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The InformationWeek January 2009 Archive « December 2008 | Main | February 2009 » |
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Will We See Live Streaming Conference PPV This Year?
Over the past couple of years, more and more conferences have been providing free live streaming to viewers at home. There are always arguments both for and against live streaming. Some feel that it takes away from those who have paid thousands of dollars to attend a conference. Others believe it offers an opportunity for those at home to interact.
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Does The Internet Help Markets Malfunction?
Consider: "So the Internet does not only facilitate the functioning of markets; it may also facilitate their malfunction." If that is in fact the case, does your company's application of the Internet's information free-flow have downsides as well as benefits? And if so, are you fully aware of what those unintended and unhelpful consequences are?
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Microsoft Patent Turns Smartphone Into A PC
Microsoft has applied for a patent that will allow you to dock your smartphone, giving it PC-like powers to print, network, connect to an external display and more.
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Take The Moblin Alpha For A Spin
Intel's Moblin project -- its own sponsored edition of Linux for Atom-powered devices -- just hit the public alpha stage. The Moblin site invites people to take it for a test drive, and that's precisely what I did.
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Mobile Roundup
It's been an interesting week in the mobile space, as Verizon had a strong quarter thanks to the Storm, Sprint said it would be axing 8,000 jobs, and Apple got an important patent for the iPhone. But there were a few stories that we didn't get to highlight, and I'll go over them after the jump.
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Umbraco's New CMS Is An Impressive Step Forward
Almost a year and a half after its last major release, the open source .Net-based Umbraco 4 content management system was finally released this week, and based on the impressive set of new functionality and features, it looks to have been worth the wait.
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There's Money Up In Them Thar Clouds
There's lots of buzz about the Google cloud storage solution -- the GDrive -- as references to it continue to pop up in various programs. When it arrives, will consumers rush to give up their data to the ether?
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Draft "LEED For Datacenters" Now Available
Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) is a certification program sponsored by the non-profit U.S. Green Buildings Council (USGBC) that is a nationally accepted benchmark for the design, construction and operation of high performance green buildings. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) yesterday posted a draft "LEED for Datacenters" on its website that the lab developed in partnership with a who’s who of datacenter industry groups, including the ASHRAE, The Green Grid, The Uptime Institute, 24x7, the European Commission, the Critical Facilities Roundtable and the Silicon Valley Leadership Group.
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Surprisingly On-Target Internet Predictions From 1981 And 1969
Check out these two nifty videos, created long ago, that surprisingly get it right about how we use the Internet routinely today. First, a video from 1969 that covers most of today's digital lifestyle in a few short minutes, including Internet shopping, Webcams, bill paying and banking, and e-mail.
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Primary Storage's Three Faces
Primary storage has three faces. There is active data and inactive data; both of these data sets actually consume space, which we can compress and then remove. Then there is the third face, with the capacity that is allocated but not in use. Each needs to be handled in a different way.
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Broadband Stimulus No Panacea
The nation's leaders plan to spend $6 billion on expanding broadband access, but it's unclear how their efforts will pan out.
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Google Adds Features To Firefox Toolbar
Google is offering up a second beta of its toolbar for the Firefox browser. The new version has several new features, including a new tab page.
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Cisco Gets Energy Wiser
Cisco's new EnergyWise technology, which measures and manages energy consumption on just about everything on the network, is, indeed, wise. But it's going to get a whole lot wiser and useful early next year when it will be extended to the management of HVAC and other building systems.
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Amazon Web Services Help Fuel Blow-Out Quarter
As the economy crumbles around it, Amazon.com yesterday reported fourth-quarter financial results that blew past Wall Street's expectations. And, though details are sketchy, it appears that Amazon's cloud services grew at nearly double the rate of overall sales.
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No Longer Co-Dependent: Personal Computing And Business Virtual Desktops
Desktop virtualization is not like what it sounds. It does not start with a one-by-one conversion of each user's desktop from a straightforward piece of hardware to one that runs only a virtual machine.
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RIM: We've Shipped 50 Million Smartphones
I received an e-mail from Research In Motion's media relations team this morning. In it were some interesting facts. The first of which is that this month, RIM shipped its 50 millionth BlackBerry.
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Wall Street Journal Revives Dell Smartphone Rumors
Last night The Wall Street Journal ran a piece claiming that Dell is set to enter the smartphone business as soon as next month. The paper reported that Dell is eyeing Windows Mobile and Android.
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California State IT Is A Monumental Disaster
I love California -- I swear I do -- but to call the state's current IT situation a monumental disaster would be to insult the words "monumental disaster." Despite a $40B state deficit, California is nevertheless planning nine "strategic" projects scheduled to consume 58 years and $3.6B. Come take a look into the abyss.
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Fannie Mae Logic Bomb Makes Case For Strong IDM
The indictment of an IT contractor working at Fannie Mae, who schemed to destroy the data on 4,000 servers, confirms what we know: bad economic times and layoffs are perilous, and identity and access management has never been more important.
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New Firmware Points To New iPhone?
One of the Internet's favorite games is spotting the next iPhone, and we've seen tons of rumors that have been squashed. But recent digging into the latest firmware updates potentially reveal a new iPhone model already is being tested.
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Google Maps Van Kills Deer, Google Earth Busts Pot Growers
Google's navigation services have provoked some interesting news items this week. Apparently, the driver of a Google Maps van accidentally struck and killed a deer. Also, over Switzerland, Google Earth helped Swiss police find and bust a two-acre pot farm.
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The Oregon Trail Of Cloud Computing
Cloud computing is like the Wild West, where the players are rough around the edges, the borders are undefined, and the homesteaders are subject to unforeseen risks. In this environment, IT governance is nearly impossible -- but an absolute requirement.
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Tech CEOs Meet With President, Support Obama's Stimulus Plans
Tech giants have come out in support of President Barack Obama's economic stimulus plans. Dozens of technology company leaders sent a letter to Congress last week saying that they supported Obama's plan.
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Do Layoffs Make SAP More American?
I received a few analyst research notes yesterday following SAP's announcement of quarterly earnings, and its plan to reduce its 51,536-strong global workforce by 3,000 heads. I thought I'd share with you the most interesting tidbits, including one analyst's observation about the cultural barriers SAP faces with upcoming layoffs.
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Which Smartphone Reached 1 Million Sold The Fastest?
An enterprising reader of Engadget put together a nifty little chart showing how fast a handful of smartphones hit the 1 million mark. The figures used are those based on actual announced sales by the companies involved. Those included are the Apple iPhone and iPhone 3G, the BlackBerry Storm, the HTC G1, and the Nokia 5800. Also, it looks like 2008 saw 1.21 billion mobile phones sold.
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Will It Take A New Deal To Stop The Economic Crash?
Colossal government work programs stopped the Great Depression and created infrastructure improvements we still use today, argues The Infamous Brad. What colossal technology programs might help pull the United States out of its economic nosedive, and leave a legacy for generations to come?
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Sun's Data Center In A Box Gets New Handle
The debut of the Sun Modular Datacenter (nee Project Blackbox), a complete data center housed within a shipping container, is an important reminder that data centers can grow greener as they expand.
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Sonos' Gear Moves To The Heart Of My Digital Home Strategy
Six years ago, just before moving into our current home, my wife and I decided that we would constantly have that home filled with music and she entrusted me to the task of making it happen. Yet, it was only over these last holidays that I finished "the design." It took me that long to figure out how to do some complicated things like integrate a single digital audio library across the whole home audio system, all of our computers, and our portable digital audio players. I'm still not completely done, but here's my recipe if you want to try it yourself.
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iSuppli: BlackBerry Storm Innards Cost More Than The iPhone's
iSuppli sunk its teeth into the BlackBerry Storm to see what the sum of its parts is really worth. According to its analysis, the Storm costs RIM about $203 to make. Verizon Wireless is selling the Storm for $199 (after rebates). Apple's iPhone 3G costs about $174 to make and sells for $199/$299.
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Ubuntu In Your Pocket
Printed documentation never goes completely out of style. Cases in point: the O'Reilly books, the ... For Dummies series, and MacFreda's Ubuntu Pocket Guide and Reference. It's $10 in print -- and free as a PDF.
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Bandwidth Management Coming To You
Cox Communications recently announced a new bandwidth management program, while Google and partners are releasing a tool to detect throttling. The traffic battles are heating up, but the deck is stacked against users since we use the pipes, not manage them. Even so, Cox's plan seems responsible and, if done right, can balance competing network demands.
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Readers Talk Back On 'What CEOs Want From CIOs'
My recent post on "What CEOs Want From CIOs" triggered some insightful responses from readers, including how one CIO forged a career-changing relationship with the CEO; the business value CEOs perceive when CIOs leverage existing systems with new, expansive technologies; four tips from a headhunter on how CIO candidates can best-position themselves to CEOs; and why a new CIO peer-level group thinks my list is too broad.
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bMighty Says It's Time To Embrace Linux
As the bad economic news continues to accumulate, Linux offers hope to cash-strapped businesses everywhere. That's why bMighty has put together a uniquely useful set of how-to guides that can help you choose which Linux distro is right for your company's needs, show you exactly how to make the move, and even point you to the best places to get free Linux help.
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A Long-Term Windows Vista Test Drive - Living With The Much Maligned OS
Even as the hype machine turns to Windows 7, many businesses are still conflicted about whether to embrace Windows Vista. Well, I took the plunge a while ago, and here's what I learned.
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In Defense Of Michael Arrington
Love him or hate him, the man behind TechCrunch is a force to be reckoned with. But did he deserve a real spit in the face? I should hope not.
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The Inevitable Has Occurred: Heartland Payment Sued
The payment processor Heartland Payment Systems just got served with a lawsuit over the allegedly massive data breach.
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Google To Tackle Net Neutrality Head On
Today Google unveiled a new tool that can be used to determine if an Internet connection is being slowed or throttled by the Internet Service Provider. Measurement Lab is an open platform that Google expects will be used by researchers to gauge just how well the Internet is working.
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Satyam's Crisis Will Spawn New Outsourcing Models
In the past, IT services vendors often resisted terms clients tried to include in their offshoring contracts. But in the aftermath of Satyam's financial fraud mess, outsourcers will be more willing to bend on client demands, especially if they're anxious to pick up work from Satyam's ex-customers.
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The Duh And Huh Of The BlackBerry Storm Launch
Verizon's fourth-quarter 2008 sales and profit results benefited from its BlackBerry Storm product launch, but I'm not sure the long-term impact will be so kind.
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House Squashes DTV Delay
In an interesting turn of events, the delay of the transition to digital TV -- which looked all but a certainty early this week -- has been put on hold by the U.S. House of Representatives.
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Paul Krugman On The Problems Of Turning Broadswords Into BlackBerrys
Economist Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize laureate and columnist for the New York Times, takes a look at the Merchant Princes series of science-fiction novels by Charles Stross, finding in them powerful parallels to real-world economics -- the problems of moving medieval societies into modernity.
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Cleaner Ways To Clear Snow
Another January day in New England. Another several inches of snow. Faced with choosing between fume-spewing snowblowers and back-breaking green options (shoveling or letting the ice accumulate) I have just one question: Where are the snow-clearing robots?
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Cloud vs. SaaS For Small Business
A new survey shows small business is shy of the cloud. At the same time, a SaaS provider that focuses on SMBs is growing fast. Does SaaS resonate more than "cloud"?
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Incremental Improvements
When I wrote on No Jitter last week about cell phones being invisible to presence, I characterized this state of affairs as a bug. But maybe it's really a feature. In any event, is it a critical issue?
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Opera Mini For Android Graduates To Full Release
Android users spoke and Opera listened. Today, Opera announced that its Opera Mini 4.2 for Android software has graduated from beta status and is now a full build. Lots of new goodies are on board.
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What CIOs Want From IT Vendors
In hard times like these, businesses are looking to slash costs -- so should CIOs beat on their vendors relentlessly for price cuts? It's a tempting short-term alternative, but it's probably not the right strategy. The next wave of leaders among IT vendors will be those that offer innovative programs to share some of the current risk in return for a bigger slice of future rewards.
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We Have Met Linux, And It Is ... Us?
