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The InformationWeek November 2008 Archive « October 2008 | Main | December 2008 » |
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Oh Boy, A Survival Kit For The Holidays
Welcome to the silly season, when marketers decide their company's products make great holiday gifts. As InformationWeek's Master of Disaster, I get e-mail from all sorts of folks who think I should say nice things about their products in this here blog. Sometimes they try just a little too hard to make their products topical.
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Looking At Twitter As A News Source
If you are into online technology, you've certainly heard of Twitter by now. It seems many tech blogs can't get enough of how great Twitter is. The scene reminds me a bit of Facebook about 18 months ago. Apparently there's nothing Twitter can't do. In addition to people sharing that they just rode a horse; watched a video; cleaned their apartment; ate a hamburger or took a shower, now Twitter is being utilized as a key news source.
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Twitter In Controversial Spotlight Amid Mumbai Attacks
Never before has a crisis unleashed so much raw data -- and so little interpretation -- than what we saw as the deadly terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India, unfolded. Amid the real-time video feeds (kudos to CNN International), cell phone pictures, and tweets, we were able to keep abreast of what seemed to be happening, and where it was going down, all the while not really knowing those other key, canonical components of journalistic information gathering -- namely, who or why.
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Microsoft Loses Internet Ground, Or Not?
As Microsoft continues its struggle for relevance in Internet services, the latest numbers seem to tell a confusing story. Depending on the headline you read, Microsoft is either treading water or losing ground to Google. A closer look at two takes on the Microsoft search share show that it's a half-full/half-empty situation with a worrisome long-term trend.
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Taking The First Steps With Drupal
O'Reilly Media, in conjunction with two of the authors of its forthcoming Using Drupal book, is presenting a webcast titled "Everything You Wanted to Know About Drupal but were Afraid to Ask" on Friday, December 5.
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My First Open Source Project
I started an open source software project a couple of weeks ago, sort of. It's about as minor as something like this gets -- at least for now. But even at that scale, it's become a learning experience.
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Nokia Gives Up On Japan, Starts Shipping Its Touch-Phone
Some interesting news out of Finland this week. First up, Nokia announced that it will cease making mobile phones for the Japanese market. Second, the touch-based XpressMusic 5800 is now shipping in some markets.
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Cisco's Off Switch
Cisco is shutting its doors to any employees who aren't "business critical" for four days, starting Dec. 29. It's supposed save money, but I think it'll cost its brand.
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Mozy Sez: Back The F:\ Up!
At least the T-shirts they're giving away at backthefup.net do. As the site says, "Screw Klondike® Bars, What Would You Do For A Back The F:\ Up T-Shirt?" Turns out what you have to do is something that promotes EMC's Mozy backup service, like writing a blog entry.
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Microsoft Releases Updated Offline Virtual Machine Services Tool
It's the second release of this handy tool, and it comes with a number of major improvements for enterprises managing numerous Microsoft virtual machines.
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Top Content Management Sites
FierceContentManagement last week published their list of the Top 10 content management websites. While compiling a top 10 list of this sort is always tough - what you leave off is usually just as controversial as what makes the list - I can't find fault with anything that they've included.
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Will Oracle And SAP Offer Big-Business SaaS? Sort Of
The question has been out there for some time: Will SAP and Oracle ever deliver software as a service to their large enterprise customers? The answer is, sort of.
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Google Sorts One Petabyte Of Data In 6 Hours
According to last Friday's Official Google Blog, the Google Systems Infrastructure Team has sorted a record 1 terabyte of data on 1,000 computers in only 68 seconds, which breaks the previous mark of 209 seconds established in July by Yahoo.
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Apple Allows Some MacBook Videos To Play On External Displays
Apple released a QuickTime update that allows standard-definition iTunes movies to play over new MacBooks' DisplayPort to older displays, according to reports on Apple blogs. However, high-def movies are still blocked, which is unfair to owners of MacBooks and other systems by other vendors that use the same technology.
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NREL Wood Chips To Power Lab's Silicon Chips
Engineers at the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory have taken a major step in launching a "net-zero energy" facility: They lit a road flare and began burning wood chips. No kidding.
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CIO Salaries And The Capitalist's Killer Instinct
"Although CIOs are an emerging presence in the executive suite, few IT executives have the business qualifications or capitalist's killer instinct for making money," says executive search firm Egon Zehnder. So what about you: Are you an animal-spirits capitalist or a pay-me-whatever-you-want Milquetoast?
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Microsoft Helps Whiny Kids Get Their Xbox 360
It's Microsoft to the rescue for bratty children who've run out of reasons why their parents should pony up cash for an Xbox 360, economic slump be damned. The Xbox Web site will now generate a customized letter "that proves to the gift-giver in your life why you need an Xbox 360 console." I'm going to put it to the test.
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Apple Needs A Netbook ... Like We Need A Third Elbow
There's been talk here and there about how Apple needs to release a netbook-style machine to remain "competitive." It's a bad idea, and a misleading one.
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Google Round Up: Evil Layoffs, Chrome Speed Test, Street Views
Here are several short updates on things that Google has been up to. The search giant has been quietly laying off thousands of contractors; its Chrome browser was recently rated as the speediest; and the Street Views user interface gets a revamp.
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Solving The DR Testing Problem
It seems like almost every time I see a report on disaster recovery plan (DRP) testing, there are typically 50% of the respondents that either don't test their DR plan or don't test it frequently enough for the plan to be worthwhile. How can we solve this?
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Sony Ericsson Adds Facebook, Windows Live To Xperia Smartphone
Looks like developers have taken advantage of the SDK that Sony Ericsson made available for its Xperia X1 Windows Mobile smartphone. This week, Sony Ericsson added two more panels to the X1's user interface: one for Facebook and another for Microsoft's Windows Live.
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Startups Use SaaS To Take On SharePoint
Microsoft's SharePoint is the T. rex of collaboration products: big, fiercely competitive, and standing atop the social computing food chain. But smaller, nimbler players are using SaaS to compete against the thundering giant.
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Green Jobs In This Economy?
The momentum for green jobs seems to be building. Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty just introduced his Green Jobs Investment Initiative for the 2009 legislative session. Pennsylvania Gov. Edward Rendell is banking on a nearly $12 million investment into alternative clean energy projects to create at least 1,200 jobs. And California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, recent host of an international summit on the issue, has repeatedly thrown his political weight behind clean-technology businesses. But there are some less sanguine faces in the crowd, too.
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Are Apple Retailers Arming For A Price War?
Best Buy is getting ready to slash prices on new Macs and other Apple products, and Apple has authorized employees of its own retail stores to match the price cuts, according to reports on Apple blogs. That's bad news for store margins, but good news for Apple fans hoping for some fruity goodness under the tree.
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VMAN Comes To Town, But Virtual Machine Law And Order Still Elusive
I've noted that the DMTF.org standards body is not working on a spec for a standard virtual machine runtime, one that could be shared by all vendors. Why not? Because among DMTF members, there's no political will to do so. There is, however, a desire to create a standard VM management interface.
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Death, Taxes, And Open Source Business Models
To the eternal list of death and taxes, we might as well add debates about open source licensing and sales. Two recent discussions about licensing and business models got me thinking again about what's suitable to what end, and how to interpret what you see other companies doing as a model for your own work.
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SAP's Pain Equals CIO Gain?
In essential physical therapy, short-term pain might be unpleasant but it's also an indispensable prerequisite for long-term health. So yesterday when SAP's new CEO said that offering the company's core ERP products in a SaaS model will end up "hurting our margin, and hurting our stock," I hope he wasn't saying SAP will try to wait out -- or worse yet, try to ignore -- the inexorable forces of market demand and technology evolution.
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Google SearchWiki Must Die
Google's SearchWiki must die. It's a fine idea, allowing people to re-rank search results and comment on them. Viva democracy.
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HTC: We're Gonna Sell 1 Million G1's In 2008
Forecasts for sales of the first Android phone from HTC have been all over the map. HTC now says demand is so strong that it is doubling the number it originally projected to sell.
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Readers Weigh In On GM Bailout
I recently provided some examples of how the death of GM or another automaker could impact the IT industry. Boy, I hit a nerve. Readers e-mailed me and posted comments at the blog, and their feelings on the topic ranged from the furious to the frightened.
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Thanksgiving Memory: Those Who Came Before Us
The following is a letter to the editor of The Wall Street Journal published on Nov. 22, 2000.
"In 1864, a coal miner, Elias Williams, lit the fuse to a blasting cap and was hoisted to the top of the shaft. Just as he reached light, the bucket he was in broke. He fell back to the bottom of the shaft hard, breaking bones and knocking away his breath. With just enough presence of mind remaining, he grasped a handful of dust to smother the sputtering fuse, inches from the dynamite."
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If You've Got Questions, Google Has The Answers
Confused by the plethora of services that Google has made available to mobile phones? Can't figure out which version works with your device, or if your device is even supported? Google intends to give you a helping hand with its newly launched Google Mobile Help Forum.
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Samsung Adds Its Omnia To Verizon's Smartphone Lineup
With just three days before Black Friday, the phone manufacturers and network operators are rolling out the new phones in furious fashion. The latest? Samsung and Verizon Wireless jointly announced the Omnia, Samsung's Windows Mobile 6.1-wielding, TouchWiz-toting, touch screen titan.
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Is Blockbuster Still A Brand Without Its Stores?
Blockbuster is rolling out an on-demand device (and service) that lets its customers rent videos without visiting stores. I wonder if anybody will care.
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ECMHUB.com Offers A One-Stop Resource For ECM Information
With so many sources for content management industry information -- print, news sites, RSS feeds, podcasts -- it can be tough to know where to wade into the flood. The launch of ECMHUB.com, the ECMInstitute's new portal, hopes to change that.
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Can't Migrate Virtual Machines Across Different Chips? Red Hat Can
I had just finished moderating a Webinar, my first, on how enterprises architect their virtual environments. One of the takeaways was, beware of the impulse to migrate virtual machines. They have to go from like to like, when it comes to server chipsets. And the first headline I saw afterward declared that information obsolete.
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Security Firm Warns Of New Apple Malware
A Trojan horse application has been found circulating the Internet. If infected, users can end up having their system passwords nabbed, and be redirected to a number of phishing Web sites.
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Gen Y Employees: Your Future--And Your Biggest Threat
Our excellent sister site Dark Reading has summarized three reports about a group representing the latest in in-house IT security threats: they don't know or don't care about IT security policies, they're heavy users of cutting-edge technologies, and they care more about securing their home PC than their work PC. They're your Gen Y employees, and they're your future.
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Opera Offers Its Mini Browser To The Android Phone
User of the HTC G1 Android phone haven't had much choice of which browser to use with their devices. That all changed when Opera Software recently made is Opera Mini browser available in the Android Market.
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iPhone MMS App In The Works
It appears that the iPhone may get the ability to send and receive picture messages after all...but not from Apple. A Swedish company called Mobispine is working on an MMS application that would be available through the iPhone Apps Store. Too little too late?
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Would You Pay For Twitter?
