out here in Las Vegas and most of the day's major news items are public. So far there have been several snoozeworthy mobile phone announcements and not much else. Not a single smartphone has been officially introduced. Here are some brief looks at what we've seen so far.
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Sex Ads Are Craigslist's Dirty Secret
Nowhere do the highest aspirations of the Internet and its sewer-dwellers come together in an unholy alliance like they do at Craigslist. On the one hand, the site is the uber-community of the online world, where anybody can connect for a job, apartment, or to sell their old junk. On the other hand, you see situations like the malicious, fake ad where someone posted a woman's name and phone number, saying she'd trade sex for cash.
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Windows Mobile 7 To Copycat The iPhone
A Microsoft insider took a major chance by spilling an internal Microsoft document containing details about the upcoming Windows Mobile 7 platform. Among the juicy tidbits of info are that WinMo7 will forgo stylus input and will be finger-touch based a la iPhone instead. Once again, Apple innovates, Microsoft follows.
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A Technology Story: A Terabyte Optical Drive
LAS VEGAS -- CES sometimes seems like it's all products all the time, but one of the interesting things about coming back year after year is that a strange sort of time-lapse perspective kicks in -- you can watch a new technology grow from concept to prototype to finished product to industry segment. I think I caught one of those at a very early stage this weekend. I met the people behind Mempile, a technology development effort aimed at creating a terabyte optical disk drive.
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Office 2003 File Formats Go Away, Then Come Back
Not too long after Microsoft released Office 2003 Service Pack 3, users started reporting a disturbing message when opening older documents. Or rather, when trying to open older documents.
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CES: AddLogix Moves A PC's Display To Any TV Over Wi-Fi
One of the major themes here at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is wireless TV. Generally speaking, this usually involves the wireless transmission of content from a high-definition source like a DVD player or a cable box to a flat panel (there's a ton of such wireless transmission being shown at CES). But, if there's a neglected stepchild in all of the wireless TV buzz, it's how to do the same thing with a PC (for example, in a conference room). AddLogix thinks it has the solution. (This post includes a video.)
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CES: Invisible Shield (For iPods, Phones, Etc.) Fails The Fritz Nelson Test
So, there we were walking the floor at a pre-briefing for the press (right before the Consumer Electronics Show was due to start) when the folks from Zagg grabbed us and said we had to take a look at what it was they have to offer. As you can see in the video below, it looks like an ordinary piece of plastic film.
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CES: Logitech's Tiny Bluetooth Keyboard Works PCs, Media Center, And Even Sony's PS3
When we spotted this tiny little Bluetooth keyboard from Logitech at the Consumer Electronics Show, we didn't even wait for a spokesperson to come over and show it to us. After getting a couple of questions answered, we decided to shoot a quick 90-second video of the nifty little $149 wireless keyboard, which is designed to work with (1) any PC or notebook that supports the Human Interface Device (HID) profile of Bluetooth, (2) any Windows Media Center PC (it has special controls to operate the media player), or (3) a Sony PS3. It comes with a USB-based Bluetooth dongle in the event your PC doesn't already support Bluetooth and the rechargeable battery is removable in the event that you need to replace it. Here's the quick video:
CES: Wireless USB Starts To Hit Its Stride
Judging by what's being displayed here at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, it won't be that long until USB cables could be a thing of the past. Well, maybe not in applications where you're depending on USB for power. But what is clear, based on my interview of USB Implementers Forum director of marketing Jon Kenton, is that it's only a matter of time before a great many USB peripherals -- everything from cameras to printers and more -- are enabled with the technology. This post includes a video.
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What's Your Digital Home Strategy?
LAS VEGAS -- It was just Saturday in Las Vegas. The Consumer Electronics Show hadn't even started officially yet, but already it was clear that "digital home strategy for 2008" was going to be a phrase I'm going to get really tired of by next Thursday. There will be miles of exhibit aisles, thousands of newer-than-new products, and unlimited digital home strategies. I'm going to get one, too, just in self-defense.
