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The InformationWeek March 2008 Archive « February 2008 | Main | April 2008 » |
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Your Next Fav.or.it Blog Aggregation Tool?
At Startup Camp in London, I met Nick Halstead, the erstwhile founder behind fav.or.it, a new blog aggregation site that's been widely discussed in the, um, blogosphere (there's a dog chasing its tail somewhere in that statement).
Continue reading "Your Next Fav.or.it Blog Aggregation Tool?..."
Fujifilm's Tape Tracker - GPS For LTO
As expected, the seemingly constant stream of news stories revealing how one organization after another has lost, misplaced, or allowed evil hackers (which some of you want me to call crackers) to access personal data about its customers, employees, and/or clients has spawned a new product. Fujifilm's Tape Tracker combines a GPS receiver and cellular modem to create a James Bondian tracking device cleverly disguised as an LTO tape. All you have to do is slip a Tape Tracker into each Turtle of tapes when the Iron Mountain courier comes to get them. If someone mugs him as he loads the van and steals your tapes, the Tape Tracker will call SCI's Lojack Intransit 24/7 monitoring center and you can track him to his secret lair.
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CTIA: Just Who Is It For?
We're here at CTIA Wireless 2008, the cellular industry's trademark show in the United States. This year's show kicked off with Smartphone Summit, where the morning held tracks discussing everything from market stats from leading analysts to the latest and greatest smartphones.
Continue reading "CTIA: Just Who Is It For?..."
BlackBerry 9000 Has Rotten Battery Life, But Otherwise Rocks
The word from early testers of the much-rumored BlackBerry 9000 mystery smartphone have reported absolutely abysmal battery life. With the Wi-Fi running, testers say the battery runs dry with just two hours of Web browsing. Other features, though, impressed the users in the field.
Continue reading "BlackBerry 9000 Has Rotten Battery Life, But Otherwise Rocks..."
CIO As Acquisition Partner
Is the CIO an effective position to enlist in your company's mergers and acquisitions strategy? It makes sense, given that integration is one of the major challenges in an M&A move, particularly integration of the IT variety.
Continue reading "CIO As Acquisition Partner..."
CTIA Wireless: On The Ground In Las Vegas
Over The Air is on the ground in Las Vegas for the CTIA wireless trade show this week and will be posting videos galore of all that we see. Be sure to check back regularly for updates. So far, the smartphone summit showed some interesting developments from Symbian and UIQ.
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Google Has A Privacy Policy That Doesn't Offer Privacy
In an effort to demonstrate its commitment to privacy, Google on Friday announced a revamp of its online Privacy Center, a repository for information about Google's privacy policies and practices.
On Sunday, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that Google's enterprise search hardware is finding its way into U.S. intelligence agencies, which also have turned to Google to power Intellipedia, a Wikipedia of sorts for spies.
Continue reading "Google Has A Privacy Policy That Doesn't Offer Privacy..."
Another Trojan Targets Mac OS X
Yet another unscrupulous chunk of malicious software is being aimed at unsuspecting Mac users.
Continue reading "Another Trojan Targets Mac OS X..."
Griefers Post Seizure-Inducing Graphics On Epilepsy Board
Attackers targeted a messaging board for the nonprofit Epilepsy Foundation and posted JavaScript code and flashing computer animation to trigger migraine headaches and seizures in some users.
Continue reading "Griefers Post Seizure-Inducing Graphics On Epilepsy Board ..."
Did Verizon FiOS' Free HDTV Inch Us One Step Closer To Jonathan Schwartz's Free Cars?
OK. So things went very badly after, in an effort to drum up more business for its fiber-optic based FiOS service, Verizon offered up free HDTVs. After Verizon had a hard time making good on the promise, the bad news spread like wildfire across news sites and blogs. But did the critics miss a bigger "free car" picture that Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz once alluded to?
Continue reading "Did Verizon FiOS' Free HDTV Inch Us One Step Closer To Jonathan Schwartz's Free Cars?..."
Outspring Mail For Mac Learns From You
I've recently been bumping up against the rough edges of Apple Mail, and so I was very interested in learning about Outspring Mail, a $95 Mac e-mail program that's designed to observe the user's actions and learn from them.
Continue reading "Outspring Mail For Mac Learns From You ..."
Are Vendors Accountable For Over-Promising Software Demos?
It's a classic. An on-stage software exec confidently gestures toward the demo of newly "announced" software, expounding on its life-changing features before a packed audience. But the software doesn't really work yet; it isn't even shipping until next year. So is this demo an act of fraud? That's an interesting question in light of the lawsuit Waste Management has filed against SAP.
Continue reading "Are Vendors Accountable For Over-Promising Software Demos?..."
Linux Wins The Security Showdown! Now What?
So now that Ubuntu Linux was "last man standing" in the PWN to OWN contest at CanSecWest, does this mean open source has it all over the competition when it comes to security? It can, and it ought to -- but it's not a guarantee. And we need to not think it is.
Continue reading "Linux Wins The Security Showdown! Now What?..."
Security Showdown: OS X Caves First, Vista Buckles (Due To Flash), Ubuntu Wins
At the 2008 edition of the PWN to OWN security showdown at CanSecWest (Canada Security West) in Vancouver, an Ubuntu distribution of GNU Linux took top honors after Apple’s Mac OS X and Microsoft’s Windows Vista eventually caved under hacker pressure. All OSes were up-to-date with the latest patches.
Continue reading "Security Showdown: OS X Caves First, Vista Buckles (Due To Flash), Ubuntu Wins..."
Cradle To Grave, Baby
Virtual Center can support 200 hosts and 2,000 VMs. VMware's new Lifecycle Manager offers hope to automate and track those thousands of containers.
Continue reading "Cradle To Grave, Baby..."
WatZatSong: You Tell Me
When we held Startup Camp in London, WatZatSong was one of the more intriguing new ventures. Raphael Arbuz' project lets the community help you figure out songs that you know some lyrics to, or a tune stuck in your head.
Continue reading "WatZatSong: You Tell Me..."
Billy Packer No ATM Card; Vern Lundquist Has An iPhone!
When North Carolina won the national championship over Georgetown in 1982, Michael Jordan was the precocious teenager alongside tournament MVP James Worthy. His game winning shot that night was his introduction into our collective consciousness. But thanks to modern technology, there are very few surprises now when it comes to college stars.
Continue reading "Billy Packer No ATM Card; Vern Lundquist Has An iPhone!..."
Death To Brick-Level Backups!
Friends, readers, fellow backup geeks, lend me your eyeballs. I come to bury mailbox by mailbox (brick-level) backups, not to praise them. Exchange server administrators shall not backup mailboxes individually via MAPI for it is so slow it causes thy tape drive to shoeshine, takes several times the disk or tape space as an information store backup, is prone to errors, and causes your backup jobs to fail, claiming disabled mailboxes are corrupted. The time has come to throw brick-level backups on the junk heap of obsolete backup technologies with tape RAID, tape multiplexing, and 8-mm tapes.
Continue reading "Death To Brick-Level Backups!..."
Printing Out Is Hard To Do
I used to have a wonderful printer. It was an HP Laserjet III, and it lasted me through about eight years and three Windows upgrades. Its black-and-white toner produced beautiful, sharp, smudge-free output. Eventually, though, it wore out and went to that great recycle bin in the sky; I had to face the loss and look for a replacement. That's where the trouble started.
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GoVault – It's The Software, Stupid
Simplicity is the key to products for the SOHO market. Small business owners are like one-armed paperhangers; accounting, technology, and other administration tasks will always take second place to doing enough business to make next week's payroll. The backup software bundled with Quantum's GoVault uses this year's hot technology, data deduplication, to make backup to GoVault's removable hard drive cartridges simple as any I've seen. All you have to do is pick the folders to backup and set a schedule. The rest of the thinking is done for you.
Continue reading "GoVault – It's The Software, Stupid..."
Cinci Bell Goes Thin With Sun
I wrote on Sun's VDI upgrade earlier this month. Charlie Babcock interviewed Jeff Harvey from Cincinnati Bell on his company's VDI deployment for our 3/31 issue.
Continue reading "Cinci Bell Goes Thin With Sun..."
Lockdown Tradeoffs
Enterprise users and consumers alike have been scared straight about data protection, given the regular headlines about laptop theft or misplaced hard drives. But as users rush to secure the desktop, are their good intentions making the jobs (and lives) of storage pros more difficult?
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CA Customers Newly Targeted
While most software exploits target end users and end-point applications, this one is aiming squarely at corporate users.
Continue reading "CA Customers Newly Targeted..."
Energy Camp @ Interop: Calling All Interested Parties In IT Energy Savings
If you're an IT professional, solution provider, or someone else with an interest in how to trim back the energy consumption of technology (especially if you're someone with domain expertise to contribute to the broader conversation about "green IT"), then I hope you'll join me and Energy Camp master of ceremonies James Governor (blog) for Energy Camp in Las Vegas on April 28 (just prior to the start of Interop). Registration is free and it gets you a coveted hall pass into Interop, too.
Continue reading "Energy Camp @ Interop: Calling All Interested Parties In IT Energy Savings..."
And The Survey Says …
The CIO must be the most surveyed profession on the planet. No wonder a new survey says CIOs are dissatisfied with their jobs -- they're tired of being surveyed.
Continue reading "And The Survey Says …..."
Google Mashup: Video Ads, Privacy, Online Safety
Google, as always, has been busy. Here's a roundup of some recent developments. Video ads are now being served in search results (although I couldn't find any); Google says it is really, really concerned about your privacy; and the company outlines steps for people to protect themselves.
Continue reading "Google Mashup: Video Ads, Privacy, Online Safety..."
Hundreds Of Servers Compromised In Hannaford Breach
More details about the credit breach at the Hannaford grocery chain are becoming known, and they aren’t pretty.
Continue reading "Hundreds Of Servers Compromised In Hannaford Breach..."
Photo: Why To Check Power Supplies Before Use Abroad
To everyone in the hotel that I was staying in while in the U.K. for Startup Camp London (including my co-workers), I apologize for almost burning the joint down. Twice. Thankfully, I'm the only one who paid a price for my stupidity: a bit of damaged finish to my brand new MacBook, a blown-up power supply for an Ethernet hub, and one destroyed power strip.
Continue reading "Photo: Why To Check Power Supplies Before Use Abroad..."
The CIO And SharePoint
Why should CIOs pay close attention to this particular Microsoft product (as opposed to the myriad others you support in your organization)? Because it's viral (meaning its use is probably growing in your company, whether you know it or not), and it needs to be managed closely to get the most of out it.
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Of Earth Hour And Toasty Undercrackers
I'll get to the undercrackers in a moment. First, a word about a global event scheduled for Saturday, March 29, which is either a planet-friendly gesture we can all feel good about, or a misguided act of "environmental indoctrination."
Continue reading "Of Earth Hour And Toasty Undercrackers..."
Three Mobile Advances: Search, Recommendation, Web Integration
Cell phone manufacturers aren't the only ones pumping new features and functions into mobile devices. Three startups--Kannuu, Aggregate Knowledge, and Ribbit--are getting into the act, too.
Continue reading "Three Mobile Advances: Search, Recommendation, Web Integration..."
Friday Open Source Round-Up
So what's new in the world of open source apps you can really use? Among other things, we have a new edition of OpenOffice, a Linux-based system-rescue utility, and a portable edition of an open source financial management application. Read on ...
Continue reading "Friday Open Source Round-Up..."
AT&T (Finally!) Sets MediaFlo Mobile TV Launch Date
More than a full year behind competitor Verizon Wireless, AT&T has set May 2008 as the date it will launch its mobile TV service using Qualcomm's MediaFlo network. This is more than four months behind schedule. The good news is that it will be launching the service with the svelte LG Vu phone, which (we can't help the comparison here) is very much like the iPhone.
Continue reading "AT&T (Finally!) Sets MediaFlo Mobile TV Launch Date..."
The 'Weekly Watch' On Content Management
With all the activity in the content management market, I thought it would be a good idea to start a weekly ritual of quick blurbs and sound bites from vendors, users, and anyone else who'd like to throw their message in the mix.
Continue reading "The 'Weekly Watch' On Content Management ..."
Viral Video Of The Week: Big Dog Beta
Surely by now you've seen the video of the "Big Dog" -- the amazing quadruped robot designed to serve as a "pack mule" for soldiers in terrains where military vehicles are unable to manage or maneuver. I'll wager, however, you've never seen the original "Beta model" in action?
Continue reading "Viral Video Of The Week: Big Dog Beta..."
UIQ Platform Updated, Receives Love From SlingMedia
The UIQ mobile operating system has been updated to version 3.3. The biggest changes with this new system software, which is based on Symbian OS v9.3, are support for widgets, as well as the most recent version of the Opera Mobile browser. At the same time, SlingMedia announced that UIQ phones can now use its mobile service to stream TV. In all, good times ahead for UIQ.
Continue reading "UIQ Platform Updated, Receives Love From SlingMedia..."
Why Did Vista Stink? Developers, Developers …
Microsoft wields incredible power in the computer industry. Still, when it comes to the image of its flagship operating systems, it is greatly at the mercy of third-party software developers. When users sit down to use Windows, the code written by Microsoft sometimes doesn't matter as much as the bugs left behind in poorly written applications and drivers. If a crash happens, the average user is more likely to blame "crummy Windows" than to figure out it's a bug with a device driver.
