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The InformationWeek September 2008 Archive « August 2008 | Main | October 2008 » |
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End Users Lax With Company Data
A new security study shows end users from around the world treat data and corporate systems with little respect for the potential consequences. When it comes to corporate data, which is actually often customer data, there's little regard for security.
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I'm One Of Sprint's First WiMax Customers
I became one the first customers in the United States to have real WiMax service today. So far (after a few easy-to-fix bumps), so good.
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Apple Mac Pro Computers Toxic?
Jason O'Grady, writing for ZDNet, has me worried. He says that, according to a French newspaper, "Mac Pro owners run the risk of getting diseases as dangerous as leukemia (blood cancer) simply by using their computer."
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Open Source Census Finds FOSS Everywhere
The Open Source Census, which I mentioned back in April, just dropped a press release this morning about the data it's been collecting. I chatted the day before with Kim Weins, senior VP of OpenLogic, a key co-sponsor of the census, and how they found a few ... surprises in the results.
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Flash Ready For iPhone, Waiting For Apple
The iPhone 3G's Web surfing in unquestionably one of the best mobile browsing experience out there, but the lack of Flash still sticks out like a sore thumb. Well, it appears that Adobe has confirmed that it's working on a Flash Player for Apple's device, but it's just waiting Apple to give it the go-ahead.
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LG, Samsung Going To Be Late To The Android Party
A report coming out of Korea suggests that handset manufacturers LG and Samsung won't have Android handsets in the market until the second half of 2009. Will that be too late?
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10 Tips For SMBs To Survive The Cash Flow Crisis
If you own a small business, it could feel like the whole world is closing in around you. And yet, SMBs have some of the best options out there, according to consultant and financial software developer Rusty Luhring.
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Windows Mobile Internet Explorer 6 To Pack In Full HTML Browsing To Compete
Pretty much the first thing I do when I review a phone running the Windows Mobile platform is to download Opera Mobile. Why? Because the mobile version of Internet Explorer is sadly lacking, especially when it comes to that whole HTML thing. In order to remain relevant in the increasingly crowded mobile browser market, Microsoft is making sure the next version of mobile IE includes HTML capabilities.
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Can You Prove Compliance In The Cloud?
Whether you're in the midst of an audit or a forensic investigation, thorough logs are the key to proving compliance with security regulations. So how do you prove your organization is/was compliant when you aren't able to maintain logs? This is the nagging question that gnaws hungrily at my weary brain every time I ponder cloud computing.
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The Economy And Jobs: More Than You Can Handle?
Feel that? It's the economy quaking. With the House rejecting the $700 billion bailout bill, stocks seesawing, and loads of uncertainty looming, it's possible you'll have more candidates than you ever imagined applying for jobs at your company. Are you ready to handle that?
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Data Leakage Is A People Problem
Cisco commissioned a global survey of IT administrators and computer users about their perceptions on data leakage. Not surprisingly, the study found employees use their work computers for personal use and IT knows it.
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SaaS Vendor Offers Free E-Mail Continuity For Exchange
LiveOffice launches a free e-mail continuity offering as a loss-leader for its archiving service.
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RIM's BlackBerry Storm For Dummies: Fake Storms Appear In Verizon Stores
You know a product launch is nearing when the dummies show up at retail locations. No, I'm not talking about your fifth cousin. A CrackBerry Forum user recently visited a Verizon Wireless retail store and was pleased to discover mock-ups (a.k.a, "dummies") of the BlackBerry Storm to play with. Verdict? It's heavy.
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Acquia Launches Commercial Drupal Distribution, Support Network
Acquia today accomplished their goal of releasing a commercially supported version of the open source content management system Drupal. At the same time, they've launched the Acquia Network, a service that offers site management tools and various subscription-base levels of support for anyone running Drupal 6.
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Scareware Purveyors To Get Legal Thrashing
We've previously warned about the rising number of scareware threats attempting to scam Internet users. Now Microsoft and the state of Washington are gnashing their legal teeth. Will it work?
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What Does Gartner's ECM Magic Quadrant Mean To You?
Content management reports and analysis always are interesting fodder for discussion, and now that Gartner's 2008 Magic Quadrant report on enterprise content management is complete, it's certain to have an equal number of vendors crowing about their inclusion, as well as those who question Gartner's findings.
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SOA Applications In Virtual Machines? Experience Matters
Not everybody remembers a little outfit called Wily Technology. It was a Silicon Valley startup that caught my eye because it did something that made eminent common sense: it watched a running Java application the way an end user would experience it on the Internet. In January 2006, CA acquired the eight-year-old company for $390 million.
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BlackBerry Bold Finally Coming?
It appears that the Boy Genius was able to get its hands on an internal Best Buy image indicating that the oft-delayed BlackBerry Bold will be available at the retailer Oct. 26. But I have to wonder if all these setbacks for the U.S. market have soured customers.
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CIOs In The Financial Storm
I've attended three CIO events in the past month and been greatly surprised at each of them to feel the same mood: calm.
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Enterprise Search: In Search Of Relevance
If an IT team decided to block Web search engines for a day, it would be mere minutes before the howling began. But unplug the enterprise search function at most companies and -- hey, was that a yawn I saw?
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HTC G1 Android Phone Temporarily 'Sold Out' Online
How something can sell out when it's not even shipping yet is a concept I can't quite wrap my head around. Be that as it may, T-Mobile subscribers attempting to preorder the GPhone over the weekend were told that it was no longer available.
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Another Open Source Feather In Microsoft's Cap
My colleague Dave Methvin jumped on the news about Microsoft's use of the jQuery library before I did, but it has to be said: it's something that says as much about the state of open source as it does about Microsoft. Most of it positive, actually.
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iPhone Round Up: 3G Available Unlocked, App Reviews Require Ownership, Apple Lowers Output
A whole lot has been happening in iPhone-land lately. The 3G iPhone is now available unlocked...in China. If you want to write a nasty note about an iPhone Application, you're going to have to pay for it first. Lastly, Apple has lowered the number of iPhones it will manufacture this year, but has raised the number it thinks it will sell.
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Obnoxious Hipster Startups Must Die
Dear Lord, please tell me not all startups are as smug, self-satisfied, and alcohol-centric as this one.
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USB Thumb Drives For Multitaskers
Serdar Yegulalp's story "12 Tricks To Teach Your USB Drive" got me thinking about some of the more accomplished thumb drives I've seen recently.
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Running A Business In The Cloud
Everybody is talking about cloud computing these days, but a few intrepid companies are actually walking the walk. To find out what it's like, bMighty.com goes out and meets this growing, vocal contingent of cloud computing "completists" who are more than happy to surrender their IT concerns to the cloud.
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Key Management? Don't Hold Your Breath
Ben Tomhave posted a lengthy set of observations from the IEEE Key Management Summit 2008. He did walk away confident that key management standards will be forthcoming. That's too bad. One of the best ways to protect data at rest is to encrypt it. However, enterprise encryption requires enterprise key management, not a bunch of proprietary systems in use today.
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Can Android Save Motorola?
According to an insider, Motorola is looking to increase the size of its Android development team sevenfold. Could deploying an Android handset be the key to righting Motorola's listing ship?
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The Death Of The Dual Controller Architecture?
Clustered storage is everywhere; are we seeing the end of the dual controller architecture?
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Microsoft Adopts jQuery JavaScript Library
Blog entries by Microsoft's Scott Guthrie and Scott Hanselman today have announced that Microsoft will be supporting the jQuery JavaScript library as part of its official development platform. A jQuery blog entry by John Resig covers the announcement from the jQuery project's perspective.
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Mozilla Fixes Password Management Gaffe
Just after Mozilla released Firefox version 3.0.02, which fixed a bevy of security problems, the foundation had to issue a notice to users about a flaw that could keep users from accessing and even creating passwords under some conditions.
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First Impressions Of The InformationWeek Virtual Trade Show
I was impressed with my first-ever visit to a Web-based trade show, the InformationWeek 500 Virtual Event, last week. It was powerful and involving. But it also demonstrated how we're still in the very early days of live virtual events, with a long road ahead.
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Archive Needs To Succeed For SSD To Dominate
In my last entry I wrote that speed is solid state disk's "killer app," but for SSD to really become the primary storage mechanism in tier one, the archive tier needs to be fully established.
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Mollom Comment Spam Solution Emerges From Beta
With a comment spam-blocking success rate of 99.79% and nearly 10 million spam messages caught, Mollom has made a big impression on the content management community since its introduction in early 2008.
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Living With NAC In An EDU World – Part Two
My last blog entry on our NAC experience at Purchase College resulted in the expected emails and phone calls from NAC vendors convinced that we would be ready to junk StillSecure’s SafeAccess and adopt their products just because I used the line “while it's not going as well as we hoped, it is going better than we feared.” Well folks while we do have a few bones to pick with StillSecure, which I’m not getting into today, most of our headaches are more about how NAC is harder in the EDU space than the real, read corporate, world.
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Check Out Samsung's 8-MP Touch-Screen Phone
Well, it appears that Samsung will be taking the touch-screen goodness of the Omnia and combining it with the camera powers of the Innov8. The company appears to be readying an 8-megapixel touch-screen phone, and details have leaked out.
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Is An Apps Store For BlackBerrys In The Works?
The answer to that question would be a big, fat yes. But the store isn't coming from Research In Motion, nor RIM's carrier partners. Instead, it is coming from a third-party vendor and, of all things, an enthusiast Web site.
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A Definition Of Cloud Computing
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison unloaded on cloud computing yesterday, using the words "idiocy," "crap," "gibberish," "crazy," and "stupidest" to describe all the buzz over clouds. It was a classic Ellison rant, but ironic because Oracle is moving into cloud computing even as its leader rails against it.
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Oracle's New Exadata Architecture
A day after Oracle CEO Larry Ellison announced Oracle's first-ever hardware product, the HP Oracle Database Machine, which he touted as the world's fastest database machine, I sat through an OpenWorld session that promised to revolutionize query processing.
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IT And Legal Make A Great Team. Yeah, Right.
While technological challenges abound in e-discovery, IT's biggest hurdle may be getting in-house attorneys to meet them halfway.
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Apple iPhone Firmware 2.2 Shows Its Face
Apple has seeded the next iteration of firmware for the iPhone to developers. One of the changes sighted is a revamped user interface for the iPhone's Safari browser.
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Google Ponders The Future Of The Internet
In a blog post on The Official Google Blog, Google's chief Internet evangelist lays out some thoughts on how the Internet will transform over the coming years. Essentially, he says that the Internet is a software artifact, and software provides for an endless frontier of possibilities.
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Sundown On Solaris?
Netcraft -- er, Jim Zemlin, confirms it: Solaris is dying. Customers are leaving it and legacy Unix behind for Linux, in his purview. Open sourcing the platform was too little, too late. Well, maybe not sundown, but it's getting mighty dark out.
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Finally, Microsoft Blows Away Some Bloat
Every time Microsoft releases a new operating system, it's bigger and more bloated than the previous one. There's an inkling that Windows may have hit high tide with Vista, and the bloat will ebb when Windows 7 arrives. It would be a welcome change.
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Senate Committee Approves Updated FISMA Bill
The Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee just approved S.3474, which will update the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA), in the hope of lifting federal security efforts beyond what many have deemed a paperwork shuffle that does little to boost security.
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Video: Sergey Brin And Larry Page's Great Google Phone Adventure
Live on my Flip camera, I captured Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin as they wowed the crowd at Tuesday's New York City intro of T-Mobile's G1 Android phone. Well, it was mostly Sergey who wowed the crowd, playing Paul to Larry's Ringo, though it was actually Larry who made the most forward-looking comment.
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CMS Watch Offers Guidance on Enterprise Content Management Systems
Although the recent announcement of the emerging Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) standards promise to make Enterprise Content Management systems play nicely together, the process of selecting an ECM vendor is still a challenge, and isn't likely to become much easier anytime soon.
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Twitter Outage Even Grounds 'Fail Whale'
A system-wide outage of Twitter on Thursday got people's blood boiling, but raises another round of questions about the Web 2.0's effectiveness in the enterprise.
