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The InformationWeek April 2008 Archive « March 2008 | Main | May 2008 » |
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Proclivity’s Prediction Software Is In Style
Proclivity Systems, which predicts trends with its e-commerce "predictive engine," is looking like a trendsetter itself. The New York startup has moved into Fifth Avenue office space, and upscale retailer Barneys New York is a reference customer. Founder and CEO Sheldon Gilbert recently took a break from selling software to be photographed for Men's Vogue.
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Citrix Rethinks Data Center
Citrix has remade themselves as a virtualization vendor. Now they want to remake your data center as a 'delivery center.'
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You're Infected With Malware. And You Don't Care.
Could it be true? Could there be thousands, if not more, Internet users infected with botnets, who know they're infected, and don't care enough to do anything about it?
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Oracle Feeling "Social" These Days
At Interop, Oracle execs pitched the company's efforts to bring social computing to the enterprise. They might be on to something.
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Microsoft Finally Concedes On Windows-Linux Management
Microsoft's announcement of Linux extensions for Systems Center settles an old debate I once had with Bill Gates. Four years ago, I suggested Microsoft could do a better job at cross-platform management, but Microsoft's chairman wouldn't hear of it. Now, the company is doing just that.
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Interop: Rat's Nests Of Cables No Match For Panduit's Intelligent Patch Panels
I'm sure competing solutions exist (or maybe not -- you tell me). But this year's Interop marks the first time I've ever seen an intelligent patch panel: one that drives the visibility into your network another layer deeper than the visibility that might normally end with your routers and switches. The offering -- a Best of Interop finalist -- comes from Panduit, and about the only thing I can imagine coming next might be intelligent RJ45 jacks. Actually, after I finished my video interview with Panduit's Mike Pula (below) and sarcastically mentioned that idea, he didn't laugh and said the idea actually solves a problem.
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The Internet And The Father Of Acid
I've been racking my brain all day to come up with an excuse to blog about the death of Albert Hofmann, the inventor of LSD. Turns out Nick Carr already beat me to it!
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Live (Again) From Interop: Workshop A Success, But No Takers On Craps Lessons
The worst news from Interop is that my fat old body just can't handle the things I did easily 15 years ago when I made a living teaching 5-day NetWare administration seminars. My Disaster Recovery Cookbook workshop went well, with 80 of my now-closest friends spending the day listening to me pontificate on the relative merits of Cemaphore Systems' MailShadow over Double-Take or WANsync. I, however, was a wreck at the end of the day. Even more disappointing, no one took me up on my offer of free craps lessons. The show seems to be recovering from a few years of dot-com bubble hangover, with bigger crowds of both vendors and attendees than I remember from the last two years.
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Google Admits Making Money With YouTube Has Been Difficult
In a candid TV interview, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said, "I don't think we've quite figured out the perfect solution of how to make money [with YouTube], and we're working on that. That's our highest priority this year." You don't say...
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What Do Google And John McCain Have In Common?
Since early March, Sen. John McCain has had the GOP nomination tucked safely in his back pocket, while the stalemate between Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton has left the Democratic party at an impasse. Like the Republican pundit, Google is benefiting from the current standoff between Yahoo and Microsoft.
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Pay Isn't The Only Gap Between Male And Female Tech Pros
You'd think there'd be more female tech pros peeved about earning 10% less than their male counterparts. But interestingly, our new 2008 InformationWeek salary survey of 9,653 IT pros indicates that money matters more to men, while women are most concerned about the job's challenges and responsibilities.
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Google Refines Its Image Search Technology
Having won the text search war, Google may soon take the lead in image searching. In a paper published last week, Google researchers describe how they were able to use image recognition technology to reduce the number of irrelevant images returned through a Google Image search by 83%.
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ReiserFS Without Hans Reiser, Continued
In my post the other day about whether or not work in the ReiserFS file system would continue after Hans Reiser's murder conviction, I mentioned that this being an open source project, it wouldn't be hard for someone else to pick up where others leave off. And as it turns out, that's precisely what's happening: according to folks on the ReiserFS team, work on ReiserFS will continue.
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If You've Done Nothing Wrong, This Shouldn't Worry You
There's a worrisome article in the Seattle Times about an investigative toolkit that Microsoft is making available to law enforcement agencies. It's got 150 tools, including data collection and password crackers, conveniently packaged in a USB thumb drive. Police no longer need to seize a computer to peek into its contents.
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Hey! You Got Video In Our FriendFeed!
Hey, FriendFeed users: Interested in getting InformationWeek headlines and TechWeb TV videos delivered to your feed? Get them now by friending InformationWeek on FriendFeed.
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Report: T-Mobile's 3G Network Launching In NYC Tomorrow
New reports are pointing to May 1 (tomorrow) as the official launch of T-Mobile's AWS 1700 MHz network in New York City. Some 20+ other cities will go live with T-Mobile's 3G network by year's end.
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Vidyo Named Best Startup Of Interop
Vidyo, which began shipping its videoconferencing-over-IP system in March, has just won the startup category in this year's Best Of Interop competition. Vidyo promises to make low-cost, high-quality videoconferencing an option for more companies.
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Content Management Blunders From Down Under
The hits keep coming in from our "Top 5 Reasons A Content Management Company Will Go Out Of Business" post. This time, the experiences come from a university from the land down under, proving content management blunders serve us all on a truly global scale.
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Official BlackBerry 9000 Specs Leaked
This is the real deal, folks. No speculation here. An enterprising informer found an internal RIM document that highlights all the details of the forthcoming BlackBerry 9000 smartphone. Take a peek for yourself.
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Interop Video: Management Guru With A Heart Of Globe
Tuesday's morning keynote at the killer Interop conference was given by C.K. Prahalad, a business professor who's not only got a keen sense of how technology impacts the globalized marketplace, but a social conscience and a sense of humanity, too. Who knew such a powerful combo was even possible?
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Interop: Palo Alto Networks' Firewall Identifies App Traffic On Content, Not Ports
You've programmed your firewall to block the ports that some unwanted app is using and that app turns up on your net again. Net-enabled applications don't tie themselves down to one port the way the Web (HTTP, port 80) and other apps do. After some firewall shuts their ports down, they find another port. Using traffic profiles instead of ports to identify more than 600 applications, not only did Palo Alto Networks' series win InformationWeek's Best of Interop in the security category, it took the grand prize as well. In the video below, Palo Alto's Lee Klarich walks me through some of the firewall's innovations.
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Best Of Interop 2008
Each year Interop presents its "best of show" awards. This year featured several products from Cisco (some developed in-house, some acquired), and the usual lineup of upstarts (Palo Alto Networks, Mellanox Technologies, Splunk, Spigit). Cisco managed its share of awards, most notably for its Nexus 7000 data center switch, but the upstarts also had their turn.
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Interop: Alcatel-Lucent Claims APIs And Scalability Are Comm Server's Key Differentiators
Here at Interop in Las Vegas, a handful of exhibitors who also are Best of Interop finalists are waiting to find out if InformationWeek's editors have singled them out as winners or not. One of them is Alcatel-Lucent, who is here showing off its XML API-enabled Omnitouch Advanced Communications Server (ACS). Via those APIs, director of product management Peter Anderholm (pictured below left) claims that enterprises can, for collaborative purposes, easily integrate point-and-click voice conferencing into any application. I caught Peter on the show floor for a video interview.
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System Center To Play Nice With Others
This is good news for multihypervisor shops. Microsoft pushed out the beta of Virtual Machine Manager today, which includes management support of VMware.
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Barracuda Launches E-Mail Archive Product
The anti-spam appliance vendor learned about the value of archives the hard way -- by getting sued by Trend Micro.
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Under Pressure, Senate Clears Runway For Air Traffic Control Modernization
Breaking up an impasse as bad as rush hour over La Guardia Airport, the U.S. Senate this week is set to pass a reauthorization bill for the Federal Aviation Administration that may finally pave the way for modernizing the nation's antiquated air traffic control system.
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Open Source's Hidden Trap: IP Liabilities
Sure, open source software is free -- as in beer. It can also get you sued if you're not cautious.
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Will Code Viruses For Beer
A controversial contest at this year's Defcon hacker conference promises to reward the most successful virus writers.
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Web 2.0: Clay Shirky On Wikipedia, Sitcoms, And Gin
Clay Shirky, an adjunct professor at NYU who studies social media, gave a stirring talk at Web 2.0 Expo last week on the Web 2.0 revolution -- how it's harnessing all the brainpower made available by the societal changes of the past 60 years. That time was, until recently, wasted watching mindless television, but now it's being put to work on Web 2.0 projects, some profound and some silly, but all significant.
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What Will Oracle Acquire Next?
So now that the BEA Systems acquisition is complete, what is next for Oracle? Given Oracle's pattern, it's due for about three acquisitions this spring.
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Hello, Would You Like A New Job?
When was the last time you got a call from a headhunter? Have those calls cooled down lately? Think it's due to the weak economy, or do you think it's possible that you're just not that "hot" anymore?
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'Lost' Fans Serve Up Surprising Lessons About Web 2.0 For Business
When I set out to do an article about fans of the TV show Lost and how they're using the Internet, I didn't think I'd learn anything about using Web 2.0 for business. I thought it was an article our readers might find entertaining, and that I'd enjoy doing, and nothing more than that. And yet I was pleasantly surprised to find that a couple of business lessons popped out, about self-organizing groups and how they can get results without traditional, top-down management.
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A ReiserFS Without Hans Reiser
After three days of deliberation and six months of testimony, a jury found Hans Reiser, creator of the ReiserFS file system for Linux, guilty of first-degree murder. There's no end of commentary about the trial itself, but now that the verdict is in, I thought I'd contemplate a related issue: What happens to an open source project when one of its main instigators suffers calamity?
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Google To Fine-Tune Image Searches
So you performed an image search for "Corvette," and instead of finding the spy shot of the C7 you had in mind, you end up with irrelevant pictures of some guy's 1977 show 'Vette. That's about to change. Google's scientists recently unveiled a new way to perform image searches, called VisualRank, that will help you find exactly what you're looking for.
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OQO Model 2 Hacked To Run Leopard
The hullabaloo about Psystar is not nearly as cool as this. Sure, any geek can hack a desktop to run Apple's Leopard OS, but a member of the OQO Talk forum posted a video of his OQO model 2 running Leopard. Very cool to see Leopard on such a small device. What if Apple created a UMPC of its own?
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Unlock Your Cell Phone All By Yourself For $26
24/7 Mobile Solutions introduced a new product today that fools your cell phone into thinking it is unlocked. Using its SIM card add-on, you can basically unlock it and use it on other networks without actually changing the software on the phone. Now if it only worked with the iPhone...
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It Could Be 15 Years Before We Know What's Really Green
It's the eve before Interop here in Las Vegas and we've just wrapped up Energy Camp where, as can be seen from the user-decided agenda, the conversation went deep and wide on a variety of subjects related to the reduction of information technology's carbon footprint. Two key takeaways for me were (1) many so-called "green" remedies have a dark enough side to them that they may not be as green as we think they are, and (2) it may take another 15 or 20 years before we have it all sorted out. It's not as bad as it sounds, but ...
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VCharter Pro Offers Insight
Vizioncore announced availability today of vCharter Pro as an enterprise-class performance monitoring and management solution for ESX shops.
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Talking Patents And Protocols With Tom Kemp
Today I spoke with Tom Kemp, CEO of Centrify, creator of that remarkable patent-to-protocol map that I wrote about last week. My first question: why create such a thing? His answer: "Just the facts," and we went from that into a discussion of how open source and open standards suited his company and the market as a whole.
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Is Business Travel Anti-Green And Unnecessary?
Business travel hasn't waned much, if at all, despite the emergence of globe-shrinking technologies like Web conferencing and virtual worlds. Will the green movement finally kill it?
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U.S. IT Salaries Are Down. Did You See This Coming?
While I expected the current economy to crimp IT salaries, I didn't see this one coming. InformationWeek's annual U.S. IT Salary Survey showed a $2,000 dip in the median total pay. This marks the first median drop in our survey since the tech bubble burst. How does the data match your reality?
