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The InformationWeek April 2009 Archive « March 2009 | Main | May 2009 » |
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Just Say No to Virtual Security FUD
What is special about a virtual computer—a VM? It’s a computer in a file. That’s it. It’s just a computer stored in a file with similar foibles and management issues as a physical computer. So why do some people invest virtual computers some magical transformative powers? Do they not understand what a virtual computer is?
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IBM Will Flex Financial Muscle In Cloud, Analytics, Outsourcing
Flexing its considerable financial muscle in strategic categories, IBM says it "will leverage our cash position to be opportunistic to accelerate our progress" in cloud computing and business analytics, while also reporting a whopping 50% jump in signings for long-term strategic-outsourcing deals in the financial-services sector.
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Twitter, Microsoft And... Oracle?
Apparently where there's Tweets, there's fire. Twitter may or may not have a business model (management claims it does), but traditional software vendors are apparently convinced there's money to be made in them thar' streams.
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Shopping Service Opens Up On Twitter
There is a new account on Twitter that gives you shopping assistance and since Twitter works on your mobile phone, this can be a useful companion when looking for something or when you have a question about a product. You just send @imshopping your question, in 140 characters of course, and it will respond with the information you are looking for.
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Meet The Palm Eos, Follow-Up To The Pre
Palm may not have announced it, but a new device called the Eos has been spotted on the Internet. It's thin, it's sexy, and it just might be more exciting than the Pre.
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Feds Ink Deals To Let Government Agencies Use Social Media
The General Services Administration reached agreements with popular social media networks like Facebook and YouTube to allow agencies to use the service. Previously, elements of the terms of these services blocked the government from using them.
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Make Linux Suck Less
Linux sucks! So says Bryan Lunduke, himself a Linux software developer, at a presentation he gave at Linux Fest Northwest. In truth, it's not a hatchet job -- it's exactly the kind of pointed and forceful Linux criticism we need more of.
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IBM CIO's Strategy: Run, Transform, Innovate
Like other CIOs, IBM's Mark Hennessy knows that a dollar saved on data center operations is a dollar earned for business-technology innovation. IBM has moved the dial on its IT budget 10 percentage points toward innovation in recent years, and Hennessy says there are still more operational efficiencies to be gained.
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Motorola CEO: 'Android-Based Devices' On Track For Late 2009
Today Motorola filed its first quarter earnings. Buried within the report was a juicy gem about the company's plans regarding Android devices, which CEO Sanjay Jha said will be available in time for the holidays. (Oh, and handset sales fell a whopping 45%.)
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BlackBerry Storm OS 4.7.0.141 Leaked Onto Interwebs
What feels like mere hours after we first learned about the existence of Storm firmware 4.7.0.141, it appears the Internet Gods have delivered it for your downloading pleasure.
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Riverbed Revenue Jumps 21% As It Sasses Cisco
Sparked by strong revenue growth in services and 500 new customers, Riverbed Technology reported revenue grew 21% in the first quarter to $88.5 million, and that it expects second-quarter revenue to be up by 13%-15% year over year. Emboldened by that success, Riverbed execs also told analysts they're beating Cisco "nine out of 10 times" even as Cisco and others offer discounts of 80% or more.
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Cloud Security Needs Its Rainmaker
The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) made its inaugural splash at last week's RSA Security Conference 2009 in San Francisco. The group kicked off an ambitious white paper that attempts to define everything from the architecture of cloud services to the impact of cloud services on litigation and encryption. It was a herculean effort to try to get this off the ground. And there is still much more work to do -- especially in the one area the group left out.
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A Plethora Of Pre News
I'm still waiting for some official word on when Palm's Pre is coming out, but a few items leaked this week that may point to a price. There's also speculation that Palm may cap the stock of the handset when it's released to create a buss. That's right, we may face Wii-like scarcities.
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Are You A Super-User?
A long list of big brand names are outsourcing customer service to unpaid, voluntary enthusiast users who staff and sometimes manage online company forums. I'm just not getting it, and I thought you might help me out.
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Pentagon Using Virtual Reality To Treat PTSD
The U.S. military is using virtual worlds to help treat veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
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Going On A Job Interview? Here's Some Help
Job interviews rank up there with root canal for most people. Wouldn't you want to know in advance the trickiest question your prospective employer might ask on your job interview?
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CIO At The CIA Recognized As IT Leader, Change Agent
For the second time in three weeks, the understandably low-key CIO of the CIA, Al Tarasiuk, has been in the public eye, this time in recognition for being named as a top IT leader and change agent at an industry event.