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Brocade Encryption Misses Boat - For Now
Anyone who's read this blog even occasionally knows that my mantra includes "Encrypt your tapes." At first glance, Brocade's announcement of a 32-port encrypting Fibre Channel switch and 16-port encrypting blade for its DCX directors provides a new option for storage admins looking for high-performance tape encryption. However, as I read the FAQ on Brocade's site I discovered that the initial release only supports encrypting data at rest on disk.
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Google's Charity, At Your Expense
Google on Wednesday launched a contest to solicit ideas about how to help humanity. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but would-be contest participants should think carefully before acting selflessly.
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Four Companies Secure $143 Million In Funding
Business loans may be hard to come by, but in the past three days, four emerging companies have revealed that they're receiving a total of $143 million in investment funding. Here's how Connectiva, Digg, MOD Systems, and OpTier plan to spend the money.
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LGR Test Drives HP Oracle Database Machine
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison announced a high-end, high-performance HP Oracle Database Machine in San Francisco yesterday. LGR Telecommunications has been working with such a Database Machine for more than a year, while the kinks were still being ironed out. Chief architect Hannes van Rooyen says it's an ideal design for taking on massive data loads with rapid cycle times.
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Visa Bringing The Power Of Plastic To Android
Visa has committed to creating a financial application for the Android platform that will provide notifications, alerts, and other location-based services. Visa also is teaming up with Nokia to enable mobile payments.
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Touch Screen Roundup
While most of the excitement this week has centered around T-Mobile's Android-powered G1, there were some interesting developments on the touch-screen front from Nokia and Research In Motion. Spies were able to snag some details on the first touch-screen BlackBerry, and the first shots of Nokia's "Tube" smartphone found their way to the Web.
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Single Sign On For Multiple SaaS Apps
A startup has launched a cloud service that offers identity management for SaaS apps. IT can enforce user authentication, manage compliance, and speed deprovisioning.
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AT&T: The iPhone Is Better Than The BlackBerry Storm
The war of words between AT&T and Verizon sees its latest salvo from the AT&T camp. A document was caught circulating the Interwebs that spells out "talking points" for AT&T retail reps to mention if a potential iPhone customer mentions the BlackBerry Storm.
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Get The Latest InformationWeek Analytics Audio Report
Find out what it takes to survive and thrive as a CIO in the latest InformationWeek Analytics Audiobook: Tomorrow's CIO. We look at responses from more than 700 readers who weighed in on how to keep the CIO role strong well into the future. Author John Soat looks at the qualities that the CIO will need, including technology savvy, business leadership, and more.
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More On The Mandriva Mini
My post yesterday about the Mandriva Mini distribution for Intel Atom-powered machines prompted a response from Adam Williamson, Community Manager for Mandriva. There, we talked more about what makes Mini a special case -- so much so that simply offering it for universal download isn't (in their eyes) a wise plan.
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About That Delay Of Windows Mobile 7...
Earlier this week a CNet story sparked furor over a supposed delay of the Windows Mobile 7 operating system. It was ostensibly pushed back from January 2009 to June 2009. Microsoft didn't clarify anything in its response to the story.
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iPhone 2.1: After Two Weeks, It's Still A Work In Progress
The iPhone firmware Version 2.1 got a lot of applause when it first came out, from users who said it fixed major bugs. I've been living with the software for two weeks now. In my experience, the update fixes quite a lot, but there's still a lot of work to be done. And I encountered one big bug that could result in a spectacular loss of data.
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India's Government Claims BlackBerry Crypto Crack
After months of wrangling with Research In Motion to hand over its crypto keys, the country now claims to have attained the ability to snoop on some RIM users in that country.
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The Evolution Of Content Creation Tools
As our content creation needs grow and evolve, the tools we use for authoring content need to grow as well. The same tools and approached that worked 10 or 15 years ago will struggle to meet our needs today.
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Using Oracle Database In The Cloud
Two of the biggest announcements from the Oracle OpenWorld Conference in San Francisco this week were that customers could run some Oracle products within Amazon.com's AWS cloud computing environment, and that the Redwood Shores, Calif.-based software giant would be supporting other cloud environments in the future.
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T-Mobile Revises G1's 3G Data Limit Policy
T-Mobile acted quickly to curb what could have been a potential disaster by changing the policy regarding usage of its 3G data network with the HTC G1 Android phone.
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Skyfire Hits Public Beta
If you've yet to download the Skyfire browser for your Windows Mobile device, you'll be happy to know it has hit public beta today. I've spent some time with the new version today, and despite some minor faults, it rocks.
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Cisco Changes The Communications Debate
As you can see in my No Jitter post on the topic, my friend Allan Sulkin, the ultimate voice communications expert, considers Cisco's announcement of a software-as-a-service play for UC/collaboration a "game changer." Maybe it changes the game; it definitely alters the debate.
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Video: Hands On With The Android Software
Here is a video tour of the basic user interface and operating system known as Android.
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Video: Hands On With The HTC G1
In this video, I take a look strictly at the HTC hardware.
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A Difference That Makes No Difference From Open Source ...
I couldn't let the "divide and conquer road map" for keeping open source at bay, as described by my colleague Randy George, pass without comment. The more proprietary software comes to superficially resemble open source, the harder it will be for people to see the benefits of the latter.
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It Feels Like 'Take Your Smartphone To Work Day'
No, this event doesn't exist, but CIOs are starting to feel like it does. The crescendo of "I want to use my iPhone" howls will only grow with gadgets like the HTC G1 phone, the first on Google's Android platform.
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Hey Congress! Slow Down On The Bailout
It might be a good idea to take more than a week to formulate a response to the biggest financial crisis in our history.
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Ex-Googler Slams The G1
If you were a bit underwhelmed by the first Android-powered handset that was unveiled yesterday, you're not alone. Ulf Washbusch, a former product marketing manager for the search giant's mobile division, recently shared his thoughts on the design, and it's not positive.
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Speed Is The SSD 'Killer App'
In a recent blog entry I provided a time line on when I thought SSD would become the dominant storage type for what is currently the active storage tier. One of the key enablers of this will be the increasing need for speed and mechanical hard drives' lack of ability to deliver it in a cost- effective manner.
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Android: Lacks Polish, But Shows Promise
After spending some time with Google's Android platform as realized on the HTC G1, I am reluctant to call it a 1.0 mobile operating system. So much is missing, it feels more like a 0.8 beta. But that shouldn't stop anyone from being excited about the possibilities.
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Mandriva Mini: Linux For Atom -- And For OEMs Only (So Far)
Looks like the "netbook" is shaping up as the major way Just Plain Folks will get a little Linux into their lives. Further evidence for that comes in the form of Mandriva's new Linux distribution specifically for Intel Atom-powered machines: Mandriva Mini. Too bad you can't download it yet.
Continue reading "Mandriva Mini: Linux For Atom -- And For OEMs Only (So Far)..."
Cloud Computing Reality Check
I met recently with more than 50 business technologists to talk about cloud computing, and two things became clear. First, the interest level is very high, and IT pros have plans that go well beyond Web-based applications. Second, everyone has their own list of issues to resolve before they take that step.
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T-Mobile Capping Android Data Plan At 1GB Per Month
Whoa, hold the phone! Some eagle-eyed readers have spotted some highly disturbing fine print in the new data plan that is required with the HTC G1 Android phone. The data plan limits users to 1 GB of data transfer per month.
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Sergey Brin: 'I'm A Bit Of A Geek'
That couldn't be a bigger understatement. Yesterday, at the Android launch, Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page showed up on in-line skates. You'll never guess what the first application is that Sergey wrote for the Android phone.
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A Roadmap To Destroy Open Source?
Deishin Lee of Harvard Business School, and Professor Haim Mendelson of Stanford's Graduate School of Business, eloquently lay out a strategy in a recent paper for squashing open source competition. Ironically, it's also a road map for open source companies to use to defeat their entrenched and expensive rivals.
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T-Mobile Google Phone Underwhelming Compared To Apple
Here's all you need to know about the ready-for-primetime-ness of the new T-Mobile Google phone. When I finally twisted my teenage daughter's arm to look at the pictures I posted of Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, at the Tuesday morning launch press conference, what she said was: "Why are they holding a Sidekick?"
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Atempo Brings Data Management To Mac Platform
Organizations that have adopted Macintoshes as their primary platform have long suffered when it comes to enterprise-class data management tools. Low market share, Apple's lack of enterprise focus, and a Mac system admins lack of knowledge of what they were missing have left this niche underserved. Seeing this opportunity, Atempo and BakBone Software ported their backup applications to OSX a couple of years ago and now Atempo's spread Macintosh support across its whole product line.
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North American Companies Embracing Security Outsourcing
The U.S. managed security services market is booming, and set to double in size in the next few years? MSSPs have been around, in one iteration or another, for as long as I can remember. Why is the market set to rock now?
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Content Management Software As A Service Comes Of Age
It has taken quite some time, but it seems that centrally hosted content management tools are finally beginning to reach critical mass. And as content management Software as a Service offerings (SaaS) become more reliable and feature rich, there's no reason to expect the trend of businesses adopting them to slow down.
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Using FlexFrame For Oracle To Implement A Virtualized Service Oriented Infrastructure
An overflow crowd of 400-plus people at an Oracle OpenWorld Executive Solution session at Moscone Center in San Francisco today heard Jörg Tettenborn, director of the Oracle Strategic Alliance for Fujitsu Siemens Computers, describe how to create a lean and agile IT infrastructure by virtualizing and consolidating Oracle Application Server and Database applications with FlexFrame for Oracle (FF4O).
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The Android Platform Will Curb Apple's Arrogance
Google and T-Mobile have finally brought the first Android-powered mobile phone to the market, and not a moment too soon. Apple's iPhone needs some competition.
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Is Innovation India's Next Big Thing?
People tend to think of lower-cost IT services -- and not "innovation" -- when Indian outsourcer Wipro Technologies' name is mentioned. So, it may come as a surprise that $1 billion, or about a quarter of Wipro's revenue last year, was generated through R&D services -- including designing semiconductors, automobile parts, and a variety of electronic devices. Looking ahead, Wipro says those R&D services will become an even bigger chunk of the company's business.
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Join Us For The InformationWeek 500 Conference -- Without Leaving Your Chair
I'm reluctant to declare that real-time events are the Next Big Thing on the Internet, because it seems like a Next Big Thing comes along on the Internet about once a month, and they're mostly forgotten the next day. Still, I've seen firsthand how powerful virtual events can be. They're an emerging trend. And InformationWeek is in the middle of it all.
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Five Things To Dislike About The HTC G1 Google Phone
Android and the HTC G1 aren't perfect. In fact, there are some glaring flaws. Here are five of them.
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Video: Preview Of The Android Platform
Google shows off its new Android platform on the HTC G1. It is snappy, smart, and intuitive. Here is Google's own take on it.
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Google's Android: A Quiet Revolution
The first phones sporting Google's open-source phone OS Android are set to be announced sometime today, courtesy of T-Mobile (my own cell provider, huzzah!). Android-powered phones are set to compete with the iPhone, Nokia's Symbian, Windows Mobile, and all the rest -- and the way I see it, it'll be in much the same way Google itself competed with AltaVista, Yahoo Search, and so on: quietly, but decisively.
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Five Things To Like About The HTC G1 Google Phone
The G1 is an interesting device from smartphone maker HTC. Here are five things about it that are really cool.
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G1 Phone Arrives; See My Android Phone Photos
I'm liveblogging from the Google, T-Mobile press conference in New York. See my photos from the event, including a shot of two special guests.
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Companies Not Ready For E-Discovery
A new survey says companies and their in-house lawyers aren't prepared to meet legal discovery requests. And McAfee's recent hiccup shows that even big companies make mistakes.
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Details Of HTC G1 Android Phone Leak Ahead Of Press Conference
The feverish readers of TmoNews.com have discovered some images and specifications of the G1 phone from HTC, set to be announced later this morning. What's surprising is what isn't included.
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When Startups Face CIOs
When six startups took the stage at InformationWeek's annual conference last week to make their business pitches, Xkoto wasn't the odds-on favorite. Its Gridscale database load-balancing software isn't sexy or cheap, and end users never see it. Here's how Xkoto CEO David Patrick swayed the judges in his favor.
