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The InformationWeek March 2009 Archive « February 2009 | Main | April 2009 » |
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The End Of Encarta
This week, Microsoft announced the end of Encarta, its multimedia encyclopedia that started life as a CD-ROM-only product offering way back in 1993. Back then, even a CD-ROM drive was a novelty. A lot has changed in the intervening years, including Internet resources like Wikipedia that tap into the collective knowledge of the world.
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Netbooks vs. Smartphones
I started my day swapping messages with an IT manager who thought InformationWeek missed the mark with our cover story on smartphones, because he thinks netbooks are the answer for his road warriors. We discussed how quickly the two devices might converge. Now I end the day reading about how Hewlett-Packard's testing Google's Android cell phone operating system for use on netbooks. Convergence ahead.
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The TomTom Dispute: No Bang
Kinda saw this one coming. TomTom and Microsoft have settled their whole dispute out of court -- leaving, as various pundits have observed, the whole MS-vs.-Linux issue still in legal limbo. That is, if there even is such an issue.
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Final Hours Remain To Remove Conficker
Whether this worm lives up to some of the hype as the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it, or proves to be a minor annoyance -- you're better off getting it off as many systems as possible. These recently updated tools help you to get that done.
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CTIA: Shock Jock Stern To Talk Up The Palm Pre
Looks like Palm wants to get the word about its forthcoming smartphone, the Pre, to as many people as possible. As such, it has tapped famed radio disc jockey -- and noted Treo addict -- Howard Stern to give its device an on-air interview.
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Boeing Lands $17B Outsourcing Deal From India
Although it has a subsidiary called Boeing India and just opened an advanced technology center in Bangalore, Boeing has landed a $17 billion outsourcing deal to deliver 100 airplanes to Indian airline companies over the next several years. No comment was available from the Obama administration on the Indian economy's decision to ship some of "its jobs" overseas.
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Card Based SSD's
With Texas Memory Systems’ recent announcement of their RamSan-20 they have joined Fusion-io in the Flash SSD on a card market. What is interesting about these solutions is that they make SSD attractive to a whole new host of users.
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Google Yanks Tethering Apps From Android Market
It looks like Google is exerting some control over a few applications in the Android Market. It recently pulled a tethering application for Developer Distribution Agreement violations.
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Cloud Interoperability? Amazon And Microsoft Play Nice
Amazon and Microsoft--both of which declined to sign the newly published Open Cloud Manifesto--yesterday said they won't lock customers into their respective cloud services.
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Detroit Free Press And E-Reader Startup Announce Partnership
The Detroit Free Press, which "delivered" its first online-only newspaper yesterday, has announced a partnership with a Silicon Valley startup, called Plastic Logic, that's developing an e-reader. Is this the beginning of a long and fruitful relationship between newspapers and e-reader companies?
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CTIA: Samsung Officially Trots Out Its Wimax Tablet
First spotted last week, it appears that Samsung is going to fess up to its Wimax-enabled Mondi Mobile Internet Device. The Mondi boasts some impressive specs, but will it sell?
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Nehalem Launch Emphasizes Upscale Drift Of Commodity Servers
Question: When is a commodity server no longer a commodity server? Answer: When the system is so darn powerful it can run your data center. That's the deal with the latest crop of server CPUs, including Intel's Xeon 5500 unveiled on Monday, and AMD's upcoming six-core Istanbul. It's all of a piece with my theory that processing power has become ubiquitous, and figuratively free.
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Software Vendors Get An F For Mobile Preparedness
With most CIOs planning or building out enterprise-wide mobile strategies, you would think enterprise software companies would be rushing to lead the charge with suitably broad product roadmaps and strategies of their own. But, as my colleague Mary Hayes Weier points out in her excellent news-analysis package, you would be wrong.
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Microsoft CTIA Announcements
Microsoft is at CTIA this week and they will be making a few announcements today - nothing Earth shattering as Windows Mobile 6.5 has already been announced and Windows Mobile 7 is the worst kept secret out there right now, but there are a few interesting items for mobile device users.
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BlackBerry Storm .113 Firmware Said To Be The Next Official Update
As seems to be the norm, the BlackBerry Storm got off to a shaky start when it went on sale back in November. It was a bit buggy, and users experienced no small number of issues. Verizon offered a firmware update in early December that fixed many of the major issues. Now, a new update is on the way. Ready for nearly every bug to be fixed?
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Time For An Enterprise Mobility Strategy
The mobile Internet has arrived for business. Do you have a strategic plan to take advantage of it? Or does your mobile business app strategy begin and end with a policy for what level of manager gets a BlackBerry and whether the iPhone's allowed?
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Obama Axes Wagoner And Other Government Silliness
The chief executive of a public enterprise that stands to pile up more than a trillion dollars in losses this year is effectively replacing the chief executive of a private enterprise that stands to pile up billions of dollars in losses this year. Does anyone think this is a smart idea?
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BearingPoint Sale Could Disrupt Customer Engagements
Tech consulting firm Gartner is warning clients that the sale of government outsourcer BearingPoint could disrupt work on current projects, such as the rebuilding of Afghanistan's civil institutions.
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Will Microsoft's Mobile Strategy Pay Off?
I ran across an interesting post at Seeking Alpha that outlines why Microsoft's attempts to make significant headway in the mobile market haven't yielded much fruit and that they've slid back in the past few years. It also argues that the road ahead is going to be tough for MS. Can Microsoft remain a key player in the mobile market?
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Cloud Manifesto Lacks Thunder
The Open Cloud Manifesto was formally introduced today, an anticlimactic and even embarrassing attempt to rally the computer industry around cloud computing interoperability.
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Warning: Bad Men In Black Hats!
If there's one criticism of open source you can count on -- one that comes back like crabgrass in the lawn of life, to paraphrase Peanuts's Linus -- it's the line that goes something like this: "Open source means everyone can see your code. Therefore anyone with Bad Things in mind can hack you all the more easily." Here is, I hope, another bullet to the forehead of that myth.
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Review: Detroit Free Press's Digital-Only Newspaper Delivery
This was the first day that my local daily newspaper, the Detroit Free Press, "delivered" an online-only edition. The execution was a bit clunky and confusing. But after slogging through it, I'm left with a sense of hope that daily newspapers might live on in digital form. I share with you my experience--your local newspaper could be next.
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Cisco Blade Will Be Built For Hosting Virtual Machines
What was interesting about Cisco's entry into blade servers Mar. 16 was the key role that it expects virtualization to play. It trumpeted its convergence of storage and networking data on the blade. But what about its assumption that the blade will be virtualized?
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Storage Startup Turns Many Servers Into One Storage Pool
ParaScale software enables a cloud-like system for tier 2 storage and archiving on commodity hardware and Linux.
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Annual Strategic Security Survey
If it's spring, it must be InformationWeek's Annual Security Survey, where we gather and analyze changes in security practices. Please join the 40,000 security professionals, IT staff, and managers who have participated in this landmark survey in recent years.
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Nokia's 5800 XpressMusic Receives Major Firmware Upgrade
Remember the 5800 XpressMusic? It's the first touch phone from Nokia, and saw a bumpy start here in the U.S., with units pulled from the shelves because of nonworking 3G connections. It later returned, and now gets a major upgrade in key areas such as responsiveness, data speeds, and camera features.
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Motorola Dishes Out The QA4 Evoke Touch Phone
Today Motorola announced a new handset, and a decent-looking one at that. The QA4 Evoke is a slider that has a full touch screen and brand-new widget-powered user interface. It apes the iPhone and the palm Pre, and is (oddly) bound for the Cricket pre-paid network.
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We Need More Storage Than Library Of Congress, CIO Says
Kaiser Permanente CIO Phil Fasano says KP's medical-imaging projects have become so massive that they exceed the storage requirements and consumption of the Library of Congress. And those requirements, he says, are still growing.
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Verizon Wireless Rep: 'Yep, Netbooks On The Way'
After a report suggested that Verizon Wireless would begin selling netbooks, a Verizon Wireless representative has confirmed the company's plans.
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Private-Cloud Azure? How About Shipping Azure?
Microsoft is hard at work trying to finish its Azure cloud operating system and eventually make the Azure world safe for customer data. With that in mind, it seems a bit premature to worry about whether users can create their own private Azure environments. Microsoft is right to tamp down speculation that Azure will move from service to product any time soon, because it is too soon.
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Can This Profession Be Saved? An IT Leader Says Yes
An IT leader who also heads up E-commerce shares his views on the initiative and responsibilities business-technology managers need to seize to shake off stereotypes as detached techies. You'll enjoy Bobby Nakanelua's observations on how IT pros can demonstrate that they're valuable teammates rather than roadblocks to be avoided.
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Video: Inside Salesforce.com's Tenth Anniversary Victory Tour
Something is happening and you don't know what it is, goes the song. Strangely, it's turning out that the Web operating system we all thought would one day challenge Windows and serve as a portal to a universe of online-hosted apps turns out to be cloud computing. I breathed the buzz of cloud's success the other day as I caught up with the New York City edition of Salesforce.com's tenth anniversary, cross-country victory tour, and I shot a video.
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The Importance Of Word-Of-Mouth Social Sharing For Startup Success
During my corporate days, one of my requirements on every promotion we ran was that there was a way to share the promotion with a friend. For nearly every promotion, sharing was the number one referral to the promotion. The key was to make the act of sharing as easy as possible. Why is word of mouth marketing so important today?
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Conficker: Loathing the FUD and Misunderstanding
Despite having the code to analyze, and Conficker being in its third-generation: it seems the experts really don't know what's going to happen when Conficker.C strikes on April 1.
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How One Small Town Is Using Twitter And Other Social Media
Following my post earlier this week about why local governments aren't making use of Twitter, Facebook, and other social media, I found myself in Second Life with the city engineer of the town of LaSalle, Ill, talking about how the government of her little town uses Twitter, blogs, Facebook, Skype and Second Life to better serve their citizens and stay in touch with other small-town officials across the United States and Canada.
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Open Cloud Manifesto Revealed
The Open Cloud Manifesto, not surprisingly, has leaked out. Though its formal publication isn't due until March 30, the document seems to be one of the tech industry's worst kept secrets.
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Is Java On Deck For Google App Engine?
While working on the post that I just published about whether data that's stored in the cloud is really safe or not (answer: your mileage will vary), I came across a post from Michael Arrington that speculates on whether Google's forthcoming super secret announcement on April 7th is that Google's App Engine platform-as-a-service will support the Java programming language. Last week, during a cloud computing panel in NYC that I moderated (in front of an audience of Java developers), I asked Google App Engine product manager that exact question.
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Facebook And Twitter Tips From People Who Should Know Better
Guy Kawasaki and Gary Hamel produced a pair of lists this week offering tips on Web 2.0 usage that widely missed the mark. Hamel published his list in the Wall Street Journal; Kawasaki's is reproduced from a presentation attended by a blogger and Microsoft employee named Don Dodge.
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Harrah's Names Tech Chiefs, Sans CIO
Harrah's Entertainment, the world's largest casino company and a leading tech innovator, has promoted two execs to succeed Tim Stanley, the company's former CIO and senior VP of gaming and innovation. Stanley, InformationWeek's 2007 Chief of the Year, resigned from Harrah's effective Jan. 31, citing personal reasons.
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Podcast: Is Your Data Really Safe In the Cloud?
Earlier this week, over on InformationWeek's sister site that's dedicated to Cloud Computing -- Plug into the Cloud -- George Crump asked a question that I thought I knew the answer to: Is data in the cloud risky? Crump points to a "recent report that the FTC is considering a request to shut down Google Apps." But after I got done laughing at such a waste of taxpayer money, I turned back to the seriousness of the question at hand.
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Mobile Round Up: Verizon Netbook, Sling Player For BlackBerry, Free BlackBerry Bold
Here's a bunch of stories hitting the Interwebs today that are worth sharing. It looks like Verizon Wireless may hop on the netbook bandwagon, while Sling Media is now offering a 1.0 release of its Sling Player for BlackBerries, and AT&T customers can get the BlackBerry Bold for free.
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Inside HP's Ink Jet Cartridge Recycling Process
Paper recycling gets a lot of ink, if you'll pardon the expression. But while many offices and public places have bins for separating waste paper from trash, getting gunked up, empty ink jet cartridges back to the manufacturer is another story.
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Obama Data Transparency Faces Many Hurdles
While the Obama Administration might talk a lot about transparency, government agencies face any number of challenges to turn that buzzword into reality, especially in terms of getting usable data online.
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Satyam Hopes Clients Can Convince Bidders To Buy
Efforts by Satyam's suitors to determine the true value of the company have been hampered by several years' worth of fraudulent financial reports along with some recently filed class-action lawsuits. So Satyam is hoping those bidders can get a glimpse of the real company by speaking with clients involved in ongoing major projects.
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Red Hat Stands Alone, For The Better
After Red Hat's last round of positive numbers, Citigroup issued a report that the flagship open source company is a "tempting acquisition target". To which I can only reply: Here we go again.
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First Mobile Wimax Device From Samsung Will Be An Internet Tablet
Samsung accidentally provided some information about its first handheld Wimax device for the U.S. market. The SWD-M100 Mondi resembles the Nokia N810 Internet Tablet and OQO model 2+. It has a touch screen, which slides up to reveal a full QWERTY keyboard. Many questions remain, though.
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Comcast's "Dream Big" Campaign Is A Nightmare
Digital conglomerate Comcast has pulled a page out of the branding textbook, and hopes to humanize itself by running its first "brand advertising" campaign. I think the spots are spooky...and pointless.