Continue reading "Why Did Vista Stink? Developers, Developers …..."
And I Recommend Caviar For Dinner
Yes, every night. Because in this age of federal bailouts of brokerages, record mortgage defaults, and a stock market that doesn't know which way is up, it's time to indulge. At least that seems to be a piece of the logic behind this report, encouraging would-be videoconferencing customers to go HD.
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All That Got Stolen Was Microsoft's Thunder
It's bad enough that Microsoft with its big war chest might sue you for producing open source software. But what's really hard to take is the suggestion that you stooped to stealing Microsoft code for your project. At the Open Source Business Conference this week in San Francisco, one show organizer got his revenge.
Continue reading "All That Got Stolen Was Microsoft's Thunder ..."
Google Restores 'Save & Close' Button To Google Docs
This is some short and sweet news. This afternoon I fired up Google Docs to write a post about Picasa Web Albums, and noticed that my favorite button is back. Thanks, Google!
Continue reading "Google Restores 'Save & Close' Button To Google Docs..."
Google Offers APIs To Picasa Developers
I use Picasa to share pictures with my friends and family. It has some great features, and even offers plug-ins for Apple's iPhoto software so you can upload directly to Picasa albums from iPhoto. Today, Google introduced a new API for Picasa that should make it easier to transfer pictures around -- once developers get around to actually using it to create Picasa buttons.
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For Big Tech Companies, Romance Is In The Air
Maybe it's the end of Lent and the coming of spring, but despite the gloomy economic prospects there's definitely a spirit of reconciliation and conflict-resolution in the air of the U.S. tech industry.
Continue reading "For Big Tech Companies, Romance Is In The Air..."
'It's Not Just A License'
Every now and then you run across something that just makes complete sense. That happened to me earlier in the week when I was reading posts in Movable Type developer Tim Appnel's blog, and I came across an entry entitled "Open Source Is Not Just A License." It sums up, in a remarkably succinct fashion, two of the major benefits of taking a closed- or restricted-source project and making it into a more open-source one.
Continue reading "'It's Not Just A License'..."
Fuze Puts Unified Communications On Steroids
Fuze uses the power of the browser to push unified communications services to the desktop, laptop, and smartphone. That includes the ability to watch -- and participate in -- a live video conference on your smartphone. I had the opportunity to check this new service out, and I have to say, it's a step toward the future of unified communications.
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Analyst: Apple Has Ordered 10 Million 3G iPhones
Rumors and reports about a 3G version of the iPhone appear to be kicking into high gear the last week or so. On top of Kevin Rose's prediction earlier this week that we'll see 3G iPhones with video-calling capability, Gartner has weighed in and says Apple already has placed orders for 10 million 3G-enabled iPhones. Hoo-ahh!
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Internet Evolution Reports On Test-Shy Peer-To-Peer Filters
More than two dozen vendors say they can help ISPs filter unwanted P2P traffic. But only two were willing to put marketing claims on the line in an in-depth test of P2P filtering technology.
Continue reading "Internet Evolution Reports On Test-Shy Peer-To-Peer Filters..."
Beyond Consolidation
Should we call this stage two of adoption for virtualization? Am I jumping too soon with my "1x1 makes sense" pitch?
Continue reading "Beyond Consolidation..."
Cemaphore MailShadow Google Edition Syncs Exchange
I've previously mentioned Cemaphore's MailShadow Exchange server continuity software. Today, Cemaphore's announced a MailShadow Google Edition that bidirectionally syncs data from an Exchange mailbox to Google's Gmail and Calendar. The sync is complete enough to allow cross-platform appointment booking and to keep read/unread state so your Exchange mailbox will reflect that you read Big Jim's message on Gmail. As e-mail is now the universal mission-critical application, organizations with low user/server ratios like small businesses and widely distributed organizations have struggled with how to provide Exchange continuity at a price they can afford. Now with MailShadowG, Google is a low-cost alternative to MessageOne.
Continue reading "Cemaphore MailShadow Google Edition Syncs Exchange..."
Startup Flips On Its Virtual Switch
A growing number of security startups aim to bring visibility to the network traffic of virtual systems. Today, Montego Networks officially came out of stealth mode.
Continue reading "Startup Flips On Its Virtual Switch..."
Lady Terps Advance To Sweet 16... And Maryland Keeps Running
The top-seeded Lady Terrapins edged out Nebraska 76-64 on Tuesday, but the real backstory in Maryland is that one of its county networks held stable in the face of a record number of unique visitors to the March Madness site.
Continue reading "Lady Terps Advance To Sweet 16... And Maryland Keeps Running..."
IT And The Global Village
"The toughest job you'll ever love," according to Lillian Carter, a tagline used for recruiting by the Peace Corps in the '70s and '80s, herself a volunteer in India at age 66. A forward-thinking IT vendor has picked up on this international service model and here's why it makes great sense.
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Helpstream Helps Those Who Help Themselves
Self-service customer support sounds like an oxymoron, but Helpstream insists that it doesn’t have to be. The company, which recently secured $8.6 million in series B venture funding, has developed help desk and customer support software that brings together communities of users to assist each other.
Continue reading "Helpstream Helps Those Who Help Themselves..."
Will Content Management Be Most Affected By Open Source?
Some of open source's biggest proponents were probably gloating this week over some results from North Bridge Venture Partners' annual open source survey (PDF). Most of the findings weren't terribly prophetic, but there were a few that caught my eye.
Continue reading "Will Content Management Be Most Affected By Open Source?..."
Squeezing Costs Out Of IT
If your company is looking for ways to squeeze more out of IT these days (and who isn't), server virtualization is one of the moves some organizations are making to find savings. Just ask Kent Kushar, CIO at wine maker E&J Gallo.
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Cemaphore Delivers E-Mail To Outlook Via Gmail, No Exchange Server Required
Let's say you're in love with Microsoft Outlook. You think it's the niftiest e-mail program ever. But the thought of licensing an Exchange server sort of makes you sick to your stomach. Acting like virtual Tums to quell your gastric butterflies, Cemaphore Systems is set to offer a subscription-based service that will deliver your e-mail via Google's Gmail system to your Outlook inbox -- no Exchange necessary.
Continue reading "Cemaphore Delivers E-Mail To Outlook Via Gmail, No Exchange Server Required..."
Video: Intel Ships QX9770 Quad Core, I Build A PC With It
After a long wait, Intel's hot new Core 2 Extreme QX9770 quad-core processor is finally here. Intel has been in something of a stealth mode with this chip, sending out review units -- like the one I used to build the PC shown in the new video included in this post.
Continue reading "Video: Intel Ships QX9770 Quad Core, I Build A PC With It..."
Turn Your Smartphone Into A Wi-Fi Hotspot
Ever try to tether a laptop to a smartphone via Bluetooth or even a cable? It can be a painful and difficult process. New software from TapRoot Systems, however, will help you avoid the hassle by turning your Wi-Fi-equipped 3G smartphone into a miniature hotspot of its own.
Continue reading "Turn Your Smartphone Into A Wi-Fi Hotspot..."
Recession And IT Attitude
It's part of a CIO's job to keep things positive in the IT organization. How are your IT colleagues holding up under the pressure of economic uncertainty?
Continue reading "Recession And IT Attitude..."
Split Decision: Is Motorola's Break-Up For The Best?
Motorola has finally decided that keeping the company together is no longer best for shareholders. Its mobile device division has long been plagued by weakness and has operated in the red for the better part of a year. But is lopping off the gangrenous limb the best move to save the company?
Continue reading "Split Decision: Is Motorola's Break-Up For The Best?..."
Olive Branch Or Crown Of Thorns?
Reading about Microsoft counsel Brad Smith's visit to the Open Source Business Conference yesterday was about what you'd expect. It's a sign that Microsoft's stance about open source has not so much evolved as crystallized -- but that's unfortunately about the limit of what I could see Microsoft doing. It can only go so far, not just because of who it is but who it has been all along.
Continue reading "Olive Branch Or Crown Of Thorns?..."
ExaGrid's Scalable Data Deduping NAS
Aiming for the SME market, ExaGrid System's built a line of data deduping NAS appliances with 5 models designed to protect from 1 Tb to 5 TB of source data. A year ago a vendor coming out with a deduping NAS would have been noteworthy on its own, but this market moves fast and I'm not that easily impressed any more. What makes the ExaGrid boxes intriguing now is that you can stack up to 5 appliances into a single grid with 34 TB of disk space and a data ingestion rate of over 2 TB per hour.
Continue reading "ExaGrid's Scalable Data Deduping NAS..."
Web App Threats Rising
Great news: 1 out of 10 Web sites you visit may actually be secure.
Continue reading "Web App Threats Rising..."
Driving Design With AutoCAD 2009
My neighbor is building an addition to his house. Lots of details. Lots of draft work. His contractor and architect use the time-honored methods. It looks painful. But it doesn't have to be.
Continue reading "Driving Design With AutoCAD 2009..."
The Disruption Factor
Here's a hypothetical based on a lot of ifs. If you had a bunch of money to invest, if you had access to the smartest brokers around, and if the economy were on firm ground, which of these ideas would you invest in?
Continue reading "The Disruption Factor..."
Web 2.0 Development For The Common Man
Talk about tilting at windmills. WaveMaker CEO Chris Keene is challenging Microsoft's Visual Studio while simultaneously pointing out the drawbacks of Java development. Keene may be suffering delusions of grandeur--or perhaps he's onto something.
Continue reading "Web 2.0 Development For The Common Man..."
Nokia Predicts It Will Sell 35 Million GPS Phones This Year
Uh, 35 million phones with GPS from one manufacturer is a lot. That number is just under 10% of all Nokia phones sold during 2007 (~400 million). This prediction is a clear indicator that GPS and navigation/location services will play an increasingly important role moving forward.
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Xerox Calculates Office Sustainability
This is the time of year many of us start thinking and talking about losing weight. Again. Vague goals like wanting to "slim down for summer" are tough to achieve,in part because they are imprecise. (And in part because pancakes make superior butter delivery platforms.) The desire to "be more green" is another vague yearning I'm hearing a lot these days.
Continue reading "Xerox Calculates Office Sustainability..."
Yahoo, MySpace Get Social With Google
Google's OpenSocial effort has two new members, none other than MySpace and rival Yahoo. The three companies said they'll put any differences aside and work together to create the OpenSocial Foundation. The foundation will be focused on sustaining a "neutral, community-governed forum" for developing applications.
Continue reading "Yahoo, MySpace Get Social With Google..."
Mobile Browser Field Gets Another Player
TeaShark is the latest to offer a Web browser for mobile phones. It has a beta version of the browser ready for general use and it can be downloaded straight to Java-enabled phones. What does it offer? Tabbed browsing, auto-completion, speedy browsing and integrated media capabilities.
Continue reading "Mobile Browser Field Gets Another Player..."
Ohloh: Social Networking For Open Source
Social networks are all the rage right now, so what's one more to add to the fun? How about a brand-new social networking site devoted to connecting users and creators of open source? Enter Ohloh.
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Why Is Windows XP Still So Much Faster Than Vista?
I've finally completed my project to build a performance PC with Intel's upcoming, top-of-the-line Core 2 Extreme QX9770 quad-core processor. Since I had all that speed to spare, I decided to do a dual-boot setup, installing both Windows Vista and XP. Boy, was I surprised. I'm a big Vista fan, but it's shocking to be reminded just how much faster Windows XP really is. And, as a Vista fan, this makes me angry.
Continue reading "Why Is Windows XP Still So Much Faster Than Vista?..."
Mission-Critical Apps Continue To Descend From The Clouds
There's a lot of interesting scenarios these days around the intersection of software-as-a-service (SaaS) and content management. Thanks to companies like Google, Salesforce.com, and Amazon, cloud-based computing is no longer some mythical, business-led, revolutionary approach to accessing technology. Everyday, mission-critical applications are being neatly packaged and delivered to business users regardless of time, place, or device.
Continue reading "Mission-Critical Apps Continue To Descend From The Clouds..."
Apple Is A Bad Windows Citizen
Over the past week, Apple has been raked over the coals for its force-feeding of new applications through Apple Software Update. The "update" word there might lead you to believe that Apple would only use the utility to deliver updates to software you previously installed. Yet Apple also uses its "update" program to download software you never requested.
Continue reading "Apple Is A Bad Windows Citizen..."
Qwaq Brings Virtual Worlds To Business Collaboration
I had a chance to talk with the CEO of Qwaq the other day. Qwaq makes virtual worlds software optimized for corporate meetings. If you've spent time in Second Life, you know the power of avatars and 3-D spaces to enhance conversations and collaboration. It's hard to explain to people who've never tried virtual worlds, but it's real. Qwaq is an attempt to tailor virtual worlds for business collaboration, adding features that businesses need and taking away features that are harmful.
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Medical Records For 2,500 Study Participants Are Stolen
Only after a laptop is stolen from the trunk of a car owned by a researcher at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) does this organization promise to do better when it comes to security. Why does it always go down this way?
Continue reading "Medical Records For 2,500 Study Participants Are Stolen..."
