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The InformationWeek June 2008 Archive « May 2008 | Main | July 2008 » |
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Fatwire Expands Its Product Line And Customer Base
Fatwire Software has strung together and impressive set of wins, most recently with the one-two punch of the introduction of its Content Integration Platform and the recent announcement that Military.com has migrated onto its Content Server product.
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Apple Plugs Growing List Of Security Holes
If you're an OS X user, and have yet to download today's 59-MB set of security patches, right now would be a good time to run Software Update. The vendor has patched 25 vulnerabilities, and some are fairly nasty at that.
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IT Budgets: Still Guardedly Optimistic?
InformationWeek last week held its annual Editorial Advisory Board meeting. The Editorial Advisory Board is made up of several leading CIOs (and former CIOs) and technology-oriented executives and investors. The most incendiary topic: the economy.
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Microsoft Needs To Want Change--It's Not There Yet
In October 2005, Ray Ozzie told Microsoft executives what needed to happen to make Microsoft a leader in Internet services. Ozzie had been at the company for about six months at the time. Now it's more than three years since Ozzie joined Microsoft. Is he making progress on this goal?
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Part One -- SMB Lessons
As I've been following the devastating floods in the Midwest and specifically Iowa, I can’t help but say something from a disaster recovery viewpoint. Clearly my heart goes out to the personal losses being suffered by thousands of people in the area, but part of my nature is always to look for ways that companies survive. I have seen a number of stories with company’s stock price being affected by not being able to maintain business operations. In some cases, this makes sense, especially in agriculture for the region but for others it does not. In all sizes of business, there is some requirement to protect data but it does differ. This entry we will focus on SMB Strategies.
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Overland Buys Snap, Adaptec Gets Out of NAS Biz
Today Adaptec dumped their money loosing Snap Appliance division, once as much a mindshare leader in NAS as NetApp, to Overland Storage for $3.6 million after buying it just 4 years ago for $100 million. Overland gets a quality line of NAS appliances to add to its mix of tape libraries, REO VTL/disk backup appliances and Ultamus Fibre Channel RAID arrays along with a sublet of Snap's plant and around 50 employees. Adaptec will keep the top of the line 700 series iSCSI arrays and get to concentrate on RAID controllers.
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Time For Congress To Enforce 'Prevailing Wage' H-1B
A great idea hit me after reading George Will's column last Friday, lamenting our “shortage” of qualified high-tech workers. Sadly, Will sidestepped the controversial issue of whether foreign nationals undercut U.S. engineers by working for less under the H-1B visa program. So why not enforce domestic pay levels for these folks, and lift the current annual cap of 140,000 H-1B green cards? Under my plan, everybody would be happy.
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Gates On Windows: 'What A Mess'
In a now semi-famous e-mail rant in 2003, outgoing Microsoft chairman Bill Gates lamented the colossal user-unfriendliness of his company’s primary product, Windows. Now that message has been given voice by a Seattle radio host.
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Voters In Both Parties Favor Same VP Candidate
No matter what their party affiliation, Americans like peanut butter, Gatorade, and Colin Powell. That's according to a company that helps big names like Wal-Mart and Gatorade with market research.
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California Says Hands-Free Law Will Save 300 Lives Per Year
Beginning tomorrow, July 1, drivers in California will be required to use hands-free devices when behind the wheel of their car. A study conducted last month believes the law will save 300 lives annually. Does this type of legislation make a difference, and how will it be enforced?
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Calif. Preps For Hands-Free Cell Phone Law
I hate to be an alarmist, but Californians have less than 24 hours to change their driving habits... that is if you like to talk on your cell phone behind the wheel.
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The Importance Of Real-Time Data In Mobile Maps
Today Google announced that it will license Tele Atlas' mapping data for another five years. An important part of the deal will allow Tele Atlas to gather info from Google Maps users about maps that are incorrect. This brings me to a bad mobile mapping incident I faced over the weekend ...
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Firefox 3 Video Tour: Zooming Web Pages
The most useful new feature in Firefox 3 is that it lets you zoom whole Web pages, making them bigger and smaller to enhance usability. Previously, you could only resize the text, which made the overall page look lopsided and funny. We'll show you how to use this new feature -- it's pretty simple, which makes this a pretty short video.
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Will Rhapsody Deal Vault Verizon's V Cast Toward Success?
I consider myself to be a heavy music consumer. I purchase between two and five CDs worth of music each month. Even though I can download music directly to my iPhone via the iTunes Music Store, I still don't go for mobile music. What's preventing me (and everyone else) from doing so, and will Verizon Wireless's new deal with Rhapsody and Real make a real difference?
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NetGear's WGR614L: (Soon To Be) My Open Router
As soon as my next paycheck comes in, I'm seriously thinking about picking up Netgear's new WGR614L wired/wireless-G router. It's yet another of the small but growing pool of hardware devices (along with some of Netgear's own earlier routers) designed with the hacker in mind.
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Company Argues For Right To Read Ex-Employee's E-Mail
A finance company is arguing in court that it had a right to read an ex-employee's personal e-mail. Sounds crazy, right? And yet, in this world where we carry BlackBerrys to access work e-mail from home, and handle personal business over the company Internet connection, it takes a crazy person to figure out where personal life ends and work begins.
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Catalyst Conference 2008: The State Of Federated Identity Management
At last week's Catalyst conference in San Diego, I had a chance to sit down with identity management executives from IBM and CA to discuss the state of federated identity management. It appears while the federation of identities hasn't taken off as expected, there is still life in the technology.
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How’s This For A Concept?: E-Mail Less, Talk More
It occurred to me, after reading Luis Suarez's piece in the New York Times today, that I need to free myself from e-mail in much the same way that Neo was freed from the Matrix by Morpheus. E-mail is not only destroying my productivity, it's hampering my career development.
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Ballmer's Right About Privacy, Wrong About Toolbars
It's pretty hard to move around the Internet today without leaving behind a trail of information. Any time that information can make someone money, you can bet that they will figure out a way to collect it. Although privacy is always a concern, users often don't realize the value of the information they're giving out for free, even when it's anonymous.
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The iPhone 1.0 Should Be Cheap Now. Right?
When Steve Jobs said the iPhone 3G was going to start at $199, I immediately figured I could cop a cheap first-generation one on Craigslist or eBay. It's only logical to think Apple addicts would ditch their handsets for the latest and greatest, and that would lead to great online bargains.
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Cloud Storage 101 – Part One
It seems like the hype-o-meter on cloud computing and cloud storage has been turned up a few notches lately. How real is this emerging market and how will the players begin to settle in? At its most simplistic, cloud storage is disk at the end of a wire that resides outside of your data center. It creates a "storage as a service" model that is delivered over the Internet. Many are positioning this as storage for your older digital assets, essentially an archive.
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Apple To Developers: We Want Your Apps
The iPhone Apps Store is open...to developers. This week, Apple sent out an e-mail to developers to let them know that they may begin uploading their applications into the store. With only two weeks to go before launch, is Apple cutting things too close?
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Livelink ECM Targets The Life Sciences Industry
Managing quality is obviously a critical issue for companies of all sorts, but few have the strict guidelines and need for process of those in the pharmaceutical and life sciences industry. Broadly including pharma companies, biotech firms, medical equipment manufacturers and others, life sciences companies have to balance both internal process with regulatory requirements. Managing all aspects of this can be a challenge.
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No One Gets Fired For Registering A Dot-Com
ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which manages the generic Top Level Domain (gTLD), recommended opening the gTLDs to organizations that can afford the registration process and can prove they have the wherewithal to manage a gTLD. Many are predicting Wild West expansion of names and the death of the .com. I predict it will be risky business for domain name owners.
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Firefox 3 Video Tour: Phishing And Malware Protection
Firefox 3 includes built-in warnings designed to protect you against those bad guys who want to trick you into giving up your credit card numbers, or download software infections to your PC. The browser throws up a warning when you try to visit a known crooked Web page. Take a look at how it works.
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Bill Gates' Legacy For IT
When Bill Gates steps out of his office today for the last time as a full time Microsoft employee, he'll leave behind a company in flux, but one that's been central to much of the business technology revolution in the last 30 years.
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Bill Gates And Windows XP: Good Night And Good Luck
Microsoft will mark the end of an era this weekend as Bill Gates and Windows XP -- two icons of the company at its zenith -- head for the sunset. Can Redmond survive this transitional moment, or will June 30 be the day Microsoft died?
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Google Retools BlackBerry Browser Support
Starting today in the U.S., users of BlackBerry smartphones should begin noticing a number of improvements to their Google search results. Google has tailored its software to better accommodate the BlackBerry Web browser.
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Linux On The Move Once More
Want a phone OS? Soon enough you'll have your choice of Nokia/Symbian, Google/Android, Microsoft/Windows Mobile, Apple/iPhone ... and now a merger between Linux mobile standards groups. There's something for everyone here.
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Picture Messaging Could Be Coming To The iPhone
One of the many features currently not supported by the iPhone is picture messaging, or MMS. Considering the device's other capabilities, this is a glaring omission (and one that happens to vex me grievously). According to a spied internal AT&T memo, the 3G iPhone may support MMS after all.
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Google Hears Your Complaints, Revamps Mobile Services Web Site
Setting up services for your mobile phone often requires you to perform some configurations via the Web. This is true for a number of Google services, and apparently people didn't think it was easy enough. Google listened to all the feedback and launched a new mobile site today to help make it easier to set your phone up with Google services.
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UC Security
It's become conventional wisdom in the VoIP/IP telephony/UC security space that the major vulnerability for voice-over-IP traffic today remains the simple fact that it runs on IP infrastructures that may be the targets of attacks that have been plaguing data networks for years. In other words, all those exotic types of attacks with names like SPIT (spam over IP telephony); VOMIT (voice over misconfigured IP telephony); or eavesdropping via packet capture -- these have not yet materialized to any significant degree. But there is plenty of reason to stay vigilant when it comes to VoIP/UC security.
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Second Life Artist Faces Setback in Struggle For American Citizenship
The U.S. government recently denied a green card application by a well-known Second Life artist, declaring her two-year marriage to an American citizen to be fraudulent. The news isn't all bad for her, though -- the denial gives her an opportunity to appeal and prove that the marriage was legitimate.
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Garmin Goes To The Dogs
We're seeing GPS in a ton of cell phones lately, but Garmin thinks humans shouldn't be the only ones who get the benefits of these satellites. The company has released a GPS-enabled dog collar to ensure that you know the location of your pooch.
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Hyper-V Released. Much Rejoicing.
More than 1 million eval instances have hopefully worked out the kinks. Oh, and MS has been running a chunk of its main portal on VMs since early June. Did you notice?
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Catalyst Conference 2008: GRC Is A Four Letter Word
If you work anywhere near the risk management functions within your company, whether it be as an executive, manager, auditor, or IT security practitioner, you've probably heard from many vendors trying to sell you a "GRC solution." Burton Group analysts say you just may be better off covering your ears.
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Sprint Says The Instinct Is Flying Off The Shelves, Breaking All Its Sales Records
Sprint's newest phone, the Instinct, is proving to be a popular handset. According to Sprint, it is the fastest selling EVDO handset in the company's history. In fact, Sprint's supply chain is being challenged to keep the phone in stock.
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Should The U.S. Nationalize The Internet?