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Treadmill Desk: It's Crazy - But Is It Crazy Enough To Be A Good Idea?
A treadmill desk is a desk that doesn't have a chair, but instead has a treadmill in front of it. The theory is that you stand up and walk while you work or play on your computer, getting exercise while going digital. When I first heard this idea, I thought the idea was completely insane. But the more I hear about it, the more it make sense to me, and I think I'll give it a try.
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Blyk Hits 100K Subscriber Mark, Calls Itself Success
Well, whaddya know. "Free" services just might actually work. The U.K.-based MVNO Blyk -- which targets 16- to 24-year-olds -- recently met its one-year subscriber goal after just six months in operation. Blyk offers free voice minutes and text messages in exchange for ads appearing on cell phones. Does this mean mobile advertising has more traction than thought, or that kids like free stuff?
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The $3 Billion Electricity Bill
How much are you paying to run your servers? A study on server electricity consumption says the utility bill for U.S. servers came to nearly $3 billion dollars.
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Windows XP Service Pack 3
While there's not a lot of big news or fanfare surrounding the imminent release of Windows XP Service Pack 3, there are a number of interesting security enhancements.
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Mac Users: Smart Or Smug?
Last week, I heard an interesting Marketplace Radio segment about Mac users: "A new marketing study has found Mac owners tend to think they're more extraordinary than the average Joe. They're also more likely than PC users to whiten their teeth, drive hybrids, drink Starbucks coffee, and eat organic food."
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Life Inside The One-Man (Or Woman) IT Shop
Got a lot on your plate? How would you like to be the IT shop? While the common belief is that one-person IT departments are typically the stuff of start-ups and mom-and-pop businesses, that's not always the case.
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Google Beefs Up Presentations' Power
Google's online PowerPoint application, called Presentations, just met with some great new -- and much needed -- features. First is the addition of speaker notes, which is something I sorely missed about two weeks ago when I was putting together a presentation. Google also added the ability to embed YouTube videos into Presentations, and its Gears roll-out now expands to Presentations as well.
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iPhone Reports: 3G, GPS, Haptics
Here's a trio of reports that festered over the weekend. First covers news of Foxconn's contract to build the 3G iPhone, second shows that the next iPhone will support true GPS, and the last tells us that the next version of the iPhone will have microvibration feedback -- otherwise known as haptics.
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Web 2.0 Expo Reveals: Mobile Is The New Desktop, Social Nets The New Media Companies
Remember, you read it here first. Wolfe's three laws of the brave new Web 2.0 world are: Mobile is the new desktop, the home page is dead, and social networks like Facebook and MySpace presage the media company of the future. These catchy Web 2.0 catch-phrases popped into my head during a heavy week of session-sitting at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. Here's why I'm optimistic that those of us who are ready to embrace the virtual future are going to be in for a fun ride.
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Web 2.0: Changing Affiliate Marketing
Sometimes you just need to change the rules to stay on message. So when a panel of affiliate marketing experts and consultants convened Tuesday to discuss their industry and how it can evolve and mesh with Web 2.0 ideas, we had to know more.
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Fake Steve Jobs Rocked The House At Web 2.0
The most trenchant observation at the Web 2.0 Expo came from Dan Lyons, the Forbes editor better known as Fake Steve Jobs.
"Facebook is like Webkinz for adults," quipped Lyons in his keynote address. "It's the biggest waste of time ever invented."
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The Weekly Watch On Content Management
Leading off this installment of The Weekly Watch is Alfresco, a company that's proven there's plenty of innovation left in the enterprise content management (ECM) sector. Alfresco sent InformationWeek some of its recent accomplishments and a few grabbed our attention.
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Web 2.0: Confabb Provides Directory And Ratings For Conferences
Most Web sites for conferences are pretty poorly designed. Simple tasks, like scrutinizing the schedule or finding the show hotel, take too long and are too painful to accomplish. That's one of the problems that Confabb, a directory, rating service, and social network for conferences, is looking to solve. I met with Confabb at Web 2.0 Expo, and got the lowdown from the company chairman.
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Not Just About Code, Part 2
The hardest part about open source isn't the code -- it's the community. Examples of this come up all the time, with Sun being one that has come up a good deal lately -- not just because of its acquisition of MySQL (which I'm still fairly positive about), but the way perceptions of its behavior can affect its acceptance. Even if you do the right thing, it needs to also look like you're doing the right thing.
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Microsoft's Third Quarter Results: Uncollapsed
For a company whose cash cow is supposed to be collapsing, Microsoft seems pretty chipper. A pretty good third quarter shows that reports of Microsoft's demise are somewhat premature. Even the weak U.S. economy worked to Microsoft's advantage this past quarter.
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Is AT&T Sitting On The 3G BlackBerry Launch?
Some interesting reports are surfacing of late that suggest AT&T is delaying the launch of the BlackBerry 9000 from June to August. The BlackBerry 9000 has been floating around Internet rumor sites for months, and is said to be the next-generation device from RIM complete with 3G. I'll give you one guess as to why AT&T might delay it.
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Google Uses Its Googley Eyes When It Comes To Design
Does Google's design language do anything for you? Do you find the cleanliness of its sites pleasing to the eye? Or do the white spaces and primary colors drive you nuts? Even though it looks like some Google sites were designed by a kid with crayons, there's a method to the madness.
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First Impression: FriendFeed Is The Social Network For Power Users
FriendFeed is absent in body from Web 2.0 Expo this week, but present in spirit. It's coming up quite a bit in conversation, even though the company isn't exhibiting or speaking here. FriendFeed is a social network for power users -- it aggregates feeds from your Twitter account, blog, Flickr, LinkedIn, and 31 other types of social services and presents them in a single feed for your friends to read. I decided to give FriendFeed a try and share my first impressions with you.
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Desperately Seeking: Green Tips And Tricks (Big Or Small) That You Think Can Make A Difference
We're just a few days away from Energy Camp, which we're holding on the day before Interop in Las Vegas. We've got close to 100 people signed up and we're anticipating quite a few walk-ins. So, we're on target in terms of the event's size and intimacy. But even if you don't plan to be there, I've established a way for you to participate virtually by sharing your own energy saving tips and tricks (or just green tips in general). I'm calling it Ways To Save The Earth and it was inspired by some school kids in Massachusetts. Regardless of whether it's big or small, if you've dreamed up a green idea that you think can make a difference ...
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White House Staffers' BlackBerrys Stolen Five-Finger-Discount Style
This story is disturbing. In what was described as a "common practice," White House staff and others attending a meeting with President Bush left their BlackBerrys sitting unattended on a table outside the meeting room. With the meeting in progress, a Mexican press attaché decided to lift six or seven of them and make a run for it. Thankfully, the Secret Service was able to catch him before he got too far. What I want to know is, what are government BlackBerrys doing sitting on an unprotected table?
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Controlling Content In A Social Publishing World
I read this PC World story and I couldn't help but think how indicative it is of the typical command and control mentality within enterprises. I know there's a balance between fighting the external social network (SoNet) effect and creating a corporate one of your own. With all the technology, horsepower, and APIs gone wild, shouldn't we be able to figure out how to create some harmony between the two?
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Quick! Unplug Your Internet Connection!
According to the security vendor Sophos, one Web page is infected with malicious software every five seconds. Yeah, but it's probably mom-and-pop and porn Web sites with all of the infections, you say. Think again.
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Sign Up For The New InformationWeek Blog Newsletter
We've been filling out our roster of great writers on the InformationWeek Blog and broadening the range of subjects we cover, paying particular attention to beefing up the enterprise coverage we've historically excelled at. We're proud of that -- but we also know that the sheer volume makes it hard to keep up. Heck, even I find it hard to keep up, and it's my job.
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Nokia Gives Widgets Superpowers
Nokia made some changes to its Web Run-Time offering that will provide S60 widgets with the brains to predict what you want and the power to have it available instantly. Sort of. The new Web Run-Time elements make it so widgets will be contextually aware. They won't quite think on their own, but close enough.
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For Businesses, Device Management Still Rocket Science
Remember the line from the great Talking Heads song "Once In a Lifetime": "Well, how do I work this?" That was pretty much what I heard today at our Over the Air Mobility Forum on mobile device management.
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Microsoft's Patents, Under The Microscope
Microsoft's whole Catch-22 of Linux infringing on certain patents claimed by them has gone on long enough. We all know this -- but barring some major (and I do mean major) changes on Microsoft's side, it's looking fairly futile to expect them to come out and say what the infringing patents are. Time to bring in some third-party muscle, and that's what Tom Kemp of Centrify has just attempted to do.
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Psystar Mac Clone Video: See For Yourself
There's been much speculation in the blogosphere about the legitimacy of Mac clone-maker Psystar, and whether it really exists. Now there appears to be proof.
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At Least The Guy Was Getting The Most From His Web 2.0 Expo Experience
On my way to the Web 2.0 Expo keynotes, I came across this funny Twitter message from journalist Rafe Needleman.
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T-Mobile: Android Handsets Coming By Year's End
A T-Mobile executive has confirmed that the carrier will be releasing more than one mobile phone based on Google's Android platform before the end of 2008. What's more, the exec said he was "impressed" with the platform. But which company will be building these handsets?
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Google Registers Weird Domain Names
Is Google getting into the burrito business? Why else would the company register bayareaburritos.com and thesecretofburritos.com?
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Google To Stuff Images Into Mobile Phone Ads
Google has decided that cell phones and the mobile Web are ready to display ads with images embedded in them. It announced the new program yesterday, whereby at least one ad per mobile page will have a graphic image. About time, or will it clutter mobile Web pages?
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The Web 2.0 Expo Keynotes In Out-Of-Focus Photos And Out-Of-Context Quotes
Keynote speakers at the Web 2.0 Expo on Wednesday delivered inspirational messages to keep innovators dreaming and working hard in the face of an economic slowdown. Tim O'Reilly, CEO of O'Reilly Media, said the Web 2.0 revolution is just getting started. He challenged attendees to work on big, world-changing problems, saying that the most successful companies in the technology industry have "big, hairy audacious goals."
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HP Upline Sets Back Cause Of Online Backup
It's no secret that I think online backup is the best solution for the SOHO market. Unlike tape, it gets the data off-site and it's set it and forget it. The backup client runs every night and will even pop up in your face if it can't backup your data for a few days. Problem is, convincing the SOHO owner. They're afraid it will stop working, someone will steal their data from the provider, it will be too slow, etc., etc., etc. Early this month, HP announced Upline, an online backup service that allows users unlimited storage for $5 to $10 a month, including multiple system support. Last week, it had to shut it down, and down it remains. Even worse, a user "Ridz" at TechCrunch reports it connected him to someone else's data repository.
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Focus On Managing Risk, Not Gruntwork
With large enterprises sporting hundreds of applications, firewalls, routers, and other networking devices -- and more than 139 newly announced vulnerabilities each week -- how do they know what vulnerabilities actually matter?
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Are EMC And IBM Reliable Storage Bellwethers?
Their success is no guarantee of success for other vendors, but dismal results from these two companies would augur poorly for the rest of the storage industry, to say the least. And quite apart from my glass half-empty outlook, I'm not sure how much weight to give the recent positive financial performance from EMC and IBM.
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One-On-One With The New CEO Of Linden Lab
In an interview with InformationWeek, the incoming CEO of Linden Lab said he's fascinated by businesses that grow up in Second Life. He also paid tribute to the "largely unfettered" creativity of the Second Life community. And he declined to comment about whether he's preparing the company for IPO or sale.
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One Laptop Per Child -- And For Microsoft, Too
Looks like the OLPC project, much vaunted for its use of open source to bring commodity computing to developing nations, is about to become yet another Microsoft-by-default domain. In an AP article, OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte talked about how the OLPC's XO notebook ought to soon be available as a dual-boot with either Linux or a cut-down version of Windows XP ... and maybe someday become an XP-only machine. Ugh.
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Do Greener Pastures Await Green Content Management Vendors?
As another Earth Day passed, I thought it was appropriate to pass along some green tidbits within the content management and IT space. I ran across Jarrod Gingras' post referring to how the green movement is affecting purchasing decisions for SaaS-based Web content solutions.