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FCC Grants Approval To An Android Phone With T-Mobile 3G
HTC announced its second Android phone, the Magic, at the Mobile World Congress conference in February. The device announced at the show was for Vodafone's network in Europe. It was widely expected that a variant of the Magic would come to the U.S., and the FCC has pretty much confirmed that T-Mobile will sell the HTC Magic/G2, too.
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Is Storage Commoditization Important?
Is commodity storage good for the enterprise and if it is who should be delivering it? A recent post by Hitachi Data Systems, Hu Yoshida claims that I missed an important point in a recent blog that I wrote here about storage virtualization; the ability for virtualization to enhance commodity storage. He's right, I did not mention it at least in that entry, but is it really that important?
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Steelers Investor: IT CEO, Hall of Famer, 4 Super Bowls
The Pittsburgh Steelers have welcomed new investor John Stallworth, best known as a Hall of Fame wide receiver who helped the team win four Super Bowls during his 14-year career. Less well known is that Stallworth, near the end of his NFL career, started an IT services company that he sold in 2006 for $69 million.
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Meeting The Needs Of An Enterprise Phone
NetWorkWorld has an article on what makes a phone optimal as a mobile enterprise device. The better IT managers are realizing that end users want devices with cool features and recognize that the carriers are more interested in catering to users and not IT departments. In the US, it is too expensive to consider buying unlocked devices of your choice for dozens or hundreds of users, so you have to be satisfied with what carriers offer. What are the bare minimum requirements for a phone for the enterprise?
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Firms Taking Web App Security (More) Seriously
Anyone in IT, who hasn't been living under a hard drive for the past decade, knows that poor application development processes have littered the Internet and corporate networks alike with trashy code that makes systems too susceptible to attack. Some companies, according to a new survey, are taking quality code more seriously.
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Microsoft Vs. The Cloud Manifesto
Major tech vendors are a few days away from unveiling an agreement to pursue cloud computing interoperability, and already there's a problem. Microsoft torpedoed the effort before it was even announced. It's an inauspicious start to an important industry effort.
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Obama's Crafty Web 2.0 Experiment
It wasn't exactly the Nixon-Kennedy debates, but the White House Online TownHall meeting today will go down in history, though not for the reasons you might think.
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Satyam Founder Could Face Lie-Detector, Narco Tests
Satyam's founder could face lie-detector tests and "narco tests" that use barbituates to lower a subject's inhibitions in answering questions. Investigators believe founder B Ramalinga Raju and his brother are withholding vital information about the $1.5B accounting fraud they have admitted to perpetrating at Satyam over the past several years.
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Opera Mobile 9.7 Announced, Now With More Turbo
Today Opera Software announced the latest build of its mobile browser. Opera Mobile 9.7's biggest improvements include compatibility with Opera's Turbo servers as well as Flash Lite and Google Gears.
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InformationWeek Releases Storage-As-A-Service RFI
The storage-as-a-service market continues to grow and change, with new players introducing products and services that give businesses an alternative to do-it-yourself, on-premises data storage. In preparation for a full-blown analysis of the market, InformationWeek is releasing a Request for Information aimed at storage-as-a-service vendors.
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The Desktop Linux Question, Re-Re(-Re)visited
My colleague Jonathan Salem Baskin clearly isn't one to shy away from a good controversy. How, he asks, can Linux realize its full potential without a robust desktop edition as part of its diversity?
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Why Aren't Local Governments Using Twitter And Facebook?
Local governments deal with people one at a time. The face of local government is the face of your neighborhood cop, your kids' schoolteacher, and the firefighter who comes when you smell smoke. Social media like Twitter and Facebook are great for helping organizations deal with people one-on-one. So why aren't more local governments on Facebook and Twitter?
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Does Twitter Mean Business?
Twitter is apparently on the cusp of providing meaningful services that businesses will be willing to pay for. According to Reuters, the company will roll out commercial accounts later this year for an enhanced version of Twitter.
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Is RIM Prepping Video Download Service?
According to informed sources, Research In Motion is set to announced a new, full-episode television download service for its BlackBerry devices. Is RIM ramping up efforts to compete on the mobile content front?
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You Can't DeDupe IT Administration
Primary Storage Optimization is about putting more data in the same amount of physical space. Server Virtualization is about putting more virtual servers in the same physical space. These are great advances for the data center, but they do little if anything to make the IT staff more efficient and all the cost savings may go right out the window when you have to hire more people.
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Google Brings Digital Doodling To Docs
Today Google announced a new feature in Google Docs: The ability to create and insert drawings into Docs, Presentations and Spreadsheets. Now your inner artist can get your Gaudi, van Gogh or Gauguin on in digital form thanks to Google.
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Microsoft To Charge Developers To Correct Typos?
Earlier this month Microsoft released information on how its application store for Windows Mobile would work for developers. There is an annual $99 fee to keep your app in the store, and that includes five new apps per year. After that, it is $99 per app. It seems though that any update to an app will cost the developer $99 as well, or will count against the five in the initial payment. Some are taking this to mean that if a developer corrects a typo and releases a .01 update, it would be $99.
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Google Launches iGoogle Game Themes
After 10pm PST on Wednesday or thereabout, iGoogle users will have access to new game-oriented themes to decorate their personal pages.
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IBM RFID Helps Track Norwegian Beer, German Cars
RFID supply-chain solutions are helping Norway's largest brewer increase profits, improve customer service, and get fresher beer to thirsty Norwegians. And Volkswagen's group CIO said his RFID project could lead to a paperless production and logistics chain throughout the entire corporation.
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Disperse The Cloud
The problem with online applications is that they put user data under someone else's control.
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Windows Server For Private Clouds
Though Microsoft says Windows Azure won't be used to power private clouds, there's no question that Microsoft will someday in the next year or two start playing in that market.
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Facebook, Zuckerberg Cave To Cavedwellers
Chalk one up for the Luddites. The Neanderthals banging their clubs on the cave walls were just too scary, so Mark Zuckerberg backed away from his plans to bring Facebook up to date.
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The Android Market Is One-Tenth The Size Of The iPhone Apps Store
T-Mobile recently shared some statistics from the Android Market. Right now, there are about 2,300 applications available, which is under one-tenth the size of the iPhone Apps Store's whopping 25,000+.
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IBM's Half-Baked Cloud Strategy
Some observers argue that IBM, in looking to acquire Sun Microsystems, wants and needs Sun's cloud computing platform and services. The reason is that IBM's own cloud computing portfolio, while impressive in some respects, also has gaping holes.
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Malware Controlling Hardware Is Not A Necessity
The last two weeks have brought us two different attack vectors affecting servers and PC’s alike. First Invisible Things Lab’s Joanna Rutkowska and Rafal Wojtczuk presented the details of an attack on Intel's System Management Module which lets the malware do whatever it wants and effectively hides from everything else. Meanwhile, Anibal Sacco and Alfredo Ortega presented an attack that subverts the BIOS at CanSecWest. Can it get any worse?
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A Cloud Can Save You Money...But What If the Cloud Goes Broke?
I've been talking quite a bit about whether or not (not) users of cloud services can prove compliance with security, privacy and e-discovery laws. (Blog piece here. Alert issue here.)
Now a story at The Register has me thinking about yet another issue--the inescapable question of financial stability.
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Google Brings Voice Search To BlackBerry
Google made good on its promise to bring better search functionality to mobile devices today by offering up a new mobile application for BlackBerries. The new app will let BlackBerry smartphones perform voice-based searches and deliver local results, to boot.
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A Little Heresy Now And Then ...
" ... is relished by even the wisest men." (I'm paraphrasing.) Meaning it helps from time to time to dissent, albeit thoughtfully and with eyes wide open, from the status quo. In today's example, it's Eric S. Raymond -- one of the key figures in the open source / free software world -- talking about why the GPL might have outlived its usefulness. You heard right.
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Does Linux Need A Desktop To Realize Its Potential?
Word from an open source conference this week is that some key Linux proponents don't see the need for a desktop product. I'm not certain how it realizes its full potential without one.
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A Modest Proposal On How Microsoft Can Clobber Apple
I've been watching the tech news and shocked by how Mac market share is receding due to the recession. Apple executives are putting on a not-worried public face -- in the company's last quarterly earnings call, CEO Steve Jobs said that Mac users are loyal. They'll postpone buying, but they won't switch to Windows. That was true during the last recession -- but is it still true today?
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Can You Measure The ROI of Enterprise Social Networking?
Probably not. But ROI is only one way to measure value. Here's an informal business case from EMC on the benefits.
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Taking T-Mobile's First 3G Laptop Modem For A Spin
Years after T-Mobile's competitors took the lead, T-Mobile has finally launched a USB wireless broadband modem for laptops. The ungainly-named T-Mobile webConnect USB Laptop Stick lets laptop users access T-Mobile's 3G network for wireless Internet. It works just fine, but T-Mobile blew a big opportunity here.
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Oracle's Phillips Sees Grid Computing For The Masses
Looking past a limited audience of advanced users to a much broader market, Oracle plans to release this summer a new version of its Real Application Clusters (RAC) technology featuring "significant ease-of-use enhancements" that will make possible "grid computing for the masses." Whether the masses are hungry for grid computing is another matter.
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Most People Use Mobile Phone For More Than Calls
Accenture has released a survey that shows 41% of users use their phones just for phone calls. If my trusty HP-12c calculator is correct, that means 59% of mobile phone owners use it for more than just phone calls.
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Microsoft adCenter Analytics: Nipped In The Bud
Back in 2006, Microsoft bought a company named DeepMetrix that offered web site traffic analysis tools and services. After being absorbed by Microsoft, DeepMetrix no longer offered those products and services. However, Microsoft was supposed to be rolling similar features into a great new product named adCenter Analytics. Not anymore.
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Podcast: New Rev Of SUSE Linux First To Officially Support .NET, Silverlight
With no change to its business model or pricing (subscription-based support starting at $349 per server), Novell launched version 11 of it Linux distribution known as SUSE Enterprise Linux. For the first time, according to Novell officials, support is now available for running applications that were originally designed for Microsoft's .NET or Silverlight platforms. But, given how IT shops are starting to pinch pennies by moving to the cloud, must Novell change course?
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Uncle Sam's Cloud Computing Dilemma
Federal agencies are under pressure to deploy cost-effective IT systems quickly, and cloud computing is one of the solutions favored by the Obama Administration. Yet, would-be cloud users in government will have to navigate a thicket of security requirements and other guidelines, warns one expert.
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Where Silverlight Meets AIR
Microsoft's Silverlight 3, with its out-of-browser capabilities, and Adobe AIR, with its out-of-browser capabilities, won't necessarily compete head-to-head as rich Internet application platforms. They're just too different.
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Blog Reviews The Unreleased BlackBerry Niagara In Detail
I don't know how The Boy Genius got his hands on it, but he did. He's posted the first part in a two-part review of the forthcoming BlackBerry 9630 Niagara. Think of it as an 8900, Bold and Storm merged into one ultra device that has the best of all things BlackBerry. Verdict? It's going to be a smash hit.
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President Highlights Renewable Energy In Call To Space
President Barack Obama called the International Space Station via satellite link from the Roosevelt Room in the White House Tuesday. He used the opportunity to emphasize his plans for renewable energy and solar power.
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Should TARPfare Bums Be Allowed To Outsource?
A Pennsylvania lawmaker is blasting JP Morgan Chase for accepting $25 Billion in TARP funds while planning to outsource thousands of U.S. tech jobs to India. And you thought AIG bonuses were a hot-button issue.
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IT's Dark-Side Potential Seen In SmartGridCity Project
In an exciting and thought-provoking experiment in the city of Boulder, Colorado, Xcel Energy has kicked off a $100M project called SmartGridCity designed to give consumers greater control over energy usage and options via Web-based accounts. But the control goes both ways: the test also allows Xcel to reach into consumers' homes and adjust thermostats during periods of high demand.
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Video: Jeff Jarvis On What Should Media Do
Bear with me here on my latest short video, because while it's not tech news per se, it's about tech news. As in, what's the business model for online sites in an age where ad revenues are declining but demand for killer content is higher than ever? That’s the discussion I had with Jeff Jarvis, author of "What Would Google Do?," journalism professor, and Buzzmachine blogger. Click on to see the video.
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We Want You For Application Delivery
Network connections have been getting faster over time and, correspondingly, applications have been keeping pace by getting fatter. Add in the changes in how applications are delivered as Web applications, hosted applications, and virtual desktops, application performance is becoming increasingly important. We want to get your thoughts on application delivery. Please take a few moments to fill out our InformationWeek Analytics Application Delivery Survey before end of day on Wednesday.
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Some Highlights Next Week
When I interviewed Avaya CEO Kevin Kennedy last week (transcript here), I was particularly struck by this comment: "My first day at work [at Avaya] was the first of January, and in January we had a bankruptcy of one of the competitors in the marketplace. We had another competitor sort of up the ante in the way they're playing and declare their intentions in the server world. And so the competitive environment actually changed quite a bit."
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Mobile Internet On Phones Becomes More Routine
Between January 2008 and January 2009, the number of people accessing the internet daily from a mobile device increased from 10.8 million to 22.4 million people according to a comScore report. The report studied the habits of 63.2 million people that accessed the internet to some degree with their phone for news and information.