The Internet faces many problems from companies looking to maximize profits at the expense of the public good. Greedy businesses threaten innovation by trying to put an end to net neutrality, media companies want to control every Internet-connected device in an effort to lock down distribution channels, and spammers and other fraudsters have pretty much taken over e-mail. Now, TechCrunch is reporting that Vint Cerf, the so-called "father of the Internet," says maybe we should think of the Internet as being like the highway system -- a public good that should be nationalized.
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Don't Troubleshoot. Change The Way You Work
Many of us computer users suffer in silence. Yes, there are the outspoken people we see complaining on message boards, but in general, we put up with the quirks of applications because the alternatives are not worthwhile. And sometimes, we have to go along to get along, which means forced updates to the latest version of software for no other reason than you have to be able to share files easily. Computers should change to fit our needs, not the other way around.
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Mobile Linux Organizations Merge In Effort To Survive
This week's announcement from Nokia and Symbian appears to have had an immediate effect on the mobile Linux community. Today, the Linux Phone Standards (LiPS) Forum announced that it will join forces with the LiMo Foundation and create one entity pushing for a standard mobile Linux platform. In the face of the forthcoming open source Symbian platform and Google's Android platform, mobile Linux needs a shot in the arm to compete.
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Help With Selecting A Digital Asset Management Solution
The process of selecting a Digital Asset Management solution can be daunting. The licensing costs alone can be staggering, even before adding in the additional expenditures for integration, consulting, and user training. Beyond just cost, though, lie other potential pitfalls: too few (or too many) features, poor integration with existing system, or a lack of vendor support.
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LG's Dare A True iPhone Rival
Other phones have tried hard to beat (or at least match) the iPhone at the touch screen game. None have come as close as the new Dare, from LG. I had a chance to get some hands-on time with it last week. Apple, watch out.
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Openmoko's FreeRunner Hits The Streets -- Just Not Here
One of my favorite open projects -- open software and hardware, both -- has finally been delivered to end users. The problem: India and Europe are the only ones getting it directly ... for now.
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Video: Socialtext Turns Wiki Into Killer Web Platform
I'm big on community-centric sites as the next Web wave. My three regular readers know that from my recent post, Joomla Rocks, Or How To Build A Professional Web Site For No Money Down. While Joomla is indeed fantastic, there's another platform that's probably better out of the box for corporate users. It's called Socialtext, and I've got a video with company chairman Ross Mayfield to show you the high points.
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Why Bill Gates Left Microsoft
Under the leadership of Bill Gates, Microsoft accomplished a lot. Now he's retiring from the company to dedicate more time to his charitable foundation. Yet I wonder why he's decided that now is the time to move on. I think the answer can be found in a 2003 rant by Bill about his problems in using the Microsoft Web site, Windows Update, and Windows in general.
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Catalyst Conference 2008: Virtualization Security, Myths Vs. Reality
At Burton Group's Catalyst Conference, here in San Diego, security and virtualization analyst Alessandro Perilli explained what he sees as some of the greatest challenges to securing virtualized environments.
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CrashPlan Takes Backup Peer-To-Peer
Anyone that's read this blog even occasionally knows I'm a big fan of online backup for the SOHO to SMB market. After seeing literally hundreds of backup failures as small businesses tried to use tape drives and applications you and I would consider easy to use, like Retrospect and Backup Exec, I've come to the conclusion that tape drives, like backhoes and heart/lung machines, should be left to professionals. If you aren't a certifiable geek and don't have a full-time IT staff, you shouldn't have a tape drive -- you won't use it right anyway.
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Escaping From Locked-In Clouds
The first real controversy at the Structure08 cloud computing conference erupted during a panel called "Working the Cloud: NetGen Infrastructure for New Enterpreneurs." Not surprisingly, it involved Google.
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Getting Started With: Drupal
The popular, powerful Drupal may seem a bit intimidating for the uninitiated, but for those looking to start out, here are some recommended resources to start learning the ropes.
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Bill Gates Revealed: A Few Things You Didn't Know
I've had occasion to chat with Bill Gates a number of times over the years, and there's often a point when something unexpected happens. He's been brutally honest, occasionally evasive, and surreptitiously a nice guy. As Gates gets ready to ride off into the software sunset, here are a few anecdotes that stand out.
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Firefox 3 Video Tour: The Awesome AwesomeBar
We're kicking off a series of videos showing off the top features of Firefox 3. This time, we're taking a peek at the AwesomeBar, an updated version of the good old browser location bar, designed to make it easier for you to return to your favorite Web pages again and again. The Awesome Bar is controversial -- many people love it (including me). But others hate it, and for those people, we've got tips for how to disable the AwesomeBar.
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With EcoSearch, It IS Easy Being Green
Here's an inconvenient truth: being green can be a pain in the neck. So when I heard of a new search tool that helps the environment without inflicting the least bit of discomfort upon users, I checked it out at once.
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Will All Content Move To The Cloud?
Opening Structure08, the cloud computing conference in San Francisco, Jonathan Yarmis of AMR Research coined an interesting phrase: Everything As A Service.
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3 Ways That Storage Virtualization Can Save You Money
Storage virtualization is often billed as what I call a "Time To" product, meaning that it reduces the time it takes IT to respond to demands on the business. Virtualization shortens the amount of time that it takes to respond to a provisioning request, allowing for more rapid deployment of storage assets. IT departments also should consider storage virtualization if they need to flatten or shrink their budget.
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The Ethical Case For Open Device Drivers
The recent announcement by Linux kernel developers that open source hardware drivers are the way to go got me thinking. You can make a business case for open source device drivers (you'll sell more hardware) or you can make an ethical case (it's the right thing to do). I believe in both, but for me the second view takes precedence over the first.
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Microsoft Hiring Mac Programmers, Enticements Include 'Kick-Butt Margarita Machine'
Microsoft is reaching out to programmers with Macintosh skills in an effort to beef up its Mac Business Unit to meet rising demand for Apple-related products. Parrothead experience preferred but not essential.
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McCain's Lack Of Computer Skills Not Campaign Obstacle
Sen. John McCain's computer aptitude, or lack thereof, became a hot topic of discussion at the Personal Democracy Forum in New York City this week. The forum tackled technology's role in politics and policy. So, when news surfaced that McCain doesn't know how to use a computer, both technophiles and politicos in attendance were intrigued. Some were also involved.
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Virgin Mobile USA In Talks To Buy Troubled Helio
Speculation about Helio's future has been all over the place the last month or so, with reports surfacing that it was a potential acquisition target. Turns out that speculation wasn't far off. Sources indicate that Virgin Mobile USA, another troubled MVNO, may be buying out SK Telecom's stake in Helio. Can pairing two troubled MVNOs make for one stronger one?
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Battery Life Issues Delaying Launch Of BlackBerry Bold
Last month Research In Motion announced the new Bold smartphone with much fanfare. The device was supposed to be available on AT&T's network starting in July. It looks like that ain't gonna happen. AT&T has yet to certify the device, which is suffering from battery life problems, as well as overheating. Um, oops.
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What Big Vendors See In The Clouds
This week we profile the cloud computing strategies of eight tech vendors. As we debated how to describe them on the cover of our magazine -- leaders, stalwarts? -- we settled on "behemoths." That's right, the unifying characteristic is just their bigness.
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CIO: The Buck Doesn't Stop Here
How involved are CIOs in corporate decisions? Fewer report being involved at the front end of important decisions, more being brought in only afterward. That's not a good sign.
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Nokia Kneecaps Microsoft, Google
A few comments and questions while digesting the news that Nokia will engulf the remaining portion of Symbian that it doesn't already own:
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Target’s (The Retailer) Swipe At Privacy
Why don't retailers care more about how they handle your personal information?
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More Pics Of BlackBerry's KickStart
If you were just glancing through, it may seem that the only cell phone news today was Nokia buying Symbian. But BlackBerry lovers may be interested in seeing some new photos of Research In Motion's flip phone.
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Test Driving Online Document Collaboration Tools
Buzzword, Adobe's Web-based word processing application, has made quite a splash over the past few weeks as it launched as part of Adobe's new Acrobat.com site. But while it's a neat tool, it faces some very strong competitors in the online document collaboration arena.
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Looking Into The Work-Trend Crystal Ball
A new report forecasting the top 10 workplace trends of the future says video and Web conferencing will make business travel extinct while social networking sites and other Web 2.0 technologies emerge as the primary tools for job recruiting. Is your organization ready to support these and other workplace trends? Or maybe you're already making these shifts.
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3G iPhone Parts Cost Apple $173, $53 Less Than The Original
According to Silicon Valley research firm iSuppli, Apple was able to leverage its buying power to keep the hardware costs of the 3G iPhone to just $173 (for the 8-GB model). That's $53 less than it paid for the original iPhone's components. For the moment, analysts are suggesting that the unsubsidized cost of the device will be near $600. Pretty healthy margins, if you ask me.
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Google Round Up: Mobile Videos, Navigation Toolbar Shortcuts, Real-Time Quotes
Google is always announcing some small tweak or update to its software and services. In the last few days, it has created a new mobile phone tricks channel on YouTube, shown us how to set up shortcuts in our navigation toolbars, and enabled real-time stock quotes.
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Another E-Mail Archive Service Gets Bought
SaaS plus e-mail archiving gets hotter and hotter.
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Skype VoIP Feed Turns Into Political 'Candid Camera' For John Edwards
It should have been a disappointment when Elizabeth Edwards couldn't make it to the Personal Democracy Forum Conference (PdF '08) in New York City where she had planned to speak Monday. Thanks to VoIP technology, those who had hoped to hear her were able to link up with her via Skype, and that turned out to be an unexpected advantage.
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Nokia Takes Initiative With Symbian Open Source Move
Nokia's acquisition of Symbian and intent to make the popular operating system open source code changes alignments in the mobile device market. Nokia has now got a lever with which to extend Symbian's reach and make life more difficult for competitors.
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Symbian: As Open As They Wanna Be (But How Much Is That?)
What with Google's Android currently stuck in the state of a work-in-progress, it was only a matter of time before someone else ponied up their own open source competition for the smartphone/handset market. But it isn't some newly-minted firm flush with a round of startup funding -- it's Nokia's own Symbian, to be merged with the S60, UIQ, and MOAP(S) platforms into one great big happy open source mashup. Well, that's the theory, anyway.
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How To Recycle Spent CFLs
Those corkscrew-shaped CFL bulbs use about a third of the power needed to light incandescent bulbs, so their cost-saving appeal to homes and businesses is obvious. But what happens when potentially toxic CFLs need to be replaced?
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New Open Source Tool For Data Quality Control
Talend has come out with an open source tool for assessing data quality. If you’re like most companies, your customer database is junked up with duplicate names with outdated titles and inconsistent information. Talend’s Data Profiler brings order to this mess.
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ASUS's Linux Eee PC Gets Price Parity With XP Down Under Once Again
A while back I noted that the pricing for ASUS's new Linux-powered Eee PC was at a premium over their XP version of the same machine, a move which defied most brands of logic I could apply to the situation. Fortunately, after a bit over a month of this decision getting flamed roundly in public, they're backing down and quoting the same price for both machines: $649.
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Nokia, Others Deal Major Blow To Android
Perhaps Android's greatest strength is not the operating system itself, rather the Open Handset Alliance that's backing it up. Without support, Android won't go far. Well, now Android and the OHA have a serious threat to worry about. Nokia and other mobile industry heavy hitters have teamed up to create an open source Symbian operating system with major fire power.