My colleague Allen Stern says no. He says he might pay to use Twitter for business, but wouldn't do it just to hear what people are having for breakfast. I think I use Twitter differently than Allen, but my answer is pretty much the same as his: In theory, I might pay for Twitter, but in reality, no.
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Kiss SCO Goodbye, Again
I'm wondering how many nails have to be pounded into SCO's coffin before people finally just take a stake and pound one through its heart. But one of the last nails has been driven in and sealed over: SCO's lost to Novell in a way that may be, gratefully, irreversible.
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Open Source You Can Use, November Edition
This month's open source roundup include: polished Chrome, portable Office, a bird (almost) out of its beta cage, and ... another bird bearing mail.
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iPhone Firmware 2.2 Breaking Some Apps
Now that the iPhone firmware 2.2 is available, reports are trickling in about new issues brought on by the upgrade. Among the problems are disabled third-party applications purchased via the iPhone Apps Store.
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IT Efficiency, First Demand Oversight
In this era of tightening budgets, storage administrators are once again being asked to do more with less. The problem is that for most data centers, the efficiency crank has been turned several times already and the easy efficiency steps already have been taken.
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Obama Appointment Offers Another Green Signal
Where is President-elect Barack Obama headed with environmental protection and renewable energy? The answer lies not so much in the encouraging but ultimately self-serving video posted on the transition team's Web site on Friday, but rather on links elsewhere on the page. In particular, look at the appointment of senior transition official Rose McKinney-James as FERC Review Team Lead.
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'60 Minutes' Looks At 'Widow Penalty' In Immigration Law
Last night, 60 Minutes reported on a group of hundreds of American widows fighting a U.S. government effort to deport them from this country. These women (and a few men) are citizens of foreign countries who married American citizens, but their spouses died before their residency applications were completed. InformationWeek covered this story in June; one of the widows fighting for her residency is a prominent Second Life artist named Eshi Otawara.
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Verizon Fires Employees Who Snooped On President-Elect Obama's Personal Cell Phone Records
The news broke publicly late last week that a number of Verizon employees had taken the liberty to sneak a peek at President-elect Barack Obama's personal cell phone records. This weekend, it's been announced that the employees involved have been fired.
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Painful Printer Experiences Are Too Common
At Microsoft's recent hardware engineering conference, WinHEC, Microsoft had some information that stunned me. In one of the sessions, the presenter said that more than one in nine Vista printer driver installations end in failure. Are you surprised?
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Video: AMD 'Shanghai' Quad Core Makes Compelling Server Upgrade Argument
AMD's just-launched, rearchitected Opteron -- code-named 'Shanghai' -- is the centerpiece of the company's compelling case that now's the time for businesses to upgrade their servers, notwithstanding the current economic squeeze. Check out my video with Randy Allen, senior VP of AMD's Computing Solutions Group, to hear his arguments about Shanghai's performance, virtualization abilities, and energy savings.
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Why Hulu Will Eat YouTube's Lunch
Saturday night, YouTube held its inaugural "YouTube Live" concert where a number of mainstream artists played and sang along with a few YouTube stars. Mogulus estimates that there were 700,000 concurrent viewers of the YouTube live stream. Sounds like a large number until you realize that most TV shows have millions of viewers.
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Namespaces, Search, Network Gestures And The American Soft-White Cyber-Underbelly
On the drive home from Boston's Logan Airport after 7 hours of red-eye flying back from Mashup Camp in Silicon Valley, National Public Radio's Here & Now aired Robin Young's interview of Larry Wortzel, chair of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, about China's alleged acts of cyberwarfare against the United States. What Wortzel said, right on the heels of what I heard O'Reilly Media founder and CEO Tim O'Reilly say about namespaces and search during his Mashup Camp keynote was enough to keep me awake and thinking for the 50-minute drive home.
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Thoughts On The BlackBerry Bold
I know everyone has the BlackBerry Storm on their minds, but I haven't had enough time to really kick the tires and give a good review. I have been handling the BlackBerry Bold for a few weeks, though, and keep on reading to see if it's been worth the multiple delays.
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IBM Demos Reuse Of Data Center Waste Heat
The energy consumption of data centers is enormous. According to a Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory report to Congress, the peak load on the power grid from data centers and servers is currently estimated to be approximately 7 gigawatts, equivalent to the output of about 15 typical power plants of 1,000 megawatts each.
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Reports Of Obama's Treasury Secretary Selection Send Stocks Surging
The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose Friday to end the week lower than it opened Monday. However, a late afternoon rally Friday erased much of the damage from the previous session when the Dow took a 5.6%, or 445-point dive.
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I'd Buy That Twitter For A Dollar
The question going around the early adopter circle this week is whether Twitter users would pay for their accounts and if so, how much would they be willing to pay. Rob Jensen has analyzed a survey which shows that most people who replied would rather see the service go away than pay for it.
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Finally, My Home-Grown Kilowatts
There have been a few sparks generated in this space recently. But what excites me more are the sparks being generated in my basement. That's right, I'm finally generating my own electricity.
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CIOs Join Board Of IT Vendor: A Smart Move?
Most CIOs are generally reluctant to publicly endorse specific technology vendors, and with good reason. So it was a bit surprising this week to see the CIO of Gap Inc. and the former CIO of Yahoo not only endorse a low-profile tech vendor but also join its board of directors.
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First Look: iPhone 2.2 Makes A Great Thing Better
The biggest improvement in the iPhone software Version 2.2 is in the Maps application -- particularly the addition of Street View. It's a slick implementation that gets a lot of information into a very small screen. You can figure out the new Street View and other Maps features easily, especially if you've already used Maps.
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Was There Really A Fist Fight Over The BlackBerry Storm?
Reuters posted a piece this afternoon about how Verizon Wireless customers are lining up at retail stores across the country to buy the new BlackBerry Storm. Apparently at one midtown Manhattan location, a "ruckus" broke out. Really? Over a cell phone?
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AOL Throws Xdrive On Ash Heap - Users Scramble
It's no surprise to readers of this here blog that the online backup market is hot. Even so, AOL has managed to fail at it and will be closing the pioneering Xdrive, founded in 1999 and acquired by AOL in 2005 for a reported $30 million. It will be shut down on Jan. 12, 2009.
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GM's Death Would Hurt The IT Industry
The mob is waving its torches and shouting, "Let them die! Let those fat-cat, private-jet flying dinosaurs collapse in a heap of rust dust!" Based on what I've read on some social networking sites, some of the most opinionated on this topic reside in Silicon Valley. Yeah, OK, let GM or another U.S. automaker go under...and then watch how that impacts the industry you work in.
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When Obama Appeared On Stage, Web Traffic Dropped
I don't remember when the Obama family strode on stage Election Night, but a review of traffic at the Clickabilty site shows a sudden drop just before 9 p.m. The drop deepens until about 9:26 and then, just as precipitously, traffic resumes at its previous level. It's a snapshot of how the Web can be trumped by traditional media.
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Fedora 10: Building A Community, Not Just Code
With all the shouting about Ubuntu 8.10's release, it's easy to forget about the other distributions out there. Case in point: Fedora, which has typically been my favorite (apart from Puppy), now getting a bump to its own revision number. And so yesterday I sat down around a warm conference bridge with Paul Frields, the project leader for Fedora at Red Hat, to chat about Fedora 10.
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SSD Can Mean Hard Cost Savings
In our last entry we talked about the time savings and potential increase in productivity and revenue that deploying SSD can enable. This entry we will focus on the hard cost savings associated with SSD. In the right situation, SSD can actually be less expensive than mechanical drives.
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Yieldex Wins Amazon Startup Contest
Yieldex, a one-year-old company with a product for forecasting online ad inventory, is the winner of Amazon Web Services' startup challenge. The prize: $50,000 in cash, $50,000 in AWS credits, and a potential investment from Amazon.
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Apple Makes iPhone Firmware 2.2 Available
The latest version of firmware for the Apple iPhone became available overnight. The 246 megabyte download brings with it a host of new features for the iPhone, many of them for Google Maps. Still no MMS and still no cut-and-paste, however.
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People Lining Up For The BlackBerry Storm
This morning as I drove past the local Verizon Wireless retail store, I was surprised to see no less than 50 people waiting outside. I stopped and asked (just to be sure) what they were waiting for. They answered, "The BlackBerry Storm!"
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Hundreds Of Thousands Of Bots Lay Dormant
According to a story that ran in our sister site, DarkReading.com, 500,000 bots from a recently severed botnet army may now lay dormant, awaiting their next set of orders.
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Six Apart Offers Journalists Free TypePad Accounts
With deep cuts in newsrooms and ad revenue shrinking, it's a tough time to be a journalist of any sort, whether online, print, or broadcast. So it's a breath of fresh air when someone comes along and does something nice for our colleagues in the Fourth Estate.
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Brocade/Foundry Deal On The Rocks?
The merger of Brocade, the clear leader in enterprise Fibre Channel switching, with Foundry Networks, one of the group with Extreme and Force10 that keeps Cisco honest at the high end of the Ethernet switching market, seemed like a good match back in August. With Cisco and the HBA vendors (Emulex and QLogic) pushing FCoE as the best thing since Fibre Channel itself (iSCSI's just for kids, you know) Brocade had to team up with an Ethernet switch vendor to try selling FC/FCoE switches that users plugged into Cisco Ethernet gear down the line.
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How To Get Microsoft Office 2007 Cheap (Limited Time Offer)
Want a cut-rate, wholly genuine version of Microsoft Office 2007 at a nice discount? Then run out and buy Microsoft Equipt, while supplies last. Here's how it works.
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Can You Define The Business Value Of Your IT Organization?
One approach is to compile an "IT Annual Report," an approach being taken by a growing number of CIOs. At this week's CA World, a panel discussion with three business-technology leaders revealed a wide range of ideas and approaches for creating an IT Annual Report that can articulate business value, foster a sense of teamwork, and underscore the need for key metrics.
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Apple Cripples MacBooks With Hollywood-Mandated DRM
Users of brand-new aluminum MacBooks are being blocked from playing movies on some external displays because of DRM built into the devices at the behest of Hollywood, according to reports. External displays used to play the movies need to comply with the High Definition Content Protection standard, according to David Chartier at Ars Technica.
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Hi-Ya! Nokia N96 Bruce Lee Edition Kicks Tail In China
I'm still laughing. Nokia and ... Bruce Lee? Yes. In Hong Kong, a special edition of the Nokia N96 has been made available for sale, complete with Bruce Lee's image on the phone itself and other swag in the box.
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Is Red Hat's Whitehurst Right? Open Source Thrives In Downturn?
CEO Jim Whitehurst says Red Hat will perform robustly through a recession. Is that true or is he engaged in wishful thinking? InformationWeek's cover story this week, "The Open Source Enterprise," concludes that open source code gets taken more seriously in a time of IT budget cutbacks. Will that help Red Hat?
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Who You Gonna Call About Your iPhone Problem?
I have a problem with my iPhone, but I don't know who to ask for help. It's one of those nagging, inconsistent problems, like the funny rattle that appears in your car dashboard at odd times (but never when you try to prompt it at your dealership). After sending one e-mail, I can no longer send any others; my valid name and/or password are deemed incorrect.