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Web 2.0 Expo: Web Pages Are Just The Beginning For Audience-Building
SAN FRANCISCO -- Web site owners who focus exclusively on building pages are just scratching the surface of Internet audience-building. Feeds, search engines, and widgets can vastly expand the potential audience for any Web site by bringing the content directly to the audience, said Web consultant Niall Kennedy, giving a workshop at Web 2.0 Expo here.
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Keeping IT Staff Happy In Tough Times
Money is always quick and easy bait to keep valued staff from leaving. But how do you retain -- or even attract -- key talent when budgets are tight?
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Google Re-Wows Investors With Ad Quality
Google last Thursday erased doubts raised by Internet metrics firm ComScore about its paid click growth. It reported that paid clicks on its sites and partners' sites grew about 20% globally from the first quarter of 2007 and about 4% from the fourth quarter of 2007.
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Google Tweaks Gmail Calendar Sync
Google first offered up the ability to sync your Gmail and Outlook calendars in early March. Since then, it's received a bunch of feedback on the usability of the product and has decided to make some changes. The changes are welcome, indeed.
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We Gotta Fight, For Our Rights, To Digital Media
Digital Rights Management (DRM) is a consumer rip-off. The only right it protects is the right of the content creator to sell you the stuff you already bought, several times over. This is because DRM is overly restrictive, ignoring widely recognized rights such as fair use and time-or-place-shifting.
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You're It! SimulScribe Rebrands To PhoneTag
The fun folks over at SimulScribe have decided that the company's name is a bit too obscure, obtuse, or just plain dumb. Beginning this Friday, the provider of visual voice mail will hence be known as PhoneTag, a name more befitting of the personality of the company. (P.S. -- Free 30-day trial offer within.)
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Apple To Intel: Atom, Schmatom
In what is surely a micro blow to Intel, Apple has chosen to buy a boutique microprocessor company called P.A. Semi. The company specializes in ultra-low-power microprocessors that fit into devices such as mobile phones. Intel has been pushing its Atom platform and hoped Apple might use it in future generations of mobile devices like the iPhone.
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Chronicle Of A Startup: Microsoft Or Open Source?
The biggest choice I face in launching my Web 2.0 site is that of underlying technology platform. So I'm throwing the question open: Should I go with a Microsoft software stack or open source?
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Video: Ruby On Rails For Absolute Beginners
I don't know much about Ruby On Rails, the open-source framework which allows you to develop Web applications. Fortunately, walking the halls of the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, I ran into someone who does, and he's offering a free online course where you can learn about it for yourself.
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Ignite: It's Simple, But Not Easy
Most IT executives I talk to are baffled by Web 2.0. Don't get me wrong, they get excited about the technology like anyone else, and arguably they understand its inner workings better than some of the Web 2.0 cognoscenti. Where they stumble is on its applicability in the enterprise. They struggle to ignite the flame. They need to come to fun events like Ignite.
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Other Voices
As much as I want you all reading my stuff, there are a many other folks writing some great content and analysis on the VM front. Here are some of the writers I try to keep up with.
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Deduped VTL Greener Than Tape?
HDS CTO and blogger Hu Yoshida started quite the little blog flame war with a post here that suggested a real world customer found their tape library was using more power than a VTL. Responses included IBM blogger Tony Pearson, The Backup Blogger, and SearchStorage's Beth Pariseau, with comments by other noted storage pundits. It didn't make any sense to me, so I decided to do the math myself.
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Physical Security Breaches Trump Vulnerabilities
When it comes to publicly disclosed breaches, chances are the root cause was a stolen system, not a hack.
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Second Life Gets New CEO
The Second Life community today got its first good news in what seems like forever -- Linden Lab, the creator and operator of the virtual world, announced its pick for new CEO. At first glance, his resumé looks like the right combination of business acumen and creativity needed to restart the engines on the foundering ship.
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Microsoft's Imagine Cup Encourages Risk, Innovation
It might be tempting to write off corporate activities on Earth Day as empty, cynical, or too little too late. But as I was driving to Microsoft's Imagine Cup competition in downtown Los Angeles this morning and saw the skyline and its brownish air backdrop, my real thought was "Now more than ever."
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Earth Day Mythbusting
Today is Earth Day, and if your hype-filter is on the fritz, you'd better go some place quiet, where the big green machine can't find you. Otherwise you're likely to encounter a cacophony of well-intentioned greenness.
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Apple Patent Reveals IM Interface For iPhone
Apple was recently granted a patent that shows an interesting new application that looks eerily similar to the iPhone's SMS feature. There are some big differences that set it apart, though. It includes new methods for interacting with ongoing conversations, including a word predictor. This could be the eagerly-hoped-for native instant messenger app.
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Is Platform Virtualization The Next Big Leap In Mobile?
Motorola recently announced an investment in VirtualLogix, a company that lets multiple operating systems run on the same piece of hardware. This means you could have a single phone in your pocket that runs Windows Mobile, the BlackBerry OS, and Google's Android OS.
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At Last, A Homegrown CIO
Weyerhaeuser's new CIO comes from within, proving some companies aren't afraid to put an in-house IT veteran in the top technology spot.
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iGoogle Gets Sandbox, Goes Social
Google has released yet more tools for developers. This time, it is offering what it calls a sandbox in which developers can play with and build widgets for Google's iGoogle user home page. That includes support for social network applications using the OpenSocial API. Is iGoogle going to be the next Facebook?
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People Would Use Cell Phones To Vote For President If They Could
According to a recent poll taken by Samsung, 61% of respondents of legal voting age said they would be interested in voting for president via text message. Apparently working up the energy to go to the polls in person is too much for some. Could such a system ever work?
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The Real Cost Of Open Source Is...?
Word has been circulating about a Standish Group research report that's apparently guaranteed to turn heads. "Free Open Source Software Is Costing Vendors $60 Billion" is apparently one of the claims made in this report, titled "Trends in Open Source," and while I haven't been able to get my hands on it, the press blurbs about it make me wonder what really is the best way to quantify open source adoption. Talking about it as "lost" revenue doesn't seem to make much sense.
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Crank Up The Volume
If storage were an audio receiver, we'd be flirting with that "9" or "10" mark on that big black dial. But we're talking capacity here (and maybe speed), as vendors appear to bend the rules of physics by cramming more bytes than any space or drive should be able to accommodate.
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Microsoft's Security Development Life Cycle (SDL) Metrics: Microsoft Can Do Better
Microsoft can, and should, provide more insight into how well its security development life cycle is working.
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The Video Mashup (Part 2)
A few more mashups from Mashup Camp, including video interviews. This time a smaller player, Denodo, and some unlikely big dogs, Intel, and IBM.
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So Crazy It Just Might Work
Startup RevStor cuts your unstructured data into chunks and stores them on the PCs and servers on your network -- no NAS or SAN required. Is this plain crazy, or just crazy enough to work?
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5˝ More Reasons That A Content Management Company Will Go Out Of Business
I seemed to have touched a nerve in my recent entry about the top five reasons a content management company will go out of business, judging by the feedback received via e-mail, tweets, IM, and the blog.
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Hey, Vista, Performance Is A Feature, Too
If you listen to the conventional wisdom about Vista, one of the biggest complaints is that it's a lot more bloated and slow than XP. A lot of current Windows users would be very happy if the next version of Windows was slimmer and faster. But what kind of bloat could be cut out? One reader pointed out that "One person's bloat is another person's feature." Do some users really have to lose their favorite features in the name of performance?
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Shuttleworth's Case For Linux
When mention of Ubuntu -- or Linux in general -- makes it into mainstream media, it's always worth reading about, if only to see how badly they mangle it. The latest bit of blurbage from the BBC (or "Beeb", as some are wont to call it), a thumbnail rundown of Mark Shuttleworth's work with Ubuntu and the progress of that particular Linux distro, won't be earth-shattering news to the existing open source faithful. But it's yet another sign that Linux is finally out of the tech-geek closet and making strong inroads towards becoming a brand name of sorts.
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IBM To Tackle Mobile Apps
IBM has decided that it doesn't want to be left out of the mobile realm. It has fired up a number of programs (instant translator, social networking, and mobile health care) that will make mobile phones even more useful for everyday tasks than they already are.
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Firefox + Google Mobile Add-On = Mobile Joy + Broken Browser
Google made a new add-on available to Firefox users in the U.S. today. After it is installed, it allows you to highlight any text in your browser and send it as a text message to your mobile phone. This would be very useful if it didn't break Firefox.
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Yodle Gets Google Seal Of Approval
Online ad firm Yodle has become an authorized reseller of Google AdWords. Yodle specializes in helping small, local businesses -- beauty salons, landscapers, and limo companies, for instance -- place online ads and convert them into customers.
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Web 2.0 Manifesto: 'Nobody Knows Anything'
The people who really understand the Web know that nobody really understands the Web. (Zen enough for you?) Or, to put it more accessibly, to succeed, you can't try to out-think what your users want. You just have to try ... stuff. Which is why I'm so excited to be headed out to the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco.
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So The Rumor's True - IBM Snaps Up Diligent
In its third storage acquisition in short order, IBM proved the rumor mill right Friday by snapping up deduping VTL vendor Diligent Technologies for what Israeli business site Globes says was $200 million. For IBM's spin on the deal, see the release here. If rumors about EMC and Quantum making a deal for deduplicating backup hardware are right, that leaves HP as the only major enterprise player without a deduplication solution.
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Dedupe's Big Week
Data Domain and Quantum get smacked around pretty good over how "in-line" their products really are. IBM bought Diligent. And deduplication-come-latelies ExaGrid and FalconStor add new gear to the mix. Geez, maybe there really is a market here.
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Google Apps Needs To Grow Up
If Google Apps wants to play in the big leagues with its desktop software service, it needs to grow up. Vague details about a blip in service for Gmail isn't going to cut it in the corporate world, even if Gmail was acting up for less than an hour on Wednesday.
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MindTouch Puts The Enterprise In 2.0
It's not often you hear terms like application integration and IT governance from companies building their businesses on Web 2.0 underpinnings such as blogs, wikis, and RSS. So I was somewhat surprised to be smacked in the face with just that from Aaron Fulkerson, the tech-talking co-founder and CEO of MindTouch, a company that wants to be the "tissue" that helps enterprises connect all those disparate systems.
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Don't Be A Control Freak
How can CIOs control the end run around IT? They can't -- that's the lesson from a new CIO survey. Live with it, loosen up, and keep track of where IT dollars actually are going.
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Qualcomm Finally Launches MediaFlo In Its Hometown
San Diego, home of cell phone chip giant Qualcomm, is finally being blanketed by Qualcomm's MediaFlo mobile TV network. This comes some 14 months after Qualcomm's partner, Verizon Wireless, launched its branded V CAST Mobile TV service in other parts of the country. Why the long delay?
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Windows Needs A Good Pruning
Responding to last week's blog entry about the Gartner "Windows is Collapsing" Affair, one reader took me to task in calling Vista "bloated." His point was that one person's bloat is another person's essential feature. That certainly can be true, but features that the user sees aren't the only thing that contribute to bloat. Microsoft needs to move aggressively to trim the fat out of Windows, regardless of its source.
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YouTube Changes Up Policy Enforcement
YouTube has modified the way in which it will go after those who post copyrighted material or objectionable videos. Of course, the new rules stirred some outrage among certain users who feel targeted by the "YouTube Police".
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No Desktop Linux For Red Hat? No Problem
Is it really the worst thing in the world if Red Hat doesn't want to make a consumer-grade desktop Linux distribution? I don't think so. With all the things Red Hat already does so well, it's not as if it's missing out -- and if other people already are hard at work on that project, Red Hat still won't be missing out. This is open source, remember?
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Nokia CEO Disses iPhone, Doesn't Seem Worried That U.S. Market Share Slipped Again
I am beginning to despair that Nokia will ever understand the U.S. market. As its recently revealed quarterly earnings tell us, its share of the market here dropped yet again. Despite the fact that Nokia is building a touch-enabled device that looks eerily similar to you-know-what, Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo called the iPhone a "niche" product.