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SQL Injection Remains Scary Back-Door Security Threat
I got onto the subject of SQL injection thanks to Intel software blogger Kenneth Graf, who caught my attention with a post provocatively entitled, "Your password is potentially dangerous." (Who knew ? :) While SQL injection is nothing new, it remains a downright terrifying security threat, since it's a very easy way for hackers to get into the database behind your Web site.
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Citect Doesn't Get 'IT' When It Comes To Application Security
Citect, the Sydney, Australia-based maker of Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) software, CitectSCADA, doesn't seem to understand IT security, or why applications that run things like pharmaceutical plants, water treatment facilities, and natural gas pipelines should be inherently secure.
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Data Domain Adds Retention Enforcement - Deduplication, It's Not Just For Backup Anymore
In a further attempt to position its deduplicating NAS appliances as general purpose data repositories, Data Domain has added date retention enforcement as an optional feature. This follows naturally from the redesign of the file system last year to support a large number of small files as well as the small number of large files typical of a backup target.
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An ISP Should Carry Bits--And Nothing More
Companies like Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo, plus the "Web 2.0" sites, get all the attention when it comes to the excitement of Internet opportunity. That's made Internet service providers jealous, and they've been looking for ways to tap into the financial bonanza flowing through their wires. Unfortunately, many of those ways invade user's privacy and break essential rules of the Internet.
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Palm Centro Gets Unlocked
The little smartphone that could has been boosting Palm's stock and is available on Verizon Wireless, Sprint, and AT&T. But, Palm announced the Centro is now available unlocked and with an enhanced Google feature.
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Agent-Based Data Movers
In last week's entry I discussed Global Name Spaces as a data mover for moving data to and from a disk-based archive. In addition to a Global Name Space there are other tools to move data to and archive. I find that the other solutions typically fall into one of two camps; Agent-based data movers or crawl-based data movers. There's also another category of monitoring tools that don't actually move the data but tell you what should be moved, leaving the rest up to you. In this entry we'll focus on agent-based data movers.
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The Aggressive IT Department
Is it important for IT departments to be perceived as aggressive? Because they aren't. In our recent "Tomorrow's CIO" research survey of 720 corporate managers and CIOs and VP-of-IT level executives, only 6% of those on the corporate side describe their IT departments as more aggressive than the rest of the company. Is that bad, or business as usual?
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HP Joins Data Deduplication Club With Agressive Pricing
HP officially joined the data deduplicators club today after several alert storage news sites including our own Byte and Switch broke the news from a premature update of HP's Turkish website. As expected they're adding Sepaton's DeltaStor, which they're calling Accelerated DeDuplication, to the VLS VTLs they've been OEMing from Sepaton for the past few years. More interesting are the new D2D2500 and D2D4000 appliances HP is targeting at what if you're HP or EMC is the SMB market but to those of us without billions of dollars of sales a year would call midmarket. Amazingly for HP the D2D2500 sets a new low for a data deduplicating target at just $6500 with 2.25TB of usable disk space after the RAID 5 overhead.
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Study: Small Businesses Making More Use Of Smartphones
According to the latest data from AMI, 31% of small businesses in the United States are using smartphones to access e-mail, contact, and calendaring information regularly. Trends indicate that SBs already are looking into location-based services and other functions such as CRM, field force automation, and sales force automation to power their businesses.
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Red Hat In Boston, Part 2.3: openSUSE And Openness, Period
Last Friday afternoon I sat down for an hour with Joe Brockmeier, community manager for openSUSE, to talk with him about SUSE 11 and the open source world in general. It was a bit rambly, but that was part of the fun: We stumbled across a whole slew of key truths about open source along the way.
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Affinnova Algorithm Claims It Can Pick Most Popular Veep
It's obvious that the Internet is shaping opinions and becoming a vehicle for sharing information during the presidential campaign. It was only a matter of time before we began hearing more about how political operatives are using the Web to shape their strategies. Now, one technology company is touting a "secret weapon" for choosing the ideal presidential ticket.
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Motorola Impresses With 5-Megapixel Camera Phone
Motorola and Kodak officially unveiled the Motozine ZN5 today. This latest handset from Motorola boasts a Kodak-branded 5-megapixel shooter with Kodak-approved optics and flash. It also packs some serious Kodak camera software. Have I mentioned that Kodak helped develop the camera? Insta-review says: Darned good camera phone.
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What To Make Of Google's Android 'Delays'
Reports are circulating around the Internet today that Google's Android platform is facing difficulties and won't see the light of day before the fourth quarter. Reuters cites technical integration hurdles as the issue, with some Open Handset Alliance partners not able to bring Android to market before next year. I say this isn't really news.
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Encyclopaedia Britannica Embraces The Wikipedians, Sort Of
With the upcoming relaunch of its Web site, Encyclopaedia Britannica is making some interesting changes. It's taken steps to embrace certain aspects of the collaborative nature of Wikipedia (and the Internet in general), but at the same time, it reasserts the need to rely on experts with strong voices and distinct points of view.
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UC Vendors As Services Companies
I mentioned in last Friday's post that Unified Communications is expected to require much more systems integration work than traditional telecom implementations. That's directly related to the fact that communications is becoming more of a software business and less of a hardware business. It also means that many of the "hardware" vendors of the past are trying to imitate IBM's successes of the last decade in re-positioning from hardware supplier to software/services firms.
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BakBone Gives Away NetVault To Red Hat Users
Following Red Hat in giving the software away and charging for support, BakBone Software is giving away a special free-use edition of its NetVault backup software. The free-use edition can handle backup for up to two client servers and up to 500 GB of disk through NetVault's built-in software virtual tape library, which makes standard disk emulate a tape library.
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Failing The Basics Will Get You Hacked
Information security firm Sophos evaluated 580 PCs over a 40-day period and found businesses of all sizes can't tackle even the most basic things when it comes to IT security.
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AP Correct In Calling BS On Blogosphere
No one else has voiced support to the AP for drawing a line in the virtual sand and attempting to preserve the tattered remnants of the profession of journalism, so it falls to me. Here goes: Just like the New York Mets with their firing of manager Willie Randolph, the AP botched big time the implementation of its copyright cease-and-desist claim against a tiny Web site, but the basic point was correct. Here's why.
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Helio Kicking The Bucket?
Don't call it a phone company. In fact, don't bother calling it at all, because various reports are saying that Helio will follow in the footsteps of Disney Mobile, ESPN Mobile, and various other defunct mobile virtual network operators.
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Satellite Radio Stumbles, Still Shines
XM Satellite Radio's share price is down another 3.6% today after plunging 17% on a discouraging report from Goldman Sachs. XM rival Sirius has suffered a similar stumble.
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AP Struggles To Save Face In Blogger Copyright Dispute
I don't blame The Associated Press for refusing to participate in a conversation about its attempts to overthrow government authority and rewrite copyright law to its own liking. The AP is like a husband who foolishly told his wife that the new jeans do make her butt look big. The best way to limit damage at that point is to simply shut up and hope the subject eventually goes away.
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Some Hard Data On Vista Users And UAC
Of all the changes in Windows Vista, perhaps the most controversial is the User Account Control functionality that often results in multiple permission prompts that border on annoying. OK, let's be honest: UAC crossed the border, broke down the front door, and is camped-out-on-the-sofa annoying.
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Seeding The Cloud
Recently, I got the chance to visit one of Microsoft's mega data centers for a tour while it was under construction. I'll just say this: creating the infrastructure needed for cloud computing isn't child's play.
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How Open Source Builds Winning Teams
Anyone who still thinks open source isn't ready for prime time hasn't been paying attention. Two events this week demonstrate how open source principles have put an entertainment juggernaut and a sports franchise at the top of their respective games.
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Red Hat In Boston, Part 2.2: Forges Or Exchanges?
Conference summaries can be so misleading. When I saw a note in the Thursday schedule for "Exchange strategies for open source software", a part of me wondered if they meant that Exchange. No -- this was about creating a software exchange on the order of SugarCRM's SugarExchange, a marketplace for SugarCRM extensions and add-ons. After all, what's an open source project -- especially something of SugarCRM's proportions -- without community contributions?
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Global Name Spacing
In speaking with an IT manager the other day, he was complaining about running out of drive letters and the difficulty that moving away from using drive letters was causing his users. He was looking into Microsoft DFS and was looking for other solutions since he had a mixed environment of Unix and Windows. Global Name Space solutions like those available from Acopia or built into OnStor NAS products are ideal for solving the complexity of managing multiple drive letters or teaching users different paths to servers while supporting multiple protocols like CIFS and NFS.
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One-Quarter Of Current iPhone Users Upgraded From Motorola Razr
The Motorola Razr was the iPhone of its day. Stylish and expensive, it was the it phone back in 2005. This recently revealed statistic, which should concern Motorola a lot, isn't all that surprising. The Motorola Razr has been a best-selling mobile phone for years, meaning a lot of people have it -- or in this case, had it. But going from a Razr to an iPhone is quite an upgrade, one that Motorola is clearly losing out on.
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Google Says: Bang, Zoom, Straight To The Moon
Google is going to pay $20 million to the first team to land a rover on the moon, drive it around a bit, and return pictures, videos and other data by Dec. 31, 2012. That's just four and a half years from now. Competitors for the Google Lunar X Prize must be privately funded, though costs for such a mission are sure to run well over $20 million. Is the prize worth it?
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The True UC Market Is Tiny...Today
I've been watching the Unified Communications market since it began two years ago, and one of the things that everybody's been trying to figure out is how to quantify the market and characterize how fast it's moving and where it might be headed. This week, Blair Pleasant of COMMfusion and UCstrategies.com delivered a great contribution to this emerging body of knowledge. The executive summary and TOC are here, and Blair's been blogging about it here, here, and here. After reading these various items, my takeaway is that the UC market is quite small, at least as of now.
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Sports Illustrated's Swimsuit Issue Comes To Your Mobile Phone
One side of the mobile business that no one likes to acknowledge or speak about openly is that adult content is a big moneymaker. To wit, Sports Illustrated has decided to jump into the game and is making a version of its famous swimsuit issue available on mobile phones. IT, watch out!
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The Findability Factor
Findability. For our purposes, it describes how easy it is for your user community to find the content and resources they need to do their jobs. And if yours is like 49% of enterprises in a recent survey, your findability stinks.
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Mozilla Confirms TippingPoint's Cheap Shot (Whoops. I Meant Vulnerability Announcement)
Mozilla security chief Window Snyder says that there is, in fact, a security flaw in the foundation's just-released Firefox 3.0 Web browser. Her announcement confirms the sucker-punch swung by TippingPoint Technologies just hours after Firefox's release.
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CMS Security, By The Numbers
Six Apart's Anil Dash posted an interesting piece recently comparing the security of Movable Type, their blogging/CMS platform, to that of WordPress,which has suffered a number of security issues over the past few weeks. The results were surprising, to say the least.
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Check Out The BlackBerry Javelin
Research In Motion has been on a tear with good-looking devices lately, but an upcoming model will make Crackberry addicts drool. Alas, there is a catch.
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Facebook Exec Leaving For Benchmark Fuels Funding Fever
Matt Cohler, one of the first five employees at Facebook, is shifting gears and adding his talents to the venture capital community, which begs the question: Will he turn around and help line Zuckerberg's nest with cash?
