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The InformationWeek May 2008 Archive « April 2008 | Main | June 2008 » |
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Hey: They’re Gonna Confiscate Your iPod
From border guards to copyright cops. Get busted with ripped music at the border, and you just may have your iPod, notebook, or smartphone confiscated on the spot. Maybe even if you acquired the music legally.
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Google's Schmidt: Mobile Internet The Future Of Advertising
Speaking to a German newspaper, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that the mobile Internet will indeed be the next major advertising platform. According to Schmidt, the iPhone is leading the charge.
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Is YouTube A Tool For Terrorist Propaganda?
I think of YouTube as being primarily a place to watch cute cat videos. But Sen. Joe Lieberman condemns the video site for something sinister: Terrorist organizations are using YouTube to post videos inciting Arabs to kill Americans. Lieberman is demanding that YouTube put a stop to the practice.
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Google Shows First Android GPhone Prototype
Sure, Google engineer director Steve Horowitz says "I'm here to tell you there is actually no GPhone" in this interesting Android demonstration video I've linked to. But then he goes on to show off a GPhone prototype he's been working with for the last six months. So let's go to the videotape.
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Cell Phones' Newest Feature: Avoiding Speeding Tickets
Trapster is a new service that allows cell phone users to alert one another about the location of speed traps. Alerts are sent in real-time to Trapster users as they approach a tagged trap. Never mind the fact that using a cell phone while speeding is probably not a good idea.
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Live Search Cashback Invites Company Troubles
My first look at Microsoft's new Live Search Cashback mentioned some concerns about its potential for abuse by employees. It would be easy for someone to buy products with company money and pocket the cashback rewards. As I've been doing a few more searches and purchases with the service, it seems like some merchants may be counting on this sort of behavior.
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Obama's Tech Outreach Betrays Small Glitches
While Sen. Barack Obama unveiled an impressively broad technology policy plan last November, his campaign still has a few glitches to work out in terms of its own use of online technology for outreach.
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Google's Android To Offer Up App Store?
Another gem to come from Google's I/O conference is news that Android-powered phones will be able to access some sort of centralized store to find and download applications to the handset. This will be great for developers looking to distribute their applications, as well as users seeking new functionality for their phones.
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Startup Incubator Opens In Pittsburgh
A new facility for startup software and Internet companies is about to open in Pittsburgh. The new AlphaLab is affiliated with Innovation Works, a seed-stage investor that has pumped $37 million into more than 100 Pittsburgh-area startups over the past eight years.
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Speed's Dead
In my recent article on data deduplication on InformationWeek's sister site, Byte and Switch, a question of speed impact came up. As we talk to customers throughout the storage community about backup priorities, a surprising trend continues: the importance of shrinking the backup window has become less of a priority for disk to disk backup solutions. Why?
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Firefox Or Flock? Or Both?
With a release candidate of Firefox 3 upon us and the final version set to drop sometime in June, I'm finding myself a bit torn: Do I upgrade to FF3 once it's fully baked, or stay with my current browser? What makes the dilemma all the tougher is that my current browser isn't Firefox 2 -- well, it is, sort of, but not really. It's Flock, which serves as great proof of how open source can allow the creation of excellent derivative products.
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ClickFree Makes Backup Stupid Simple
Like many other members of the geek brotherhood, I provide informal tech support services for my friends and neighbors. In return they take care of Dr. Humphrey D. Dogg, DCS (Doctor of Canine Studies), when I fly off to Interop or TechEd. A few weeks ago one of my dog-run buddies was lamenting the lack of a good backup program for his Mac that would save his data to recordable DVDs. Given that he had an older PowerPC-based Mac and couldn't run Time Machine, I didn't have a better answer for him than to run Carbon Copy Cloner to a USB drive. This morning he told me the drive in his machine died. Of course, he was planning on running a backup today.
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Spigit's Web 2.0 For Enterprise Collaboration
Harnessing the collective wisdom of the crowd always sounds so good in theory, but few do it really well. More important, few have figured out the best ways to do it inside the walls of a corporation. I was surprised a couple weeks ago when the head of our HR department forwarded a job description to several of us to help her fill: It was for a company-wide Wiki manager -- not the "manager" role that makes it run and administers it, but the kind that evangelizes it, gets people to use it, and finds interesting threads and knowledge developing from it. I hope this is a new trend in corporate intelligence mining. On a related note, I talked to Paul Plushckell, CEO of Spigit, a company creating some interesting social network tools for the businesses.
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MEDgle: Symptoms Ending In 'gle'
You know that rash, that one you don't want to talk about but that you keep scratching and wondering about but you're afraid to go to the doctor and get it checked out? I'm kidding -- but seriously, if you did, you could go to MEDgle first and find out how seriously to take it. This self-funded startup is yet another interesting way to exploit the expansiveness of the Web to create a new business opportunity.
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Die, Comment Spam. Die
Blogging software and services provider Six Apart (known for MovableType and TypePad) has unleashed a new anti-comment spam filter, creatively dubbed TypePad AntiSpam. Now how will I get the latest stock-trading tips, body-enhancing drugs, and pharma deals?
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Qualcomm Lays Out Map For The Future Of BREW
This week at Qualcomm's annual BREW conference, the giant chipmaker gave its content delivery platform a double shot in the arm. BREW's future includes Flash integration and the ability to run widgets created with Qualcomm's Plaza initiative. Are these improvements enough to fend off the competition?
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CDNs Stage 3
In an upcoming InformationWeek cover story and online special report on the future of Web video (coming out next week), one of the areas I explored was content delivery networks. As executive producer of TechWeb TV, I publish a fair share of video, but it's been a while since I was able to take a deep dive into the land of CDNs, and boy, have they changed.
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MokaFive Virtual Desktops: A Flexible Leash?
Virtualizing desktops is clearly an area of the enterprise that begs for IT action, but the variety of ways to go about it indicates that this technology segment is in deep ferment. Will those who have dominated the desktop so far rule a virtualized future? Perhaps, but where there's fermentation, there's also a whiff of disruption.
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Obama's 'Solution' For Bridging U.S. Science Gap: Eliminate SATs
The Democratic presidential candidate has found a unique way to boost U.S. students' performance in math and science -- he'd eliminate rigorous testing and let everyone into college for free. Yup, that ought to do it.
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3G iPhone Report Of The Day: It's Delayed
Quick, everyone panic! Apple's stock is going to tank if this one is true! German cell phone chipmaker Infineon said that it is seeing less demand for its HSDPA chips than it was expecting for some big, unnamed project (hint: 3G iPhone). Surely this means Apple is delaying the 3G iPhone's launch. Right? As Mr. Spock would say, "That's highly illogical."
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Opera Cozies Up To Google, Adds Gears Support
I use Google Gears. I also use Firefox. When I upgraded to Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1, I lost access to Google Gears because it isn't supported yet. This is somewhat vexing. I also use the Opera browser from time to time. Today, Opera Software announced that both the desktop and the mobile versions of its browser will support Gears. Time for me to change browsers?
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Windows 7 'Ultimate' Video: First Glimpse?
Windows 7 appears to look a lot like Windows Vista, judging from a video purporting to show the "Ultimate" version of Microsoft's next operating system that has popped up on the Internet and drawn more than one million hits on YouTube.
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Like It Or Not, You're An Internet Exhibitionist
Emily Gould is an attractive young woman who's an Internet exhibitionist. She writes in the New York Times Magazine about her experiences as the co-editor of the gossip blog Gawker, where she shared intimate details of her romantic life and posted scantily clad pictures of herself. You might simply look at Emily as a freak. But if you use Facebook, or Twitter, or keep a personal blog, or are active on any other social media, then you and Gould are two of a kind -- the only difference is where you draw the line between private and public.
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Will Apple's 3G iPhone Still Fall Short?
In April, shortly after I bought my very own iPhone, I blogged about the device's design flaws, pointing out the 5 Areas Where Apple's iPhone Falls Short. With the new 3G iPhone on the way, the question to ask now is whether all the lingering annoyances are being fixed. Here's my blow-by-blow assessment.
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Cybernetic Monkeys Offer Hope To Human Invalids
The New York Times has a front-page story today about a group of monkeys who have learned to move robotic arms using only their thoughts, using tiny sensors in their brains called neural interfaces.
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Converting Science Fiction To Reality: The Transformative Power Of Technology
Think there's no more magic in this business? Still have people trying to tell you that IT doesn't matter? Think again. I spent most of Wednesday at Carnegie Mellon University and among the people I spoke with was Jay Srini, the Chief Innovation Officer for the neighboring University of Pittsburgh's Medical Center Health Plan. Jay spoke about the extraordinary advances being made in the spaces where IT and medical technology and bioengineering meet health care.
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Why The NY Times And Mashable.com Were Off Base On Blogging And Heart Failure
OK, I'm going off-campus in this post, but I now feel as though I've joined a "privileged class" that entitles me to comment on the New York Times story questioning the connection between the stresses of prolific blogging and heart failure and subsequently, a completely distasteful post on Mashable.com about being able to see (on a map) where bloggers are "dropping dead." The NY Times piece was shoddy reporting. Mashable was out of line. Here's why.
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Open Source And Open APIs, Facebook-Style
The more I read Facebook's statement about opening its platform to third-party developers, the more it seems like you could interpret what they say as a promise to open just their APIs, or both their APIs and their underlying platform code. Which one's more likely? Better to ask: which one makes the most sense for Facebook, or any other Web company?
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Unified Communications Confounds Small Businesses
Vendors love to talk up the benefits of Unified Communications, but an exclusive study of small and midsize companies by bMighty.com suggests that many companies are not yet getting the message.
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Google I/O Overrun By Developers
More than 2,900 developers descended on the Moscone Center West convention center in San Francisco on Wednesday and Google wasn't ready for them.
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HTC's Android Phone Shown Off At Google Conference
Google's I/O developer conference in San Francisco has marked the unofficial debut of HTC's upcoming Android-powered smartphone, the Dream. Here's a video sneak-peek.