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CES: Celestron's SkyScout Spots And Identifies Stars, Constellations, And Planets
Although it has been out since last year, I couldn't help but marvel at the SkyScout, a product from Celestron that the company is showing at the Consumer Electronics Show here in Las Vegas. When you point SkyScout at a star, constellation, or planet, not only can it use GPS technology and its internal calendar to identify those celestial bodies, it also can remotely tell one of Celestron's telescopes (via a technology called Celestron Connect) where to point itself so you can get a better look (this post includes a still image and video).
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HDTV Trends For 2008
So, I'll admit it right up front -- I'm no consumer electronics expert. I love electronic toys, but other than that, I'm about as qualified to cover the consumer electronics show as you are. That said, I hit press conferences from LG and Toshiba this morning, and here's what I learned.
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CES: CellPoint's Earbuds Stay Put In Your Ears
Are you one of those people who has tried a range of stereo earbuds and Bluetooth headsets only to have them fall out of (or off of) your ears all the time? If you are, perhaps CellPoint's Flamingo Music wired headphones or the company's Bluetooth-based Flamingo Stereo is the answer. Here at CES in Las Vegas, CellPoint is showing off both products, which include an ear-grabbing, patent pending technology the company calls EarClick. This post includes still images and video.
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Ready Or Not, Here Comes Mobile TV
There's almost no doubt that in one way or another you'll be getting TV on your phone and other mobile devices. Last year at the consumer electronics show, Samsung laid out a technology called AVS-B. Now, archrival LG is proposing a standard of its own which is being actively trialed here in Las Vegas.
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CES: Celestron's Digital Microscopes Convert Tiny Things Into Megapixels
Here in Las Vegas, at a special press briefing just prior to the beginning of CES 2008, Celestron was showing off two digital microscopes -- one that comes in the more traditional microscope form factor and another that's a handheld unit. At $129, the latter targets consumers while, at $299, the former also is for consumers but could work well in some scientific settings and classrooms. This post includes still images and video.
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CES: Noritsu Drops Cost Of Getting Into Commercial Photo Printing
Here at the 2008 edition of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, commercial developing-system manufacturer Noritsu is showing off a photo ink jet printer designed to put more retailers in the business of developing pictures (this blog post includes video and a photo).
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CES: Green, Fast, And All Things iPod
Last night's press preview revealed three predominant themes: First, a good number of manufacturers are seeing the benefit of providing more energy efficient / eco-friendly technology. Second, gamers continue to drive the mass market some of the most cutting-edge advances in desktop hardware. And finally, if they couldn't think of anything else, manufacturers put an iPod port on their gear, spiffed up the design, and called it a new product.
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Microsoft Gives Bloggers A Free Ride At CES (Literally)
Bloggers covering the Consumer Electronics Show this week in Las Vegas can skip the taxi lines while getting in some Halo 3 time, courtesy of Microsoft.
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The CIO And Privacy: Liable, Culpable, Or Merely Responsible?
Or maybe all of the above. What exactly is the CIO's role and responsibility in protecting the digital privacy of customers, partners, and employees and the security of proprietary corporate data? Where does the privacy buck stop?
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Goodbye Google, Hello Startups
David Hirsch, a sales veteran in Google's New York office, is leaving the company to advise and invest in Web startups. Hirsch was one of Google's earliest New York-based employees and the first manager of its business-to-business vertical markets team.
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Let's Raise The Stakes For Data Loss Culpability
After a year of unbelievable (and in some cases incomprehensible) data loss among corporations both big and small, I propose we adopt a brand-new catchphrase for 2008. To borrow somewhat from culinary personality Emeril Lagasse: It's time to kick the penalties up a notch.
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The Five Things I'd Like To See Most At CES
Rather than offer up some predictions about what will be unveiled at CES next week in Las Vegas, I've formulated a few products that I'd really like to see showcased on the floor -- but probably won't.
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Five Things For Open Source In 2008: The Follow-Up
After posting my article about five things that open source needs in 2008, I braced for a storm of feedback, as would be generated by most any discussion of the subject. To my surprise, I got more than a few things worth chewing over and sharing.
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CES Spotlights The Consumer Effect
Those of us who cover enterprise IT don’t often describe computers as sexy, snazzy fashion accessories, but that seems to be the way the technology industry is moving these days.