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Red Hat in Boston, Part 2.1: Fixing Patent Failure Without A Bulldozer
I couldn't pass up a discussion of the failures of the American patent system -- certainly not at the Red Hat Summit, where questions of IP law, licensing, and copyright are filling the air. What I got was not a fiery invective against the USPTO or a fulminating war cry against patents in general, but a much more nuanced and well-argued case for selective patent reform than I've heard in a long time.
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Why The IBM-Google Hook-Up Really Matters
Tech analysts have raved, rightfully, about the developing partnership between IBM and Google. But they're missing the real reason this linkage between tech titans old and new matters so much.
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Google Docs Now Supports PDFs
If there's one file type that lands in my in-box more than any other, it is PDFs. I typically have to download them to my desktop, open them in a PDF reader, and choose where to store them. Not any more. I can open them directly in Google Docs and store them online.
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Hawaii Tests RFID For Tracking Tomatoes
Hawaii is one of my favorite places to visit ... the beaches, the snorkeling, and fresh seafood that doesn't travel thousands of miles on a supply chain before landing on your plate. Turns out it's got some smart scientists, too. While in a previous blog we shared opinions about whether RFID could be used to track tainted tomatoes back to the farm, Hawaii already is working on such a program.
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80% Of Mobile Phones Offer A 'Good' Mobile Browsing Experience? I Think Not
Dev.mobi set some criteria to define what a decent mobile browsing experience is. After determining the parameters, the site concluded that four out of five mobile phones offer a "good" experience when it comes to browsing the mobile Web. Um. What???
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Mystery And Margin
Over at No Jitter, consultant Gary Audin has posted a blog based on a new report that looks at IT services costs. The report, from the OnForce analyst firm, finds that VoIP is by far the most expensive IT component to service; the average VoIP work order is more than half again as expensive as the next-highest category, wiring and cabling, which of course also can be a significant contributor to VoIP/IP telephony expense, too.
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Red Hat In Boston, Part 1.2: In Open Source, You Can't Be Half-Pregnant
A prime choice from yesterday's panels at the Red Hat Summit in Boston was a synopsis of Alfresco's third Open Source Barometer. The Barometer is a yearly survey conducted by open source content-management outfit Alfresco to learn about who's using what and why amongst folks doing content management. For every revelation that had me nodding in recognition, there was another that came as a total surprise.
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Would More Megapixels Make The iPhone's Camera Worse?
There's an interesting article over at Ars Technica about how boosting the number of megapixels in the iPhone's camera would lead to worse picture quality. The author explores the things that really matter: autofocus and lens quality. For the most part, I agree with his analysis, but Apple still could have improved the camera.
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Make Your Own Worm
Point. Click. Worm. Malware creators make it easy to convert any executable file into a self-propagating worm, the folks at PandaLabs have just reported.
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Alfresco Keeps Up Its Forward Momentum
Despite the notable departure of a few key executives over the past few weeks, Alfresco, the open-source enterprise content management provider, has kept up its forward momentum with the well-timed announcement of two significant deals with Activision and Adobe.
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Verizon To Feature Visual Voicemail
If you're a fan of the iPhone's much-touted Visual Voicemail but can't possibly see yourself signing up for AT&T's service, you may be in luck. It looks like Verizon Wireless is slated to rock this feature on select handsets this summer.
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How The White House Is Winning In Missing E-Mails Case
For the last few months it has appeared that the federal courts would force the Bush White House to account for, and eventually turn over, the infamous "missing e-mails" from the period March 2003 to October 2005. Now the judicial tide has turned.
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Google Posts An Article To Explain The Benefits Of Cloud Computing To The Enterprise
In case the idea of cloud computing hasn't been beaten into your brain yet, Google has posted a primer on the benefits of using Google Docs with your business. Here's a breakdown of what's what.
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Infonetics Reporting Growth In The NAC Market
The research summary headline, Reports of NAC's death have been greatly exaggerated; market up 16% in 1Q '08 really says it all. But let's not get too excited. The increase of 16% in 1Q over the previous quarter means approximately $10 million more in sales. The market is still relatively small, so any movement will be magnified. What's more interesting is the market breakdown.
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The Renewed Allure Of Telecommuting
With gasoline prices rising above $4 a gallon, a recent survey found that 40% of tech workers would willingly take a pay cut to telecommute. Meanwhile, more employers are apparently offering IT pros the choice to work remotely as a perk to attract hard-to-find skills. Is telecommuting an option you offer your staff?
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Red Hat In Boston, Part 1.1: Why 'Faster' Isn't Always Faster
My first actual panel for the opening day of the Red Hat Summit sported the eye-grabbing moniker Why computers are getting slower (and what we can do about it). With a title like that, I was worried I'd be in for a fluff panel about spyware 'n viruses on Windows being performance killers, with Linux as the panacea for that. I couldn't have been more wrong, thank goodness.
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Gadget Lovers Are Jerks
According to an online survey, those who are first in line to buy the latest and greatest gadgets are not only assertive, but arrogant. If you go to just about any user forum on the the major tech blogs, you'll see firsthand how fanboys and haters alike prove the study true.
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Red Hat In Boston, Part 1.0: A Community Gathering
The big first topic of the morning as I headed downstairs for the first day of the Red Hat Summit in Boston wasn't virtualization or kernel optimizations, but the Celtics trouncing the Lakers. I'd heard the street-level mayhem for that victory from 20 floors up at just before midnight (mainly, endless car horns honking) and had called the front desk in a half-panic to make sure it wasn't an incipient natural disaster. With that out of the way and my program guide, complementary backpack, free Fedora 9 live media and bonus 1 GB jump-drive (attached to my badge lariat), I followed the rest of the early birds for the opening keynotes.
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Verizon Releases Data Breach Investigation Report
The Verizon Business Investigative Response team recently released a report detailing the facts and figures associated with system breaches from more than 500 cases over the past 4 years. The report mostly contains obvious information regarding the who, what, where, and how of most data breaches, but it's worth reading. There were some pretty interesting statistics and factoids contained in the piece.
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Sprint Sets $129 Price Point For Instinct
If you've been drooling over Sprint's forthcoming touch device, the Instinct from Samsung, the good news is that it is priced at $129 -- $70 less than the 8-GB 3G iPhone. The bad news is, a data plan and voice plan combo -- totaling at least $70 per month -- is mandatory. The Instinct goes on sale Friday, June 20. Is it worth it?
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Solid State Disk And Green
I saw a recent claim by Sun that Solid State Disk Drives (SSDs) consume 20% of the energy that traditional storage systems do. While I can't verify that to be the case, it makes sense. Texas Memory Systems, the veteran of the SSD space, recommends that for real power savings, companies should compare a SSD with a storage array that is configured to deliver the same level of performance that an SSD can.
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Galexi CMS Focuses On Hospitality And Travel
While many off-the-shelf and open source content management solutions may offer specialized modules intended to support the travel and hospitality industries, sometimes a dedicated, customized solution is a better fit.
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MXlogic Offers Free Service To Flooded Companies
In a shocking demonstration of good citizenship, Colorado-based e-mail management vendor MX Logic is giving two months of free service to businesses and organizations in the flooded-out Midwest. Busineses can reroute their e-mail to MX Logic's servers and use MX Logic's spam, virus, and other filtering services, in addition to giving their users fully functional Webmail until their e-mail infrastructure can be restored. Once users have rebuilt their infrastructure, MX Logic will forward all the mail into the permanent mail server.
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Who Is Tomorrow's CIO?
We're looking for nominations for the future leaders in business technology, or those already in place, who have the right stuff to lead their companies into the dynamic and demanding business environment of the 21st century.
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There's Value In Data Leak Prevention
Richard "IDS Is Dead" Stiennon is back to his absolutist ways. This time he is aiming (again) at the DLP space.
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Red Hat In Boston, Part 0
Greetings from Boston, where for the next three days I'll be covering the fourth annual Red Hat Summit -- three days of breakout sessions, vendor demonstrations, and partner pride for all things Red Hat.
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On Life Support, Philly Wi-Fi Gets A Reprieve
At this point, jumping in to rescue a failing municipal Wi-Fi network seems like taking over as manager of the Mets: you're unlikely to succeed, but at least you're almost certain to do better than the last guy.
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Startup Launches New Firewall Line
Palo Alto Networks debuts a next-generation firewall for the midmarket. A startup we've been closely tracking because of its innovative firewall technology, Palo Alto today announced a midrange appliance to complement its enterprise product line.
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The Archive In The Sky
LiveOffice launches an e-mail archiving service, but competitors abound.
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Google Offers $10,000 To Winner Of Code Competition
For the developer or developers who come up with the best solution to a set of coding challenges, the grand prize will be $10,000. Registration for this year's Code Jam is now open. If you think you've got the right stuff, be sure to sign up.
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Today's Teens: Breakin' The Law, Breakin' The Law
Kids these days, I tell ya. Turns out most teenagers could care less about the law when it comes to driving and cell phone use. In fact, a recent study shows that in North Carolina, teen use of cell phones while driving has increased since laws preventing it were enacted. How is it they are failing to get the message?
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Sony Ericsson Offers Up The Wii Of Phones
Today at the CommunicAsia show in Singapore, Sony Ericsson unleashed an onslaught of five new phones. Stuffed in the mix of entry-level phones and high-end camera phones is a gaming phone that uses Wii-like motion sensors to let users interact with games. Now you can punch out fellow commuters on the bus or train as you bowl or fish with the Sony Ericsson F305.
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Will Enterprises Buy Hosted UC?
This week the carriers are having their big show in Las Vegas, NXTComm, so we're seeing announcements like this one from Nortel, of a joint solution with Microsoft for carrier-hosted Unified Communications. The focus of that particular release is SMBs, which have generally been the target market for hosted services. There's an ongoing debate about whether larger enterprises will opt for hosted UC.
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Tomorrow's CIO: No Tech Lightweights
Of course tomorrow's CIOs need to be broad business leaders, not just technologists. But skimp on the tech foundation, and CIOs may have no future at all.
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TSA Thinks Pretend-Police Costumes Will Get Them Respect
The TSA gropes our crotches, paws through our stuff, makes us stand in long lines to get to our flights, and treats us like criminals. But the agency knows the real reason they're disliked is because they ain't stylin'. And they think realistic badges will be a solution to the problem.
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Antivirus Firm: Use File Recovery Tools To Defeat Ransomware Attack
While Kaspersky Lab says it's currently not possible to decrypt files encrypted by the most recent variant of the so-called "ransomware" Gpcode virus, file recovery tools just might get your data back.
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Open Text Works To Deliver On Enterprise 2.0 Promises
Open Text last week announced a number of interesting enhancements to round out its portfolio of Enterprise 2.0 solutions. It's a buzzword-heavy mix, as it embraces social networking, personalization, and Web 2.0 collaboration. But the most interesting features may appeal most to legal and regulatory departments.
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Data: The CIO's Most Underutilized Asset
In my recent feature story, "Tomorrow's CIO," one interesting fact that emerged from the original research we did for the piece concerned the use of data: Corporate managers see leveraging their organizations' data assets as one of the CIO's most important opportunities. So why don't more CIOs see it that way?
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Petabyte Storage Hurdles Are Technical--And Maybe Political
On Monday, Ed Bott blogged about an interesting discovery he made in the vssadmin command-line tool that Vista uses to manage the System Restore and Shadow Copy features. That utility allows you to specify the reserved sizes in petabytes (1,000 terabytes) or exabytes (1,000 petabytes). Since the drive makers have just started pushing out 1-TB drives this year, is this just a former Boy Scout inside Microsoft who wants to be prepared?