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Tomorrow's CIO: The Qualifications
What are the attributes that make for a good CIO, today and going forward? Here's another peek at our "Tomorrow's CIO" research survey results, specifically the attributes and abilities both CIOs and executive management are looking for in top technology talent. How does this line up with your own ideas about what it will take to prepare for the challenges of Tomorrow's CIO?
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Does Cloud Computing Create A Bad Work Environment?
I was speaking with some industry people last night and was horrified to learn about the work environment of an acquaintance of mine. Though he has a regular 9 to 5 job, he doesn't get his own cubicle. Rather, he has to sit in a sterile work station that cannot be personalized in any way. Is this the best that cloud computing has to offer?
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How The Cable Companies Can Win Again
The cable companies are in trouble, but the trouble is so avoidable. They have home and business premise access, and those lines have been robust enough to carry hundreds of video channels, many now in high definition. The addition of phone and Internet service has been, I'm sure, a fantastic boon to their businesses. But the growth of video on the Internet and the power of the Web as its platform will be this decade's final disrupter. Those with no urgency today will be scrambling for survival tomorrow. Time is ticking like a clock in Kitchen Stadium.
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Analysts Rain On Apple's iPhone Parade
With iPhone sales petering out due to their growing unavailability, Apple may not sell 10 million iPhones in 2008, say analysts. What spurred Jobs to believe that Apple could attain that number, when to-date the iPhone has sold only 5.4 million? Discuss.
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Finding The Needle, Part One - Saving Money
In the last week another new storage startup is launching a new product, another just received another round of founding, and still another announced it was being purchased. This happens almost every day with technology startup companies, especially in storage.
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It Must Be Summertime Because We're Starting To See Rumors About A Mac Tablet Again
Certain periodic events mark the passing of time. The sun rises and sets. The weather goes from warm to cold to warm again. Football changes to basketball, then baseball. And, a couple of times a year, we see a new rumor that Apple will be coming out with a tablet computer. Because, you know, that Newton was such a huge hit that Apple's just sweaty-palmed to do it again.
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Cisco Delivers On Open Promise
John Chambers has been talking about transforming the way enterprises use and manage IT resources for a couple of years now. With "Cisco Motion," he's finally delivered.
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To POP Or To IMAP, That Is The Question
Anyone who uses POP to retrieve e-mail from a mobile device knows that not everything you do on your phone is reflected in your account online. Google feels your pain, and wants you to know that IMAP can save you the hassle of re-performing actions when you log in from your PC.
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If You Have No Privacy, Don't Blame Microsoft
Recently, I came across a conspiracy theory that Microsoft is spying on us using the Malicious Software Removal Tool (MSRT). This theory has no doubt been given new impetus by Microsoft's (unrelated) training police forces in computer forensics, which seems like a bad idea to me. But I have to wonder; does the fault lie with Microsoft, or is it just a result of our shrinking liberties?
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Architect, Sure, But Of What?
The CIO is generally thought of as an architect -- traditionally of a company's IT structure and strategy and, increasingly, potentially, of a company's overall business processes. However, not everyone, it seems, is willing to make the leap to the CIO-as-process-guru hypothesis.
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In Your Face, Climate Alarmists
The agitators over at grassfire.org want you to "break free from the 'carbon footprint guilt' being imposed by Climate Alarmists."
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Adobe Flash Player Under Attack
Security researchers are warning that an in-the-wild exploit within the Adobe Flash Player has been planted in from 20,000 to 250,000 Web pages. If that wide range of potentially affected Web pages isn't enough disparity for you, try this on: it's not entirely clear what versions of Flash are at risk. Read on...
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Windows 7 Shows Microsoft Hasn't Learned Vista Lessons
The project was called MinWin, a Microsoft effort to slim down the next version of Windows. The company said it had heard, loud and clear, that another bloated OS like Vista wouldn't fly. Then Windows 7 galumphed into the room.
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Startup Replay: The TiVo Of Software
Startup Replay Solutions has mostly (re)played in the gaming world, with customers like Electronic Arts, Vivendi, and Microsoft, but now it's moving into financial services and other verticals with its TiVo-like ability to re-create and play back application sessions for quality assurance and testing.
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Via's OpenBook Is Share Alike, If Only On The Outside
Open hardware specs seem to be catching on. After the OpenMoko released CAD design files for all of its handsets, Via's gone and done the same thing with its new OpenBook. It's only the outside that's being released as an open design, but that's not a bad start.
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I Think, I Video, I Am
In a cover story for InformationWeek next week, I will say the following (technically I've already said it, you just haven't read it yet; technically, I'm paraphrasing myself, which may be a form of plagiarism, but I don't know): I think Web Video is undergoing a massive upheaval today. Right now. Before our eyes. I think in two years, the lines between what we watch on the Web and what we watch on television will cease to blur. I think all video will soon be delivered over the Internet. I think it's already happening. I think we all know it.
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Joomla Rocks, Or How To Build A Professional Web Site For No Money Down
Working in a garage-based company that's looking to create its first killer Web site? Or maybe you're toiling in the bowels of a behemoth corporation, wondering why you're mired in an old-fashioned, "waterfall" software-development process when all you wanna do is board that Web 2.0 train, and quickly. Well, I've got the answer for you, and it's called Joomla.
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Infrastructure Virtualization
Server virtualization helped justify and broaden the use of the SAN by leveraging networked storage to enable features like server motion. In similar fashion, companies such as Scalent Systems are using infrastructure virtualization to further justify and broaden the use of a SAN by bringing those server virtualization capabilities to nonvirtualized systems: the ability to move or start new application instances in a matter of minutes after powering on and booting what was a cold, bare-metal server.
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Business Tech Is The Land Of The Living
Women prefer careers working with living things, rather than "inorganic matter," according to a study recently blogged about by my colleague, Richard Martin. But how come more females don't seem to realize that a successful career in the business technology field is all about working with people? People are "living things," too, right?
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Paying The "Linux Tax"
Most of us know about the "Windows Tax" -- the extra cash you shell out to pay for the cost of a Windows license when you buy a new PC. But what about a (so-called) "Linux Tax," the cost incurred by an ordinary user switching to Linux from Windows?
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Cleveland Rocks!
How did the CIO of a rust-belt financial firm buffeted by the mortgage meltdown mess pull out a big win in Cambridge, Mass., last week? Here's a hint: Make the most of what you've got.
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Microsoft (Slightly) Lifts Curtains On Windows 7
After a long silence, Microsoft Windows chief Steven Sinofsky is talking, the Windows team is blogging publicly about Windows 7, and there are rumbles that Windows 7 might actually be demonstrated at a conference this week. But is Microsoft actually saying anything?
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UK Theme Park Bans SmartPhones. Everybody Panic!
Whenever I get in a discussion of the convenience of mobile devices, I run into some old fart who gets his knickers in a twist about how he doesn't carry one of them newfangled barkberries, he's too important to be at the beck and call of an electronic ball-and-chain. When confronted with one of these pundits, I like to inform him about an exciting new feature on my cutting-edge smartphone that helps protect my privacy. It's called an "off button."
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How Will Your Social Computing Strategy Deliver ROI?
I spoke with Matthew Greeley, CEO of Brightidea.com, recently and came away impressed with its approach to delivering real value with Web 2.0 sizzle. It just released WebStorm 5.0, which uses social networking elements to capture information that companies can use to drive innovation.
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RIM To Indian Government: No Crypto Keys For You
Just last week it looked like RIM was ready to hand over its BlackBerry message encryption to the Indian authorities. Now, it seems as if, to quote singer/songwriter Tom Petty, RIM has had a "Change Of Heart."
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Huge Web Hosting Company Begs Users To Adopt Gmail
DreamHost must have never imagined that so many people would use its Web-hosting services and choose to use its e-mail product. In some recent comments made by DreamHost, it is asking that its customers choose Gmail instead, because "it's something Google...can do better."
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Grasping At 3G iPhone Rumor Straws
Turns out, people are sort of desperate for news about the 3G iPhone. So desperate, in fact, that they are willing to infer just about anything. Take the latest 3G iPhone reports. Apparently, Apple has received 188 containers of something at a North American port. These particular containers are of interest because they are unlabeled ... and Apple's containers are usually labeled.
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Desert Island MP3s: What's Your Must-Have Music?
Here's a holiday weekend thought experiment, which doesn't seem so far-fetched anymore given the high price of gas: If you were stranded in the middle of nowhere, what digital tunes would you have to have on your music player to survive the boredom? In the old days, radio stations called this challenge "Desert Island Discs." I'm updating it for the MP3 era; read on for my list.
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FCC Wants To Sell Yet More Airwaves, Google Perks Up
I guess the $20 billion the FCC brought in during Auction 73 just wasn't enough. Today, Kevin Martin, the FCC's chairman, floated the idea of another spectrum auction. This one will sell off 25 MHz of spectrum, with the express purpose of providing free wireless broadband services. Google must be licking its chops.
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Google Eases Search Term Entry On Mobile Phones
I've spouted off once or twice about how difficult it can be to enter text information on cell phones. Even phones with full QWERTY keyboards have their quirks. Google thinks it is annoying, too. It has been studying how to make filling out search fields in its mobile search products better. Its answer involves fewer "clicks."
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First Windows Mobile 6.1 Smartphone Goes On Sale At Best Buy This Weekend
HTC is the first company out of the gate with a smartphone running the Windows Mobile 6.1 operating system. Sure, some have been floating around the Internet, but the Touch Dual will be the first one you can run out and buy. WinMo 6.1 is a step up from WinMo 6, and the HTC Touch Dual brings it to life well.
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Do iSCSI-Only Systems Make Sense?
When iSCSI first began to appear, there were several companies -- LeftHand Networks, EqualLogic (now owned by Dell), and others -- which developed storage solutions based solely on the protocol. But what these companies had really developed was a storage software solution that probably could have run on any protocol, although they choose iSCSI. My opinion is that this was as much a marketing decision to ride the iSCSI wave as it was a technology decision.
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Facebook Vulnerable To Serious XSS Attack
If you can’t trust your friends, who can you trust? On Facebook, you better think before you click that link, a security researcher warns ...