Real Tossers
How long do you hang on to decommissioned hard drives and storage devices? Do you at least wait to make sure your new drives or backup applications are functioning properly?
If you answered yes to that last question, there might be a job at the White House for you.
Continue reading "Real Tossers..."
The Recession And IT Hiring
Has the (possibility of) recession affected your company's IT hiring plans? Because a lot of organizations say that that will be the first thing to go.
Continue reading "The Recession And IT Hiring..."
3G iPhone To Have 2-Way Video Conferencing?
That's the word according to Kevin Rose. He says the 3G iPhone will have both a main camera and smaller, lower-resolution, user-facing camera. It will have 3G, and the capability to conduct two-way video calls. Too bad most of Rose's predictions don't come true.
Continue reading "3G iPhone To Have 2-Way Video Conferencing?..."
Is Google-Run Wi-Fi The Answer To Wireless For The Masses?
Haven't we been here before? Now that Google has lost the spectrum auction, it's petitioned the FCC to open up white spaces spectrum so it can provide Wi-Fi to smartphones (like, it's own, Android smartphone). What's wrong with existing Wi-Fi networks, and how is Google going to do it better?
Continue reading "Is Google-Run Wi-Fi The Answer To Wireless For The Masses?..."
Bite-Sized Server Apps With BitNami
What I enjoy most about open source is when people take existing products and twist them around into new shapes. I've long had high regards for PortableApps for doing that, but thanks to a commenter on a previous post of mine, I now have a new crew to watch in that regard: BitNami.
Continue reading "Bite-Sized Server Apps With BitNami..."
Network Appliance Rechristens Itself NetApp, Picks Bad Logo
In a stunning demonstration of branding over substance, Network Appliance, the market leader in corporate NAS, has decided that its biggest problem is that its target market of the top 5,000 storage-using organizations in the world had never heard of it. To address this problem it, like FedEx before it, adopted the company's nickname of NetApp as the official name and decided to use the worst stylized N logo since NBC in the '80s. Various other bloggers have compared it to Stonehenge, a staple, and a Lego piece. The Register points out that a Dutch JiffyLube-type operator has a logo at least as similar as the Nebraska public TV log was to NBC's.
Continue reading "Network Appliance Rechristens Itself NetApp, Picks Bad Logo..."
WiMax Is 'A Disaster' That 'Failed Miserably'
Oh, man. This doesn't sound good. The first WiMax operator to launch a WiMax network in Australia already has shut the network down. The CEO of Hervey Bay's Buzz Broadband berated the technology during a public meeting and said that it simply doesn't work as it's been advertised.
Continue reading "WiMax Is 'A Disaster' That 'Failed Miserably'..."
VMware To Double R&D Presence In India
VMware's Bangalore engineering office is set to grow to 1,000+ in two years. Add in 200 or so other sales and support employees, 160 channel partners, university partnerships, and many customers across India to see the big picture.
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Confessions Of A Basketball Junkie
It's Easter Sunday, so it's fitting that I ask forgiveness for my serious addiction to basketball, an affliction that I don't suffer alone but one that has me concocting work-related reasons to watch basketball, pursuing every possible technology angle behind the games and ignoring every single priority in my life. They don't call it March Madness for nothin'.
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NCAA Round 1 And 2 Highlights
Damn these brackets. Let me tell you how bad it is. After round one, my colleague Mitch Wagner was ahead of me. This is a guy we had to explain the tournament to; a guy who sent out an e-mail about our Hoop Madness site with the subject line "NBA Tournament."
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CNN Creates Citizen Journalism Channels On Web, In Second Life
Budding Wolf Blitzers can bring their news reporting talents to the Web and Second Life using a citizen journalism program run by CNN. Reporters post video, photos, audio, and text reports to the beta iReport site, and have the news appear on the site unfiltered. The best contributions appear on CNN itself.
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From The Rumor Mill -- IBM To Buy Diligent
Israeli business news site Global Online reported last week that negotiation for IBM to buy data deduplicating VTL software vendor Diligent Technologies for $200 million had reached an advanced stage. http://globes-online.com This would follow on IBM's acquisition of Israeli grid storage startup XIV a couple of months ago. Considering that XIV Executive Chairman Moshe Yanai remained a director of Diligent after it was spun off from EMC Israel in 2002, he just may have tipped his new bosses off to a good deal.
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Clarke Never Crossed Sci-Fi Humanities Divide
I'm a bit late weighing in on the death of Arthur C. Clarke, who was buried Saturday in Sri Lanka, having taken (me, not him) some much-needed time off to contemplate various things. (Hey, if there's one key element in Clarke's writings, it's long time spans where nothing much happens.) So here's my contrarian thought, amid all the laudatory obits about this sci-fi pioneer.
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Small Post, Tiny Footprint
Ubuntu's JeOS (say 'juice' if you must) weighs in at 151 MB. Want to roll your own VMware miniappliance? JeOS is a pretty good place to start.
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Crapware Costs You Time, But Makes Them Money
It's an unfortunate fact that most Windows-based systems are filled with crapware when they're delivered. This unwanted software has a limited lifetime or crippled functionality. When its teaser trial is up, you either succumb to its incessant pleas for money or find a way to uninstall it. Last week, Sony put forth a solution. For a mere $50 more, it would deliver a system that is the way it should be -- free of crapware. After a harsh reception all over the Internet, Sony backed down and now says it will send you a system sans crapware for no extra charge.
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But Cling If You Must To The Illusion Of Privacy
I'm trying to work up a head of steam over the presidential candidate passport snooping. But my contract with TechWeb limits my self-righteousness to certain decibel levels, which, frankly is quite smart when the subject is data privacy.
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'No Reg' Drives March Madness On Demand Traffic Up 122%
Kansas State wasn't the only team to advance on the NCAA tourney courts Thursday. CBSSports.com managed to rake up some of its own points on the first full day of March Madness, proving that fans want more game and fewer hoops to jump through.
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George Clooney Googles Himself
Writer A.J. Jacobs takes the debonair actor on a hilarious cybertour of what people are saying about him on the Internet. He bravely reads his Wikipedia entry, looks up reviews of his best and worst movies, and joins the Facebook group "George Clooney is NOT the sexiest man alive."
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So, Did Google Win Or Lose The Spectrum Auction?
Google did not come away from the FCC 700-MHz spectrum auction with any licenses. It did, however, force Verizon Wireless to spend $4.74 billion and trigger the open access provisions to a massive block of spectrum that covers most of the country. With those provisions, and Verizon's own "Any Device" initiative, that leaves the door wide open for the Android platform.
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The Google Of Peer To Peer?
Tiversa, a five-year-old company based in Pittsburgh, specializes in knowing what kind of content is being shared over peer-to-peer networks. Until now, it's concentrated on helping businesses find and fix data leaks caused by file-sharing users. But Tiversa's got other plans for its technology, including working with advertisers to understand and respond to user activity on P2P networks.
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SnooperGate: Two Fired Over Illegal Obama Passport Snooping
It’s the second time in a week where workers improperly accessed electronic records of the rich, powerful, or famous.
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Spicebird: More Open Source Competition For Outlook
There's been a lot of discussion about which open source application works best as a replacement for Microsoft Outlook: Evolution, Ximian, Thunderbird, and so on. Let's add another contender to that list, shall we? Meet Spicebird, currently in beta 0.4 form.
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Apple To Ban SDK Developers From Accessing iPhone Music Features?
Since Apple released the SDK several weeks ago for the iPhone, the euphoria has slowly been fading. Reports that not everything will be open for access and other detractors have tempered the initial joy. The latest piece of bad news? Developers won't be able to create music players for the iPhone.
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Viral Video Of The Week: Star Wars Meets Saul Bass
Welcome to our new end-of-the-week feature. The clever and astute might recall seeing a similar incarnation on the Network Computing Blogs a while back. I convinced (read: fast-talked and begged) the powers-that-be that this would be a fun way to bid the last five days buh-bye and head into the weekend.
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More Users Going Off-Deck For Mobile Content
The walled gardens built by the mobile network operators continue to crumble. As more and more content can be reached off-deck, mobile users are finding it and the carriers are losing control of their distribution models. With AT&T and Verizon Wireless flinging their networks open, how long before the gardens are gone entirely?
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5 Assertions By Nicholas Carr That Do Matter
Set aside the emotions engendered by Nicholas Carr's writings. The author of the infamous "Does IT Matter?" spoke at Search Engine Strategies in New York this week and raised a number of cogent issues that should be keeping IT managers and CIOs awake at night.
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Green Agendas Continue To Influence Content Strategies
My first post of 2008 was a content management trend watch: number two on the list was the movement toward green IT.
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Behind Microsoft's Visor
What if Microsoft decided to get really serious about server virtualization? Yeah, yeah, I know Hyper-V is coming this summer. But especially now that they've made such a hash of Vista, virtualization's a natural place for the company to regain a bit of momentum and stature, at least in the data center.
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Rethink The Business Case?
Every P2V business case is about cost savings, right? You know the pitch; consolidation will set you (and your budget) free. PR firms are even touting virtualization as the saving grace for budget woes in the coming Dark Age, er, recession. What if I told you that IT pros up and down the food chain are looking at VM'ing to resolve server-build hassles and a list of other operational woes? What if I said those same folks are expecting costs to be neutral, or higher for P2V, but their business case is still good...
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USB Drive Dongle –Stick One In Your Bag O' Tricks
It happens to the best of us every once in a while. The CEO broke his laptop screen, or the desktop power supply of the VP of HR, who insists on storing data on his C: drive, bit the dust. Now you have a hard drive full of data in a dead system. How do you mount the drive so you can recover the data? Put it in a spare desktop? Is it PATA, SATA, or the mini-PATA connection for laptop drives that also carries power? For around $30 you can stick a USB drive dongle in your bag of tricks and read them all.
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When Google Speaks …
... CIOs should listen. Google's CIO Douglas Merrill gave a (brief) interview to The Wall Street Journal earlier this week. Plenty of IT people picked up on it. If you haven't read it, you need to.
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Video: Bug Labs' Build-It-Yourself Mobile Devices
We caught up with Peter Semmelhack, president and CEO of Bug Labs, to talk about how his company is building tools to allow users to build any mobile device "as easy as snapping Legos together." The company's mobile devices are based on open source hardware and software to foster innovation. Watch now to get a look at the devices, and find out how Bug Labs hopes to make money by giving technology away for free.
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Is Your IT Team Ready For March Madness?
An onslaught of content is traveling through your servers right now. Do you block it? Do you pass? Perhaps you can score. Anyway your employees play, it's the customers who'll demand that you get'cha head in the game.
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Verizon Bests Google In FCC Auction
Verizon Wireless did it. Its bid of $4.74 billion beat out all the other interested parties and secured the C Block in the FCC's 700-MHz spectrum auction.
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It's A Support Thing -- Or: One Throat To Choke
Last year, word swirled in the air that Hewlett-Packard would be the next big PC vendor after Dell to add support for Linux on desktops. So far the official word remains muted, in the realm of "we're exploring options, we'll make an announcement when the time is right", but the guesses now center around HP providing SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop as its distro of choice. The real question isn't what distribution, though -- it's what kind of support options you'll get, or as they say, which throat to choke when things break.
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The Start Of NAC Market Consolidation?
Lockdown Networks has closed its doors and is looking for someone to buy it's IP. Is this just the beginning of the NAC market consolidation, or an isolated event?
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XPrize: $10 Million For 100-MPG Cars
The XPrize Foundation is doing for cars what it has already done for commercial space flight (and is trying to do for human genomics and lunar exploration) -- it is pushing for groundbreaking technical innovation by offering big prize money.
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BlackBerry Addicts Get 1 GB Of Free Online Storage
Cortado Connect and Box.net are giving users of BlackBerry smartphones 1 GB of free online storage for pictures, files, music, whatever. If you want more storage, however, you'll have to cough up some dough. It's sort of like a mini-FTP for your phone. Check it out.
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HTC 'Dreams' Up Its Android Phone
HTC was one of the first handset makers to commit to building an Android phone this year. According to inside sources, that phone will be called the Dream. It will package together a large touch screen with a full qwerty keyboard. It should street later this year.
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Google's IT Department To Google Staff: Use Whatever Hardware And Software You Want
Google's CIO lets employees pick whichever hardware / operating system they want and download whatever software they feel they need to be productive. If you think it sounds like a security nightmare, you'd be wrong. Google's model is all about choice, even if it is a little less cost efficient.
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Veedow's Online Personalized Shopper
How can you lose with someone named Fabio at the helm, talking about how his company, Veedow.com, will do for shopping what Pandora does for music? Veedow will customize a recommendation-based social shopping site based on the items and styles that appeal specifically to you.
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Brightbox Ruby On Rails Hosting
Traditionally, Ruby On Rails developers have had difficulty taking applications from their development systems to deployment (difficulties not experienced developing with PHP, ASP, or Java). But Brightbox, a U.K.-based startup showing off its wares at Startup Camp in London recently, specializes in Rails hosting.
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De-Dupe Do-Si-Do
I'm not sure if you need a dance card or a scorecard to keep track of the pairings in the data deduplication market. One thing's abundantly clear: this storage app must have more commercial appeal than most everything else that's come down the pike lately, given the scramble for partners.