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iPhone Generates 50% Of Mobile Web Traffic: Report
According to the latest report from AdMob, the iPhone has usurped 50% of the smartphone Web traffic in the U.S. RIM comes in second place.
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Finding Your Way Around The New Facebook Home Page
Facebook recently redesigned the page you see when you first log in. The redesign is proving to be controversial -- more than 1.7 million users have signed up for the Petition Against The New Facebook group on Facebook. I guess that makes me part of a small minority -- I like the new Facebook. Sure, the user interface still needs a lot of tuning, but Facebook has definitely moved in the right direction.
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Cloud Computing FUD Muddies SaaS Waters
Vendors adopting cloud computing strategies are disparaging SaaS in a manner that could jeopardize their entire service-based business model just as it's starting to gain larger acceptance in the market.
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Is Data In The Cloud Risky?
With the recent report that the FTC is considering a request to shut down Google Apps, the question of Cloud Security has come up and with it the question of if data in the cloud is risky. Of course only the government could hold a two day hearing on whether or not data in the cloud is at risk.
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Google Improves Search Results
Google has tweaked its search technology in hopes of providing better search results. It now offers a refined list of associated searches and also provides lengthier snippets of each result to let you glean more information on the results page before clicking.
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The Coming Linux Malware Scourge (And How To Stop It)
There's an oft-repeated homily that goes something like this: "The only reason Linux hasn't become a malware target is because it's not that popular." I'm learning there's more truth to that than we realize. Especially if open source developers in general use "open source" in the abstract as a security measure ... and it's not.
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Serious, Stealthy, Deadly BIOS Attack
After covering IT security for well more than a decade, few new attacks scare the freckles off of my back. This persistent BIOS attack, as demonstrated by Alfredo Ortega and Anibal Sacco from Core Security Technologies is one of these new attack techniques.
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Churn Rising Among SaaS, Hosted Subscribers: Gartner
Subscribers to software solutions with a fixed duration are shopping around more vigorously for replacements and cost-cutting is a major motivator, a Gartner blogger says. The frenzy hasn't hit on-premises software companies nearly as hard because their perpetual licenses are, well, perpetual -- so in that universe the churn-and-burn season never happens.
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Five Steps To A Well-Tuned Cloud
Many early adopters of cloud computing are poorly equipped to monitor and manage the performance of their cloud applications. In a just-published InformationWeek article, author Michael Healey outlines five steps users can take to change that.
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Obama's Latest March Madness Pick: Health IT Czar
Though the Obama administration still has lots of key positions to fill--including naming a federal chief technology officer-- one critical appointment was made last week that will help fill in many of the important details related to Obama's nearly $20 billion health IT stimulus program.
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Next-Gen iPhone To Have Faster Wireless Internet, Chew Your Food For You
Reports about a future version of the iPhone are starting to ramp up, even though Apple itself has not even hinted that new hardware will be announced any time soon. The latest scuttlebutt says that the next version of the iPhone will have "significantly faster" wireless Internet, video capture and more.
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Strong-ARM Tactics
You're probably just as fed up as I am with hearing about Linux-powered netbooks that'll be veritable Windows-killers. Well, there's more of them on the way. And as it turns out, they may well turn out to be Windows-killers in at least one respect: Windows won't run on them, period.
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Smartphones Withstood Attacks At Hacker Contest
There was a three-day Pwn2Own contest in Vancouver where, according to this CNN Money article, contestants were offered $10,000 and some free cell phones if they could hack one of the mobile platforms at the contest. All five platforms withstood the assault.
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YouTube Hosts Amateur Slam Dunking Contest
Google's YouTube unit is getting into the spirit of the NCAA tournament. It is having its very own slam dunk contest. Anyone can shoot themselves pulling an air Jordan and then upload their video to YouTube, where it will be judged by NBA pros.
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Carriers On Dell Smartphone: No Thanks, Too Dull
Differentiation in today's smartphone market matters. In that regard, Dell has learned a painful lesson: it ain't got not design chops. According to a Kaufman Bros. analyst, Dell shopped a smartphone to the wireless network operators and was told it was too "Dell-like." Dude, ouch.
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Facebook Redesign And Crowd Sourcing Misconceptions
Facebook's redesign has created a mini-revolt among Facebook users, prompting several critics to suggest that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg listen to his customers and switch back to the earlier look.
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Podcast: Sybase, SAP Talk Smartphone Apps
I've been tardy in posting this five-minute podcast, where Sybase chief marketing officer Raj Nathan and SAP vice president Vinay Iyer delve into their joint deal to improve access to SAP's smartphone apps. (Sybase is providing the middleware.) But you should listen, because the "smartphone is the computer" is a meme that's rapidly gaining traction from deals like this.
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Is IE8 A Rising Star, Or Just Maintaining Altitude?
In Microsoft terms, Internet Explorer is on a fast track. It's been just over two years since IE7 was released, and IE8 is already making its debut. In contrast, it took more than five years for IE6 to meander its way up to IE7. In the meantime, IE's market share has dropped from 95 percent to 67 percent. Will IE8 change that trend?
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SXSW Video Discussion And Demo Recap
Last week I traveled to Austin, Texas for the SXSW Interactive Festival. I'd like to share some of the videos I recorded throughout the week.
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Mobile Roundup, The Non-iPhone Edition
Of course, the mobile news this week was dominated by iPhone, iPhone, iPhone, but there was some really cool smartphone news that you may not have caught. This week I'll dive into an amazing-looking new BlackBerry, one of my favorite Nokia smartphones, and a Samsung device that pretty much blows the iPhone out of the water.
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Departing Google Designer Decries Focus On Data
Douglas Bowman, Visual Design Lead at Google, has decided to leave Google for an undisclosed opportunity. In a farewell note posted on his blog, he takes a swing at Google's data-centric, engineer-driven culture.
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Report: Cloud Computing Could Be Bigger Than The Web
A new report, funded by Google, portrays cloud computing as representing the next major evolution of computing, one that follows in the footsteps of mainframes, PCs, and smartphones. The authors suggest that cloud vendors could power a "dramatic expansion" of the U.S. economy, and they call on U.S. policymakers to get involved.
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ReviewCam Of Sun's Innovative Drag, Drop, & Deploy Virtual Datacenter Designer
While at Sun's CommunityOne East Developer Conference where Sun announced a pretty compelling entry into the cloud computing market (called the Sun Cloud, see the details and listen to the podcast), I caught up with Sun Cloud Computing CTO Lew Tucker who sat down with me to demo a GUI-based virtual datacenter deployment tool (all in a Web browser). Perhaps Sun should call it 4D; Drag, Drop, Deploy, and (voila!) Datacenter (in Sun's Cloud that is). I caught the entire thing on tape as one of our video ReviewCams (below).
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Listen To A Conversation About Battlefield Robots With:"Wired For War" Author P.W. Singer
P.W. Singer, author of the book Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century, inspires wonder and fear about real-life advances in robotic technology. Thousands of unmanned drones and ground-based robots have become an essential part of warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan, changing the nature of war and what combat means to our soldiers, sailors, and airmen and women.
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Google's Mobile YouTube App Doesn't Go Far Enough
Today Google made a new mobile YouTube application available to the Windows Mobile and S60 3rd Edition smartphone platforms. While it's great for consuming video on the go, it would be far better if it gave users the power to upload directly to YouTube.
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Sun As An Independent Business Unit Of IBM
If IBM acquires Sun, and that prospect becomes increasingly likely with each day that passes without a denial, here's one thing it should consider doing: it should keep Sun intact and operate it as an independent business unit, much like EMC did with VMware.
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Google's Summer Of Code '09: FOSS, The Next Generation
Despite the negative press Google gets from time to time, they do more things right than wrong. One of the things they do right every year is their Summer of Code initiative, where they offer stipends to students who want to contribute code to some of the best and brightest open source projects out there. It's a happy collaboration, and one worth doing outside of Google's aegis.
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TomTom Needs To Answer Microsoft's Linux Charges
TomTom, a Dutch manufacturer of in-car navigation systems, has countersued Microsoft in a legal spat that could ultimately have implications for tech vendors' ability to freely use the open source Linux OS, or parts of it, without first paying a toll to Redmond.
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OMG! Facebook Is Too Dangerous
My 13-year old daughter and I attended an information session on the dangers of social networking presented by Children Online at my daughter's public school in New York City last night.
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AT&T To Offer Nokia's E71 Six Months Too Late
Reports suggest that AT&T is nearly ready to begin offering the Nokia E71 smartphone. The E71 has been on sale since last summer in other markets. With the E55 and E75 on deck, why bother with the E71 at all?
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In Consolidating IT Industry, All Bets Are Off
Polite vendor execs used to call it "coopetition"--the state of tech industry affairs whereby the fiercest of rivals could be the chummiest of partners depending on the circumstances and the market they're chasing. A more up-to-date and colloquial description of this industry dynamic might be: All bets are off. Some recent evidence:
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Plug Those Leaks
There's a spirited discussion going on among our technology editors over data loss prevention (DLP) technologies. Is DLP the new NAC? Sure, it's expensive, but could this keep data from walking out on thumb drives? Could we finally put a lid on the insider threat?
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No Wonder Ericsson Wants Out: Sony Ericsson Issues Major Profit Warning
Sony Ericsson may have some exciting phones in its roster of devices, but that's apparently not enough to convince consumers to buy. Today, Sony Ericsson warned that it might, might, sell half as many phones this quarter as it did last quarter. With sales that bad, who can blame Ericsson for wanting to erase its name from Sony Ericsson.
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Amazon Working On Software For Mobile Devices
Earlier this month Amazon released Kindle software for the iPhone and now it is talking about future mobile device plans.
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Should Facebook Be Your Company's Intranet?
On the face of it, that question may seem ridiculous. But for at least one midsize company, the answer already is "Yes!" Take a peek at the benefits -- and the risks -- raised by Serena Software's bold social-networking experiment.
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Google Offers Gmail 'Undo Send' Feature
Google's Gmail Labs now offers yet another way not to send a message.
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HP, IBM, Sun Execs Blast Obama's Protectionist Policy
While touring India this week, execs from Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Sun criticized the Obama administration's anti-outsourcing policies as unrealistic, claiming they fly in the face of the global economy and will not produce positive results.
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Is The Mobile Thin Client An Impossible Dream?
During numerous interviews I did for a story to publish March 30 on software and smartphones, many CIO types said they hoped to one day avoid distributing software to employees' BlackBerrys, Windows Mobiles, and other devices, and instead have smartphones entirely dependent on software in the cloud. But given what my research revealed about how employees use smartphones, that seems an impossible goal.
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Where Was Linux In The Pwn2Own Contest?
The first round of the Pwn2Own was something of a redux of the previous one: the Mac was the first to fall (I'm actually not surprised given Apple's culture of obscurity-over-security), with Windows 7 via IE 8 shortly thereafter. But Linux wasn't even in the running this time. What gives?
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iPhone 3.0 SDK Providing Hints About Future Features And Devices
iPhone developers have been downloading the iPhone 3.0 OS SDK since it became available earlier this week. As they sink their teeth into the new SDK, lots of gems are popping up that suggest new, unannounced features -- and devices! -- are on the way.
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The Problem With Sun's Cloud Strategy
Sun's plans for a cloud computing platform and related Sun Cloud services are getting a thumbs up for the technology, innovation, and openness that Sun promises to bring to this emerging market. Unfortunately, Sun's cloud could be dead on arrival.
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BBC Responds To Allegations About The Legality Of Their Report
Yesterday Nick Reynolds of the BBC directed me, and many other writers covering this story, to the BBC's official response to allegations that BBC's technology show, Click, violated the U.K.'s Computer Misuse Act when it purchased and used a botnet as part of an investigative report into cybercrime.
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New Search Site Debuts For Business Users
The Financial Times Group has launched a public beta of Newssift, a business-oriented search engine that provides multifaceted search and other cool features.
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Consolidation Causing Angst In IT
It was once axiomatic that you couldn't get fired for buying IBM, although you could extend that security blanket to include the likes of Microsoft, Cisco, and Oracle.
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Using DNS To Distribute Trust
In "DNSSEC: Forgetting The User, Again," I opined about why users should be notified about signed vs. unsigned DNS responses. Dan Kaminsky, a security researcher with IOActive, and I got into a quick conversation about DNSSEC, SSL, and trust on the Internet. Kaminsky had some interesting thoughts on distributing trust.
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Wolfe's Den Vlog: iPhone Gets Battery Life Boost From Mophie
Even fanboys admit that, when Steve Jobs gifted his iPhone with wonderful attributes, he skimped in the battery life department. Fortunately, what the creator omitted, a cool add-on gadget called Mophie delivers. Read on to see a short demo video of this useful "juice pack" for Apple's iPhone.
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Gmail Users Can Now View YouTube Videos From Within Gmail
Google just doesn't stop. New in Labs this week are several added features that let users access YouTube, Picasa, Flickr, and Yelp content without the need to open a separate window, tab, or link.
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Oracle CEO Ellison: We'll Keep Taking Market Share
Oracle will "continue to take market share from [SAP] for years to come," has produced a better database machine than Teradata, and is taking database share from both Microsoft and IBM -- all because of the $3 billion Oracle invests each year in R&D, CEO Larry Ellison said yesterday.
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What's New For Developers In Windows Mobile 6.5? Widgets!
The Windows Mobile blog team has released some information about what is new in Windows Mobile 6.5 for developers. Current development tools consist primarily of C/C++ or the .net compact framework. WinMo 6.5 will bring Windows Mobile Widgets, which use Web code such as CSS and HTML.