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Microsoft Live Search Cashback Deserves Some Credit
With Live Search Cashback, Microsoft has decided that it's willing to take some heavy losses to buy search market share. Ignoring the bribery, which inevitably will have to end, the search engine itself is actually pretty good.
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OGD1: The Open Source Graphics Card
Open source software was just the beginning, as we're now seeing the slow but steady proliferation of open source hardware as well. The newest development in this field is now accepting preorders -- the Open Graphics Project's OGD-1, a totally open source FPGA development platform. It's actually not a graphics card yet, but that's one of the many possible things it could be morphed into. And that's all part of the plan.
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Connecticut Attorney General Blasts Bank Of New York Mellon
It's happened again. Another backup tape with millions of customers' information has gone missing. The tape was lost on Feb. 27, and the Connecticut authorities want to know more.
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Bizarro World: Line Forms At NYC Apple Store For No Reason
I don't get it either. For no apparent reason, some 60-odd people have decided to line up at the 5th Avenue Apple Store in Manhattan. Some believe they are getting on line for the 3G iPhone, which isn't likely to be available for some four weeks. What the...?
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Red Hat's Next Steps With RHEL 5.2
Red Hat's just delivered the 5.2 version of its venerable Red Hat Enterprise Linux, right on the heels of the version 9 release of the equally-venerable Fedora. I took some time out to talk with Daniel Riek, product manager for RHEL, about what was new. The best new stuff all involves the "V"-word: virtualization.
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5 Extreme Gas Saving Tips
Yesterday I wrote about five ways to save money on gas. Here are five more, including one that's begging for a virtual slapfight between its proponents and detractors.
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Google's Page Argues For White Space
Earlier this year, Google indicated interest in "white space" spectrum. Today, it took its proposal to Congress and the FCC, where it asked that the spectrum be freed up for anyone to use. Legitimate questions remain unanswered, though.
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iPhone Reports: GeoTagging, 3G On/Off Switch, Availability
Some more reports have surfaced about the 3G version of the iPhone. This round of tidbits tells us that the iPhone will include the ability to geotag photos (which means it will have GPS), users can toggle the 3G radio on and off, and we have some new information on exactly when the iPhone will be available.
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Google Offers Everyone Access To 'Sites'
If you've dreamed of starting your own Web site, Google has made it easier than ever. It has expanded the availability of its Google Sites service -- originally only for Google Apps users -- to everyone. There's no limit on the number of pages you can create, nor what you can share with the WWW.
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Yahoo Survey Respondents Want You To Keep Quiet
Almost three in four consumers (74%) would like to see mobile phone usage on airplanes restricted to features that don't involve talking, according to a survey released on Wednesday by Yahoo.
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Tooting Our Own Mobile Horn
BlackBerry and iPhone owners, listen up. We heard your requests and we're here to tell you that InformationWeek.com for mobile devices is ready for you now at mobile.informationweek.com.
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Research In Motion May Hand Crypto Keys To Indian Government
Apparently, the Indian government can't crack 256-bit encryption to read protected e-mails on RIM BlackBerrys. It appears RIM is willing to lend a hand, by handing over its (your) keys.
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Microsoft's Antitrust Case, 10 Years Later
In the Freedom to Tinker blog this week, Professor Ed Felten started a series of entries marking the 10 years since the Department of Justice brought its antitrust case against Microsoft. The past decade has brought a lot of changes for Microsoft as well as the entire industry. But if you're wondering where things are headed for Microsoft, it might be instructive to look at what happened to IBM.
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Microsoft Spends To Undermine Google's Pay-Per-Click Gold Mine
Google executives reportedly met in the U.K. this week to discuss how to respond if Microsoft decided to revive its bid for Yahoo. Had they known that Microsoft on Wednesday would start offering cash rebates to searchers who buy products found using Microsoft's Live Search, they'd have been able to discuss a more pressing threat than the possible purchase of Yahoo.
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Microsoft 'Heroes' Include Open Source Programmers
The phrase, "Microsoft's open source heroes," doesn’t trip lightly off the tongue. But that's what we're seeing when we visit a page on the Microsoft Web site: "Heroes Happen Here/Open Source." Do not expect to meet Linus Torvalds, Roy Fielding, or Andrew "Tridge" Tridgell on this page. Do expect to "Click here to download Silverlight."
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An Inconvenient Data Retention Policy
I recently met with a client that had a 45-day retention policy for ALL data. I've heard of this kind of policy for e-mail, but I don't recall ever hearing of it for all the data in the enterprise. Is this realistic and can you get away with that short of a data retention policy? Not really, and here's why.
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NBC Claims Latest DRM (Broadcast Flag) Trainwreck 'Inadvertent'
If you followed any of my coverage of Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology over on ZDNet (before I jumped ship to TechWeb and InformationWeek), then you'll know that I have a different acronym for DRM. I call it C.R.A.P. Originally, I thought CRAP could be expanded to mean Content Restriction Annulment and Protection. But the Free Software Foundation's spiritual leader Richard Stallman asked that it stand for Cancellation, Restriction, And Punishment instead. ZDNet's readers concurred and who am I to argue? Today we have yet another tale of why DRM technology is so deserving of being called CRAP.
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Tiny Nokia Phone Makes Big Splash At T-Mobile Party
Last night at the Edison Ballroom in NYC, T-Mobile hosted a bunch of journalists to kick off its newest handset, the Nokia XpressMusic 5310. This handset is about the size of an iPod Nano, and manages to squeeze some solid features into a teeny-tiny phone.
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What CIOs Say About Innovation And Web 2.0 Tools
There are plenty of barriers to innovation, including a fear of change, riskiness, cost, and more. But an important element in facilitating innovation is collaboration, and Web 2.0 tools that help people share ideas are helping some organizations to break down the barriers stunting innovation.
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Women Say 'No, Thanks' To Sci/Tech Careers
What if Lawrence Summers was right?
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5 Tips For Saving Money On Gas
You wouldn't know it by all the fleece around the office, but the start of summer driving season is only days away. With oil prices relentlessly pumping up gas prices, some drivers are looking to the enterprise and the Internet for ways to save on gasoline.
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XO Gets 2.0, Sugar Goes Indie
Now that some of the furor over the OLPC XO notebook becoming -- at least in part -- the OL-XP-PC has died down, both the instigator of the project and its former software czar have announced where they're going from here. The hardware's intriguing, but the software's here now.
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Google Offers Peek At How It Controls Search Quality
Google's only goal: Improve user experience. How does it do that? According to Udi Manber, VP of engineering at Google, Search Quality, it is a heck of a lot of work. Google improves its search algorithms an average of nine times per week. Here's why.
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Updates To InformationWeek's NAC Immersion Center
As part of our on-going coverage on network access control, InformationWeek's NAC Immersion Center was recently updated with new content from the Las Vegas Interop keynotes and presentations.
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Social Networking As Rocket Science
The average age of NASA employees is 46.2 years and rising, and the space agency forecasts that more than 4,000 of its full-time workers will retire over the next six years. The numbers tell the story behind NASA's experiment with social networking as a way to capture and share knowledge before those employees wave goodbye.
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Old Is New Department: Microsoft Patents Proactive Virus Protection
Microsoft has just snared a U.S. patent for proactive virus protection, which is how security software helps secure your PC when it encounters shape-shifting malware not already in its antivirus definition file. What I want to know is, what does this mean for all the other vendors -- like McAfee, Symantec, Kaspersky, and Trend Micro -- that have been selling proactive protection software for years? Do they now have to pay Microsoft protection; I mean, royalties?
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AT&T Mobile Broadband Users Get Free Access To AT&T Wi-Fi Hotspots. Oh, But Not Apple Users
AT&T announced a great new addition to its LaptopConnect mobile broadband service: Free access to AT&T Wi-Fi hotspots (you know, the ones at Starbucks). You have to pony up $60 for AT&T's 5 GB data plan, but that nets you AT&T's HSDPA network, plus 17,000 Wi-Fi hotspots. But only if you use a Windows machine.
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The Consumer Effect In Beantown
Boston is a bitter pill for a fan of the New York Yankees and the Cleveland Cavaliers, such as myself. But I guess I'll make the best of it. I'm here to cover -- and participate in -- the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium, which got off to a rousing start with a night-before visionary speech by the CIO of Verizon.
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Agile Programming And Offshore Outsourcing
A small offshore outsourcer, Exigen, is pitching would-be clients on using agile programming -- and an interesting pricing wrinkle -- to make offshore IT projects less likely to flop, and more likely to get done early. Problem is, most companies aren't even close to ready to work with outsourcers in an agile mode.
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E-Mail Security And Compliance Not Taken Seriously
Forget viruses and spam as threats to e-mail. Those as so last century. And phishing attacks tend to take money from those who may not be smart enough to hold onto theirs. I mean, who clicks on an e-mail link and starts entering sensitive financial information? That leaves regulatory compliance, lawsuits, and data leakage as the big threats.
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How SAP Is Trying To Fill The Talent Pipeline
Last week, SAP announced new university alliances to prepare future professionals with business, tech, and soft skills needed in the rollout of NetWeaver, ERP 6.0, and other popular SAP products. This week, the company talked to me about the work under way with other third parties to help fill the talent gap now.
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EMC Announces 3 Deduping Backup Targets
Monday at its EMC World conference, EMC announced a line of three deduplicating backup targets that are the product of its long-rumored collaboration with Quantum. While the 3D disk libraries bear some resemblance to Quantum's own DXi line, EMC has done more than just OEM Quantum's product. In addition to using EMC Clariion disk arrays, which gives them greater scalability, and RAID 6 for enhanced reliability, they use Western Digital's GreenPower 1 TB drives that draw half as much power as standard 1 TB drives when spinning idle.
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Virtualization’s Yin And Yang
EMC doesn't like it if you suggest virtualization might not be worth the hassle.
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Senate Should Stop Complaining About Bush Cyber Security Initiative
I've been following the debate surrounding U.S. Senate authorization of funding for President Bush's Comprehensive National Cyber Security Initiative. A bunch of senators are complaining that they don't know precisely what they're funding and that there's all sorts of secrecy involved. Hey, of course much of the plan is secret! It's about security, stupid.