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Information Cards Are Awesome; But Are Identifying Parties Really Ready To Do This Right?
Perhaps the greatest thing about information cards is that they might finally free us from the purpose-defeating and idiotic practice of using Social Security numbers as a nigh-universal identifier. But it won't work unless the Identifying Parties find a way to balance security with portability, and can smartly manage distribution, expiration, and destruction.
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Content Management Best Practices For More Than Just SharePoint
I was recently catching up on some posts on the SharePoint Team Blog, and came across the announcement for the SharePoint Best Practices Series.
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Standing Up For Mainframes
Server virtualization gets lots of press these days, but don't be so quick to drop the big iron.
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McAfee Secures Place In UTM Market With $465 Million Acquisition
There's still big demand for unified threat management (UTM) devices, especially in the SMB part of the market, and with its $465 million acquisition McAfee is making a big move that will shore its network security products.
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Not Getting Stung By Oracle Beehive
Since Oracle OpenWorld (OOW) at Moscone Center in San Francisco this week has at least 100 people doing live blogs, I thought it would be a more productive use of my time to focus on what's newsworthy in Oracle's enterprise product releases.
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Verizon Wireless Ditches Contracts
Verizon Wireless took a nice step toward opening its networks today by offering customers the ability to sign up for monthly voice and data service without a long-term contract. Under this model, if you don't like the service you can take your business elsewhere without paying a hefty early-termination fee.
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Double-Take Livewire - Real Time Protection For Less
Double-Take's eponymous flagship product was one of the first high-availability solutions for Windows providing asynchronous replication and failover even before Windows NT 4.0 hit the mainstream. Over the years, it has fine-tuned the data capture and replication core of the product while adding features to simplify the process of recovering common applications, making Double-Take Software the market leader for host-based replication.
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What's Hot? SAP Skills And Pay
A scarcity of experienced talent combined with the growing popularity of SAP's NetWeaver platform and other products has helped pump up pay considerably for SAP-related skills in recent months, according to a new report.
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On Android Eve, Google Ponders The Future Of Mobile
Tomorrow in New York City, Google, HTC, and T-Mobile will unveil the world's first handset based on the Android platform. It is sure to be a spectacle. OverTheAir and InformationWeek will be on hand to provide you with all the news. In the meantime, Google gives us its glimpse of the mobile landscape of tomorrow.
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FMC: It's All About Features, Says DiVitas
DiVitas Networks has been one of the leaders in enterprise fixed-mobile convergence (FMC), going back to the time when FMC mostly meant the ability to transition from a cellular network to voice over Wi-Fi without dropping the call. Now, DiVitas's CEO calls that capability "table stakes."
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Widening Canonical's Commercial Software Pipeline
My comments about Unison in last week's blog from the Web 2.0 Expo -- specifically, that its product was to be distributed through Ubuntu's own repositories -- prompted Gerry Carr, marketing manager for Canonical, to get in touch with me. From the look of it, offering commercial software through Linux repositories is the next big step to mainstream acceptance for Linux.
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Startup City Is Austin Bound
InformationWeek's Startup City is about to make a road trip to Austin, Texas, and we're looking for up-and-coming technology companies to meet while in town.
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Analyst Says Apple Will Sell 5M iPhones In 4th Quarter
Gene Munster of Piper Jaffray is at it again. This time he's proffered up his predictions for Apple's fourth quarter sales. He says Apple is primed to sell 5 million iPhones between now and the end of the year, and that the iPhone will represent a "meaningful percentage" of Apple's revenue.
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Cloud Storage 2.0
Cloud storage 1.0 as it exists today has one primary service; it stores data. Not very exciting. Cloud storage 2.0 will have to provide the ability to do more with that data than just store it.
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Music Cos. To Offer DRM-Free Music On MicroSD Cards For Phones
Here's an interesting move. SanDisk, maker of Flash memory cards, and the four biggest recording labels are teaming up to offer microSD cards that are pre-loaded with DRM-free music. You'll be able to walk into a Best Buy and pick up that new album for $7-$10, pop it into your phone, and listen to it right away. Can this business model work?
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In A Web 2.0 World, Quality Is Irrelevant
Quality sucks! Makes you want to read further, doesn't it? Not so much my original lede, which was: In an online world where the Twitter limit is 140 characters, brevity isn't just the soul of wit, it's the currency through which quality is transacted. So does this dichotomy between the inflammatory new and longwinded old spotlight exactly what's going on here? Yes; the definition of what constitutes successful Web 2.0 work has changed. Here's how and why.
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'I'm A PC' Made On A Mac
Microsoft's Seinfeld-successor ad campaign, which features people from all walks of life that use Windows-based PCs, was created on Mac computers. After this fact was discovered in the image metadata, Microsoft tried to belatedly close the barn door by removing the metadata. Lame.
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Web 2.0: 'Fake Steve Jobs' Describes How He Survived Being Outed
When journalist Dan Lyons was publicly outed as the caustic and popular Fake Steve Jobs, he expected the blog to die. But it lived on. He found that puzzling at first, but then he realized he wasn't just writing a blog. He had created a performance space, where real people and fictional characters -- including Fake Vladimir Putin, and Fake Noam Chomsky -- talked and argued with each other.
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Sitecore's Foundry 2.0 Simplifies Multiple Site Management
As an organization's needs grow beyond a handful of sites, the complexities of managing them with consistent yet flexible content and design increases exponentially. For businesses with dozens or even hundreds of individual sites, it can get unmanageable very quickly.
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Australian Spy Warns Of Rising Corporate Espionage
The deputy-director general of the Australian Security Intelligence Organization, who cannot be named under Australian law, warned attendees of Australia's Security in Government Conference 2008 earlier this week that commercial and national espionage are becoming more intertwined.
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Y2K, CEP, And The Mess On Wall Street
In December 1999, I remember trying to reassure a friend's brother -- who had just bought a pair of new shotguns from the local sporting goods store that he was planning to use for self-protection for himself and his teenage son -- that "the Y2K bug" was not likely to cripple the daily functioning of our society.
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Bluetooth Headsets Galore
If you live in California, or any of the states that have outlawed driving and talking, then you know how useful a Bluetooth headset can be. With this in mind, Motorola rolled out a pair of noise-canceling headsets today, and they look like winners.
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Can Web 2.0 Stop Brain Drain?
As baby boomers retire, they walk out the door with years of institutional knowledge. Can we catch it?
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Nokia Prepping New E Series Smartphones
It looks like the Internet spies have done it again, as two new E Series smartphones from Nokia have been leaked. Not much is known about these handsets, as Nokia's keeping mum for now, but one of them will feature a slide-out QWERTY keyboard.
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Nokia Calls For Eco-Friendly, Socially Responsible Mobile Apps
Can that brick in your hand save the planet? Maybe it will when you download the right app.
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Web 2.0 Expo: Microsoft, Mozilla, Google Discuss The Future Of The Browser
I was hoping to see some real bloodshed at the Web 2.0 Expo panel with representatives from Microsoft, Mozilla, and Google. But sadly, everybody was cordial and informative. The one time sparks flew was when a developer in the audience complained about how much work it is to write apps for multiple browsers, and challenged the vendors to fix that.
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First Good Pictures Of HTC's Dream Phone Appear
It is very hard for companies to keep anything secret these days, thanks to the Internet. That said, I am surprised images of the Android handset from HTC haven't made the rounds sooner. Some blurry shots circulated a while ago, but today we've got three clear shots of it.
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Analyst Predicts 400,000 Android Handsets Sold By End Of 2008
Strategy Analytics has been doing some number crunching. According to its computations, Android will grab 4% of the market for smartphones in the United States during the fourth quarter of 2008. That amounts to some 400,000 units sold. What do you think, is that bullish or bearish?
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Former Google Exec Launches VC Fund
David Hirsch, one of Google's earliest New York area employees and the first manager of its business-to-business vertical markets team, is now officially in the venture capital business. Hirsch and a partner have launched Metamorphic Ventures, a New York investment firm for startups in digital media, mobility, and financial technology.
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Is There A Problem With Oracle And SAP Maintenance Costs?
Oracle announced impressive first-quarter earnings yesterday, thanks in part to its highly profitable software maintenance business. At the same time, some complaints have arisen recently from both the Oracle and SAP customer camps about maintenance costs. While enterprise software vendors have to keep shareholders happy, my hope is they're listening to customers, too.
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Web 2.0: Intridea Considers Open Source (Too)
Intridea is a Washington, D.C., company that builds collaborative tools for the enterprise. Its big release this week was Present.ly, a "Twitter that runs inside the firewall" -- something I imagine most people reading this will either love or hate on sight! It's all built on open source -- Ruby on Rails -- but, again, it's not an open source app itself.
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Apple Patent Shows 'Today' Screen For iPhone
The basic home screen of a Windows Mobile 6.1 device gives you a nice overview of your recent missed calls, messages, calendar appointments, and other items. Looking at a recently granted patent, it looks like Apple may be taking a page from Microsoft's playbook.
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NIC QOS?
Quality of service is the ability to provide different priority to different applications, users, or data flows, or to guarantee a certain level of performance to a data flow. Up until we started virtualizing servers, you generally only needed this at the network switch level. Now with the multitenant nature of virtualization hosts, we need QoS at the network interface.
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Recapping Web 2.0: What’s Your Take?
After three days at Web 2.0, it’s clear the event has a bicoastal following and things in the Web 2.0 space are moving fast enough that it’s not overkill to hold it multiple times a year in multiple places.
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Podcast: Is There Room For Another RIA Platform? Curl Thinks So.
Just when you thought there were enough rich Internet application (RIA) platforms and runtimes on the market (Adobe's Flex, Microsoft's Silverlight, Sun's JavaFX, etc.), another one turns up claiming to solve a problem the other ones don't. In the case of the one I found at Web 2.0 Expo, the company is Curl and the unique selling proposition of its RIA platform, according to chief architect Bert Halstead in the audio interview below, is that it outperforms the others, particularly in enterprise situations.
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Palin E-Mail Hack Was "Easy"; FBI Investigating
Person who purportedly hacked VP hopeful Sarah Palin’s Yahoo E-mail account posted what he or she claimed to be a first-person account of the attack. Meanwhile, the FBI is on the case of the pwned candidate’s account.
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Web 2.0: Yuuguu Contemplates Open Source
In the "Long Tail Pavilion" (bad name, interesting people) at the Web 2.0 Expo, one of the companies I took time out to speak with was Yuuguu, which makes an online-meeting system that works across Linux, Windows, and Mac equally. Are they open source? No, but they use a lot of it. Will they be open source someday? Mmmmaybe.
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Web 2.0 Expo: Using Online Gaming Tricks To Increase Audience Engagement
Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr, and other sites that we don't think of as games nonetheless use the principles of gaming to keep their audience engaged, said online game developer Charles Forman at a presentation at Web 2.0 Expo. Other site publishers can use gaming techniques to keep their audiences involved and loyal, said Forman, who is founder and CEO of the social gaming site Iminlikewithyou.
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Virtual Movable Type Makes Setup Even Simpler
Following just over a month after the release of its flagship blogging/content management platform Movable Type 4.2, Six Apart this week announced the release of Virtual Movable Type, which promises to simplify the process of getting an instance of Movable Type up and running.
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Web 2.0: Zoho Gears Up
The other year, when I first looked at Zoho, it was (to me) an upstart curiosity. Now it's a force to be taken seriously in the online apps space, thanks to leveraging open source in its work -- even while it faces possible competition from, you guessed it, open source.
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Get The Latest InformationWeek Analytics Audio Report: The InformationWeek 500
This week, we have a very special InformationWeek Analytics Audio report: The InformationWeek 500. Listen in to find out how the most innovative and productive enterprises are using IT to create business value.
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Petzl Headlamp Singes Head
Petzl America, in conjunction with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), on Thursday issued a safety alert for its "MYO" and "MYO Belt" headlamps.
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6 Tools For Managing The Money Meltdown
The horrible news keeps gurgling out of the seeping wound that is Wall Street, but online resources help demystify the mess. If you can't go out and spend it, might as well log on and learn all you can.
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Sneaky E-Mail And Other Tricks
Sarah Palin's Yahoo account is a stark reminder of how easy it is for employees to get around corporate compliance policies.