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A CEO And A CIO Share Thoughts On IT Spending In This Economy
Do you spend on IT or pull back during tough economic times? It partly depends what you're spending that money on. Here are the views of a software company CEO, and the CIO of a world-famous company, on that topic.
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Arthur C. Clarke Remembered
Arthur C. Clarke, who died Wednesday, spent more than 60 years writing about how communications and computing technology could help drive the the next stage of human evolution. So it's appropriate that he's now being remembered on the international communications network, the Internet.
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Google's Search UI Derided As Antiquated
Some have declared that Google's search user interface -- and results pages -- are just too darned simple. It definitely isn't taking advantage of all that broadband has to offer with its elementary layout of links. Searchme, in comparison, displays results similar to CoverFlow in iTunes. Very fancy. I decided to compare Google, Ask, Yahoo, and MSN Live Search to Searchme to see what I could turn up.
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Morphing Along With Amazon EC2
I've been curious about the way Amazon.com's Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2, can be used to create SaaS applications. This week I spoke to the folks at Morph Labs, who're doing exactly that using an open source software stack. If the idea of using EC2 sounded intriguing but you blanched at the idea of trying to work directly with it, these guys have one way to fix that.
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Fight For Cleaner Technology Before The Man Insists On It
In a study of 100,000 IT professionals surveyed by The Corporate IT Forum in the U.K., "About 58% said it was difficult to make a business case for green IT; they found it difficult to overcome the 'so what?' factor."
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Novell Hasn't Forgotten Microsoft's Jab At WordPerfect
News came this week that the Supreme Court wouldn't block Novell's antitrust lawsuit alleging that Microsoft harmed Novell's office suite during the 1990s. Novell won $536 million in 2004 regarding Microsoft's actions against NetWare, and is still pressing its decade-old grudge against Microsoft for the decline and fall of WordPerfect. The difficulty I see in resolving this case is in deciding how much of the damage was done by Microsoft and how much was self-inflicted.
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Content Management Companies Can Learn From Social Networkers
I continue to be impressed with how vendors outside the CMS space are helping companies manage content, and lots of it. One in particular is Neighborhood America, the Florida-based company that provides social networking capabilities to companies such as CBS Networks, Kodak, and Fox News.
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In Massive Patch, Apple Mends Roughly 90 Security Vulnerabilities
In one swing, Apple unleashes a tally of security updates that nearly surpasses all of the patches it released last year.
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Is Web 2.0 An Endangered Species?
Yesterday I read two articles that suggested Web 2.0 growth is stunted, if not actually in danger of stopping altogether.
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Details Emerge About Verizon's Any Apps, Any Device Initiative
Verizon Wireless is hosting developers at an event in New York City this week where it is sharing details on its Any Apps, Any Device program. It's promising quick turnaround for device certifications and should have the program up and running in the second half of the year. Will this really usher in new user freedoms?
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Madness On Demand: Future Of TV
Today, CBSSports.com issued an additional 250,000 VIP passes for its exclusive March Madness on Demand (MMOD), a service that lets you watch every single game of the NCAA basketball tournament online, regardless of local blackouts. A VIP pass gives you priority access over others. The final VIP passes in the initial 500,000 allotment were claimed via registration earlier today and, given what CBS Sports officials say is typical, the highest demand for access will take place the morning of the first games while worker productivity, at least for those companies not specifically blocking access, drops faster than a brokerage house market cap.
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Tibco's Spotfire Predicts . . . Siena?
Bracketology is clearly an obsession. I've written so far about two different applications written to help people fill out their March Madness brackets. (I know I keep saying this, but don't forget to join the InformationWeek bracket). This is about a third program, this one built by the Spotfire team at Tibco. Spotfire is an enterprise analytics platform that specializes in interactive visualization.
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Reports: Dell To Re-Enter Smartphone Business
Rather than an Android phone, which was reportedly in the works back in January, this time sources at Foxconn Electronics in Taiwan indicate that Dell is set to resume making Windows Mobile-based handheld devices. Did Asus' recent purchase of smartphone maker E-Ten have anything to do with it, or is Dell finally getting its mobile act together?
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Does Desktop Virtualization Need Desktop SOA?
Part of the rationale for Web services has always been that they can tunnel through firewalls, linking networks that are otherwise securely separated. Virtualization puts up similar barriers between applications within a single machine, so will crossing them require similar technology?
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Intel's Next Top Model?
Who else wants Mike's job? He gets to hang out at Intel predicting the future of computing.
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4.2 Million Credit Cards Leaked
A New England-based supermarket, Hannaford Bros., said Monday that a system breach may have given criminals access to more than 4 million credit and debit cards. It's a significant event, and while the facts aren't out yet, it looks unlike most other breaches.
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Information Is Power
Government officials' seeming inability to manage information has led me to conclude they don't need a backup and archiving policy so much as they need a virtual Roto-Rooter turned on their servers and tape drives and cardboard boxes. And here are three cases in point.
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The Modular Tape Library -- Flexible Yet Old-Fashoned
In my life as a consultant I seem to attract clients that need a network janitor. Regardless of whether the cause was a CIO past his prime trying to squeak out a couple last years by keeping the budget down or just a network that grew past its designer's ability, the network's not working right. I've also learned that if the network's not working right, the backup system isn't working at all. As a result, I frequently have to specify a new tape library before I have good capacity planning data. Since I have to guess at how many tape drives and slots the client will need for the next 10 (or even 2) years, I pick a modular library that can grow with the client's needs.
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LimeWire Bandit: ID Thief Gets Four-Year Jail Sentence
A Seattle man was sentenced yesterday to 51 months in prison for using peer-to-peer networks to commit identity theft. The case highlights a PC security risk that catches many users and businesses off-guard.
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Is Ripping DVDs To Your iPod Legal? (And Here's How)
Over the holidays, someone I know became the happy owner an 80-GB Apple iPod Classic. However, it quickly became apparent that, while music is easy to get onto the device, movies are a problem. Most DVDs are encrypted, and resist easy conversion. But if you've paid for the thing, why shouldn't you be able to rip videos to your very own iPod?
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iPhone Gets Some Enterprise Love From Sybase
Sybase announced it will provide enterprise-level support for the iPhone through its Information Anywhere Suite. That means secure Lotus Domino and Microsoft Exchange e-mail, as well as other device management controls to keep IT happy.
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Subcontractors, Meet Open Source
Now that the recent lawsuit against Verizon by a couple of open source developers has been settled, it's become clear -- as some people suspected -- that the real offender here wasn't Verizon per se but a subcontractor, Actiontec. I wonder if this will mean a new level scrutiny or contractual stipulations for the way subcontractors are hired to do this kind of work -- with one of the possible stipulations being "no open source," especially if litigation is a serious risk.
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Today Google Docs Completely Failed Me
For the first time in 15 months, Google Docs failed to meet my needs and left me totally stranded. I no longer own Microsoft Office. I needed to send a PowerPoint file. I imported an existing presentation into Docs, edited it, and attempted to export it as a new PPT presentation. Alas, Google Docs only lets you export presentations as PDF or TXT files. I was flummoxed.
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The Casual Fan's Guide To March Madness Success
Need some guidance in filling out your brackets for the NCAA men's college basketball tournament? Here are a few off-the-cuff tips, based on lessons learned from 20 years of tournament pool experience. Warning: While I've managed to win a few pools in my day, I've also flamed out early with a high-risk strategy. One year I correctly picked all four teams in the Final Four -- only to finish second. For a chance to win a 42-inch plasma TV, fill out the InformationWeek Hoops Challenge brackets by going to CBS Sportsline here, and then signing up for the InformationWeek Bracket here using the password biztech.
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New Credit Card Breach Will Test PCI
The latest exposure of more than 4 million credit and debit card numbers may strain the validity and stability of the credit card industry's controversial security rules.
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Coming Soon: Mobile Phones As Boarding Passes
I travel via airplane about five or six times per year, most often for work. I am always amazed at how inefficient the entire check-in and boarding process is. Looking to change that, several airlines are trialling the use of mobile phones as your boarding pass. Will it work, or will we always wait in lines no matter how advanced technology becomes?
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Second Guessing Microsoft On Internet Explorer 8
Microsoft's IE8 effort has been kicking into gear lately with its first beta release and a bunch of information. One controversial change is that IE8 is aiming to be "standards compliant" more than "IE7 compliant". Both IE6 and IE7 lagged far behind HTML and CSS standards that were well-established before the browsers shipped. After eight years, Web developers have become reluctant experts about the hacks and patches needed to make IE work properly. Many Web pages break when existing IE6/7 hacks are applied to the new IE8 browser, and that could spell trouble when IE8 ships.
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Behind Coke Zero’s Bracket-O-Matic
Having trouble with your brackets? I've got your answer. Thanks to Coke Zero and the folks at Crispin Porter and Bogusky, a boutique creative design shop, you've now got Bracket-O-Matic. Just use the nifty sliders to select the values you think are important and voilà, you've got your bracket. But don't stop there. You can put that bracket right into the CBS Sports.com bracket (including the one you belong to with InformationWeek; password is biztech).
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Not As Dumb As Eliot Spitzer
Don't get me wrong -- I think Chris Crocker would make a crap spokesperson for HIPAA. But the medical staff of the UCLA Health System facing discipline or dismissal for snooping in Britney Spears' medical records deserve everything coming to them.
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Sun VDI 2.0 Offers Anywhere, Anyhow Desktops
Sun's rapid move to v2.0 brings a new Virtual Desktop Connector hoping to serve as a "universal translator" for many-to-any desktop delivery.
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PacketTrap Goes Pro
Network management startup PacketTrap has introduced a professional-grade version of its pt360 Tool Suite for network monitoring and diagnostics. The product is aimed at midsize companies, but seems to have caught on with some large corporations, too.
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More Than Half Of IT Pros Foresee A Recession
IT people tend to be a pretty optimistic bunch. So it's discouraging to see that 58% of IT pros in our recent survey say the economy is in a recession or headed toward one.
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Hospital Workers Busted For Snooping On Britney Spears’ Medical Records
The Los Angeles Times reported over the weekend that medical workers violated the star's privacy when she visited the UCLA Medical Center in late January and early February of this year. They're all getting fired.
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In Japan, There Are No More 2G Phones
The first month of 2008 saw something remarkable in Japan: Not a single second-generation cell phone was sold anywhere in the country. Every phone sold in January was 3G or better, and 85% of the population is already using 3G handsets. The picture of adoption isn't so rosy here in the U.S. and elsewhere. What's the hold up?
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Predictive Analytics Applied To March Madness
Last night, watching all of the experts reach the same, boring conclusions (only Bobby Knight colored outside of the bracket lines picking Pittsburgh to win it all) it became clear that only by sheer luck or insanity could you pick a Marquette or a George Mason (or Pitt) to get to the Final Four. There are so many factors to consider, but it always comes back to the number one seeds. But we live in an Information Age, so why not use technology. And that's just what two professors have done to create Dance Card (to predict at-large tournament berths) and Score Card (to predict the tournament winners).
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5 Ways To Cut Data Center Power Costs
Here's the problem: Power costs keep rising, while storage needs keep growing. Whether your data center is a couple of servers or a roomful of racks, creating efficiencies doesn't have to be complicated. Here are five ways to start cutting costs today.
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FatWire Quietly Serves Billions
After hearing FatWire Software brag about one of the best quarters in its history, I thought it was a good time to catch up with its CEO, Yogesh Gupta. We spoke about everything from open source to SaaS, with Gupta also highlighting some of the company's recent enterprise 2.0 moves.
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Google Talks More Smack About MicroHoo
Even though Google already has made its position concerning a merged Microsoft-Yahoo entity fairly clear at this point, Google CEO Eric Schmidt couldn't resist reiterating the point. He said, "We are concerned that there are things Microsoft could do that would be bad for the Internet." Them's fightin' words!
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WebMynd: A Catalog Of Every Web Page You Visit
WebMynd, a startup launched in January, has come out with a browser extension that keeps a record of every Web page you view. It's a nifty tool, but a word of warning to would-be users: You may want to shut it off sometimes.
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Google Android: For More Than Just Phones?
So far all the talk about Google's Android has been about phones. But the more I think about it, the more I realize phones may just be the tip of a very large iceberg that Google is trying to conquer. Why stop at phones?
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Windows Mobile To Get Flash Support, Thumbs Nose At iPhone
Even though Microsoft has its own mobile video-viewing software, Silverlight, it has decided to bite the bullet and license Adobe's Flash Lite and Reader software. This means future generations of Windows Mobile devices will be able to view and interact with a wider range of mobile Web sites -- ones that the iPhone can't view.
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Internet Explorer 8 Screenshots
Want an early glimpse of Internet Explorer 8? Then have a look at these screenshots. They're a good sneak peak at some of the new features in Microsoft's latest Web browser.
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RPPtv's Simple Web-Based Video Production
RPPtv sounds a little too good to be true: A Web-based uploading, sequencing, editing, and output program for consumers and broadcasters. It's also free, available any day from RPPtv's site or as a Facebook application.