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Is SaaS 'Unstoppable' For Open Source?
In yesterday's Q&A about the Honest Public License, Fabrizio Capobianco was of the opinion that in the future, most software (open source included) will be run as services. His word was "unstoppable," which I admit raised eyebrows on my end. But it rests on some pretty solid observations about how open source works.
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3G iPhone Launch 'Confirmed' For June 9
Gizmodo is reporting that inside sources have confirmed that the 3G version of the iPhone will indeed launch on June 9, after Steve Jobs' keynote address at Apple's WWDC. It will be available worldwide, and price points will not be locked to one figure.
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Opera Mini Users Prefer To Be Social
Social networking sites are the No. 1 destination for users of Opera's Mini browser, with 40% of all traffic headed to MySpace, Facebook, and similar sites. In the United States, that number jumps to 63%. WAP sites aren't so popular (gee, I wonder why), and have seen traffic decline as full HTML browsers become more readily available on mobile phones.
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CIO: A Lot To Live Up To
Especially if it stands for "Chief Innovation Officer," which is what Citi has in mind for the acronym. Is it a corporate turning point or management hocus-pocus?
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Data Deduplication: Did You Say 20% Or 20 Times?
Single-instance storage is one of those concepts that is devilishly simple on its face, but intensely complex to implement correctly. That leads to different implementations -- and that leads to very different performance claims.
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Old Media Looks To A Radio Guru
Right now, among the beleaguered employees of the Tribune Co., the prevalent question (besides "Will I still have a job tomorrow?") is, "Who the hell does Lee Abrams think he is?"
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When Is A Data Warehouse Not A Data Warehouse?
Answer: When it's a database-less appliance. Unlike some competing products, Dataupia's data warehouse appliance doesn't have its own database management system. Instead, Dataupia's appliance, called Satori Server, performs analysis on data stored in existing databases.
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EMC Foggy About Cloud Computing
Joe Tucci's keynote fails to articulate a vision for EMC and the winds of change.
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EMC's Own Not-So-Little World
After last night's party, which featured the Goo Goo Dolls, EMC World is in full swing. The morning keynotes said about what you'd expect them to say, talking about the huge growth in stored data and all the value that can be gotten from that data. Then, of course, there was a lot of talk about new products. And while I guess I shouldn't have been surprised, I was disappointed to hear almost nothing about interoperability or standards.
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Atempo Adds Mac, Linux Support to Live Backup
Do you rely on your road warriors to backup their laptops? Is that working out for you or are you just blaming the victim when they're machines are lost, stolen or just break down after being sent through the airport X-ray machine one time too many? Once you accept the fact that users, especially Sr. executives won't take any action at all to backup their data on a regular basis you'll start looking for an automated solution. Atempo's Live Backup has been that automated solution for Windows for years. With Version 3.2 Atempo is expanding client support to the fast growing Mac and Linux platforms.
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Standalone SRM
In a recent briefing with a Storage Resource Management Software manufacturer I heard the quote that I have now heard 1,001 times; "Excel is the No. 1 Storage Resource Management software." People are using Excel to do SRM work more often than specific SRM tools. They are manually inputting storage capacity, storage used, and other storage information into Excel spreadsheets.
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Man Answers Cell Phone On Plane, Refuses To Get Off, Raises Ethical Questions
It was a life and death decision. An Austin man forgot to turn off his phone before a flight. As the plane he was on approached Dallas, it rang. He answered it. His father's heart had stopped and medical professionals were seeking end-of-life options. With his father's life literally in his hands, he refused to get off the phone when approached by Southwest Airlines staff -- despite that it's not permitted. What should he have done?
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MicroHoo2: This Time It's Sensical?
Microsoft is reconsidering a deal with Yahoo. Microsoft's last plan was to buy Yahoo outright, which would have led to an opportunity-consuming mess as redundant products and services were trimmed. This time it's looking for a limited partnership -- but what do they have in mind?
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Eight Things Microsoft Can And Should Do To Be More 'Open'
Microsoft as of late has been championing what it says is the cause of openness. But there's much, much more Microsoft needs to do to win over skeptics hardened by years of take-no-prisoners competition and one antitrust investigation after another.
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Afghan Hijacker Gets Job At Heathrow Airport
When the authorities stopped him while he was driving around Terminal 5 (the new one) at Heathrow Airport, they thought he was an unlicensed cab driver. Turns out he is a convicted hijacker working as a cleaner at the airport. There's more ...
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Honest Public Licensing: Q&A With Fabrizio Capobianco
The other week, I wrote about the ASP loophole in open source, in which I took the stance that the loophole wasn't as egregious as it might seem. Not everyone agrees, of course, and some have decided to take pre-emptive action by either moving to the AGPLv3 (a variant of GPLv3 that addresses software as a service) or drafting entirely new licensing altogether. Among those doing the latter: Fabrizio Capobianco of Funambol, with his Honest Public License. To get a better idea of what it's all about, I asked him a few questions.
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Google Surpasses Yahoo In The U.S. Take That, Microsoft!
Despite the ongoing drama between Microsoft and Yahoo during the month of April, the number of people visiting Google hit the 141 million mark. This put it ahead of Yahoo for the first time ever as the most-visited Web site in the United States.
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The Weekly Watch On Content Management
Some of the nuggets rising to the top this week include the continual shift to social computing, international customer wins, enterprise search, and a CEO announcement.
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Analyst: Don't Buy iPhone 2.0
It's hard to argue with some of the advice given by Rob Enderle, principal analyst with Enderle Group, about iPhone 2.0. In short, he says, "Wait a little while before running out to get one." Thanks, Rob, but would anyone make a similar comment about any other phone? I doubt it.
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Microsoft's Latest Yahoo Gambit: Why This, Why Now?
Make no mistake, Microsoft's newest grab for a piece of Yahoo is all about Google, and little else. And it may be a coincidence, but its announcement seems perfectly timed with Microsoft's annual ad conference, advance08, this week.
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Video: Yahoo Tells All About Mobile Development
Roaming the show floor at Web 2.0 Expo recently, I was surprised to hear that Yahoo has a story to tell developers every bit as good as Google's. That's the message that came through loud and clear -- and with a British accent -- in my video conversation with Sophie Major, international program manager for the Yahoo Developer Network.
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Off To EMC World
I'm joining several editors at EMC World, the storage giant's annual user conference, to get interviews with executives and find out what EMC has in store for the future.
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Chipotle Uses Social Media To Combat Hepatitis Scare
When my neighborhood Chipotle restaurant, where my wife and I had been eating every week for years, was linked to a hepatitis outbreak, the company turned to social networks as a part of a campaign to rehabilitate its reputation. I ended up respecting the fast-food chain for its conscientious business practices and innovative use of social media for marketing and public relations. But, unfortunately, that didn't make me want to return to Chipotle.
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Grid Vendors Shut Down Whole Nodes To Be Really Green
As I talk to vendors about storage solutions for non-OLTP applications, from backup and archiving to supporting massive, object-based Web applications like photo sharing, I've been seeing more solutions based on the RAIN (Redundant Array of Independent Nodes) architecture.
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Stereo Bluetooth Would Be Awesome If It Didn't Stink
The idea of stereo Bluetooth -- streaming your tunes from your phone to a headset sans wires -- is highly appealing. But it still needs a lot of work.
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The XO Gets XP
It's official: The One Laptop Per Child's XO notebook is going to ship with both Windows XP and its own custom Linux distribution. Mixed feelings abound, mine included.
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Hotel Doorman More Reliable Than Google Maps Mobile
As I was preparing to leave Chicago today, I needed to find the nearest subway stop to my hotel. I fired up Google Maps Mobile on my phone and attempted to find one. Let's just say that the charming locals working the doors of Chicago's finest hotels outperformed Google Maps.
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Yahoo's Letter To Carl Icahn: Full Text
In response to Carl Icahn's pointed letter Thursday calling Yahoo's board "irresponsible" for not accepting Microsoft's merger offer, Yahoo chairman Roy Bostock fired off a missive of his own to Icahn. Bostock says Icahn holds a "significant misunderstanding" of the merger talks. Here's the full text of Bostock's letter.
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One-On-One With The Founders Of FriendFeed
The four co-founders of FriendFeed have the best resumés on the Internet. They were the original engineers who developed Gmail and Google Maps, the applications that launched the whole Web 2.0 craze (yes, it's all their fault). Now they're starting over with a Web application called FriendFeed, designed to let users aggregate all their social networking activity -- their blogs, Flickr accounts, del.icio.us bookmarks, Twitter chitchat, the whole enchilada -- onto a single, at-a-glance page.
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DRM 'Problem' Shows Broadcast Flag's Stupidity
Thanks to the paranoia of moviemakers and broadcasters, American televisions are encumbered with a technology called the broadcast flag. A signal sent by the broadcaster can tell a recording device such as a DVR that the program being shown cannot be recorded at all, or can only be kept for a limited time.
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Verizon: LiMo Linux Is More Open Than Android
Earlier this week, Verizon Wireless joined the LiMo Foundation as a core member and took a seat on the organization's board of directors. It said it will use the LiMo Linux Platform as its preferred Linux OS in future devices, and implied that Google is too controlling over Android.
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EBay Feedback Cutoff Kicking In, Sellers Angry
When eBay announced back in January that it was pulling the plug on its longtime policy of letting sellers leave negative feedback on buyers, those self-same sellers were royally peeved. Now that the policy is set to go into effect, on Monday, May 19, the ire of eBay sellers shows no sign of abating. Boy, are they p.o.'d. Here's what they're telling me.
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AIIM Recommending Retention Of More Mail: Another Reason To Stop Insourcing E-Mail Systems?
AIIM, the Association for Information and Image Management now also known as the Enterprise Content Management Association, says its research demonstrates the increasing degree to which important business documents (let's call them "needles") can get lost in the e-mail "haystack." They might be in there. They're just impossible to find. According to AIIM's press release on the matter, one of the culprits is an insufficient e-mail retention policy as the number of business-critical documents stored in e-mail systems rises. For $65-$75, AIIM will teach you how to manage the problem. But is this one more reason to....