The Linux Foundation's "We're Linux" video contest is the newest attempt to get Linux a little airtime alongside both Windows and the Mac. A fine idea in theory, but I'd like to submit a few notes about why this sort of thing is a lot tougher than it looks.
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The Death Of PCI DSS? Don't Be Silly
Yes, in the past year two big retailers, who were apparently compliant to the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, were breached. Does that mean PCI DSS has grown increasingly irrelevant? That's absurd.
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Content Management Recommendations That Pull No Punches
You can barely take two steps on the Web these days without tripping over another "picking the best Web content management system" article, but I came across one published earlier this week on Webdesigner Depot that was particularly informative, funny, and certain to stir some mild controversy.
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AISO.net: A 100% Solar-Powered Data Center
While many data centers and hosting providers tout their environmental concern by the dubious practice of trading carbon credits and purchasing green energy certificates, AISO.net, a solar-powered data center in Romoland, Calif., is one of only a small number of facilities powered by renewable energy that's generated on-site.
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Watch Me Beat The Snot Out Of A Motorola Tundra
Have you ever wondered just how tough rugged products are? I have, and I decided to see just how far I could push Motorola's newest rugged handset, the VA76r Tundra. Find out if it can survive the heat of a blowtorch.
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Oracle's Charles Phillips: You Get What You Pay For
A team of InformationWeek editors sat down earlier this month with Oracle president Charles Phillips, a very busy man who has done very few press interviews. I really appreciated his time because I thought Phillips was the best person at Oracle to speak directly to some discontent I've been hearing about the software industry's maintenance fee structure.
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Microsoft Woos Obama Administration
President Barack Obama has talked a lot about the need for transparency in government, and his campaign, transition team, and administration have used the Internet as a primary vehicle for communicating with citizens. Now, Microsoft wants to help him with that mission, and it's pulling out all the stops.
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NFS On VMware, Not NetApp's Sole Domain
Using NFS to store and boot virtual machine images is becoming an attractive option, and for obvious reasons NetApp has been promoting the use of its solutions as the perfect complement to a VMware on NFS strategy. However, NFS isn't the sole domain of NetApp any longer. It now has company from a variety of vendors, including EMC, ONStor, BlueArc, and Isilon.
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New Zealand Man Buys MP3 Player, Gets 60 Pages Of Sensitive U.S. Military Data
New Zealand's Chris Ogle probably thought it was his lucky day when he scored a used MP3 player cheap. But his luck soured when it turned out to be broken -- and loaded with 60 pages of U.S. military data and personally identifying information.
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Will IE8 Reset The Browser Performance Bar?
The honest PC user must admit that Firefox is neither as good as widely proclaimed, nor is Microsoft's Internet Explorer as bad. That viewpoint, which is what my personal experience has taught me, has only been reinforced by my recent test of Internet Explorer 8. (I got the IE8 beta by downloading Windows 7, with which it was bundled.
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Apple Pushes Out iPhone Firmware 2.2.1
Along with a number of software updates released today, Apple is boosting the iPhone's firmware version by dot-one to 2.2.1. What does the firmware include?
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Swamped By Bad News On Land, Sea, Air
Throw me a life preserver: I'm drowning in environmental bad news from NOAA, NASA, and academia the world over.
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Should Google Buy Skype?
The latest whisperings around the Internet water cooler suggest that Google is eying Skype as a potential acquisition target. Would it be a better corporate overlord than eBay?
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White House E-Mail Down
White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs announced at a 1:45 p.m. press briefing yesterday that he was unable to send out the customary week-ahead memo as the White House e-mail system was "not working so well." D.C. reporters got their next e-mail from the White House around 8:30 this morning indicating that the outage lasted most of a day.
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Criticizing The OLPC (And Its Critics)
Jon Evans of The Walrus didn't like the OLPC. He thought it was the wrong tool for the job -- badly engineered, improperly envisioned, and more hype than substance. The OLPC folks didn't take that criticism lying down, but their response is in many ways just as narrow-minded as some of Jon's criticisms.
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Nicholas Carr Redirects Google-Tea Heat To Real Source
The always-interesting Nicholas Carr turns the recent kerfuffle about Google searches and tea kettles on its head by focusing on the real issue: "But this isn't really about Google, which is only supplying us with services that we want. It's about us." Whether or not you believe we humans are boiling the Earth (I don't), you'll enjoy Nick's analysis of Google's "moral quandary."
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Lost In Austin (Startup City TV)
I arrived in Austin, Texas, today to go talk to IBM, again, about how it's helping make the planet smarter, this time focusing on how Web 2.0 technologies can help companies become more green. I am well prepared for Austin because I was just here in November (editor's note: It was October, Fritz), and I have a photogenic memory (editor's note: uh, photographic, and no).
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Software Piracy Places Everyone At Risk
On Monday, the United States claimed victory in a World Trade Organization case against China for that country's alleged lax stance toward software piracy. What's that have to do with IT security? Plenty, as the recent Downadup outbreak, as well as a number of new Trojans to hit the Mac OS X platform, highlight.
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Microsoft's H-1B Visa Controversy
As Microsoft does its first-ever mass layoffs, there are some questions about who is being pink-slipped and how they're being selected. Microsoft has been a vocal advocate of expanding the H-1B visa program that allows noncitizens to work in the United States, arguing that there just weren't enough qualified Americans to take those jobs.
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Hard Decisions Loom As CMS Vendors Face Tough Times
It's an unfortunate reality that in an economy like this not every content management vendor is going to stay afloat. While many ultimately will make it through, some are certain to be taken over and others simply will be forced to shut their doors.
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The G1 Gets Multitouch
It looks like G1 owners won't have to be jealous of iPhone owners and their pinch navigation, as the Android community has made multitouch possible. Unfortunately, I have a feeling we won't see it in an official way for a long while.
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Schwarzenegger's 'Restructuring' Plan Provides Comic -- Not Financial -- Relief
Since most of you are slogging through your third or fourth plan to reduce expenses in the past five months, sit back, take a deep breath, and have a laugh or two at some of the approaches the truly great state of California is taking to reduce its $40B deficit. And no, I am not making these up -- they're right from "The Governor's Road Map For More Efficient Government."
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Should Camera Phones Be Required To 'Click'?
Here's an interesting tidbit. A new bill has been put before Congress that would require camera phones to make a noise or "click" whenever they are used to take a picture. The idea is to make it clear to everyone in the vicinity that the camera phone is being use as a camera. Is this really necessary?
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How To Succeed At Twitter
As with most things, persistence pays off on Twitter. Just post regularly, a few times a day. Follow people. Engage in discussion. Respond to what other people say. Post whatever interests you if you think it interests other people. Sometimes post what interests you even if you don't think anyone else will find it interesting. Experiment.
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Indexes Rise As Stimulus Package Considered
Major stock indexes rose Monday after last week's losses. The Dow Jones industrial average rose .48%, or 38.47, to close at 8,116.03. The S&P 500 rose .56%, or 4.62, to close at 836.57. The Nasdaq composite rose .82%, or 12.17, to close at 1,489.46.
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New Femtocell From Verizon Wireless Falls Short
Verizon Wireless officially introduced a femtocell product to enhance in-office or in-home coverage for cellular voice service. The big problem is, it doesn't offer any sort of boost for 3G data services.
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OS X Trojan Resurfaces In Photoshop CS4
I guess too many people got wind of the iWork 09 Trial Trojan application that was circulating in some peer-to-peer networks. The bad guys have changed their strategy: they're now targeting people downloading pirated versions of Adobe Photoshop.
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Senator Quizzes Microsoft On Layoffs
Microsoft's plans to lay off 5,000 workers have ruffled the feathers of Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), a long-time critic of the U.S. H-1B visa program. Microsoft, a top 10 employer of H-1B visa holders, has been among the most vocal tech companies over the last several years urging Congress to raise the cap on H-1B visas. Now Grassley is urging Microsoft to furlough those temporary foreign workers first before handing out pink slips to Americans and permanent U.S. residents.
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CSC, Terremark Pitch Cloud Computing To Feds
Outsourcer Computer Sciences Corp. and infrastructure services provider Terremark are teaming up to introduce cloud computing services aimed at the federal government.
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Microsoft's Netbook Woes Also Mean Linux Yays ... Right?
When Microsoft specifically cited netbook PCs as a big reason for its weakening sales, the "L word" didn't get mentioned by name -- but it wasn't difficult to tell this was the flip side of that news tidbit about Linux-equipped netbooks being returned. So what's this mean for Win7 vs. Linux in what is fast becoming the battleground for the new desktop?
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RIM CEO's Statement On Buggy Phones Is Unacceptable
The Wall Street Journal ran a story detailing the "bumpy start" seen by Research In Motion's BlackBerry Storm smartphone. InformationWeek detailed a lot of the Storm's software problems in its full review of the device. In response to the rocky launch, RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie said that such issues are the "new reality." I think that's the wrong attitude.
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California Dreamin': Cut IT By $1.5B But No Job Losses
Hey -- you think you've got a tough job? How would you like to oversee 8,000 to 10,000 IT workers, 130 CIOs, and a budget of about $3 billion? That's the state of California's IT sprawl, where CIO Teri Takai is charged with cutting $1.5B in costs over five years without reducing headcount. I respect the challenge, but the no-layoffs plan is sheer lunacy.
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Spread Of Downadup Worm, New Apple Mac Trojan
Security firm Symantec notes that the Downadup worm has swept through China, Argentina, Taiwan, Brazil, India, Chile, and Russia. The infection doesn't even register in the United States. Why?
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Can Virtual Goods Work For Scrapblog?
When I spoke with Scrapblog CEO Carlos García last year, he described the service as "a way to create multimedia scrapbooks." I liked the service then because it knew that users alone wouldn't be enough to generate sustainable revenue. This weekend it is launching the next phase of its business model.
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Pittsburgh Steelers Will Win, But 5 Ways To Beat Them
Although this is "Global" CIO, I'm going strictly local for the Super Bowl and picking my hometown Pittsburgh Steelers to beat the Arizona Cardinals, 24-16. Arizona fans, feel free to write back and explain how the Cards will win -- and to get you started, here are five areas where the Steelers could be vulnerable.
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Microsoft Can't Have It All
At Microsoft's earnings call on Thursday, the company announced measures to cut costs and staff. Normally, Wall Street looks at belt tightening as a positive thing and rewards the stock with a bit of a bump, but not this time. Part of it was lowered expectations for the next two quarters, but I also suspect the market saw through Microsoft's tepid cuts. Microsoft isn't really addressing their problems.
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How To Rip DVDs To Your iPod
I periodically find myself "cleaning" my iPhone -- removing old podcasts and apps, rearranging the screen icons -- in an electronic analog of how I de-gunk my wallet. (No dollar-off coupons in the iPod, though.) The only really unpleasant part of the process is dealing with stuff that everybody does but iTunes still refuses to support. Namely, ripping protected DVDs
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DTV Delay Still A Bad Idea
With more households going digital, the U.S. Senate's plan to push back the mandated DTV transition date from Feb. 17 to June 12 makes less sense than ever. Hey, if we're supposed to be entering a new age of personal and national responsibility, let's bite the bullet and exercise some technological leadership here.
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There's Web Work Out There Now Go Get It!
Over the years as I travel around the country, one of the most popular questions I am asked is whether I know of anyone looking for help with their website. Internet marketing consultants ask me, developers and designers ask me, and search engine optimization consultants ask me. There's plenty of work out there, you just have to know where to look.
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Behind The Music: Animoto And RightScale Ramp Up To Render Facebook Videos In The Cloud
If you build a better Web 2.0 mousetrap, you have to be careful when everyone beats a path to your door. Remember Cuil, the over-hyped search engine that launched last year, which is currently nursing a market share around 0.01%, thanks to an initial server crash and complaints about the accuracy of Cuil’s search results? On the other hand, there's Animoto, a 2-year-old New York-based start-up that creates MTV-style videos, which was able to leverage cloud computing to ramp from 5,000 to 250,000 users in three days to satisfy a feeding frenzy of Facebook users.
Continue reading "Behind The Music: Animoto And RightScale Ramp Up To Render Facebook Videos In The Cloud ..."