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Newber Calls It Quits Because Apple Doesn't Know How To Communicate
I received an e-mail from Newber's media relations team that carried with it sad tidings. Newber submitted an application to Apple for approval over five months ago. With no word from Apple at all -- no approval, no denial -- Newber can't wait around any longer and is calling it a day. Is this what iPhone developers have to look forward to?
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You're Not As Bad As You Think
Welcome news: your company isn't as far behind the times, or the Enterprise 2.0 curve, as you think.
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Apple Takes The Lead With iPhone 3.0
Sure, the iPhone 3.0 update gave Apple's smartphone some features cell phones have had for the last five years, but I still think the update helps Apple jump into the lead of the high-end phone market. Why? It's all about developers, developers, developers.
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Have $700 To Burn? Buy An iPhone From AT&T With No Contract
It appears as though AT&T is going to offer the iPhone crowd a way to get their hands on the device contract-free -- as long as they don't mind footing the entire bill. For $699, you can buy a 16GB 3G iPhone sans contract directly from AT&T starting March 26.
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Scammers Face 150 Years For Photos Of Secret Gear
How rigorously do you guard against the risk of visitors surreptitiously photographing confidential assets? Two engineers whose employer had a $1.2M contract with a Chinese tire maker are facing 150 years in the slammer for allegedly scamming their way into a Goodyear plant in Kansas and secretly photographing proprietary equipment. So maybe it's time to review that security plan.
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Kosmix Aggregation Tool Is Beautiful Branding
Three cheers to the PR firm or freelancer behind the publicity for Kosmix, which is a startup company offering an alternative approach to aggregating Internet search results. One recent story asked that it not get compared to Google, and then compared it.
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Did Apple Move The Mobile Device Forward With iPhone 3.0?
Apple had their big iPhone 3.0 announcement yesterday and it included a number of much awaited features. When the iPhone was released in 2007, it was miles ahead of its competition at the time in several areas, most notably a killer mobile browser and the sliding finger gesture driven UI. In 2008 it upped the ante with MobileMe and the App Store. Did Apple push forward again in 2009?
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Sun + IBM = ... ?
After I read that IBM apparently is in talks to buy Sun Microsystems, I felt an odd sense of "oh, yeah -- why not?" coming on. It certainly fulfills one of the predictions people were throwing around about Sun -- but what will happen to some of the flagship open source projects under Sun's wing, namely OpenOffice and Solaris?
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Citrix Giving Away XenServer Enterprise For Free, Why?
Citrix just upped the ante on VMWare and Microsoft with its recent announcement that XenServer Enterprise, along with many of its high-availability features, will be given away for free. We caught up with Citrix CTO Simon Crosby to get his take on the new Citrix server virtualization strategy. Read on to hear what he had to say.
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Cisco's Unified Computing Vision - Is It Too Much Cisco?
Cisco's Unified Computing announcements last week provided a lot of ammo for friends and foes. On the up side, it's hard to argue with the message that existing server, storage and networking architectures render a virtualized data center hard to manage.
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Ericsson Wants Out Of Sony Ericsson Joint Venture
According to a German technology magazine, Ericsson is seeking ways to end its part in the Sony Ericsson joint venture. Ericsson and Sony are in talks to work out a plan, but apparently financing the deal is a big problem.
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Why Kundra Isn't In The Clear
Federal CIO Vivek Kundra might be back in office after a seemingly meaningless weekend of leave, but he's not out of the woods quite yet.
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Podcast: Sun's Cloud To RESTfully Give Developers Access To Virtual Data Centers
The Web is brewing with analysis of the news that IBM is in talks to buy Sun. Most of it covers the sensibility of IBM buying into Sun's existing businesses and customers. But, should IBM acquire Sun, it will also get a portfolio of cloud offerings that are being announced later today at Sun's CommunityOne East Developer Conference in New York. Given the traction that cloud computing is getting and how IBM isn't viewed as a cloud player (by a long shot), an acquisition of Sun would instantly put IBM in the game against the likes of Amazon and Google with a new offering that actually packs quite a punch.
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Google Tweaks 'Unread' Function In Gmail Conversations
For me, threaded messaging -- whether that be email, SMS, MMS, IM or whatever -- is the only way to go. Gmail has spoiled me in that regard. The latest adjustment Google has made to its Gmail product is a better way to fine-tune your unread emails within threaded conversations.
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Your Storage Has To Do More With Less, Too
Sick of the phrase "Do more with less"? How about putting the pressure on your storage system? If you have to do more with less, it should at least carry some of the responsibility.
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India To Have More IT Pros Than U.S., Infosys CEO Says
What if, three years from now, India has more IT professionals than the U.S.? Would that be wonderful for India and terrible for the U.S.? Would it mean the U.S. has taken another giant step toward being a nation of purely non-producing consumers? For India, says Infosys founder S Gopalakrishnan, it would mean that "in the IT revolution, we are at the centre."
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Video Search Coming Of Age (Includes Video)
Here's one simple ingredient for monetizing video: Get lots of video traffic. Here's one simple ingredient for driving video traffic: Make the video great. Here's one simple ingredient for great video: Create content that matters. Here are three simple ingredients for creating content that matters: Make it entertaining; make it practical; make it easy to find. Blend rigorously, optimize video search engines, and wait for dough ($) to rise.
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Interop Insider #4 (MP3): Arista Networks Positions Itself As "The" 10-Gb Networker Of The Clouds
Although she dodged the question at the end of my podcast interview (below), Arista Networks CEO Jayshree Ullal can't help but think that history is going to repeat itself. Following Cisco's acquisition of Crescendo Networks in the '90s (where she worked), Ullal ended up working for Cisco for 15 years. Notwithstanding its newly announced Intel-based blade servers, Cisco usually prefers to buy than build. If everything Ullal says about Arista's 10 Gigabit Ethernet switches and "the cloud's" appetite for them is true, she'll probably end up at Cisco again (by way of acquisition).
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U.S. CIO Saved From Media Hyenas
Vivek Kundra has been reinstated as the federal government's chief information officer, to the consternation of hyenas whimpering for his head.
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I Hope Red Hat Follows Oracle's Advice....
I hope Red Hat follows Oracle's advice to give away its Enterprise Linux with the same speed that Oracle has exhibited in taking Bob Evans' advice. Evans, an InformationWeek director, said in a letter to Larry Ellison that Oracle should give its customers a break during the downturn and lower the annual maintenance costs.
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AMD Proposes Better Battery Life Tests
AMD chief marketing officer and senior VP Nigel Dessau admits that laptop and mobile phone makers give out relatively meaningless numbers when trying to convey to users what kind of battery life they can expect. He suggests that more reasonable tests be developed and used to make the information more reliable.
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Thank Goodness For The Microsoft Azure Crash
Over the past weekend, Microsoft Azure was unavailable for nearly a day. Microsoft's cloud OS offering is still in beta, so the company isn't making any promises about availability or reliability at this point. However, events like this are just what a company needs to improve the product before it ships -- and before it's too late.
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iPhone OS 3.0: Apple Adds Features From 2007 To The iPhone
Today Apple added a lot of "new" features to the iPhone. Make no mistake, it is nice that the iPhone will have MMS, cut-and-paste, and stereo Bluetooth, but all Apple has done here is catch the iPhone up to where smartphones were two years ago. And there are still tons of features that have been left out.
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Linux Vs. ... Google, Sort Of
An odd headline, I'm sure, but that's the latest wave of insight from the pundits with an eye turned to the Linux-powered netbook world. It isn't a Windows vs. Linux race; it's a Linux vs. Linux race.
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BBC Botnet Experiment IS Illegal, No Matter What They Say
Saturday, "Click"--"the BBC's flagship technology programme"--broadcast an investigative report on cybercrime. The exciting thing about this particular program is that they purchased and used a botnet as part of their investigation. The creators of the program are under the impression that their experiment was perfectly legal, because they had no criminal intent.
They are mistaken.
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Best Thing Since Wheels
Good thing the gal who invented the wheel is dead, or, boy, would she be mad; someone finally invented something that runs circles around her dumb old idea.
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The Stephanopoulos/McCain Twitter Interview: For People Who Find TV News Soundbites Too Complicated
It wasn't exactly the Frost/Nixon interview, but it was entertaining enough. ABC News Washington correspondent George Stephanopoulos interviewed Sen. John McCain for 15 minutes on Twitter today, an exchange that covered 10 questions on the AIG bailout, Iran and Iraq, and McCain's daughter Meghan's feud with Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham.
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Ask Not What IPT Can Do For You...
We're getting to the point in the VoiceCon Orlando cycle when I start thinking about what I'm likely to see and hear during the event, what themes I expect to hear repeated over and over during the week. Clearly, a lot of the focus this year is going to be on cost savings, business cases, ROIs, and the like. How could it not be?
Continue reading "Ask Not What IPT Can Do For You......"
Windows Azure Goes Down
It seems it's not the matter of if a cloud will go down, but when. Google and Amazon already have had well-publicized outages of their cloud platforms. Now, Microsoft has joined them, as Windows Azure was down for about 22 hours beginning Friday night.
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Wikis To Go
PBwiki's new mobile edition lets employees access collaboration wikis from the iPhone and the BlackBerry.
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HTC CEO: 'At Least Three' More Android Phones This Year
HTC is surely one company that has placed its bets on Android. HTC CEO Peter Chou recently said that the company plans to release at least three more phones running on Google's Android platform in 2009.
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AT&T Taken To Task Over 3G Wireless Network Issues
Over the weekend, hordes of SXSW attendees overloaded AT&T's wireless network in Austin, Texas, with their iPhones and other 3G-enabled devices. In response, AT&T doubled its network capacity in the city in a matter of hours. Why wasn't AT&T's network capable of handling the demand in the first place?
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Rackspace Heads Into The Cloud And Beyond
For 11 years, Rackspace has built its business in the unglamorous world of data center hosting. The company is now jumping into the cloud computing market with both feet, and it has hired blogger Robert Scoble to raise its profile in the process.
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Wal-Mart Plans Rapid Expansion Of Retail Bank Business
Wal-Mart is preparing an aggressive expansion of its retail banking business after a year of cautious experimentation to understand customers and build out its IT banking infrastructure. The goals? To make money, boost sales in Wal-Mart stores, provide basic banking services to consumers, and credit and payroll services to suppliers.
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Do We Care Where Technology Products Are Made?
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration kicked off a new labeling program yesterday, requiring fresh and frozen fruits, veggies, and meats to specify country of origin. It got me thinking about the utility of similar IDs on branded tech products.
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Reality Check: Apple's OS X, Safari Security
More security researchers are realizing that when it comes to Apple software security: there is no there "there."
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Google Earth Used For Crimes: Pretend You're Surprised
When a thief uses a tool to commit a crime, the tool usually isn't featured prominently in the story unless it's particularly odd. "Car Used To Help Robbers Escape" would make a poor headline.
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RIM, Google Fail To Properly Support Gmail On BlackBerrys
I've been using a BlackBerry Storm for the last few weeks. Since Gmail is my main e-mail account, I set it up on the Storm. I'm able to send/receive e-mails with no problem. What's untenable, however, is that anything I read on the Storm is not marked as read on the server and vice versa. This is just unacceptable. RIM and Google need to fix it.
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Tech Chiefs Ignore Twitter At Their Peril
I got a kick out of seeing an exchange between George Stephanopoulos and Sen. Claire McCaskill on Twitter the other day and took it as a sign that tweeting has finally grown beyond the so-called "twittering classes."
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Will Windows Mobile 7 Fix The Update Scenario?
According to some details in a job posting, Ars Technica is reporting that Windows Mobile 7 will finally fix the broken update scenario for the Microsoft platform. Right now, we seem to be dependent on the carriers to get updates and fixes for the platform. Is Microsoft taking control of the process?
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More Questions For Kundra
Federal CIO Vivek Kundra is on leave while the FBI continues to investigate his former offices in the District of Columbia, after arresting an employee and charging him with bribery, money laundering, wire fraud, and conflict of interest.
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From Many Models To A Few?
In my last post I talked a bit about an ongoing effort to build a taxonomy of open source business models. As with open source licenses, one could argue that over time there will be a consolidation of business models, too -- so if that does happen, which ones will lead the pack?
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Boost Mobile To Let St. Patrick's Day Revelers Reach Taxis For Free
Tomorrow is St. Patrick's Day, which means many will head out to celebrate the holiday. In order to curb the possibility of driving under the influence, Boost Mobile is offering its subscribers free access to taxis.
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Touch-Based Motorola Phone Clears U.S. Government Scrutiny
An unannounced phone from Motorola with a large touch screen recently cleared the FCC regulatory process for approval. The basic spec list qualifies it as a midlevel device for Sprint, Verizon, or other CDMA-based network operator. Unfortunately, not much is known about the touch-based user interface.
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Rolling Brownouts Jolt Outsourcers In Hyderabad
From 6 a.m. until noon two days a week, outsourcers in and around Hyderabad will receive no electrical power as part of the state-owned utility's plan for rolling brownouts until the end of summer. So check that fine print in your SLAs -- do they cover "load-shedding" contingencies?
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Cost-Reducing The Backup Infrastructure
You are spending too much money on your backup infrastructure. You've built this massive infrastructure specifically to handle one task...The Full Backup. Most enterprises do their entire full backup job over the weekend so they have enough backup-window time to get the job done. We've been doing backups this way for the last 20 years, is it time for change? Could changing it rein in the costs of the backup process?