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The Clock Is Ticking For Retailer Web Application Security
In a few months time, what is now considered merely an advisable best practice will become mandatory for any business accepting credit card payments over the Web. Problem is, the mandate is ill conceived.
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Microsoft Lights A Fire Under Internet Explorer 8
Something's gotten into Microsoft lately. Its developers are singing like canaries about their plans for Internet Explorer 8. Earlier this month, Microsoft released IE8 Beta 1, which is intended mainly as an early look for Web developers. It's quite a change for a product that seemed to have gone dark in the days after Vista's release.
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Worth Watching
Back when I covered storage networking a lot more closely, I learned to anticipate the industry's rhythms. If any one of EMC, HP, IBM, or NetApp introduced something, one of the other three would frequently contact me on the QT to let me know why their solution was still superior.
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Cinderella Gone Mad
We already have some clues about this year's Cinderella, the team that somehow every year spoils all the fun (see also: make mad in march; anger) for top seeds but actually makes it that much more interesting for viewers. Mostly they come from mid-major (a term that smacks of "not quite good enough") conferences, and most of those conferences have finished their yearly tournaments by now; the winners get automatic births (ah, to be born).
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Delivering Video On Demand (Part Of An Ongoing Blog Series)
One day after the official launch of Hulu's Internet TV service, Thursday's New York Times warned of a bandwidth crunch on the Internet in the not-too-distant future. Video traffic on YouTube alone, data showed, was as much as all Internet traffic in 2000. Next week begins CBS Sports.com's March Madness On Demand, and for now neither CBS Sports, nor its key partner, Akamai, are worried.
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YouTube Slowly Uploading High-Quality Videos
If you've got an HDTV sitting at home, watching standard definition TV can be a drag. What's even worse is tuning into YouTube videos. The video quality is often lacking in a big way. YouTube is hoping to change that, however, and is beginning to make higher-definition videos available for viewing.
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Video: Can Coke Get Its Bottlers On A Common IT Platform?
When a large company tries to convince partnering companies to invest in a common technology platform, it's rarely a walk in the park. One example of this is Wal-Mart's slow-going RFID initiative. Now Coca-Cola faces this challenge in an initiative to get 300 bottlers worldwide standardized on SAP's service-oriented architecture.
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See, It's Not So Easy To Disconnect, Is It?
Back in January, I pondered if I would be able to survive a week away from e-mail, cell phones (other than for emergencies), and overall connectivity during my family's trip to Disneyworld. Several readers expressed surprise and disbelief at such a quandary, saying how easy it was for them to leave their gear behind for vacations and extended periods of time. According to a new study, however, disconnect anxiety is not all that uncommon.
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Apple Denying iPhone Developers In Droves
It appears that not anyone can sign up and become a registered developer for the iPhone. Apple is sending out rejection letters via e-mail. Twitterers are firing up their tweets in protest and anger.
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Rosedale Out As Second Life CEO
Philip Rosedale, the co-founder of Second Life, is stepping aside as CEO of corporate parent Linden Lab, and the company will begin a search for a CEO with more operational and management experience. This could be great news for Second Life and its community -- the service is, in many ways, brilliant, but it often trips over its feet when trying to execute some of the functions that are basic to any business, like communicating with big customers and processing payments.
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T.J. Maxx To Hold 'We Got Hacked' Sale
As part of class-action settlement for one of the most egregious breaches of consumer credit cards in U.S. history, T.J. Maxx plans to hold a special one-day sales event. Seriously?
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Kidaro, Microsoft, And ... Struggling To Define Desktop Virtualization
I spoke with Kidaro CEO Kevin Brown for about 90 seconds yesterday afternoon; the conversation was cut short due to an emergency conflict on my end. Kevin and I hope to reconnect via phone next week while he is in Israel. I suspect he and his will be a bit busy for the foreseeable future, what with that recent Microsoft acquisition...
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Watch The Video Of My Interview With Fox News About Social Networks
Fox Business had me on this morning to introduce its viewers to social networking. I explained a little about what it is, who the big players are, and why it's popular. I talked about the differences between the three big companies, MySpace, Facebook, and Bebo, and why people like them. We're a social species (I said), and socnets replace the kind of face-to-face casual conversation we'd have if we all lived in the same small town and ran into each other on the streets every day. Watch the video below.
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Asus' Eee Gets Windows XP ... But Hasn't Lost Linux (Yet)
At the CeBIT convention in Germany the other week, Asus unveiled a new edition of its flash-based Eee sub-notebook PC, nominally running a custom version of Xandros Linux. New models, Asus said, will run Linux ... and now Windows XP.
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Could Virgin Mobile Have Saved Eliot Spitzer?
In the wake of the Eliot Spitzer scandal, there have been some informative articles on how technology led to the downfall of New York State's governor. Virgin Mobile took advantage of the tech angle and crafted an ad that lampoons Spitzer. It's pure marketing genius. Spitzer, a.k.a. Client #9, could have avoided some trouble if he'd only used a pre-paid phone from an MVNO such as Virgin.
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Air Force Sheds (Some) Light On A Strategic Cyberspace Vision
But after reading the Air Force Cyber Command Strategic Vision, I'm still not clear on what the strategy actually is ... or if it's just PR posturing.
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What Sticks
And what doesn't in the startup world doesn't appear to have much to do with technology. Like in sports, whoever can deliver on the fundamentals -- in this case, basic business fundamentals, stands a better chance of thriving in the market.
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Darwin And The Big Telcos
For a telecom and Web conference, the Emerging Communications Conference at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley this week had a lot of talk of death and extinction. Most of it was related to the big telecom carriers.
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Apple WWDC Dates Announced
Mark your calendars for the annual developer conference in San Francisco, but expect more than just the iPhone SDK on the agenda.
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FCC Chairman Under The Gun, Auction Crawls Along
Kevin Martin, the Federal Communications Commission chairman, is being investigated for his leadership style and the possibility that he has adversely impacted policies regarding the wireless industry. Meanwhile, the 700-MHz auction (remember that?) plods along painfully. When, oh when, will it end?
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Rethinking AOL Mobile: Could Bebo Have An Impact?
It's fair to say that AOL's mobile services are pretty much off the radar when compared with competitors Google and Yahoo. Until today, I've never even visited AOL's WAP Web site to see what's shaking. The answer? It's a nice portal, but there's not a whole lot going on. Could AOL's acquisition of Bebo change that?
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Watch My Interview On Fox News
Fox Business Network is going to interview me tomorrow about AOL buying Bebo. They're going to put pancake makeup on me. I told them if they wanted to make me look good, they're going to have to apply it with a trowel.
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Fixing The Flaws Of The Web Experience
A lot of the conversations I've had lately have revolved around the notion of the user experience, or in vendor speak, the Web experience. I'm not knocking the marketing messages (OK, maybe a little) but we've been talking about the Web experience since the Web 1.0 days, without much movement.
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March Madness On Demand: You Gotta Be In It To Win It
There is absolutely nothing like March Madness to kick off the spring. Bubbles and brackets, vasectomies (I'll come back to that), 9:00 a.m.-until-God-only-knows-when because I've fallen into such a stupor that I start hearing Jim Nantz's voice in my dreams. Did I mention you don't need to miss a game? Oh, CBSsports.com. All the games. Online. Live. On Demand. Need I say more?
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The No-Risk Firefox 3 Beta Tryout
Want to give the Firefox 3 beta a spin, but you don't want to go through the tedium of backing up your profiles and personal data? Here's an easy solution if you're a Windows user.
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Want To Earn More Money With Your Web Site? Google Ad Manager Will Help
Today Google introduced a new service called Ad Manager. One guess what it does. It gives Web site publishers more control over their ad sales and ad serving. Google's target users are SMBs. It's yet another free service; there are no fees associated with Ad Manager. Google will, however, take a commission on revenue from ads it sells on your site.
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Digital Pennies From Analog Dollars Are Web Content Conundrum
NBC chief executive Jeff Zucker put his finger on the new-media conundrum, in a speech touting the network's online success in serving up half a billion video streams last year. Good news, right? Not completely, because while old-media broadcasts command mucho bucks for commercials -- $2.7 million for a 30-second Super Bowl spot -- you can get yourself a banner ad on a hot Web site for a few thousand.
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Video: EFF Co-Chair John Perry Barlow Is Feeling Optimistic
We caught up with the former Grateful Dead lyricist and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation at the ETech conference in San Diego last week. He says technology is beating Hollywood efforts to control knowledge. We talked about how people will make money if they can't sell copies of their work, and more.
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Developers: Check Your %*^& Inputs
Better watch where you click, you just may be stepping into a Web page with a Trojan horse, according to security researcher Dancho Danchev.
This warning brought to you by the fact that developers continue to neglect to check their application -- and in this case, search engine -- inputs.
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Cemaphore MailShadow -- Exchange Failover With A Twist
E-mail, and more particularly Microsoft Exchange, is a classic example of how user adoption can turn an application mission critical before the IT guys catch on. Most IT departments protect Exchange servers with the same techniques they use to protect other applications. Replicate the data to another disk somewhere and have an idle Exchange server mount the database for failover. Rather than collect data at the file or block level, MailShadow collects Exchange objects at the transaction layer for replication. Working higher on the stack brings MailShadow some significant advantages.
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I Smell A Reality Show
Geeky? Unsociable? Does this sound like you? It's how the European Union's top technology official summed up the current lot holding down jobs in IT. Her prescription for change isn't likely to win her tons of support, either.
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What Hulu Will Do... And What It Won't
I've been beta testing Hulu.com, the NBC Universal - News Corp. collaboration that puts TV shows and some movies online. At first blush ... it's very entertaining and there are some enterprise possibilities, but why does it have to be so much like TV?
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Google Opens Up YouTube's APIs To Developers
YouTube decided that operating a destination site was no longer cool and beefed up its capabilities. It is now offering partners and developers a full-fledged platform to help them maintain their own brands with a new set of APIs and tools. These tools can be used to integrate YouTube into Web sites and allow for the creation of YouTube applications.
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Airbus Deal Critics Ignore Boeing's Outsourcing
The Air Force is getting lots of ack-ack for its decision to award a $35 billion airborne tanker contract to Europe's Airbus instead of Chicago-based Boeing. National defense shouldn't be outsourced, the critics say. There's just one problem with that argument -- Boeing itself sends key military work offshore.
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StartUp Camp: Video Interview With WebCanvas
You may have heard about bands discovering a fan base (or vice versa) on MySpace or YouTube; or about the launch of some new Web TV show on YouTube which makes its way onto regular television because of its popularity (to some degree, South Park is a great example). Now, thanks to fun startup WebCanvas, artists can have the same opportunity. The WebCanvas presentation at Startup Camp last week in London was impressive in its creativity. But these guys, who finished second in Camp voting for best Startup, have some work to do in several areas.
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Buttoned Up No More, BlackBerrys Get Their Own Music Store
Time to let your hair down and loosen your tie. Starting April 1, BlackBerry users will have access to Puretracks' DRM-free music store, with tunes available from four major labels, plus myriad indie labels. Rock on!
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The Windows Home Server Bug, And A Lost Opportunity To Fix It
On Monday, Microsoft's Windows Home Server team posted an update on their blog about the persistent data loss bug that has been hanging around since October 2007. At this point, the group says they have a handle on the problem, but they don't expect to have a complete fix until June.
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Liquid Computing Wants To Virtualize Everything
I've been digging into I/O virtualization lately and ended up speaking with some folks who want to virtualize everything. Everything. Data I/O. Network. Entire physical servers. Liquid Computing is hoping to be the next major disruption in the force.
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Songbird 0.5rc1: Still Hatching
A while back I looked at an earlier release of the Mozilla-derived open-source music player Songbird, and while I liked what I saw it was still undeniably rough. Now I've looked at the first release candidate of the new version 0.5 of the program, and while it's still promising, there's a few too many places where the promise just isn't completely fulfilled yet. But hey, welcome to beta software.
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AMD Names New CIO
He's Ahmed Mahmoud, and he comes to the chipmaker from the IT shop at Dell, which has had its share of high-profile IT alumni.
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iPhone Firmware 2.0 Already Hacked. Apple, Give Up Control!
The iPhone Dev Team did it again. Using the iPhone SDK, they were able to hack into the included 2.0 version of the firmware and unlock it. It is completely jailbroken. And it ain't even public yet. Since the iPhone hacking community already has Apple by the, uh, stem, why doesn't Apple just give up and let them develop for the iPhone as they wish? Because, Steve Jobs, you've lost.
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Oracle: They Do So Much But Can They Do Everything?
It's always a challenge for something baked into an enterprise platform to be as competitive as the pure-play providers. And in most cases, if content management is the set of applications you're trying to incorporate, it can be even more daunting.
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Build-A-PC Chronicles: Intel's QX9770 Rocks, But My Project Hits A Snag
I'm becoming convinced that PCs have distinct personalities. Maybe I've been at this too long, but the idiosyncrasies I encountered in my latest quad-core PC build project have convinced me that gremlins lurk in every system. Fortunately, I was saved by a novel diagnostic indicator, which Asus included with the motherboard.
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Facebook Application Finds Blood Donors
Now here's a great idea: Register with the Takes All Types facebook application, tell them your location and blood type, and they'll contact you when your blood is needed.