GE Pushes Smart Grid Via 'If I Only Had A Brain'
The current economic crisis has blurred memories of the fuel-price crisis, but now there's supposedly a low-energy-prices crisis that's heating up the alleged boiling-the-Earth crisis. To escape the vises of these crises we need an infusion of IT into the distribution and usage of energy, so GE's jumping into the smart-grid business with a Super Bowl ad featuring a dancing scarecrow singing, "If I Only Had A Brain."
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Journalism School 'Ricochets' Spam Messages
If you get a message this weekend from RJICONTACTS as part of the Missouri School of Journalism, don't reply. It's the result of a mail server snafu.
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Web 2.0 Tools Not Bringing Transparency To White House
Reality doesn't seem to be measuring up to the hype about the new administration's promise to use technology to increase access, accountability, and transparency.
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A Sketchy Virtualized Desktop Begins To Flesh Itself Out
How is Citrix's upcoming desktop hypervisor different from its XenDesktop already on the table? Mainly, end users gain the ability to leave the network that connects their client to a host server and still operate their personal virtualized desktop. XenDesktop, on the other hand, is tethered, not free roaming.
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Carbon Nanotubes: California Has Big Questions For The Small Packages
Carbon nanotubes, the wonder material that is used in some solar cells, batteries, and circuits, has the California Department of Toxic Substances beginning to wonder. The agency yesterday put manufacturers and importers of the material on notice that it wants more information on the health effects of exposure to CNT byproducts.
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13 Mac Productivity Tools, From Merlin Mann And Friends
Productivity maven Merlin Man, author of the blog 43 Folders, gives a video tour of his Mac desktop in his uniquely entertaining and informative style, talking about the tools that help him work. After watching this video, I spent hours and hours fiddling with the tools Merlin recommends, which I'm sure will save me minutes of wasted time.
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A Little Neighborly Consideration, If You Please?
The other night a friend of mine, an active open source developer, told me something which has convinced me all the more that you can't be a good open source developer by simply being a good programmer. You have to also be a good neighbor, for lack of a better word.
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Will G1 Android Users Get To Eat 'Cupcake' Or Not?
Developers have been working on a branch of code called "Cupcake" for the Android mobile operating system from Google. The update for Android promises major improvements to the mobile operating system. G1 users are anxiously awaiting the update, but T-Mobile is saying "no" for the moment.
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Reasons Why Paper Is An Emergent Technology
As Conficker/Downadup worms its way into PCs, and the OSX.iWork trojan haunts pirated copies of Apple's updated work suite, I'm reminded that the technology of paper continues to find new uses.
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Stop The Presses! The 'Boss Every CIO Would Love' Is Out!
Talk about timing: Touted yesterday by Global CIO as the type of boss every CIO would love to have because of his strong advocacy for customer-driven business technology, First National Bank of Omaha president Rajive Johri has just left the company. He says his departure was voluntary. And I say no one should believe there's any such thing as a Global CIO jinx.
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Nokia's First Touch Phone Sells 1 Million, Sees UK Launch Frenzy
The Nokia 5800 XpressMusic is the company's first attempt to bring a touch-based phone to market. It went on sale at the end of November in several European countries, and has sold 1 million units so far. Today, Nokia fans in London lined up in the wee hours of the morning to get their hands on the touch screen device.
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Cloud Storage Matures
The cloud is becoming tangible and definable. Customers are beginning to store data on it and companies like Bycast, Cleversafe, Amazon and Nirvanix have real customers paying real money to use their products or services. Companies like EMC and HP are bringing legitimacy to the concept and companies to watch like ParaScale are moving through the development cycle.
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President Barack Obama Has Been Googlebombed
We all know the story of the Googlebomb, right? Googlebombs are created by manipulating links and search rankings to produce a specific result for a certain search term. Perhaps the most famous is the one that targeted former President George W. Bush. When you Googled "miserable failure" the results pointed to him. A new Googlebomb has been created for President Obama.
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A Smarter Alternative To PCI
Let's dump the credit cards' security compliance program and replace it with a framework to actually reduce the risk that card data will be stolen.
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Fidelity Selling India IT Operation To Infosys Or IBM?
In a further sign that the Indian IT services industry remains a powerful force in global business, Infosys is competing against IBM to acquire the India-based IT unit of the largest mutual fund company in the world, Fidelity Investments. It's also interesting to note that Fidelity will reportedly retain control over high-value services such as business analytics and BPO while unloading primarily back-office functions.
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Sun Cloud CTO: 'Your Data Center Is Your Computer'
Lew Tucker has contributed to several waves of technology innovation over the last 20 years. Currently VP and CTO of cloud computing at Sun Microsystems, Tucker started work on distributed computing in the mid-'80s as a research scientist and director of advanced development at Thinking Machines, working on machine vision and system architecture to create the massively parallel Connection Machine.
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Panelists Say Legacy Apps In The Cloud Are A Roll Of The Dice
The premise of the Thursday morning panel discussion at the Cloud Connect event at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., was that it's possible to have the best of both worlds: your legacy applications and the cloud. By the end of the hour-long discussion, many of the 200 or so attendees seemed to have come to the conclusion that enterprise and Web-scale development were worlds apart and moving further away from each other at something approaching the speed of light.
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Don't Chase Checkboxes
Drew Conry-Murray takes apart PCI in his recent blog PCI Is Meaningless, But We Still Need It. I agree with most of his points, but they mostly apply to companies that view compliance as a set of checkboxes that have to be filled in annually. Filling checkboxes is doomed to failure. Focus on the spirit of the requirements and your company's security posture will be the better for it.
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Who's The Champ? Apple, Microsoft, Nokia Report Smartphone Sales
Apple disclosed sales figures of the iPhone for the holiday quarter. The total amounts to 4.4 million iPhones sold. That's a huge increase over the year-ago quarter, but down significantly from the 6.9 million 3G iPhones sold during the previous quarter. At the same time, Microsoft says 2008 saw 20 million Windows Mobile smartphones sold. Nokia sold 113 million phones, but how many of them were "smart"?
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2010 Too Late For Windows 7 To Save Microsoft
Microsoft needs to ship Windows 7 as soon as possible. If that wasn't obvious before Thursday, it sure is now. Despite two years of positive spin from Redmond, it's clear that Windows Vista is one of the biggest flops in computing history. And each day that passes with Vista still on the market brings Microsoft another day closer to the abyss.
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Apple Drops Hints About Netbooks, iPhone Nano
Apple's top brass let slip some tantalizing clues about the company's plans for an "iPhone Nano," netbook, and Apple TV during the their quarterly earnings conference call on Wednesday. Or did they? With Apple, it's always hard to tell.
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Obama Administration Outlines Plan To Secure IT Infrastructure
Barren of details, it's really not a plan -- yet. But the administration did publish a number of goals aimed at better protecting the nation's critical IT networks.
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Why You Should Try Google's App Engine In The Cloud
When thinking about applications in the cloud, it's best to think of new applications, applications oriented toward Web operations, and applications that do things in a way that's contrary to what you're accustomed to. In other words, think about using Google Bigtable.
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Does Best Practices = Monkey See, Monkey Do?
According to Info-Tech Research, the term "best practice" is a widely misused and misunderstood management consulting idea. Business owners and IT managers would be wise to abandon it in favor of seeking the best solutions for their unique business challenges.
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How To Save A Whopping One-Half Watt Of Energy In 12 Easy Steps
If you can't trust the geeks at MIT when it comes to leveraging technology, whom can you trust? Still, the memo the other day that students and faculty save a half-watt of electricity by turning off the backlit LCD displays on their VoIP phones seemed a bit over the top.
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Linux's Active Directory Killer Is A Step Closer
For years one of the few truly irreplaceable Microsoft technologies has been Active Directory. Now it's that much closer to being replaced, by the open source Samba project in its fourth major revision.
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Apple Earnings: Every Silver Lining Has A Cloud
While Apple's fourth-quarter earnings defied the economic slowdown, breaking its own revenue and earnings records even in the middle of the malaise, the news wasn't all good.
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Supreme Court Rejects Child Online Protection Act
The Child Online Protection Act is still dead. COPA, signed by President Bill Clinton in 1998, would have required commercial Web sites to block children's access by requiring information from users. Critics said it was overly restrictive and unconstitutional, and the law never took effect.
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Intel Plant Closures Mask Grave Chip Challenges
It's been a quadruple whammy week for the semiconductor industry, amid Intel's moves to close five factories and cut quad-core processor prices. AMD has likewise pared prices and also is facing another round of layoffs. Some may take these developments as signs of the economic apocalypse. Putting them into perspective, though, what they really show is that the chip industry always has been brutal; these days, it's simply more so.
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PCI Is Meaningless, But We Still Need It
The Heartland Payment Systems breach demonstrates that PCI is bunk. Unfortunately, unless something better comes along, bunk is better than nothing.
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Google Adds YouTube Videos To Gmail Chat
Google decided that opening another window on your desktop to view a YouTube video required too much effort. Solution? Video viewing capabilities are now a standard Gmail Chat feature.
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Global CIO: A Boss Every CIO Would Love To Have
The 150-year-old First National Bank of Omaha is leaning heavily on IT and its CIO to expand into futuristic high-tech branches, attract 1,000,000 new online customers, and open profitable branches in new territories. Ripping out legacy systems to free up needed funds, FNBO offers a classic example of how customer-focused IT can create huge new business value. UPDATE: This boss must have been just too ideal for this imperfect world -- he resigned this week!
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Apple Targeting Palm For Patent Violations?
During yesterday's earnings call, Apple COO Tim Cook said the company will defend its intellectual property vigorously. He didn't name names, but the Palm Pre with webOS has multitouch capability. Apple holds the patents for that technology.
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Adobe Launches Two New Content Authoring Suites
Content management tools aren't just used for posting content to Web sites -- they also can be used for authoring and presenting documentation, creating interactive courses, and countless other purposes. Adobe this week announced the launch of two new content authoring suites, each with a separate target audience but a similar focus on delivering compelling content using mature, well-integrated tools.
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How The Cloud Enables A New Set Of Personal Applications
Moving applications to the cloud is what the Cloud Connect conference is all about. But cloud services at this stage tend to be somewhat self-referential. They're about working with what's already available in the cloud. Look at Lasso2Go, for example, a service I didn't know I needed.
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The Cloud/Electric Generator Analogy
One of the key slides in Adam Selipsky's presentation in the Evening in the Cloud panel on Jan. 20 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., was a picture of Amazon's CEO Jeff Bezos in front of a vintage 1890s electric generator in a Belgium beer factory.
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Apple Patches QuickTime Flaws
Apple on Wednesday released QuickTime 7.6, a new version of its multimedia software that improves quality, compatibility, and security.
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The Danger Of IT At Capacity
As the IT budget has every ounce of excess rung out of it and storage optimization technologies promise to delay future purchases by delivering maximum utilization, for the first time storage administrators are living at much higher utilization rates. While this looks good, it has a dangerous underbelly.
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Cloud Connect: Evening Panel Woos IT Managers
"Much of what happened today, such as the Obama inauguration, happened in the cloud," panel moderator David Berlind said in his introduction to the Evening in the Cloud event on Jan. 20 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif.
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Outsourcing Clients More Carefully Weighing Risk And Rewards
Satyam's financial fraud mess is undoubtedly supplying an extra dash of drama to the Indian IT outsourcing marketplace lately. However, the economy is still the dominant factor fueling change in what clients expect these days from their IT services providers, says an Infosys executive.
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How Green Is Your Collar?
Is your collar green if it's covered in coal dust? How about if it's covered in powdered sugar? In some instances, both collars may be green, a new study suggests.
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Is A Handset Price War Primed To Erupt?
A less-than-stellar holiday season means that extra inventory is on hand at cellular phone retailers. In response, Nokia and Sony Ericsson have cut the price of some of their most expensive phones. Could this be the start of a price war?
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What Far-Out Technology Of Today Will Be Mainstream In 2019?
The president of the United States has a blog: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/. It's featured prominently on WhiteHouse.gov. I started blogging near the beginning, in 1997-99 or so. I couldn't have imagined then that we'd reach this point -- especially this quickly.
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Cloud Connect: Tackling The Issue Of Cloud Interoperability
There's an important discussion under way among cloud computing's inner circle on the subject of interoperability. Service providers and implementers recognize that adoption will be hampered if they don't come up with a good way of integrating data and applications across clouds.