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Guitar Hero, Environmental Villain
Video games get blamed for a lot of stuff, including violence, ADD, and obesity. Now you can add environmental degradation to the charges.
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Nokia Enterprise Round Up: E71 AT&T Bound, Lotus Notes Now On Board S60 Phones
Some major developments have been occurring in Nokia land lately that are worth discussion. First up, a version of the Nokia E71 smartphone has been spotted with AT&T branding on it. Second, Nokia announced today that it is adding support for Lotus Notes to its S60 smartphones.
Continue reading "Nokia Enterprise Round Up: E71 AT&T Bound, Lotus Notes Now On Board S60 Phones..."
64-Bit Flash On Linux: It's A Portal
And lo, Adobe did create a 64-bit edition of Flash for Linux. And it was good -- but now that appetites have been whetted for more Adobe software on Linux, what else may be in the pipeline? My take: Native Flash, yes, but native Photoshop, no. And not just because of Linux's currently marginal desktop market share.
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EC Data Center 'Code' Offers Mix Of Common Sense, Impracticality
The Green Grid has thrown its support behind the new European Commission's Code of Conduct on Data Center Energy Efficiency. While critics regularly assail the EC's voluntary Codes of Conduct as toothless, the latest code offers much-needed guidance for data center operators.
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Google Adds Contacts Sync To BlackBerrys
One of the killer assets of the Microsoft Exchange platform is that it not only syncs your e-mail, but also your contacts and calendar appointments with devices such as BlackBerrys. Gmail users, however, haven't enjoyed all these luxuries. Until today.
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Google Releases GrandCentral Desktop Software For Mac -- At Last
Is it possible to be very happy and very disappointed with a service at the same time? That's the way I've felt about the GrandCentral phone service since Google bought it last year. I'm happy because GrandCentral does the job that I wanted it to do: Callers dial one number, and it rings my cell phone, office phone, and home phone, in any combination I desire.
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Ballmer: What Part Of 'No Microhoo!' Do You Not Get?
Give Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer a microphone and in no time, you're bound to get a couple of great zingers out of him. At a shareholder meeting this week, he did not disappoint.
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London Hospitals Still Sick From Virus Breach
I was reading Graham Cluley's blog at Sophos earlier this week about a virus infection (the computer kind) at a number of U.K.-based hospitals. I pretty much passed over this story until I learned just how badly the hospitals were prepared for this.
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SSD In Tough Times
At a recent conference I was asked how to cost-justify solid state disk during tough economic times. The interesting aspect to SSD is that because of its cost, it always has needed to be cost justified, regardless of the economic situation, and as a result is far better suited to do more than just "ride out" the storm.
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End Of An Era: Boston's Out Of Town News To Shutter
Out of Town News, an iconic newsstand in Boston's Harvard Square selling newspapers and magazines from all around the world, is shutting down, citing competitive pressure from people reading online.
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Overrated! Underrated! 18 Technologies That Don't Get The Respect They Deserve
Perception does NOT equal reality. Many technologies simply can't live up to their hype, while others languish in unwarranted obscurity. bMighty.com pumps up the hidden gems and takes the blowhards down a peg.
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Hate The Way Gmail Looks? Now You Can Change It
The one thing about using "cloud" services that can be a bummer is the lack of customization offered by some. Case in point, the user interface of Gmail allows users to make minor tweaks to how Gmail functions, but you can't really shake things up and change the colors, or fonts, or templates. Well, now you can.
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Cemaphore's MailShadowX Links Exchange To Exchange Online
Riding the coattails of Microsoft's announcement of its hosted Exchange service Exchange Online, Cemaphore Systems announced that its MailShadowX product will sync Exchange Online mailboxes with mailboxes on an organization's in-house Exchange server.
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Will IT Management Go SaaS?
Forrester Research forecasts SaaS will take a modest bite out of the IT management market. The big surprise is the high level of interest from medium-sized and large enterprises.
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Tech Outlook 2009: IT Optimism Shunts Aside Convertible-Debt Doubts
If that headline doesn't grab you, I don't know what will. And it should, because, depressing as the past few weeks have been, it's hard to tell whether the economic glass is empty or half-full. On the plus side, in a new report, Swiss securities giant UBS predicts tech sales could be down as little as 6% in 2009, and a rebound could begin as early as late Q1. At the same time, the BreakingViews financial site warns that a bunch of tech companies are going to have difficulties refinancing their debt. My assessment of the two competing data points finds that, in the IT sector anyway, there's cause for optimism. Read on for my argument.
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Wal-Mart Nabs The iPhone?
Have you ever been shopping at Wal-Mart and just had to have a touch-screen smartphone? Well, you may be in luck, as the Boy Genius is reporting that the retail giant will be selling the iPhone 3G this holiday season.
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New 'MPG' Metric For Data Centers
While data centers consume massive amounts of energy, most data centers have become massively more efficient over the past several years.
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Google Can't Tell The Difference Between 'iPhone' And 'Sex'
This is a stitch. British users of Google's new voice-powered search application are finding that the software isn't quite ready for prime-time. The issue? It can't understand the British accent. The outcome? Searches for "iPhone" are returning results for "sex" instead. Um, oops.
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An Open Source Vendor's Biggest Competitor: Its Customers?
When my colleague Charles Babcock spoke to Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst, one sentence that fairly leapt out at me was "[Red Hat's] biggest competitor is simply people who stop buying subscriptions." So where do they go from there?
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IT's Next Headache: Cloud Chaos
It's easy to get started with cloud services, which is one of those mixed blessings that can get businesses into trouble. A few internal developers may sign up for cloud services, rogue business units do the same, usage grows, and before you know it, your company has plugged into multiple clouds without a coordinated plan. IT departments need to guard against the impending chaos.
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Is The iPhone The Number One Phone In The World?
According to AdMob, a firm that serves ads to mobile phones, the iPhone is the No. 1 mobile device in the world. But what does that really mean?
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TV Redefined Before Your Eyes
Write this down: We will look back on these few years -- ostensibly 2006 until the end of this decade -- as the remarkable revolution of television. We are transforming it right now and, I fear, not appreciating it. Time-shifting was just a blip, and I don't mean to diminish it, but like the West Coast offense, small ball, and reality TV, it's just one building block among many.
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Aww, LG Finally Hatches Its First Smartphone
Today LG and AT&T offered up the Incite for sale. The Incite is LG's first device that qualifies as a smartphone. It runs Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional to take care of all the business a professional might need to get done in a day. It also offers some things for the not-so-professional in you to pass the time.
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Thompson Era At Symantec Drawing To A Close
Yesterday, the news broke that decade-long Symantec veteran John Thompson would be retiring. Symantec's board of directors appointed Enrique T. Salem, currently chief operating officer at the company, to be president and chief executive officer effective April 4, 2009.
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Microsoft's OneCare Replacement: Is Free Good For You?
When Microsoft announced its Windows OneCare utility suite back in 2005, there was a lot of speculation about what it would mean for security powerhouses like Symantec and McAfee. The answer turned out to be, "not much." Now that Microsoft has announced OneCare's replacement, a free anti-malware product code-named Morro, security companies should be a lot more concerned.
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Day's Great Year
Day Software is having an outstanding year so far. It landed squarely in the Visionaries quadrant of Gartner's 2008 Enterprise Content Management Magic quadrant report just a month ago, and its year-to-date revenue as reported at the end of last quarter was up nearly 10% from 2007. But probably the most exciting accomplishment is the release of newest version of its flagship Web content management system, Communiqué (CQ) 5.1.
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Why Platform As A Service Matters To Businesses, Not Just Developers
Sure, platform as a service is mostly aimed at software developers. But by making it easier to create specialized programs, PaaS promises more and better business applications.
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Progress In Interoperability
At VoiceCon San Francisco last week, I had a chance to speak with Jim Burton about his role as intermediary in the talks between Microsoft and IBM on presence federation. Thinking about that conversation now, I kind of wonder if maybe Jim shouldn't put in his name for Secretary of State in the new administration. Sounds like the negotiations were as complex and delicate as a lot of international diplomacy.
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CSI 2008: You Want Standards, You Have To Demand Them
This morning's Trusted Computing Group summit focused on the Trusted Platform Module (TPM), NAC, and the TNC. The event was well-attended and covered a range of topics from what the TPM is and what it is used for to the TNC's role in NAC and NAC standards. One overwhelming message came out: Users want standards. Vendors are not listening.
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Career Tips For IT Pros In A Rotten Economy
The economy has everyone on edge. But during these uncertain times, there are a few maneuvers tech professionals can make to help survive -- and maybe even thrive -- during the downturn.
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Does Management Get Virtualization?
We're in the middle of a project where we'd proposed to measure the difference in perception of virtualization between business decision makers and technology decision makers. At the same time, we're looking at the same perceptions for advanced Web technology -- stuff like Ajax, the trend of adding collaboration and BI capabilities into apps. I've been surprised by the results.
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Climate Group Urges Smart Technologies
The Climate Group, a global coalition of governments and businesses, today is expected to announce specific policy recommendations for the U.S. federal and state governments to use so-called "smart" monitoring and metering technology to reduce environmental damage.
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Google Taps LIFE's Image Library, Offers It To Everyone
Through the decades, Life has provided a pictorial tapestry of American history. Through a new collaboration with Google, many of the iconic images captured by Life are now available through Google's Image Search function.
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Stay Transparent, They'll Love You For It
Not long ago I wrote about how "closed-but-free" software may be a bigger challenge to open source than for-pay proprietary software. Looks like the open source folks at the 451 Group think the same thing: closed-but-free is a challenge to open source, but not an insurmountable one.
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Verizon Wireless Bungles BlackBerry Storm VIP Event
Last week we learned that Verizon Wireless was inviting its VIP customers to a special preview event featuring the BlackBerry Storm. The whole idea was to give those customers a chance to see the Storm ahead of the masses. Too bad no Storms were at the event.
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Debating The Auto Bailout: What If GM Were Intel?
It's always dangerous to discuss politics or religion, so of course I'm going to tackle both today: the politics of a GM bailout and whether that comports with the faith we have in free-market capitalism. I say, yes, we can rescue the American automobile industry and still live with ourselves, economically speaking, in the morning.
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Is Amazon's Interface Its Brand?
Amazon has built a powerful brand without spending much time or money on the obvious tools of branding.
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Green Hills Software Integrity: A Secure OS At Last
Green Hills Software Integrity 178B operating system is the first, and only, certified Common Criteria Evaluation Assurance Level (EAL) 6+ operating system on the market. Green Hills Software uses Integrity as the basis for a secure PC operating system called Integrity PC and includes Padded Cell Virtualization, a secure hypervisor running within Integrity PC. Integrity Global Security LLC has been formed as a subsidiary of Green Hills Software to market Integrity PC. Integrity PC is provably secure.
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Who Can Replace Jerry Yang?
With the ax falling on Jerry Yang, many people will be saying it was long overdue. The Yahoo press release says the board has initiated a search to replace Yang, who will stay on in his previous role of Chief Yahoo! (including the exclamation point) and remain a board member.