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Optimizing Primary Storage
Data deduplication has done much to optimize disk backup storage, but can those same efforts be successful in primary storage? Primary storage is, of course, different than secondary storage. Any latency can cause problems with applications and users. Thin provisioning, which I wrote about last week, can help a great deal, but once the data is actually written, the space is allocated. How can you make primary storage take up less space?
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RIM Makes The Touch-Screen, iPhone-Killing 'Thunder' A Reality
Today, The Wall Street Journal confirmed rumors that RIM will be releasing a touch-screen enabled device to compete head-to-head with Apple's iPhone. It will be called the Thunder, and will be sold exclusively through Verizon Wireless and Vodafone.
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What’s So Bad About An Air Force Botnet?
Air Force Col. Charles W. Williamson III proposes the armed service branch ready and deploy a massive global botnet capable of digitally choking our adversaries. Some don't like the idea. I'm wondering why this botnet hasn't been built yet.
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Alltel Follows AT&T And Verizon, Chooses LTE For 4G
Long Term Evolution has evolved into the wireless networking technology of choice for the future. The 3GPP and 3GPP2 standards bodies haven't even finalized what LTE is, but now AT&T, Verizon Wireless , and Alltel have picked it as their fourth-generation wireless network technology. This convergence toward a common platform will be extremely beneficial down the road for everyone involved, especially users.
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Hats Off For Fedora 9
With the arrival of Fedora 9, I gave it three places of honor in my testing lab: a standalone PC, the dual-boot partition on my notebook, and a VirtualBox VM. It's run like a champ on all three. Fedora's actually become more appealing to me with each successive revision -- and the more I think about it, the most crucial of those reasons aren't about things as interchangeable or subjective as look-and-feel.
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JS-Kit Provides An Instant Community Platform - Just Add People
JS-Kit provides a set of software tools and services to allow Web site publishers to add comments, ratings, and other community technology to sites, just by copying a couple of lines of JavaScript into the site's HTML templates. JS-Kit is potentially a good solution for companies of any size that need a cheap and easy way to add community features, without getting involved in a hairy IT project. JS-Kit can be deployed by anybody who knows HTML and can modify a site's pages. It doesn't require IT departments to get involved -- which is, of course, a great strength and also potentially a big problem for potential JS-Kit customers.
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CBS Buying CNET; So Does Old Media Understand The Web? (No)
I suppose it makes perfect sense that the network perceived as the favorite of old folks that advertisers no longer covet would attempt to leapfrog its competition by making a big splash in online. However, in moving to acquire CNET Networks for $1.8 billion, just what exactly is CBS getting? A new-age media company at the cutting edge, or a leader of the Web 1.0 world which lately has been slow to adapt?
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Grand Theft Auto IV Fans Under Assault
Identity thieves, creative scourge that they are, are always looking for the most recent trend, craze, news event, or blockbuster hit to pin their phishing and social engineering scams on the unwitting. Now they're targeting the runaway hit Grand Theft Auto IV.
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IBM Says FalconStor SIR Didn't Cut The Mustard
In what seems to me to be kicking a perfectly good supplier when it's down, Beth Pariseau at SearchDataBackup.com reports that IBM stated that FalconStor's SIR deduplication add-on for their virtual tape library didn't make it through the validation process. Given the fact that IBM recently bought Diligent Technologies for its ProtecTIER deduping VTL software, it's no surprise that someone at IBM wasn't convinced that Single Instance Repository, or SIR, was the best thing since sliced bread.
VMware Site Recovery Manager Is A Game Changer
VMware announced this week that its Site Recovery Manager would be available to real users like you, dear reader, next month. Click here for our crack InformationWeek news department report on the announcement. From where I sit, Site Recovery Manager could be as big a game-changer for SME disaster recovery planning as server virtualization itself.
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Now That Google Has Won...
The collapse of Microsoft's bid to acquire Yahoo has prompted Google watchers to ponder whether Google's dominance of search advertising poses any dangers for the Internet.
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Yes, It’s Time To Destroy Your E-Mail Servers. What App Is Next?
If running your car on corn oil were possible, the car got 100 miles per gallon on corn oil, and corn oil was 25 cents per gallon, plentiful, and the use of corn oil meant you never had to take the engine in for a tune-up, what sort of rationale would you use to fool yourself that you still needed a fossil fuel-powered car? It's the same rationale that many businesses are using today to justify....
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Filling In The Gaps With Open Source
I turn to open source software for a lot of things -- not just the fact that it's almost inevitably free for personal or internal business use, but that it's often written by and for people who have very specific problems that need solving. They're little irritations, problems that typically don't get attention from commercial software makers, and which can be recycled into other solutions by dint of being open source. Here's a local example.
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Apple iPhone Vs. BlackBerry Curve
It's time to upgrade my crummy old refurbished Moto cell phone to a snappy smartphone. (Yes, I will recycle the relic.) I've narrowed down my choices, and I'm either going to hold out for a next-gen iPhone, or go for the BlackBerry Curve.
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Google Futzes With Faces In Street View
No, your vision isn't failing you. Google is testing new software that blurs the faces of people captured by its Street View cameras. The goal is to appease privacy advocates. Manhattanites will have their privacy restored first.
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Data Analytics Startup Lands MySpace As Early Adopter
Three-year-old Aster Data Systems is about to launch its flagship product, an analytics database that scales to hundreds of microprocessors. The Silicon Valley startup has an impressive customer, MySpace, that's apparently already using its new system.
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Saving Sun
The current poll on InformationWeek's sister site Byte and Switch, "Sun Down," paints a very bleak outlook for Sun storage. The final question, "Do you think they should exit the storage hardware business?" has a surprising 57% say that it should. Can Sun save itself? Probably not, but I can ...
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AT&T Wins Tri-State Area 3G Wireless Data Speed Showdown
Someone out there has a lot more patience than I do. A Computerworld editor took his laptop out and about in Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York and collected 500 data points with a ThinkPad X300 and wireless data cards from AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon. AT&T's HSDPA network proved the fastest.
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Microsoft Boasts About Future Smartphone Market Share, Is Clearly Crazy
Whoa. Microsoft is getting a little bit ahead of itself here. It has yet to contend with the entrance of Android in the mobile market, but it has declared that it will attain some 40% of the global smartphone market in just four years. Microsoft, dare I ask what you've been smoking?
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Why Software Stinks
Earlier this decade, many universities started adding cybersecurity as part of a well-rounded programming curriculum. Apparently, universities in the U.K. didn't get the memo.
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Big Web Players Move To Keep Reins On Users
In the last few weeks several big Web and social networking players have released versions of "open" platforms that allow users to port their data and their connections between sites and between devices. Does this mark a major turning point for the advent of Web 2.0?
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CIO To CEO: It Can Happen
How many CIOs make it to CEO? Frankly, you can count them on one hand. But if that's what you want from your career, there's hope: Here's one who made it.
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EarthLink Gives Up On Wi-Fi In Philly, Pulls Plug
Citing a failure to find a buyer for the troubled city-wide Wi-Fi network, EarthLink unlinks Philly.
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Salesforce.com And Workday Get Chummy
There's been a good amount of buzz in recent months about whether Salesforce.com is prepping itself for a marriage of some sort. What about Salesforce.com and Workday? The two could make one heck of a SaaS powerhouse.
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SAP Isn't As Easy As ABC
Having a hard time finding professionals to staff your SAP software rollouts? That's apparently the case for many organizations implementing NetWeaver, ERP 6.0, and other SAP technologies, as well as the third-party companies assisting in the deployments.
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Look For Data Center Consolidation From HP-EDS
Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark Hurd says the company will "run the same playbook" with EDS that it's using to make HP more profitable. OK, time to torture the sports metaphor: look for Hurd to call Data Center Consolidation left and right, with CIO Randy Mott as the lineman knocking over anyone who gets in the way.
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A Black Eye For Debian
News of a massive security hole in the Debian distribution of Linux has dropped jaws everywhere, mine included. It's the sort of thing that speaks very badly indeed for the way Debian does code review -- exactly what's required urgently for open source to work well.
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Report: Mobile Phones More Important Than Wallets
A poll of 2,367 people indicates that more than one-third would choose to bring their mobile phone with them rather than their wallet, laptop, or other items if they had to choose. Which would you bring?
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How Will Microsoft Handle Ultra-Low-Cost PCs?
I understand why Microsoft wants the world to move to en masse to Vista with all deliberate speed, and they are all good business reasons. The problem is that the world isn't cooperating. The latest speed bump to Vista's world coronation is the rise of the ultra-low-cost PCs.
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The Enterprise Future Of Semantic Search
Powerset launched a tool to search Wikipedia and open source database Freebase Monday, but the technology that powers the search startup could wind up at home in a corporate setting.
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Closing The Open Source ASP Loophole
What is to be done about companies who use open source software to create something derived from open source, but provide it as a Web service and don't contribute their changes back to the community? Aren't they violating the spirit, if not the letter, of the open source agreement? I don't think so, for a variety of reasons.
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Google Picks Top 50 Android Developers. Are You One Of Them?
Remember the Android Developer Challenge? Google offered up some prize money to those who submit the best applications for the Android platform. Today, Google said it has whittled the 1,788 entries it received down to the top 50. Each of them earned a $25,000 initial prize, but just what makes a good Android application?
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Google Friend Connect Only Half Open
You gotta give Google props for its openness, in terms of its executives speaking in plain English and not treating a launch as an excuse to engage in robotic sloganeering. (Remember "We'll release it when our customers tell us it's ready"?) On the other hand, the problem with Google's new Friend Connect is that it's nowhere near as open as competitive offerings from Facebook and MySpace. Hey, Google, open means open. What part don't you understand?
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Baynote Offering Brings Business Value To Social Search
The Long Tail, the now-famous reference to targeting customers that buy the hard-to-find or nonhit items, got a little shorter with the release of Baynote's Merchandizing and Editorial Console.
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Apple Makes It Official: No More iPhones Online
Yesterday, reports were surfacing that the iPhone had been completely sold out at the U.S. and U.K. online Apple stores. Apple confirmed the reports. No more iPhone for you.