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Huckabee And Obama On Globalization, Technology
First off, Huck-a-who? I had to do some research this morning to learn more about the winning Republican candidate at the Iowa caucus. So Mike Huckabee is an ultraconservative and former Baptist preacher. Ohh-kay. But I'll resist the urge to spout out my personal views here and share with you what Huckabee and Democratic winner Barack Obama have to say on the issues of globalization and technology at their Web sites.
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Man Defies Death By Jumping Onto Subway Tracks To Save His iPhone
A New York City man was so desperate to retrieve his lost iPhone that he jumped onto subway tracks to save it from being carried off by a rat. OK, maybe a rat wouldn't really be interested unless it was slimed with pizza sauce. But that doesn't change the fact that the gentleman involved risked his life for his iPhone.
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Windows XP Service Pack 3 Looks Like OS Life Extender
Way back in 2004, Microsoft released a little OS upgrade it called Service Pack 2. Windows XP owes much of its current popularity to the changes made in SP2. Although Vista is grabbing all the front-page attention with its soon-to-be-released Service Pack 1, XP hangers-on are hopeful that the upcoming Service Pack 3 can solve the nagging problems of software middle age.
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Why Windows Predominates On Virtual Machines
We reported Jan. 2 that 96% of IT managers polled by Sage Research reported running Windows on their virtualized servers and 52% reported running Linux. Without a lot more information, exactly what that means can be debated, but I think it means Windows runs on a lot of physical servers.
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Another Year, Another Bogus iTunes Antitrust Lawsuit
Maybe if enough lawyers sue Apple for violating monopoly laws with its iTunes/iPod service, eventually one of them will find a judge bonkers enough to agree. The latest lawsuit brings up variations of the same old arguments: Start with the assertion that Apple dominates the online media market, follow up with a lot of handwaving, conclude by saying that Apple should be required to write a big check. Be sure to pay the lawyers first.
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Clueless Circuit City Scrooges Itself Out Of Christmas Sales
Yesterday I was railing against the ill-behaved legal eagles of the RIAA. Today's raspberry goes out to the executives in charge of consumer-electronics mega-retailer Circuit City, who canned their best employees and subsequently -- surprise!-- reaped what they sowed.
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The CIO Reading List: The Big Switch
Nicholas Carr is the master of good timing. His latest book is sure to stir up controversy among business executives and IT managers, just as his Harvard Business Review article, "IT Doesn't Matter," did several years ago.
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Can OpenMoko's Open Source Handset Compete With Android?
Today OpenMoko announced that it is going to make a version of the open source Neo 1973 available to the mass market later this year. This is great news for open source, but with Android set to be released this year, too, what chance does the Neo FreeRunner have?
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What The Heck Is Spock?
I’ve been getting dozens of e-mail invitations recently from people on a new social networking service called Spock. Then I started getting another batch of e-mails asking, “What the heck is Spock?” So I called the Spock team to find out.
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From BeOS To Haiku
Who remembers BeOS? The "media OS", produced by a company with former Apple alum Jean-Louis Gassée at the helm, and which was briefly considered as a possible replacement for the Mac OS? Well, after an all-too-brief moment of possibility, it died. Ended up in the hands of Palm, and a few people (me included) shook their heads at what could have been. And now, after a fashion, it's been reborn. Meet Haiku.
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Startup Reinvents Business Presentations And, Once Again, Itself
FreshBrew is preparing to introduce software that turns business presentations into rich Internet applications. The company has characteristics of a startup--a new name and Web site, soon-to-be-released software application, and financial backers--though its roots go back 20 years.
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Can A Firmware Update Trump All Of The News From CES?
The Consumer Electronics Show starts in just 96 hours. When it does, the din will be deafening. Some 2,700 exhibitors will be pitching their latest and greatest doodads to the world. Last year, Macworld was held at the exact same time. Jobs' announcement of the iPhone essentially silenced the noise from CES entirely. This year, Macworld occurs a week later. What will Jobs do to keep the focus on Apple?
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Is ComScore Trafficking In Spyware?