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Can't Access Gmail Via Webmail? Google Says Not To Panic, Offers Tips
I don't use a desktop e-mail program. I use Gmail's Webmail client as the one and only interface for my e-mail accounts. That means if Webmail's down, so am I. Google recently posted some tips on what to do if you can't get into Gmail through the Web.
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Clay Shirky Busts The Myth Of Information Overload At Web 2.0 Expo
It's hard to write a news article about a Clay Shirky presentation. The conclusion of an article is supposed to be at the top, in the headline and lead sentence, which is supposed to pack such a wallop that the reader feels compelled to read. But the conclusion of a Shirky presentation isn't the best part. With Shirky, the entire talk is a unified whole, and the best part is listening to Shirky walk through his thought process.
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T-Mobile Bolsters 3G Network Ahead Of Android Launch
Today T-Mobile announced that it is going to light up half a dozen more 3G markets, just in time for the arrival of the HTC Dream phone running Android. By mid-October, T-Mobile will have 21 3G markets up and running.
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From VMworld To Houston...
Sorry for the delay in getting this entry posted. I arrived in Houston last night to a city that is about 60% blacked out, including my office. Thanks to the kindness (a common theme in Houston) of a local storage integrator, Unique Digital, I am able to be back in business and send you today's entry, "From VMworld to StorageWorld."
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Tim O'Reilly's Plea At Interop & Web 2.0: Create More Value Than You Capture
I was live blogging Tim O'Reilly's keynote here at Interop and Web 2.0 Expo when FireFox "unexpectedly quit" according to the error dialog. So, I've relaunched and will attempt to capture some of what I lost. O'Reilly is on stage (photo below) talking about two major themes: First, how Web meets World and secondly how to create more value than you're capturing. "You better be working on something that can really make a difference" he just said (as my system was recovering).
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Lack Of Standards Adoption Is Softening NAC Uptake
There are a lot of reasons why NAC adoption is slower than expected -- it's expensive, it's complicated, there isn't always a clear benefit, competing IT projects are taking priority, and there's still a lot of confusion about NAC technologies. Until IT grasps these issues, they won't move forward.
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Report: Android-Powered HTC Dream To Cost $199
The new sweet spot for smartphones is right around the $200 mark. Smartphones from the likes of Samsung, RIM, Motorola, and others have all targeted this price point (with subsidies, of course). So did the Apple iPhone. Apparently, so is the first phone running Google's Android platform.
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Getting Ready To Join Web 2.0 Expo, Already In Progress
I'm late to the party for Web 2.0 Expo -- I spent the early part of the week at the InformationWeek 500 Conference, and now that I'm here in New York I'm eager to catch up with my Web 2.0 peers. I've found previous Web 2.0 events in this series made fundamental changes in the way I look at Web publishing, so I'm curious to see whether this event will be equally mind-blowing.
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XOOPS 2.3 Nears Release
XOOPS, long a favorite of the open source content management community and a finalist for Packt Publishing's 2008 Open Source CMS Awards, is on the cusp of a final release of XOOPS 2.3.
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Sayonara, Seinfeld!
Word on the street is that Microsoft will announce the end of the Seinfeld phase of Microsoft's recent ad campaign on Thursday. The Microsoft PR spin is that this was planned and the ad campaign will move on to another theme. Riiiiiight.
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Some (Insert Insult Here) Paid $17,000 For A BlackBerry Javelin On eBay
eBay continues to amaze. Nowhere else can we find stories as baffling as this one. Some eBay user by the name of jdavidson31 paid $17,100 for the unreleased BlackBerry Javelin. Exsqueezeme?
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Novell CEO Zigs At Interop. Meanwhile, Web 2.0 (Across The Hall) Zags
If you're not here at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York City, then what you may not know is that Interop and Web 2.0 Expo (both sisters to InformationWeek under the TechWeb umbrella) are running side-by-side with one another in the same building. What's really odd about this is that if you're at Interop, you can almost feel the Web 2.0 folks across the way disruptively changing the course of IT history while those here at Interop continue to evangelize the tried and true approach to IT. As evidenced by Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian's keynote, history is clearly repeating itself.
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Ozzy Osbourne At Interop
So, here's something I didn't expect from Interop: I met Ozzy Osbourne. I didn't realize he was standing just a few feet away from me, near the Nokia booth, until he walked up and urged me to fill out a form that someone else had just handed me.
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IBM's Bob Picciano Shows Off IBM's Forward Thinking On Social Networks
I'm at Interop in NYC on the first day of the exhibition and, to kick the day off, there's a lineup of four keynotes in a row and I've planted myself in the front row of the keynote hall at the Jacob Javits Center to hear what each of the speakers has to say. First on stage was IBM Lotus Software and WebSphere Portal general manager Bob Picciano, who showed how some of IBM's traditional solutions, such as its Sametime unified communications offering, are bridging the gap to social networking trend and how that can benefit the enterprise.
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VP Hopeful Sarah Palin's Yahoo E-Mail Account Hacked
A team of hackers dubbed "Anonymous" claims to have breached vice presidential hopeful Gov. Sarah Palin's Yahoo e-mail account, based on a number of announcements and screenshots posted to the Web and Wikileaks.org
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5 Web Lessons From Google's Analytics Guru
Google's Avinash Kaushik offered a series of tips -- squeezed in between an impressive series of one-liners -- for how Web analytics professionals and those driving Web businesses must evolve in a Web 2.0 world. Kaushik, who describes himself as an author, blogger, and analytics evangelist -- delivered his insights at a Web 2.0 expo New York session.
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Web 2.0: Ifbyphone Makes Phone Mashups As Easy As A Web Page
So far the award for Single Coolest Thing Done With Open Source at the Web 2.0 show has to go to Ifbyphone. These folks have used open source to make custom telephony applications as easy as designing a Web page. Easier, even.
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Verizon Wireless Confirms Imminent Arrival Of The BlackBerry Storm
Late yesterday, Verizon Wireless made a teaser page available on its Web site. Until then, the network operator had not officially acknowledged the touch screen device's existence. Now, it is providing a picture of the Storm, and a place to sign up for e-mail updates.
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Network Recorders Are A Window To The Past
Announced at Interop, Endace Analytics Center 2000 provides network analysis for Endace's NinjaProbe, while Solera Networks announced an OEM program providing data-capture services to others. In both cases, the ability to play back captured network traffic eases troubleshooting and resolution.
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Google Beefs Up Mobile Maps
The search giant has added some new features to its mobile map programs as users can now get Street View and Walking Directions directly on their cell phones. I've played around with these new features, and they look like winners.
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Backup Exec Supports Virtual Machines
Symantec's SME backup software will be able to back up virtual machines from VMware and Microsoft.
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Public Vote Prematurely Gives 3G iPhone 'Gadget Of The Year' Title
Sorry, citizens of the United Kingdom and Stuff Magazine readers, but 2008 is far from over. How could you hold your "gadget of the year" vote before Android-based phones are available in the market? And what about all the problems the 3G iPhone saw in its first two months of availability?
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Is Google Going To Buy Gaming Company Valve, Maker Of Half-Life?
Reports are suggesting that Google is eying a new acquisition target: Valve. Valve is best known for its smash-hit game Half-Life. What it isn't so well known for -- at least outside of gaming circles -- is its rich content distribution system called Steam.
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GAO States Obvious: U.S. Cybersecurity Is Stinko
The Government Accountability Office finds government's cybersecurity efforts lacking.
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Web 2.0: Unison And Ubuntu
Time for some serendipity. I sat down with Rurik Bradbury of Unison to talk about its unified messaging solutions for Windows and Linux, and ended up with a strong hint as to how the commercial application space for Linux might get a boost.
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The New Open Virtualization Format 1.0
At VMworld 2008, VMware's user conference held this week in Las Vegas, the Distributed Management Task Force announced a new virtual-management initiative VMAN, aimed at making it easier and cheaper to manage virtual environments.
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Bluenog Offers Integrated Portal, CMS And Business Intelligence Suite
Bluenog, released Bluenog ICE 4.0 this week, intended to address multiple enterprise needs by bringing together portal, content management and business intelligence software in one integrated package. ICE 4.0, which stand for Integrated Collaborative Environment, brings together the latest versions of Bluenog CMS, Bluenog RichPortal, with their newly released Business Intelligence module.
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NSA Offers Security Advice For Macs
The National Security Agency (NSA) has posted Security Configuration Guidelines for Apple's Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) operating system.
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Web 2.0: Define 'Disruptive'
When you sit down to talk with someone who has the title "Senior Director, Platform and Disruptive Innovation," the first question that comes to mind is: OK, what's "disruptive"? That was, indeed, the first thing that popped out of my mouth when I spoke with Max Mancini of eBay.
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Do Voters Really Care Whether McCain Invented The BlackBerry?
I believe that U.S. Sen. John McCain supports business and innovation. However, a McCain staffer may have over-shot a little when he tried to highlight the impact McCain has had on technology and commerce. And, the misstep has caught the attention of the media.
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Web 2.0 Discussion: Do Communities Need Active Management?
Social Web design expert Joshua Porter asserted in a Web 2.0 Expo session on Designing for Community that companies must appoint a manager to actively run their community efforts. This individual, according to Porter, plays a critical role in managing the discussion, applying your community policies to participants, answering questions, ushering users around the community, and more.
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Confirmed: Google's Android To Launch Sept. 23
I just received an invitation from T-Mobile to a press conference next week. T-Mobile and its partners will formally announce the first Android phone at 10:30 a.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 23.
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Beating The NAC Standards Bush
Halfway through NAC Day at Interop, I moderated a panel populated by representatives from the sponsors. What became clear during and after the panel is that attendees are very concerned about standardizing NAC. Who wants to buy a proprietary product that won’t play well with others?
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IBM Goes Back To The Future To Save Earth
Purpose-built accounting machines? Water-cooled servers? IBM is taking a page from its past to deliver energy-saving systems for today and tomorrow.
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Are Text Messages Responsible For 25 Deaths?
Saturday's Metrolink train crash was a tragedy and may have occurred because the engineer was distracted by text messages sent to his cell phone. The possibility raises the issue of how companies are to handle personal technology in the workplace -- especially when lives are at stake.
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Power's Out? POTS Saves The Day
A $9 phone did what the Internet could never do -- let me work during a power outage.
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Web 2.0: The Power Of The Web, Opened
"How will you use the power of the Web?" That's the slogan for the Web 2.0 Expo, courtesy of both TechWeb and O'Reilly Media. I'm there this week to ask that question in a slightly different way: How will people use open source to use the power of the Web?
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Report: 31,544 Cell Phones Left In NYC Cabs In The Last 6 Months
Yowza. I have seen some scary reports about the number of cell phones left in cabs before, but 31,544 in a six-month period? That's incredible. Now, just think about how many of them are smartphones and how much enterprise data is at risk.
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SEC Fines Wall Street Firm LPL
The Securities and Exchange Commission took -- relatively -- harsh action against financial services firm LPL Financial for failing to protect its customer data. While the fine levied against LPL certainly isn't the most important news to break on Wall Street this week, it is the first step in what I hope is a long-term harsher stance taken by the SEC.
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IW500: CIOs In Search Of Good IT Talent
Hearing CIOs at the InformationWeek 500 conference today talk about the unmet need for good talent was pretty good evidence that IT has to be one of the safest jobs in today's scary economy. That's only true, however, if IT professionals are of the right kind of talent.
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Apple's Safari Gets Gears
Gears is now available for Apple's Safari Web browser, making Google's bridge to the offline world more broadly accessible.
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IW500: Microsoft IT Is 'First And Best' Customer Of Microsoft Products
Microsoft's IT department has a double mission: To be an IT department serving the needs of the company, like any other IT department, and also to be the "first and best customer" -- a testing ground and model implementation -- for Microsoft's own products.
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Drupal Conferences, Past And Future
It's been a couple of weeks since Drupalcon Szeged, held in Szeged, Hungary, came to a close, and it's probably a good bet that many more people are interested in what happened than were able to attend. Fortunately, there are a few good ways to get caught up.
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Web 2.0 Expo Sessions You Don't Want To Miss (Think Google)
Several Web 2.0 Expo New York panels this week are shaping up as must-see events.