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The Video Mash
Thankfully, as the popular press tries to make anything that is a combination of two things a "mashup," the trend is actually now toward building enterprise-class services to create enterprise-class mashups. The litany of companies (new and old) we talked to at the recent Mashup Camp in Mountain View, Calif., was a respite from the Map + Something Else mentality of the early mashup days.
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Ever Lose A Smartphone?
I've lost a number of them, and each time I've left behind a smartphone or PDA, I've worried not so much about the device -- but the personal data it holds. Kaspersky Lab is offering what could be a viable solution.
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When Open Source Closes Up A Little
When MySQL / Sun announced the other day that some advanced features of future versions of MySQL would only be made available in the enterprise (read: for-pay) edition of the product, people began fulminating openly about Sun's commitment to open source. The MySQL situation itself isn't anywhere nearly as dire as it might sound, but that doesn't make people bristle any less.
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Do We Need To Legislate Common Courtesy?
Turns out cell phone users are jerks the entire world over. On top of this week's proposed ban on in-flight calling in the United States, the mayor of a city in Austria has demanded that cell phone users on public transit keep their phones in silent mode. These are signs that a mobile society is not a polite one...
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5 Areas Where Apple's iPhone Falls Short
For two weeks now, I've been the relatively happy owner of an iPhone. Still, I have some major complaints, and I know the folks in Cupertino are just waiting to hear what I've got to say. The problem is that the iPhone is a great gadget and conversation-starter, but not yet a true corporate tool.
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3 Ways Content Management Changes Marketing
Last week I mentioned the danger to companies that disregard trends in the content management space. I'm going horizontal this time and taking a crack at one of my favorites lines of business -- marketing.
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One In Eight 'Borrows' Neighbors' Wi-Fi
Using others' Wi-Fi is apparently like speeding: As long as no one notices, it's OK. Problem is, both are against the law (in some regions). That doesn't seem to bother 12% of U.S. and U.K. users, who think nothing of hopping onto unsecured Wi-Fi networks. You'd better hope it's not your employees.
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What's The Hardest CIO Job?
It must be tough to run IT in a big bank these days, what with all the regulation and oversight going on. Logistics and shipping companies put a strain on IT systems. Google's CIO just left, perhaps for good reason. However, my nomination for the toughest CIO job is ...
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Mac Clone Maker Psystar Also Offers Ubuntu, XP, And Vista
A Miami-based system integrator that's selling an unauthorized Mac clone also is offering the open source Ubuntu Linux desktop as an option on the system, as well as Windows XP and Windows Vista.
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How Long Is Gmail Going To Stay In 'Beta'?
For that matter, how long are all of Google's services going to remain as beta -- and not v1.0 -- releases? Gmail has been around for years, and has yet to graduate to a full version of software. Is there a hold up? And does it really matter?
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Google Veteran To Start Venture Fund
David Hirsch, one of the guys who helped establish Google's New York City presence, is about to launch a New York-based venture angel fund that invests in tech startups. Hirsch's Metamorphic Venture will focus on interactive media and mobile technologies.
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When You Spring A Wikileak
When thinkers of big thoughts talk about the democratizing effect of technology, they needn't look a whole lot further than Wikileaks or LiveLeak. Incendiary anti-Muslim video, copies of documents from Guantanamo –- this stuff leaves the Huffington Post and other Web 2.0 "news" sites in the dust.
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Good News: After Breach, Consumers Vote With Their Feet
Survey results show that nearly one-third of consumers terminate their relationship with an organization following a security breach.
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ExaGrid Releases Deduping Gateway For iSCSI Disk
ExaGrid's been getting pretty good traction with its deduplicating NAS appliances for backup, with more than 200 customers. I wrote about ExaGrid's appliances just last month here. This week it's introducing a gateway model that lets you use iSCSI storage for your deduplicated data rather than buying an appliance with built-in storage. ExaGrid's tested the gateway with EqualLogic's iSCSI arrays and is pitching the combination as the best of both worlds.
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Polycom, Greensleeves, The Drop Test
Polycom made a series of announcements a couple of weeks ago at VoiceCon, including some new applications, integration with Microsoft OCS, and a new version of its rugged wireless phone for the small and medium-sized businesses.
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Securing VoIP With SecureLogix
SecureLogix was an early pioneer in voice over IP security. I remember several years ago, when I was running Network Computing, we gave it our product of the year award. So it's no surprise to see the company still plugging away in 2008. The question is, really, to what end, and I put that to CTO Mark Collier.
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American Journalist Uses Twitter To Bust Out Of Egyptian Jail
As Egyptian police were descending on UC Berkeley graduate journalism student James Karl Buck, he had time to send just one word to his friends on Twitter: "ARRESTED." Buck had been photographing a noisy demonstration, and as he was being hauled off to jail, friends around the world rallied to his support.
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A Quick Dance Through Cisco's UC Arsenal
I had fun catching up with my old pal Alan Cohen, now VP of Cisco's Enterprise Solutions, to talk about all of the work his company is doing in unified communications.
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Digium's Open Source Voice Solution
The unified communications space is very hot right now, and Digium, with its open source approach, is getting plenty of notice. We caught up with them at VoiceCon a couple of weeks ago.
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How To Convince An iPhone It's In Ethiopia
Among the cool iPhone features touted by Apple is its "self-localization" ability: Turn it on, and it tells you where you are! Turns out, though, it's a simple matter to phool an iPhone.
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The Unconference For When Oil Costs $120 Per Barrel
James Governor, who will be presiding over Energy Camp on April 28 in what is probably the least green city on the planet (Las Vegas: not counting how green in emerald-like color the MGM is), has hit the nail on the head in terms of characterizing the new unconference. He calls it the unconference for oil at $120+ a barrel. The cost of oil reached a new high today of nearly $115 per barrel: a grim reality which highlights the fact that what's good for the planet also is good for your bottom line. That's what we'll be talking about at Energy Camp.
IMAP And Ajax UI Temporarily Go AWOL On Gmail
It happened all at once today (and maybe that's why Gmail is still in "beta" after all these years). Both the Web interface and my various e-mail clients (Outlook, my smartphone) that were accessing my enterprise Gmail account seized up on me completely. Standalone Gmail account holders were affected, too (according to a blogsearch on the matter). The cause? An AWOL IMAP interface caused the mail clients to clam up and most of Gmail's Ajax-like functionality vanished at the same time, causing serious browser indigestion. What are the implications?
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Zoho Takes A Shot At SalesFoogle
In light of the new partnership announced between Google and Salesforce, CRM provider Zoho decided to retaliate with some facts that cloud up some of Salesforce's claims. Chief among them? Salesforce isn't "affordable." Wait, isn't that Benioff's line about Siebel?
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Should U.S. Scrap H-1B Visa Lottery?
If your H-1B visa petition was among the 163,000 filed earlier this month, you've got about a 50/50 shot that your application was selected in the government's H-1B lottery the other day. Fifty-fifty odds look great if you're playing lotto. But they're not so hot when you're playing games with people's jobs.
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Microsoft Versus Salesforce-Google
Microsoft senior VP Chris Capossela was spitting bullets yesterday when asked about the recently announced Salesforce For Google Apps. "Opportunistic," "uninteresting," and "publicity stunt" were just some of the terms he used to describe the competitive move.
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Telligent Takes SharePoint Social, Focuses On ROI
The rush to provide social computing tools to the corporate world continued this week as Dallas-based Telligent released Community Server 2008. Unlike other pure-play community software and social networkers, Telligent is banking on Microsoft to help it befriend corporate customers that have big plans for SharePoint. But SharePoint isn't the only draw in this fight. ROI is the other weapon it's using to spar with others in the competitive social computing space.
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The American Red Cross Has A New CIO
And he has a familiar-sounding set of priorities: cut costs and streamline business processes. He's also got to get to know a new CEO.
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Open Source Census: Stand Up And Be Counted
Just how much open source software are people using? Getting hard numbers about open source usage is one of those tough-to-crack problems that doesn't seem to have a definitive solution -- partly because of the nature of open source itself. Self-reporting seems to be about the only way to get any numbers at all, unreliable and biased as that may be. But if self-reporting open source usage is made as easy as a couple of mouse clicks, why not do it?
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Politicians Want To Make In-Flight Calling Illegal
Rep. Peter DeFazio stood up and said what we're all thinking: "The public doesn't want to be subjected to people talking on their cell phones on an already over-packed airplane." Couldn't have said it better myself. Now, will Congress listen, and actually pass a law?
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Google's Answer To MicroHoo: Salesfoogle
The debut of Salesforce for Google Apps on Monday wasn't particularly surprising, given that the two companies announced a partnership last June. But the tightening embrace between the two shows that Google isn't going to leave Microsoft's competitive moves unanswered.
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Latest iPhone Reports: iPhone Shuffle On The Way
This is the first I've caught wind of the most recent rumors regarding the next generation of iPhone. A Macenstein writer says that Apple envisions a line-up of iPhones, including a "Pro" version, the current version, and a smaller, "Shuffle" version. Guess which one gets all the good specs.
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Unified Something-Or-Other
As voice over IP becomes a routine part of any corporate enterprise, the goals also are starting to change. The big topics include telepresence, unified communications, and federated presence. Unified communications seems to be the big buzzword today, but we've been talking about it for years.
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Blatant Self Promotion: Disaster Recovery Workshop At Interop
The editors at InformationWeek have told me I have to limit the blatant self-promotion to TechWeb-produced events, so I'm glad to announce that Interop is coming fast. On Sunday, April 26, I'll be presenting The Disaster Recovery Cookbook: Recipes for Recovery, a full-day workshop at the beautiful Mandalay Bay hotel casino and conference center in Las Vegas. Check out the program at http://www.interop.com/lasvegas/education/workshops.php . Mention you read this blog and join me for a free lesson in craps (but you must buy your own chips for the live final).
Syspine: VoIP For The Small Business
Syspine was showing a key system based on Microsoft's Response Point speech engine at VoiceCon. This is intended for the small or medium-sized business, according to Syspine's Jerry Moore, and it's pretty elegant and simple. Or as Moore says: "A poor man's communications system."
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Mapness Travel Journal
It's always interesting seeing a company as it's just coming out of hiding and starting to market its product. Mapness is just such a company, and you could sense the wide-eyed fear of expectation as Wojciech Kosinski talked about this online journal site.
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Data in Motion, And At Rest
As an IT professional, which one worries you more? And what do you do about a technology like RFID that splits the difference between those two conditions -- stationary, yet traveling across the airwaves, and god knows where else?
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A Sunny Look At Startups
Lots of talk this week about OpenSolaris from Sun as the market treads gently on what it may mean. Is this Sun doing the right thing or chasing the latest trend? Similarly, Sun was at our Startup Camp in London last month, rubbing elbows with and offering help to fledgling startups left and right. What gives?
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Apple Set The Bar Low For iTunes Movie Rentals, But Still Isn't Clearing It
When Apple launched iTunes movie rentals in January, it said it would have 1,000 movies available for rent by the end of February. That's not an impressive number -- Netflix offers 90 times as many. And Apple is falling far short of even that modest goal, according to Macworld.
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Libertarians Use Web 2.0 To Protest Arrest At Jefferson Memorial
What would Thomas Jefferson think about Web 2.0? Libertarians gathered earlier this week at the Jefferson Memorial to dance silently for 10 minutes (listening to music on iPods) in celebration of the founder's birthday. When police came along and ordered them to disperse, one dancer failed to obey, and she was led away in handcuffs. Since then, libertarians have used BlackBerrys and cell phone cameras to spread the word and drum up support for the woman they're calling the "Jefferson One."
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AOL Brings Mobile Search To The iPhone
Yet another site has crafted an iPhone-specific version of itself -- this time we're talking AOL's mobile search portal. It breaks up search results into those for the Web, Images, and then a separate section for local results. Is it any more usable than Google or Yahoo's search platforms?
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Is It Time For Security To Go On The Offense?
Security researcher Joel Eriksson recently demonstrated how security vulnerabilities within hacker attack tools can be used to turn the tide on online criminals.