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Google Overhauls iPhone App
This evening the new Google application for the iPhone became available. Not only does it bring the new voice-powered search function, it also revamps the usability in a big way. Here is InformationWeek's first take.
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CSI 2008: The Business Case For Governance, Risk, And Compliance
There are three legs of a table that, if weakened, put your organization at risk and, if a leg is removed, let the table fall to the ground. IT governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) is fundamentally a return to the basics of information security. Regardless of technology, you need to know what to protect, when it needs protecting, and why it needs protecting. Getting ahead of the game is more effective than catching up later.
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Fallout From 'Joe The Plumber' Snooping Heats Up
This presidential election involved more hacking and digital snooping than any other election I can recall.
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Align IT With Customers, Or Support And Enable? The Woodshed Awaits.
My recent post calling for overthrowing the old bromide "align IT with the business" and replacing it with "align IT with your customers" has sparked a lively debate. One commenter, signing is as "Insulted CIO Guest," takes me to the woodshed and feels a pretty good thrashing is in order. Since it's my tail on the line, I'm hardly an objective voice and so must turn to you, dear readers, for a ruling on whether the whip should come down.
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Storage Consolidation?
Every so often you hear the prediction of consolidation in the storage industry, especially during times where the economy is in question. Now is again one of those times and surely we will see some acquisitions here or there, but I think we are a long way off from the classic consolidate down to three vendors scenario. Here's why....
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FastTCP Appliance Gains Traction
FastSoft, the two-year-old startup with an Internet accelerator appliance that employs souped-up TCP/IP, has two new customers. Limelight Networks is using the device to speed content uploads to its storage servers, and Getty Images has deployed it to hasten video distribution across long distances.
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The Planet's New On-Demand Storage Cloud Service
Managed hosting vendor The Planet has announced the availability of an on-demand storage cloud service that merges on-premises storage performance with cloud storage capabilities.
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Dell Crunches Fuzzy Green Numbers
It's quite tempting to dismiss Dell's claim today that since 2005 it has saved consumers $3 billion in energy costs and spared the environment 29 million tons of CO2. The savings, says Dell, came through power management and energy efficiency features found on the OptiPlex desktop, Latitude laptop, and Precision workstation.
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iPhone Experts: Stay Away From Firmware 2.2
Reports suggest that iPhone firmware 2.2 will become available to users of the iPhone beginning Friday, Nov. 21. The iPhone Dev Team cautions that iPhone users who've jailbroken their phones skip it for the time being.
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CSI 2008: Brian Snow's Assurance And Controls
Brian Snow's keynote at CSI 2008 started with an amusing graphic of a guy pouring gas over his head while lighting a cigar. The message was we always take risks, even when we aren't aware of them. Snow learned a thing or two about risk while working at the NSA for 20 years, ending as technical director for information assurance. Information risks, he points out are, moving targets and information security programs need to be adaptable and well designed.
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French RIAA Sues SourceForge For Aiding And Abetting Piracy?
Yes, this sounds every bit as ridiculous to me as it probably does you. The Société civile des Producteurs de Phonogrammes en France, or SPPF -- France's analogue to the RIAA -- is preparing to file suit not only against the makers of various P2P sharing apps, but SourceForge.net, which provides code hosting for many such projects. All together, now, in your best Stupefied Bill Maher Voice: What!?
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Google's iPhone and SMS Apps Are No-Shows
iPhone users excited about Google's new voice-powered search application may have noticed that it never appeared in the iPhone Apps Store over the weekend. As of 9 AM today, it still wasn't there. Also missing in action is that chat-based SMS feature that Google promised would be added to Gmail. What gives, Google?
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CSI2008: Security Reconsidered
This year's CSI 2008 event promises to be every bit as interesting as ever. CSI tracks are broad, the topics deep, and the speakers top-notch. Once again I find myself wanting to see all of it (9 tracks!) but only one of me.
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Palin E-Mail Hacker Trial Delayed
The trial of David "Popcorn" Kernell, the 20-something student who has been accused of hacking then vice president-hopeful Sarah Palin's Yahoo e-mail account, has been postponed.
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No Bargains At The Microsoft Store
Microsoft had a pretty stealthy unveiling of The Microsoft Store last week. There you can buy any product Microsoft makes, from Windows to Webcams. Don't expect to find any bargains, though.
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McAfee's Cybercrime Response Unit Prepares For Launch
Few services can be had for free nowadays, but if you're a victim of identify fraud or data theft, add McAfee's new Cybercrime Response Unit to the list of resources you can utilize to aid your investigation.
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A Critical Look At Content Management Interoperability Services
It's been an interesting two months since the announcement of the proposed Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) standard. While some vendors rapidly got on board -- Alfresco, for example, released the first implementation of CMIS -- other companies, such as Day Software, have alternately supported and gently poked holes in the proposal.
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Pssst. What's Your Password?
Your company invests heavily in provisioning and identity management software. Password are to be changed every 90 days or so. The goal is to make sure accounts are secure and users are accountable for their actions. Problem is: Everyone is sharing passwords.
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Thoughts On The T-Mobile G1
It's been almost a month since Google, HTC, and T-Mobile unleashed the first Android-powered G1 on the public, and I'm sure there are plenty who are still on the fence. I've been putting the handset through the wringer for the last few weeks and found it's a good device with some ups and down. Is the G1 the right smartphone for you?
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Mathematica's New Cloud Computing Partnership
Last week, Wolfram Research announced that it was developing a cloud computing service for users of its Mathematica software used to graph and understand complex mathematics, physics, and engineering problems.
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8 Reasons To Pick The BlackBerry Storm Over The iPhone?
CIO offers up eight reasons to pick the forthcoming BlackBerry Storm over the Apple iPhone 3G. At least one of them is invalid. What about the others?
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'GreenPC' From The Emerald Isle
At first, I thought it was some new Nigerian e-mail scam that slipped through my spam filter: "I designed and developed a really green pc. After months of hard work, I came up with a product that I think everybody will love." Right ... and you want me to send you money so you can buy back the patent or something?
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Shoot The Mantra: STOP 'Aligning IT With The Business'
Recently uncovered fossil records indicate that the tattered cliché of "CIOs must align IT with the business" was first uttered shortly after the discovery of fire. And while that bromide made sense for a few thousand years, it no longer applies here in the early 21st century because today's mandate for CIOs must be to align IT with their *customers*, not with their business. Because one points to the future, while the other merely reflects the recent past.
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Obama Says Yes We Can Use YouTube
When I first heard that President-elect Barack Obama would be using online video to distribute his weekly addresses, I was excited. It's great to see that he wants to engage the nation across both video and audio. I assumed that the videos would be posted to the whitehouse.gov and change.gov websites.
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Web Check Means No Job At The White House For Me
Less than two weeks into U.S. Sen. Barack Obama's transition toward the presidency, it has become clear I'm unlikely to get a job with the next administration.
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Is It Adultery If The Sex Happens In Second Life?
Is cybersex adultery? That's a question faced by a U.K. couple, who divorced after she caught him having cybersex with another woman in Second Life. She called up the real-life lawyers and kicked the bum out. But is it really adultery if there's no physical contact? Is it cheating if the two people having relations never even see each other, or hear each others' voices?
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Samsung Launches A Slew Of iPhone Wannabes
This week saw something ridiculous, like three different touch screen devices from Samsung hit the market or be announced. The Delve, the Behold, and the Eternity bring a mixture of media and smartphone-like features complete with touch screen input.
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What Brown Does For HP
UPS spent 18 months working with Hewlett-Packard to develop a wearable printer-scanner that should make its package sorting more efficient and significantly cut paper use. HP can now sell the printer to anyone, including UPS rivals. How's that help UPS? CIO David Barnes explains.
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Web Services Alert You To Speed Traps And Red-Light Cameras
When I was in college, a large whiteboard was placed in the campus center where students would post locations on the highways where cops would sit and wait for speeders. Everyone would copy the list for their route before they headed home. Today there are services online that can provide real-time updates of where the speed traps and red light cameras are located.
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Sun's Rich Green Set Open Source In Motion; Lift-off Still To Come
Sun's Executive VP for Software, Rich Green, has resigned, just as Sun says it will lay off 15-18% of its employees. This is an awkward juxtaposition. Sun is reorganizing its software unit; open source software is at the heart of its business strategy; and the leading spokesman for open source is going away.
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Microsoft Office Coming For Linux (Sort Of)
No, Microsoft isn't releasing a platform-native version of Office for Linux. It's doing something a lot smarter: releasing a platform-neutral version of Office -- its vaunted Office Web suite -- that can theoretically run anywhere, Linux included.
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Sun: The GM Of IT
I cringed on reading the news that Sun is slashing upward of 5,000 jobs. For me, it's sad proof that Sun has turned into the GM of IT: a beached whale, too big for its own good, that will now be picked to death mercilessly by scavengers.
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iPhone Gets Voice-Powered Search From Google
Google is finally catching up with competitors Microsoft and Yahoo for once. It is rolling out a new application for the iPhone that allows users to conduct searches with their voice rather than typing. Nice of Google to catch on to the voice-activated search craze.
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A Vendor-Neutral Standard For Virtual Machines? There Isn't One
I asked, how's progress coming on a neutral VM runtime format that could be recognized by all the hypervisor vendors? Winston Bumpus, president of the DMTF, said: "Nothing is under way at the moment. Nobody's proposed that we undertake that work."
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Bloggers Say Twitter's Voter Fairness And Accuracy Project Less Fair, Accurate Than Voting
The Twitter Vote Report was subject to human judgment and technological error, according to two bloggers from Reno, Nev., who analyzed the network.
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HTC G1 Not On Sale At Wal-Mart After All
Remember how Wal-Mart advertised that it would sell the HTC G1 Android phone for $31 less than T-Mobile itself was charging? Turns out, T-Mobile didn't take kindly to that idea and Wal-Mart is charging the same price that T-Mobile is.
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Surprise: CTOs Want To Pay For Open Source
Matt Asay, open source blogger for CNET, got some eye-opening feedback from CTOs about their use of open source. As with many other aspects of business, money speaks louder than freedom alone, but freedom isn't a bad bonus.
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World Of Borecraft: Wrath Of The Lich King
Blizzard Entertainment has thrown the switch on servers that support Wrath of The Lich King, a World of Warcraft expansion pack in which players can traverse new territory filled with a host of never-before-seen enemies. Wake me when it's over.
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Tracking Twitter Trends With TwitScoop
Keeping track of trends on Twitter is like walking down Main Street and being able to hear every single conversation by everyone you pass. Sometimes, the results are obvious. Last Tuesday, for example, everybody was talking about the U.S. presidential elections. But sometimes you pick up a couple of surprises.
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Sprint To Employees: Take A Hike If You Want To
The nation's third-largest provider of mobile phones and services has had a tough year. So tough, in fact, that it lost gobs of money in the most recent quarter and has told its employees that if they want to quit, they are more than welcome to leave.
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Cisco & The Stalagmite Business
Cisco last week announced results that affirmed expert expectations for declining tech spending well into 2009. Maybe it's time to reconsider the stalagmite business.