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Heartland Payment Systems' Big Breach & Lame PR Tactic
A recent breach at Princeton, N.J.-based payment processor Heartland Payment Systems, by some accounts, may have totaled tens of millions of individual credit and debit card transactions. And what does the company do? It pulls a cheap PR tactic by announcing the breach on inauguration day.
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Sun's Pitch To Obama: Go Open!
Looks like we have our first hint about what attitude the new administration may have toward using open source. Scott McNealy of Sun's been tapped to write a paper for Obama and his cabinet about using open source to leverage cost savings.
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Google Cuts Newspaper Program, Adds Calendar Gadget
Google gave another service the ax yesterday, this time ditching its Print Ad business. At the same time, it added a new feature to its Google Desktop program.
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Big Blue Helps Lead Turnaround After Record Inauguration Day Slide
U.S. President Barack Obama won votes and support by offering hope and change, but that part of his message seemed to fall on deaf ears on Wall Street.
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The IBM Desktop
At the opening of this week's Lotusphere, a lot of the talk was about LotusLive, which is IBM Lotus' new offering in the cloud/software-as-a-service (SaaS) market, and Bob Picciano, general manager of IBM Lotus software, talked this solution up as an extranet service -- i.e., one that could connect an enterprise's CPE-based Lotus systems with cloud-based systems used by partners.
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Want To See What The Next Android Phone From HTC May Look Like?
Tech blog Gizmodo scored a huge scoop today by publishing a story that shows purported images of the next Android phone from G1 maker HTC. The G2, as it is being called, is thinner, and loses the QWERTY keyboard.
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Microsoft's Rumored Job Cuts To Pay For Branding Failures?
Microsoft may be the next technology brand to announce layoffs "due to the terrible economy." I'd suggest its terrible branding is at least partly to blame.
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Truevert's Semantic Search
Semantic search is like porn: I'm pretty sure I'll know it when I see it. So when semantic search upstart Truevert came by for a visit, I got all googly (I think I might have even screamed "yahoo"). The Truevert system, powered by OrcaTec's discovery toolkit, is narrowly defined around green, but it's definitely an eye-opening, fresh approach to an elusive problem.
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MixedInk Helps Large Groups Find A Common Voice
While there's no shortage of collaboration tools for small workgroups, large groups with dozens or even hundreds of individuals are somewhat limited in the ways they have to work together. With a multitude of opinions to consider, authoring and building consensus on a single document can be challenging, and while traditional wikis have their place, a company called MixedInk has launched a new service aimed at making the process easier and more efficient.
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Microsoft Decides TV Is No Longer King
On Friday, Microsoft disclosed that it had dumped all its Comcast stock by the end of 2008. It's most likely a signal that Microsoft has finally given up on the whole set-top-box idea, started more than a decade ago when the company made its initial $1 billion investment in Comcast and also bought WebTV. The investment in both probably seemed like a good idea at the time, since there were plenty of opinions that the TV might be at the center of the Internet revolution. But it didn't turn out that way.
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Wikileaks Owes Steve Jobs An Apology
I have a great deal of respect for the journalistic principles that Wikileaks espouses, but the site has done itself and journalism a disservice: It has published images that purport to show part of Apple CEO Steve Jobs' medical file, one of which is acknowledged to be fake and the other of which is deemed suspect.
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U.S. To Sharpen Cyber-Weaponry
Last month, the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS) Commission on Cybersecurity for the 44th Presidency warned that the United States is losing the battle to protect cyberspace. This is an arms race we can't afford to lose.
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Microsoft's Mobile Ambitions Leak?
With BlackBerry Application Storefront rounding into shape, the App Store selling like gangbusters, and the Android Market about to get paid apps, questions still remain on what Microsoft will do for Windows Mobile. A report from Neowin said Microsoft will fully flesh out its mobile strategy next month, and it includes an App Store and MobileMe competitor.
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Question The Internet
While many people have embraced Timothy Leary's advice to question authority, too few demonstrate willingness to question the Internet.
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New Administration Reaches Out Through New Media
U.S. President Barack Obama wasted no time showing that he would continue to use technology to engage the public after reaching office.
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Obama Speech Praises Tech, Ignores Small Businesses
In Obama's highly anticipated inaugural address, he once again turned to technology to solve our problems, but failed to mention small businesses. bMighty.com dissects the speech and presents a slide show of what the new administration will mean to technology and smaller businesses.
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Using Tech Tools To Cope With The Recession
While many companies these days are focused on squeezing out extra value from existing IT investments, some are deploying new technology tools to help their businesses adapt to and survive the economic downturn.
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Tale Of Two Microsofts: How Does Redmond Develop Software?
My recent post (a rant, really) "More Than Coding Mistakes At Fault In Bad Software," lamented the lack of well-tempered development practices, particularly as regards PC software, among most programmers. Which leads directly to another can of worms -- namely, how do they do things at Microsoft?
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Google Kills Off iPhone-Optimized iGoogle
Without warning or announcement of any kind, Google is redirecting iPhone traffic away from the iPhone-specific version of iGoogle to a unified version instead. iGoogle for the iPhone was first introduced in January of 2008. Why the sudden change?
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'One More Thing' (Actually, A Few More) About Steve Jobs's Possible Successors
Up until last week, it was hard to imagine Apple without Steve Jobs. But in the face of Jobs's announcement that he's temporarily stepping aside as CEO, some new management faces have taken the spotlight at Apple. It's become apparent that the company has a deep enough management bench that it can continue to thrive, even in the absence of its charismatic co-founder. It'll be a tough job, and the Apple that emerges will be a different company, but at least potentially still powerful and still producing great, innovative products.
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Inaugural Reminder That Environment And Economy Are Partners
It's been more than 60 minutes now since Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th president of the United States and still the economy is in a shambles and the environment remains trashed. Go figure.
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Indian IT Industry To Speak Out During InformationWeek Webcast
In explaining the more than $1 billion in phony revenue and profits he reported for years, former Satyam chairman B. Ramalinga Raju compared the fraud to "riding a tiger, not knowing how to get off without being eaten." U.S. customers of Satyam and other IT outsourcers are wondering if they could get bitten, too.
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IT Could Make Or Break Obama Presidency
Amid unprecedented pomp and ceremony, Barack Obama will be sworn in at 11:56 a.m. Tuesday. But the honeymoon will be short-lived if America's 44th president is unable to translate vision into policy, and policy into results. The latter will to a great extent depend on the Obama administration's ability to manage information technology.
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Creepy Or Cool: Palm's webOS Is Context And Location Aware
Roger McNamee, an investor for Elevation Partners, which has dumped half a billion dollars into Palm, disclosed some interesting new features of webOS. The new OS from Palm can tell when you're going to be late for a meeting, and take action to help you out. You'd better hope it doesn't also e-mail your boss to tell him what you're up to.
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Linux Users Enjoy The Inauguration Thanks To ... Microsoft?
The bad news for Linux users: Obama's 2009 inauguration ceremony is being Webcast -- but only for those with the Microsoft Silverlight plugin. The good news: Microsoft to the rescue. Say what? Yes.
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LG Usurps No. 3 Spot From Motorola
With the full-year sales figures from the major handset vendors trickling in, there's been another shift in the landscape. Nokia remains the No. 1 one handset maker by a wide margin, but LG leapfrogged both Motorola and Sony Ericsson to take spot No. 3.
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Virtualization Driving SMB Storage
As server virtualization begins to work its way down the data center food chain, it is making small to medium-sized enterprises (SME) change their plans for storage selection. Shared storage is almost an agreed-to requirement to get the full potential out of a virtualization investment, but how can an SME find the right product and not vaporize its budget?
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Do The Monster Mashery
I'm sure just about everything can happen in the cloud these days -- maybe even things I don't want to know about. But when we're starting to help companies perform API management in the cloud, which is what Mashery is doing, it's probably a pretty good sign.
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Sprint To The Inauguration
On the eve of Barack Obama's inauguration, John Croce, a program manager with Sprint's Emergency Response Team (ERT), not only took my call, but put off lunch for a few minutes and whistled off an e-mail to his client, then told me all Sprint was doing to provide both coverage and emergency response for the nation's capital. I guess they take that "response" part seriously.
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Pick Which Sites Google Will Search For You
Google recently rolled out a new experimental feature that lets you choose which sites you want it to check first when you perform searches.
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Botnets: A Look Ahead
While the infamous Storm botnet ran its course, and at least one hoster that was accused of hosting a good number of botnet command and control servers was shut down, don't expect spam or the botnet threat to disappear anytime soon.
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GPS Helps Thieves Steal Two Cars From One Man In Same Night
I'd hate to be this guy. A Long Island resident had a Mercedes stolen from a Manhasset restaurant. The keys to his Porsche were in the car, too. The thieves used the GPS unit in the Mercedes to find the man's house and liberate him of his Porsche.
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Belkin Cops To Faked Product Reviews
If you read user reviews of a particular Belkin router at Amazon.com recently, chances are it could have been a fake review that was written for money.
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Getting Past Satyam Shock: A CIO's 10 Tips On Outsourcing
Jolted by Satyam's financial scandal, CIOs are scrutinizing their outsourcing policies and fortifying their due-diligence efforts. As a reality check, here's a 10-step plan for creating successful outsourcing engagements, brought to you by Jeff Meier, senior VP and CIO of Fujitsu Network Communications.
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Astroturfing On A Tight Budget
Journalists are often accused of being in the back pockets of the companies they cover. I've been accused of being a Microsoft shill many times when I say something favorable about the company, and even accused of being on their payroll. But all that effort for positive press coverage is so 1990s, dude. Why even deal with journalists when you can take your schmoozing and deception directly to the people?
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$16B Bank Goes Off The Grid With Hydrogen Fuel Cells
A search on "hydrogen fuel cells" turns up a blend of results, including some puzzlers (e.g., from September 2007, a hydrogen fuel cell bicycle). But add the words "data center" to the search and you'll find that $16 billion First National Bank of Omaha and its data center are in their 10th year of being completely powered by hydrogen fuel cells and are -- literally -- off the grid.
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What's Next For Jaiku And Dodgeball?
Earlier this week Google announced that several products will be shut down or will be modified. Included in the list were two social services: Jaiku and Dodgeball.
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Downadup Worm Growth Explodes
Finnish security firm F-Secure calculates more than 6 million newly infected systems with the Downadup worm in the past few days. This makes Downadup one of the most virulent infections we have witnessed in quite some time.
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So How Many Employees Should Fly Together?
Writing about an IBM senior sales rep who survived the US Airways crash last week, my colleague Paul McDougall noted that some companies limit the number of employees who can travel together to minimize corporate risk in case of an accident. That reminded me of a funny exchange on that topic many years ago when I was young and foolish.
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5 Ways To Stretch Your 2009 Security Budget
The economy stinks, and as usual, IT is under more pressure than ever to do more with less. While budgets shrink, the complexity of keeping your data safe grows. With some creativity, you can do more with what you have, or in some cases, add necessary new capabilities on the cheap. Here are some of my ideas on where to start.
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A First Step Toward End User Virtualization
The savings that flow from server virtualization are well known and accepted. The potential savings on the client side, I believe, are even greater. But that premise is much less widely accepted, and even less frequently implemented. Perhaps virtualizing end users one application at a time is the way to go.
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Is Facebook Connect A Useful Tool Or A Totalitarian Plot?
Facebook, the popular social media and networking site, is aggressively rolling out its sign-in tool to let other content providers -- CBS, most recently -- exploit the technology to let visitors seamlessly move their logged-in identities across sites.
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When Tech Journalists Attack: Fake Steve Jobs, Gizmodo Lash Out At Jobs Coverage
The reporting about Steve Jobs' health has been the very picture of a media feeding frenzy. We've seen rumors and speculation reported as fact, and streams of self-righteousness pouring forth from keyboards. Three examples hit my in-box today, from Gizmodo, Fake Steve Jobs, and Bloomberg.
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Will 'Cobol In The Cloud' Lead To Unplugging Your Mainframe?
As part of the company's recently launched Enterprise Cloud Services, Micro Focus announced yesterday that it will enable enterprise Cobol apps to run on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) -- just a month after the company announced support for Microsoft's Azure Platform.