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Microsoft, The (Open Source) Census Taker
Wary eyes have been turned to Microsoft for some time now about the way it has been dipping toes into the open source pool. It's not quite ready to cannonball in -- my feeling is it simply can't -- but it's getting used to the water, and is making tentative gestures toward being a better open source citizen.
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Obama Supporters Have Edge As Internet Expands Role In Campaigns
InformationWeek has reported on a number of developments showing that the role of the Internet in American politics is expanding rapidly. Now there's proof.
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AT&T: No Tethering For The 3G iPhone
Tethering a smartphone to your laptop and using it as a wireless modem to access a network operator's 3G data network seems like it should be a slam dunk. Even though the iPhone can access AT&T's 3G goodness, AT&T won't permit it to serve a modem.
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Flock 2's Beta Edition: Good, And Only Getting Better
Last week I wrote about the Flock browser, based on Firefox and a surprise hit with me because of its social-networking integration. The 1.0 version was great, but I was most eager about the 2.0 release, based on the Firefox 3 code and also open source (of course). Wait no longer; here it is.
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Storage Consolidation, The Foundation
As a business grows and the demands on IT increase, there comes a point where the young data center has to consider such initiatives as server virtualization, advanced backup software, disk-to-disk backup, and deployment of its first SAN or NAS. Storage consolidation via a networked storage solution (be it SAN, NAS, or both) provides a foundation for those other early initiatives and is a logical first step.
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Google To Offer Tool To Test For Network Throttling
Net neutrality is a hotly contested issue, and has come under renewed fire as several ISPs have been caught throttling Internet speeds and others have publicly stated they plan to test metered broadband services. Users, caught in the middle, will soon have a new tool to use against their ISPs: a detector that will tell them if their Internet speeds are being throttled by the ISP.
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Nokia Finally Makes The E66 And E71 Smartphones Official
These smartphones were first spotted on the Internet back in December 2007. Today, Nokia finally owned up to their existence and said that they will be available in the third quarter of the year. The best part of the news is that they will come in versions supporting U.S. 3G networks.
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You've Already Got Communications-Enabled Business Processes
Communications-Enabled Business Processes, or CEBP, is one of the hot buzzwords in enterprise communications. Many people see CEBP as the Holy Grail of communications technology, something that may be attained years from now. But, in fact, you have CEBP in your enterprise now. It's called PBX features.
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NEC Replication/Failover Supports All Three Leading Hypervisors
NEC has been quietly selling its Express Cluster for Windows and Linux servers for more than 10 years while noiser competitors like Double-Take Software and CA XOsoft have gotten most of the attention. NEC's sold more than 10,000 copies of Express Cluster. Granted, some of that was in the Japanese home market, but it still put them in the top 5 in the market segment.
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Microsoft TechEd: Tell Me Something Technical
Last week, I attended Microsoft TechEd IT in Orlando, Fla. Although there didn't seem to be as much enthusiasm as I've seen in previous TechEd conferences, there were still plenty of IT people there. Microsoft estimated the total attendance at about 9,500. There were definitely some gems for those who did attend.
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ioSafe Fireproofs Individual Drives
I've talked about ioSafe's fire-resistant USB hard drive and NAS solutions in previous posts and even posted the response I got from the company's CEO. Last week they took me out for lunch and offered a Riverside Drive barbecue, which I, afraid of how Hoboken's finest would respond, politely declined. The motivation for this was their newest product, the ioSafe 3.5, which wraps a 2.5-inch hard drive in shiny steel and fireproofing to enable it to survive 1,400 degrees F for 15 minutes and waterproof to 5 feet for 24 hours while still fitting in the space normally used by a 3.5-inch hard disk. And ioSafe is so confident its little drive in a box will survive that it will spring for $2,500 of data-recovery services should you need it.
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MessageOne's Emergency Alert System Goes Global
Ladies and gentlemen, we have a problem. Since IT was the only group that included disaster recovery and/or business continuity planning as a line item on our budgets, senior management has let the geek squad (that's us, not the guys from Circuit City) run with the ball. We can manage to keep all the data safe, keep the applications up and running, and even set up a virtual desktop and SSL VPN environment so the users can run their applications from the nearest Wi-Fi hotspot, but how many of you have given any real thought to how you're going to let your fellow employees know that corporate headquarters is now a smoking pile of rubble and they need to do something different than they usually do next Monday?
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Cell Phone Fees OK For Consumers, Not Government
I hate early termination fees. Big shock, I know. But what's even more infuriating is seeing reports that Sprint didn't charge government subscribers an ETF because "the government will never, never accept such penalty amounts."
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Avoiding Enterprise Content Management Pitfalls
Developing a sound strategy for a successful enterprise content management rollout can be challenging, but, fortunately, numerous resources offer advice on best practices and pitfalls to avoid.
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Best. Cellphone. Ever.
Remember the standard desk phone from the '50s and '60s? You know, the huge, rotary phone that you could probably have killed someone with? Well, picture exactly that, but instead of using regular phone lines, the Port-O-Rotary lets you insert a SIM card and take it with you wherever you go. So what if it fills your entire carry-on bag?
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In Other News: Coffee, Bandwidth Pricing, And In-Flight Connections
In case you were distracted by the release of the newest, cheaper version of a certain popular mobile device this week, here's a recap of wireless and broadband news you might have missed.
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Lawyers In The Cloud
A new service provides on-demand e-discovery to help companies churn through reams of electronic files.
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Obama Fights Smears Via Web 2.0 Approach
Blogs, e-mail, and Web sites have reached a milestone of sorts in campaign politics. If Sen. Barack Obama's campaign is any indication, they have taken on a new level of significance. Obama's team created a Web site just to deal with rumors generated online. Interestingly, the site tackles the problem in a decidedly Web 2.0 way.
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Site Exploits Linux Programmer's Death On Rainier To Hawk Malware
File this under, "How low can you go?" A Web site is trying to capitalize on hiker-programmer Eduard Burceag's tragic death on Mount Rainier on Tuesday to hawk malicious software.
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Who Makes The UC Buying Decision?
Forrester Research has a new report out that offers some insights into the communications technologies that enterprises are adopting -- and are still holding off on. There's also a provocative data point on how involved business unit executives are in Unified Communications purchases.
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iPhone Applications To Be Limited To 2 GB In Size
It looks like developers for the iPhone will have to keep their applications under an absolute limit of 2 GB, set by Apple. Apple didn't specify any reason for the limit, but it probably isn't a bad thing.
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Nokia To Open Source Devs: 'We Need Closed'
Who gets to tell the open source world it needs to learn to play by proprietary rules? Nokia, evidently. When VP of software Dr. Ari Jaaksi spoke at the Handsets World conference earlier this week, he stated that open source developers needed to be "educated" in how the (very closed) mobile telecom industry works. Touchy words, but not wholly foolish ones.
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Reducing Backup Windows, Part III
In this third segment on reducing backup windows, the focus will be on getting rid of the data that no longer needs to be backed up. If you're like most of the customers we speak with, well over 85% of the data that you backup during your full backup hasn't changed since the last backup and 70% hasn't changed in the last few years. Yet, every week, it's methodically backed up. If you could eliminate this data, that means in a 10 TB environment you could reduce your full backup set to 1.5 TBs, or worst case to 3 TBs. That will have a dramatic and positive impact on your backup window.
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Google Eases Mobile iGoogle Usability
Google has made customizing the mobile version of iGoogle a whole lot easier. Rather than do it from your phone, you can make all the changes and alterations to iGoogle's appearance from your desktop.
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Google Attempts To Speed Mobile Search Times
Google took steps to accelerate the time it takes to load Google's home page on mobile phones and initiate a search. I took Google for a spin on several different phones. Is it really that much faster?
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China's Long List Of Hacking Denials
China today denied allegations from two U.S. congressmen that the nation had cracked its way into congressional computer systems. In fact, says China's Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang, China doesn't even have the skills to do so.
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SpringCM Blends Ease-Of-Use With Solid Features
SpringCM is on a roll, with a user base that doubled in 2007, $14 million in fresh funding and an aggressive release schedule (about every quarter, as of late) that is adding significant new features to its core document management system at a rapid rate. With version 4.3 of its software as a service (SaaS) flagship product, a number of these features caught my eye.
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Microsoft, Yahoo, Google Behind The Glassdoor
Apparently, Microsoft employees love their pay but aren't too wild about boss Ballmer. Likewise, Yahoo seems like a great place to work, but Jerry has lost his "mojo." These and more salacious tidbits can be found on new social slam book site Glassdoor.com. Thankfully, there is an enterprise lesson to be learned here.
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What Are The Best Political Blogs?
As part of preparing to work on our new Political Tech blog, I've been putting together a reading list of the best political blogs, newspapers, and magazines across the political spectrum. And now I'm coming to you, to share the list for your benefit and to find out if you have any recommendations.
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Flash Vs. RAM Solid State Disks
As major vendors ready for entry into the solid-state disk (SSD) market with Flash memory systems, don't count out the traditional RAM SSD. Even though RAM SSDs are more expensive per capacity, companies like Texas Memory Systems are seeing continued growth in RAM-based SSD systems. Why? RAM SSDs have two advantages: speed and reliability.
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Happy Carbon Belch Day, America!
Conservative group Grassfire.org wants people to waste as much energy as possible today by "hosting a barbecue, going for a drive, watching television, leaving a few lights on, or even smoking a few cigars."
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How Technology Could Solve The Mystery Of The Tainted Tomatoes
It's been seven weeks since people started getting sick from tomatoes and the FDA still doesn't know who is producing them. The tomato industry has lost tens of millions of dollars, and my craving for a thickly sliced tomato sandwich on sprouted wheat with mayo and Swiss goes unsatisfied. Too bad there's an unused technology, called RFID, that may have tracked those tainted tomatoes back to the grower by now.
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Clearwire: We'll Have $17.5 Billion In WiMax Revenue By 2017
Clearwire gave investors a peek at its future recently. If you ask me, the peek was too far into the future. Reaching $17.5 billion in WiMax revenue by 2017 is nice, but what will the picture look like in 2010 or 2011? Not so rosy.
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Customer Service Reps: The Next American Idol?
Here's a thought: What if contact centers become the breeding ground for a new generation of Internet-created media stars? That provocative idea comes from our friends at Wainhouse Research, Andrew Davis and Brent Kelly.
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What's 'Disruptive' About Open Source
The other day, while in a phone conversation, the old canard about open source being a "disruptive technology" came up. It's true, but I think it's one of those things (like "information wants to be free") that runs the risk of becoming a thought-cliché. You always want to talk about what's being disrupted, why, and to what end. For me, what's being disrupted most is complacency: the mentality that no one ever got fired for buying Vendor X.
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Video Demo Of Firefox Mobile Browser Surfaces, Looks Incredible
Wow. That's all I can say right now. It's been about nine months since Mozilla promised to "rock the mobile Web" with its forthcoming mobile version of the Firefox browser. If the final product bears even the slightest resemblance to the browser demonstrated in this video, every other mobile browser out there has a lot to worry about.
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T-Mobile Hits A Not-So-Hot Spot
It seems that the more expensive the hotel room, the better the chance that you'll pay extra for anything more than the bed. So, when I recently booked a low-priced hotel that included free Wi-Fi Internet access, I was pretty proud that I had beaten the system once again. This time, though, there was an unwelcome twist.