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Google Goes To The Social With Friend Connect
Interested in adding social network applications such as user registration, friend invitation, and message posting to your site, but aren't the code guru you should be? Google's Friend Connect lets you set it all up, programming skills not required.
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MindTouch's Momentum Shows The Power Of Mashups
There's no question that mashups are hot right now. In fact, it's a market that Forrester Research's Oliver Young says could be worth nearly $700 million by 2013. Vendors in every sector are rushing to deliver these so-called "situational applications" to sophisticated business users everywhere in the hopes of improving collaboration and spiking productivity.
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RIM Sets Stage For Smartphone Smackdown With Apple
Research In Motion officially made the BlackBerry 9000 -- aka the "Bold" -- public today after months of it appearing on Internet rumor sites. As expected, 3G is on board, and in three flavors, making it the first BlackBerry that can roam from the U.S. to Japan and South Korea. It's a smartphone first, but its media capabilities aren't lacking, either.
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The Very Beta OpenOffice.Org 3
The first public-consumption beta of OpenOffice.org 3.0 has arrived, and while I'm not trusting any production work to it yet I'm still giving it a whirl. There's a whole catalog of new and improved features, but from the outside it still looks and works like the same program. That may be the best feature right there.
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Hacker Publishes Personal Data Of Six Million Onto Internet
The hacker took the data from several government-run Web sites, then displayed the data for all to see.
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U.S. Apple Stores Selling Out Of iPhone
First the iPhone sold out in the U.K. online Apple stores. Now it has sold out in the U.S. Customers attempting to order one are met with a "Currently Unavailable" message. This includes both the 8-GB and 16-GB models. 3G iPhone around the corner?
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Amtrak's Choice: Wi-Fi Or Die
Train travel, glamorized by film noir, is in vogue once again, thanks to soaring oil prices and the dismal state of air travel. But attractive prices alone won't fill those railcars with business passengers.
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Complete Virtualization
As the economy slows down and budgets tighten up, once again IT professionals are being asked to do more with less (does anyone remember when you were allowed to do less with more?). How can you tighten up your storage processes one more time? The first technology that I would count on to help is virtualization. For virtualization to truly pay off it must be more than just server virtualization.
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Girl Gets Stolen Mac Back With 'Back To My Mac'
I've spent this weekend -- yes, the life of a tech journalist is that exciting -- not Twittering but rather mulling the significance of the incident involving the White Plains, N.Y., girl who led the police to recover her stolen Mac after she took a picture of the thieves using the laptop's "Back to My Mac" feature.
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Google CEO Schmidt Asks: 'What Recession?'
The resilience of the U.S. economy in the face of recent recession worries is a wonderful thing to behold. If you're like me, you've resigned yourself to a kind of schizoid view of the current business cycle. Greatly simplified, it boils down to: average people, very worried; businesses, not so much. Or, as Google CEO Eric Schmidt put it in a recent interview: "What recession?"
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Virtualization For Disaster Recovery - SunGard Gets It
It should be clear to most of us by now that server virtualization changes the disaster recovery game dramatically. Rather than having to maintain a server at your DR site for each server in your production environment, you can replicate physical, and/or virtual, servers from your production site to virtual servers at your DR site, reducing the cost of protecting production systems or increasing the number of servers you can protect.
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Shameless Self-Promotion
Astute readers may have noticed many of my recent blog posts have touched on VM management. I've been doing research for InformationWeek Reports, investigating the state of vendor offerings, real-world experiences, and new solutions to handle VM sprawl.
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Google + Yahoo = GooHoo
Google co-founder Sergey Brin recently said, "We have been talking to Yahoo and we are very excited to be working with them." The goal? Tie the two companies into an advertising powerhouse, which I have decided to call GooHoo.
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The Next Billion: Mobile Technology Saves Lives In Sub-Saharan Africa
Who says the profit motive and Third World development can't work together? Wireless infrastructure giant Ericsson is trying to prove otherwise in remote areas of Sub-Saharan Africa.
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Flu Strikes JavaOne Attendees, Health Department Says
A flu virus was picked up by at least a few attendees to the JavaOne Conference at the Moscone Center, the San Francisco Health Department has warned. It didn't say how many of the 15,000 attendees were affected, but as I read this in the San Francisco Chronicle, I'm feeling poorly [look at his pallor] myself.
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Are Worms Always Bad?
Self-replicating programs, which spread unchecked across the Internet, are always bad. Except when they're good. At least that's the theory behind U.S Patent number 7,296,923, awarded to Symantec for "Using a benevolent worm to assess and correct computer security vulnerabilities."
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Skype's GPL Follies
Another legal challenge to the GPL has ended, at least for the time being. This time it's courtesy of Skype, in German court, with the kind of legal maneuvers that make you wonder what they were thinking -- although they do conveniently illustrate the nature of some of the knee-jerk arguments against the GPL (and FOSS, too).
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No Hurry For Windows Vista And XP Service Packs
After finding a few last-minute problems with Vista Service Pack 1 and XP Service Pack 3, Microsoft delayed deployment on both of them. Now they're both back and ready for download, either manually or through Windows Update.
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AT&T Can't Make Up Its Mind About Free Wi-Fi For iPhone
This is bordering on ridiculous. Last week, iPhone users (myself included) noticed that they could get free access to Wi-Fi service from AT&T at Starbucks locations. Later in the week, AT&T yanked the service. Early this week, it put the service back up, complete with information on the AT&T Web site. Today, any references to free Wi-Fi for iPhones is once again gone. What gives, AT&T?
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One Small Step For Socialcast, One Giant Leap For Enterprise Social Networking
The Jet Propulsion Lab will begin pilot testing startup Socialcast's social networking software for potential use by NASA. The space agency is interested in using Socialcast for knowledge transfer as Apollo-era employees retire.
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When Are Mobile Broadband Prices Going To Drop?
I pay $60 per month for my wireless broadband card with Verizon Wireless. Sprint and AT&T charge similar rates. Are the carriers keeping prices high to deter people from signing up, or is $60 for 5 GB of wireless data the fair market price?
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Data Moveage: How To Move Data And Live To Tell About It
In a previous entry I wrote about the importance of moving data from primary storage to another platform. The roadblock is how to move that data from expensive storage to secondary storage. The traditional approach of deploying an agent on every server that monitors all the files and then moves files that haven't been accessed to a lower class of storage hasn't worked well in the enterprise. There are a variety of reasons, but most of the issues are the deployment and management of that many agents, plus the challenge of leaving stub files (files that point to where the actual file was moved) and managing those files.
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3 Mistakes Customers Make With Their Content
Recently I've been pretty hard on content management vendors by pointing out some of the mistakes that can drive them out of business. While vendor elitism with customers can be a big problem, I can't let content management clients completely off the hook. There are a few mistakes that I've seen over and over in every vertical.
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Startup Camp: The Social Network Slapshot
I am not a fan of hockey. I make no apologies for that, but I do love seeing hockey live. No other sport beats it. So when I sat down with Josh Schachter, the founder of startup HockeyBarn.com, I expected to have to make myself concentrate really hard to appear interested as he rattled off things like shots on goal and the mystical notion of icing. Instead, this passionate young entrepreneur wowed me with a very cool social media idea.
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BlackBerry 9000 Video Review Surfaces
The web site CrackBerry, which bought the BlackBerry 9000 for over $800 on eBay, has filmed its own video review of the next-generation hardware from RIM. In this video, CrackBerry performs a walk through of the revamped user interface. Looks fantastic.
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Firefox Provides Increased Security Over Internet Explorer? Not So Much.
It's been reported that the Firefox Web browser has been distributing a Trojan horse application with the Vietnamese language pack. No one is sure how many users may have unwittingly downloaded the malware.
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How To Kill Array Vendor Lock-In? An iSCSI Replication RFC
A few years ago it was easy to divide IT organizations into haves and have nots. The haves used Fibre Channel SANs and array replication to dedicated disaster recovery sites over high bandwidth dedicated links or dark fiber. The have-nots used SCSI DAS (Direct Attached Storage) on their servers and, if they did real time replication at all, used server-based replication solutions like Double-Take or CA's WANsync.
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Google Offers Mobile Enterprise Protection Tools
In case you hadn't heard, mobile employees are a threat to your business. A lost smartphone, or a laptop that connects to a rogue network rather than a legitimate one, can open your company to all sorts of risks. To help match some of the threats and one-up VPNs, Google used its Postini acquisition to create Web Security for Enterprise.
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Is Google Facing A Brain Drain?
Google may be denying that there's a brain drain going on, as the BBC reports, but that doesn't mean it's not happening.
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Asus Eee Fans Down Under Get One-Upped By Microsoft
Good news: Asus is about to unveil its next generation of Eee PC mininotebooks in both Windows XP and Linux editions, and they look downright snazzy. Bad news for folks down under: The Linux version of the new Eee is more expensive in Australia. What!?
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Students Sound Off About Java
What do future generations think about the state of Java and its relevance to their research? The answer may surprise you, and Sun.
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Where Is Europe’s Google?
Or Microsoft or Cisco or VMware or...? A Swiss technologist's book says a culture that values risk-taking is Europe's missing ingredient.
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iPhone Sells Out At O2, 3G iPhone Spy Shots Emerge
U.K. network operator O2 has sold out of its supply of 8-GB and 16-GB iPhones. It has no plans to restock either model, suggesting that the 3G iPhone will soon be available. Also, purported spy shots of the 3G iPhone have emerged from Taiwan, where it is being manufactured. There are some subtle changes compared with the current model.
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A Sign Of The Times: E-Signatures
Three years after signing its first electronic "John Hancock," DocuSign has now inked more than 9 million digital signatures. As companies look for ways to introduce eco-friendly business processes, more are signing, virtually, on the dotted line.
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Workday Laughs Its SaaS Off In Viral Videos
Viral marketing is moving into areas you'd never have thought. Take software-as-a-service, where upstart Workday, a company formed in 2005 by PeopleSoft founder and ex-CEO Dave Duffield, is posting up on YouTube a series of short videos -- OK, they're commercials -- which poke virtual fingers in the eyes of industry powerhouse SAP.