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A CIO Tries To Get His Arms Around The Cloud
Anwar Abbas, CIO of the Motion Picture Industry Health & Pension Plans, has been tasked with assembling a cloud computing roundtable at UCLA's Anderson School of Management. As it turns out, cloud experts are hard to find.
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Dear Readers, Please Pick My Google Notebook Replacement
As we learned yesterday, Google's Notebook service -- along with five others -- is biting the dust at some point on the not-too-distant future. I want your help in choosing what I replace it with.
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Looking Ahead To Joomla's Future
It appears that the Joomla community won't have to wait much longer to kick the tires on the next major release. The alpha release of Joomla 1.6 may be ready for testing within the next month or two, according to a blog posting from a Joomla lead developer Andrew Eddie.
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US Airways Crash And Hero Pilot Sully Sullenberger
Yesterday's US Airways crash in the Hudson River has had me thinking about risk management of a very personal kind. In the past decade I've flown US Airways out of LaGuardia hundreds of times, and the views of skyscrapers and bridges and rivers have dazzled me each time. But next time -- a few days from now -- will probably stir some different reactions.
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Things I'd Like To See In The Next iPhone Firmware Update
Without going overboard with suggestions (because that would be too easy), here are a few things that Apple could add to the iPhone with the next minor or major firmware update.
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Million-Dollar Private Clouds
Private clouds that emulate the characteristics of public cloud services sound promising, but they won't necessarily be fast, easy, or cheap to create. A recent meeting with Cassatt CEO Bill Coleman reinforced that impression, especially when I heard about the price tag associated with them.
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Debian And Ubuntu Flaunt Their Package Popularity
Two "popularity contests" in the Linux world aren't what you might think they are -- they don't track Linux's appeal at large, but rather who's installing what packages from a given Linux distribution. The results are still somewhat raw and subject to different interpretations, but eye-opening nevertheless.
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Kogan Puts The Kibosh On World's Second Android Phone
If you were hoping to plunder an Android phone from down under, there's bad news. Kogan, maker of the Agora Android phone, has canceled the device and is refunding those who preordered it.
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Microsoft, Google, And Yahoo: One Doesn't Belong
Yikes! Yahoo is bleeding advertisers. A lot of advertisers. Yahoo's newly named CEO, Carol Bartz, will be tasked with pulling back the stick of a company in a steep nosedive.
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Thief Steals Sony Ericsson Prototypes
I was expecting a slow week in the mobile world following Macworld and CES, but we can always count on corporate espionage to spice things up. It looks like an employee, or someone with access to company keycards, made off with some prototype cell phones from Sony Ericsson.
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Steve Jobs's Health Is A Private Matter Now
I couldn't disagree more with this New York Times blog post demanding that Apple and Steve Jobs come clean about his health. By taking a leave of absence as CEO, Jobs has made his health a private matter.
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Google Gets Personal And Social
Little drops of personalization continue to fall upon Google properties. The drizzle is enough to suggest that the word "social" belongs somewhere in the company's description of its focus: "search, ads, and apps."
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The $6 Million Mistake
A recent court ruling shows how easy -- and expensive -- it can be to screw up the e-discovery process.
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Apple Handled Jobs' Health Disclosures With Dignity And Class
Over the past day, since Apple revealed that Steve Jobs is stepping aside for five months to manage his health problems, I've been impressed by the way that Apple and Jobs have handled disclosures about his condition. They've stumbled a couple of times over the past half-year or so, since the issue first emerged. They haven't always been as forthcoming as perhaps they should be. But, still, overall, they've visibly been trying to do the right thing, motivated by a desire to balance personal rights to privacy with the public good. They take their responsibility to investors and the public seriously.
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Microsoft & Best Buy Team To Explore Age-Appropriate Slaughter
There's a new public-service campaign coming from Microsoft, Best Buy, and a handful of industry and parent groups, intended to promote age-appropriate carjacking, zombie annihilation, and troll slaughter.
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Twitter Spreads News Of U.S. Airways Crash In An Instant
Today was yet another indicator that Twitter is the way we're going to consume breaking news in the future. I learned about the US Airways Hudson River plane crash before it was on CNN.com, NYTimes.com, and FoxNews.com.
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The Downadup Worm Hits 3.5 Million
Security firm F-Secure says that the Downadup worm has spread to more than 3.5 million computers by exploiting a vulnerability Microsoft patched last October.
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Evidence From Database Errors Can Be Used In Court
The U.S. Supreme Court has decided, in a 5-4 vote, that police can use evidence obtained in searches resulting from erroneous information in databases, as long as the error was a result of negligence -- not "systemic errors or reckless disregard of constitutional requirements."
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With Lives At Stake, Has Kellogg's Failed The Social Web Responsibility Test?
If you work in the IT or PR department of a company whose products could, in some conceivable circumstance, bring harm to your customers, this case study is for you. Ask yourself this question: If you discovered that your product could be carrying a lethal payload as Kellogg's has discovered with two of its peanut butter cracker brands (photo below), what is your next move on the Web? After all, with its multimedia capability, the Web is practically a perfect channel for the social responsibility that must follow such a discovery.
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Five Things Motorola Needs To Do If It Wants To Have A Future
The Good Times haven't visited Motorola in nearly two years. The company has struggled quarter after quarter to regain the success it saw earlier in the decade when its iconic Razr phones were new. How can it turn things around? Here are five ideas.
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Eli Lilly's Cloud Computing Breakthroughs Offer 80/20 Help
Using the cloud, Eli Lilly can now deploy a new server in three minutes (instead of 50+ days) and can get a 64-node Linux cluster online in five minutes (instead of 100 days). Those types of technological breakthroughs can help IT teams cut maintenance costs and fund innovation. And at Eli Lilly, the managerial breakthrough came when it focused on the cloud's possibilities instead of its uncertainties.
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Demand Response In Demand
Demand response is in demand, according to a new federal report. That's good news for operators of data centers, disaster recovery, and business continuity sites, and large users of electricity.
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Superstar Syndrome Shouldn't Have To Keep Canonical Down
Nobody I've talked to believes Steve Jobs is anything but deathly ill. They're also convinced that Apple will go on somehow -- even if not quite in the same vein. But what if this situation applied not to Jobs but to another technology entrepreneur that I've covered a great deal -- Canonical's Mark Shuttleworth?
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Analyst Says Oracle Laid Off 1% Of Workforce
It appears Oracle is doing some layoffs, with one analyst putting the number at 1% of the company's 85,000-strong global workforce. Oracle is perhaps the most financially healthy company in the software business. If it's worried about maintaining its strong profit margins, this is one of the biggest indications yet of a downturn in the software applications sales and services industry.
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Google Trims Fat, Plans To Cut 6 Services
As if word of layoffs isn't dire enough, Google also is looking to save money by halting the forward movement of six of its products. One of them, Google Notebook, happens to be a handy tool that I've been using for well over a year. Also among the affected is Google Video.
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Google Blog Converters Project Simplifies Platform Migrations
Content migration can be one of the more technically challenging tasks facing administrators, whether you're running a complex site with thousands of articles or a simple blog with a handful of posts. Hoping to ease the pain a bit for the latter, Google recently introduced the Google Blog Converters project, which features tools intended to make migrations easier to and from a number of popular blogging and content management platforms.
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Engine Yard Switches Rails To Mainline Cloud
Engine Yard, a hosting and support company for the popular Ruby on Rails programming framework, today announced two new offerings designed to improve the development, deployment, management, and security of cloud applications.
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Apple Will Thrive Without Steve Jobs
Apple has a deep management bench and will continue to thrive without Steve Jobs at the helm, according to Apple bloggers and journalists. The company announced today that Jobs is taking a five-month medical leave of absence, which sent the company's stock price into a dive. Nonetheless, blogger Robert Scoble and other bloggers and journalists expressed confidence in the company. "You are an idiot if you sell your Apple stock tomorrow," Scoble wrote.
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Stocks Suffer Economic News, Jobs' Leave
Tech stocks weren't spared Wednesday as the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the S&P 500, and the Nasdaq suffered steep declines on more bad economic news.
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Breaking: Motorola Cuts 4,000 Employees
What a day for bad news. On top of Apple CEO Steve Jobs stepping down, Motorola announced that it is planning to reduce its staffing levels by an additional 4,000 people.
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Apple CEO Steve Jobs Taking Medical Leave Of Absence
Steve Jobs plans to take a medical leave of absence from Apple until June, to focus on his medical conditions, which, he said in a statement on the Apple Web site, "are more complex than I originally thought." Apple COO Tim Cook will oversee day-to-day operations.
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Paris Hilton's Site Hacked: Expect Much More of This Throughout 2009
More than 15,000 Web sites have been infected with the same Trojan that has been by detected at Paris Hilton's Web site, ParisHilton.com. This certainly won't be the last time this happens this year.
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Stop 'Aligning IT With The Business'; Connect With Customers
You've heard "align IT with the business" millions of times and wondered, 'Wait a minute -- aren't we already a *part* of the business?' That old alignment path leads to being reactive and tactical and branded as a cost center, whereas the customer connection points to business value, strategic value, and growth. I make my case for the new road in this week's Global CIO column.
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Breaking: Steve Jobs Vacates Apple CEO Post
Today Apple CEO Steve Jobs said he is relinquishing his duties until June for health-related reasons. Tom Cook, the current chief operating officer, will take over until Jobs returns.
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Nortel Restructuring: Breathe And Relax
Nortel has initiated a restructuring process in an attempt to turn the company around. Despite the doom and gloom about the announcement, Nortel is far from a fire sale. Restructuring may be a good step to get control of the company. With $2.4 billion in cash, Nortel is in a far different position than U.S. automakers. Nortel has been struggling for the last few years to turn its business around.
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GMail Users Can Now Send And Archive With One Click
The latest addition to the beta features found in Gmail Labs is a new tool that lets you send and archive e-mail in one, tidy step.
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Did Apple Lie About Steve Jobs's Health?
Update, 5 pm EST: Several hours after I posted this blog, Apple announced that Jobs is taking a medical leave of absence.
Apple seems to have learned from Bill Clinton. Like our randy former chief executive being questioned about his sex life, Apple handled Steve Jobs' ongoing health problems by making statements that were literally true, but ultimately misleading. That's going to have Apple watchers taking a microscope to every statement and action by Apple to find out what the company really means. But Apple watchers already are doing that, so Apple doesn't lose out.
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Report: Dell Readying Smartphone
The reports of a Dell smartphone have been on-again/off-again for two full years. Now, analysts are saying that Dell is set to debut a new smartphone as soon as the Mobile World Congress show in Barcelona next month.
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Windows 7, Meet Fedora 10; Play Nice
I'm tempted to name my notebook Panmunjeom. In real life, that's the name of the DMZ where North and South Korea meet and conduct what diplomacy they can. As far as my notebook goes, it's where I have the public beta of Windows 7 and various Linux installs (currently Fedora 10) running dual-boot.
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Windows 7 Beta Install Hints At Microsoft's Planned Ship Date
I'm perplexed at all the huffing about the difficulties some people had installing the Windows 7 Beta. If you had patience -- or did the download over the weekend in the dead of night, when Microsoft's servers weren't overloaded -- it wasn't a problem. (I know, I really should get a life.) More interesting is that fact that the beta provides strong hints about Microsoft's release schedule for the operating system.
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Apple Apparently Reverses App Policy, Approves 3rd-Party Browsers
In what looks to be an about-face, Apple has begun to approve browsers for the iPhone and iPod Touch made by other companies. A few basic restrictions seem to exist, but this could pave the way for mobile versions of Firefox and Opera to appear on the iPhone. Updated with info from Opera.
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Eli Lilly On What's Next In Cloud Computing
Eli Lilly's Dave Powers talks compellingly about how the pharmaceuticals company is using cloud computing services to support its scientists with on-demand processing power and storage. What's even more interesting, however, is what Eli Lilly has planned next.
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Futility Of Microsoft's Exploitability Index
As far as Microsoft patch Tuesdays are concerned, 2009 treads in like a lamb, with the software maker issuing only one security bulletin in its MS09-001 January patch rollout. Yet, even as MS09-001 is rated as "critical" for popular versions of its operating system -- the company's Exploitability Index hails: "Functioning exploit code unlikely." What's with the mixed signals?