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Energy Literacy: Saul Griffith Unplugged At ETech
The monumental imperative to save our planet requires launching ourselves over what seems an insurmountable hurdle involving the orchestration of global agreement and policy combined with individual actions that manifest themselves as a nebulous series of micro decisions. So good luck with all of that and call me when the polar bears and penguins are tanning themselves on Fire Island. Or maybe we should completely re-examine our own lives like Saul Griffith, MIT PhD, chief scientist at Makani Power and the most fascinating presenter (despite some 70 slides) at ETech last week.
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Wikipedia's Tin-Cup Approach Wears Thin
Wikipedia gets 300 million page views per day and could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars if it sold ads. But it doesn't -- it survives on donations. The company hired an executive director nine months ago, and is looking for ways to raise revenue, which is tough because it's a not-for-profit that depends to a huge degree on volunteer labor.
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Economic Spin
While we contemplate the wisdom of locking Eliot Spitzer and Geraldine Ferraro in a room together for all eternity, let's take a deep breath and give thanks for some positive economic news (Go, Dow, go) and wonder what in the world they're smoking over at the freshly renamed NetApp.
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Malware Made Real
Romanian visual artist Alex Dragulescu has created a series of images depicting malware, under a commission from MessageLabs, a communications security company. The results are stunning because they sustain the expectation that malicious code is somehow alive.
Dragulescu uses algorithms and data culled from blogs, spam, and other computer files as his raw materials. For the MessageLabs commission, he developed images using actual malware code.
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PR Snafu Outs LG Phone Before Its Time
Cross-Pacific communication can be a pain in the rear. Especially when coordinating product announcements. Unfortunately for Alltel and LG USA, corporate LG in Korea announced a new phone before LG USA and Alltel were prepared. The news (about a fancy new touch-screen phone) caught them off-guard. Bloggers -- ever at the ready -- took the opportunity and ran.
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Hard Data On Opportunities And Threats For India's Outsourcers
Our just-published original research gives a glimpse into clients' satisfaction with their India-based IT outsourcers, and it's a key part of an in-depth package on "What's Next For India." Here are just a few data points that note strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats for India's IT outsourcers.
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Motorola's CTIA Handset Lineup Spilled On YouTube?
A promotional video, purportedly made by Motorola, has appeared on YouTube that shows off a number of existing and unannounced mobile phones from Motorola. The mystery phones, which include a Windows Mobile 6.1 smartphone and 5-megapixel Kodak-branded shooter, could be the cards Motorola plans to reveal in a few weeks at CTIA.
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Should 'Internet,' 'Web,' And 'E-Mail' Start With Lowercase Letters?
Just as the Internet has evolved over the past decade and a half, the language used to describe it has evolved as well. We used to say "World Wide Web," now we just say "Web." English tends to get more compact and faster over time.
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Startup Camp U.K.: Are Domestic VCs Missing Out On Better Opportunities?
As I write this blog post -- a reflection on Startup Camp London -- I'm on a Boeing 777 that's racing across the Atlantic to Boston's Logan airport. This plane is full of technology. Presumably, the first class cabin has seats that can convert into beds or that can pivot and face a variety of directions. I heard that everyone up there also gets Bose noise canceling headphones. I'm not sure. It's a secretive place that only people who've paid 10 times what I've paid to cross the Atlantic are allowed to see. One thing I do know: several of the entrepreneurs we saw at Startup Camp London will one day be able to buy seats in that cabin. For their entire families.
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Thou Shalt Not Trash The Planet
Call it sinflation. The Vatican has doubled the number of mortal sins and one of them is really dirty: polluting the environment.
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Students Successfully Hack RFID Crypto
RFID-chips -- commonly used for wireless payments, access key cards, and even to open car doors -- have been shown relatively easy to hack.
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Coca-Cola's CIO Talks Innovation
The décor in the executive wing at Coca-Cola's headquarters -- Ming vases, mahogany furniture, plush carpets -- could have been lifted straight out of 1886, the year Coke was born. No question, Coke is a company steeped in tradition. But equally important for Coke is continued innovation, and that's where CIO Jean-Michel Arès and his team are helping out.
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Splunk CEO Explains Platform Strategy
Splunk has introduced a new version of its IT search engine, one that exposes APIs and common services so users, developers, and partners can tie in their own applications. "We're opening up the basic platform," says CEO Michael Baum.
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Wal-Mart Bids The gPC Adieu
Looks like Wal-Mart's experiment with Linux PCs was just that: an experiment. The big-box retailer is pulling the Everex gPC from its shelves. So what happened?
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Google Shows Off First Android Application, More To Come
If the Android SDK isn't quite enough to guide developers through the process of creating applications for Android, Google is working to provide a clearer road map. Its new Apps-for-Android site will host sample applications that show off all that Android can do, giving developers, in turn, a better idea of what they can do with the platform.
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Startup Camp London: Video Interview With Startup Scred
I have a friend who does everything in Excel. I mean EVERYthing. If he were ever to write a novel, I am convinced he would do it in Excel. He obsesses about balancing his books at home on Excel; organizing trips in Excel. So when we went to Italy a couple of years ago and shared expenses, he built us a handy spreadsheet. There was nothing complicated about it, but its elegance and logic just made everything tidy -- well, except the part where I owed him money. Now I don't need the spreadsheet, though. Enter Scred, one of the attendees at last week's Startup Camp in London.
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MySQL Co-Founder: Success = Humility + Passion (Not Exit Strategy)
There's nothing more charming than a humble entrepreneur like MySQL co-founder David Axmark. Zero ego, maximum success, achieved from a place of pure personal passion and the observation of need rather than blatant commercialization. Axmark made it clear to the Startup Camp audience in London this past weekend that while most companies start up with a business plan that includes an exit strategy, Axmark and his partner Monty Widenius started simply to create, to fill a need, because it was fun.
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Demise Of The Specialist
Security's never been an afterthought in storage, but it wasn't exactly a major cornerstone as stored bytes moved beyond the mainframe and into storage networks. Lost or stolen hard drives, laptops, and backup tapes have made big headlines in recent years, and prompted state and federal lawmakers to horn in on the act.
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Mozilla Introduces Firefox 3 Beta 4
Mozilla introduced Beta 4 of Firefox 3 , with a boatload of stability fixes and a few improvements to the user interface. Mozilla says the beta -- like all the pre-release browser versions -- is for developers and testers only, but I've been using it as my primary browser since December and it works just fine.
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Developer: iPhone SDK Is 'Crippled'
One of the underground developers working on hacking iPhones says that the Apple SDK is "crippled," and predicted that the thriving market in jailbroken applications will continue.
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Visiting Roma In Second Life
Second Life's Aberystwyth Lane recently visited one of the best areas in Second Life: Roma, which is dedicated to role-playing the ancient Roman Empire. She posted a terrific photo essay, which highlights all the detail and creativity that went into the build.
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Motorola's Downward Slide Steepens
Moto is teetering on the edge of the abyss. Last week saw two top-level executives depart the ailing maker of mobile phones, one of them the former head of the mobile phone division. And if its sales figures keep up their current pace, it will close out 2008 down three spots to the world's fifth largest supplier of mobile phones.
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WhiteHat Seeks To Protect Top E-Commerce Sites
WhiteHat CEO Stephanie Fohn says that you need her company's service if you've got a Web site that takes transactions. WhiteHat is a SaaS vendor that offers black-box penetration tests for Web sites.
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Google Report: Spam, Security, User Support Are Trouble Spots For IT
Google's Enterprise folks released the results of a massive IT study that polled 575 CEOs, CIOs, and CTOs in large, multinational enterprises as well as small organizations. The results? Spam continues to be annoying. IT pros are having difficulty reaching security, compliance objectives. IT pros are spending too much time helping end users.
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How Daylight-Saving Time Costs More
If you're certain that daylight-saving time is good for the planet, put your hands up. Now put your hands down, because a recent study of more than 7 million residential meter readings over a three-year period shows what many of us have believed anecdotally for years. Electric bills go up when we switch to daylight-saving time.
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Microsoft Releases Vista's Successor, And It's FAST
I don't know how this one slipped under everyone's radar. On Feb. 27, Microsoft released a new operating system that can replace Vista. It has all the patches and fixes that are in Vista SP1, and runs nearly all the same software, but runs it faster. Early reviews show that Windows Workstation 2008 is the speediest and most secure version of Windows to come along in a decade.
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Microsoft's Mesh Promise On The Horizon
It's becoming clear that synchronizing information across devices and services is set to become a critical part of Microsoft's Web strategy, and Ray Ozzie made that point even clearer last week.
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OpenOffice: Free As In ... Unencumbered
Sun's decision to move OpenOffice's licensing to the LGPLv3 sounds like a way to make sure that one of its bigger software products doesn't fall victim to software patent issues. After all, Sun went through a great deal of hassle to try and liberate Java from its legacy restrictions, so maybe it's just trying to make sure history doesn't repeat itself. A wise measure.
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8 Gb FC, Qlogic, HP, And VM I/O
I've spent the better part of the last week reconfiguring gear in the virtualization test lab, getting reacquainted with machine specs and idiosyncrasies. We have a variety of servers connected to a Dell, nee EqualLogic, iSCSI SAN. Half of our HP servers and one Xserve also have 2 Gb Fibre Channel HBAs, unused since we lost our FC SAN. Remember when those 2 Gb FC connections seemed zippy? 4 Gb HBAs have been on the market for a couple years, and a number of recent 8 Gb FC solutions are being touted as a remedy for I/O constraints in virtualized environments.
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Wi-Fi Hotspots Are Doomed
I bet you love your Wi-Fi. Well, don't get too attached. Ericsson's chief marketing officer believes that Wi-Fi is already irrelevant and will be replaced by high-speed wireless broadband sooner than we think. Roadblocks are definitely in the way, but 3.5G networks will far outstrip Wi-Fi in coverage the world over.
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Will The SDK Be The iPhone's Achilles' Heel?
Apple is betting its future in the smartphone market on a control-freak business model. Where other smartphone platforms let anybody build applications for them, Apple demands to be the gatekeeper for what goes on the iPhone, to protect users from inappropriate and dangerous content, and to generate additional revenue for itself. But developers might decide that Apple's business model is too much hassle and give their business to competitors instead. And Apple needs third-party developers to ensure the ongoing success of the iPhone.
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Breach: British Police Force Allegedly Infiltrated By Al-Qaeda
According to a story that ran in today's edition of the Daily Mail, four officers in Britain's Met police force have been eyed as terrorist spies.
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iPhone SDK Developers Angry At Apple's Tight Control
Steve Jobs giveth, but only a little bit, and only when his hand is forced. This is the case with the iPhone SDK, which is both a parry against Google's Android tool kit and a recognition (in the wake of Apple's iBricking scandal) that iPhone owners want third-party apps, no matter what. But Apple's stated intention to tightly control all apps built with the SDK -- and you can bet they'll do so -- is causing lots of complaining among developers.
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Novell On Virtualization
Novell's Richard Whitehead and I sat down to a lively discussion on the trials and tribulations of VM management. Whitehead was good enough to remind me of Novell's open source chops on SUSE and Xen...
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HP Video - Them Servers Blow'd Up Real Good
Like many guys, I have to admit a certain fascination with explosions and explosives. If there had been a Patriot Act when I was a young man, I would almost certainly be blogging from a federal pen somewhere as I did combine my fascination with my studies as a chemistry major to make my own little toys. The statute of limitations having run out and the heat being on, so to speak, I limit myself to Mythbusters and other televised explosions. When surfing the Web this afternoon looking for good visuals for my Interop Disaster Recovery Cookbook workshop, I tripped across a video HP made where they blow up a simlulated data center with five racks of servers and an XP disk array. To see it yourself, go to this site.
Startup Camp London: The Unconference
My colleague, David Berlind, held Startup Camp in London Friday and Saturday, for an eager crowd of hotshot startup companies interested in sharing experiences, getting feedback, or maybe just looking for that gentle pat on the back to keep them going through 18 hour workdays and family sacrifices. Startup Camp is but one in a series of what Berlind calls "unconferences" where there is no structured agenda except for the one the crowd creates when they arrive. This is the "format for you to share your common passion for being an entrepreneur," Berlind told the crowd.
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A Taxing Response
"No effort to control greenhouse-gas emissions or to lower the carbon footprint ... can succeed unless those emissions are priced properly," writes Michael Specter in the Feb. 25 issue of The New Yorker. "There are several ways to do that: they can be taxed heavily, like cigarettes, or regulated, which is the way many countries have established mileage-per-gallon standards for automobiles." Exchanges where entities buy and sell rights to pollute are another way.
While Specter's article is largely about the cost of greening up our food supply, there's no reason why some of the solutions he discusses couldn't be applied to IT.
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ETech Video: Cory Doctorow On Climate Change, Being Great, Wireless Wiretapping, And More
We caught up with Cory Doctorow at the ETech conference here in San Diego. Cory is co-author of the blog Boing Boing, a digital rights activist, science-fiction writer, and all-around brilliant thinker. We talked about some of the themes that emerged at ETech, including how we can reduce climate change without "putting on hair shirts," how to become great, the wireless wiretapping controversy, and more.