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Lawmakers: Chinese Hackers Pwn3d US
There are numerous news reports that multiple congressional computers have been hacked from systems apparently residing in China. The hackers’ target: a list of dissidents.
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Google v. Apple
The future of the Internet may come down to a battle between Google and Apple. It's tempting to see the contest as open versus closed, but that fight -- Google v. Microsoft -- has more or less been decided. Open won. It's hard to see how Microsoft's decision to copy Google's business model can be spun any other way.
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Enterprise 2.0: Power To The People
Corporations have a way of dragging their feet when disruptive technologies promise to goose -- or threaten to halt, depending on where you sit -- productivity.
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Keeping Secrets And Finding Clues In Data
Your company (probably) has rules about how frequently systems get backed up, e-mail gets deleted, and other data-retention issues. But would those policies hurt if your company was suddenly yanked into litigation, especially noncompete, patent infringement, or trade-secret cases?
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Resurrecting Speed
In a recent entry I pronounced 'speed is dead' as it relates to solving the backup window problem. As the entry indicates, the NEED to reduce the backup window continues to be a desire. The ABILITY to reduce the backup window is the challenge. Due to the network infrastructure, the ability of the servers being protected to send that data fast enough, as well as a host of other issues, are the big limiters now in backup window reduction.
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It's A Flock, Not A Herd!
I have to admit, the first time I heard about Flock, I said "What, another Web browser?" My skepticism remained high when I learned how Flock was designed to make it easier to work with social Web sites, most of which I never touch. Then I actually tried it out, and within two days I was using it to manage my Flickr account. Within four days it was my new default browser. And with a success story like that under my belt, I picked up the phone and chatted with Flock CEO Shawn Hardin about the whole Flock thang.
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Tomorrow's CIO: Process Before Technology
Which comes first: process improvement or technology implementation? If you answered the former, congratulations, you are well on your way to being Tomorrow's CIO. If you answered the latter, well, good luck with that patch-management project because that's what you're going to be doing for a long time to come.
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70% Of iPhone Apps To Be Available For Free
Update: Looks like current iPhone owners will have to wait until July 11 to upgrade to firmware version 2.0 and access the iPhone Application Store after all. Word was that the store would open for business as early as June 27. Turns out that report was false. The good news is, a survey of iPhone app developers indicated that 70% percent of all applications will be made available for free. Not bad!
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Sony To Blow Other Cameraphones Out Of The Water
While the iPhone 3G is getting much of the hype right now, it still has what many consider a lackluster camera. Sony Ericsson looks to be readying a new flagship smartphone for its Cyber-shot line that will pack a whopping 8.1-megapixel camera.
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Location Awareness Is The Real iPhone Revolution
With the imminent availability of the iPhone 3G, we're seeing the emergence of a new category of personal productivity applications that will prove as important as e-mail, word processing, and the spreadsheet: Location-aware applications, software that knows where you are and helps you take better advantage of what's around you.
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Pearl Jam 'Gets' Mobility, The Internet. Metallica Doesn't
Pearl Jam is good to its fans. Not only does it encourage bootlegs, it has teamed up with Verizon Wireless to offer free bootlegs from its upcoming tour via Verizon's V Cast music service. Bands like Pearl Jam and Nine Inch Nails definitely have the power of mobile phones and the Internet figured out. Meanwhile, Metallica recently forced bloggers to take down (positive) reviews of its forthcoming album.
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A Look Inside Google Pittsburgh
On a recent trip to Pittsburgh to meet with tech startups, I stopped by Google's office in the Collaborative Innovation Center on the campus of Carnegie Mellon University. In an interview, Google engineering manager Kamal Nigam explains why Google came to Pittsburgh and what it's doing there.
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Double-Take, Neverfail Announce Support For Hyper-V
Here in steamy Orlando at Microsoft's TechEd IT Pros geekfest, Double-Take Software and Neverfail both announced that they'll be supporting MS's upcoming Hyper-V server virtualization hypervisor.
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A Pricey Peek Behind The Curtain At IBM's Intranet
IntranetBlog's Toby Ward recently said that "IBM has the best intranet in the world." That's a strong statement, but you'll have a rare opportunity to see for yourself when IBM gives the world a look on Thursday, June 12.
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The Trouble With Social Computing
Is it too simplistic to state that "we've left the PC era and we're now in the era of social computing"? That's how Tony Clement, CEO of social-collaboration software house Aegeon, put it in a fascinating session at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. Here's my take on his provocative statement.
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Sergey Brin To Quit Earth
In the year 2011, Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, will hop aboard a Soyuz rocket and get outta Dodge ... at least for a while. The ship will dock with the International Space Station, where Brin will likely discover just how fun zero gravity is (or isn't). Let's hope, for Brin's sake, that he doesn't get motion sickness.
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Obama Staff Scrubs Site Of Hate Speech
Sen. Barack Obama's campaign staff scrubbed his campaign site clean of some community posts after bloggers criticized the candidate for hosting anti-Semitic statements.
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Current iPhone Owners Are In The Dark About Device Upgrades
I bought an iPhone in the first few hours they were available, and I expect to do it again when the iPhone 3G ships next month. But what's the plan for current iPhone owners to upgrade to the iPhone 3G? Will we get a discount? Will we have to renew our service plan from AT&T? What can do we do with our current iPhones? Apple isn't talking about that just yet.
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New Visual Studio SharePoint Extensions Balance Good News/Bad News
SharePoint developers who use Visual Studio 2008 should be happy to hear that the Visual Studio 2008 Extensions version 1.2 (VSeWSS 1.2) was released last week. This follows the release back in February 2008 of the Visual Studio 2005 Extensions version 1.1 (VSeWSS 1.1), which had multiple new features.
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How Tech Savvy Does A CIO Need To Be?
One of the areas explored in our upcoming feature story and analytical report, "Tomorrow's CIO," has to do with just how technical CIOs will need to be in the future. Will technology expertise be off-loaded, or will CIOs still need to call the shots, systems- and software-wise?
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Alternatives To The iPhone 3G
It's almost a cliché to say the original iPhone was a game-changer, but it was. Apple's so-called "Jesus phone" was well-received by critics and adored by consumers. It can be credited with bringing the smartphone to the masses, as well as a slew of touch-screen imitators.
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Two Conferences, Two Different Directions
This week, there are two conferences being held. One is Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference, which sold out for the first time this year. The other is Microsoft’s TechEd IT. Apple’s announcement of a new iPhone, one that appeals to IT departments, may leave some mobile IT aficionados thinking they went to the wrong conference.
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Apple Sacrificing Short-Term Profits To Build An iPhone Platform
Apple's primary goal with the iPhone 3G is to saturate the market with iPhones, to make the device a major development platform alongside Windows and the Mac. That's why it's selling it cheap -- it wants to get as many devices into users' hands as possible, and it's willing to sacrifice some short-term profits to do it.
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Lights! Camera! Action! New Job?
Unemployment numbers are rising, according to the U.S. government's latest labor stats. In the hunt for new work, do you think a Web-based video resumé would help you stand out from other job candidates? Some folks think it's worth a try.
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Where Is Google's Free FTP Service?
Google provides so many services for free, I am rather surprised that it doesn't offer a free FTP hosting service for small business customers. Sure, Docs, Apps, and even GMail and Picasa can serve as repositories of files, but they aren't super convenient for transferring large files back and forth. Will there ever be a Google FTP?
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There Are Now (Finally) Business Class Disk Crypto Options For OS X
Back in January, we listed a few things that Apple needs to do to to make the Mac OS X more "enterprise" IT security friendly. While we're waiting, a number of independent security vendors are stepping up with enterprise-class disk encryption.
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The Four Trends Driving Enterprise Cloud Computing
Google predicts that virtually all meaningful innovation in business applications over the next 10 years will occur within the cloud, driven by four distinct trends. What are they?
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Who Wants To Be A Beta-Tester?
Me, evidently! This month I've been elbow-deep in the beta-testing of no less than three open source products: Movable Type 4.2, OpenOffice 3, and (of course) Firefox 3. It's no coincidence I use these three applications almost daily, so I have a vested interest in making sure their newest revisions work well. (That doesn't keep me from retaining the existing known-good versions, of course...)
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Symantec Goes For VMware’s Jugular
The company teams with Citrix to carve out a chunk of the server virtualization market.
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Boston Celtics' Secret Battle Cry: Ubuntu
The Boston Celtics are closing in on another NBA championship after having adopted ubuntu as their rallying cry at the beginning of the season.
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RIM's Touch Screen Device Spotted
While the world had its eyes on San Francisco yesterday, another noteworthy gem popped up on the Internet. A new, but unannounced, touch screen device from Research In Motion was photographed and shared across the Web. My question is, does this device even have a chance against the new iPhone?
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D'Ambrosio Steps Down From Avaya, Citing Medical Reasons
Avaya announced today that its president and CEO, Lou D'Ambrosio, is stepping down due to "medical reasons" (about which no further details were given), and that he'll be replaced on an interim basis by Charlie Giancarlo, who left Cisco late last year to join the private equity firm, Silver Lake Partners, that acquired Avaya almost exactly one year ago. The Avaya announcement is here and my No Jitter analysis is here (we'll be following the story at No Jitter throughout the day). The timing couldn't be much worse for Avaya, as a slowing U.S. economy threatens to stall growth for the enterprise voice market in North America.
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Five Reasons NOT To Buy The 3G iPhone
To be sure, the 3G iPhone announced during yesterday's WWDC keynote is a big improvement over the original. But there are still a few detractors to keep certain people away. Here are five reasons explaining why you may want to avoid the 3G iPhone.
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Is 'Good Enough Security' Good Enough?
There's a name for security on a shoestring budget, where you're constrained by economic realities and so you delude yourself that the minimal steps you've taken are "good enough" to protect your organization against workaday threats. But the reality is, they're not good enough and you ain't protected.
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Sepaton Boosts VTL Speed And Capacity
Answering the question "Why would anyone want to dedupe as a post process" with a data-ingestion rate of a whopping 9.5 GB/s (Yes, that's GigaBYTES per second), Sepaton announced its newer, bigger faster virtual tape library, imaginatively named the S2100-ES2 VTL Series 1000 at the Symantec (formerly Veritas) Vision conference in Las Vegas this week.
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Can The Spam
According to recent data from Akismet, some 89% of all blog comments are spam. If you're running a blog with unmoderated comments without some sort of anti-spam measures, your signal noise ratio is going to be a mess and your comment threads will be virtually unreadable.
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Sun Micros' John Gage Goes Green
Sun Microsystems' fifth employee has left the company to join his friends at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and research green technology. It's a bittersweet day.
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New Ransom-Ware Virus Resurfaces
Kaspersky Lab is warning that a new variant of a previous virus attack is under way, and those who fall victim will find their computer files held for ransom.
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AT&T Reveals Major 3G iPhone Caveat
AT&T has chimed in with some information about the 3G iPhone. There's no mincing words. Over two-years, the 3G iPhone will cost owners $40 MORE than the current generation iPhone.
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Energy Woes? Blame The CIO!
A new survey puts responsibility for managing an organization's energy consumption primarily on the CEO, then on the CIO. There's a difference between responsibility and liability, but either way CIOs have to do more to influence corporate energy use.
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Apple's WWDC Meta Liveblog: 3G iPhone Announced, Includes GPS
The 3G iPhone is official! It comes with GPS, increased talk and stand-by times, better audio quality, a flush 3.5-mm headset jack, and will be available worldwide on July 11. It will cost $200 for 8 GB, $300 for 16 GB. That puts it on even pricing ground with dozens of competing models.