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NFS Saved By VMware?
Will NFS become the predominant storage deployment method for VMware implementations?
NFS didn't need to be saved, but because of VMware its use has been broadened beyond the traditional Unix implementations. Instead of creating a LUN for each VMware Virtual Disk (VMDK), with NFS you manage multiple VMDK files on a single NFS Volume. This makes sense because VMDK's are files, not actual disks.
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xVM 1.6 - Lean, Free, Runs On Everything
Want to try out desktop virtualization? Take a look at Sun's latest open source VirtualBox -- I bet it has a binary with your name on it.
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Microsoft Desperate To Curb Zune Demand
Microsoft must be having a problem manufacturing Zunes, and needs to slow down sales. That's the only conclusion I can draw from the news that Microsoft has pledged to work with NBC to build a copyright cop into the Zune in return for selling NBC's popular TV shows through the Zune store.
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Internet Explorer Zero-Day Treasure Hunt
Somewhere on Israeli security researcher Aviv Raff's Web site is proof-of-concept code for a zero-day exploit that affects Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser.
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The Most Critical Factor To Attaining Organizational Security: You
According to a study just released by consulting firm Frost & Sullivan, you -- that's right: you -- may be the most important factor in the security of your organization.
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How Recession Helped Get A Sprint-Clearwire Deal Made
It's a truism that smart money finds places to invest during a downturn. Today's Sprint-Clearwire deal is a perfect illustration.
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Google's Hedge Against Verizon
With its $500 million investment in the $12 billion Sprint-Clearwire partnership, Google buys itself a hedge against the possibility that the open access rules it fought to link to the C Block of the 700-MHz spectrum might be flouted.
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Video: Can WebEx Banish The Boring Phone Meeting?
Corporate calling. Corporate who? Long, boring, time-wasting, day-deadening, you can't get out of it, corporate online Web and phone meeting, that's who. (This is my Internet Age version of a knock, knock joke, and just about as unfunny.) But if all-hands-on-deck meetings are like death and taxes -- i.e., unavoidable -- at least WebEx is working to energize them so that they'll be more useful. Call it collaboration on Web steroids.
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Savvy CIOs Market Their Successes
If you want your IT group to be thought of as a center of innovation for your organization, you've got to get the attention of business management. Internal marketing can help.
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Betting Billions On WiMax
An unusual alliance of tech and media companies is betting billions of dollars on the as-yet-unproved technology known as WiMax. Will they finally usher in the wireless Web? Or is this fated to be another one of those cumbersome tech alliances that go down in flames with technology that doesn't work?
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3G iPhone All But Confirmed. Launch Imminent?
The 3G iPhone reports are off the charts. We still have over four weeks until Jobsnote at WWDC, but everyone and their mother believes the 3G iPhone is going to hit store shelves in the very near future. Here's the latest scuttlebutt.
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Alfresco's Social Computing Slant Shows ECM's Evolution
I had an interesting discussion with John Newton, the co-founder of Alfresco, recently. I'm a little star-struck by this guy. It's hard to get much higher on the food chain when you look at Newton's credentials. Not only did he co-found Documentum, he's also less than five years into the launch of Alfresco, arguably one of the biggest disrupters to appear on the enterprise software radar in years.
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On MySQL's About-Face: It's About Expectations
The official word from Kaj Arnö of MySQL / Sun is out: Portions of MySQL that were originally being considered as closed-source components will now be open source as well. Good news, bad news, or none of the above? I take the third view. The real issue is, again, not open vs. closed code, but how you engage the open source community -- how you clue them in to what kind of company you are.
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Does Your Top Management 'Get' IT?
It seems like an old -- and answered, mostly in the affirmative -- question. But according to an upcoming InformationWeek survey, fewer top execs get IT these days, not more.
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Making The Most Of Limited Space, Time, And Money
Ken Abendshien is CIO of Midwest Health Systems Data Center, a tech support organization that provides outsourced data center services to 27 small county hospitals and long-term care facilities in Kansas, and two in Nebraska. Some of those sites are really tiny -- treating one or two patients a day. And with those hospitals having even tinier IT budgets, Abendshien needs to stretch his resources very carefully.
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Google's Deep Thoughts On Clearwire
Since it tossed $500 million into Clearwire, a new mobile WiMax company, Google decided it was due a few words. In a post on the Official Google Blog, you'll see such words as: "choice", "freedom", "open", "excited", "embrace", and -- my favorite -- "competitively-neutral network management". Uh. Say what?
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Reporter's Notebook: Sapphire Sets Stage For A Different Kind Of SAP
When Harley-Davidson CIO Jim Haney drove a Harley onstage during Leo Apotheker's keynote address at Sapphire on Tuesday, there were more than a few gasps from the audience. This is the type of stunt typical of a California tech company, not the stoic German we know as SAP. But I saw it as just one example of SAP trying to reinvent itself, including the upcoming change in CEO leadership.
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'Clearwire' Rises From The Ashes Of Previous Failed WiMax JV
It's almost poetic. Like a phoenix reincarnated from the ashes of its former self, Sprint and Clearwire have formed a new joint venture to roll out mobile WiMax to the masses. And this time its more than just words. The companies are teaming up with a handful of cable operators, as well as Intel and Google (man, Google is just everywhere these days), to forge a $14.22 billion entity known as Clearwire.
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Data Keepage
Your servers are probably bloated with data that is years old and yet despite your retention policy, if you have one, you keep it all. The relatively inexpensive price of disk capacity has made it easier to keep everything on primary disk storage. When you think of primary storage, you think of active data, databases, current documents, e-mail, etc. -- but because of the affordability of storage, it basically also has become the archive. Data is kept on disk, "just in case." It seems easier to simply add more disk space to primary storage than to force users to manage it; as a result, "Data Keepage" begins.
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Security Researchers Find Trove of Stolen Data
A server used as a "drop site" for stolen and highly sensitive information has been uncovered by security researchers.
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Damage Prevention Via Smartphone
Vettro has come out with an application for mobile devices that helps utility crews and excavators avoid trouble in the risky business of working around buried cables and pipelines. GPS devices can save money and lives in this sometimes dangerous occupation.
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Manhole Covers: Gateways To Terrorism
Fear mole-men with bombs. That, more or less, is the message from Manhole Barrier Security Systems, which on Monday warned that cities need to do more to protect against assaults on infrastructure launched by underground attackers.
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Search Gmail More Effectively
One of my favorite features of Gmail is how easy it is to search through your e-mails to find what you want/need. Sometimes, though, you need to be really specific. Google has some search tips that let you quickly narrow your search down to just a handful of results.
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Stimulus Checks And Storage
With stimulus checks on the way, the question I'm sure you're asking is how you can use yours to help out the storage industry. You are, aren't you?
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T-Mobile Launches 3G Network, But No New 3G Phones
Finally! T-Mobile officially made it official. Though users reported that the network was up and running late last week, T-Mobile announced the launch of its 3G services in NYC yesterday. Too bad it doesn't have any killer 3G phones to use on it.
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The 'Right' Linux
Any talk of Linux brings with it talk of what it will take to get Linux on the desktop in big numbers. Much of the talk in this vein revolves around distribution X versus desktop Y, or something of that nature. The real issue, though, may not be a particular distribution or package model, but the mind-set of the creators.
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Cursive Recognition Is Cure For Crappy iPhone Keyboard
It hit me yesterday, when I was reading fellow blogger Eric Zeman's complaint about the difficulties he's had typing accurately on the iPhone's soft keyboard. That's a problem I've kvetched about constantly, most recently in "5 Areas Where Apple's iPhone Falls Short." But I think I've figured out the solution, and, surprisingly, it's not a hard keypad a la my beloved BlackBerry.
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HTC Shows Off Its Latest Jewel, The Diamond
Today in London, HTC chiseled out its latest Windows Mobile smartphone, the Diamond. This stylish and powerful touch-screen device is super thin, carries HSPA, and a custom YouTube application for the video hungry. It will be available on most carriers later this year.
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Startup Camp: Get Your Game On
It just so happens that more startups fail than succeed. It just so happens that startups have more ideas before breakfast than most of us have in our lifetime; it's just that sometimes they don't wake up until lunch. It just so happens that startup founders can be a little eccentric (and passionate and blindly brilliant and single-minded and stubborn).
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Microsoft's Plan B: The Mobile Web
Now that Steve Ballmer has taken his ball and gone home, three things have become clear about the failed Microsoft bid for Yahoo: 1) This deal is not dead yet; 2) Yahoo's future as an independent company is at any rate limited; and 3) Microsoft is playing in the wrong arena.
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Why Is It So Hard To Be Found?
Across various industries, the one thing I always hear customers say is "How can I make sure I'm found?" This applies to both internet searches and searches within the firewall. Everyone wants their content to be found, read, appreciated and remembered.
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Data Deduplication Will Not Become A Feature
As data deduplication matured last year, the constant question I was asked by industry analysts was "Isn't this just a feature?" The question implied that anyone that was specifically in the data deduplication space was going to be erased by the larger manufacturers as they added deduplication to their offerings. It seemed logical, but hasn't occurred. The major manufacturers have struggled putting together viable strategies for data reduction and, to some extent, it's really not in their best interests to reduce the amount of storage required.
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Google Seeks Open Access Assurances From Verizon Wireless
Google has doubts that Verizon Wireless will honor the open access provisions that come with the freshly-won spectrum it nabbed in the FCC 700-MHz auction. In fact, it went so far as to file a petition with the FCC forcing Verizon to officially pledge that it will honor the conditions. Google, are you in third grade?
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Security Continues Its Drive Toward The Cloud
Everything from CRM software to word processors and spreadsheets is now delivered as services. It’s about time that more security vendors do the same.
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I Stink At Typing On The iPhone
I hate to admit it, but it is true. After 10 months (and untold thousands of messages), I still stink at composing text using the iPhone's software QWERTY keyboard. I make mistakes all the time, and have to edit and re-edit messages before sending them. Time to go back to a physical keyboard?
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Opening Up To Solaris
OpenSolaris, Sun's open-source version of its Solaris operating system, gets its official kickoff today at Sun's CommunityOne conference in San Francisco. And it's not Sun's attempt to knock Linux out of the box -- it's something a little subtler than that.