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IBM Makes A Splash Into Clean Water
IBM's thirst for higher margins has pushed it into a new line of business: clean water. Last week Big Blue announced a pair of clean water initiatives: new filtration technology and a line of water management services.
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iPhone 3.0 To Match Palm Pre Features, But No MMS
Digg founder Kevin Rose shared his predictions during SXSW for what new features we'll see in iPhone 3.0. I wouldn't put so much stock in his predictions if he hadn't been exactly right in the past. He says cut-and-paste is coming, but video and MMS will still be missing.
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IBM India Creates Voice-Driven Sites Via Mobile Phones
IBM's research lab in New Delhi has developed technology that lets mobile-phone users create speech-driven web sites that can not only listen but also respond.
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Microsoft Maintaining Strength In Downturn
Numbers may not lie, but survey respondents sometimes do. That came to mind when I read that Linux Gaining Strength In Downturn. IT managers can answer a survey any way they want, but the real test is whether they commit money to Linux, or divert money from Microsoft to Linux.
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Mobile Security Looming As New Hacker Frontier
I'm more worried about losing my cell phone than I am about getting my wallet lifted. Probably I shouldn't fret over a physical loss -- with password protection, you can set your misplaced iPhone or BlackBerry to wipe its data after 10 unauthorized access attempts (unless your password is "password"). What troubles me more, though, is that we haven't begun to seriously grapple with mobile security, mostly because hackers aren't flooding the space. But they will be.
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What's SXSW All About?
I am here in Austin, Texas, for the next week covering the SXSW Interactive festival. What's SXSW all about and why do I find it relaxing and jam-packed at the same time?
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Can We Bridge The Security Divide?
This week I spent some time at the Boston Source Conference, attending Christopher Hoff's balanced discussion of cloud computing security and Jeremiah Grossman’s take on making money the black hat way, among other sessions. Great quality content, well worth the time, and I’ll never look at online banking the same way. This "a little knowledge equals a lot of fear" syndrome isn't new for me -- for years, I've edited security experts like Mike Fratto and Greg Shipley. But Source drove home just how wide the gap has gotten between those who know what goes bump in the dark reaches of the Internet, and everyone else.
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No Fooling: Conficker Set To Strike April 1
Almost two months ago, we noted how antivirus firm F-Secure estimated that the Conficker/Downadup worm had infected nearly 9 million PCs. Today, IT management vendor CA warns that the worm has big plans for April Fools' Day.
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Rebranding/Reviving SOA During An Economic Downturn.
As curator of the SOA Center blog site, Software AG's Miko Matsumura recently renamed his site the Whatever-You-Want-To-Call-It Center in reaction to Anne Thomas Manes declaration that SOA is dead. Hoping to emulate the success formula of the Artist Formerly Known As Prince (who is now known again as Prince), Miko wants to replace the devalued "SOA" moniker with a symbol, perhaps a "W" shape (for "Whatever") similar to the singer/songwriter’s unpronounceable symbol [usually spelled out as O(+>)]. In an interview this week with InformationWeek senior editor Roger Smith, Miko said he are also amenable to the acronym AFKAS, which is short for the "Architecture Formerly Known As SOA."
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Mobile Roundup, Friday The 13th Edition
Well, it's been another busy week in the mobile world, as there was a lot of interesting news about Palm, Apple, and Nokia. In this post, I discuss what I'd like to see in the iPhone 3.0 update and when to expect new functionality in Google's Android, and I say goodbye to one company's pitchman.
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GOP Looks To Twitter And Other Social Media To Rebuild
The GOP is looking to Twitter and other social media to help reunite the party and rebuild its power base. Part of that strategy is to use social media to communicate directly with the people, bypassing newspapers and other traditional media, which the GOP perceives as biased against it and dying. The GOP is looking to the example of Barack Obama, who leveraged social media to build a coalition and raise funds in last year's election.
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Podcast: Sun Looks To Start Privacy And Governance Alliance For Cloud Computing Industry
Stealing a page from the playbook it used to launch the Liberty Alliance (and undermine Microsoft's Passport service in the process), Sun Microsystems' newly appointed cloud computing chief governance officer, Michele Dennedy, tells me in this podcast how she now has her sights set on forming a similar industry consortium for governance and privacy in the area of cloud computing. Additionally, Dennedy's appointment is one of many ducks that Sun is getting in a row as it gears up to make some allegedly blockbuster cloud computing announcements in New York City on March 18.
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How Many Commercial Open Source Models?
Pop quiz: How many commercial open source business models can you think of? Most people would probably say two or three. How about 10?
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Phone Market To Shrink In 2009, Smartphones Still Climb
IDC is forecasting mobile phone shipments down 8.3% in 2009 as the world wrestles with a downturn in the economy. This is after they rose 4.3% in 2008 over 2007 levels. It gets even worse if you look at specific markets like Europe, Japan, and the United States, where year-over-year declines could approach 24%. The growth drivers in recent years like China and Russia will have breakeven years. What's interesting though is this decline is mainly affecting the basic cell phone, or what I call a feature phone. Those are the phones that are often free from your carrier with a contract and have a few, very specific set of features, but no real ability to sync with your data or add much more than tiny Java apps to them. Smartphone growth in 2009 will still be just over 3%.
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IBM Goes For A SWIM
IBM may have reached the height of opportunism with its Public Sector Energy and Environment Diagnostic consulting service and Strategic Water Information Management (SWIM) solutions platform -- two related efforts to cash in on our stressed environment. Good for IBM.
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PODCAST: CIO: Outsourcing Helps His Team Become Strategic
When JohnsonDiversey CIO Matt Peterson signed his first outsourcing agreement three years ago, his No. 1 goal was cost reduction -- "and it was a long way down the list to get to No. 2," he said. But because the relationship with outsourcer Wipro has steadily evolved, Peterson is finally able to turn his focus outside the company to working with customers to drive revenue and loyalty.
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SAP: Business ByDesign SaaS Is 'Mature'
SAP has been pretty quiet on Business ByDesign, its hosted business software service in development, but expect to hear more about it within the next few months. SAP told me today that Business ByDesign has reached a "mature" stage in its development.
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A Recession Demands Retention
As we work our way through the current economic situation, IT staffs are faced with a variety of challenges that are in conflict: maintain or increase services levels, drive out costs and increase efficiency. One of the items that can't be neglected is retention of data. In fact, it may be more critical in tough times than in prosperous times.
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Symbian: We're Going To Release A New Mobile Platform Every Six Months
The Symbian Foundation recently shared some huge news about how it will operate moving forward. A key part of its revised strategy is to release new versions of its mobile platform each six months, which will enable it to keep up with the competition better.
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Interop Insider #3 (MP3): ScienceLogic's David Takes On Goliaths BMC, CA, IBM, And HP
Based out of Reston, Va., ScienceLogic CEO David Link is no Silicon Valley insider. He might as well be, though, because the technology that ScienceLogic has cooked up in the form of it's 7-in-1 EM7 data center management appliance is the sort of solution that usually requires a patchwork of solutions from the management titans normally associated with such functionality: BMC, CA, IBM, and HP.
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Apple Puts The Wireless Industry On Notice
As if the first-generation iPhone didn't rattle the wireless industry enough, Apple gave it another firm shake. Yesterday, Apple announced that it will preview the next generation of its iPhone OS at a special event to be held at Apple headquarters next week. If Apple can release new a version of its OS each year, can Palm, Microsoft, Symbian, BlackBerry, and other mobile operating platforms keep up?
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Twitter Intruder Story: Man At His Best
In case you haven't heard, Revision3 COO David Prager Tweeted a bizzaro home invasion at his San Francisco studio this week, which he documented in a series of 18 Tweets that resulted in harm to no one, but much bemusement among members of the commentariat.
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Finding The Off Switch In Windows 7
People testing early versions of Microsoft's next OS report that they've discovered a way to turn various programs off. I'm still waiting for somebody to tell me what, or who, the next version of Windows turns on.
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Why You Shouldn't Expect Online Privacy
First let me say that I only surf pornography sites for the purpose of researching human behavior -- and someday all of mankind will benefit from my acquired wisdom.
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The Future Of Mobile TV
If you're into college basketball, you can watch March Madness on the boob tube, online, and even on your iPhone now. This got me thinking about how comfortable mobile TV actually is, and will it be as big here as it is in places like Japan. I spoke with Bill Stone, head of FLO TV, about these issues.
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The Bill To Blur Google Earth
The satellite imagery in Google Earth and Google Maps is the equivalent of yelling fire in a crowded movie theater, which is to say that it's not protected by the First Amendment right to free speech.
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Fed CIO Kundra: An Extraordinary Day In An Extraordinary Week
The media bubble enveloping federal CIO Vivek Kundra almost burst today as, in almost-simultaneous alerts, old-fogey-onliner the Wall Street Journal said his former offices had just been raided and equally ancient C-SPAN was posting video of a speech he'd just given. But the (media) day belonged to the Twittering classes, who saturated both events.
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A Tool Suite For Open Source TCO?
With all the talk I've heard about how open source lowers costs of development and ownership, I think it's about time for some enterprising software company out there to sink its teeth into a project that might seem way out into the stratosphere: a suite for performing open source TCO calculation, that covers everything from development to deployment to user education. Is this even possible?
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IT Managers, What's In Your Dumpster?
Never mind what's in your wallet. What's in your Dumpster? If you're among the 15% of IT managers interviewed by Osterman Research, electronic waste is sitting there.
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Investor Bullish On Motorola, Comeback In The Works?
Oppenheimer analyst Ittai Kidron recently said in a note to clients that Motorola may warrant another look. Why? It is bound to have a spectacular second half of the year. Has Motorola finally hit bottom? Is it finally on track for a rebound? So says Kidron.
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Behind Wal-Mart's E-Health Records Plans
Wal-Mart isn't waiting for the Obama administration to figure out how to digitize medical records. The World's Biggest Retailer hopes to do for electronic health records what it has done for dog food, plastic lawn chairs, and some generic drugs: make them widely accessible for a reasonable price.
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FBI Raid Of D.C. IT Offices Is A Federal Headache
Even though the Washington, D.C. mayor's office and federal authorities say federal CIO Vivek Kundra isn't a target of an FBI raid of Kundra's former offices at the D.C. IT department this morning, this is one distraction I'd bet he didn’t want to have to deal with.
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Are You A Voice Or Data Person?
Some people are voice centric and it just so happens that they also can get e-mails on their phone. Others are data centric. The primary reason they have a phone is that is just the device by which it's easiest to access data from the Internet. The fact that they can actually talk to someone with the device is just another feature. Which one are you?
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Breaking: Apple To Hold iPhone Event March 17, New iPhone OS In The Works
Apple has invited journalists to attend a special event on March 17. Apple will use the event to show off iPhone operating system 3.0.
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Amazon's New Option: On-Reserve Servers
Amazon Web Services today introduced a new payment option for customers looking to rent its virtual servers. Rather than pay for Elastic Compute Cloud instances on demand, customers can pay an up-front fee to reserve server capacity for later use.
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Who Needs A VoiceOver iPod When You Can Blink?
Apple introduced the third-generation iPod Shuffle yesterday, and it comes with a feature called "VoiceOver" that announces your song choices. I think I/O controls are the next great undiscovered country for mobile devices, don't you?
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Google Improves Image Search Powers Of Android And iPhone
Google recently launched a new image search results page for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and Android platform. The new results place up to 20 pictures on a single page, allowing users to find what they want faster and get the information they need.
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Coca-Cola Opens $90M Technology Center In China
Fulfilling the vision of China as "the future growth engine of the company's business," the global soft-drink icon has opened a $90M innovation and technology facility in Shanghai that will employ 600 people -- three times the number forecast by the company 18 months ago.
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Microsoft Unveils Developer Strategy For Windows Mobile 6.5 And Beyond
Microsoft has announced details on its strategy for working with developers to get their apps on the new Windows Marketplace for Mobile. Microsoft is going all out in getting developers lined up prior to the WinMo app store launching, even though there are more than 20,000 applications already in existence for the platform.
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At-Risk Government IT Systems Require Immediate Action
The federal government's new "pro cloud" attitude is about to get its first test. Office of Management and Budget director Peter Orszag is warning that a government portal used for competitive grants is at "significant risk of failure" due to system overload. Can cloud computing save the day?
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Living With Windows 7: Better, But Still Vista
I've spent the last few months relying on Windows 7 as my primary computing platform for my home office. Like many former Vista users, I'm happy I made the transition. But Windows XP diehards may be harder to convince.
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Retail CIOs Focus On Growth Rather Than Cost-Cutting
Retail CIOs are looking to boost revenue via automatic replenishment, demand forecasting, enhanced promotional effectiveness, and Web-based sales channels, a new study says. Plus, 26% expect IT budgets to go up as a percentage of sales, while 51% expect them to hold steady. Cutbacks, schmutbacks!
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Drawing A Line On Web Application Security
Web application security is of particular importance because so much of our digital life is spent interacting with Web applications. Lori MacVittie, technical marketing manager with F5 and former Network Computing senior technology editor, has spent years kicking the question of where application security belongs -- in the network or the application -- back and forth. But I want to draw a line in the sand: Don't depend on Web application firewalls to fix your software problems.
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Oracle To Buy Virtual Iron? It Has A Good Reason To
There's been a persistent rumor circulating that Virtual Iron is about to be acquired, fueled in part by a recent Jefferies & Co. research report that said Oracle was interested in the virtualization startup. Why would Oracle, with its own Oracle VM, want a third-tier player in the virtualization market?