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IBM Turns To Cloud Management
Want a clue on what's next from IBM in cloud computing? Then take note that Dennis Quan, the guy behind IBM's cloud computing partnership with Google, recently moved into IBM Tivoli's development group. His new assignment tells a lot about the challenges IBM sees ahead.
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No Worries About Climate Change? Horsefeathers!
My fellow blogger, Bob Evans, apparently was left slack-jawed upon reading a recent post of mine suggesting that we appeal to business interests to help save the environment. From what I gather, Bob believes that we should "protect" the environment but that the urge to "save the environment" is "silly." Also, he says, that by not ratcheting down the hype "we'll end up doing terrible damage."
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Survey Says: Compliance Drives E-Mail Archiving
A new survey from Barracuda shows compliance is the most important reason to archive mail, but not the only driver.
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Verizon Wireless: BlackBerry Storm Available Nov. 21 For $200
This is it, the final and official confirmation we've all been waiting for. If you're in the market for a touch-screen BlackBerry Storm, it will be available on Nov. 21
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Laptop Lapses As Must-Have Gadget; Does Anybody Really Want One For Xmas?
Here's the thought that hit me last night, checking out the tabletop gadget displays at the Consumer Electronics Show's New York press preview: Where are all the laptops? And why don't I care that there are so few? The answer is obvious -- unless you covet a new MacBook, you're not crossing your fingers in hopes of finding a shiny new notebook computer under the tree. Smartphones, netbooks, and digital SLRs, definitely. But laptops? Yawn!
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Looking To Online Newspapers For Design Tips
It can be easy to fall into the trap of focusing so much on content management tools that you end up forgetting that they don't mean much of anything without good site design. Smashing Magazine this week published a great piece on newspaper Web sites that serves as a strong reminder of that very point.
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Visa To Test New Credit Card Security Tactic
Credit cards were never designed for online purchases. They were designed more than 50 years ago for face-to-face purchases, yet credit card companies and online merchants continue to try to re-tool credit cards as viable for online payments.
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Let's Rethink PC Security
This past Sunday, there was a wee bit of a problem with AVG Antivirus. It deleted one of the core Windows XP files, rendering the system unbootable. AVG issued an update within hours, but by then the damage already had been done.
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Dow Down On Government Changes, Weak Reports
The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell almost 5% Wednesday, marking the third day in a row of falling stock prices.
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Nokia E63 Makes Official Appearance, Unnamed Model Makes Unofficial Appearance
Today, Nokia formally announced a new addition to its E Series business phones, the E63. What's more interesting is a new Nokia flip phone seen on the Internet that has a full QWERTY keyboard and some other interesting specs, such as support for U.S. 3G.
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'Save The Environment'??? Puh-leeze: Let's Get Real
My fellow blogger Kevin Ferguson, who's doing excellent work on our Green Technology beat, recently ended a post with this jaw-dropper: "And perhaps that's what is needed to save the environment." Now, while I'm as fully committed as the next guy to the need for businesses to do a better job with more-sustainable sourcing, recycling, and energy conservation, we all need to severely ratchet down the rhetoric or else in our wildly misguided quest to "save the environment" we'll end up doing terrible damage.
Continue reading "'Save The Environment'??? Puh-leeze: Let's Get Real..."
Sun's Amber Road: Open Storage, And Maybe Profit, Too
Despite all the gloom about Sun's ailing business, there's little doubt that the company has the capacity to pump out good ideas and great hardware. Its newly introduced Amber Road storage systems probably won't dig it out of the hole it's in by itself, but could be one rung on the ladder out.
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Tips For Managing Vendor Relationships In Tough Times
If you're thinking about consolidating your vendor and outsourcing relationships in an effort to save money, don't be hasty. Here are a few tips to consider first.
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Cutting IT Costs: Dos, Don'ts And Best Practices
These days, many companies are looking to slash their technology budgets any way they can. A new report from Info-Tech Research shows you how to do it the right way, without adversely affecting morale or operations. And the folks at bMighty.com -- InformationWeek's sister site for small and midsize companies -- have arranged to let you download this $2,000 report, FREE!
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Google Updates Search On The iPhone
Google has refreshed the way search results display on the iPhone. Google is doing its best to provide results that are as comprehensive as any desktop would provide, but better presented for the iPhone's user interface.
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What's Yahoo's Brand Name Worth?
Microsoft isn't interested in repeating its bid for Yahoo, if you can believe Steve Ballmer's latest public comments. I hope he means it.
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Las Vegas: Mo' Green
Finding ways to turn Las Vegas's Consumer Electronics Show green should be like shooting khaki–clad fish in a barrel. Right? Everywhere you look, vendors are doubling down to waste more natural resources than the competition in the adjacent booth.
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Will The Cloud Hurt Storage Companies?
There have been a few articles written lately which claim cloud computing will hurt smaller storage companies like 3Par, Compellent, Xiotech, etc…. The theory being that there will have to be some industry consolidation. I disagree. Cloud computing should be a net gain for storage companies and here's why.
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BlackBerry Storm To Street On November 24?
The guessing game continues. A recently leaked internal Verizon Wireless document suggests that the much-anticipated BlackBerry Storm will be available on Monday, Nov. 24.
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Over $9K In Prizes Up For Grabs At Mashup Camp This Monday
Just a heads up that the seventh Mashup Camp starts this coming Monday, November 17th, at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. We've got room for 400 people in the building and are somewhere north of 375 registrations right now (see who's coming). Tim O'Reilly is keynoting and over $9,000 in prizes will be given out on-site to the best mashups.
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Serious Flaw Leaves SAP Users Vulnerable
The US-CERT is warning SAP users of a flaw that could make it possible for systems to succumb to remote, unauthenticated attacks.
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Google Flu Trends
Google.org, Google's philanthropic arm, has launched a service to help medical experts and the public track the incidence of influenza across the United States.
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New Backup And Recovery Software For SharePoint
As SharePoint nears $1 billion in revenue, third-party software vendors are joining the party with tools and add-ons.
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Microsoft Users Highlight VoiceCon
Microsoft's entry to the communications market has changed the way enterprise decision-makers look at their choices for the future, so it made sense that the software giant brought a couple of customers along with its own keynoter on the first conference day of VoiceCon San Francisco 2008, for a discussion of how the enterprise should organize and prioritize for the changes that Unified Communications will bring.
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Google Adds Video And Voice Chat To Gmail
Today Google introduced a major new feature to the chatting program that's embedded within Gmail. Gmail users can now expand their chats to include live audio and video of their contacts.
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6 Steps Toward Ensuring Data Privacy
U.S. companies and other organizations that handle lots of employee and customer data (isn't that just about everyone?) need to view privacy as a formal practice, to the point where it can become a competitive differentiator, according to one of the nation's leading privacy executives.
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Hard Times In Tape Business
Between the shift to disk backup and the economy rolling downhill, times are tough for tape library vendors. While IBM and Sun can shift their sales from tape libraries the size of a small Winnebago to their home-built VTL, the makers of midrange tape libraries are having a tougher time as much of their sales came through OEM deals with EMC, HP, or HDS and those vendors' VTLs don't pay Quantum or Overland's rent. Even media vendor Imation is hurting.
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Report: iPhone Firmware 2.2 To Be Released Nov. 21
iPhone users who've been drooling in anticipation of the new functions coming with firmware update 2.2 have something to cheer about. Word is, the firmware will be offered up in 10 days, on Nov. 21.
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Debian On The Android T-Mobile G1: Maybe One Day We Won't Have To Hack It
If you build it, they will hack. They hacked the iPhone, the PSP, the PlayStation 3, and just about every other "closed" piece of consumer electronics out there. Now we have a hack that lets you run Debian on the Android-powered T-Mobile G1. But if Android is getting a far less restrictive application store than the iPhone, does that mean this kind of reverse engineering is ultimately irrelevant?
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Google Apps Inventor Rajen Sheth Unplugged, Part III: Some Finishing Touches For Google Apps?
Last week, I published Part I and Part II of my recent interview with Rajen Sheth, aka the inventor of Google Apps. Throughout Part II, Sheth and I discussed the degree to which the pre-release version of Google's open source browser Chrome represented the sort of browser-side innovations that might take Web-based applications (such as those that are found in Google Apps) to the next level. Google can and does of course push modern day browsers to their limit with the coding it does on the server-side. But there's only so much that can be done on the server-side to take Web applications to the next level before the browser must reciprocate.
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BlackBerry Storm To Cost $219 With Contract
Some eagle-eyed surfers spotted a Verizon Wireless staging site that spilled some details of the BlackBerry Storm. Among them was the price. The Storm will set you back $219 if you sign a two-year contract.
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G.ho.st Twitters From Amazon Web Services
G.ho.st, a startup that has developed a "virtual computer," is integrating Twitter with its browser-based user environment. More than a dozen applications are available from G.ho.st, a unique company where Israelis and Palestinians work together writing Web 2.0 software.
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Planet Metrics Sizes Up Carbon Impact
Chances are you don't remember EcoSynergy. It was an environmental firm that began making some noise 18 months ago at green gatherings. But Silicon Valley powerhouse Draper Fisher Jurvetson and angel investors are betting $2.3 million that you'll remember the company under its new name, Planet Metrics, after it makes its debut today.
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A Web 2.0 Summit For The Ages
"Why didn’t you take the $33 per share, Jerry?" John Battelle asked Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang 33 different ways at last week’s Web 2.0 Summit until, on some level, you cringed for the poor bastard. Moments earlier, Battelle had introduced Yang as a man he'd known for a long time, a man who doesn't back down from a fight. Then Battelle – gently at first – brought the fight. I interview people for a living in front of cameras, but this was simply a masterpiece and ultimately I cringed for the both of them: Battelle for having to do it; Yang for wandering aimlessly, sadly, and, I suppose humanly. This was among dozens of remarkable, memorable moments in a conference that seems to keep getting better each year.
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ImpressCMS's Award-Winning Platform Receives An Upgrade
With the release of version 1.1 of its content management system in late October, ImpressCMS has capped off an exciting year that would be the envy of almost any open source project.
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Next: VMware Tackles Smartphone Virtualization
The bane of the cell phone industry is that its software needs to be rewritten for every new model. And since new cell phones come along about as often as, ah, cell phone commercials on TV, that's a problem. The answer is virtualization -- break the dependence on hardware of a piece of software written for a particular device.
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Apple iLife Gets Security Fix
Apple today announced a serious security fix for iLife 8.0, Aperture 2, and Max OS 10.4.9 through 10.4.11. Each of the security flaws, if left unpatched, could lead to "arbitrary code execution," which means attackers could run code of their choice on your system.
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Cloud Computing Issues Are Different, But Familiar
David Berlind points out the difficulty of assigning blame with mashups built out of cloud technologies. One "simple" solution, the one that Microsoft might like you to consider, is getting all your cloud technologies from a single vendor. That's not likely to solve the problem.
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EMC's New Global Cloud Storage Offering
Storage giant EMC today debuted its first cloud-optimized storage offering, called Atmos, that promises to help huge content distribution services, such as video and photo sharing sites, store petabytes of data across cloud storage environments around the world.