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Wells Fargo Uses Market To Filter Out Innovative Ideas
Our Innovation Stock Exchange had its genesis about two years ago as we brainstormed ways to supplement what we do as part of our daily work. Innovation is embedded in the Technology Information Group's culture; on a daily basis, our team members partner with Wells Fargo's other business lines to deliver innovative products for our customers, such as personalized ATMs, online banking services, and our Commercial Electronic Office portal for treasury management customers.
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The Education Sector Needs You
Teaching is a pretty popular second act for people changing professions. The pay, of course, isn't the draw, but rather it's often the altruistic nature of teaching that's appealing to people leaving careers in other industries. Know any techies who've made the move into the education sector? What about you?
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When Test Release Went Viral, Ogilvy Knew It Had A Hit With Web Transporter 1.0
We had been hearing a lot about the Web transforming itself into this new interactive, mature medium of the future -- Web 2.0, Web 3.0, and even higher "versions" seem to dominate a fair amount of presentations and discussions in the industry. However, this seemed to have little bearing on practical application within our environment. While we were still trying to figure out how this "ideal new version" of the Internet could impact our applications, we had a problem brewing in our own backyard.
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Xerox's Path To Managing Information Risk
How do you manage information risk with 57,000 employees worldwide working in various business organizations supported by numerous third-party service suppliers?
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How CIOs Stay Strategic
Manjit Singh, CIO of Chiquita, was at a meeting with fellow executives when the projector went out. Everyone looked to him to fix it. Singh's advice: If you want to be a strategic, global CIO, don't let your colleagues equate enterprise IT with personal tech. He let someone else fix the projector this time.
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Google Gooses Performance Of Desktop 5.8 For Windows
Google decided it was sick of hearing people complain about the performance of its Desktop program for the Windows platform and decided to make a few tweaks. The result -- Google Desktop 5.8 -- is a lighter, faster product that should ameliorate some of the issues seen with the previous version.
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Convergence Saves PricewaterhouseCoopers Money And Boosts Staff Mobility
Convergence is a multiyear voice-over-IP initiative at PricewaterhouseCoopers that transforms the way we communicate with each other and our clients. It provides more agility to our mobile workforce of nearly 32,000 professionals -- many of whom work at client sites, telecommute, or use a "hoteling" system to check in to temporary workstations at different PwC offices.
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Web Tools Help Cigna Tackle Ballooning Health Care Costs
Rising health care costs are a conundrum for the Western world. Attempts to manage costs have been compared with squeezing a balloon -- you may constrain costs on one end, only to have the other end inflate. The solution Cigna is seeking is to take costs out of the health care system -- without compromising care.
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Accenture Looks To Youth Culture To Work More Efficiently And Ubiquitously
Accenture's existing employees, and those we'll be hiring in the next five to 10 years, are accustomed to interacting, both on personal and professional levels, on Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, LinkedIn, YouTube, Wikipedia, and other Web-based social networking and collaboration sites. Today's teenagers are a driving force behind communication vehicles such as texting, IMing, video chats with Web cams, and sending messages through Web-based social networking sites.
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Sun, VCs Invest $10M In MySQL Datawarehouse Startup
There's a new open-source datawarehouse company on the market with a different technology approach and a fresh infusion of cash, it was announced today, from Sun Microsystems and two venture firms. The connection is—you guessed it—Sun's newly acquired MySQL database.
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IW500: Canadian CIO Delivers Cautionary Tale About Internationalization
The CIO of a Canadian heavy equipment company delivered a warning about what happens to companies that fail to take local customs into account when doing business internationally: What happens when your contractors just stop showing up?
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RIM's BlackBerry Storm Gains Strength
An internal Verizon Wireless email was leaked on the Internet today that details the upcoming BlackBerry Storm's "talking points." Among the device's specs are a 3.2 megapixel camera, a touch screen user interface and world-wide roaming capabilities. Could RIM and Verizon have a home run on their hands?
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Survived Ike? Time Will Tell...
Ike tore through Houston, home one of our office and our lab. Once again, businesses have to learn that surviving the initial hit is only the beginning. The "P" part of a Disaster Recovery Plan is very critical to the long-term survival of the business.
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Cisco Widens Its Lead
Allan Sulkin's mid-year study of the voice communications market shows a contracting market overall, but big gains for the new market leader, Cisco.
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New HTC Touch HD Has Massive Display, 5 Megapixel Camera
The latest in the ever-expanding lineup of touch-based smartphones from the Taiwanese device maker sports a 3.8-inch wide-screen VGA display and a 5 megapixel camera. About its only flaw is that it doesn't support U.S. 3G networks.
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The Barriers To Shuttleworth's 'MacBuntu'
I can't fault Mark Shuttleworth for being ambitious. He wants to make Ubuntu into an operating system of choice -- one not only as good as the Mac, but better, and he wants to do it in 24 months, give or take. Dream big or die, right?
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iPhone Dev Team Pwns iPhone 2.1
That was fast. Mere hours after Apple released the iPhone 2.1 firmware update, the iPhone Dev Team cracked it. Now you can jailbreak your 3G iPhone running 2.1 and run your own apps on it.
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IW500: CIOs Are Anti-Social On Social Networking
I can't say I'm surprised by what CIOs told me at the InformationWeek 500 conference about Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking sites: They're just not into those services. However, the CIOs see that young people have a very different attitude. Social networks are their primary channel for communication, and so companies need to be hospitable to social networks to continue to attract young recruits.
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Those Crazy SiteMeter Guys Do It Again!
A couple of months ago, the SiteMeter service made a big mistake with the code that it injects into all its customer sites; the result was that everyone visiting any of those sites with Internet Explorer got a dialog box that said "Operation Aborted." This past weekend, SiteMeter made another mistake: it tried to do an abrupt mass upgrade of its service's user interface.
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IW500: Getting Ready For The InformationWeek 500
In a couple of hours, I'll be driving to the InformationWeek 500 Conference, which starts today. It's a two-day annual event where elite CIOs and high-level IT managers gather to learn from each other about how to optimize their careers and departments for success
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Hewlett Packard Ponders A Windows-less World
There's a story in BusinessWeek that Hewlett Packard has been exploring the possibility of using something other than Windows for some of its computers. The article has some denials from HP spokespersons, but their denials are -- at least partially -- a misdirection.
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UAE Bank Breach Spreads
International investigators still aren't sure, or they're not saying, how criminals managed to generate counterfeit bank and credit cards of legitimate users and conduct fraudulent charges from about 20 countries.
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Anxiously Awaiting Google's Android Phone
Forget the hotly hyped Google Chrome browser, what I want to know is, is the long-awaited Google Phone on the verge of release? Some reports say the GPhone is supposed to debut Sept. 23, via T-Mobile. The interesting dynamic here -- far more than the phone itself (if that's possible) -- is that what we have here is a product unveiling which will instantly outpace the iPhone and put Apple on the backburner, forcing Steve Jobs to play catch-up. Big time.
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John McCain: Digital Dunderhead Or Internet Whiz-Kid?
Is John McCain an out-of-touch dunderhead who doesn't know the Internet from a series of tubes? Or is he an Internet-savvy septuagenarian who needs someone else to operate the keyboard for him because of his Vietnam war injuries?
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Interwoven Rolls Out Enhancements to TeamSite, LiveSite
Interwoven recently released significant upgrades to TeamSite, it's flagship content management system as well as LiveSite, its content customizing marketing tool.
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New Obama Ad: McCain 'Can't Send An E-Mail'
After more than a week of getting pounded by Sarah Palin supporters, Barack Obama's forces are hitting back in a new campaign ad, playing on John McCain's admission that he can't send an e-mail or even use a computer. Obama says these points -- and others -- are evidence that McCain is "out of touch."
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Beyond Server Consolidation: Data Center Consolidation
Innovative global companies like Emerson are increasingly consolidating their underutilized computer server resources in order to overcome server, storage, and application sprawl.
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Use Your Cell Phone To Hail A Cab
A new service being rolled out by AT&T, Verizon and Alltel will let you hail a taxi by dialing a shortcode message. Better hope you're not in a hurry, though.
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CrowdSpring Used Competing Service To Design Its Own Logo
CrowdSpring is a company that allows businesses to use crowds of graphic designers to create logos, images for ads, and other artwork. They boast about how they used their own process to design their own logo, eventually awarding the project to a janitor who taught himself graphic design. It's a compelling story -- but it's not the whole story.
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Google Adds Host Of Features To Apps
Google has some staffers touring college campuses trying to teach students the merits of using Google Apps. In the "back to school spirit" Google has added some features to its Apps programs that are sure to appeal to students and regular Joe's alike.
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Lenovo & Linux: Honeymoon's Over?
Word's been circulating that Lenovo's no longer going to be offering Linux on ThinkPad notebooks to individual customers, at least in the U.S. But it's far from the end of Linux for Lenovo, period -- it just means the honeymoon's over.
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Could There Be More To Google, Android, Chrome, & Gears Than Meets The Eye?
Yesterday, I wrote about the war -- more like the Armageddon -- that's on the verge of eruption in the mobile space. Given how critical third-party software developers are to the strategic success of any platform ecosystem, we can fully expect Apple, Google, RIM, Sun (with Java), the Symbian Foundation, Adobe, and others to fight tooth and nail for every mobile developer on the planet. More than one will succeed. But not all. Or, might it not matter? The answer could very much depend on how exactly Google plays its cards with Android, Chrome, and Gears. Consider this.
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Apple Offers iPhone Firmware 2.1 To Set Things Right
Finally. Thank you, Apple, for fixing my iPhone. Today the company made the 2.1 firmware update available for the iPhone. The new firmware makes a multitude of improvements on the device and even adds a couple of new features. So far, I have noticed drastic improvements in performance of my iPhone. Apple has also improved the security of the iPhone.
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Kazeon Discovers Virtual Machines
New software finds VMs and performs e-discovery searches to ensure relevant information gets found.
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FCoE Or iSCSI, Does It Really Matter?
There is a lot of debate about Fibre Channel over Ethernet and converged network adapters. A CNA is a 10-GbE network interface card that supports multiple data networking protocols, basically TCP/IP traffic and storage networking. These adapters are going to support Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE). The plan is to reduce networking cost of ownership by converging the data and storage networks onto a single adapter, which results in lower adapter, cabling, switch, power, and cooling costs.
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How Do You Dispose Of Old Tapes?
Now that we've all agreed that, while selling your used backup tapes on eBay or to a recycler may be good for the environment, it could also be hazardous to your employer and/or your career, the question remains: How do you dispose of old backup tapes? Do you just keep them squirreled away in storage, hoping to retire before you have to deal with it? Or do you just throw them in the trash, secure in the knowledge that the data is AES-encrypted?
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Password Crackers For Hire
Earlier this week we wrote about how attackers are selling bogus security software suites to not only rip unsuspecting Web surfers off, but also infect their systems with malware. Now, an IBM researcher says many of those Webmail online password "recovery" services may actually be hackers for hire.
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eZ Publish Delivers Software Upgrades And Significant Growth
eZ Systems has had an exciting few weeks, including terrific earnings, a solid new release of its flagship content management system and nomination for a prominent open source content management award.
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EqualLogic Releases Bigger Array, New Software
In the first announcement of new products since Dell acquired EqualLogic in January, EqualLogic's new PS5500E holds 48 SATA disk drives, boosting the maximum size of a single EqualLogic storage group to more than 500 TB. It also announced that it would release a software update for all EqualLogic arrays to support RAID-6 and software to offload the snapshot process from VMware Infrastructure hosts to the array.
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Amazon Pitches The Security Of Its Cloud
Amazon Web Services, in an effort to foster faith in the security of its infrastructure, on Thursday published a white paper about its security processes.
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Letting Microsoft Virtualize And Optimize Your Infrastructure
Microsoft sees the adoption of virtualization technology accelerating at a blistering pace, from the desktop to the data center, in the next few years.
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Garmin Could Dispute Apple's Patent Intelligent Garment Pairing Application
One of the better posts to pass through my RSS reader (Google Reader) today had to be Nick Carr's Apple declares war on sneaker hackers. First, he spanked Apple's Genius announcement.