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TechWeb's Digital Library Gets Facebook Facelift
I've found the perfect excuse to spend part of my workday surfing social-networking sites, and get paid for it, too. I do it by developing Facebook apps. My latest is a feed for the TechWeb Digital Library [login required], which will allow you to see our latest white papers, Web casts, and research reports via a little link residing right on your own personal FB page.
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Life Beyond The Four Largest BI Vendors
Are IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP the only companies that matter in the business intelligence software market? Well, of course not. That's ridiculous. Independent BI vendors and even some surprises -- Google, anyone? -- are driving a lot of the innovation.
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Facebook Shock
How did I get so old? And what have I done with my life? Facebook triggers an existential crisis.
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Putting Windows On A Diet ... To Compete With Linux
How scared is Microsoft of Linux? There's a hint or two of its fear in the fact that MS is preparing a special slim-and-trim version of Windows XP, within the next month or two, to run specifically on Asus's Eee PC. You'd think maybe it could have done this slimming-down sooner -- something that Linux already does without breaking a sweat.
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New iPhone Firmware 2.0 Features Uncovered
Aside from the wealth of business-friendly features that will be added to the iPhone come firmware version 2.0, seems Apple has a number of other nifty upgrades to the iPhone's feature set. You'll now be able to search your contact database, as well as save photo attachments or Web images directly to the iPhone.
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Android's Goal: Be Open To Developers, The Industry, And Users
Developer Robert Love spoke recently about the open source Android mobile phone operating system and SDK. He firmly believes the platform will deliver innovations in mobility. I don't disagree, but will the industry truly adopt the "open" model?
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Energy Camp Mentioned In InfoWorld. Are You Coming?
Energy Camp, the IT industry's first unconference dedicated to establishing a multilateral dialog between all IT constituencies on issues relating to running green technology and reducing energy consumption, was mentioned in a story by Brad Reed in InfoWorld. I, along with Redmonk principal analyst James Governor (author of the Greenmonk Blog) will be hosting Energy Camp in a few weeks. Somewhat ironically, ...
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How Microsoft Can Prevent "Collapsing Windows"
As you might expect, the discussion over Gartner's Windows is Collapsing presentation reverberated across the Internet. No doubt, the era of desktop PC dominance is ending; users are interacting with more computers than ever, but as cell phones, DVRs, and airline check-in kiosks. Windows won't ever be the center of the computing universe like it once was. What can Microsoft do to prevent, or at least slow, the decline?
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Another CDP Vendor Bites The Dust. IBM Buys FilesX
2008 isn't turning out to be a good year for continuous data protection vendors. Mendocino Software closed it's doors, Double-Take Software snapped up TimeSpring for a nice bag of shiny beads and a few ax handles, and now IBM is buying FilesX for what Israeli business news site Globes reports to be $70 million to $90 million dollars. That would be a pretty good exit, as the VCs that funded FilesX only put in around $20 million. FilesX will be a good server complement to IBM's Tivoli CDP for Files, which is really only useful for laptops and workstations.
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CISO: More Strategic Thought Needed
The time has come for chief information security officers to become less tactical, more strategic.
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E-Ignorance Can Be Bliss
I missed something that was staring me in the face. It wasn't something huge or important, like, "Oh, look, Hillary Clinton's really trying to be nice this week." No, what I happily missed were online ads served up by Evite alongside the "Come to dinner" verbiage. This offense apparently is enough for the New York Times to proclaim the site as the ruination of parties in our modern e-times. But what if we forget to notice?
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NetEx Speeds Data Transfers, Replication
Distance is the key difference between disaster preparedness and mere high-availability systems. Unfortunately, with distance comes latency, and latency can really kill the performance of TCP/IP applications. Add in even a tiny bit of data loss, say one in a million packets, and TCP/IP scales back its data-transfer window, dropping the effective data-transfer rate of your cross-country T-3 line to as little as 10 Mbps. NetEx's HyperIP appliances can boost link utilization for common replication applications to 90% by replacing TCP across the WAN link with a protocol that can have more data in flight across the net between acknowledgments.
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Microsoft Users Rallying To Keep Windows XP
Users are drumming up petitions, blog posts, and Web sites aimed at trying to convince Microsoft to continue support for Windows XP, which Microsoft plans to discontinue on new computers beginning June 30.
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Flaker's Aggregated Activity Tracker
It's somewhat hard to categorize Polish startup Flaker, and without playing around with it (it's in private beta at the moment), it's difficult to see how powerful it might be, but it's an interesting idea: take user activities on Web services and aggregate those into a profile.
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PeopleperHour (Hint: It's Just What The Name Says)
I have a friend who develops mobile applications. It's just him in his pajamas in his basement, cranking out code for every mobile phone platform (native OSes and some of the mobile portals). To keep up with user feedback and bug reports, he farms out code fixes to a huge web of developers-for-hire. It's dicey, but it works for him, especially since the work can be small, but very interrupt-driven. In a sense, that seems to be what Peopleperhour, a new U.K.-based startup, is providing.
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Eseye Makes Dumb Stuff Web Smart
Eseye is a 3-month-old startup we met up with at Startup Camp in London last month. It essentially provides embedded device makers with the ability to link those devices back to the enterprise network using a mobile network. The beauty of this is it makes those devices infinitely smarter: You can send or receive data from them, making them a form of Web appliance.
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Web 2.0 Expo To Highlight 'Unconference' Program
Marc Andreessen, Max Levchin, Jonathan Schwartz, Yahoo's CTO, the chief architect for Al Gore's Current TV, and The Fake Steve Jobs will be there. What about you?
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Mac Clone Maker Psystar Vows To Challenge Apple EULA
A Miami-based vendor that has ported Apple's Leopard operating system to generic PC hardware says Apple's restrictive licensing terms run counter to antitrust laws -- and it's vowing to fight.
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Bubble Days For Online Video
As the National Association of Broadcasters convention gets under way this week in Las Vegas, I can confidently report that the online video space is now in full-on bubble mode.
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Live Mesh To Push Microsoft's Synchronization Strategy
Synchronization has become a major theme for Microsoft's online strategy, and the forthcoming launch of Live Mesh at next week's Web 2.0 Conference shows that the company is finally getting ready for more of its "software plus services" coming-out party.
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Google To Aid Search For Abused And Missing Kids
Google has taken its commitment to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children another step by offering tools to help search for lost or missing children who might be the victims of abusive criminals.
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Today Is Cell Phone Freedom Day In Cuba
Before today, it was illegal for everyday citizens in Cuba to purchase and use a cell phone. President Raul Castro, Fidel's brother, has relaxed some policies, much to the joy of many. People lined up by the hundreds outside Cuba's government-run telephone offices today to be the first to join the mobile community. Welcome, Cubans!
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The Weekly Watch On Content Management
Since my post last week mentioning the fight to surpass SharePoint in the marketplace, I've received a lot of feedback from various SharePoint partners and competitors. This installment of the "Weekly Watch On Content Management" is peppered with some SharePoint-related stuff, collaboration news, and an acquisition rumor that just won't die.
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OpenMoko's Next Step: Running Free
Remember OpenMoko, the makers of the Neo 1973 handset that runs Linux and is designed from the ground-up to be a hacker's and customizer's paradise? They're back again with more tinkerer's delights: the FreeRunner. They've also learned a few things from their experiences with marketing and developing the Neo -- not just hardware and software, but how to sell something this unusual.
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Verizon Attempts To Be More Competitive With Smartphone Plan Pricing
Of all the national wireless operators, Verizon was charging a bit more than any other for smartphones and PDAs to access vital things such as e-mail and the Web. As of today, Verizon changed up the rates it charges Small Office/Home Office users, and is even offering a new hosted Exchange-based e-mail service to boot.
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Little Silver Boxes On The WAN
Pano Logic's virtual desktop solution (VDS) is getting a major rev update to v2.0, picking up WAN, wireless, and improved USB support for its tiny, shiny VDI client.
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The Temperature Of Storage
Why can't I look away from the morning weather report, or just turn the page when I come across the odds-makers' lines on the sports section? Maybe it's the control freak in me. Or that I want to believe some mere mortal really knows how this will all turn out. Maybe I just want information, even if it's deemed reliable but not guaranteed.
I try to remember all this as I read the temperature taking going on in the storage industry, against a backdrop of bankruptcies, foreclosures, and record energy prices.
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MIT & CIO: Impressive Acronyms, Separately And Together
Networking is an important ingredient in a CIO's stew of knowledge. The MIT Sloan CIO Symposium looks like a good place to indulge.
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Intel 'Atom' Mobile Internet Device Previewed
I've changed my mind about Intel's new downsized Atom processor, which is being pitched by the semiconductor behemoth as a little chip with enough power to deliver a biiiiiig handheld Web-browsing experience. My initial thought was: Who needs a mobile Internet Device (MID), when you're already toting around a laptop, smartphone, iPod, Bluetooth earpiece, and who knows what else? Then I heard about Gigabyte's prototype MID.
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10 Tips For Starting A Startup
Budding entrepreneurs mingled with startup veterans at a meeting this week hosted by the Pittsburgh chapter of TiE, a national association that promotes entrepreneurship and innovation. You could read volumes on how to start a company, but nothing's more valuable than talking to people who have done it. Here are some do's and don'ts from the TiE meeting.
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HP's Got Linux On The Low End
Seems like everyone's getting into the low-end notebook market these days. Hewlett-Packard is the newest of the bunch to step up to the plate with its VIA-driven HP 2133 Mini-Note, a nifty-looking machine that clocks in at $499 for a Linux edition. A little pricier than the ASUS Eee, but it looks like low-cost computing is one niche for Linux to derive wider market penetration.
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Simple Tricks For Getting The Most From Your iPhone
Jason Snell at Macworld has some totally awesome tips for making you into an iPhone ninja. My favorite batch of tips apply to any camera phone: Use the camera to take pictures of, well, anything you don't want to forget.
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In Defense Of One Of Vista's Most Annoying Features
The User Account Control is one of the most hated features of Vista, constantly throwing up pop-ups asking if you really want to do what you just asked to do. In an intriguing defense, Microsoft says they know it's annoying -- they did it on purpose.
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Windows Is Collapsing!
There are several news reports from a Gartner conference in Las Vegas this week that included a session titled "Windows Is Collapsing: How What Comes Next Will Improve." Gartner may not be stellar at identifying industry trends, but they sure know how to pick controversial session titles.
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Accelerometers To Power Innovation In Phones Of The Future
ABI Research says the cool spatial interactivity features we've seen in the Apple iPhone and Nintendo Wii are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to how we'll use accelerometers to interact with technology in the future. Prognosis? The sky is the limit.
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Car Phones Get Sillier By The Day
One of the few things I am really passionate about in life is sports cars. While I want to drive a Porsche or Ferrari as much as the next guy, my interest doesn't extend to phones that are branded with auto manufacturing logos. Instead of re-badging a Motorola Z8 with the Ferrari crest, this phone is actually shaped like an F1 Ferrari. I have to wonder if the ringtone is the sound of that massive engine revving, or the horn beeping.
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Top 5 Reasons A Content Management Company Will Go Out Of Business
Several months ago a content management vendor told me that the oncoming recession was causing it problems with revenue generation. I said perhaps, but it's also possible its problems were related to the fact that its customers were really angry and really vocal. It's too easy to blame market conditions without taking a hard look in the mirror sometimes.
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Google's Schmidt Turns To Pal Quattrone For Help With Microhoo
As Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo all wrestle with Microsoft's attempt to buy Yahoo, Google decided it needed some outside counsel. Google CEO Eric Schmidt chose none other than Frank Quattrone, who was cleared of obstruction of justice charges last year, to whisper sweet hostile take-over nothings into his ear.
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Mirrored Excitement
I haven't seen the storage blogosphere this atwitter since Dan Warmenhoven's testy exchange with some analysts or EMC blindsided the industry with its support for solid-state drives. But Atrato and Xiotech have generated real buzz this week over something potentially game changing for storage.
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Security Is No Longer About The Operating System
Now that Adobe has updated its graphics and video software, a near ubiquitous security vulnerability has been fixed.
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Al Gore's Top Secret Speech At RSA
If any RSA Conference attendee wants to loan me his or her RSA badge on Friday afternoon for about an hour, send me an e-mail.