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Ballmer's Yahoo Deal: Mission Accomplished?
Perhaps it's inevitable that the most visible executive at Microsoft is the target of all kinds of vitriol and insult, regardless of whether it's deserved or not. As Bill Gates is winding down his involvement with the company, Steve Ballmer is taking his place as Chief Lightning Rod for Microsoft. And boy-oh-boy, this failed Yahoo deal has really brought out the Ballmer-busters.
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8 Trends In IT CIOs Can't Ignore
Accenture's chief scientist sees several IT trends emerging over the next 36 months that CIOs need to embrace. Hint: One leads to the CIO becoming the Chief Intelligence Officer. If you like the sound of that, read on.
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Deutsche Telekom Mulling Sprint Nextel Buy
Reports wafting over the Atlantic Ocean suggest that Deutsche Telekom -- parent company of T-Mobile USA -- is considering Sprint Nextel as a take-over target. And why not? Sprint's share price is below $10, and the euro continues to dominate the dollar. Sprint's spectrum alone is worth it. That would make T-Mobile + Sprint the largest wireless operator in the United States. But could it work without falling to pieces?
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Yang's Words To Yahoo Troops
Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang sent out an e-mail to the staff at Yahoo. In it, he says, "Now is the time for us to shine and show what we're made of." Yahoo has to do that, and a whole lot more.
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Reporter's Notebook: On The Eve Of SAP's Sapphire 2008
It's Sunday night in Orlando, and I'm getting ready to attend Sapphire 2008, SAP's annual user conference. Tomorrow I meet with co-CEO Henning Kagermann, and am curious to hear more about this cross-pollination idea he mentioned last week between the company's new SaaS offering and its traditional licensed software.
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Sun CEO Schwartz: Giving Something To Startups
Sun's CEO Jonathan Schwartz is a geek at heart. Maybe the ponytail gives it away, or maybe it's the jabs he takes at his handlers (the bomb-sniffing dogs roaming Startup Camp were interesting), or that he has one of the Internet's most popular blogs, but now he needs to grind his way through the discomfort of poor quarterly financial results and 2,500 layoffs. He faced the public challenge here at Startup Camp, by talking about what Sun is and hinting at some announcements for tomorrow.
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Startup Camp: Sun CEO Schwartz Hints At Amazon-Related ZFS Announcement
Here at Startup Camp in San Francisco today, during his keynote presentation, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz hinted at a major Sun-Amazon announcement that the two companies will be making tomorrow on the eve of the company's annual developer confab: JavaOne. What exactly that announcement will be was unclear, but Schwartz dropped several hints, one of which had to do with...
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Yahoo Shares Poised To Drop Monday As Microsoft Walks
Yahoo leaders Roy Bostock and Jerry Yang said they're relieved that Microsoft has taken its merger proposal off the table. Will they still feel that way when the markets open Monday and investors' attorneys start calling?
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5 (More) Areas Where Apple's iPhone Falls Short; Readers Weigh In
When I lambasted the iPhone in a recent post for its numerous shortcomings, Wolfe's Den readers responded in droves with comments. As is par for the course, most criticized me for my criticisms of the sainted Apple. (Hey, I own an iPhone now and am trying to get into the iPhone Developer Program, so how anti-Apple can I be?) However, many readers responded with their gripes about still-unaddressed iPhone failings. Here's their list.
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Is Live Mesh Dead Before Arrival?
Microsoft recently announced its latest attempt to be a playa in the Internet, called Windows Live Mesh. As former Microsoftie Joel Spolsky opined, Live Mesh is not the first time Microsoft has tried a master plan for connecting everything via the Internet. It's not clear how this effort will end any better for Microsoft than the last one.
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Just Another Earthshaking Revolution
Forrester Research analysts Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff call it The Groundswell. Nicholas Carr calls it The Big Switch. Tom Hayes calls it the Jump Point. Whatever it is, it's clearly going to involve major earthshaking.
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Want Your Web Site To Get More Traffic? Make A Better Mobile Version Of It
New research shows that a good mobile Web site will extend the reach of your standard Web site (and brand) by as much as 13%. Maybe this thing called the "mobile Web" could be useful after all.
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Is This A Trade Show Or A Rock Show?
So Neil Young is apparently going to perform at JavaOne next week, where he's expected to belt out his Keep on Rockin' in the Free World anthem. Hey, hey. My, my. Will the encore be Needle and the Damage Done?
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What Does RIM+SAP Really Mean?
We all know that RIM enables mobile access to e-mail and other enterprise applications on its BlackBerry devices. SAP delivers powerful enterprise software that has typically been tethered to the PC. Today, the two companies announced plans to craft mobile versions of SAP's software for BlackBerry devices. For existing SAP customers, this is a good deal. But will it bring in new customers?
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Plug Storage Leaks With Data Access And Leakage Tools
Your storage has holes and the data is leaking right out of it...
Lost tapes continue to capture headlines. Recently I meet with a client that had 300 GB of data worth $500K stolen. How did they know it was worth $500K? That's what they paid for it. The disk was encrypted and the network was pretty well locked down. So how did the master thief hack into the network and steal the data? Through the front door -- with a USB hard drive in his pocket.
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Is The Recession Good For SaaS?
I heard opposing voices at Interop about whether the bad economy will drive companies to software as a service.
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Add Your Own Sense Of Style To Google Docs
If you're a total control freak and want things to look exactly so, the newest feature in Google Docs is for you. You can now edit your own custom styles within Google Docs and dress your Docs up however you wish. Even if you have no sense of style.
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SCO On The Stand
There are times when the jokes just seem to tell themselves. Yesterday, during testimony for Novell's lawsuit against SCO to determine how much Novell was owed for its ownership of the Unix copyrights, none other than Darl McBride took the stand and said two things that will no doubt become fodder for .SIG files from here to eternity.
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Too Many Vendors Or Not Enough Innovation?
One of our contacts in the PR world sent over some thoughts after reading our continuing discussion about why content management companies fail. His remarks might not be terribly surprising for those of you that live and breathe content management, but they warrant a re-visit.
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CommVault Offers Tape eDiscovery Service Using Index Engines
While heavily regulated and leading-edge organizations use dedicated systems to store their archival data, if you asked most IT managers where their archives were they'd point at a shelf of old backup tapes or the logbook of tapes at Iron Mountain. Similarly, legal hold meant taking a group of tapes out of the rotation and putting them on the shelf. When someone actually wanted all the documents and e-mail messages related to "The Incident," some poor backup boy had to restore all those tapes and use some e-discovery tool to find the pertinent data items.
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BlueCat Proteus 2.5 IP Address Management
We've been covering BlueCat's fantastic management appliances for years, and its Proteus IP Address Management has always fared well in some of our product comparisons. At this year's Interop, BlueCat announced version 2.5.
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Be Careful With Whom You Chat
Security firm Akonix Systems is warning of a big increase in attacks that target instant messaging systems.
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Zude's Social Mix: The Greater Communicator
Zude is a clever company. It has managed to create a platform where you can build a more personalized social network environment whether you're a nontechnical user or a developer (see our video below). But now it is taking the platform further, perhaps even into the dangerous (but fun) waters of data portability.
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Interop: IronPort's S-Series Blocks Suspicious Content At The Web Page Component Level
Here at Interop 2008 in Las Vegas, IronPort (a division of Cisco) is showing off its latest security solutions -- the S650 and the S350 Web Security Appliances. The S-Series was a finalist in this year's Best of Interop competition. In the new security appliance, the company leverages its SenderBase anti-spam reputation management technology to determine what parts of a Web page (if any) to let through to users' browsers. In the video below, IronPort product manager Samantha Madrid tells me more about the S-Series.
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BlackBerry Clamshell, Called The Kickstart, Spotted
What the what? A clamshell smartphone from Research In Motion? That's what pictures spied on the Internet lead us to believe. Unlike the BlackBerry Pearl, this one is a bit of a clunker in the looks department. I truly hope this is a prototype design from our friends over the border.
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Google Adds Street View To Driving Directions
Like the drummer from Green Day, this is Tre(s) Cool. If you use Google Maps to get driving directions from Point A to Point B, you'll now be able to add Street Views to the directions to see a clearer picture of exactly where you're going.
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In Emergencies, People Turn To Web 2.0, Not Traditional News
When danger is at their door, people turn to social media sites, blogs, and instant messages, rather than the mainstream news media, for necessary information. Twitter and Google mashups in particular prove far more useful than traditional government channels, according to a report prepared at the University of Colorado. I learned that the hard way myself last year.
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Sun And Adobe, Both Opening Up
Two major announcements in the past day or so both caught my attention: the inclusion of an open source version of Java with Linux, and an effort on Adobe's part to open up the proprietary nature of Flash. Both are potentially huge, and they both cover about as much territory as they overlap.
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8 Dirty Secrets Of The Security Industry
An IBM security expert ripped the scab off the dirty little secrets of the security industry in a highly entertaining presentation Wednesday at Interop. Joshua Corman, principal security analyst at IBM Internet Security Systems, highlighted the gaping divide between what customers think they're buying (safety) versus what security vendors are most intent on selling (stuff that'll bring in the bucks). Here, in condensed form, is his list.
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'Greening' Primary Storage With Thin Provisioning
Welcome to the Storage Blog at InformationWeek. As I take over the reins from Terry Sweeney, who has moved on to be editor in chief at TechWeb's Internet Evolution site, the first order of business is a quick introduction. I am a veteran of the storage area from the late '80s. I have worked at almost every angle of the storage space, from customer to supplier to integrator and now finally as analyst and writer. As founder of Storage Switzerland, I'm fortunate to have the opportunity to meet with storage administrators and end-users as well as suppliers from around the world. Part of what we learn during those conversations will make it into this blog.
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iPhone Users Get Free Wi-Fi Access At Starbucks
Since AT&T is providing Starbucks locations with their Wi-Fi networks, it decided to do iPhone users a solid and give them free access to the Wi-Fi. The only caveat is that you have to be an AT&T subscriber.
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