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Whose DBA's Earn Six-Figure Salaries?
Think your DBA job pays well? Not as good as some database administrators, according to a research study sponsored by Ntirety and produced by Unisphere Research. One hint: it's all about location, location, location.
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CTIA: BlackBerry Gets All Sorts Of Love From Google And TiVo
If you're a BlackBerry user, prepare to let the good times roll. A host of new software and service offerings were made available to the BlackBerry platform this week, including a brand-new Google application and wireless access to your TiVo DVR.
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Google Launches Location-Aware Search For Windows Mobile
Google has made location-aware search a reality for users of Windows Mobile devices. Now, when you pull out your WinMo smartphone to perform a search, Google will automatically deliver results relevant to your location.
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Getting A Jump On The New Content Management Standard
CMIS won't be an official standard for at least a year, but you can start playing with a draft implementation today.
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Get The Latest InformationWeek Analytics Audio Report: The 2008 Strategic Security Survey
In this week's installment of Informationweek Analytics Audio, we take a look at security, in our 2008 InformationWeek Strategic Security Survey Audiobook. Find out how the top enterprises are managing risks from threats both inside and outside the company.
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Video: KFC Hires Armed Guard To Transport Chicken Recipe
This is a cute publicity stunt: The president of KFC decided that the famous original recipe lockdown wasn't secure enough, so they hired a Brinks guard to transport the document to a new, more secure location.
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Officially On The Tech Radar: The Mobile Arms Race
Although it clearly matters, this isn't just about everyone-mobile-but-Apple vs. Apple. This also is about the war for the hearts and minds of mobile developers that's about to erupt as those in grave danger of becoming mobile has-beens seek to restore their luster, the latest stars look to extend their momentum and, in some cases, their advantage, and the players stuck in the middle hope to avoid becoming collateral damage. Yeah, the iPhone has got some mojo. But there are really no clear winners yet.
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What's 'Commercial Use' With Open Source Derivatives?
Some projects derived from open source have licensing fees based on who's using them -- a good idea in practice, but sometimes it can become unintentionally thorny. This goes double if the criterion is "commercial use," one of those terms that, in the words of The Princess Bride's Fezzik, does not always mean what you think it means.
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Google Thinks 9/11 Is Just Another Day
Google runs special versions of its home page to mark everything from the Persian new year to the birthday of Diego Velazquez (who?). So what's on the search giant's Web site today--the seventh anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and UA Flight 93? As of Noon Eastern, nothing.
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XP Security 'Scareware' Scams Skyrocketing
More users than ever before seem to be falling for scams being levied by fraudsters looking to make a quick -- and lucrative -- buck from bogus security applications. It's sad to see people get scammed from their money when they're seeking some level of protection from Internet threats -- but instead they end up paying to install software that does nothing, at best, or is in fact itself malware. At least one security firm says criminals are raking in hundreds of thousands a month doing so.
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KMWorld Announces Their 2008 List of Trend Setting Products
KMWorld, the magazine and website dedicated to content, document and knowledge management, recently announced their 2008 list of trend setting products.
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Get Virtual And Go Green
During the free "Get Virtual Now" event last Monday, September 8th that attracted over 1000 attendees, Microsoft made several key System Center and virtualization software announcements, highlighted customer success stories, and outlined a new Microsoft "vision statement" that will be supported by $8 billion in annual software research and development spending that will be spread across entertainment software, Vista-enabled desktop computing, and cloud computing.
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Google Maps Street View: A Tool For Pedophiles?
A group called Stop Internet Predators claims that Google Maps Street View endangers children. I find that loopy.
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CTIA: BlackBerry Devices (Finally!) Get Native AIM From AOL
You might think that the world's best mobile e-mail devices would also be killer instant messenger devices. Though users were able to use GChat, Yahoo IM, and Windows Live Messenger, AOL's AIM was AWOL. So RIM and AOL teamed up to offer a native AOL Instant Messenger application for BlackBerrys. Time to break our your thumbs and get your IM on!
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Google Pontificates On The Future Of Search
Today on the Official Google Blog, Marisa Meyer posted an in-depth look at what the future of Internet searches holds. She shares many interesting thoughts.
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'Don't Be Evil' - Yes, But What's 'Evil'?
Advocates of open source often echo Google's "don't be evil" slogan, with non-FOSS code (among other things) being evil in this purview. That is, evil until you decide not to open source something you've created. Suddenly, you're the bad guy.
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HTC's G1 Android Phone To Come In Three Colors, Be Announced Soon?
I am not one for fancy colors. I don't need a lot of choice when it comes to cell phone hues. But since HTC is making products for everyone else, it appears that the Android phone will come in black, white and brown. A chocolate-colored smartphone?
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iPhone Mobile Web Usage Soars
Users of the Apple iPhone can't seem to get enough of the mobile Internet. According to AdMob, the Apple iPhone was the fastest growing device in the world last month and ended August with more than 2.9 million mobile Web page requests per day. Other devices are making headway, too. Seems this thing called the "mobile Internet" just might take off.
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CTIA: Sony Ericsson Sets September 30 As Xperia Launch Date
The Windows Mobile smartphone from Sony Ericsson, which has a unique "panels" user interface, will become available at the end of the month. Too bad it won't be sold in the U.S.
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At DEMO, Quantivo Challenges BI's Status Quo
At the DEMO conference, Quantivo showed a new data-mining-as-a-service for retailers. The company promises "super fast" business intelligence at a fraction of the cost of in-house data warehouses.
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Recycling Backup Tapes - Green Or Just Scary?
I got an e-mail today with the subject We Buy Used Tape Media, which got me thinking. In today's environment, where lost backup tapes get companies, and their storage administrators, in the newspaper, and possibly the unemployment line, who in their right mind would sell their old backup tapes?
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SSD Domination, Sooner Than You Think
Based on the recent news that Intel has announced an 80-GB Solid State Disk for less than $600, the end for the mechanical drive may get here within the next five years.
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NAC Happenings At Interop
Earlier this summer I was tapped for NAC Day 2008. It's a day-long event on the topic of Network Access/Admission Control at Interop NY held at the Javits Center. I'll agree to almost anything if I can get a trip to Manhattan out of the deal. I hope to cover nearly every aspect of NAC in 5 hours and 45 minutes.
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Proposed Standard Would Open Proprietary Content Management Systems
Microsoft, IBM, EMC, and others aim to make it easier for users and applications to pull content from competing repositories.
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Today, TechCrunch50. Next? TechCrunch100? 150? 200? Parked Domains Tell All
All it takes is a quick WHOIS search of parked domains to get some idea of where Mike Arrington and Jason Calacanis might take the TechCrunch50 brand once this year's event is over.
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Touch Screen BlackBerry In Action
For BlackBerry addicts with a bit of iPhone envy, the upcoming touch screen BlackBerry is an intriguing proposition. But RIM's Storm could be a disaster if the interface fails. A developer ninja got his hands on it, and shared his thoughts on YouTube.
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Microsoft: Four Patches, Eight Vulnerabilities, One Biggie
Earlier this week we predicted that Microsoft would release a massive update, and the software giant certainly did. While it's not big in megabytes, it touches nearly every Windows user on the Internet. Make sure you're aware of the risks, and get yourself patched.
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NEC Updates HYDRAstor Deduping Grid
When NEC first briefed me on its Hydrastor product last year I loved the idea of a deduping backup target that used the RAIN (redundant array of independent nodes) architecture based on standard Xeon servers. Now NEC's releasing new storage and accelerator nodes that boost capacity to 12 TB (raw) on each storage node and the data ingestion rate to 300 MBs for each acceleration node.
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Old News Is Not Good News
You may have seen the news that United Airlines stock plummeted when a Web site resurrected an old Chicago Tribune article about United's 2002 bankruptcy filing. Google News indexed this "new" story; a reporter found and reposted it as if it happened that day.
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DEMO: CrowdSpring Is Like eBay For Creative Professionals
CrowdSpring the first vendor I've ever interviewed that made me afraid. As we talked about their business model, I found myself thinking: Are these guys going to put me out of a job?
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Workcation: The New Staycation
I just got back from my staycation, which is the holiday destination to debark at when you're not going anywhere. (I was watching my son, in the stretch between camp and back-to-school.) The week turned out to be a bit more active than I'd expected, though, and it morphed into -- here's the new word I've coined -- a workcation. You know: time off, but BlackBerry close at hand.
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DEMO Roundup: Web 2.0 Goes To Work
According to Chris Shipley, executive producer of the DEMOFall 08 conference, we've already moved past Web 2.0. We're wrapping up the third generation of the Web. And we're moving on to the fourth. That's when social networking and Web 2.0 (which is actually Web 3.0, she says -- confused yet?) gets to work.
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Change Is Always In The Air For CIOs
Time for a change? If you're a CIO, it's always time for change. Whether it's the more optimistic, positive sort of change (i.e., growing the business) or the less pleasant (heck, painful) kind of change, like cutting costs, you'd better be ready.
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TechCrunch50: Startups Get Schooled
As I was watching the TechCrunch50 conference Webcast this morning, the session on collaboration turned brutal.
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Move Over, IT. Here Comes ET, Energy Technology
Job losses. Foreclosures. High energy costs. An unstable world economy. The bad news keeps coming. But a critically important new industry may hold the keys to economic recovery -- IF it can find sufficient investment and legislative support.
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Careful With That Publish Button
When a mistake causes content to go live before (or long after) its time, there's plenty of finger-pointing and blame to go around. But one thing is certain -- when you're in the driver's seat of a content management system, wield the "Publish" button carefully.
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Video: Taking Google's Chrome Browser On A Test Drive
If you want to take a closer look at Google's Chrome browser, check out my video tour of the software. I'll take you around the user interface, features such as application windows and incognito mode -- aka "porn mode" -- and more.
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Trial Lawyers: E-Discovery Too Expensive
Cases are being settled based on cost, not merit, according to results of a survey released today.
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BlackBerry Bold Creating Sour Grapes Between AT&T And RIM?
Here's an interesting tidbit for you. According to informed sources, AT&T demanded that BlackBerry maker RIM cough up a 3G smartphone. RIM conceded, and developed the Bold. But the constant delays of the device are fraying the nerves of AT&T and RIM alike.
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Live Blogging: IBM Rolls Out 'Event Processing' Roadmap, Goes After Business Agility
I'm at the Taj Hotel, attending IBM's eXtreme Business Event Processing Summit, looking to live blog the action as IBM's Software Group senior VP Steve Mills takes the stage to make what's expected to be some big announcements. I'll be updating this blog with text, photos, and eventually video (once we get it produced). First up at the podium was IBM SOA & WebSphere VP Sandy Carter (photo below), who set the stage by defining the term "event," setting the tone for IBM's road map to make businesses more agile in the way they respond to such events.
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OpenOffice.org 3 Edges Towards Release
OpenOffice.org's first release candidate for version 3.0 hit the tubes yesterday. It's an evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, edition of the open source office suite. It isn't to OO.o 2 what, say, Office 2007 was to Office 2003 -- but it's solid, and most importantly, noticeably faster.
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Are Journalists Persecuting Sarah Palin And Her Daughter?
The story of Sarah Palin's daughter's pregnancy has got McCain supporters riled up. They're angry at what they see as yet another conspiracy by the mainstream media to tear down a good conservative while giving liberal darlings like Barack Obama and John Edwards a free pass.
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What Does Web 2.0 Mean To Your Business?
Deciphering what Web 2.0 means to your organization can be challenging but getting up to speed with the lingo, tools and technology can only benefit you and your team. From a content management perspective, Web 2.0 means innovative tools that offer a completely new approach to process and collaboration. But that's just the tip of the iceberg.
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HDTV Makers Play 'My Screen's Bigger'
This is what the blogosphere has driven me to -- tawdry headlines in search of traffic. But what do you expect, on a day when I receive an e-mail from a respected market-research firm with the subject line, "Does Size Matter for U.S. Flat-Panel TV Buyers?"
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Google Is Everywhere
Google is everywhere. The "search, ads, and apps" company has designs on the air, sea, and land.
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Google Chrome Polishes Its First Security Update
Last week, Google released its shiny new Chrome browser. However, before the week finished, Google also had to issue a patch for one of security's most common -- and most well-known to developers -- application security issues: a buffer overflow vulnerability that would make it possible for an attacker to completely take over your system.