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Government Using Widgets, Twitter To Take Information To The People
One of the ways that social media changes the Web is that social media require you take your message to the people. The game is no longer about attracting people to your Web site -- it's about bringing your content to Twitter and other people's Web sites. That's a lesson that the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) put into practice in the recent recall of tainted peanut-butter, and that the Ohio Attorney General is using for home foreclosure information.
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The Many Shades Of Green...Storage
Green storage, or making storage more power efficient, continues to be a hot topic of discussion from storage vendors and for storage consumers. What is interesting and sometimes comical is watching vendors explain how their storage is suddenly green. Let's examine the common claims.
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Why Is Amazon Having A Fire Sale On HTC G1s?
Amazon.com is offering the HTC G1 on its site for the meager sum of $97.99. T-Mobile is still selling it for $179.99. Is there a reason that Amazon is looking to dump its G1 stock?
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The Underwear Theory Of Social Networking
Facebook is where I hang out in my underwear, metaphorically speaking. That's why I'm unfriending all my business contacts.
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Crazy Patch Tuesday (And Not Because Of Microsoft, Either)
As Microsoft's Patch Tuesdays go, this one struck me as a fairly straightforward day. Yet, what was up with Symantec and Adobe? Patch Tuesdays aren't a good day to make the jobs of IT security and operation teams any more difficult than they already are.
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The Hybrid Netbook Experience, Revisited
No, I don't mean a computer powered by solar panels or fuel cells (although those aren't terribly absurd assertions, either). Rather, there's a growing sense that netbooks -- and notebooks generally -- won't just be running Linux or Windows, but a mix of the two. But this doesn't look like proof that Windows is on the skids.
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Microsoft Whets Our APPetite
Are you ready for those awesome new apps we'll soon be able to download to our Windows Mobile-powered smartphones?
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RIM And Apple Make Big Gains At Nokia's Expense
According to new numbers published by Gartner, Nokia's worldwide market share for smartphones has slipped from 51% to 41%. Research In Motion and Apple stole the biggest slice from Nokia. Why is Nokia losing out?
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TechWeb And InformationWeek Launch ReviewCams: Video Reviews Of Web Services & Software
If you haven't seen it yet, I encourage you to check out our first ever ReviewCam. Using video, the goal of our ReviewCams is to put you up close and personal with an editor's-eye-view of Web services or software.
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ReviewCam: Socialcast Privatizes The Power Of Twitter, Del.icio.us, And FriendFeed For Enterprises
In this, our first ever "ReviewCam", Socialcast CEO founder Tim Young demos his company's namesake service while we're "rolling tape" on the demo. For $1 per user per month Socialcast offers its customers a private service that includes Twitter-style microblogging, Del.icio.us-style social bookmarking, and FriendFeed-style lifestreaming. But for brownie points, Socialcast also integrates with the actual Twitter, Del.icio.us, and other social networks like YouTube, Digg, Facebook, and Google Reader.
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Google: View Only The Ads That You Want To See
Google has taken its advertising offerings to the next level with the adoption of "interest-based" ads. Going beyond serving ads that are relevant to the content on each Web site you visit or search you perform, users will be able to fine-tune their ad preferences to see exactly the type of stuff they are interested in.
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Phone-Based Authentication Helps Hunt Cybercriminals
Two-factor authentication is the centerpiece of one of the more interesting technologies at FOSE this week, one of those "why-haven't-I-thought-of-that-before" technologies.
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JP Morgan Chase Expanding India Outsourcing By 25%?
JP Morgan Chase is reportedly planning to increase its use of Indian outsourcers by 25% to handle the IT integration of Washington Mutual and Bear Stearns and other projects. The moves are expected to cut overall IT costs for JPMC even as it raises its volume of Indian outsourcing business to a reported $400 million.
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Microsoft Releases Notebook Hardware Patch
High-powered notebook PCs can get really hot, to the point where resting it on your lap can be hazardous to your health. Dangerous notebook heat is not only poor design, it's a hazard that system makers fix quickly because they care about their customer's safety. Hah! Had you there for a minute, didn't I?
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A Merger That Makes Sense
Overshadowed by Monday's ginormous $41 billion merger of pharmaceutical companies Merck and Schering-Plough, two companies in the small and often overlooked field of complex event processing (CEP) software announced that they have joined forces with the twin goals of expanding the reach and increasing the speed of innovation of real-time event processing technology.
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Microsoft Edges Closer To Its Own App Store For Windows Mobile
Microsoft officially announced its own application store for Windows Mobile devices last month during World Mobile Congress, though it wasn't news to most people. It now has a mobile Web site that looks like a placeholder for the new site. There isn't much there, but it shows progress is being made.
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Can Trust Clouds Be Trusted With Government Information?
Vivek Kundra, an early adopter of cloud computing, has an interesting, but potentially risky, proposal to consider as he steps into his new job as federal CIO. Cisco and Swan Island Networks are promoting the idea of "trust clouds" as a way of sharing sensitive information among government agencies.
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Android Roundup: Evernote, Calling Card App, Taiwan Support
New tools for the Android platform are being approved all the time. The latest include an Android-optimized version of Evernote and a new calling card application. Additionally, Google has opened up shop in Taiwan to better support Android hardware makers.
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Is Fed CIO Kundra Flouting Obama's 'Buy American' Plan?
Newly minted federal CIO Vivek Kundra plans to scour the globe for great ideas: "I want to make sure we're leveraging innovations from throughout the world." But hold on a second -- wouldn't such an approach cut against the grain of President Obama's "Buy American" platform and his "our jobs" anti-outsourcing stance?
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More Details Emerge On Reported Apple Netbook
Another reputable news organization is reporting independent confirmation that Apple plans to launch a netbook with a touchscreen as early as the second half of this year, while a prominent tech blogger shares some interesting analysis that the device will be a keyboardless tablet.
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Apple's Trouble Handling Success
Apple's role as benevolent dictator of the iPhone ecosystem has pluses and minuses. Lately, however, it has become apparent that the company can't manage the control it insists upon. It risks becoming an incompetent dictator, and that's the kind of regime that's prone to collapse.
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Java Developers Get Their Own Apps Store
The latest mobile application store to be announced doesn't come from a handset maker or network operator, but rather a provider of Java developer tools. Javaground announced a new site where users of Java-enabled mobile phones can find, trial, and download content. Can it compete with the big boys?
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Oracle Study Finds Grid Adoption May Smart From High Costs
Fifty-eight percent of utilities surveyed by Oracle recently said that while they offer net-metering programs only 11% of their customers take them up on their offer. I'm hoping that 100% of those utilities know why: The up-front costs are way too high.
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Help Wanted: CIOs Need Not Apply?
The recession is turning out to be a career-booster for some folks within IT management ranks, but a dream-buster for a lot of CIOs looking for new jobs.
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When Equivalents Aren't
The other week I received an e-mail in response to my piece "Windows 7. vs Linux," from a fellow who'd tried to run Ubuntu 8.10 and ran into rocky territory. The whole thing brought up some tough questions about whether talking about open source "equivalents" to existing programs may be misleading.
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The Cloud And Primary Storage
As cloud storage continues to evolve, clearly the two major initial uses are as backup and archive storage, but where does primary storage fit into this equation? Is primary storage going to be made extinct by the cloud?
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Politics, Not Hackers, Take Down Fed IT Security Chief
So after one year on the job, the leader of the team that protects this country's national information infrastructure has resigned over turf battles with the NSA and insufficient funding, my colleague Tom Claburn reports. Talk about screwed-up priorities: We spend $71,000,000,000 on federal IT but can't pay to protect our economic and national-defense interests?
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Facebook More Popular Than Chocolate
Catholics traditionally give something up for Lent, often chocolate. This year, a growing number of people are giving up Facebook instead.
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Palm 'Withdraws' McNamee's iPhone-Killing Pre Statements
Last week, Elevation Partners investor Roger McNamee made some interesting statements about how he believes early adopters of the iPhone will jump ship and replace their Apple hardware with the Palm Pre. Palm thought his statements went a little bit too far, and submitted a document to the SEC "withdrawing" them.
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Microsoft: A Few Companies Buy 20% Of Servers
Microsoft senior VP of research Rick Rashid remarked the other day that 20% of all servers are being bought by a handful of large Internet companies, including Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. It's evidence that, behind all the talk about cloud computing, there are huge investments in server infrastructure.
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Google Makes Nice, Lets Devs Get Paid Apps, Updates Android Dev Phone 1
Owners of the Android Dev Phone 1 recently discovered that they wouldn't have access to the premium, paid apps offered via the Android Market. Google has (mostly) reversed this policy, and also offered a firmware update for the Dev Phone 1.
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Why Not WiMax And LTE On The Same Phone?
The only winner in the standards battle between Long Term Evolution (LTE) and WiMax should be the consumer.
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Do Breach Notification Laws Work? Yes
Apparently a good number of consumers who receive letters notifying them that their financial or credit card information has been breached are tossing the notifications without taking action. Does this mean these notices are worthless?
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Palm: We Need To Sell Stock To Survive
This morning Palm announced that it plans to exercise rights to sell about 18.5 million shares of its stock in order to build up capital. The company has current cash reserves of just $220 million, and it needs the cash to see the Pre through its launch later this year.
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Reports: Apple Netbook Due In Third Quarter
Take this one with a big grain of salt: Asian technology news site Digitimes is reporting that Wintek will supply touch panels for Apple's new netbook, which will ship the third quarter.
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The Good, The Bad, And The Open
A quote attributed to various sources goes as follows: "Technology is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral." It takes the shape you give to it, but it will always take one shape or another. The same could be said of open source, and ought to be.
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Verizon, Nokia Teaming Up On LTE Touch Phone: Report
Nokia and long-time nemesis Qualcomm recently buried the hatchet and announced plans to work together on devices for the U.S. market. With Verizon's commitment to deploy LTE by the end of 2009, it will need some hardware that can access the new 4G network. According to reports, that device will come from Nokia and will be touch-enabled.
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Intel Envisions Shape-Shifting Smartphones
If you think iPhones have set the template for the gadgets of the next 25 years, then get ready to think different. Intel is quietly engaged in some of the coolest research this side of Star Trek. At Intel's Pittsburgh lab, in collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University, senior researcher Jason Campbell says: "We're working on materials that can change their shapes." Think of a smartphone that resizes itself into a netbook when you're ready to surf the Web.
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Acer Favors Windows Compatibility Over Linux
Acer recently announced it was getting into the smartphone business. It seems it is all Windows Mobile devices and that decision has drawn criticism from those that support Linux desktops.
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Microsoft's FAT32 Deserves Its Freedom
Last week, Microsoft sued TomTom for infringing on patents relating to (among other things) the format of its File Allocation Table 32-bit (FAT32) disk format. These patents relate to mundane issues like how to translate pretty names like "C:\Temporary Files" into ugly short ones like "C:\TEMPOR~1" that older programs can understand, and the layout of files on the physical media such as hard drives or flash memory.
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Why QR Codes Could Help Save Print Advertising
I am a marketer who loves what Quick Response codes can do for marketers and consumers. What are QR codes? Can these new bar codes help print marketing regain some ground lost to online marketing?
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The Fed CIO Agenda: Should Every Mortgage Have A Data Tag?
Based on his track record, Vivek Kundra, the U.S. government's new CIO, is sure to push Web 2.0 tools to increase transparency. But what does that really mean? One idea: Requiring mortgages to have XBRL tags that describe them, so we could search and analyze multibillion-dollar pools of mortgages at least as effectively as photos on Flickr.
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The Mobile Roundup
It's Friday again, which means I'm here to walk you through all the stories in the mobile world that slipped through the cracks. This week we'll talk about a new sleek BlackBerry, how much it costs to lead Motorola, HTC and its German legal issues, and we'll say goodbye to an important player in the industry.
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The Cloud Puts Out A Help-Wanted Sign
If you're looking for some positive IT employment news for a change, take a look-see at the following hockey-stick graph that tracks job postings containing the phrase "cloud computing" at the job search aggregator Indeed.com:
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Google Solicits Planet-Saving Videos
Google wants you to use energy to save energy. In its latest scheme to save the planet, Google is asking anyone with a video camera to make and upload a video that illustrates the benefits of energy-efficient computing.
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Interop Insider #2 (MP3): Cisco Offers Email Security In The Cloud
In this, my second installment of Interop Insider, Cisco e-mail security group product manager Nick Edwards explains the company's newest foray into the cloud -- that of reproducing the e-mail security functionality found in the company's IronPort appliances as a cloud-based service offering. With Interop in Las Vegas just around the corner, I'll be publishing an entire series of Interop Insiders (each with a write-up and podcast interview) to give you an idea of what can be found at the show.
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Keeping Track Of What?
Talk about a superfluous use of technology. The State Department launched a new interactive travel map for tracking Hillary Clinton's peripatetic adventures across the globe. Gee-whiz! It's not enough for me to read about where she's been -- I need to visualize it on a map!
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RightScale Offers Schools Freebie Cloud Management Tools
RightScale, a company that supplies tools, expertise, and automated technology to help companies run scalable applications across numerous public and private clouds -- including Amazon, Go Grid, and the open-source Eucalyptus cloud -- this week launched a new program that provides qualified educational institutions copies of the company's Cloud Management Platform free of charge.