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Google Gives Third-Party Developers Access To LBS Tools
Location-based services are a long way from reaching their potential. Applications we've seen from the likes of Google (think MyLocation) and other GPS-based developers are just scratching the surface. In order to uncover more of LBS's functionality, Google has given third-party developers access to its location server to power LBS apps of their own.
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Nero's Dilemma: Why Pay For Closed-Source Software On Linux?
Here's a problem for you. Once you have made the jump to Linux and discovered that a great many commercial programs have free / open source equivalents, why would you want to pay for a given program (like, say, a CD burning suite) when you can get the same thing or even more from your distro's software repository? That was the question I put to the folks at Nero, makers of the for-pay Nero CD/DVD authoring suite for both Windows and Linux.
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Sepaton Launches New Backup and Dedupe Products
The VTL company says its new products can deduplicate and store petabytes of data.
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Telepresence: Hype or Revolution?
One of the hottest topics in Unified Communications is video, and specifically the high-definition, high-end experience known as telepresence. HP and Polycom make telepresence systems, but the concept really took off in the market when Cisco announced its version of the technology almost 2 years ago.
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Samsung's Omnia To Challenge Apple's iPhone?
Curious timing, Samsung. Of all days, Samsung chose today, June 9, to launch its flagship device for 2008, a Windows Mobile-based über-phone. We all know that Apple is set to announce the next generation of its iPhone later today. Let's take a look at the features of the Omnia and compare them with what we believe will appear on the 3G iPhone.
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Metadata Consolidation
In storage, there's always discussion about consolidation; taking all your dispersed storage assets and consolidating them to a single storage system. But there's a different kind of storage fragmentation going almost unnoticed in metadata, or data about data. Many applications create metadata -- backup systems, data movement or archive applications, data management applications, and content search applications -- but only a few consolidate them.
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Zango Just Needs To Stop, Or Be Stopped
Last week, spyware researcher Ben Edelman released another batch of evidence that shows the false "value proposition" of Zango's business model. Zango, formerly known as 180Solutions, has had its software installed under shady circumstances and false pretenses, and it's been happening for years. They need to stop, now.
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Antidote To Apple's iPhone?
A couple of thoughts on Apple's introduction of its 3G iPhone, about which it's now becoming clear that the reality can never live up to the advance hype. First off -- I admit it -- I want one, even though there's nary a scratch on my "old" EDGE iPhone. Second, one is likely to get a much better deal -- like, cheaper service for near-equivalent functionality -- by waiting until next year for a Google phone.
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InPhase Lays Off 40, Holographic Storage Still SciFi
Despite well-received demos at the NAB show in April and promises then to ship its long-awaited Tapestry holographic storage drives and media in May, InPhase Technologies has once again missed a delivery date and is now promising drives and media for December. Since the first promised delivery date was back in 2006, I'm not holding my breath. It's too bad, as we could really use a high-capacity, random access, WORM storage device that didn't draw power when idle like the 300-GB Tapestry promises to be. For now, Plasmon's 60-GB UDO-2 will have to do.
Are These Photos Of The Next-Generation iPhone?
CrunchGear has photos of what it purports to be the next-generation iPhone, which Apple is announcing Monday. It's thinner than the current model, comes in both red and black, and it has a front-mounted camera for video iChat.
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Google's Grand Experiment: You
Google has opened up a testing bed of sorts for Gmail users to check out new, unreleased features and provide feedback. Called Labs, it's sort of an early peek at the behind-the-scenes world of what Google's developers are working on. I decided to take it for a spin.
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Startup Neocleus Sees Desktop Hypervisors As Key
Desktop virtualization has its dominant vendors, namely VMware and Citrix Systems. But in an embryonic field, consider the alternatives. I'd like to cite Neocleus, an Israeli firm, which is focused on running the virtual machine at the desktop, not on a central server, under a desktop hypervisor.
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Mysterious Boxes Appearing At Apple Resellers
This is the penultimate 3G iPhone teaser. An Apple reseller in Australia has received a mysterious shipment of unidentified contents that is under strict NDA and not allowed to be opened until June 10. What could be in there? Gee, I wonder...
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Sitecore’s Web CMS 6.0 Promises Beauty, Brawn
The newest version of Sitecore's flagship content management system, Web CMS 6.0, focuses on further refining and enhancing its core strength -- a great-looking, intuitive user interface.
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Survey: 55% Will Unlock The 3G iPhone
Gizmodo has a running survey on its site today. The question: Will you unlock the 3G iPhone once you get one, even if the SDK apps are good? The answer tells us that even iPhone firmware 2.0, with its access to third-party apps, won't be enough to douse the temptations of unlocking.
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Goin' Mobile (With Ubuntu)
Chalk up another edition of what's shaping up to be the Linux edition for the rest of us. A new version of Ubuntu, "Netbook Remix", sports a feature set and a slimmed-down footprint specifically for the emerging (shilling for already emerged!) micro-notebook market.
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Finding The Needle, Part Three
In our final entry about finding emerging technology, I'll look at the third motivating factor when selecting an emerging technology company -- going with a company that is solving a problem that's not entirely unique, but they are just flat out doing it better.
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Contact Centers As The UC Killer App
If you're looking for early-adopter scenarios of Unified Communications, your best bet is probably to watch what happens in enterprise contact centers (or call centers, as they used to be known). Contact centers are frequently at the cutting edge of communications technologies, as occurred with computer-telephony integration (CTI)--a comparison that understandly makes UC advocates a little nervous.
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Movable Type 4.2 To Focus On Speed
Good news for the Movable Type user community: As of last week, Movable Type 4.2 Release Candidate 1 is now available for download. Movable Type 4.2 is intended to address some of the most common pain points users face: search speed, template management, and anti-spam functionality for blog comments.
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Note To Dennis Howlett: If You're So Down On E2, Then Stay Home
Dennis Howlett has posted a blog on ZDNet that essentially disses next week's Enterprise 2.0 Conference where he's scheduled (apparently, against his will) to moderate a panel discussion on microblogging (you know: Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, etc). Enterprise 2.0 is a production of TechWeb (Disclosure: the parent company to InformationWeek). Howlett's blog is called Enterprise Alley. Alleys, including his, are where garbage is sometimes found.
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Microsoft: Seven Security Fixes For June
The software maker says seven security updates are on the way next week. One has been ranked "moderate," three as "important," and the remaining three reached "critical," its most severe rating.
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Google Adds Bus/Train Directions To Maps For Mobile
A vital aspect of traveling to other cities is being able to get from point A to B when in unfamiliar territory. Depending on where you are, public transportation often makes the most sense. With that in mind, Google has improved its Maps for Mobile product by providing bus and train directions.
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Penguins, Pirates, Steelers, And Startups
Pittsburgh is known for its sports teams, three rivers, steel-manufacturing heritage -- and increasingly for its technology innovation. The Penguins' championship bid just ended and the Pirates are in last place, but there are other reasons for "the Burgh" to cheer. A startup incubator has just opened on the city's South Side, and the Gates Center for Computer Science is under construction to the east.
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Sci-Fi Shocker: Ray Bradbury Wrong On Future Of Electronic Books
Science-fiction icon Ray Bradbury, who was quoted the other day as saying that e-books will never succeed because they're "not books," is wrong.They're succeeding already, and they are -- pretty much -- books.
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Will The iPhone App Store Open For Business On Monday?
Opinions vary on whether or not Apple will make the iPhone Application Store a reality on Monday, June 9, after Steve Jobs' WWDC keynote address concludes. Some say yes, others don't think it will be ready for another few weeks. Which will it be?
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Goodbye, Alltel
Another venerable telco name is about to disappear in the wake of Verizon Wireless' announcement that it is going to buy Alltel Corp. Alltel joins GTE, Contel, Centel and scores of other telephone company names that have disappeared in the past couple of decades as the industry consolidated and continues to be decimated by competition from new technology.
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Is 'OpenWindows' Just A Pipe Dream?
Every few months without fail there's another call for Microsoft to release Windows as an open source platform. This time around it's in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. The easy interpretation: it's a sign the idea has reached critical mass. My take: it's pipe dreaming.
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Nanotechnology: Tiny Tech Is Clean Tech
If anyone at the NSTI Nanotechnology Conference and the concurrent CleanTechnology show in Boston this week was concerned about recent reports of toxicity associated with carbon nanotubes, they weren't showing it.
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BlackBerrys To Harness The Power Of E-Trade For Real-Time Trading
If you dabble in stocks, have an E-Trade account, and a BlackBerry, this news is for you. Today, E-Trade and Research In Motion announced E-Trade Mobile Pro, new software that will allow investors to receive real-time quotes and make investments directly from their BlackBerrys.
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Will Microsoft Fix These UI Bugs In Windows 7?
Blogger Long Zheng has set up a Windows UI Task Force to identify the UI inconsistencies that exist in Vista. I think it's great to help Microsoft identify these problems, but I have some ideas on how to make sure Microsoft sees them and fixes them before Windows 7 arrives.
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The Need For Interoperability
One of the major discussions in UC has to do with the need for interoperability. The legacy voice world is highly proprietary, built around PBXs that speak vendor-specific protocols understood only by that vendor's telephones. A lot of people like to compare the PBX to the mainframe computer, and suggest that, just as in computing, the end station will become untethered, hardware will become commoditized, and everything will reside in software. That may, in fact, turn out to be the end state, but we're nowhere close today. And the interoperability aspect is even more challenging than the basic software issue.
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OS X Lockdown
I just finished reviewing Apple's Mac OS X Security Configuration for Version 10.5 Leopard guide. Anyone who is interested in keeping the 10.5 installation secure should take a look.
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Running SharePoint On A Vista Box
Bamboo Solutions announced late last month on its community site that it has devised a way to run Microsoft SharePoint on a Vista box.
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Adobe's Buzzword Fails To Compete With Google Docs
I'll say this: Adobe's Buzzword, a cloud computing word processor, sure is pretty. That will be the last positive comment I make about Buzzword, though, which trades functionality for form, simplicity for style, and substance, for, er, Flash.
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Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey Talks About Its Business Model
In Raiders of the Lost Ark, a character asks Indiana Jones what the plan is. "I don't know. I'm making this up as I go," Indy replies. Loosely paraphrased, that's how Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey answered when I asked him what the company's business plan is.
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Google's Missing Link
What do Microsoft and Yahoo have on their home pages that Google doesn't? They have links to their respective privacy policies.
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Using Baby Carrots To Motivate Staff In Big Ways
How do you thank your hardest working staff? Is it through once-a-year raises, or perhaps with occasional bonuses? Some companies are using Web-based services to recognize outstanding employee performance throughout the year with small rewards that can really add up in goodwill.
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Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey Describes Upcoming Upgrades
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said the service is working on upgrades including improved e-mail notifications, the ability to let users create groups of Twitter friends, new instant messaging and social media connectivity, and iPhone applications. However, they'll all have to wait on improving Twitters uptime, he said, which has recently been horrendous.
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Cell Phone Study: People Don't Travel All That Much
Northeastern University secretly spied on the movements of 100,000 cell phone users as they traveled outside of the United States. The conclusion? Most people stay within 20 miles of their homes for more than half the year.