I was planning to attend Al Gore's keynote on emerging green technologies that day from 2:15 PM to 3:00 PM, but it turns out that members of the media aren't going to be allowed in.
Evidently, Gore will be discussing the ingredients in Soylent Green and only wants a select few to know what goes into those tasty wafers.
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Opera Courts Android With Mini Browser
Nobody has really seen the browser that will ship with phones running Google's Android platform, but Opera Software already wants to replace it with its own. It has made Opera Mini for Android available to developers. Part of me is surprised that Apple hasn't already attempted to embed Safari into Android somewhere...
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Study: Adults Don't Care About Mobile Music
A new survey conducted by Jupiter Research shows that fully two thirds of American adults have absolutely no interest in listening to music on their mobile phones. Some of the biggest roadblocks? Songs cost too much, and it's just too difficult to find them via mobile phone. I agree, in part. Do you?
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Coming To Your Cell Phone: Text Messages From Uncle Sam
The FCC has approved a new nationwide alert system that will send text messages to cell phones to alert Americans when an emergency, disaster, or attack occurs. Only three types of events will trigger the emergency text message, which will be sent by your carrier.
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Yahoo's Latest Last Stand
Reports of Yahoo-AOL-Google tie-ups and Microsoft-News Corp. bids are signs we're in for more trench warfare in the struggle for Yahoo's future. And more hints that Yahoo doesn't want any part of Microsoft.
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Another Red Letter Day For Open Source At ... Microsoft?
Time for some open source news from a place where such a thing ought to be an oxymoron: Microsoft. Sam Ramji, who used to head up Microsoft's Open Source Software Lab, has been promoted to the head of that company's worldwide open source / Linux operations team. Great, but what will it really mean for MS's stance on open source?
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When Politics And Porn Collide
If the measures of effective protest include chaos and noise, then yesterday's anti-Chinese demonstrations in San Francisco were modestly successful. I inadvertently waded into the mayhem late Wednesday morning trying to make my way to the RSA Conference going on at the Moscone Center this week.
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Fujitsu Releases DR Disk Array Bundle
Setting up a disaster recovery site is a daunting task for most smaller IT departments. They'll need to find a site, contract for bandwidth between their office and the DR site, set up data replication, and learn how to babysit the whole thing, all while keeping the existing systems running. Sometimes, after I've managed the process for a client, I think changing the tires on a Greyhound bus as it rolls down the highway would be easier. Now Fujitsu Computer Systems has released a bundled solution that includes not just the disk arrays for both primary and DR sites, but also the hosting and bandwidth.
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Why Did EMC Buy Iomega?
By now you've read the news reports that EMC bought Iomega for $213 million. I can't help but wonder what they got that was worth it. Back in the days when 100 MB Zip disks were the easiest way to move more than a floppy's load of data from one place to another, Iomega was a force to be reckoned with. Today it sells USB hard drives, low-end NAS boxes running Windows Storage Server, and the REV removable media hard drive. Why would EMC, king of the services sale, want to enter the low-margin consumer market where it will compete with Seagate and Western Digital? Even if it does, is the Iomega name worth $200 million? I really can't believe it was desperate for the REV technology. What do you think?
Five New Virtualization Security Vendors
There are plenty of virtualization security vendors leaping out of the shadows. Here are five new players worth a look.
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The Cybercrime Economy
Dot-coms daunted by the financial downturn would be well advised to look to the cybercrime economy.
Cybercriminals "have very sound business models," said Joe St Sauver, manager of Internet2 Security Programs through the University of Oregon at an RSA Conference panel on Wednesday, "better than many corporate business plans I routinely see."
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Office Open XML: Sounds Great, Less Fulfilling
Microsoft has been working to get its (OOXML) sanctified as an ISO standard, and the recent vote seems to indicate they've succeeded. But I wonder, what are the practical implications of OOXML being an ISO standard?
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Content Players Look To Social Computing For New Sources Of Revenue
Has social computing become the enterprise software vendor's strategy to avoid a recession? It's evident there's a rush to help organizations become better collaborators. If you stick 2.0 behind any typical enterprise-oriented term, you've probably heard all the versions. ECM 2.0, knowledge management 2.0, and, of course, the party favorite, Enterprise 2.0. The real question is whether we'll see real revenue as these types of systems are rolled out.
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Outspring Posts Fixes To Mac E-Mail Client That Learns By Watching You
Outspring Mail, a mail client that learns by watching you, got an upgrade recently that fixed some bugs in an early version, and also clarified its pricing. The software is available for an introductory price of $59.
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Symantec Buying AppStream
The biggest news out of ManageFusion so far? Symantec bought AppStream last night and is rolling 'em into the newly formed "Endpoint Virtualization" group.
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Nokia N810 Hacked To Run Android, HTC To Debut 'Dream' Phone In May?
News about Android is slowly beginning to gather steam anew. First up, some developers have decided they can't wait for it to be finalized and hacked their Nokia N810 Linux-based Internet tablets to run the Android platform. On top of that, HTC has invited a bunch of journalists to a special event in early May. HTC doesn't usually party it up too much, so this could be the introduction of its Android-based 'Dream' phone.
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VIA'S Turn To Open Up
Slowly, more and more hardware manufacturers are getting clued-in on the idea that open source drivers will help both them and their customers. Now VIA's stepping up to start offering driver source code for many of their current chipsets. Pop the champagne!
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Which Is Better, T9, SureType, Or Qwerty?
If you use your phone to send SMS, IM, or e-mail messages frequently, surely you've run into all three types of text input. Rita El Khoury over at Symbian-Guru laid out her thoughts about T9. I fall into the qwerty camp, though I was pretty good with SureType. Which do you use, and why?
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Google's Gears Needs More Cogs On The Wheel
As an everyday user of Google Docs, I was excited when Gears finally became available so that I could write while offline. I downloaded and installed Gears on both my computers, but in the end it was a waste of time. Right now Gears only supports Reader for me; I haven't been granted access to Docs in an offline mode yet. And this brings me to my big complaint: Google, why announce new features when not everyone can use them?
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Google Docs Adds 'Save As PPT'
Either Google read my harangue from a couple of weeks ago or this was already long in the works. You can now save Google Presentations as PowerPoint files. That's one more reason to give cloud computing a shot.
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Google Opens Its Infrastructure
Google this week began a limited beta test of its new Google App Engine, a platform for developing and running Web applications. Its arrival into the infrastructure-as-a-service space will surely not go unnoticed by Amazon.com, which appears to be building a significant business selling computing power by the drink through Amazon Web services.
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Wheeling And Dealing
With the RSA conference on the West Coast competing with Storage Networking World in Orlando, Fla., this week, there are just a couple of vendors big enough to straddle both realms. Any guesses? Both have figured prominently in the tech headlines in the last 48 hours.
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Online Storage: Security Risk Is Minimal
InformationWeek security reporter Thomas Claburn questions the security of online storage services. Do online storage services pose a grave security risk?
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Interoperability Breakdown: Who's To Blame? IMAP Or E-Mail Vendors?
In the e-mail world, where possible, I used to urge organizations to stick with the Internet-standard Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) instead of using the addictive proprietary alternatives from Microsoft and IBM Lotus (found in Outlook/Exchange and Lotus Notes). Now, thanks to Google's GMail service, I realize I may have been mistaken.
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Report: Apple Readying Thinner, More Powerful, Greener MacBooks
Apple plans big changes to its MacBook and MacBook Pro notebooks, with new versions that use more powerful, recent Intel processors, eco-friendly materials, and that borrow design elements from the new, thin MacBook Air and aluminum iMacs.
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Have We Become The Mass Media?
A few weeks ago I was watching an April 2007 episode of Bill Moyers Journal called "Buying the War. Moyers' program served as a critical look at the media's handling of the run-up to the Iraq war and examines how the media got the story "so wrong". So how does this relate to mobility?
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Firewall Startup Lands Fortune 500 Customer
Palo Alto Networks aims to reinvent the firewall. A Fortune 500 customer has bought into this vision.
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Google App Engine: Just Code It
After Amazon EC2's service went online, I waited for other companies to follow suit with similar ideas. Now it looks like Google is about to take a stab at the same idea in their own way with the Google App Engine -- and from the look of it, the App Engine might be the more immediately accessible of the two. It's for coders, not coders who now have to moonlight as sysadmins.
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Open Source For Wall Street
Open source software company Marketcetera has secured $4 million in Series A funding. The startup is developing a software stack, due for general release later this year, for automated financial trading.
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Google Posts Videos To Demonstrate Its Mobile Services
Google has decided that not enough people know how to use its mobile services. In order to help spur adoption, it has posted a series of services that walk you through how they work. The first tutorials go over how to make the most of Google Maps for Mobile. It really isn't that difficult.
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End To End Trust Needs More Firepower
As I sit here at the RSA Conference in San Francisco watching Microsoft's Craig Mundie talk about his company's new End to End Trust initiative in a fireside chat-style discussion, I'm struck by how poorly the homey, conversational interview format suits such a significant call to action.
Microsoft is basically saying computing and the Internet need to be reinvented because there's no way to trust people and information online. This is the stuff of drums and trumpets, not a technocratic tête-à-tête.
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Lifecycle Manager, Part II
Here's a follow-up with VMware on the company's new Lifecycle Manager add-on for ESX.
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Google Argues User Data Is Public Info
A recently published security report from European data protection commissioners blasted Google for holding onto user data for 18 months. Google defended the policy, saying it is necessary to improve the results dished up by its search engine. How long is long enough? And is your IP address personal property?
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Is This Cushy Enough For Your Content Managers?
I'm seeing more free CMS services pop up these days, even though we know that in true Web 2.0 style, eventually we'll have to pony up for something. The latest online incarnation is CushyCMS, and it comes from Stateless Systems, an Australian Web company that claims it has more than six million visitors a month visiting its Web properties.
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Nokia Prepping iPhone Competitor, Hates On Apple
During a recent presentation, Nokia let slip some shots of a project it has dubbed "Tube". Tube, which looks strikingly like you-know-what, will offer a touch-based user interface and is set to go head-to-head with Apple's little darling. On top of that, Nokia dissed on Apple's sales volumes, claiming that it shipped 6 million devices "overnight."
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What Is Virtualization Security?
It's RSA week. Which means we're going to be inundated with security news, and the hype is going to be loud. And a number of research firms predict virtualization security will be near the top of the hype-o-meter this year.
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The Risk Of Online Storage
HP's new entry into the online storage arena, Upline, looks like a reasonably good deal. For $59 per year, a single user gets unlimited online storage, with sharing, publishing, and search capabilities. That's about how much EMC's Mozy charges for its online backup service.
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Time's On Microsoft's Side In The Yahoo Conflict
Steve Ballmer finally got tough with Yahoo after several weeks of playing nice. (My summary of the letter: "You understimate the power of the Dark Side!") Yahoo fired back with a response that shows they're ready to rumble. It seems to me that the longer this goes on, the worse off Yahoo will be.
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Second-Guessing Yahoo
I'm not a native Californian, but after eight years of residency, I often find myself in the position of having to defend or explain aspects of life in the Golden State: the improbability of Gov. Schwarzenegger, the unnatural obsession with Britney Spears, or the latest woo-woo, crystal snorting trend, to name a few.
But here's one I recently fielded that I didn't see coming: Why is Yahoo playing hard to get with Microsoft?
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The New CIO: Hire From Outside, Or Promote From Within?
By tapping an outsider for its open CIO slot, Cummins decides not to practice what it preaches -- or at least what its former CIO preached.
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New Capacity Analyzer For VMware
VKernel was launched last year to help IT departments track usage of VMware servers and charge business units for the virtual resources they consume. The startup's Capacity Bottleneck Analyzer, which handles the first part of that problem, is due to ship later this week.
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Sun Adds Data Deduplication To VTL Line
Just as the arrival of the first robin -- the bird, not Dick Grayson, fanboy -- is a harbinger of spring, adoption by three-letter vendors is an indication that a technology is moving from the revolutionary land of the startup to the mainstream. Sun's announcement today that it's adding deduplication to the StorageTek VTLPrime is just another indication that deduplication is mainstream, if not overdue.