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HTC Touch Pro Coming To AT&T As Fuze?
It looks like AT&T has snagged up HTC's Touch Pro and will be bringing it stateside with the hokey name "Fuze." Awful name aside, this is a great move, as the Touch Pro looks like an excellent smartphone for business users.
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Are Businesses Ready For Radical Desktops?
For a long time, IT's options for how to outfit a new employee had all the thrill of the "paper or plastic?" choice. For IT, it was a "laptop or desktop?" world. Get ready for a change.
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Could "ReTweeting" Become Ground Zero For Virulent Political Influence?
Other than using Twitter a couple of times to point to some of Jon Stewart's hysterically funny videos, my public usage of Twitter (I'm "dberlind") is very much apolitical. I can't say the same however for the many people whose Twitter feeds I follow. It's becoming evident to me that it's not just what people are "tweeting" that could influence opinions, but what what they're "retweeting" or "RTing." Through retweeting, you can pretty much watch the virulence of some subject as it happens, in real-time.
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Palin's Home State Last Frontier For Tech, Too
After U.S. Sen. John McCain chose Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate for the presidential campaign, I decided to look into her technology track record. I didn't come up with much.
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What's Really Behind The Talent Gap
It's been a long-running complaint that there aren't enough young people entering the IT field. But judging by the laundry list of experience and skills some employers demand from IT job candidates, you have to wonder if young people just starting out their careers even have a shot at being hired.
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Living With NAC - A Report From The .EDU Trenches
As readers of my earlier blog entries will know, SUNY's Purchase College, where I work my day job keeping the network and Servers humming peacefully along, has had a rather checkered past with network admission control systems. This fall we're making our third attempt to implement a NAC system that will keep our student's systems safe from malware without making their lives too miserable.
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Having Fully Shattered Global Voice Roaming Fees, MaxRoam To Whack At Data Next
If, at the end of each year, I was to identify the top 10 most disruptive solutions that merit your attention, MaxRoam would be at the top of my list every year running. I was turned on to MaxRoam last year when I went to Ireland for Mashup Camp (speaking of which, the next Mashup Camp in Silicon Valley starts on Nov. 17). If you live in the U.S. and travel internationally, then you know that AT&T and T-Mobile rape you blind on voice roaming charges. MaxRoam simply obliterates those fees while offering a few great value-added benefits at the same time.
Continue reading "Having Fully Shattered Global Voice Roaming Fees, MaxRoam To Whack At Data Next..."
Analyst: Android 'Ain't No iPhone,' Will Fail
Google's much-hyped mobile platform, Android, is set to make its big debut in the market in the coming months. Developers, execs, and analysts who've used it say it is going to bomb, and if it does, it is all Google's fault.
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Are PST Files A Problem?
InformationWeek readers know their users store e-mail on local drives, but aren't sure if they approve.
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Is UC Tactical Or Strategic?
Wainhouse Research is out with a new survey of enterprise attitudes and practices in adopting unified communications. One of the key findings is that, more so than last year, the decision is being made by IT, rather than at the CXO level.
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Why VIA's Open Source Video Driver Is Missing A Few Things
A scenario for you: A company announces that it's going to offer open source drivers for its hardware from now on. Rejoicing ensues. Then the drivers themselves arrive, only to be missing things -- not enough to make them useless, but still frustrating. What happened?
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Major iPhone Firmware Update Reported To Be Available On Tuesday
The 3G iPhone has no doubt had a bumpy introduction to the market. Signal issues, system crashes, and other glitches have plagued users. Most recently, a glaring security flaw allowed people to bypass the password lock code and gain access to the iPhone's contact list. Firmware update 2.1, believed to be announced at tomorrow's Apple event, might fix everything.
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Cloud Storage's Weakness
Cloud storage has one glaring weakness compared with traditional storage offerings; it does not get cheaper over time. Today, some services each year will increase your capacity at "no extra charge," but you are still paying the same amount of money for data written last year and data written this year.
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RIM Makes Huge Smartphone Gains, BlackBerry Bold Coming In Oct.
RIM has been kicking some serious smartphone tail and has doubled its market share from a year ago. RIM now owns 17.4% of the smartphone market. Also, new reports have stronger evidence that the much-delayed BlackBerry Bold may finally see the light of day.
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Daily Kos Publisher Takes Us To Task On Palin Coverage
The publisher of the political blog Daily Kos took us to task last week for our coverage of the controversy over Sarah Palin's teenage daughter's pregnancy. His letter raises a different issue: To what extent, if any, does the publisher of a site bear responsibility for the comments posted by a member of the site? Are the owners of Web communities obliged to control content posted by their members?
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Patch Tuesday: Potentially Massive Windows XP, Vista Update Ahead
On Tuesday, Microsoft will release four security fixes as part of its monthly patch update cycle. There are four patches slated for release and all are rated as critical. Yet, one of the bulletins strikes me as unusually vague. Is this cause for alarm?
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You Thought Vista Was Bad?
Like a lot of folks, I saw the first Microsoft ad with Jerry Seinfeld during the NFL season opener. This is the ad campaign that is supposed to resurrect Vista's image with the public? Holy cow, this ad makes IBM's Ideating concept look like marketing genius.
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Firewall Vendors Need To Bring More To The Table
Traditional firewalls are becoming more and more useless as we extend our networks and build VPN tunnels to remote staff and business partners. But there's a business opportunity for firewall vendors to expand their footprint by expanding their feature set.
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Working At Google
What's it really like to work at Google? If you haven't worked there (and I haven't), it's harder than it might seem to get a straight answer.
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Ingeniux Revamps Their Hosted CMS Offerings
Following just months after the launch of version 6.0 of its flagship CMS, Ingeniux this week announced a significant update to its Ingeniux OnDemand hosted Web content management solution.
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Cloudbursting Handles Overflow Processing
Amazon Web Services evangelist Jeff Barr coined a new term last week for an old concept. Provisioning data center resources to handle sudden and extreme spikes in demand is nothing new, but Barr's hybrid application hosting model, which he calls "cloudbursting," goes a step further in combining both private data center resources and remote cloud resources such as Amazon Ec2, which provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud.
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Nokia's Biggest Strength Is Its Biggest Problem
Today, Nokia warned that it will lose some market share in the third quarter due to a slowing world economy. It cited "aggressive pricing" as a particularly nettlesome problem. Gee, Nokia, is it possible that your $800 devices -- while amazing -- might be part of the issue?
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Google Announces Photostreaming App For Android
The final list of applications that will appear on the first wave of Android handsets hasn't been revealed, but this new, open source project from the Android Developers Blog might be one of them. Photostream can stream Flickr photos to an Android handset.
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Google Docs, Zoho, Or ... DIY? Meet OpenGoo
With all the worries people have about the stability, safety, and privacy of Web-based apps and cloud computing in general, why not do it yourself? "It", in this case, meaning hosting your own Web apps via an open source package that you install and manage on your own.
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Globally, Chrome Zings Past Opera And, In Our Logs, Safari & IE8, Too
Judging by what's happening in both private and public logs of Web traffic, Google's Chrome is seeing the sort of uptick in popularity that other browsers have only dreamed of. The question is whether things will die down once the bloom is off the rose, particularly given the beta status of Chrome and the shortcomings that often go with that status. When we here at InformationWeek saw how Chrome bypassed Opera yesterday as it edged up on Safari (according to GetClicky's global stats), we took a peek at our own traffic logs for kicks.
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In The Cloud, Architectures Matter
There is a common statement that I hear when talking with members of the cloud community, that the user should not be concerned with what is the architecture of the cloud. I disagree -- details matter.
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Windows Vista: The OS About Nothing
Microsoft's new Windows ad, featuring Jerry Seinfeld, is outdated and not very funny -- but it's highly revealing of all that's wrong out there in Redmond.
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The CIO vs. General Counsel
When it comes to information management, power may be shifting from IT execs to lawyers. Should you be afraid?
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Perhaps One Day, We'll Send Our VMs Away For Their Updates
Some people think I'm crazy, but I really love my current system configuration. I run with a MacBook Pro and it's worth every ounce of weight and every dollar paid for it. Thanks to VMware's VMware Fusion which lets me run Windows Vista in a virtual machine on this Mac, I'm having my cake and eating it too (read on, and you'll see what I mean by that). But I'm irked by a little quirk and am now wondering what role the cloud (particularly offerings like Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud or maybe some new startup) might play in maintaining the health of virtual machines like mine.
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Internet's 'Next Generation' On Display In Beijing
Some of the latest computing and networking technologies were on display or in use during the Olympic Games in Beijing this summer, and IPv6, the so-called "next generation" Internet Protocol, was one of them.
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Apple Nixes 'Pull My Finger' App, Even Though It's A Gas
Apple's iPhone Apps Store approval process clearly has some bugs to work out. Apps will be approved, and then pulled. Some bad apps remain in the store, while others aren't approved at all. The latest casualty is an application that, well, I probably shouldn't publish what it does here in the first paragraph, but Beavis and Butt-head would have loved it.
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2008 Open Source CMS Awards Finalists Announced
Accepting nominations since mid-July, Packt Publishing announced this week the finalists for its 2008 Open Source CMS Awards. Final voting began on Sept. 1 and runs through Oct. 20.
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One Unlikely Browser Controls The Market
With Google's surprise announcement of its Chrome browser, a lot of attention has been focused on how Chrome might change the browser landscape. Google's technology certainly has potential, but there's one browser that today defines the boundaries of cutting-edge Web development. No, it's not Firefox, Internet Explorer 7, Opera, Safari, or Google Chrome.
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Red Sox, Patriots, Celtics, And Startups
Its baseball team is in a pennant race, its football franchise is about to make another run at a championship, and its basketball squad brought home the NBA trophy in June, but there's more to Boston than hardball, pigskin, and hoops. Beantown's technology startups are making their own run at the competition.
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Google Chrome Is Unresponsive. Restart Now?
That's the error message I get when attempting to launch an additional Chrome window from a Chrome shortcut (like the one its installation routine puts in Windows' Quick Launch Bar). How do you reproduce it and what's the workaround? Read on. But remember folks: it's "beta."
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Google Updates The Chrome End User Licensing Agreement
In response to the brouhaha that ensued when people began to read Chrome's crazy terms of service, Google has amended them. Google now no longer retains the rights to own anything you do when using Chrome. Whew. Legal quagmire avoided.
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Introducing InformationWeek Analytics Audio
Today, InformationWeek is launching Analytics Audio. It's a new way for you to get the information you need to solve the toughest problems in enterprise IT. In addition to reading our Analytics reports, you can listen to them as well.
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Bluetooth To Be The Killer App Of Mobile Internet Devices?
According to ABI Research, mobile Internet devices -- or MIDs -- are set to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 167% in the next five years. Wi-Fi, WiMax, and UWB will play a role in that growth, and, says ABI, so will Bluetooth. Why? VoIP calling, among other reasons.
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Privacy Policies Are For PhDs
BNET has a story, Privacy Policies Are Great -- For PhDs, highlighting the point that privacy policies are so obtuse that a college education or better is required to understand them. That point is perfectly clear to anyone who has read a privacy policy or an end-user license agreement (EULA). These policies are written for legal professionals, not the masses.
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Google Releases New, Consolidated BlackBerry App For Plain And Google Apps Gmail
The Gmail Blog's suggestion to give Gmail a whirl on Google's new Chrome browser (be sure to take our Chrome Poll) isn't the only interesting news to come out of the Gmail camp. An understandable inaccuracy in my coverage of Google's implementation of Google Apps-based Gmail and the resulting exchange with Google over the matter reveals big news for BlackBerry users who access either version of Gmail (the plain, standard one or the Google Apps version).
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IBM's E-Discovery Platform
IBM launches eDiscovery Manager software to help enterprises find and manage information that may be relevant to litigation.
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NYC Store Sells BlackBerry Bolds For $1,300 Each
An enterprising company with a retail location in midtown Manhattan managed to get its hands on five prerelease versions of the much-coveted BlackBerry Bold. What did it do? Put them up for sale, naturally. The price tag? A staggering $1,300. For that, you get a phone that may or may not be fully optimized for AT&T's network.