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Top Indian Outsourcers Drop Prices, Welcome Japan
India's largest outsourcers are dropping prices by up to 20% as financially challenged global customers "renegotiate existing contracts and award new projects at much lower rates," says the Economic Times. Tata, Infosys, Wipro, and HCL have been or are discussing such rate adjustments with high-profile corporations in financial, retail, automotive, and telecom markets -- read on for some of the names.
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Microsoft Vs. Amazon: A Battle Is Brewing
Amazon Web Services has established itself as a leader in the cloud computing market, and Microsoft has been playing catch-up. However, as Microsoft's Azure cloud strategy falls into place, it's sounding more like these would-be partners are on a collision path.
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Android To Outsell iPhone By 2012: Analyst
New research published by Informa suggests that the Android platform will surpass the iPhone in unit sales by the year 2012. Do you think that's accurate? Will it really take three years, or do you think it might happen sooner?
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Barnes & Noble To Take On Amazon Kindle?
Yesterday Barnes & Noble completed its acquisition of Fictionwise, which also includes eReader.com and eBookwise, for $15.7 million. Could this be the book retailer's move into e-books, taking on the popular Kindle store by Amazon?
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PODCAST: Outsourcing Helps Insurer Attack 80/20, Pursue Innovation
A $1 billion insurance company has sharply reduced its dependence on a brittle 30-year-old mainframe and redeployed many internal IT staffers to new initiatives by outsourcing the hosting, care, and feeding of that mainframe. The three-year project at Harleysville Insurance achieved the top-level goal of shifting big chunks of fixed costs to variable costs and allowed the IT team to focus on higher-value projects.
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IT Suppliers Unaware Of Green Opportunities
When I read the Carbon Disclosure Project's (CDP) just-released Supply Chain Report 2009, I can't help thinking about Vinny Gambini's (Joe Pesci) question to the lard-scooping short-order cook in My Cousin Vinny: "Excuse me, you guys down here hear about the ongoing cholesterol problem in the country?"
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CIO, OMB Begin By Keeping Obama's Promises
Being a veteran of the Fourth Estate, I love words like transparency, accessibility, and accountability.
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A Hands-On With Fixing OpenOffice
If one of the community values of open source is participation, I figured it was high time I participated by doing more than just using a product. This week I sat down and filed bug reports for OpenOffice -- or rather, affirmed that I'd like to see this feature added and that I had that problem as well.
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PODCAST: Find Out How To Protect Your Enterprise With Our Strategic Security Survey
Learn how the top enterprises are managing risks from threats both inside and outside the company. InformationWeek quizzed nearly 2,000 IT professionals about their plans and priorities for securing their companies' assets, and found that IT has a long way to go to catch up to other disciplines in adopting systematic risk management processes.
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Want To Save Money? Google Crowd-Sources Good Ideas With 'Tip Jar'
Google recently announced its newest idea, the Tip Jar. Google hopes people will use the Tip Jar, which acts somewhat like a forum, to offer up, comment on, and rank money-saving ideas that people can use in their daily personal and professional lives.
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PODCAST: Survive And Thrive As A CIO
Enterprises expect a lot from their chief information officers -- not just stellar technology skills, but also visionary business leadership. More than 700 InformationWeek readers weigh in on how to keep the CIO role strong well into the future.
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BT To Its Business Customers: You Will Be Assimilated
BT has started turning 200,000 of its business customers' Wi-Fi hubs into public hotspots in its OpenZone network. Only it hasn't overtly asked for their permission.
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Live On Video: Federal CIO Vivek Kundra In His Own Words
I've been hunting around to see if we can flesh out the picture of our new federal CIO, Vivek Kundra. On Thursday, our own K.C. Jones wrote about his priorities, and Rob Preston and Bob Evans have blogged about what he needs to do and the top 10 questions he should answer. So now let's hear from Kundra in his own words, in three YouTube videos. The most interesting is where Kundra talks about championing Google Apps in his previous position as CIO of the District of Columbia.
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10 Questions Our New Federal CIO Needs To Answer
UPDATE: Bob Evans has posted a new column on this subject called "The $200-Million-A-Day Man: Our New Federal CIO." You can read it here.
It will be fascinating to see if newly minted federal CIO Vivek Kundra can establish a meaningful agenda, command the respect (or if necessary the fear) among the myriad agency CIOs he'll be trying to herd, and sooner rather than later get beyond such vague chatter as "improving citizen participation" and "promoting interoperability." Here are 10 questions to help our new federal CIO gain some focus.
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Offensive Computing: A Bad Idea That Never Dies
Your network is getting scanned from some system on the other side of the country, or perhaps the globe. You traceroute the IP address, and discern the offending system is infected with a bot that's trying to infect you. You take a look at the device and see it's not patched for a multitude of OS vulnerabilities. Is it ethical (never mind legal) for you to take the system down with some exploits of your own?
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Microsoft's Azure, Where You Go To Build Cloud Apps
In talking to Microsoft's Steven Martin about cloud computing, he said something that suggested how much the world has changed. Amazon runs Windows in its EC2 cloud, and Martin says, "We're rooting for them. We want them to be successful [at running Windows]." And that tells me something about the nature of Azure, Microsoft's future cloud.
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A CEO And CIO Compare Their Priority Lists
For anyone wrestling with deciding what IT projects to keep and which to kill in this recession, here's a quick test from a CIO I just listened to: If an IT project doesn't map to a specific CEO priority, you shouldn't be doing it.
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Cloud Computing Reality Check
Lots of fresh research is coming out on the state of cloud computing. The following data points provide a snapshot of user attitudes in this fast-moving market.
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The Top 10 Reasons To Outsource Your Enterprise Email To Gmail Now
Last week, I wrote about how the recent Gmail outage actually draws attention to why Gmail is more worthy of enterprises than it has ever been. That opinion stands in contrast to a story my colleague Antone Gonsalves recently published (see "Google Takes Credibility Hit With Gmail Outage"). My response: If you are currently insourcing your e-mail and, at the very least, not considering that system's replacement with Gmail, I want some of what you're smoking.
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As GM Fizzles, MIT Transportation Initiative Must Sizzle
GM released its annual report Thursday, and while no one was expecting sunshine and unicorns to float off its pages, this is a dark document. Here's a taste: "There is no assurance that the global automobile market will recover."
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Ending The Stupid Broadband Penetration Battle
A new report on America's ranking in terms of broadband penetration is likely to set off a new round of futile debate about where we stand.
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With Federal CIO, Obama's Off To A Decent Start, But ...
Thanks for listening, President Obama. The responsibilities you've carved out for Vivek Kundra, your newly appointed federal CIO, are roughly in line with those I recommended in a recent column. Now the devil is in the execution.
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Pew Study Throws Cold Water On Democracy 2.0 Idealism
A study from Pew Research casts doubts on the idealistic vision that Web and social media tools level the democracy playing field between rich and poor. The study says that the disparity between rich people and poor people in online politics is even worse than the disparity using conventional political tools.
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RoboReceptionist: BladeRunner Meets Cisco Reception Desk
When I visited Cisco's Silicon Valley campus this week, I saw a videoconferencing application I had never heard of before. But it wasn't in some super-secret press-only demonstration -- it was in the lobby!
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Nokia Claims Firmware Update Will Fix Busted 5800 XpressMusic
So far, the U.S. launch of Nokia's first touch phone has been a disaster. It fails to work properly on AT&T's network and Nokia's flagship stores halted sales of the device shortly after it went on sale. Now, Nokia says a simple firmware fix should solve on the problems.
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Getting IE Mobile 6 Before Windows Mobile 6.5
One of the best features of Microsoft's forthcoming Windows Mobile release is Internet Explorer Mobile 6, which is built largely on Internet Explorer 6 from the desktop, optimized for the smartphone platform. It should rival the browsing experience on the iPhone, and perhaps be even richer if the device also has Adobe Flash Lite on it. You may not have to wait until WinMo 6.5 ships this fall though to get the new browser.
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The Flock Flap
Dealing with rumors and gossip is like nailing jelly to the wall. The right (wrong?) ones take on a patina of truth they don't deserve, just because they sound right or we feel they should be right. Consider the recent blog-buzz about whether or not social-networking Web browser Flock, a Firefox-derived product, is going to ditch its Mozilla base and switch instead to Google Chrome because of poor support from the Moz side.
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Carbon Disclosure Project: What's In Your Supply Chain?
The Carbon Disclosure Project, which secured a remarkable 634 responses to the first supply chain questionnaire of its kind, is looking for fuller disclosure: Later this year it will issue a "lighter questionnaire" in hopes of convincing hundreds or thousands more suppliers to participate.
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BlackBerry App World: PayPal Required, Older Models Not Supported
Details about Research In Motion's forthcoming application storefront have emerged with some surprises. Among them, the requirement that users and developers alike have PayPal accounts for the sale and purchase of applications. What also may be distressing is that legacy BlackBerrys will be left out in the cold.
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Loath To Improve Itself, Could Twitter Be Disintermediated By A Protocol?
John Herren, known by some for inventing TagCloud.com, is a talented developer who has spotted opportunity at the intersection of Twitter and what he calls "Web hooks." In a blog he posted earlier today, he offers some real-world examples of how easy it is to trap Twitter's e-mail notifications for events that can trigger any business process. The same could go for any site (eBay, Facebook, etc.). If there is such a thing as Web 3.0, he may have scratched its surface. Bigger picture: Could social networks like Twitter end-up disintermediated by open protocols?
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Windows Clouds Are Drifting This Way
Not long ago, the phrase "Windows cloud" was an oxymoron; no two words could be further apart in meaning. But cloud computing is evolving quickly, and Windows clouds are finally taking shape.
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I Want My GTV! Google Set To Offer Universal Music Videos?
According to The Wall Street Journal, Google's YouTube is in discussions with Universal Music to create a new YouTube-based focal point for music videos from Universal's roster of artists. Will teenagers soon be screaming, "I want my GTV!"?
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Do CIOs Want SaaS Contracts To Extend To 3-5 Years?
Blogger Vinnie Mirchandani says that while today's duration for SaaS deals averages 1.5 years, "the secular trend is towards higher renewals…and multiyear deals. SaaS will likely become like outsourcing contracts -- 3, 5, 7-year deals." Sounds good in theory, but will CIOs go for it?
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Storage QoS For Virtualized Environments
As the initial wave of virtualization projects come to a close, many are finding an odd result. CPU utilization is actually lower than when it started. Now users are looking to pile on more workloads but before they do they need to prioritize storage I/O performance to those workloads; they need a QoS for storage.
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Vista Is Seriously Unbalanced
Sometimes, a small change can make a big difference. When the change makes a bad difference, it can be a disaster. One of those slow-motion disasters may be in the making with a small change that Microsoft slipped into the network stack for Windows Vista.
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iPhone Kindle: Is Kindle Gonna Be Kindling?
In a move that some may look at as an admission of defeat, Amazon.com has made its proprietary, expensive, and single-use hardware Kindle platform available as a free app on the proprietary, expensive, and multiuse iPhone. Since the Feldmonster is an admitted iPhone addict and a reading junkie, naturally I jumped right on it. The verdict? It's pretty cool, and if you like the Kindle store selection, it's just what Dr. iPhone ordered. Still, it has a few warts. Read on.
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Rod Johnson On Federal CTO: Promote Open Opportunity
"Whatever the federal Chief Technology Officer's agenda, Mr. President, think big." That was the advice that a group of commercial CIOs, CTOs, and major technology company CEOs offered the president on the task before the soon-to-be-appointed U.S. chief of technology. Open source developer Rod Johnson had another bit of advice: Support open opportunity.
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Our Green Journey To Brazil (Video Included)
Brazil just sounds exotic: the rain forest, the Amazon. My yardstick usually consists of how many shots and pills CDC recommends, and leaving the clinic I felt like A-Rod on my way to batting practice. But we journeyed to Sao Paulo, far from the Amazon, and our mission was much more pedestrian: to explore Banco Real. What we found wasn't exotic, but alluring: a bank that has taken eco-leadership to fertile ground in a country basting in the politics of green.
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One CIO’s Strategy For Software As A Service
Here is some crisp strategic thinking I picked up this morning on software as a service from an innovative CIO in manufacturing. He considers CRM, HR, and probably e-mail as ready to be delivered via SaaS. Consider how vital those three pieces -- sales, people, and collaboration -- are to a company.
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Linux(Foundation).Com
For what felt like forever, Linux.com was a stale holdover from an earlier generation of the Web -- and an earlier generation of Linux. Now it's about to get a major makeover, thanks to both the Linux Foundation and SourceForge. To get a better idea of how the revamp will take shape, I got up close and personal with people on both sides. On the SourceForge side, I spoke with Jon Sobel (official title: Group President, Media); on the Linux Foundation side, Amanda McPherson (VP of Marketing and Developer Programs).
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Google Updates Picasa Beta For Mac And (Yet Again) Tweaks Gmail
Never content with the status quo, Google's engineers toil continuously to bring us new and improved versions of its products. Today, Google announced an updated beta version of Picasa for Macs, and new filtering features in Gmail.
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NetSuite Tries To Lure Sage Customers To SaaS
NetSuite has gotten some fire in its belly lately. Today it offered Sage Group customers 50% off the first year of a SaaS subscription, and 100 hours of free professional services, if they sign up by June 30, calling it the "Sage Switch" program. This follows a program for SAP R/3 customers that it calls "Business ByNetSuite," a jab at SAP's idled Business ByDesign ERP SaaS.