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Admins On The Hunt For Safari Downloads
When I launched iTunes over the weekend, I got the typical software update notification pop-up that I've come to expect every couple of weeks from Apple. As part of this update, however, there was a request to install the Safari browser -- which I had absolutely no interest in doing.
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Blogging As Fast As We Can
Three well-known tech bloggers have had heart attacks since December, and a story in the New York Times suggests that the high stress of blogging may be a cause.
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Is In-Flight Calling A Good Idea, Or A Bad One?
Today the European Union cleared the air for passengers to make phone calls from their mobile phones while in flight. Even though the FCC essentially put the idea on hold here in the United States, American travelers are sure to encounter the phenomenon when overseas. Do we say "yay" or "nay"?
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Firefox Vs. Safari: Small Features Make A Big Difference
Daring Fireball's John Gruber has a fling with Firefox, but comes home to Safari. He praises Firefox's extensions, memory management, auto-restore of closed windows, the way it handles history, and more. But he decides that he prefers Safari because of a laundry list of small features that seem big to him.
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Top Windows Vista Apps: In Praise Of Microsoft Word 2007
Pulling together a list of my favorite Vista apps, I've run into a problem. The piece of software I keep coming back to isn't sexy and doesn't perform any extraordinary technical functions. It's often unheralded and frequently slammed. Yet its user interface is beautifully designed and it's a pleasure to use. If you haven't guessed already, I'm talking about Microsoft Word 2007.
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"Rock Chalk Jayhawk"
It's the question of the NCAA tournament. Everywhere you turn, people are chanting "Rock Chalk Jayhawk" and nobody really knows what it means. We asked people all weekend, and we got as many answers as people we asked. Some talked about the bounty of limestone in Kansas, others about choo-choo trains and still others about mythical birds. Some even went zen on us . . . one person's response: "It's everything." Another's: "What isn't it?" After Monday night's impressive performance (yes, I know, I was wrong) the answer is easy: It means "winner."
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There's More To Serena's YouTube Success (1.17MM) Than Sex
I have to admit that, at first, I didn't get it. Last month, at Mashup Camp in Silicon Valley (the next camp will be in June in NYC), Serena debuted its Just @#$% It!! What are they saying? video.(The video also is embedded below.) The video (now up to 1.17M views) features office workers telling each other to "mash it" as though the word "mash" is a dirty word. Each occurrence of it (and there are many) is bleeped out. By the time the librarian-esque female star of the video has "@#$%-ed" it, the bun in her hair isn't so tightly wrapped, there's a bit more flesh showing below the neckline, and...
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Nokia Hits 'Play' On N-Gage Gaming Service
Nokia has finally unleashed its new N-Gage mobile gaming service. N-Gage software is available for download to a select number of N Series handsets such as the N81 and N95. Some of the titles available include an incredible "Star Wars: The Force Unleashed." (See demo in post.) Gamers, rev your S60 engines. It's time for game on! (P.S. - Don't tell your boss!)
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ASUS's Eee, Virtually Free
How'd you like to try out the ASUS Eee without paying a dime, sort of? ASUS just posted the software development kit for its groundbreaking Linux-powered notebook on SourceForge, along with a fully functional system image of the Eee's Xandros OS. It's not quite the same experience as the machine itself, but for those itching to develop for it, this is a way to get a jump-start on that without needing the hardware itself.
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Open Handset Alliance Members Frustrated With Android
Android is perhaps proving to be more difficult an undertaking than Google might have initially conceived. More than five months after Android was first announced, many important aspects about
Android's code base still must be resolved. The delay is vexing Open Handset Alliance partners, who voiced concerns at last week's CTIA conference.
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Heading To ManageFusion
Happy Monday -- I'm catching a plane out to the Altiris ManageFusion conference in Vegas.
Continue reading "Heading To ManageFusion..."
Bleary-Eyed In Orlando - Must Be SNW
Well, after the usual two-hour delay getting out of Newark I'm finally ensconced in my 1-star hotel and preparing for another Storage Networking World. I've already gotten a few interesting "pre-briefings" before tomorrow's big golf outing. For those that don't follow such things, SNW is run by SNIA (The Storage Network Industry Association) and they seem to think the most important part of the conference is the golf outing. They must, or they wouldn't always have it at a $300/night hotel with a world-class golf course.
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Rock Chalk Phogedaboudit
The Riverwalk might as well be called The Mississippi Riverwalk, because Memphis owns this town this weekend. Despite a thoroughly impressive win over North Carolina, Kansas could bring Phog Allen back from the grave -- hell, they could bring James Naismith back and throw in Roy Williams to boot -- and they won't beat the (formerly known as Memphis State) Tigers. They are that good.
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Virtualization Security
From virtual rootkit "aka Blue Pill" attacks to attacks that make it possible to break out of a virtual machine's operating system to the underlying server OS -- there's been plenty of talk about virtual security in the past few years. Yet, the more I look into the issues surrounding virtualization and security, the less I think it's about securing the actual virtualization software itself, such as the hypervisor.
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The Road Ends Here, If You Can Get Through The Traffic Jam
Underneath the city of San Antonio, Texas, right next to The Alamo is the Riverwalk, the bastion of faux-Mexican restaurants and shopping that is serving as the thrumming hub of this year's Final Four. The restaurants are jammed, the waiting time is legendary, cabs are impossible, and walking is an exercise in frustration, unless perhaps you are Derrick Rose and you can prance magically along the water.
Continue reading "The Road Ends Here, If You Can Get Through The Traffic Jam..."
Microsoft Gives Yahoo Three Weeks To Accept Friendly Takeover
Microsoft said Saturday that Yahoo must accept its buyout offer within three weeks or face a hostile proxy battle. The company also said it would lower its offer for the Internet giant if it's forced to go the proxy route.
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In Lockstep At RSA
Just a few days before the RSA show begins in San Francisco, it's HP and not EMC that's talking loudest about storage and security. Why is that odd? Maybe because EMC owns RSA.
Continue reading "In Lockstep At RSA..."
Mojix To Push RFID Limits
After four years of development, Mojix is about to introduce an RFID system that promises to overcome some of the technical barriers that have hampered RFID's adoption. The company claims its Mojix Star system is more accurate and works at greater distances than other passive RFID systems.
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Why Am I The Last To Know About A Dying Hard Drive?
Several times in the past dozen years, I've had hard drives fail. There was a horrible run of data destruction caused by three IBM Deskstar 75GXP drives before I put them all out to pasture, but several other brands have bitten the dust as well. Usually the failure was gradual enough that I could recover any recent changes on the drive and replace it. But I can't thank Windows for raising the alarm about drive failures.
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Read A Book; Save A Forest
Do you continue to regularly blow money on books, even though you haven't read one cover-to-cover since The World According To Garp? What if there were a way to indulge your love of reading and simultaneously save some trees?
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Battle Of The Sexes: Internet Fraud Edition
They say girls develop much faster than boys. At the very least, they appear to be quicker on the uptake when it comes to avoiding getting duped on the Internet.
Continue reading "Battle Of The Sexes: Internet Fraud Edition..."
Google Absent From Wireless Show
It is disappointing that Google failed to participate in the wireless industry's largest trade show. Google likes to do things behind the scenes, but playing a more active -- and visible -- role in an industry that it is helping to shape would be nice.
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Wireless Industry Suffers From iPhone Envy
If there's one thing I saw too much of at this year's CTIA Wireless show, it was iPhone knockoffs. LG and Samsung were the most glaring offenders, with the Vu and Instinct. Apparently the wireless industry can't "think different."
Continue reading "Wireless Industry Suffers From iPhone Envy..."
Video: AMD On Data Center Consolidation
Is a six-minute discussion about data center consolidation boring? Maybe, but if you want to hear a cogent disposition of the salient issues -- like power and cooling considerations, virtualization, and how to get the most server bang for your buck -- click ahead to see my talk with AMD VP for commercial business Kevin Knox. But whatever you do, don't tell Kevin servers are "hot."
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Viral Video Of The Week: Home Sweet Cube
Office pranks have come a long way since those early days of filling a vacationing co-worker's cubicle with packing peanuts or covering all the items in her office with tinfoil. This one, for example, gives new meaning to the phrase "home away from home."
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What's (Not So) Great About Firefox 3
You've probably read Mitch Wagner's post extolling the virtues of the just-released Firefox 3 Beta 5. I've had experiences that are no less grand than his, albeit with one little exception that illustrates the hazards of beta-to-beta upgrades.
Continue reading "What's (Not So) Great About Firefox 3..."
The Weekly Watch On Content Management
This week's "Weekly Watch" on content management includes an ECM acquisition, Vignette's enterprise 2.0 moves, and a few lesser-known companies making their own noise.
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CTIA: On Mobile Phone Design
I've always been a fan of the field of industrial design. Whereas an architect is responsible for the overall design of a building, industrial designers are responsible for the design of everyday products from tables to cars to, yes, even cell phones. So when I got the opportunity to speak with Frank Tyneski, executive director of the Industrial Designers Society of America, I jumped at it.
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Microsoft Ready To Patch Eight Security Flaws Next Week
The software maker's monthly batch even includes important fixes for Microsoft Vista Service Patch (I mean Pack) 1.
Continue reading "Microsoft Ready To Patch Eight Security Flaws Next Week..."
Google: We Bid In Auction To Drive Up The Price
The FCC gag rule preventing Auction 73 bidders from talking about their mobile plans expired today, and boy is the news starting to flow. Google freely admits that it bid in the auction with the intent of driving up the price to reach the open access provisions.
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A Federal Indictment, That's What
Stop me if you've heard this one: What do you get if you try to board a flight to China while carrying confidential documents, a thumb drive, four external hard drives, 29 recordable CDs, a videotape, and $30,000 in cash?
Continue reading "A Federal Indictment, That's What..."
CIOs And Spring Cleaning
Given everything that's going on right now -- talk of recession, the presidential election, the baseball season starting up -- it's a good time for tech chiefs to take stock and do a little (or maybe a lot of) housekeeping. Here are a few thoughts.
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You Wanna Rock? Guitar Hero Now Available On BlackBerrys
Every mobile professional faces downtime when on the road. Those little patches of space between meetings or at the airport that aren't long enough to get any work done provide a golden opportunity to goof off. Now that includes channeling your inner Slash with Guitar Hero Mobile on BlackBerrys.
Continue reading "You Wanna Rock? Guitar Hero Now Available On BlackBerrys..."
Final Four: Live Online For The First Time
UCLA vs. Memphis, Kansas vs. N. Carolina ... It will be the first time ever that a major U.S. sporting event has been shown live and in its entirety on the Internet.
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Sprint Delays Xohm To 'Later This Year'
Sprint just doesn't need bad news like this right now. As part of its CTIA participation, a company spokesperson said that it has delayed the launch of its WiMax network from this month to "later." What does this imply?
Continue reading "Sprint Delays Xohm To 'Later This Year'..."
What's In A Name? That Which We Call A Rose ...
In uttering those words, Shakespeare's Juliet makes the point that a name is less important than the person or thing it represents. If so, why are so many startups changing their names? Something is rotten in the state of California.
Continue reading "What's In A Name? That Which We Call A Rose ......"
At CTIA, No News Is Big News
What a downer. I just opened the CTIA "Show Daily," from the very creditable news outlet RCR Wireless News, to find that ... Nothing Happened at the big CTIA Wireless show in Vegas.
Continue reading "At CTIA, No News Is Big News..."
The Olympics In The Internet Age: More Than China Bargained For?
Free people and journalists everywhere are expressing outrage today on the heels of news that 34-year-old Chinese Hu Jia will be jailed for another 3-1/2 years (in addition to the year that he's already spent in prison) for broadly distributing his views on democracy and criticisms of Chinese policies via the Internet. In this day and age of the Internet, did China get way more than it bargained for when it lobbied to bring the Olympics to Beijing?
Continue reading "The Olympics In The Internet Age: More Than China Bargained For?..."
Sun and Ubuntu: (Also) Happy Together
First, there was Sun and MySQL AB. Now, Sun wants to build stronger ties with another open source player, one that might be even more visible and politically advantageous: Ubuntu.