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Sarah Palin's Babygate And The Future Of Journalism
The story of Sarah Palin's daughter's pregnancy is an example of the uneasy partnership between journalists and bloggers. The events make it clear what journalists' roles ought to be in the post-blogger era. But it's unclear whether journalists actually did their jobs here, because this is such an ugly story that it's hard to see past the sordid surface to find out what happened.
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More Blatent Self Promotion: DR Workshop At Interop NY
Once again, on Monday, Sept. 15, for one day only, I will be performing my latest one-man show, The Disaster Recovery Cookbook: Recipes for Recovery, as a workshop at Interop at the fabulous Jacob Javits (a New York liberal, Republican senator, and Lantzman. You don't see those together very often anymore) Convention Center in The Big Apple (New York). Over the day we'll explore how to make your organization's IT infrastructure disaster tolerant with an emphasis on solutions that are affordable for midsize organizations that don't have the open-ended budgets of our friends on Wall Street.
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The Steady Rise Of Targeted Trojan Attacks
Look before you click may be a good idea for a new IT security public awareness campaign. Consider the reports coming out of South Korea that North Korean spyware made it's way onto the computer of a S. Korean army Colonel. There's no reason why this can't happen to you.
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Sony Ericsson Releases SDK For Xperia X1
Sony Ericsson's been having a tough time lately, but there are still plenty of fans eagerly awaiting its Xperia X1 smartphone. Well, the company released an SDK today that should mean the X1 will be available soon.
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AIIM Offers A Fall Full Of Information Management Webinars
The Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) has scheduled a series of seven Webinars through September and October covering topics ranging from enterprise content management processes to collaboration tools and techniques. These Wednesday Webinars, as AIIM calls them, look like they'll be a good, free way to get familiar with some fairly complex topics.
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The bMighty Manifesto: Small Is The New Large
To celebrate its first anniversary, TechWeb's bMighty.com has published an actual manifesto. The message? Technology has radically shifted the competitive landscape, handing new advantages to smaller, more nimble organizations rather than large enterprises.
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HP Signs On For ProStor’s RDX Disk Cartridge
Tape vendors have been having a hard time lately and nowhere worse than in the SMB market. In the 1990s, small businesses backed up to DDS/DAT tapes. But as the 20 GB (native) capacity of DDS4 became too small for even SMB full backups, no clear replacement emerged. ProStor System's proposing its RDX hard disk in a cartridge system as a good alternative and HP's jumped on the bandwagon, offering RDX docks in Proliant servers and XW workstations along with 160-GB and 320-GB HP-branded cartridges.
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Research: Those Over 30 Can't Figure Cell Phones Out
According to some data from Bowen Research, more than one-third of adults over the age of 30 can't stand their cell phones. Why? They can't seem to figure them out. Those under 30 don't have the same problems. Are younger users better suited to some technologies?
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Mozilla Fires Back At Google: Our JavaScript Engine Runs Faster
Everyone's running speed tests to see how Google's new Chrome browser measures up.
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What Do The ISO And The NBA Have In Common?
My favorite quote of the day so far comes from a comment that was filed on Bob Sutor's post about how the International Organization of Standardization is risking irrelevancy based on the way it ignored objections to the rushing of the Office Open XML (OOXML) specification through the ISO's ratification process. OOXML is primarily a Microsoft-authored competitor to the already ISO-ratified OpenDocument Format (ODF). Bob Sutor is the grand pooh-bah of open standards at IBM (a major proponent of ODF).
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AT&T Explains Data Outage
Looks like Ma Bell had some problems this morning on the East Coast, as multiple reports said there was no mobile data access. The problem was particularly affecting iPhone 3G users (what else is new), but some reported that there was absolutely no AT&T cellular data. AT&T spokesman Mark Siegel gave me the skinny.
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For Sale? It Depends - Who's The Buyer?
Would you want your company to be acquired by a larger company, I remember asking Ross Mason, founder and CTO of MuleSource, which provides the Mule enterprise service bus as an alternative to commercial integration products. His answer surprised me.
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Google's Brin: Chrome Coming To Android
It was nearly a year ago that Google said it was going to create a mobile Web browser. It managed to get Chrome, a full desktop browser for Windows-based machines, out the door yesterday. What about a mobile version for its Android platform? Google co-founder Sergey Brin says it is on the way.
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Who's Afraid Of Online E-Mail Archives?
A lot of IT pros, according to an InformationWeek survey. But as compliance and litigation pressures mount, those fears will fade.
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How To Keep A Mobile Number Active For The Least Money
One of the advantages of working here at TechWeb is that the company will provide me with an activated BlackBerry phone with the added benefit of never having to fill out an expense report for it. Woo-hoo! But, if I want to move my existing cell phone number to that BlackBerry, the company's fine print is clear that I will never get the number back. In order to keep that number active so people don't lose track of me, my only choice is to do so at my own expense. But, with all the crazy wireless plans out there, what's the least expensive option? I made some calls to find out.
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Why Does Google's Chrome Seem Tarnished?
I should be more excited about Google's Chrome browser than I actually am. It's fast on its feet, looks good, runs very nicely even for an 0.2 beta, and has even been released under the extremely liberal BSD license. So why do I feel like it's the wrong solution for the wrong problem?
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Case Studies In Cloud Computing
Cloud computing can seem amorphous and hard to grasp -- billowy white puffs of IT infrastructure. The best way to bring the trend into focus is through real-world business examples, and we're beginning to see more of them.
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Data Theft
The ability to steal company data is no more real today than it was five years ago, but the volume of data that can be stolen is.
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'Say Cheese!' Google Updates Picasa And Web Albums To Version 3.0
It's the morning after, and I am over Chrome. For now. Google did make some other announcements yesterday. One of them included a big one about the hugely updated picture-sharing service, Picasa. New features include facial recognition capabilities.
Continue reading "'Say Cheese!' Google Updates Picasa And Web Albums To Version 3.0..."
RFID At The Olympics
The Beijing Olympics featured a number of security technologies to ensure that visitors and participants were safe and that systems and applications remained tamper-free. Among these technologies was RFID, which was used for the sales and verification of admissions tickets to eliminate counterfeiting, provide faster check-in at events, and protect against unauthorized access to certain areas.
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Is Chrome Right For The Enterprise?
As with most things Google does, Chrome rates high on the coolness scale. From its design under the hood to Google's attention to an appropriate level of features, there's a lot to like about Chrome, but as increasingly seems to be the case with Google, there's also a lot to that should give enterprise users cause for concern.
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Your Favorite Open Source Company's Acquired. Now What?
Like all wise people, my colleague Charles Babcock knows well what he doesn't know. In the many weeks he researched his recent article, in which he explores what happens after open source companies get acquired, he often would remind me we're in uncharted waters with this trend and don't know just how it will play out.
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Alfresco And Adobe Broaden Partnership With Acrobat.com
Alfresco this week announced that Adobe's Acrobat.com has incorporated their enterprise content management functionality into its suite of tools. Adobe has used Alfresco's content repository on the back end of Acrobat.com to support the site's sharing and collaboration features.
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Google Chrome: Browser Or Cloud Operating System?
By most accounts, the Google Chrome development team has dramatically achieved its goal of building a browser that combines a minimal design with sophisticated technology to make the Web faster, safer, and easier.
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Google's Chrome-yism. Are Multiple Internets The End Game?
I've installed and played with Chrome but I'll spare you my review of it. What's more interesting to me and of concern to you is where the Internet is heading as specific client- and server-side technologies (as well as the entities in between) become deeply aligned with one another at the expense of openness. Or should I say Internets? Upon close examination, the executives of Google and Mozilla, two organizations famously aligned against mutual rivals, didn't mince words. From 3,000 miles away, the tension is palpable and Chrome and Android probably have more to do with one another than meets the eye.
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Google Chrome: More Or Less Privacy?
Google's new Chrome browser may end up being more secure than the current crop of browsers, thanks to its sandboxed multiprocess architecture. But it's not yet clear whether it will be more private.
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Will Comcast's New Bandwidth Limits Bring Rise In Wireless Broadband Hijacking?
Starting next month, Comcast says it will start metering the amount of bandwidth its customers can consume each month, and users that exceed the threshold may be cut. If I understand anything about human nature, this means that more people will steal the additional bandwidth they need.
Continue reading "Will Comcast's New Bandwidth Limits Bring Rise In Wireless Broadband Hijacking?..."
Free And/Or Open, 25 Years On
This September marks the 25th anniversary of the Free Software Foundation, and no discussion of open source is complete without them. They've given a philosophy to the computing world -- and to the world as a whole, let's face it -- but like any philosophy or movement, it's not a static thing. The minute the words leave your mouth, they're not yours anymore.
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Walt Mossberg Posts In-Depth Review Of Google's Chrome
The Wall Street Journal's Walter Mossberg has been testing Google's Chrome browser for a week next to Firefox and the latest version of Microsoft's Internet Explorer. His verdict? "Chrome is a smart, innovative browser that, in many common scenarios, will make using the Web faster, easier, and less frustrating."
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Help Wanted: Finding The Perfect IT Person
What do IT staff, mechanics, and laborers all have in common? They're among the 10 hardest job titles to fill nationally this year, according to a new study.
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3G iPhone Tethering Plan In The Works?
I've railed against the 3G iPhone's lack of tethering abilities in the past. Seems I am not the only one. A customer e-mailed Apple CEO Steve Jobs about the issue, and Steve e-mailed him back. What did he say? "We are discussing it with AT&T."
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Android Dream Pics?
If you managed to tear yourself away from the barbeque this weekend, you may have spotted these supposedly leaked photos that Engadget snagged of the first Android-powered handset. Reps from HTC and T-Mobile are not responding, but it does seem to match previous FCC documents, as well as leaked footage.
Continue reading "Android Dream Pics?..."
Busy Week For E-Discovery: Part 2
Like a blockbuster summer movie, my previous blog on e-discovery tools gets a sequel.
Continue reading "Busy Week For E-Discovery: Part 2..."
Auditing File Access
During a recent briefing with Cofio Software on its new AIMstor product, the discussion of file auditing or file logging came up. File auditing is the ability to see who has created, modified, or deleted a file and to take appropriate measures.
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Microsoft, Jealous Of Apple And Google, Working On Apps Store Of Its Own
Application stores appear to be all the rage. Apple opened up the iPhone Apps Store in July, Google announced its Android Market last week, and now it appears that Microsoft is developing an application store, too. SkyMarket, as it is currently called, will support the future Windows Mobile 7 platform.
Continue reading "Microsoft, Jealous Of Apple And Google, Working On Apps Store Of Its Own..."
'Little Known Facts About Sarah Palin' Is New Twitter Fad
Twitter users are having fun with the fact that GOP VP pick Sarah Palin was nearly unknown on the national stage before last week. Twitterers are sharing "little-known facts" about Palin, most of which are ... shall we say? ... of dubious origin.
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Podcast: Google's Matt Glotzbach On Addition Of Video For Business To Google Apps
The way Google Enterprise director of product management Matt Glotzbach describes it in the attached podcast interview, behind the firewall publishing of video for a variety of purposes (e.g., training) has strictly been the domain of corporations with deep pockets. But given today's addition of secure video publishing and sharing as a feature to the $50 per user per year version of Google Apps (the premier version), businesses need not be Fortune 500 companies to get what essentially is a private version of YouTube for a fraction of what most enterprises would pay for such a solution.
Continue reading "Podcast: Google's Matt Glotzbach On Addition Of Video For Business To Google Apps..."
Google Chrome Answers The GreenBorder Mystery
Google's new browser, named Chrome, seems to have taken off a bit earlier than Google anticipated. As far as I know, it's also the first browser launched by a comic book announcement. It's actually a very effective and entertaining way to explain the goals, features, and architecture of Google Chrome.
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Breaking: Google Is Polishing Off Chrome, Its New Web Browser
Yes, you read that correctly. Google is taking a major swipe at its competitors with the imminent launch of Chrome, a new Web browser based on Webkit. Thus marks the beginning of a new phase in the browser wars.
Continue reading "Breaking: Google Is Polishing Off Chrome, Its New Web Browser..."
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