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401(k)s Gutted By Risk Management Gone Wild, 'Black Swan' Guy Says
The reason your 401(k)s are underwater -- melted like an ice cream cone on the sidewalk, is how the pseudonymous Stanley Bing puts it -- is because the financial analysts who were managing your nut have been trained all wrong. All those business schools have been pushing out MBAs trained erroneously (insanely!) in risk analysis, which paradoxically is really risky. Oh, now you tell us! Well, that's what Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of "The Black Swan," is indeed saying. Tell it, Nassim.
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Obama's Vision For A CTO
All eyes in the tech community are watching to see who will become the nation's first chief technology officer. While there's plenty of speculation and uncertainty about who will fill those shoes, it's clear what the next president expects from the person who fills them.
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What Would You Do For A BlackBerry Storm?
Our friends at Crackberry are giving away 10 BlackBerry Storms to the most-dedicated fans. I was a big fan of the first touch-screen handset from Research In Motion, but these winners are far more dedicated than I ever could be.
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What IT Folks REALLY Think
Do you know what your IT staffers are thinking? Are you sure? Unless you're in the trenches with them, their concerns may surprise you -- and they'll definitely make you laugh.
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Your Incredibly Shrinking Paycheck
Your 401(k) account isn't the only thing that looks pretty shriveled up these days. If you're a tech professional, your paycheck might've shrunk recently, too, says a new report.
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Serious Bug Causing Real Problems For Android Handset
Users of the HTC G1 Android phone have come across a scary problem. Some of the handsets are interpreting words typed on the QWERTY keyboard as root commands -- and it is executing them.
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Obama Still Using Internet To Raise Money, Support
The presidential campaign ended last week, yet the Obama camp sent out another e-mail blast today asking supporters to fork over another donation -- this time to help pay off the debt of the Democratic National Committee. It makes me wonder if Obama will continue to use e-mail communications to get support, and money, from U.S. citizens well into his presidency to help fund federal initiatives.
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Google's Schmidt Says No To U.S. CTO Post
Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt on Friday took himself out of the running for the U.S. CTO post in Barack Obama's administration.
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Cutting The Digital Fat
Unnecessary copies and older versions of documents clog up employee hard drives and make discovery exercises longer and more expensive. One vendor's software aims to help companies get smarter -- and more aggressive -- about deleting digital fat.
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Apple iPhone Passes The MotoRazr To Be No. 1 Handset In The U.S.
Finally. According to a new report from The NPD Group, the Apple iPhone 3G has surpassed the Motorola Razr V3 to become the top-selling handset in the United States.
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Case In Point: Extracting Business Agility Out Of Public Social Networks
By TechWebTV executive producer Fritz Nelson's account, the House of Shields (a bar just off Market Street in San Francisco) was far too packed-to-the-gills on the second eve of Web 2 Summit for he and TechWeb's multimedia engineer Matt Conner to actually shoot any video. But how he came to be there in the first place is a bit of a case study of the role that social networks and other tools can play when it comes to improving business agility.
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Economics A Key Metric To Green Hopes
Economics are fast becoming the lingua franca of the environmental movement. And that's a good thing.
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Linux On Netbooks: Doomed Already?
So goes some of the punditry I've heard from various quarters. I mentioned the Guardian's "Linux is washed up" take on the issue, and now Ian Lamont at the Industry Standard put it this way: Windows 7 will make Linux downright irrelevant on netbooks.
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An E-Waste Story That'll Make You Want To Quit Tech
60 Minutes (the CBS news magazine) ran such a disturbing story on e-waste last night that it's practically enough to make you want to disavow yourself of hi-tech altogether. I almost wish I didn't see it because now, I'm having a hard time reconciling all the digital products I have (or want to buy) and what I tell my kids about leading a greener lifestyle. How can we possibly make that next iPod, cell phone, notebook, or flat screen purchase and say we're green at the same time?
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VM’ing Phones?
A quick announcement out of Palo Alto this morning... VMware plans to bring the metaphor of virtualization to mobile handsets.
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YouTube Goes Hollywood, Adds MGM Catalog
It was only a matter of time. With Hulu.com a proven success for offering legitimate television and movie content online, YouTube, the one-time Web video innovator, needs to play catch up. It has made some movies from MGM's catalog available to viewers to watch for free.
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Solving The Gap Between Virtual Machine And Storage
Server virtualization rollouts often get stuck after the first wave. That first wave is where you have virtualized most of your easy stuff. Then as the virtual machines begin to proliferate, it occurs to you that you have lost control. One of the key disconnects is from server to storage.
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Adobe Reader Vulnerability Being Attacked
Within days of the announcement of a serious Adobe Reader flaw, attackers already are planting maliciously crafted PDF files to attack Windows users.
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Will The Economic Downturn Push Coworking Further Ahead Or Will People Head Out?
When I speak with Web developers and designers who have lost their jobs over the past few months, many of them tell me that they are considering going out on their own and launching either a consultancy or a startup. As the discussion continues, about half of the group say they will look to begin the process at a coworking location versus working at home or at a coffee shop.
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Yahoo Hopes To Be Microsoft's Black Friday Deal
As Yahoo's fortunes and stock price continue to drop, CEO Jerry Yang has become much more open to another offer from Microsoft. "We were ready to negotiate," Yang said of the Microsoft deal earlier this year. There's the problem right there; Microsoft was overpaying and Yahoo should have known it.
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Election Week Mobile Roundup
It was a historic week, as the Internet and mobile tech played a big role in the U.S. election. This week also saw Google being giddy with the white spaces decision, T-Mobile looking like it's on the upswing, and Sprint continuing to hemorrhage customers. But your mind may not have been focused on the mobile industry this week, so stick with me and I'll catch you up on what else went down.
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Who Would Make A Good U.S. Chief Technology Officer?
Early in his presidential campaign, Barack Obama said that the United States isn't doing nearly enough to create jobs through technology and pledged to create the first-ever Cabinet-level post of chief technology officer.
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E-Waste In Prime Time
OK, it's been all over the Web lately, but if you haven't seen the online teaser for the upcoming 60 Minutes episode this Sunday, it's worth taking a look.
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Huffington, Newsom & Trippi: The Web & Politics
Riding the tailwind of an historical election, Web 2.0 Summit set out to establish the Web as part of that history thanks to a dynamic, provocative panel that included Arianna Huffington (Huffington Post), Gavin Newsom (yeah, that one: Mayor of San Francisco), and Joe Trippi (political consultant).
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LimeWire Wants To Get More Social
LimeWire is adapting its model to show how P2P is still a legitimate business investment. But is adding social networking and becoming more feature rich the right fix?
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Ballmer Gasses Off About Open Source (Again)
First Steve Ballmer was scratching his head about Android; now he's murmuring about the possibility of using open source components in Internet Explorer. Small wonder so many of us are scratching our heads, too, but there's a consistency in there, amazingly.
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Barracuda Swims Into The Cloud
The anti-spam vendor buys into the cloud with acquisition of an online backup company.
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Android: Not So Open After All?
Earlier this week, hackers found a way to gain root access to the Android operating system of the HTC G1. Root access allows users to install unauthorized applications. Google caught wind of it, and pulled a move eerily similar to what Apple has done in the past with the iPhone. Google issued an over-the-air firmware update that buttoned Android back up.
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Apple Beats RIM, Microsoft To Become No. 2 Smartphone Provider
Analysts have confirmed the numbers. Apple did indeed surpass RIM in sales during the second quarter to become the second-largest provider of smartphones. It also surpassed Windows Mobile. But can Apple keep the momentum going?
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The View From Firefox's Bleeding Edge
I don't normally live dangerously. I wear my seat belts and follow the labels on my prescription bottles with religious care. That said, stick an alpha or beta edition of an open source app in front of me, and I'm honor-bound to try it out -- within reason, of course.
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Chinese Hackers Repeatedly Hack White House Network
The Financial Times is reporting that Chinese hackers have repeatedly nabbed e-mails between government officials.
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Plone Raises Its Profile With Award And World Plone Day
Today, Nov. 7th, 2008, is World Plone Day. No, it's not some obscure holiday you've never heard of, but instead an opportunity for the community of developers and users of the Plone content management system to try and get the word out.
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Cloud Storm At Web 2.0
At the Web 2.0 Summit here in San Francisco, executives from Salesforce.com, Google, Adobe, and VMWare attempted to take the cloud discussion beyond the typical "compute-in-cloud" model, and into some uncomfortable and ambitious places.
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Samsung The New King Of The Mobile Hill In U.S.
This is a sad day for Motorola. The beleaguered maker of mobile phones has lost the top spot in the United States to Korean handset maker Samsung. Motorola has steadily lost market share over the last year, and for the first time since 2004, is no longer No. 1 on its home turf.
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Google Apps Inventor Rajen Sheth Unplugged Part II: Polishing Google Apps With Chrome?
Earlier this week, I published Part I of my recent interview with Rajen Sheth, who is known in the halls of Google as the inventor of Google Apps. Just the name Google Apps causes a bit of confusion. Many users of Google's browser-based word processor, spreadsheet, and presentations solutions think they are using Google Apps. Indeed, they are using Google's browser-based applications. But Google Apps is more than just a colloquial reference to Google's portfolio of browser-based applications.
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SSD's Latency Impact
In our last entry we talked about latency and what it was. We also discussed how storage system manufacturers are trying to overcome latency and performance issues of mechanical drives by using techniques like making the drives faster by using higher RPM drives, array groups with a high drive count, short-stroking those drives, wide striping those drives, and increasing the number of application servers for improved parallelism.
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The Enigmatic Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg
I can't tell whether Mark Zuckerberg is obtuse or just plain real. I can't tell whether he's going to follow in the footsteps of Bill Gates (debated forever as simultaneously genius and evil). But what I can tell you is that he is an never-ending source of amusement and wonder, and never more so than when he's on stage at Web 2.0.
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AT&T: Right Moves, Wrong Noise
If nothing else, AT&T is making major symbolic gestures toward consumer broadband and mobile broadband services, and by doing so is trying to demonstrate its willingness to paint itself as a new AT&T. The gestures are, indeed, impressive, but the company's reluctance to admit its failures damages its credibility.
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The Worst Way To Learn Of A Data Breach
While there’s no welcomed way to learn that your customer data has been compromised, perhaps the worst way is to learn via an extortion letter. Pay up, or we'll expose millions of patient records, threatens a letter to Express Scripts.
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Software Is Dead? Benioff Says He May Have Exaggerated Demise
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff made a splash with his announcements of ties to Facebook and Amazon's computing cloud at his company's Dreamforce user group meeting this week. "None of these announcements will produce discrete revenue," points out Steven Ashley, the Robert W. Baird investment bank analyst who shared my table at lunch. Then again, they don't necessarily need to.
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iPhone Getting Support For Wireless Podcast Updates
The next iPhone software update will include the ability to download podcast episodes over the air, reducing the need to sync the device with a desktop computer, according to reports. For podcast listeners, that cuts another major tether attaching the iPhone to a desktop or notebook computer.