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Will Any Of Software's Emerging Stars Defeat SharePoint?
Collaboration and community are two very big hills for vendors to climb these days. As the saying goes, many have tried and many have failed. Add Microsoft's SharePoint to the growing list of things you'll need to overcome and some might say you're spinning your wheels.
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My Journey To The Final Four
Every year since 2000 I have gone to the Final Four. If you like college basketball, you must somehow find a way because it is an experience you cannot miss. I have been fortunate enough to watch my alma mater play in two Final Fours and win a national championship. I've watched Duke fans cry until blue paint streamed down their cheeks. Those are just some of the pleasures of March Happiness.
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A Paradigm Spins Down
Which is better (and less cliché) than a paradigm that shifts, in my opinion. But based on public and private comments from readers, it's well past time to do away with these fault-prone spinning platters called storage arrays. Here's why.
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Is Deduplication An Excuse To Be Lazy?
I was chatting with a three-letter storage vendor today about its upcoming entry into the data deduplication market. As its reps rattled off the usual benefits of data deduplication, they said administrators could stop running differential and incremental backups and just make full backups since the virtual tape library would deduplicate the data anyway. I see the logic, but the old-time admin in the back of my head is yelling "That's just wrong." What do you think?
Continue reading "Is Deduplication An Excuse To Be Lazy?..."
VM Sprawl?
We all know how it starts. You said, 'sure, just this once.' Someone said, 'psst, buddy, try this out.'
Continue reading "VM Sprawl?..."
CTIA: Satellite Phones Ride Again
Many have associated satellite phone technology with networks like Iridium, which launched in 1998 to great fanfare only to go bankrupt less than a year later. While satellite phone technology (including Iridium) has proven itself within certain organizations, such as those in the government and petroleum sectors, high service-equipment costs combined with low data bandwidth have limited their broader appeal. Startup TerreStar Networks is angling to change things with the launch of its own satellite network that should boast higher data speeds and lower costs.
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What's Great About Firefox 3
Mozilla introduced Firefox 3 Beta 5 on Wednesday, with more than 750 changes from the previous beta, including improved stability and Web compatibility, user interface enhancements, performance improvements, and better integration with Windows, the Mac, and Linux.
Continue reading "What's Great About Firefox 3..."
Everything You Need To Know About Tech Startups
Venture capital firms invested $29.4 billion last year, pumping $5.3 billion into software companies, $4.6 billion into Internet companies, and billions more into telecom, IT services, and networking companies. How can you keep up with all the new ideas, product development, and emerging companies on the receiving end of that money? Here's my list of online resources.
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CTIA: First Impressions Of Windows Mobile 6.1
Microsoft's newest update to Windows Mobile was officially launched at CTIA on Tuesday. In many ways, the launch of Windows Mobile 6.1 wasn't a big surprise -- Microsoft had made reference to the operating system when it announced System Center Mobile Device Manager at the last CTIA show in October and news that the company would officially launch at CTIA had been discussed in the press for several days before the show.
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Branson's Mars Hoax Nets Credulous Spaceniks
So what about the Mars mission volunteers who bounded up on stage with Virgin Group Ltd. founder, Sir Richard Branson, yesterday? Did they know they got punk'd?
Continue reading "Branson's Mars Hoax Nets Credulous Spaceniks..."
The New Age Of Innovation
Is there a new paradigm for business in the 21st century? The authors of a new book say yes, and CIOs will need to play a prominent role in it -- or they won't, to their detriment.
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Google's CIO Will Be Hard To Replace
Google employs plenty of impressive people. But Douglas Merrill, Google's CIO, is the only Googler I've met that I've mentioned to my kids as an example of accomplishment in the face of adversity.
Merrill is leaving Google to join EMI.
Continue reading "Google's CIO Will Be Hard To Replace..."
Google Wants To Be Your Alarm Clock
So I was perusing my Google Calendar the other day and noticed that the "See What's New" link was bright red. That means there are new features to the product. I click on the link and what do I find? Google is now offering an alarm clock service called Google Wake Up Kit, and will integrate it into your Google Calendar. Google promises to annoy you until you get out of bed.
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iPhone Shortage Suggests Possible Arrival Of 3G Version
Apple stores are running out of stock of the iPhone. Several analysts have placed calls to dozens of Apple Stores to confirm the shortages. Could this mean the 3G iPhone is right around the corner?
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A Microsoft-Yahoo Ad Network Still Isn't Google
As Microsoft continues its enthusiastic pursuit of Yahoo, one of the supposed prizes of that acquisition is the Yahoo advertising network. Steve Ballmer says that catching Google is his goal, so a strong competitor to Google's ad network is critical. I am not convinced that is what they are getting.
Continue reading "A Microsoft-Yahoo Ad Network Still Isn't Google..."
Wow! Kleer Gets $28M Of Funding In Series B Round (And Deserves It)
Kleer's PR counsel just sent a blast out to say that the company has received $28 million of funding in a Series B round. On video (embedded below), I took a closer look at Kleer's technology during the Computer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January and this new injection of cash comes as no surprise given what Kleer's wireless technology can do.
Continue reading "Wow! Kleer Gets $28M Of Funding In Series B Round (And Deserves It) ..."
No, It’s Not Your 15 Minutes Of Twitter-Fame. Say Hello To Twitter Spam
For a fleeting moment, I thought my Twitter ID (dberlind) got stuck in some viral tornado of fame. For several days, hardly 30 minutes could pass without another e-mail showing up in my in-box saying that someone else was "following me" on Twitter. Did some tweet of mine suddenly turn me into Twitter.com's new Mr. Popularity? Hardly. A pattern started to emerge. And then, on a long shot, I Googled "twitter spam."
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Only 2% Of Internet Traffic is 'Raw Sewage'
This figure, recently touted by Arbor Networks, strikes me as very low.
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Choices vs. Consequences
A big buzzword with open source is that you have that many more choices available to you, and Choice, as we all know, is a Good Thing. The problem is that too much choice is as bad as no choice at all -- especially when it's not clear what the consequences of those choices are.
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Verizon's PR Czar Responds To Whistle-Blower RE: 30K Missing HDTVs
Uh oh. It looks like things are about to become unglued over at Verizon where there's a dispute over the number of HDTVs that were promised to new FiOS subscribers, but that so far remained undelivered. In response to the debacle, Verizon apparently told ABC News that only a handful of customers were affected. But an alleged whistle-blowing Verizon customer service rep says that the number is more like 30,000 and that CSRs are being asked to dial back the make-good for those in the lurch. If the assertions prove true, legal action may not be far behind.
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CTIA Video: Playboy Undresses A Phone Of Its Own
Yep. Mobile phones sure are popular these days. If you want proof, look no further than a shiny new piece of hardware announced by none other than Playboy. If you want hot, sexy mobile phone action, here it is in all its scantily clad glory.
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CTIA Video: Hands On With Windows Mobile 6.1
Today I had the chance to spend a few moments with the newest version of Windows Mobile. Version 6.1 offers some nice usability enhancements, but the guts of the OS are essentially the same. Over The Air shot some video so you can see it for yourselves.
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Mission Creep And Storage
Anyone who has ever worked in an organization of, say, more than 50 people is aware of the phenomenon of mission-creep. It's always clear that it has occurred when the person whose initial job was ordering Post-its finds himself handling quality control, handling "external relations" (whatever that is), and traveling two-thirds of the time to make sure branch offices are using the right copying paper. Does any of this ring a bell for today's storage professionals?
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Look, Up In The Sky -- It's A Mobile Phone!
Attending the Nokia press conference to announce the new WiMax edition N810 Internet tablet today required me to break at least a couple of my rules for living. The first one was "Never sign a liability waiver on April Fools' Day."
Continue reading "Look, Up In The Sky -- It's A Mobile Phone!..."
CIOs And The Wall Street Journal
The financial markets' newspaper of record seems to have taken notice of CIOs. Is it a sign that tech chiefs have finally arrived?
Continue reading "CIOs And The Wall Street Journal..."
NBC To Broadcast The Internet
April Fools'. (Though it's not a stretch to imagine a bunch of television execs sitting around the conference table, and one of them says, "Hey, I've got this great idea." Not.) All of which is a roundabout way of getting at the point that users of all media -- includes Web sites like this one -- want what they want, when they want it, and how they want it.
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No Foolin! April Fools' Web Jokes Have Become Tradition
With the dawn of the Internet, April Fools' Day has taken on a whole new level. Today's BBC news report about a recently discovered breed of flying penguin reaches far many more viewers (via YouTube) than its 1957 television piece about the Swiss harvesting spaghetti off of trees.
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Energy Camp Datapoint: TechWebTV's Most-Watched Video Is About Green Tech
Are you coming to Energy Camp on April 28 where we'll be having an open conversation about green technology? If not, why not? Why do I ask? I was just checking the logs on our YouTube channel (TechWebTV) and noticed something unusual. Or maybe not.
Continue reading "Energy Camp Datapoint: TechWebTV's Most-Watched Video Is About Green Tech..."
Despite Mac Gains, Windows Still Rules Enterprise Computing
Windows still nearly monopolized enterprise desktops in 2007, even though it lost some market share at the expense of Apple, according to a report by Forrester Research. Enterprise Windows market share dropped nearly 4%, but 95% of business users run Windows. And Apple market share tripled, but it's still just 4.2%, limited to enthusiasts and small workgroups.
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CTIA: Symbian Faces Uphill Battle In U.S.
Sitting down with two executives from Symbian, provider of the world's leading mobile-phone operating system, and analyst Avi Greengart of Current Analysis at the CTIA Wireless show in Las Vegas gave me a feeling of déjà vu.
Continue reading "CTIA: Symbian Faces Uphill Battle In U.S...."
More Is Better, But What About Better Is Better?
After my earlier comments about support for open source apps I went hunting for some other perspectives on the subject and happened across the FOSSBazaar site (a corporate-sponsored "gathering place to discuss, explore, share experiences and cooperatively solve issues related to FOSS governance"). One post in particular that caught my eye: "Not enough support? No, too many support choices!" I'm thinking it's not just a case of more, but better.
Continue reading "More Is Better, But What About Better Is Better?..."
Why Outlook Isn't The Best IMAP Client For Gmail
For anybody who wanted folder synchronicity between their email client (eg: Outlook, Thunderbird, Mac Mail, iPhone, etc.) and their online email service, it was pretty much impossible to find until, in its Gmail service, Google decided to support a special e-mail retrieval protocol (IMAP) that's designed with that purpose in mind. Unfortunately, POP -- the protocol through which most email clients attach to online email services -- can't do the trick. After determining that neither Mozilla's Thunderbird nor Apple's Mac Mail were up to the task of working well with Gmail's IMAP support, I tried Outlook and hit another wall.
Continue reading "Why Outlook Isn't The Best IMAP Client For Gmail..."
Dthree Uses Oracle Infrastructure To Power Marketing 2.0
I caught up with Oracle customer Dthree recently wanting to get the scoop on how Oracle's infrastructure is helping them deliver something meaningful to marketers. I'm always interested in how such technology-driven companies can speak to the business user.
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Purchased: One $20 LCD Cleaning Kit From Klear Screen
After joining the team here at TechWeb (which includes InformationWeek, Interop, etc.), I was outfitted with a beautiful MacBook Pro with a 17-inch LCD panel. But after three months of usage, the LCD's surface is covered with fingerprints (plainly visible when the display is off). Fearful that I could ruin the display if I cleaned it the wrong way, I hunted down the solution (double entendre intended).
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A Little Small-Mindedness
Who says old molecules can't be taught new tricks? Japanese researchers have concocted a new molecule that reverses cirrhosis damage -- at least in lab rats. So as you contemplate the wisdom of that next beer, let us marvel at other small-scale breakthroughs in storage.
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Show Me Some Class, Babyyyyyy
I will normally turn down the sound on a game involving the vocal assault rifle of Dick Vitale. It's just my taste, which doesn't tend toward an unnatural love affair with Mike Krzyzewski or the barracks sadist Bobby Knight ("Robert Montgomery Knight"). But I appreciate what Vitale brings to college basketball.
Continue reading "Show Me Some Class, Babyyyyyy..."
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