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Future Of The Phone, Again
A couple of interesting developments have come up recently when it comes to desk phones. A recent blog by Steve Slattery, VP and general manager of Cisco's IP Communications Business Unit, made reference to two market research studies that offered up conflicting projections on the future of the desk phone:
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Virtualizing Switch Management
What has been happening to your data center port density over the years? If you've been adding server hardware, then chances are port density has been increasing in one's and two's. But if you've been adding virtualization, the port density may be rising in four's or eight's as you try to balance network I/O over multiple NIC’s. Get ready to virtualize your management.
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Embedded Watch: Intel's Atom Ambitions Stretch Far Beyond Netbooks
You've got to hand it to Intel for never taking no for an answer. The marketplace has long told the semiconductor behemoth that it loves its desktop and laptop processors, likes its NAND flash chips (no profit there, though), and is amenable to its graphics strategy. But as for its forays into the communications and embedded spaces, well, not so much. Nevertheless, Intel CEO Paul Otellini is taking yet another crack at those last two areas. Read on to find out why.
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Doctors Yelp At Online Ratings
You can count on doctors like no other group to fight any kind of change. Whether it's trying to prevent "alternative" medicinal practices from horning in on their business, or adopting new technologies, doctors have shown they'll put their vested interests ahead of the common good.
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Palm's Treo Pro Finally Coming To Sprint March 15
Palm first announced the Treo Pro back in the summer of 2008. It's been a long time coming, but Sprint will finally offer the Windows Mobile smartphone from Palm starting March 15 for $200.
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Microsoft Tells Senator It's Laying Off American And Non-American Workers
When Microsoft announced plans in January to lay off 5,000 workers over 18 months, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, fired off a letter questioning Microsoft about who the company was planning to cut. Grassley wanted to know whether Microsoft -- which has been lobbying Congress for years to raise the cap on H-1B visas -- would cut foreign workers before Americans. Grassley finally got a reply from Microsoft yesterday.
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Apple Refreshes Desktops: Is The iMac Irrelevant?
Apple this week upgraded its desktop line, boosting the speed and power of its Mac Mini, iMac, and Mac Pro. The Mini is once again a nice low-end system for someone looking for a second Mac. The company added even more power to the Mac Pro, its high-end desktop for people who need a lot of power and are willing to spend a lot of money for it. That leaves the all-in-one iMac stuck in the middle. In an era when desktop PC sales are being eroded by netbooks, notebook computers, and the floundering economy, how long will the iMac survive?
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Enterprise Computing In The Cloud
The past few days have brought new evidence that cloud computing can be used for more than lightweight and newly built Web applications. IBM, SAP, and Microsoft have just revealed efforts to use the cloud to move and manage the kinds of big workloads that are common in corporate data centers.
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Jekyll & Hyde: Android Gets Finance, Guitar Hero Apps
Google recently released its Finance application for the Android platform. Finance gives Android users the ability to check stock quotes and other financial information in real time. In case Finance doesn't sound too interesting, Hands-On Mobile also released a version of Guitar Hero for Android. So now the inner investor and inner rock star in you can work and have fun on your Android phone.
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Is U.S. Losing Role As #1 Market For New Technologies?
A deeper and broader entrepreneurial drive among consumers in India, Brazil, and China is displacing the U.S. from its leading role as the key market for new networked technologies, according to a report from Accenture. "To put it bluntly, these consumers see networked technologies and services as a way to make money," a news article about the study says.
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Drawing The Green Line With Netbooks
Where do you draw the green line when it comes to buying a notebook? I may have crossed it with my purchase yesterday of an Acer Aspire One netbook -- ironically, to cover an environmental summit in Istanbul in two weeks. Between the jet fuel and Acer's poor environmental record, I may be doing more harm than good.
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Amazon Releases Kindle Software In iPhone App Store
Amazon has just released Amazon Kindle for iPhone. Since its initial release in 2007, the Kindle has been a hot seller, often having buyers on a waiting list to get one. The Kindle 2 was recently released and, by most accounts, it improves on its popular predecessor. For Amazon, this isn't about the hardware, though, it's about the content, and the company just took its first step into the content-only sales model for Kindle books.
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Is Antivirus Software Slipping?
A "study," released by a security firm just yesterday, points out the well-known weakness in signature-based antivirus software. But does this mean you shouldn't rely on antivirus software?
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Carly Fiorina Treated For Breast Cancer
Carly Fiorina had cancer surgery this week and, although it's been about four years since she left her post as CEO of Hewlett-Packard, she never left the national spotlight.
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Twittering Our Way To ... Where?
Socialtext is coming out with a Twitter-like tool for internal company use, prompting TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld to dub this "the year of the activity stream." There's a risk for companies here that CIOs can help manage: too much focus on process, not enough on the result.
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What, Nobody Told Me About The Asteroid?
OK, I just read that a meteor the size of a 10-story building passed within cataclysm range of the Earth yesterday, and nobody told me about it!
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Can Netbooks Survive The Carrier Subsidy Model?
AT&T recently began offering netbooks for the low price of $99 -- as long as you're willing to sign up for a $60-per-month wireless data contract. The Internet is a key tool for netbooks, but will the subsidy model really work as it does for cell phones?
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Cisco Tiptoes Into The Cloud
New hosted e-mail security offerings underscore the struggle of hardware vendors to stay relevant in the age of cloud services.
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iSCSI Strikes Back
With all the talk about FCoE and NFS it seems that iSCSI has become the odd man out. All reports indicate that Dell continues to do well with the EqualLogic acquisition but what Hewlett-Packard is doing with its LeftHand Networks purchase remains unclear. Don’t count iSCSI out yet, though -- companies are planning iSCSI storage solutions aimed right at the SME market.
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The Daily Show's Jon Stewart Looks At Washington's Twitter Obsession
In this clip from The Daily Show, host Jon Stewart and fake correspondent Samantha Bee cast skeptical eyes on Washington's embrace of Twitter, portraying Beltway Twitterers as a bunch of middle-aged members of Congress and journalists trying desperately to appear hip. Stewart plays the cranky old guy who's skeptical of Twitter, while Bee plays the breathless -- and clueless -- early adopter.
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iPhone Claims Nearly Two-Thirds Of Mobile Browser Share
According to research by Net Applications, the iPhone is used 66% of the time by people browsing the Web with their phone. Second place was JavaME at 9% share.
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Row 44 Flies Its Wi-Fi (Video Included)
Conveniently, surprisingly, I was flying from LAX to New York's JFK the very first day Gogo's wireless in-flight service launched on American Airlines. I had a lovely video chat, watched some YouTube, downloaded one of our videos, and instant messaged (some of it at the same time) for almost five hours. Everything worked perfectly. And I haven't used it since. Yet I was still excited to talk to Row 44, which is in trials with Southwest Airlines and Alaska Airlines.
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Evidence-Based Open Source Adoption
I mentioned to a friend of mine the other day how I was replacing Word with OpenOffice in the long run. He replied that they use OO exclusively at his place of work (mostly as a security measure, as it turns out). That provoked a question from another, skeptical friend: How do you know this is really going to help?
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Motorola Shows Off New Camera Phone That Looks Like A Nokia
Motorola recently published a Web site that provides details of an unannounced new phone. The ZN300 is a slider with a 3-megapixel camera and looks like it was designed in Espoo, not Schaumburg.
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Google Sticks Chat Feature Into iGoogle
Google's latest enhancement to its user-customizable iGoogle site is the ability to conduct Gmail chats from within iGoogle. The new feature means you can do more on the iGoogle site without having multiple windows open.
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Adobe And Time Warner: Another Big Step
Adobe announced what it calls an alliance with Time Warner, today, saying that Time Warner will fully embrace Adobe's Flash and video tools for Turner Broadcasting, Warner Bros., and HBO. As announcements go, I'm not all that partial to those touting new alliances, but this one adds snugly to the list of entertainment companies evolving their business models as advertisers Nip/Tuck some of their broadcast TV dollars.
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China Follows Moon-Crash With Exhale Ban, River-Paving
Following its deliberate crash of a lunar probe into the moon to gain experience with lunar landings, China is reportedly planning to ban humans from exhaling in order to gain experience with lower carbon dioxide levels. And it has been learned that as a third phase in its novel string of experiments, China is reportedly planning to fill its primary rivers with concrete to gain experience in driving trucks on water. Can these two followups really be true?
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Google's Outage Produces Microsoft Outrage
The much-reported Great Gmail Outage of 2009 would be a boon for Microsoft, if only it knew how to take advantage it. But instead of an alternative, it offers invective.
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White House Web Site Stops Using YouTube-Embedded Video
The White House stopped embedding YouTube videos on its Web site. Videos featuring U.S. President Barack Obama initially used long-term cookies to track blog visitors, whether or not they watched the video.
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Doing More Than Messaging With SMS
Just about everyone knows that you can send and receive text messages with their phones using SMS (Short Messaging Service). Texting, as it is sometimes called, is just the beginning, though, of what you can do with this service.
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With VMware, A Private Cloud In Every Data Center
VMware last week continued its push into the cloud computing market with updates to its vCloud initiative and API, Virtual Data Center Operating System (VDC-OS), and more. So, how many of its customers does VMware expect to deploy internal "private" clouds? Answer: all of them.
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Toyota Prius 2010: Better Mileage, Bottoming Sales?
Ask Toyota Prius owners what their average miles per gallon is and the answer you're likely to get is "50." Rounding is commonplace. The math can be fuzzy. But the 2010 model Prius makes the figure official.
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'Niagara' BlackBerry Falling Toward Summer Release On Verizon?
The rumor mill has churned out reports of a new BlackBerry headed to Verizon Wireless later this year. The Niagara, as it is called, would be another world phone for Verizon, able to work on its network in the United States as well as networks in Europe and Asia.
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Ambitious Startup Wants To Manage All Your Unstructured Data
Digital Reef swings for the data management fences by indexing and classifying all unstructured data in the enterprise. Top applications include e-discovery and storage management.
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Fear Of Obama IT Protectionism Policy Spreads In India
In the handful of days since President Obama vowed to punish U.S. "corporations that ship our jobs overseas," the backlash in India against such a disastrous move has spread to officials from government, IT industry associations, and leading Indian IT services companies such as Infosys and Wipro. And while they say they want to wait for more details, they are also clearly deeply concerned about the huge implications such policy would have.
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Don't Be Half-Safe -- Be All Unsafe!
There's little that's more frustrating than someone who only seems to get half the picture. Consider this article at TechRadar, "Open source doesn't make software safer." The underlying premise is one I've hammered on myself, but the way this article talks about it amounts to strawman snark.
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Satyam Woes Threaten SanDisk
Gadget maker SanDisk is warning investors that the trouble at scandal-plagued outsourcer Satyam has put its business operations at risk.
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Vote For Your Favorite Startup
This April, InformationWeek will unveil the Startup 50, the top tech companies shaking up IT. You can help decide which startups make the cut by voting for the most innovative, disruptive companies.
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The IT Opportunity In Sinking Consumer Demand
Predicting consumer demand has become a nightmare for CEOs. That makes this exactly the right time for CIOs to help their companies get a better grip on real-time sales.
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Bill Gates Has Banned The iPhone From His House
According to a recent interview given by Melinda Gates, wife of Microsoft pioneer Bill Gates, Apple's iPhone and iPod are two devices that are not permitted in the Gates household.
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Interview: Intel Talks Multicore Processor Trends, Chip Tech
Get ready for a new battle in the multicore wars. AMD is planning to ramp up production of its next-gen 32-nm processor in mid-2010. This follows on the heels of Intel's revelation that it'll be first to ship 32-nm parts with its Westmere chips late this year. What jumps out at me most here isn't that this is great news for consumers -- it is -- but that there's a big element of saber-rattling going on. That's because the 45-nm chips shipping from both vendors are still new themselves and far from obsolete. Read on for my interview with Intel's Stephen Smith, where he discusses new chip-making technology, server processors, and netbooks.
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Amazon Keeps It Simple With Kindle 2
My 67-year-old mother-in-law, who baby-sits my preschooler on Mondays, came bustling into our house this morning flush with excitement. She opened her bag and pulled out her new prize possession, the Kindle 2. She spent the weekend reading books on it, and concluded, "I love it."
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Smartphones Set To Double Market Share
According to In-Stat, smartphones are going to double their share of the mobile handset market in the next four years. Considering the success of devices such as the iPhone, the G1, and others, this isn't so hard to believe. But which platform will dominate?
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Should CIOs Play To Win, Or Play Not To Lose?
Is it better for CIOs to have high-level positions reporting to top executives, or to have mid-level roles where their ability to make great contributions is stifled by bureaucracy and politics but the job security is better? That's a question posed in a recent column on the public-sector Governing Web site. At first I thought it was a joke, but then I read the headline that delivered the punchline: "All CIOs Great And Small."
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Nokia's 5800 XpressMusic Off To A Rough Start, Sales Stopped
Nokia's first touch-screen phone went on sale in the United States last week. Unfortunately, it wasn't for sale very long. Users immediately complained about poor 3G performance, and Nokia stopped selling the phone mere hours after it went on sale.
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Sometimes, A Squad Of Geeks Isn't Enough
My PC stays busy 24 hours a day, with various chores like backup happening during the middle of the night. That makes an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) a must-have accessory. When I experienced three short power outages in a single windy day, my old UPS didn't carry the load at all despite a recent battery change. Facing the prospect of more unexpected afternoon de-lights, I ran out to Best Buy during lunch to get a replacement.
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