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CIOs Need To Keep Open Mind On Indian IT Firms
These days, mention Satyam and few of us are likely to think of how it won a prestigious 2008 award from SAP for excellence in customer experience and accelerating innovation, plus two independent awards for shared-service excellence. In a Global CIO column, Professor M.S. Krishnan says customers evaluating their relationships with Satyam cannot afford to dismiss those achievements or the long-term quality of the Indian IT services industry.
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Out Of Space? Thin Provisioning Vs. Traditional Provisioning
There has been a lot written about thin provisioning and how it can optimize capacity and increase efficiency of the storage administrator. The constant response is that thin provisioning is "risky" compared with traditional hard-provisioned volumes. Is it really?
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Latest iPhone Nano Scuttlebutt Indicates A June Arrival
With Macworld come and gone and no iPhone-related gear for Apple fans to drool over, iPhonatics have nothing but rumors to go on that Apple is prepping an iPhone Nano. The latest info suggests that we'll see one in June.
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The Cisco Desktop
I don't know if Cisco is going to make it as a consumer electronics company, but it's making some really important moves to reposition itself in the enterprise. And it's all about the desktop.
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Data Center Efficiency At The Component Level
If you're looking to green your data center and wondered what effect sourcing new components might have, The Green Grid has some details you should look at.
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Google Mops Up The Search Competition
Posting strong search numbers in December, Google continues to gain ground on Microsoft and Yahoo. Will either firm be able to regain search market share?
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Launching InformationWeek’s Startup 50
What are the most innovative and compelling tech startups with products and services for business? InformationWeek is setting out to identify those up-and-coming companies, and we're asking your help in finding them.
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Analyst: Palm Will Sell 1.5M Pres In First Year
Let the guessing games begin. An analyst from Citi issued a note recently, stating his belief that Palm should be able to convince 1.5 million people to adopt the Palm Pre as their next smartphone. Will it happen?
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The New York Times On Ubuntu: Half-Right
When an article about Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical, and Ubuntu begins with the words "They're either hapless pests or the very people capable of overthrowing Windows. Take your pick," then I'm fairly sure I'm not about to read a good article about any of the above. But that's the first line of a piece about them in, incredibly, The New York Times.
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World Bank Keeps Losing Outsourcers, Data, And CIOs
With banks like this, the old cash-under-the-mattress investment philosophy is starting to look pretty good: The World Bank has announced the ban of outsourcer Wipro for four years, shortly after having done the same to Satyam. So it's bouncing core IT partners, is still reeling from massive data breaches, and has a new acting CIO. If the World Bank were a stock, would you buy?
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Will Latest Acquisition Help Oracle Play Bigger Role In More Regulated Financial Industry?
During an earnings call last month, Oracle's CEO Larry Ellison said the global economic slowdown would present the company with more opportunities to make acquisitions in niche segments, something the mammoth software vendor has been doing a lot of lately.
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CWE/SANS Top 25 Programming Errors
A group of security experts comprised of vendors, government experts, educators, and individuals published Mitre's Common Weakness Enumeration, a scheme that identifies common programming problems and offers guidance to avoid the problem in the first place. The group hopes the CWE list will be used by colleges to teach secure programming, vendors to avoid the mistakes, and customers to demand these problems are not in shipping code.
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MojoPortal A Solid CMS Option For .NET Shops
While there are plenty of options to choose from if you're looking for free, open source PHP-based content management systems, the list is much shorter for organizations using Microsoft's .NET framework and coding in C#. While DotNetNuke has received the lion's share of attention over the past year or so, it certainly isn't the only game in town.
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The List Developers Need To Know
There seems an almost endless number of mistakes that can be made to make applications susceptible to attack. Fortunately, the list of programming mistakes that really matter in today's risk environment is relatively small. Here's that list.
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Microsoft's Fear Of BitTorrent
Microsoft finally delivered a public beta of Windows 7 on Friday. This should be cause for great rejoicing, but somehow Microsoft managed to take the genuine excitement around this public unveiling and turn it into a sour experience.
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Satyam Clients Aren't The Only Ones Losing Sleep Over Scandal
Satyam customers aren't the only ones worried about the company's mess. Non-Satyam clients who outsource pieces of their IT to other services providers should be looking over their shoulders, too.
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Pilot Who Faked Crash Was Facing $1.4 Million Lawsuit
So there was this bizarre story making the rounds today about a pilot who falsely claimed his plane was in trouble, then bailed -- D.B. Cooper-style -- into a Florida swamp. Thanks to the power of the Internet, I think I've discovered a motive.
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A Close Look At Phoenix’s HyperSpace
With all the talk there's been about Linux displacing Windows on the desktop, the big question is how is it going to happen? Here's one possibility: it will outflank it. One way this may happen is through HyperSpace, Phoenix Technologies' Linux-based boot environment that could give people one less reason to boot regularly into Windows.
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The World Bank's Data Breach, And Its Sorry Follow-Up
The World Bank (annual IT budget about $250 million) has been hit by a range of data breaches, at least one of which involved info belonging to staffers. So a corporate guy overseeing IT has sent a flaccid memo to the whole organization. Take a look at the memo and ask yourself if it will make World Bank employees feel better -- or want to quit.
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More Than Coding Mistakes At Fault In Bad Software
I'm glad the SANS Institute released its list of "top 25 most dangerous programming errors" in a bid to raise awareness about the omissions which make software vulnerable to deadly security breaches. However, security-clueless coding isn't the only thing responsible for software that sucks. Sadly, most people in the industry know what the problem is. So why doesn't anyone ever do anything about it?
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What To Include In A Product Or Service Pitch
In the last column, we looked at the optimal time for sending out your product or service pitch. In this column, I'd like to share what I like to see included in a pitch for a product or service. I think it's important to spend time on the blogs and news outlets you want to get covered by to see if they outline what they look for in submitted pitches.
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CES 2009: Palm Pre Pricing Predictions
One detail that Palm and its carrier partner Sprint did not share about the new Pre is its selling price. Right now, it is reported to cost anywhere between $99 and $399. What's the real price going to be?
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ASUS Eeeeeeeee PC: Innovative Netbook
Honest, CES was my first real hands-on look at the netbook class of notebooks, so I'm a little behind. HP called its version a "companion PC." I'm not sure if that means it's your companion, or an extra device to bring along. Regardless, these are -- naturally -- getting much more powerful, much more energy efficient and much more useful. For a certain class of power users (and maybe that's a majority), this could become the only device they carry.
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CES: Startup Ctera's CloudPlug (Literally)
Sometimes it's the tiniest things that thrill me. In the middle of the gigantic TVs and the booming sound systems and the magic acts and the private suites and the thrumming parties was Ctera, an 18-employee company headquartered in Israel. When they showed me their device, I literally did a double-take (luckily off camera; very awkward). The CloudPlug is a tiny plug with a processor inside, an Ethernet jack, and a USB port, with which you can turn any USB device into a NAS and back up your data to Ctera's cloud-based service. And it's so damned cute.
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Another CES Green Moment From Horizon Fuel Cell
Last year Horizon Fuel Cell blew us away with a generator/charging device that used water to create electricity. My colleague, David Berlind, filed this blog, and this video on YouTube that not only produced more than 1.3 million views, but well over a hundred comments, many of them doubting the viability of the technology. This year, the company has not only created a final product, but showed off smaller, cleverer versions as well.
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CES 2009: Wireless Charging Video Demo
One of the neat aspects to Palm's Pre announcement is that it works with a wireless charger called the Touchstone. Palm wasn't the only vendor offering conductive charging technology. Watch this demonstration of how it all works.
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10 Things That WON'T Happen In 2009
As we ease into the new year, everybody and his brother has predicted what will happen in 2009. But that wasn't good enough for the folks at bMighty.com -- we decided to buck conventional wisdom and tell you about 10 important things that won't happen this year.
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CES 2009: Palm Shakes Its Mojo At Developers
Now that we know about the new Pre and webOS, we're naturally curious to know how Palm expects to bring applications and services to webOS. In an answer to that burning query, Palm announced Mojo and the Mojo SDK, its new development tools for webOS.
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CES 2009: Palm's Entire Pre Announcement Video
Palm has made the presentation of the Pre available online to anyone who is interested in watching it. It was a masterful presentation, and I highly recommend you check it out.
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HeartMath's Great Stress Relief
Stress is ... a big presentation, managing a budget, dealing with end-user gripes, rolling out a new application, traveling, attending a trade show. But now, thanks to HeartMath emWave, you can effectively manage your stress. This technology is good for an individual, or certainly for a corporation that cares about the well-being of its employees (know any of those?).
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HP Goes Crazy With New Products
HP's been busy, and in some surprising ways. It has always been an inventive, engineering-oriented company, but other than its printers (where it continues to reign supreme), the company hasn't been a consistent winner in the desktop and consumer space. At CES it showed off an impressive (and overwhelming) array of technology, from its TouchSmart interface to its high-end displays to its netbooks and light notebooks to its home media appliance.
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NEC Shows Spiffy Mobile Projector at CES
There were lots of big empty spaces at CES this year, like vacant stores in a shopping mall. Many of the would-be exhibitors had booked hotels and meeting space, so they still came and set up shop off site. I'm not sure if NEC was one of them, but one might draw that conclusion. We pranced down to the ballroom at the Embassy Suites (who knew they had more than one!) to see NEC's interesting NP62 mobile projector.
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Microsoft's Light Patch Tuesday Offset By Oracle
While Microsoft is slated to issue one patch next week, Oracle announced it will release an eye-popping 41 security vulnerability fixes that touch hundreds of applications. Oh joy.
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CES 2009: Unlock Your Front Door With Your BlackBerry
Schlage was in the Research In Motion booth at CES demonstrating its latest bit of lock technology: locks that can be opened from your BlackBerry.
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Satyam And Its 8-Year Ban From World Bank
Barely three weeks ago, a defiant Satyam Computer Services was demanding apologies from and threatening legal action against the World Bank for its 8-year ban on the IT services provider due to alleged inappropriate behavior. While that high drama was, of course, totally upstaged by this week's news of financial misstatements, the World Bank situation deserves a closer look.
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Can Windows Mobile Fight Back?
The mobile industry has been abuzz with Palm's Pre smartphone and its webOS platform, Apple continues to sell millions of iPhones, and Research In Motion's BlackBerrys are getting more popular. So, what is Microsoft going to do to make Windows Mobile a success? In an interview with The New York Times, executives talked about their strategy for the mobile market, and I think it's a good one for the most part.
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CES 2009: Where Are All The Android Phones?
The second day of CES 2009 is quickly fading out and I haven't seen a single Android phone anywhere. The question everyone is asking is, where is the new mobile OS from Google?
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Something Not CES-Related At All
Vinnie Paul, brother of late Pantera guitarist Dimebag Darrell Abbott, is offering up his very first cell phone in an eBay auction. It happens to be a Motorola.
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Amid Belt-Tightening, Engine Yard Expands The Cloud
In the past few weeks, Engine Yard has brought in a new CEO, laid off 15% of its workforce, and merged two of its key development efforts. With that out of the way, the Ruby on Rails hosting company appears ready to announce a cloud platform and a new hosting option.
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There's No Such Thing As A Private Cloud
I talked to two cloud startups today, but to my mind only one of them should get to use the term "cloud" in how it positions itself.
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NYPD Wants To Interrupt Mobile Communications During Attacks
The New York Police Department wants the ability to interrupt mobile phone service and other electronic communications during terrorist attacks.
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CES 2009: Dell, AT&T Offer Subsidized Laptop With 2-Year Contract
Today AT&T and Dell announced that if you want to buy an Inspiron for $99, you can get one. All you have to do is agree to a two-year LaptopConnect wireless Internet plan with AT&T.
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DTV Transition Delay Talk Is Terrible Tech Policy
The effort to get Congress to push back the television industry's Feb. 17 cutoff to transition from analog to digital broadcasting reflects a shocking lack of nerve for a nation that's supposed to be a beacon of technological leadership. Really, can't we just get with the 21st century, already? Or should we ditch our MP3 files and bring back vinyl records, too?