The Internet economy runs on information, and a lot of that information relates to Web traffic. Among other things, it greatly influences decisions on where to spend advertising money. For years, companies like ComScore have been offering detailed statistics about where people are going and what they are buying on the Internet. Have you ever wondered what people are participating in this grand behavioral monitoring effort? Perhaps you or the people in your company are providing that information to ComScore for free, and you don't even know it.
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Make Mine A Mac
Year over year, Apple has been selling more Macs. 2007 was no exception; the Mac's market share continued to grow. The surge might have seen more sales thanks to Vista or the release of Leopard. Either way, there is some kind of iPod "halo" effect going on.
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IBM Pays Big For Little Startup
Did IBM pony up to 100 times the initial investment for a startup? Why?
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Microsoft Making Millions Off Novell Linux
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer once called Linux a cancer. Now, thanks to his company's alliance with Novell, he's probably labeling the open source OS as something much more benign.
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Will Mobile Disappoint Yet Again In 2008?
It's the second day of the year and it seems almost everyone is finalizing their schedules for CES next week. Filling the news void, bloggers are busy rehashing the big news from last year and pontificating on the new year. So, I decided to add my own thoughts to the mix. What does mobile promise in 2008?
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What Are Your 2008 Job Predictions?
Bad economic news is making techies glum about jobs, even though managers supposedly remain fairly upbeat about IT hiring and spending plans, according to a new report. What does your gut tell you about tech jobs in 2008?
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Social Security ID Protection: A Bloody Mess
A few weeks ago a notebook containing information on 268,000 blood donors was stolen from a Minnesota blood drive. The data included names, addresses, blood types, and Social Security numbers. Police suspect it was a random act, not one committed with the express intent of getting the personal data. Still, it's one just more case of data privacy woe that could be avoided if companies stopped using SS numbers to identify customers.
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IT Managers Don't Know Their Stuff -- Or Their Staff
An anonymous e-mailer takes CIOs, IT managers, and IT staff to task for not knowing how to complete their projects. And if they don't know how to do their own work, how can they expect to expand their responsibilities beyond IT?
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Celio Hopes To Succeed Where Palm Failed With Foleo Look-Alike
The Palm Foleo was probably the worst product non-launch in recent memory. Announced in May, Palm canned the laptop-sized "smartphone companion" in September before it had a chance to hit store shelves. Looks like Celio didn't learn anything from Palm's mistake, because it is launching its own version of the Foleo for Windows Mobile smartphones called the Redfly.
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The BlackBerry 9000 Shows Its Face, Touchscreen Not Included
Debunking one of the favorite Internet rumors of late, purported spy shots of the BlackBerry 9000 have emerged. Contrary to what has been reported in the past, it does not have a touchscreen. It does have a redesigned keyboard, but otherwise it isn't all that different from the BlackBerry Curve.
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RIAA Behaving Badly; Let's Cut Their Copyright Privileges
Innocent consumers are being bothered by another round of the record industry behaving badly, via more lawsuits and anti-copying threats. This time, though, I've got a solution. We should do what we do to children who misbehave: Take away their privileges. Here's the deal.
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The Five Open Source Business Models
Open source has become standard in Silicon Valley, with nearly every software startup planning to release at least some code. So far, they've found five main business models:
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Will Windows Vista Succeed In 2008? Don't Count On It
Conventional wisdom seems to be that existing Microsoft customers won’t leapfrog Windows Vista and wait for "Windows Seven," currently expected in 2010. There’s a feeling of inevitability about the transition, as if it’s just a question of when to write the checks to Microsoft and do the tedious work of switching operating systems. Yet as Vista celebrates its first birthday, the chances are increasing that many users will never see it on their desktops.
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Five Offshore Outsourcing Predictions For 2008
Plenty of change lies ahead in the area of offshore outsourcing, which has evolved from a little-used practice to a mature industry in less than 10 years. Here are five predictions for offshore outsourcing in 2008:
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Will Web 2.0 Survive The New Year?
Are you just about sick to death of the so-called magic phrase "Web 2.0?" If so, you'll be pleased to hear that it's doomed to crash and burn faster than Britney's/Lindsey's/(insert scandal-ridden starlet's name here) career. At least, that's what one U.K.-based research firm claims.
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