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Turmoil In The Financial Industry
No, not that turmoil. CIO turmoil. A couple of financial heavyweights get new top tech execs.
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CIOs Should Teach High School
The Wall Street Journal had an article yesterday about corporations funding high-school curricula, particularly in accounting, engineering, and science. Bravo, I say. Not only that, CIOs should make a point of getting involved in these kinds of activities: teaching -- or at least visiting -- high school classes.
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Video: AMD To Ship Bug-Free Barcelona
AMD won't be laboring under the fallout from the bug which marred the launch of its Barcelona quad-core server processor much longer. A fixed chip will ship to AMD's partners -- including Tier 1 server vendors Dell, HP, IBM, and Sun -- by the end of March. That's what Kevin Knox, AMD's VP for commercial business, told me in a highly entertaining (well, it ain't bad) video interview. Read on to view the clip.
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Is Drupal Finally Enterprise-Ready?
The open source CMS platform Drupal is going commercial thanks to an 11-person startup named Acquia. It recently secured $7 million in funding and plans to sell a suite of services it says will make Drupal enterprise-ready.
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E-Tech: Stamen's Stunning Approach To Data Visualization
One of the most exciting concepts demonstrated during ETech was a data visualization concept, a phenomenally attractive and useful way to find information so quickly and thoughtfully, it seems at once elegant, clever, and obvious. The company: Stamen, a design studio in San Francisco. The application: Like anything in the visual world, it's easier if you just see it, but it involves a series of sliders that make underlying data come to life as you stretch the boundaries of the information you're looking for.
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Salesforce.com’s Secrets Of Startup Success
When wildly successful startup companies review history, it can often seem instead like a revisionist history; as if success ever happens according to a perfectly mapped out vision. There are two key distinctions when it comes to Salesforce.com: first, many of its early employees came from Oracle or Siebel or both, so the templates for success (in some cases for better or worse) had been somewhat molded and embedded; second, regardless of any contrived formula, there are phenomenal lessons other startups should ponder.
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iPhone: Open To New Features
In case you're not familiar with S60's slogan, "Open to new features" is it. Yesterday's announcements from Apple were a watershed moment for the iPhone and the mobile computing industry. While many are now asking if the iPhone will replace RIM in the enterprise, we should be looking more at Nokia, its S60 platform, and whether or not it can ever regain its footing in the United States.
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MozyPro Resellers And Users Get Reprieve On Price Hike
In an e-mail yesterday, MozyPro resellers learned that the price hike for server protection that was to go into effect March 1 has been postponed until the 12th (next Wednesday). The delay was "due to the overwhelming amount of feedback from our resellers and the lack of time we've had to respond and address a lot of you." The e-mail includes a FAQ section I've posted below. The biggest news there is that users grandfathered in will be able to expand their storage for existing servers at $0.50 per GB per month indefinitely.
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ioSafe Responds to "Fireproof Storage? I Don't Get It"
I received an e-mail from Robb Moore, the president of ioSafe, responding to my recent post wondering if the whole concept of fireproof storage devices for on-site backup was a bad idea. Restraining myself from making snarky comments to his points I'm posting his message as is, and with his permission, below. I'll probably make snarly comments soon since restraint isn't my greatest strength.
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Is Microsoft Losing Ground With Portable Computer Users?
Hey, what is going on here? In Thursday's list of Amazon's best-selling portable computers, only seven out of the top 25 run Windows! As you might expect, Apple takes a lot of the spots, but it's not just MacBooks. The Linux-based Asus Eee PCs and Nokia tablets are grabbing high positions in the list. That's a lot of computers that aren't paying tribute to Microsoft.
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AOL's Open AIM Turn 2 -- 2.0, That Is
"AOL" and "open source" haven't typically been two phrases you'd utter in the same breath, but that may be changing. For two years now, AOL has been pushing a development named Open AIM that encourages developers to build clients for the AIM network. Now, with Open AIM 2.0, it has kicked things all the more open -- albeit with a few gotchas that will probably turn off people accustomed to more uninhibited development practices.
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Google Caves To Pentagon Wishes
The Pentagon said that Google's Street Views is a threat to national security and made Google pull images taken on streets near U.S. military bases. Google complied with the governmental order, even though the images were taken from public streets. Freedom of information and security butt heads once again.
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MixerCast's Widget Operating System
Nearly every company these days is racing to that next big thing to ensure their product or service is being seen by the masses. Portals and search engines have been, and will continue to be prominent. But there has been a stampede toward social networks as companies figure out how best to traverse that world, how to be visible without tarnishing the social environments sites like Facebook and Bebo and MySpace have tried to create. MixerCast has taken an interesting stab at helping big brands effectively use these platforms.
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Microsoft Preps Bevy Of Office Patches
Microsoft is readying four "critical" security patches for next week. While it's a far cry from last month's 11 patches, IT shops will be busy nonetheless.
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In Love With Wireless
And public Wi-Fi hotspots, texting galore, and the iPhone are the tools of this seduction. But with more applications and wireless spectrum (and YouTube clips) on the way, where exactly are we going to store all this new content?
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IntroNetworks Adds Visibility To Social Networks
It was hard to tell if there were more social network platforms at O'Reilly's ETech/Graphing Social Patterns (GSP) than there were companies looking to fund them. The parade of ideas gets a little bit weary, the eyes blur when trying to distinguish between one or the other, the amount of data required by each is a bit staggering, and it's often hard to tell a friend from an acquaintance, a widget from an midlet (if you combined them would they be a midget?), a twitter from a clatter. So here's another: IntroNetworks.
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In Post-Enron Era, E-Mail Governance Still A Challenge
E-mail governance might not be the sexiest thing when it comes to content technologies, but don't tell that to your CIO or general counsel. Besides keeping them out of jail, a solid e-mail governance strategy drives compliance, improves information retrieval, and reduces paper.
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Should T-Mobile Buy Sprint?
The latest rumor sweeping the wireless world is that T-Mobile's parent, Deutsche Telekom, may acquire troubled U.S. carrier Sprint. Is this really such a good idea?
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Why Can't I Find A Good 3G Smartphone?
We heard about upgrades today to both RIM's BlackBerry platform and Apple's iPhone, but frankly, I couldn't be more underwhelmed. Why? Because it's March 2008 and I still can't buy a 3G BlackBerry or iPhone. So why should I care about these upgrades?
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iPhone SDK Details Include Full MSFT Exchange Support And iTunes Apps Store
Apple kicks off its Town Hall meeting about the iPhone SDK road map at 1 p.m. Eastern today. Check back here for constant updates on the breaking news, meta liveblog style! Updated: Full Microsoft Exchange support! Update 2: iTunes Apps Store!
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Can "Girl Power" Save Europe's IT Sector?
Much like America, Europe is faced with a bit of a crisis -- interest in IT-related jobs is waning among students. Computer and engineering majors are dwindling, placing the future of IT in jeopardy on both sides of the pond. However, the European Union's Information Society Commissioner Viviane Reding has a solution: Mars -- I mean -- IT needs women!
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Random Celebrity Endorsement Of The Day: Will.i.am And RIM
Erm. Huh? RIM is looking for another angle into the consumer market and decided partnering with Will.i.am and his Dipdive online community is the way to do it. If you're left scratching your head at this one, you're not alone. Is a music and politics-themed social community the right angle for RIM?
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SCO's Return From The Dead Continues
Bloodied (or maybe bloodless would be a better word) but unbowed, the apparently unkillable SCO has taken the next step out of the bankruptcy grave toward something like a renewed existence. Ugh.
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Google Calendar Adds Outlook Sync
Google has made some updates to its Calendar product recently. Google introduced a new tool that gives users the ability to auto-sync their Outlook calendar with their Google Calendar and vice versa. Say goodbye to manual syncs!
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Intel Cuts Forecast On Falling Flash Prices
Flash memory prices are tanking, and financial analysts everywhere are having a cow because Intel on Wednesday cut its first-quarter gross-margin forecast to 54% from 56%. Hey, is anything really new here? Flash prices periodically crater, and there's always downward pricing pressure -- these are commodity parts, remember. Yet just two days ago, these same analysts were ecstatic over Intel's new Atom processor strategy. People, take a chill pill.
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Intel's VMDq On ESX = Broad Market Goodness
I missed Intel's 10GbE and IOV news. Read on for why you shouldn't make the same mistake.
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Lessig Advocates Technology Tools For Campaign Finance Reform
Government-reform advocates plan in two weeks to launch a system for members of Congress to pledge to reduce the role of money in government, Lawrence Lessig said. The Change Congress project will ask members of Congress to make three commitments: To reject contributions from lobbyists and political action committees (PACs), work to ban earmarks, and support public funding for elections.
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USB & Firewall System Attacks Surface: Disable Your External Media Ports
It appears as though, more than ever before, if you lose physical sight, and especially control, of your notebook, your data could be hosed. This is even more so now that tools that attack disk-based crypto are surfacing at an alarming rate.
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Join Over The Air's Meta Liveblog Of The iPhone SDK Event
On Thursday, March 6, Apple is hosting an event to lay out the future of the iPhone SDK. Rather than sit back and wait for the end of the event to post the news, Over The Air will provide you with a meta liveblog. So tune in, hit "refresh" often, and get yer SDK news here!
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Bug Labs Looks To Make Mobile Innovation Simple
Bug Labs wants to make innovating hardware as simple as innovating software. So they created the Bug, an open source hardware design and software for building modular mobile devices. Developers can snap together a cell phone, camera, LCD display, GPS, accelerometer, and more to build custom tools.
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Julienne Storage
Given the variety of ways that stored data gets sliced and diced these days, it's hard not to imagine that Ron Popeil of Veg-o-Matic fame didn't have a hand in there somewhere along the way. Here's what I mean.
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Chronicle Of A Startup: The Funding Question
I got good advice from Silicon Valley investors about Project Melville, my stealth-mode Web business, but no money. Everyone agreed my best bet is to bootstrap it. In other words, don't quit my day job, eat brown bag lunches, and pull in a few friends as roll-up-your-shirtsleeves partners.
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Plan B If You Can't Hire H-1B Visas Workers
Some folks predict the volume of H-1B visas petitions employers file starting April 1 will be lighter than last year. But that's not because demand is waning for foreign tech talent. Rather, companies are being more selective in the kind of talent they're seeking, given the odds aren't good they'll have their visa applications approved.
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A Mighty (Renewable) Wind Blows In California
California dairy cows are giving the state's power grid a blast of renewable energy, but the real money maker in bovine biogas may lie elsewhere.
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Innovation Is As Innovation Does
Do you have an interesting innovation story to tell? We're looking for great case histories to feature as part of a new online project we're developing -- and you could win a free lunch with management guru C.K. Prahalad in the bargain.
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Will The Real Content Management Vendor Please Step Up?
While no one doubts the demand for pure-play content management services, there's still a tremendous amount of confusion around what customers should hand off to certain vendors. Fact is, sometimes your CMS provider may not be the best fit for managing the flow of content in your online community or forum.
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Microsoft's Office Live Workspace, You're No Google Apps
Last night I spent some time with Microsoft's Office Live Workspace (OLW) beta that was recently announced. Some articles have characterized OLW as a competitor to Google Apps, which is just plain wrong. Instead, it's just a way for Microsoft Office users to store and organize their files to access or share anywhere on the Internet.
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Study: Brits Text While Walking, Hit Faces On Lamp Posts
I am not making this up. Apparently Brits are so focused on texting that they become completely unaware of their surroundings. In fact, 6 million of them were injured last year after walking into lamp posts, bollards, and garbage cans on the sidewalk. Does texting while walking need to be banned next?
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ETech: K-Factor's Social Network For Social Network Developers
Some companies here at ETech are so new they don't even have business cards yet. Jing Chen flew in a mere hour before she was expected to demo K-Factor Media's Developer Analytics at AppNite in San Diego, and it turned out to be one of the more compelling early success stories. In the not too distant future, she won't have to be giving out slips of paper with her e-mail address instead of business cards.
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ETech: Hungry Machine Comes Recommended
Recommendation sites, like Yelp, have been great, successful experiments in building sustainable social networking communities. Hungry Machine, one of the ETech AppNite presenters, has tied a series of vertical recommendation ideas to the existing social communities, like Facebook. There are a few key differences, however.
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Android Is (Or Was) Insecure? Don't Panic
After news broke the other day that Google's Android handset development library had several vulnerabilities that could be exploited by an attacker, I braced for a flood of "Told you so!"-type announcements. Frankly, the fact that these problems have shown up at this stage in the development process isn't a bad thing. This is the best possible scenario.
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Android SDK Not Secure, Vulnerable To Attack
According to researchers, certain open-source image processing libraries in Google's Android SDK are outdated and can be attacked by hackers. A total of eight vulnerabilities were found by Core Security. Core showed that the weaknesses can result in hackers taking complete control of Android handsets.
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Betrayal Of Trust: When An Engineer Lies
How would you behave if ethical push ever came to shove? That's the question which came to mind when I saw the story, "Engineer Pleads Not Guilty To Perjury." Turns out a New York City inspector approved a bunch of building renovations without really checking them out. Later, rotting support beams trapped and killed two firefighters. Now the engineer is going on trial.