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Open Source In Obama's Tech Agenda
Much noise has been made in the past week or so about President-elect Barack Obama's creation of a governmental chief tech officer position. My question is: What will be their stance on open source? Will they lean towards it, mandate it, forbid it ... or ignore it entirely? I looked into it, and came away feeling we had much bigger problems looming.
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Blue Ants At CES Bluetooth Picnic
I know I said I didn't really care about more Bluetooth headsets, but it's always so much fun to see what Blue Ant is up to. Call me a hypocrite. We talked to Blue Ant about its latest technology, Q1, which combines improved noise suppression with the voice control capabilities it launched earlier this year. (Still looking for a Bluetooth headset that fits into those massive ear holes kids are sporting these days.)
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CES 2009 Video: LG TV Extravaganza
Was it me, or did it seem like LG has taken over half of the space at CES? Its TVs and giant walls lined the inescapable booth at the Las Vegas Convention Center. If it's true that there were 130,000 attendees at CES, then I saw most of them in the LG stand, nearly got trampled a half dozen times, once getting stuck behind Yahoo founder Jerry Yang's entourage (undoubtedly trying to find him a job) and some suits from CBS. An LG PR person told me there had been an altercation earlier. OK, the LG HDTVs are superb, but not worth fighting over.
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CES 2009 Video: LG Cell Phone Watch (And Wait)
LG's Martin Valdez looks a little like he could enter an Elvis look-alike contest, a much-needed feature for what ended up being mostly show: The unveiling of LG's Cell Phone Watch. For once, this actually looks like something you might want to wear, and I don't mean for the khaki/sneaker set either (you know who you are). This is stylish. Maybe sexy. But it doesn't work. The ideas are great, but at this point, because the device is far from shipping, they're just ideas.
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CES 2009 Video: Palm Pre View
Palm booked a VIP suite at CES, guarded it with official looking beef boys, spared little expense on meeting canopies, food, alcohol, and ambiance for its selected guests (somehow I got in anyway), and set up some swanky demo stations where you could look at (but not touch) its latest mobile offering. Palm called it Pre, which I pronounced, mistakenly (though you can imagine why), "pray"; and its OS the Palm Web OS, known pre-announcement as Nova. Like the car.
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CES 2009: Day One Wrap-Up
Here's a collection of small things that turned up today on the first full day of the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show, including some great new info about the Palm Pre.
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Oracle On Salesforce.com's Service Disruption
Salesforce.com went down worldwide for about 40 minutes Tuesday, marking the company's first notable service disruption in months. There's never a good time for a service disruption, but this one seems particularly ill-timed, given Oracle's sudden bloodthirsty gaze on Salesforce.com's customer base.
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Hey Larry: Two Sizes Of Windows Aren't Enough
Larry Osterman of Microsoft recently pondered why one of his fellow Microsoft developers would complain that a Windows Server 2008 system had poor audio quality. After all, he reasons, a server operating system isn't meant to play music, games, or other consumer-desktop functionality. If you want those features, a desktop client version of Windows is a better fit. So why would an intelligent developer choose a server OS for their desktop?
Continue reading "Hey Larry: Two Sizes Of Windows Aren't Enough..."
Gen Y Stays Plugged In But Feels Boxed Out
They work afterhours but aren't allowed to use all their skills; they're on the front edge of mobile technology but aren't permitted to fully exploit that for competitive advantage; and they feel their 21st century skills are being lost in a workplace constipated by 20th century thinking. Are CIOs stifling the leading-edge skills and potential of the Gen Y workforce?
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A Hosted Content Management System Cautionary Tale
The past couple of days have been an interesting roller-coaster ride for sites using the hosted SoapBlox content management system. From all appearances, SoapBlox's servers were compromised by hackers earlier this week, and Paul Preston, the president of SoapBlox, came close to shutting down the service completely.
Continue reading "A Hosted Content Management System Cautionary Tale..."
When It Comes To Development, Doesn't Anyone Learn From History?
From the successful microblogging site Twitter to a Web site toll-payment system in New Zealand for a motorway that runs from Orewa to Puhoi, security still remains an afterthought.
Continue reading "When It Comes To Development, Doesn't Anyone Learn From History?..."
CES 2009: Palm Hits A Triple With The Pre
Today at CES Palm unveiled its next-generation mobile platform and the first piece of hardware running on that platform. The Palm Pre and webOS are solid steps forward for Sprint, but they aren't a home run. Yet.
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Can 150 Million Facebook Users Be Wrong? (Plus, What Apps Should We Build?)
The blogosphere is all aTwitter with the news, via a blog post from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, that the social-networking powerhouse has ratcheted up its user base to 150 million people. Whoa! Are those folks doing anything useful or just wasting their time?
Continue reading "Can 150 Million Facebook Users Be Wrong? (Plus, What Apps Should We Build?)..."
OLPC Feels The Pinch
Chalk up another open source victim of hard days: the One Laptop Per Child project. It isn't dead, and I'm glad it's not, but I'd wondered how well these guys could weather the tough times.
Continue reading "OLPC Feels The Pinch..."
Battery Maker Eyes Michigan For New Plant, New Jobs
In a deflated digital economy, can investment in manufacturing plants spur renewed prosperity? U.S. manufacturing is dead, we've been told, but A123Systems isn't buying it. The battery maker is angling to expand its U.S. production capacity and create 14,000 jobs in the process.
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Managing Amazon Web Services From An iPhone
The day has arrived when Average Joe can manage data center resources from a soccer field or the beach using the world's most popular gadget. Ylastic, an Atlanta-based startup founded last year, has introduced an iPhone version of its management interface for Amazon Web Services.
Continue reading "Managing Amazon Web Services From An iPhone..."
CES 2009: Celio Beefs Up Redfly Smartphone Companion
Celio announced a new set of hardware and software products to enhance the usability of smartphones on the road. Its new docking station gives smartphones the ability to add a mouse, keyboard, and external display.
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CES 2009: Nokia Bringing E63 Smartphone To The U.S.
Nokia first introduced the E63 smartphone back in November. It is a solid little smartphone that offers a good feature set at a great price point. Today, Nokia announced that it will be available in the United States.
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CES 2009: OQO's Model 2+ Impresses
OQO, which has been making small, fully functional Windows machines for years, debuted its latest hardware, the model 2+. Key improvements include a much faster Intel Atom processor, an OLED display, and worldwide 3G wireless data capabilities.
Continue reading "CES 2009: OQO's Model 2+ Impresses..."
Security Spending May Increase In 2009
Research firm Forrester predicts security spending, as a percentage of overall IT budgets, is set to rise this year.
Continue reading "Security Spending May Increase In 2009..."
The Best Time To Pitch Your Product Or Service
One of the most popular questions I am asked is when is the best time and/or day to pitch a tech product or service to bloggers and reporters. There are absolutely better times than others and I'd like to share my thoughts and ideas as you move closer to launch. In future columns, we will explore the right content to include in a pitch.
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CES 2009: Sony Ericsson Pops Out Two New Phones
Ah, finally some phone announcements. This evening, Sony Ericsson unveiled a new Cyber-Shot phone and a new Walkman phone.
Continue reading "CES 2009: Sony Ericsson Pops Out Two New Phones..."
Nokia: No More WiMax Device For Us
Today Nokia confirmed that it is ceasing production and distribution of the N810 Internet Tablet WiMax Edition. That's one less device for Sprint/Clearwire subscribers to use on the Clear WiMax network.
Continue reading "Nokia: No More WiMax Device For Us..."
CIO Replies To CEO: 10 Reasons To Keep Me
Four weeks ago, CEO Jim wrote a performance-review letter to CIO Pat questioning whether Pat is in fact the right person for the job. As requested, Pat has written a response in which he lays out a 10-point plan for how he and the CEO can work together to use IT to enhance business value. Pat also tells his boss to stop threatening him and start supporting him.
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At CES, A Super Screen Goes Commercial
If you like wide-screen TVs and computer monitors, check out Hiperwall's video wall technology. The startup has demonstrated its system running on 40 LCD monitors combined into a display that's 10-feet-high and 27-feet-across. Now, Samsung Electronics has agreed to distribute and support the super-sized, high-resolution displays.
Continue reading "At CES, A Super Screen Goes Commercial..."
Google Street View Helps Find Missing Child
Google Maps Street View, a service that has been criticized as an invasion of privacy, has been used to help find a missing child.
Continue reading "Google Street View Helps Find Missing Child..."
Tech Policy Issues Up Front In New Year
Technology policy took a front seat on political agendas Wednesday, even though President-elect Barack Obama hadn't named the nation's chief technology officer by late afternoon.
Continue reading "Tech Policy Issues Up Front In New Year..."
Twitter: The Water Cooler For Mobile Workers
Twitter makes a good substitute for cubicle chatter that I miss in my home office.
Continue reading "Twitter: The Water Cooler For Mobile Workers..."
CES 2009: Upload Video From Camera Straight To YouTube Via Eye-Fi
Eye-Fi's SD card for cameras has allowed photogs to take pictures and wirelessly upload them via Wi-Fi for about a year now. Taking things to the next level, Eye-Fi is set to bow a new service that lets users upload video from their digital cameras directly to YouTube.
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CES 2009: Samsung Intros Pico Projector For Mobile Phones
Today at CES Samsung introduced a pico projector. The device will connect to mobile phones and allow users to project video content onto any nearby surface.
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CES Cool Gadget: Aliph Jawbone Bluetooth Headset
I've been playing around with Aliph's second iteration of its über-cool Bluetooth cell phone accessory -- called the Jawbone -- since I saw it at the CES gadget preview held in advance of this week's big Las Vegas show. Here's my quick review.
Continue reading "CES Cool Gadget: Aliph Jawbone Bluetooth Headset..."
Apple Shafts Customers With DRM Deal
Yesterday, Apple announced that it is stripping digital rights management from the iTunes Music Store. That's great, but customers who want to upgrade are getting a raw deal.
Continue reading "Apple Shafts Customers With DRM Deal..."
CES 2009: SD Card Association Sets Spec For 2-Terabyte Memory Cards
No, that's not a typo. 32-gigabyte microSD cards are barely available yet and the SD Card Association today introduces SD eXtended Capacity. SDXC will be able to fit up to 2 terabytes of data onto a small memory card.
Continue reading "CES 2009: SD Card Association Sets Spec For 2-Terabyte Memory Cards..."
Tech To Obama: Fund Innovation, Not Bridges
I've got nothing against infrastructure projects as a way to stimulate the economy. However, it's becoming clear that one constituency's argument is being largely ignored in the rush to money-print our way out of the recession. Namely, the technology industry's. Read on for details of how a legitimate "innovation stimulus" could both drive tech spending and create jobs.
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CES 2009: LG Offers Little To Gloat About
Continuing the line of evolutionary -- not revolutionary -- announcements at CES 2009, LG showed off its watch phone during is press conference this morning. It also introduced a solar-powered car kit.
Continue reading "CES 2009: LG Offers Little To Gloat About..."
India's Outsourcers Hit With Perfect Storm
First it was the Mumbai terror attacks. Now, India's outsourcing sector has been rocked with revelations of a massive, Enron-style accounting fraud. Can the industry, on which U.S. companies depend for everything from software development to call center operations, survive these twin shocks?
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SAP CEO Predicts SaaS 'Disillusionment'
Conventional wisdom is that the tough economy makes this a good time to subscribe to software as a service as a way of avoiding capital investment in on-premises software. But Bill McDermott, president and CEO of global field operations for SAP, argues that strategy could backfire, and in some cases already has, for companies that take it too far.
Continue reading "SAP CEO Predicts SaaS 'Disillusionment'..."
Green Is A 'Nice To Have'
2009 is here and for IT, it's ugly. Storage projects will need to be justified with near instant ROI's. Over the next several entries we will look at projects you can undertake which will deliver that near-instant ROI, but first let's look at what Green IT's new role is during the economic downturn.
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Software Should Be Free, But Nice Guys Should Finish First, Too
On the eve of the release of the fifth iteration of the Debian Linux -- er, GNU/Linux -- release, a bit of noise erupted that got me thinking about the whole question of why, when it comes to the ethics of software development, polite manners tend to get short shrift.
Continue reading "Software Should Be Free, But Nice Guys Should Finish First, Too..."
Is ITunes Succumbing To The Music Industry's Death Wish?