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Dell Announces Dedupe Strategy - No Product Yet
Dell's backup portfolio is still a bit thin at the high end, lacking both a virtual tape library and deduplication (no, the CommVault-provided single instance storage on the DL2000 doesn't count). Currently, Dell customers looking for deduplication can buy The Data Storage Group's ArchiveIQ source deduping backup software for Windows or an ExaGrid gateway to an EqualLogic array through Dell's reseller arrangements with those vendors.
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Presidential Politics Inspiring IT Transformation
America voted for change this year in the face of huge risk and uncertainty. And though technology wasn't a major theme of the 2008 presidential race, there are lessons for today's IT leaders that we saw on the political stage.
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Why Microsoft Will Prevail In The Cloud
Microsoft last week unveiled its cloud computing strategy, a plan that was met by some with skepticism and doubt. Yet, while it's true that Microsoft is behind Amazon and Google in offering on-demand Web services, it's a mistake to think Microsoft won't catch up. It will, and here's why.
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Sexy Web Browsing On A Windows Mobile Device
In late 2007, I purchased a Windows Mobile-based smartphone. The top issue I heard from friends before I made the purchase is that the browsing experience was nothing like the Safari browser on the iPhone. I knew that I wanted the ability to blog from the mobile if needed and so I wanted a device with a keyboard. The first month was exactly what my friends said it would be...miserable Web browsing.
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AT&T CEO: iPhone To Get Tethering App 'Soon'
Using a 3G-enabled smartphone to serve as the wireless modem between the network and a laptop should be offered by every carrier and every smartphone. Alas, only a handful of phones can do this. According to AT&T's CEO, the iPhone will soon be one of them.
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FCC White Space Approval Raises Spectre Of Interference
I'm not saying it's necessarily a bad thing (well, actually I am), but the FCC's approval of the use of "white space" broadcast spectrum for Wi-Fi is the kind of move which could only happen in an age when computers have apparently wiped out the collective technical consciousness of the entire radio and television era. Yep, I'm talking the vast potential for interference amongst the coming unlicensed services.
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Symphony's Now Playing For Linux And Mac
IBM's Lotus Symphony -- the clever and stylish rebranding of OpenOffice.org -- is now hitting Ubuntu Linux and Mac desktops. It's another sign that for the software of the future -- especially open source software -- the platform won't be the deciding factor.
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Intel's Vision: The Future Of Collaboration
Tell me if you've heard this before: Economy in crisis today; tomorrow looks bright; let me tell you why you should be excited about where technology is going. Intel CEO Paul Otellini sang this hymn on stage at Web 2.0 Summit this morning, painting a vision for the future of enterprise collaboration that was as engaging as it was elusive.
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Steve Ballmer On Android: 'Blah-De-Blah-De-Blah'
Speaking at an investor meeting in Australia, Microsoft's Steve Ballmer said he doesn't get the business model behind Google's Android platform. Some might say the same thing about Windows Mobile at the moment.
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Michael Crichton Exposed Greens' Junk Science
Talk about the courage of your convictions. Author Michael Crichton stood up to the Chablis-sipping, let-the-Third-World-eat-cake ecobullies while living right in their midst in Hollywood. Crichton died Tuesday, but his words live on and should be closely read by the incoming president and anyone else who cares about the economy and jobs.
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Video: Box.net Eases File Sharing For Normal Folks
Sometimes in our rush to embrace the latest and greatest, us early adopters forget that it's not about cutting-edginess, it's about utility. As in, can normal people accomplish tasks they couldn't otherwise do if they were working with, say, index cards? That's why Box.net is so valuable. It's a way to share massive files without having to fumble with ftp. To learn more, check out the short video I shot with Box.net's Jim Herbold.
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Micrososoft's Cloud Ecosystem Czar: 'When Mashups Fail, Whose Throat Do You Choke?'
Whereas most cloud computing czars at most cloud solution providers are usually very gung ho about the cloud and mashups, Brandon Watson, Microsoft's director of Microsoft's Cloud Services Ecosystem, offers a bit more of a sobering look at today's state of affairs when it comes to using a variety of disparate Internet-based services to composite or mashup some business application.
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Verizon Tells Us What The BlackBerry Storm's Plans Will Cost
Verizon Wireless, you're such a tease! People are dying to know how much the BlackBerry Storm is going to cost. What does Verizon Wireless do? It trots out an announcement about the Storm's global data plans, but not the cost of the device itself.
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What's Lance Armstrong Got To Do With It?
As part of the continuing theme of do-good at Web 2.0 Summit 2008, Lance Armstrong, unretired cyclist-cum-philanthropist extraordinaire, took the main stage as the dinner keynote. This was the only appearance he agreed to honor after announcing his cycling comeback and his visit was much anticipated. It didn't disappoint.
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Yahoo's Yang: Train Wreck
On the heels of the Yahoo deal that fell apart V 2, comeback CEO Jerry Yang was skewered by the able hands of Web 2.0 Summit host John Battelle earlier today. Yang looked weary, to say the least; and who wouldn't, after seeing hundreds of millions of potential revenue flushed away thanks to Google's reluctance to battle the DOJ. Worse, Yang's strategy for Yahoo looked pretty close to a train wreck; or maybe warmed-over leftovers of a Web that's passed his company by.
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SiCortex Offers Green HPC Efficiency Metric
SiCortex, which in September introduced what is arguably one the most energy-efficient high-performance computers, today is expected to introduce the Green Computing Performance Index (GPCI), a tool to rank the "greenest" computers.
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Overland’s REO Compass Adds Replication Dedupe
Overland Storage's new REO Compass appliances take a unique approach to the ROBO (remote office, branch office) backup problem using data deduplication, encryption and compression to replicate backup data to a central site. Unlike Quantum's DXi or Data Domain's appliances, the REO Compass doesn't actually serve as a backup target storing your data but instead replicates data, through a partner, Compass, from one real or virtual tape library to another.
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The Cloud Computing Monopoly Debate
I've been following with interest a cloud computing debate that's been going on the past week or so between O'Reilly Media founder Tim O'Reilly and technology writer Nicholas Carr about the potential for a single company to achieve monopoly control of the world of cloud computing.
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What Windows 7 Must Do
Lately, Microsoft has started to open up about the company's plans for Vista's successor, Windows 7. Microsoft should do more -- and must do more -- if the company hopes to keep the Windows franchise vital. Here are four things that would be a good start.
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John Doerr On Everything
At Web 2.0, New York Magazine's John Heilemann talked to John Doerr (Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers) about a myriad of issues, from some of our nation's priorities to the economy to where he sees venture investment going. Heilemann, fresh off a flight from Chicago where he finished covering the presidential election, claimed his first two questions came directly from Barack Obama.
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Malware Attack Riding Coattails Of Obama Win
Antivirus software maker Sophos today discovered attackers have launched a Web campaign of their own that aims to exploit the senator's presidential victory. And it's rather nasty.
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Google Do-Gooder: Brilliant
Dr. Larry Brilliant, today's first speaker at the annual Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, has marked a turn in the tone of this seminal conference. Brilliant, a long-time philanthropist who has spent his life helping fight disease around the world, is the executive director of Google.Org, the search giant's attempt to make a difference in the world, and he opened the main stage conversations and "high order bits," with John Battelle and Tim O'Reilly.
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Everyone Hates Computing Under Battery Power
Having attended a fair number of conferences over the years, I've noticed one constant: People hate running their laptops on batteries.
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The Community Cloud
Could it be worthwhile for businesses to tie their virtualized data centers with one another to create a pooled set of resources that acts like some sort of community cloud? The logistics need working out, but it could be a new way to get more capacity without massive build-out while avoiding painful subscription fees.
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Android Gets Tethering App
Being able to tether a 3G phone to a laptop is a delight when you need connectivity. Now, a developer has released a tethering app for the Android-powered G1. The only problem is that it's not an official app, and it's a pain to set up.
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SSDs Are All About Latency
Nearly every storage manufacturer has been articulating a solid state disk (SSD) strategy in the past two quarters. EMC, HP, IBM, HDS, NetApp, and Compellent are all set to add the capability to their offering. Some are doing so today, while others are still in the strategy mapping process.
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Green Data Storage With MAID
Data centers use staggering amounts of energy, so it's not surprising nonstandard ways of cutting power consumption are quickly gaining the attention of data center managers. One of these is MAID (Massive Array of Idle Disks) storage technology that employs a large group of disk drives in which only those drives in active use are spinning at any given time.
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Obama Presidency Could Be Tough On Tech Companies
If you're an investor, now might be a good time to short stocks in the big tech companies. The Obama administration could make things rough on them.
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Is There A Non-Persistent Middle Ground For Offline Browsing?
Redmonk analyst Stephen O'Grady and I have been batting the challenges of persistence in Web browsers back and forth over the last week. Obviously exasperated with something, he tweeted (via Twitter) how he'd like to see a browser have the ability to recall recently visited Web pages from a local cache of some sort. I immediately replied, thinking what he was really looking for was off-line persistence of a Web application and, after Twitter failed us in the ability to carry the dialog, we took to the blogs (him, me) to continue the conversation.
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Pittsburgh Medical Center CIO On Smartphones As Notebook Replacements
The latest outtake from my InformationWeek cover story, "Is The Smartphone Your Next Computer?" offers up an extended version of my interview with University of Pittsburgh Medical Center CIO Dan Drawbaugh, who discusses how handhelds are increasingly being woven in the day to day operations of the health-care powerhouse. Read on for Dan's interesting and valuable perspective.
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Red Hat Puts On Fedora #10
Hot on the heels of Ubuntu 8.10, Red Hat has a new version of Fedora preparing to go out the door later this month. After the remarkable level of polish on Intrepid, Red Hat's Cambridge has a tough act to follow, even if the two distros aren't meant to cover the same territory -- or even compete with each other.
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Microsoft Is Stealing Apple's Mojo
As early reviews of Windows 7 come in, it appears that Microsoft is getting a start at putting Vista behind it, the way the Coca-Cola Company did with New Coke. That's good news for Windows users -- and bad news for Apple, which has leveraged Microsoft's weakness to drive market gains.
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Google Axes Yahoo Deal
Google wimps out and has decided that it is no longer interested in teaming up with Yahoo in an advertising deal that was first announced back in June. Here is, in their own words, what Google and Yahoo each have to say about the matter.
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G1 Android Phone Fully Jailbroken
Just last week some coders figured out how to unlock the HTC G1 from T-Mobile's network. Now, some innovative tinkerers at the XDA Developers Forum have figured out how to gain full access to the G1's code and jailbreak it entirely. Full instructions for freedom inside.
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Microsoft Offers Free Software, Cloud Platform To Startups
Microsoft today introduces a new program that gives startups no-cost access to its software, technical support, and marketing machine for three years. The initiative, called Microsoft BizSpark, makes it much easier for entrepreneurs to build new businesses using Microsoft software and services. It comes at a time when cash-strapped startups may be looking for help.
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Google: Election Day Searches Show Passion Of The People
Yesterday, Google offered us insight as to what Americans were searching for during the presidential election. High on the list were searches for results at the state level, and, oddly enough, a movie about Adolf Hitler.
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BlackBerry Bold FREE At Wal-Mart
If you're in the market for a brand, spanking new BlackBerry, now hear this: Wal-Mart is selling the just-released BlackBerry Bold for free. Who knows how long that price will last, so you'd better hurry...