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Jobs: Flash Not Good Enough For The iPhone
In comments made at Apple's recent shareholder meeting, CEO Steve Jobs said that the iPhone doesn't support Flash because it runs too slowly on the device to be useful. The iPhone's lack of Flash has been one of the major complaints levied against it. He also said we won't see iPhone apps until "summer."
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Outsourcer Augmentum Has Aggressive Growth Plans
How does an up-and-coming Chinese outsourcing company get the attention of U.S. businesses? Augmentum's answer: Don't get painted into the corner of low-end software development and stay close to your customers.
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11 Lifehacking Tips For Improving Productivity -- And Knowing When That's Not The Point
San Diego -- Gina Trapani, the queen of Internet productivity, shared her tips for getting things done at ETech 2008, spilling the beans on best practices for maximizing results and efficiency. Trapani, editor of the blog Lifehacker and a book of the same name about to go into second edition, said that her whole career stems from a presentation at ETech 2004 -- one she didn't even attend.
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Does Cisco's Switch To Linux Make IOS More Open?
When Cisco and Juniper first said they were opening their router OSes, I thought that they'd be about as open as the iPhone. With Cisco's launch of IOS XE, I realize I was wrong: The iPhone is much more open.
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Is This Really A Good Idea?
In a world concerned with terrorism, is providing the capability to monitor factory and plant information from a handheld device really a good idea?
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Software 2008's Innovation Showcase
Event planners for the Software 2008 conference, to be held April 29-30 in Las Vegas, have extended the application deadline for companies interested in participating in the event's Innovation Showcase. The Innovation Showcase has emerged as one of the premier venues for startups and established software companies alike to unveil compelling new products and services.
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Apple Not-So-Genius
Overheard in an Apple Store today: "Parallels ... made by VMware; Boot Camp, like, way better for running Windows."
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SRM Gets The Gas
In Vendor Land, it's a short hop from capacity planning to storage resource management (SRM). A couple product guys from IBM volunteered to explain why this makes good business sense (even if it blows your budget).
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No Crock: GM Announces Next-Gen Hybrid System
GM announced plans Tuesday to roll out a second-generation version of the GM Hybrid System with a more powerful lithium-ion battery. The announcement comes just weeks after GM vice chairman Robert Lutz called global warming a "total crock of s***."
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Motorola Seeking Salvation From The Outside
Motorola CEO Greg Brown has made public the firm's search for a leader to galvanize its ailing handset business. Rather than hire from within, Brown is looking outside the organization to find the road back to profitability. Brown also said that 2008 and 2009 were going to be 'rugged.'
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Obama Photos Show Up On Open Source Blog
Negative campaigning tends to make people stay at home, which is why I'm not voting today in either Texas or Ohio. But as a former resident of Ohio many years ago, I am compelled to reveal everything I know about Barack Obama. Well, actually, everything Barton George at Sun Microsystems knows.
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Farewell, Gary Gygax -- Thanks For All The Adventures
I remember my first time just like it was yesterday. It was the early '80s and I was sitting on the floor of my friend's house in Pennsylvania. I was nervous -- I'd never done anything like this before. My hand shook for a moment before I opened it, releasing several dice onto the rug. "Nice," my friend said, "you picked the lock. The door swings open and there's nothing but darkness ahead." With that, I began my first journey into the world of Dungeons and Dragons.
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Gates Disses On Google Apps, Says Google Doesn't 'Understand The Special Needs Of Business'
OK, not everyone likes Google Apps, including Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates. He firmly believes that the search giant doesn't have a clue about how to provide enterprise-grade software, and its application suite is proof of that. Is Google cut out for the enterprise, or not?
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Hifn Puts Hashing For Deduplication On A Card
Like BASF in their TV commercials, Hifn is one of those companies that doesn't make the storage and computing products you buy, they make the parts and ingredients that make them better. Amongst those that know it at all, Hifn is best known as patent holder for the LZS compression algorithm used in everything from Cisco routers to just about every tape drive you own. Hifn's main product nowadays are compression and encryption chips that speed up everything from VPN gateways to most of the major virtual tape libraries. Now it is shipping a card, four-way PCIe or 64-bit PCI-X, that in addition to compression and encryption also generates hash values for deduplication.
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Dipity Do Social Timelines
The AppNite demo presentation that drew the biggest collective "ah's" and head nods at O'Reilly's ETech was Underlying's Dipity, described as a Wikipedia for timelines -- a way to organize the Web using time. Many companies are experimenting with timeline concepts, including Google, because it's a new way to give information more context. In the case of Dipity, timelines become a way to bring communities together.
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Teens Still In The Hacking Biz -- On Both Sides
Way on the other side of our little blue planet, folks in New Zealand are reeling from the recent arrest of 18-year old Owen Thorn Walker, who masterminded a group of programmers that infected more than a million computers around the world.
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Spring Is In The Air, And So Are H-1B Visas
Get your engines running! It's almost time for the H-1B visa race to begin! The U.S. government starts accepting petitions on April 1 for the 85,000 visas allotted annually, and if history repeats itself, those visas will run out in a flash. So make sure all your T's are crossed and I's are dotted on those forms now.
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Learning To Get Things Done By Avoiding Meaningless Arguments
Consensus-building is key to getting things done in any organization. You can't get your way unless you get other people to agree with you. Sunday and Monday, I had encounters with two people who separately told me great stories that illustrate how to avoid organizational deadlock by skipping meaningless arguments. They told me about dinner-tabling and bikeshedding.
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Sun In The Snakepit
This past weekend at Sun Tech Days in Sydney offered up further evidence that open-source acquisitions are about human talent, not merely acquiring tools 'n technologies. Sun welcomed two new employees into its fold, Ted Leung and Frank Wierzbicki, two developers of repute who will be working on something unmistakably Sun-specific but also open source: the Python-derived Jython.
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ETech's AppNite: Time Well Wasted
O'Reilly's ETech (Emerging Technology) Conference features a smaller conference called Graphing Social Patterns (GSP) which dives deeply into the social networking phenomenon. GSP runs straight through to AppNite, a demo contest for developers. AppNite featured both educational and silly games, but a few gems emerged, both on the purely personal side and the business side.
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October In London?
So you liked trekking to Cannes for VMworld? Pony up for autumn in the U.K. to attend the vendor-independent "Virtualization Congress."
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Now Google Gears Takes Smartphone Apps Offline
Google recently announced that Gears is available for the Windows Mobile platform. This will allow you to continue using your Web-based applications even when you lose your data connection or are in an offline mode. Now you have one less excuse for not getting your projects done on time.
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Google's Iowa Data Center Emerges
On the site of a former drive-in movie theater in Council Bluffs, Iowa, a new Google data center is approaching the midpoint of a two-year construction project. The data center will eventually house thousands of servers, in effect becoming Google's Midwest nerve center.
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OpenText's Enterprise 2.0 Strategy Unfolds
A good way of perfecting your trend-watching in the high-tech sector is by paying close attention to how and when vendors release their so-called strategic road maps. It's essentially their way of legitimizing themselves in an increasingly competitive and noisy marketplace.
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Good News: Federal Agency IT Security Improving
Usually the government releases news it wants to bury over the weekend. This Saturday, however, the Office of Management and Budget released a report stating that, overall, federal IT security is improving.
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A Bracketed Discussion
You know, the kind where you want to decide where to go for dinner, and suddenly your significant other/spouse/soulmate is off and running on the past, present, and future of the relationship and why you never ... well, you get the point.
This is actually good practice for when you try to talk to a vendor or reseller about storage capacity planning. Why? Because this very specific function you want help with snowballs quickly into a referendum on the future and sanctity of your enterprise's data -- maybe its very existence.
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25 Third-Party iPhone Apps We'd Like To See
In a case of great minds thinking alike, even as I was putting the polish on a wishlist of third-party iPhone apps, Macworld was doing the same. They had a few ideas I missed, including a finger-painting app, voice recorder, and app for listening to Internet radio.
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CIO Turnover At The Feds
A new survey says there's been considerable turnover among federal CIOs and that more of them are reporting to CFOs than did just a year ago -- a lot more. Sound familiar? It should, because the same thing appears to be happening with CIOs in the private sector. What goes around comes around, I guess. But what, exactly, is going around?
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Last Week's Florida Blackout Reveals Fragile Grid
Once again last week the utility industry's version of Jimmy McNulty (see HBO's The Wire) disabled two separate protection devices while diagnosing a bad switch at a south Florida substation causing a fault that propagated through the grid. In the process it cut out power to a nuclear power plant causing it to shut down (And why is it nuclear power plant's can't run on the power they generate?) along with power for 3 million people from Miami to Tampa. While most users got their power back in a few hours this incident leads me to ask: How reliable is our power? and What if this had happened in August when Florida's air conditioners are working full out?
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Open-E Extends Free Storage Software Offer
I reported in a previous post Its_Hard_To_Beat_Free that German storage vendor Open-E was giving away its open source-based DSS Lite software that turns a typical PC server into a NAS/iSCSI initiator and target/Fibre Channel initiator and target till Jan. 31. Apparently enough people downloaded the Lite version with its 1 TB storage limit and then decided to buy Open-E's bigger versions to make it worthwhile, so Open-E is again providing free downloads.
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Intel's Atom Processor Won't Solve UMPC Confusion
Call it Silverthorne, call it Atom, but whatever Intel calls it, the company hasn't erased the confusion caused by its desire to popularize a new category of handheld portables variously called Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs) or Ultramobile PCs (UMPCs). The real question is, do consumers want these things? The answer: Mostly, only the early adopters.
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Google, Why Did You Take Away My Favorite Button From 'Docs'?
One thing I've had a hard time getting used to with Google Docs and other Google services is that functionality comes and goes. The latest victim? In Google Docs, the "Save" and "Save & Close" buttons are no longer there in the upper right-hand corner of the page. Google, please, pretty please put those buttons back.
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What We Have Is A Failure To Interoperate. Let's Change The Rules
E-mail and group calendaring are 1990's technologies. Yet, for some idiotic reason, they still only work well when everyone is on the same vendor's system. Interop's general manager Lenny Heymann, who uses Lotus Notes, can invite me to a meeting that ties in a Cisco MeetingPlace-based teleconference, and thankfully, I can accept that invitation in Gmail. But what if that meeting moves to a different time (as meetings so often do)? That's where the interoperability ends. If Lenny changes the teleconference time in MeetingPlace, the notification I get is an abomination of technology that can't interoperate with the originally booked meeting. Who's to blame?
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What The Heck Happened To i-Mate?
Reports started filtering over the Web this past weekend that i-Mate, maker of the Ultimate series of Windows Mobile smartphones, has laid off most of its U.S. staff. Reports were later confirmed with ex-employees, who said the engineering, quality assurance, and tech writing departments were all sacked. I guess having the Ultimate product doesn't assure you success in the mobile enterprise industry. Updated, 3/04.
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Developers, Get To Work: Third-Party Apps We Need For The iPhone
The iPhone is a terrific smartphone, but it's got some glaring gaps in what it can do. Many of these gaps are baffling because they're not particularly glamorous -- capabilities that have been available for more than a decade on other PDAs and smartphones are unavailable on the iPhone today. I'm excited about the imminent availability of sanctioned third-party apps on the iPhone in part because I'm looking forward to the iPhone getting some basic capabilities that, frankly, should have been there all along.
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Marc Andreessen On Barack Obama
On his Pmarca blog today, Marc Andreessen comes out in support of Barack Obama in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. Andreessen bases his endorsement on a private 90-minute meeting last year in which, he says, Obama "grilled him" on the impact social networking would have on politics.
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Windows Vista Price Cuts Are Historic, But Not Significant
Last week, Microsoft announced that it was cutting retail prices for Vista. In one way, this is pretty historic. I've been watching Microsoft for two decades, and I can't remember a time when it's actually cut the price of Windows. It doesn't say much for the retail demand that should be fueled by upgraders, but that's to be expected given Vista's high hardware demands. In the end, though, you can't read much about Vista's ultimate success or failure from this move.
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Report: People Not Using Advanced Mobile Services
Even though three-quarters of those polled by AppTrigger believe that mobile services and offerings have improved, fully 57% have not taken advantage of any of them. That means 43% of users are driving all the adoption of new technology. The data shows that most people use their phones just as phones and not much else. What happened to convergence?
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Brainstorming With Ubuntu
Ubuntu just kicked off its new Brainstorm site, a place where ordinary users and techies alike can vote on or suggest ideas they feel are critical to Ubuntu. At the very top of the list, with more than 3,400 votes as of this writing: Fix Suspend and Hibernate.
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Join Us Tuesday For InformationWeek Live: Report From India
Join us Tuesday at 3 p.m. Eastern for a conversation with InformationWeek's Chris Murphy describing the insights he gained on a two-week tour of the IT industry in India. Chris looked at startups, IT in a small village, and of course the thriving outsourcing industry.
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Who's On eBay: Pete Townshend's Magic Bus
Want to own a piece of rock 'n' roll history? If you'd been a quick eBay bidder, you could have picked up a VW camper owned by Pete Townshend, leader of The Who.
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Is That A Trojan Calling?
Numerous security researchers, including the US-CERT, are warning of a new Trojan that attempts to attack Microsoft Windows Mobile Devices. Is that threat anything to worry about?
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