I can't decide whether Apple's announcement yesterday that it's going to sell DRM-free songs at variable prices is a good thing, or a really dumb idea.
Continue reading "Is ITunes Succumbing To The Music Industry's Death Wish?..."
Borders CIO Survives C-Level Flux But Now Reports To HR
The good news: Borders CIO Susan Harwood still has her job. The bad news: Her CEO, CFO, and CMO colleagues were all replaced Sunday, and Harwood no longer reports to the CEO; now it's to the newly named CAO, who until three days ago ran HR. What the heck's going on here?
Continue reading "Borders CIO Survives C-Level Flux But Now Reports To HR..."
Nielsen Norman Group Announces 2009 Best Intranets List
Jakob Nielsen of the Nielsen Norman Group posted his 2009 picks for the best-designed intranets in his Alertbox column earlier this week, and while there are no earth-shattering surprises, the list and his views on the state of intranets in general is always an interesting read.
Continue reading "Nielsen Norman Group Announces 2009 Best Intranets List..."
CES 2009: So Far, So Boring
It's CES Eve's Eve here in Las Vegas. The Consumer Electronics Association kicked things off to a somber start with the CES Unveiled event, a veritable snoozefest of lackluster gadgets and gizmos.
Continue reading "CES 2009: So Far, So Boring..."
Microsoft Dominates The Netbook, Unless ...
As netbook mania (and sales) took off in 2008, it looked like Linux had a chance to be the netbook OS of choice. That is, until Microsoft brought XP out of retirement just for netbooks to use. Now, most netbooks run Windows, and it's likely to stay that way for a while. Still, there are two companies that might pose a threat to Microsoft in the netbook category: Apple and Google.
Continue reading "Microsoft Dominates The Netbook, Unless ......"
Crash Kills SOA On New Year’s Day
On her blog, Burton Group analyst Anne Thomas Manes declared SOA dead on Jan. 1, saying it was wiped out by the catastrophic impact of the economic recession. Luckily for me, I have an alibi and I was nowhere near the accident scene when it happened.
Continue reading "Crash Kills SOA On New Year’s Day..."
The Twitter Hack: One Thing You Need To Do
As many of you know, the week has been off to a bad start for the Twitter microblogging site. While there's no absolute way to protect yourself when a vendor's security system fails, there is one crucial step you can take to limit your exposure.
Continue reading "The Twitter Hack: One Thing You Need To Do..."
Model Seeks Court Order To Identify Anonymous Blogger
A model has asked a court to require Google to turn over a name or other information that would identify an anonymous blogger who posted derogatory comments about her sexual behaviors, looks, and mental state.
Continue reading "Model Seeks Court Order To Identify Anonymous Blogger..."
Career Experts Predict 2009 Should Be Good For Tech Pros
The new year almost always ushers in feelings of high hopes. While the rotten economy is putting a damper on some of that customary New Year wishfulness this time, career experts say IT pros should feel optimistic about jobs in 2009.
Continue reading "Career Experts Predict 2009 Should Be Good For Tech Pros..."
Solar Power's Breakout Year
The solar industry is the Ugly Betty of clean technology. Photovoltaic panels aren't pretty and solar power isn't yet cheap. But Solar keeps plugging along in its chunky glasses and thick sweaters, inching ever closer to its full potential.
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How Eli Lilly Taps Into The Cloud
I'm expecting 2009 to be a year in which large companies embrace cloud computing in greater numbers. But how will they do it? And why? Eli Lilly, an early adopter of Amazon Web Services, will discuss its motivations and experiences in an upcoming InformationWeek Webcast.
Continue reading "How Eli Lilly Taps Into The Cloud..."
Will EMC Wrap Products In Open Source?
If people are skeptical about open source on the desktop or in mobile spaces, the one place where open source has generated a good deal of consensus is in that amorphous place so commonly referred to as "the cloud". Just ask EMC, judging from its most recent open source acquisition.
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Will IT Spend On Itself In 2009?
In today's economy, does the IT department dare spend to improve its own operations? At many companies, that will go over like the old man getting himself a new bass boat for Christmas, while the kids get socks. But now might be the right time to spend to get IT operations in order.
Continue reading "Will IT Spend On Itself In 2009?..."
Will UC Save Enterprise VOIP?
The voice-over-IP visionaries have always hung out in the consumer space, for the most part; after all, VoIP started out as a subversive, disruptive application whose advocates more or less explicitly predicted that they'd kill the big telcos. A noble goal, and one that proved well beyond their means. Even the wildly successful (and free) Skype didn't come close to killing the carriers.
Continue reading "Will UC Save Enterprise VOIP?..."
CES A Little Long In The (Blue) Tooth
On the eve of CES in 2008 I was so giddy an oblong ear bud might have made me moist. This year, you can ... well, you can shove 'em in your ear. The pompadoured David Caruso (CSI: Miami) and his handlers picked TechWeb to talk to last year (I don't remember what he said, but he did that look -- you know, where he looks like he's looking at the ground, but he's looking at you at the same time, all dramatic like); now my in-box for meeting requests is practically crickets chirping. Not even Cisco seems to care if I come visit or not. Ever get the feeling that everyone just wants to muddle through and get it over with?
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DLP Market Continues Its Consolidation
CA's data loss prevention (DLP) vendor acquisition today clinches it: DLP vendors must either forge partnerships or be acquired to survive.
Continue reading "DLP Market Continues Its Consolidation..."
Google Earth Enterprise Goes Mobile
Today, Google announced that the enterprise version of its Google Earth product is available in mobile form "immediately." What does this mean? You can look at your enterprise's own Google Earth data out in the field when not connected to the enterprise network.
Continue reading "Google Earth Enterprise Goes Mobile..."
Obama To Name CTO
U.S. President-elect Barack Obama could name a CTO as early as Wednesday, but some people in the technology sector have complained about how long that has taken.
Continue reading "Obama To Name CTO..."
The FOSS Project Blues
Here's frustration incarnate for you: an open source program that fills a vital niche in your computing experience, but hasn't been updated in what feels like forever and ... could really use an update.
Continue reading "The FOSS Project Blues..."
Oh, Steve Jobs, Why Do You Hate Me?
All last week I worked frantically on an article previewing this week's Macworld conference. The big news prior to the conference was the rumor that Steve Jobs was sick -- declining rapidly, too sick to work. "Nobody, however," I wrote, "has presented a single scrap of evidence that Jobs is actually sick. It's all a bunch of gossip." Several hours after I posted that article, Jobs released a statement that he is sick. I really hope this isn't a sign of how the rest of the week is going to go for me.
Continue reading "Oh, Steve Jobs, Why Do You Hate Me? ..."
VMware, SpringSource Link Arms On Development
It's getting more common to see a proprietary company partner with an open source one, but even so, the alliance of SpringSource and VMware is notable. Each is a leader in its field, and their ability to work together is a boost for both.
Continue reading "VMware, SpringSource Link Arms On Development..."
Phishing For Tweets
A new phishing scam that targets Twitter users is a backhanded compliment to the messaging service.
Continue reading "Phishing For Tweets..."
Can A Super 'Nova' Save Palm?
Palm's CES press conference is mere days away. Before Palm CEO Ed Holligan has a chance to tell us what the company is up to, the Internet has coughed up some details and a rough sketch of the new smartphone from Palm.
Continue reading "Can A Super 'Nova' Save Palm?..."
Boston's CIO Caught Between Politics And Transparency
A Boston councilman wants more details about city business posted on its Web site, but a 1947 law says such details can appear only in the paper-based City Record. Stuck in the middle is Boston's CIO, who's installing 21st-century tools but lacks authority to decide what information gets published. And you thought your office politics were ugly.
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Steve Jobs Responds To Rumors About His Health
This morning, Apple CEO Steve Jobs sent out a letter to the Apple community. The letter addresses Steve's health in a straightforward manner to dispel rumors that Mr. Jobs is on his deathbed. Read the entire letter here.
Continue reading "Steve Jobs Responds To Rumors About His Health..."
Google Helps Mice Avoid A Better Trap
Google is expected to work even harder this year on Gmail, its Web-based e-mail product, so it can keep gaining ground on Microsoft and Yahoo. It just might succeed.
Continue reading "Google Helps Mice Avoid A Better Trap..."
What Are The Damages From Vista-Capable PCs?
Here's another installment in the continuing saga regarding Microsoft's "Vista Capable PC" logo. This time, the question is about damages. If the buyers of these PCs were deceived because of the logo, what did it cost them? Here's where the lawsuit falls apart.
Continue reading "What Are The Damages From Vista-Capable PCs?..."
VeriSign Announced It Has Transitioned To Stronger Crypto
Last week the IT security community lit up with the news that a team of researchers demonstrated how they could force digital certificates -- those digitally signed files that make it possible for software to vouch for its publisher -- and Web sites to safely identify themselves.
Continue reading "VeriSign Announced It Has Transitioned To Stronger Crypto..."
Will FriendFeed Be Able To Reach The Mainstream Internet User?
This weekend there has been a lot of chatter about FriendFeed and where the service needs to move to grow out of its core user base of early adopters. For those of you who haven't tried FriendFeed, think of it as a new-style forum based on a person's activity across the Web.
Continue reading "Will FriendFeed Be Able To Reach The Mainstream Internet User?..."
Gartner: Top 10 'Anti-Resolutions' For 2009
Gartner VP Jeffrey Mann has compiled an intriguing list of his Top 10 "anti-resolutions" for 2009 that he either (a) wants someone else to do or (b) wants others to stop doing. It's a thought-provoking list, particularly about how some IT vendors tend to treat their customers.
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Are Web Site Defacements Really Cyber War?
Almost every time there's a physical conflict, online "attacks" follow. And the recent spate of Palestinian Web site defacements are no exception. This sort of reaction on the Internet is certainly not new. In fact, we can only expect them to escalate.
Continue reading "Are Web Site Defacements Really Cyber War?..."
The Trouble With Netbooks
Rumor has it that Google would like to see its Android operating system powering more than mere mobile phones.
Continue reading "The Trouble With Netbooks..."
The For And The Against For Linux
Two responses to things I've written recently are worth commenting on. Both were responses to my post about Windows 7 being more of a previous-version-of-Windows-killer than a Linux-killer -- and both bring up further points to be argued and defended.
Continue reading "The For And The Against For Linux..."
Analyst: Apple To Debut Alternate Version Of iPhone
Ah, the rumor lives on. An analyst has chimed in with his thoughts on Apple's future product lineup. In the mix, you guessed it, is a "lower-cost version of the iPhone." The analyst stops short of calling this device the iPhone Nano, but that's what it's widely believed to be.
Continue reading "Analyst: Apple To Debut Alternate Version Of iPhone..."
Dell CIO Adds Huge New Business-Side Role
Underscoring the huge potential for customer-centric CIOs, Dell has expanded the responsibilities of CIO Steve Schuckenbrock by naming him as head of its newly formed Large Enterprise business unit. So let's replace CIO = Career Is Over with the new 2009 model: CIO = Capability Is Optimized.
Continue reading "Dell CIO Adds Huge New Business-Side Role..."
iPhone Dev Team Offers 'Yellowsn0w' iPhone 3G Unlocking Tool
The day has finally arrived. The iPhone Dev Team's hard work has paid off and users of the 3G iPhone can now unlock their devices. Right now, the software is being called a beta, and true to beta form, some users are reporting success, while others are reporting failure.
Continue reading "iPhone Dev Team Offers 'Yellowsn0w' iPhone 3G Unlocking Tool..."
Google: Have A Mobile Product Idea? Give It To Us!
Could Google possibly be running out of ideas for new and interesting mobile products? Probably not, but that's not stopping Google from asking Joe Public to contribute some gems. Google recently set up a new Web site where users can submit their brilliant concepts for new mobile applications.
Continue reading "Google: Have A Mobile Product Idea? Give It To Us!..."
Windows: Linux Can't Touch This
Serdar Yegulalp makes some great points in his blog entry about Linux versus Windows in 2009. There's no doubt that Linux has Microsoft-beating strength in several important categories such as servers and mobile devices. However, Microsoft still owns the PC market and it doesn't look like that will change in 2009.
Continue reading "Windows: Linux Can't Touch This..."
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