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Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey: Improved Uptime Is Top Priority
Twitter is working on adding the ability for users to separate their contacts into groups, support for sending and receiving messages by e-mail, and adding new instant-message and Internet channels for the service, said CEO Jack Dorsey in a one-on-one interview with InformationWeek. But first Twitter needs to fix the outages that have plagued the service for weeks -- that's the first and only priority for now, he said. We talked with Dorsey about uptime, the company's business model, and new features.
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SMB Data Protection
A friend of mine runs a small insurance company and they only have two servers, but that data is as critical to them as the hundreds of terabytes that Exxon Mobile stores is to them. While he does backups, it is to another disk drive, and he doesn't take the hard drive home with him. In fact, to be honest, the second drive is installed internally inside one of the servers. What if his office catches on fire or gets flooded?
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More From The FUD Factory
An article at Law.com named "Open Source Software Shows Its Muscle" has been drawing a lot of fire from other commentators on the open source beat. Allow me to add my own heat to that fire.
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Bloggers To Enlighten The World Come Jobs' WWDC Keynote
Without mobile broadband, the world of all things Apple would seemingly go dark on Monday, June 9, between 10 a.m. and noon, during Steve Jobs' keynote address at the WWDC. Why dark? Because there will be no live video or audio broadcasts of the event. Instead, we'll have to rely on the hard-working, on-site bloggers to break all the news.
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Organizational Challenges For UC
The convergence of voice and data onto a single network has required some significant changes to the IT organization. But those changes may pale beside the effort that will be required to get the enterprise IT shop ready to implement and support Unified Communications.
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O2 Employees Fired For Selling iPhones On eBay
Note to retail employees everywhere: Using your employee discount to purchase merchandise at reduced cost and then selling it on eBay for a profit will likely upset your employer and jeopardize your job.
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Hezbollah Has Hacking Chops
Michael Chertoff, Homeland Security secretary, recently stated that Hezbollah is the greatest threat to U.S. national security. And Western intelligence agencies are increasingly taking the organization's cyberattack skills more seriously. What do you think their targets would be?
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CIO Succession: Lack Of Inside Talent, Or Lack Of Opportunity?
Following up on a lively recent discussion about hiring an insider or outsider to replace the CIO. Eight in 10 CIOs expect their replacement to come from within, a recent survey says. The disconnect: Other execs and managers don't share the CIO's faith in insiders.
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More Than A CIO: Piling On Operations
HSBC North America, "the world's local bank," according to its tagline, has promoted its CIO to something called a Chief Technology and Services Officer. I'm all for CIOs taking on more responsibilities, but is there a limit?
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Twitter Management Stood Me Up
I was all excited to do an interview with the Twitter management team this afternoon, but the appointed time came and went and they didn't show up when they said they would. They were unavailable. This is ironic because one of the points of the interview was going to be Twitter's unreliability and unavailability over the past few weeks.
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Why Does Carl Icahn Think He Should Play A Role In Shaping The Future Of Tech Giants?
I am sorry, but is this guy the biggest egomaniac ever? The activist investor cum corporate raider not only fiddled with the fate of Motorola, but now he is seeking the removal of Yahoo's CEO, Jerry Yang. Will Icahn ever stop?
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Goosh: A Command Shell For Google, By Gosh
At first I thought this was a nerdy joke, but I played with it a couple of minutes and by gosh it looks useful: Goosh is a Unix-like command line for Google. Type in any of about 20 commands, and Goosh returns the output from Google. Type web microsoft and Goosh returns search results on the Web for Microsoft, ordered by number -- enter any number to go to the corresponding Web page. wiki microsoft returns a Wikipedia search, video Microsoft returns a video search, and so forth.
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Supreme Court Backs Online Fantasy Leagues
Striking a blow for fantasy-league owners everywhere, the Supreme Court on Monday declined to intervene in a suit involving Major League Baseball and a Web-based fantasy-league operator.
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ProStor Boosts RDX To 500 GB
Taking advantage of the new 500-GB, 2.5-inch laptop drives recently released by Hitachi, Samsung, and Fujitsu, ProStor Systems is boosting the maximum capacity of its RDX removable disk cartridges, making them an even more viable alternative to tape for SMB backup and archival storage.
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Meet Me In Boston On June 9 For A Free 'Evening In The Cloud'
While there's no shortage of events that you can attend to find out more about the various Internet-based substitutes for the solutions you might normally run on your own servers or in your own data centers, there's no event where the question "Can you run all of your IT in the cloud?" is being asked. That's the public conversation that I and other CIOs and IT pros will be having with Amazon, Google, and Salesforce.com at this coming Monday's free tech meetup in Boston. I'm calling it an "Evening in the Cloud" and you're invited to come, join the conversation, network, and enjoy a few cocktails on me. Details are below.
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Computer Science 101: Gates And Google
A corner of Carnegie Mellon University's normally quiet campus is a noisy mess these days, due to construction of the new Gates Center for Computer Science, a steel-framed building perched high atop concrete columns. The site is only a hundred yards from CMU's Collaborative Innovation Center, home to none other than Google.
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Nokia: Video Calling Uptake Slow Because People Are Vain
This is rich. Video calling services that send live video feeds to/from mobile phones use really interesting technology that has many potential uses. The problem is, most people have decided that the view of themselves captured by mobile phones "isn't very flattering."
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A Quick Look At Facebook's Open Source
The other week, when representatives from Facebook mentioned that they'd be open-sourcing significant portions of their platform, I hazarded a guess that they would be providing at most a set of APIs. Now that Facebook's actually released some code under the aegis of the Facebook Open Platform, I had a look-see. To my delight, I saw more than just APIs.
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OmniUpdate Upgrades Its Flagship CMS
As the school year comes to a close and students and faculty start to thin out, it's a good opportunity for campus IT departments to look at making the upgrades and system changes they've been delaying until they have minimal user impact. For schools looking at upgrading or evaluating a content management system, OmniUpdate's latest revision to OU Campus, its flagship CMS, comes at the right time.
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Does UC Improve Productivity?
The whole reason for Unified Communications, it’s believed, is that UC makes your workers and your business processes more efficient and productive. But productivity benefits are almost always tough to quantify and measure reliably, and that’s certainly the case with UC.
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Clickability Wins Award As Best CMS
The Clickability On-Demand Web Content Management Platform recently won the 2008 CODiE Award for Best Content Management Solution. While some awards don't carry too much weight, the CODiE award submissions are judged by industry peers and members of the SIIA, which means there's no monkey business with the ballot box. This win for Clickability is a nice feather in its cap.
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Blogosphere Eyes Hillary Clinton's Last Stand
As the last two Democratic nominating contests approach, Sen. Hillary Clinton's online presence hasn't diminished.
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Sensationalism: The Established Media's Only Answer To The Long Tail?
In response to my last post (the one on why both the NY Times and Mashable.com were off-base about the connection between blogging and heart failure), several readers wrote to offer an opinion about the direction that the NY Times' coverage is taking. Have you noticed the dramatic background music being played on your favorite local or national news program? The river of graphic headlines on most big-league news sites? Some shortcuts in reporting being taken that certain news outlets would never have taken before? You can thank the Internet's....
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Windows 7 Will Be A Lightly Tweaked Windows Vista
Last week, Microsoft gave a teeny, tiny bit of information about the successor to Windows Vista, currently named Windows 7. There wasn't a lot of real meaty data in its disclosures, but it said enough to reset any expectations you might have that Windows 7 would be a radical departure from Windows Vista.
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Mars Probe Uses Twitter To Communicate With Earthlings
NASA is using Twitter to communicate with its closest friends on Earth. The Phoenix Mars Lander account on Twitter is http://twitter.com/marsphoenix, and it started posting to twitter May 7 from interplanetary space. In that short time, it's accumulated about 15,000 followers, making it the 14th most popular Twitter in the galaxy, according to Twitterholic.
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Twitter Struggles With Downtime, While Fending Off Irked A-List Bloggers
Twitter is coming off a rough couple of weeks. The service seemed to be down more often than up, and had to switch off services like SMS and instant messaging in order to throttle demand on its servers. If that wasn't enough, the Twitter team has had to fend off sniping from A-list bloggers like Robert Scoble -- who got the idea that Twitter was blaming him, personally, for the outage -- and TechCrunch.
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Untangle: Aptly Named
Scarcely a week goes by when I don't hear about yet another new (or relatively new) open source project that stands in for a proprietary solution. Consider Untangle, a network gateway appliance that runs on any commodity hardware and handles spam, firewalling, Web filtering and protocol controls, VPN, and tons more. They'll even send you a preloaded demo server.
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Juggling Workloads And The Beach
Summer is almost here. Do you know where your employees are? When colleagues are on vacation, those back in the office are often left scrambling to make up the work that's left behind, especially when there's a project deadline approaching. But project resource planning tools can help.
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Report: RIM Must Hand Over Keys Or Risk Takedown
The Economic Times is reporting that the Indian government's Department of Telecom isn't buying RIM's claim that it can't hand over the encryption keys for its popular BlackBerrys. And that the telecom department is (in the best Don Corleone voice it could muster) giving RIM an ultimatum it can't refuse. While there's no severed horse head, there's more to the story.
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Neil Young's Big Green Electric Hybrid Machine
Neil Young is making tech headlines again, following his appearance last month at the JavaOne conference. This time the legendary Canadian rocker is getting attention for his collaboration with Johnathan Goodwin of H-Line Conversions to transform a 1959 Lincoln Continental into a hybrid electric vehicle.
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What Is Unified Communications?
Since this is a new blog, I'll start with a very quick introduction: I'm the co-chairman of VoiceCon, the leading conference on enterprise real-time communications/UC. I'm also editor of a TechWeb site called No Jitter, which runs blog postings and in-depth features on IP telephony, UC, and converged networking. I used to be the editor of Business Communications Review, which many of you may remember, and which sadly was discontinued at the end of last year. I'll be blogging regularly here on Unified Communications topics.
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Google's 'GPhone' Delayed Until 2009
Before you get all bent out of shape, it's worth pointing out that the GPhone and Android (Google's Linux-based smartphone operating system) are two entirely separate things. Was anyone waiting for the actual GPhone, anyway?
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Learn From Other's Mistakes - Encrypt Your Tapes
In the most recent of what seems to be an endless litany of mistakes by people who should know better Bank of New York Mellon has used a third party carrier to transport data tapes from one of their sites to another and as Gomer Pyle would say "surprise, surprise" the courier lost the package. Twice. On February 27th they lost a box of tapes with data on over 4 million customers, on April 29 they lost another tape. In addition to responding with the usual, patently untrue, platitude "Protecting the confidentiality of our clients’ information has long been a top priority at The Bank of New York Mellon" the bank is on the hook for 2 years of credit report monitoring and $25,000 in identity theft insurance for the customers placed at risk.
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Finding The Needle Article, Part Two
In the first entry about deciding on an emerging technology company, I discussed the issue of price being a key motivator. In this entry I'll discuss selecting an emerging technology company because it is the only one that's solving a problem you have.
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New iPhone Likely Not To Be Subsidized
A couple of weeks ago, AT&T's CFO Rick Lindner made some comments that raised the idea of subsidies for the 3G iPhone. Some think the price of the new hardware might be as low as $200. Analysts say no way, Jose. Is AT&T's 3G network playing a role?
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North Oaks, Minn., To Google: Get Lost
Google's Street Views has caused a fair amount of controversy since its debut in 2007. Many have claimed that it violates basic privacy of everyday citizens going about their business who happen to be photographed by Google's crew. This time, an entire town has demanded that Google remove imagery of it from Google Street Views.
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