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Green Ballot Measure Wins In Missouri, Fails In California, Colorado
Missouri voters stood alone yesterday in approving a renewable-energy ballot initiative. Californians rejected two measures, and Coloradoans rejected one. A nonbinding measure was passed in Massachusetts.
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WordPress 2.7 Simplifies Administration, Content Creation
WordPress 2.7 Beta 1 was released this past weekend, and although it's always tough to make a full assessment based on beta software, its improvements to the administrative functions are making it look like a compelling upgrade.
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Mass. Voters (Non-Binding) Praise For Green Measure
Renewable energy was given a faint boost of praise this evening in Massachusetts, where voters in 11 districts are voting -- in a nonbinding referendum -- whether to encourage their legislators to vote for a reduction in greenhouse gases. As of 9:45 p.m. Eastern Time, voting was running at a 2-to-1 margin in favor.
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Google Fights Biological Viruses
Google, which works diligently to defend computers from viruses, also is funding efforts to protect people from viruses.
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Six Apart CEO Aims To Disrupt Social Networks
How do you transform a Web 1.0 company into a more powerful force in the Web 2.0 gene pool? Why, change the rules. That's what CEO Chris Alden and his team at Six Apart are planning for these days.
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The BlackBerry Bold's On Sale
What are all those lines for? Oh yeah, after what seems like ages, Research In Motion has finally released the U.S. BlackBerry Bold. The latest flagship phone is available now at AT&T phones for $299 with a two-year contract.
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Intel Raises Performance Bar With Nehalem Core i7
Intel's new Nehalem (aka Core i7) processors are causing a stir, on the heels of the rave "first look" review on ChannelWeb. The chips are significant because they mark the introduction of an all-new microarchitecture, and, boy, are they powerful.
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Dreamforce: A Douse Of Cloud Computing, Without Getting Soaked
With balloons floating as tethered "clouds" in front of the Moscone Center and clouds projected onto the beams of the keynote hall, attendees at Dreamforce in San Francisco probably got the picture that CEO Marc Benioff wanted to talk about cloud computing. Which he did yesterday for two-and-a-quarter hours straight.
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Optical Scanning Machines, Not Just DREs, Giving Voters Trouble Today
If voters do not even have confidence in the voting machines recommended by the Verified Voting Foundation, what hope have we in any voting system in use today?
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Zoho CEO Blog Levies Sharp Accusations Against Salesforce.com's Benioff
Here's something you don't see too often: The CEO of one company going public about the sort of sensitive conversations with the CEO of another company -- the sort of conversations that normally start behind closed doors and stay behind closed doors. In this case, it's Zoho's Sridhar Vembu taking Salesforce.com's Marc Benioff to task for trying to force Zoho to shut its CRM offering down before Zoho would be allowed to join Salesforce.com's AppExchange program.
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Capping Data Center Energy Use
As part of its Green Business Technology initiative, Hewlett-Packard on Monday introduced a new technology called Dynamic Power Capping that lets data center managers set a limit on how much power individual servers are allowed to use.
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Adobe Patches PDF Flaw
Security firm Core Security Technologies is warning users that Adobe Reader versions 8.1.2 and earlier are vulnerable to specially crafted PDF files that could be used gain access to authorized systems. You might want to check which version of Adobe Reader you're using.
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Don't Fear Big-Box Linux Development
News of a new Linux graphics-server project called "Wayland" crossed my desk this morning. It got me thinking: are "big-box" open source vendors going to make individual programmers irrelevant?
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Man-In-The-Browser Mitigation Advice That Companies Won't Follow
Gunter Ollmann, director of security strategy with IBM Internet Security Systems, wrote a short paper on designing applications to be resistant to infected hosts. Ollmann offers some solid, high-level design advice that Web developers should read and consider adopting. But the paper also highlights the difficulty and complexity in securing the Web-based ecosystem.
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RIM Mulling Pre-Paid BlackBerry Service Options?
According to some internal Research In Motion documents, the company is considering how to pitch prepaid BlackBerry services to carriers. The company already has launched prepaid services in some Asian countries. Would it make sense in the U.S. of A.?
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Vote!
I slipped away from my home office to vote this morning, and it was fast and easy.
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Brightcove To Shutter The Free Version Of Its Online Video Service
Apparently feeling a pinch (somewhere) and choosing to focus on the paid side of its video hosting and provisioning service, Brightcove issued a notification late last night that it would be shuttering the free versions of its services: The Brightcove Network (where video could be freely published YouTube-style) and Brightcove.TV (the distribution channel where videos published by Brightcove Network users as well as Brightcove's paying customers were featured online).
Continue reading "Brightcove To Shutter The Free Version Of Its Online Video Service..."
Apple Finds New Way To Block 'Pwning' iPhones: The MacBook
Every time Apple updates the iPhone's firmware, hackers find another way to crack it. Rather than adjust the software on the iPhone, Apple is employing a new tactic. User reports suggest that the Pwnage tool itself will not run properly on the new Apple MacBooks and MacBook Pros.
Continue reading "Apple Finds New Way To Block 'Pwning' iPhones: The MacBook..."
Parsing Ray Ozzie
I listened last week to Ray Ozzie's plan to drag Microsoft into the 21st century of Web software. Ozzie was open, thoughtful, and mostly convincing, but there was nuance in his message, too. Here are excerpts of what Ozzie said -- and my interpretation of what he meant.
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Testing Out LinkedIn's Web 2.0 Features
As social networks go, LinkedIn is not as flashy as MySpace or as "vox populi" as Facebook, but it gets the job done, especially for those of us in the real working world with a handful of new add-ons ready to download.
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List Of Devices On Your Telecom Bill: PVR. Cable Box. Netbook?
Earlier today, I filed the following response (below in blockquotes) to Dave Winer's post regarding the coming of the $99 netbook. In essence, the question is whether we are just pulling closer to Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz's world of nearly free cars (a.k.a., the hardware).
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Linux Vs. Windows 7: The Coming Showdown
It's inevitable. With Microsoft's showcasing of Windows 7's pre-beta edition at PDC, the Boys From Redmond have thrown down a gauntlet to the Linux community that's been angling to take over the netbook market (and then maybe the desktop). Anything you can do, they say, we can do better.
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Google Apps Inventor Rajen Sheth Unplugged, Part I: It's Not Just About Mail Anymore
Last year, while I was still working for CNET, I was given the opportunity to sit down for a video interview with Rajen Sheth who, within Google, is regarded as the inventor of Google Apps. A few weeks ago, I was back on Google's campus and had an opportunity to catch up with Sheth for an update, this time sans the video crew. The timing of the interview was serendipitously relevant given last week's announcements that Microsoft has both Office Web, a Web-based version of Office, and Azure, a platform as a service (PaaS), in the works.
Continue reading "Google Apps Inventor Rajen Sheth Unplugged, Part I: It's Not Just About Mail Anymore..."
Salesforce.com's New Big Buddy: Amazon
Salesforce.com's been talking a lot about cloud computing lately, but its own data center doesn't match the size of its ambitions. So, where would the additional infrastructure come from? The clouds created by this question cleared up a bit today with the unveiling of Salesforce.com's new big buddy: Amazon Web Services.
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Is There A Surplus Of iPhones?
Apple may have hit a home run with the iPhone during the last quarter, but analysts are suggesting that Apple is prepared to slash production of the iPhone by more than 40%.
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Is LG Finally Going To Make Smartphones?
Despite LG's success in the feature phone market, one place it hasn't dipped its toe is the smartphone or business market. That may be about to change. LG has signed a new mobile technology deal with Microsoft.
Continue reading "Is LG Finally Going To Make Smartphones?..."
Time's Gadget Of The Year Is Peek?
What is going on here? It looks like Time put up a poll for its gadget of the year, and the leader, by a lot, is the e-mail-only handset Peek. I first got wind of Peek a few months ago and have no idea why it's so high up the polls.
Continue reading "Time's Gadget Of The Year Is Peek?..."
Follow The Election News On Twitter And Skip The Babbling Pundits
Twitter is a great tool for following breaking news stories when you're just looking for the latest information and don't want to wade through an endless torrent of bull from pundits, analysts, commentators, and bloggers. Many news organizations feed their headlines to Twitter, and following those accounts gives you a concentrated source of facts without the fluff. On Election Night, I'll be looking to Twitter as my main source of information.
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Primary Storage Data Reduction – A Process
Primary storage data reduction is a series of steps you can take to reduce the amount of capacity dedicated to Tier 1 storage. The most common techniques are archiving, compression, data deduplication, and the use of intelligent storage systems. The question often comes up, what should I do first?
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Sun Continues To Fade
You know you're in trouble when you make the technology pages of the New York Times with a piece about how much money you're bleeding. Such is the case with Sun, which reported a $1.7 billion loss for the first quarter of 2008. And that's not the worst of it.
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Windows 7 Looking Like A Winner (Plus, Installation Screenshots)
I just installed the prebeta build of Windows 7 on my ultimate quad-core PC and boy, am I impressed. Sure, when my son took a look at the screen, he said: "That's Vista." But isn't that the point? It looks to me like Microsoft is getting ready to shed its tainted Vista brand and replace it with a lean, mean, good-looking operating system which works. Call it sheer marketing brilliance.
Continue reading "Windows 7 Looking Like A Winner (Plus, Installation Screenshots)..."
Google Yanks SMS Feature From Gmail Chat
Last week, there was much hoopla over the fact that Google added SMS capability to its Gmail chatting program. Looks like everyone got excited for nothing. The feature didn't work, and Google pulled the plug. For now.
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Windows Update To Get An Update
According to the Microsoft Update blog, a substantial update to the Windows Update agent is on the way. The company says this update should increase the speed with which it will scan your system, as well as the number of patches it can download.
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Kohl's Green Retail Efforts Worth Checking Out
Kohl's Department Stores exhorts its customers to "expect great things." Judging from the retailer's eco-friendly efforts honored last week at the 2008 Green Power Leadership Awards, Kohl's customers already are seeing great things.
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The Great Experiment: Integrating FriendFeed With Twitter
I've been playing around with a new FriendFeed feature that lets you copy all your FriendFeed posts to your Twitter account. I think I like it so far, although it's also possible that it will result in the complete destruction of the space/time continuum. Or, even worse, overwhelming Twitter with a lot of noise.
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Inspector General Confirms It: Little HIPAA Enforcement
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 was set into law about 12 years ago, the security rules went into effect earlier this decade. Hospitals knew these regulations were coming long ago, so why is compliance so lax?
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Always Think Before You Submit
Over the past 10 years, I've written and spoken about the need to "think before you submit." What I mean is that when you say something online, it will be stored forever and can come back to bite you years later. With a blog it's relatively quick to post and once the post hits the RSS feed, it's pretty difficult to take the post back.
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Windows 7 Upgrade May Not Be So Chaotic
Sorry, but it's just too early to say that Windows 7 Upgrade Chaos Looms. There could be pain, perhaps, but any OS change or upgrade is going to be be tough. After experimenting with the Windows 7 pre-beta distributed at the PDC, I'm somewhat optimistic.
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