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iPhone OS 3.0 Beta 4 Adds Voice Memo Recorder
Late Tuesday, Apple made a fourth beta version of the iPhone 3.0 operating system available to developers. One new feature spotted in the software is a voice-recording application.
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Podcast: Is Twitter Making Us Stupider?
Leave it to Nicholas Carr to get us so twisted up that his mere name evokes a leer or a cheer, and rarely anything in between. His big stir ("Does IT Matter") gave way to "The Big Switch" (his book), and just for fun in between he published things like "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" Done questioning whether we matter, in "Twitter Dot Dash," he questioned our patter.
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Incubator Aims to Cook Up Potential Cloud Standards
A group of heavyweight tech vendors have assembled to put cloud interoperability and security specifications on a fast track to standardization
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New ProCurve Threat Module: Flexibility Requires Planning
HP ProCurve announced a new module for their ProCurve 8212 and 5400 modular switches. The Threat Management Module offers firewall, VPN, and IPS functions simultaneously on the switch backplane which is unlike Cisco’s approach with the Catalyst 6500 requiring separate security modules firewall, VPN, and IPS. The cost, however, is lower performance per module. ProCurve needs to increase module performance to make it a replacement for appliances.
Continue reading "New ProCurve Threat Module: Flexibility Requires Planning..."
The Palm Pre Costs Less To Build Than The iPhone, Storm And G1
The price point of the Palm Pre has been a much-debated topic ever since the phone was announced. iSuppli hasn't coughed up that nugget of information, but has estimated that the Pre costs a mere $138 to manufacture.
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You Can't Have Your Java And Fork It, Too
The other night I commiserated with a friend over Sun's sale to Oracle, with both of us agreeing gloomily that this most likely means the end of Java as we know it. Actually, it may mean a whole new beginning for Java -- or a whole bunch of new beginnings -- and that's exactly the problem.
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Application Aware Storage and Protection
In storage, its easy to forget that it is all about the application, especially when it comes to protection and more importantly recovery of that application. There is a wide variety of storage data protection from basic RAID to snapshots. There is an even wider variety of data protection software that provides multiple levels of protection, but between the two there is only rudimentary understanding of the application.
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Microsoft: We're Not Making A Zune Phone For Verizon Wireless
The Internet has been rife with a bevy of reports recently concerning new smartphone hardware (codename "Pink") from Microsoft. In response to the reports, Microsoft said in plain English: "Microsoft is not going into the phone hardware business."
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bMighty bSecure Virtual Event: SMB Security On A Budget - Today!
When times get tough, it's all too tempting to push security concerns aside -- especially at small and midsize companies with shrinking IT budgets. Fortunately, you don't have to make that mistake, there are ways to address security issues without breaking the bank. Today -- Wednesday, April 29 -- the bMighty bSecure virtual event brings together business and security experts to show you how to do exactly that.
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Microsoft's Tellme Voice Service For Windows Mobile
Microsoft's Tellme subsidiary is announcing a voice service that will be available to carriers and manufacturers for free for use on Windows Mobile 6.5 this fall. Users will be able to push a button on their phone to activate the service and say things like "Text Steve Jones" and the device would open up the SMS application, create a new message and pre-address it to Steve Jones.
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Motorola Ex-CFO Drama Continues
Today, Motorola's former CFO, Paul Liska, formally denied the allegations that he ran a data scrubber on his company-issued laptop to destroy evidence. Meanwhile, Motorola calls the whole thing an "extortion campaign."
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Sun CEO Schwartz To Staff: We've Fueled Entire Industries
In a memo to employees announcing the Oracle deal, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz makes every effort to emphasize the high value Oracle is placing on Sun's people. And, perhaps releasing his inner publicist, Schwartz also says Sun has "fueled entire industries with our people," driven the discovery of new drugs, and "transformed social media."
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Federal Reserve IT Analyst Arrest Highlights Internal Threat
I've always had a pick with the trite and hackneyed marketing hype among IT security vendors who repeated the "insiders conduct the most attacks," or "Insiders are the greatest risk." This most recent arrest stokes the debate that was rekindled with the recent release of Verizon Business' 2009 Data Breach Investigations Report.
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BlackBerry Round Up: Storm Firmware, Addiction App, Niagara Update
Today has been a busy one out in BlackBerry-land, so here's a tidy summation of all that's been discovered. We've received new word on the next firmware build for the BlackBerry Storm; a new application lets you test your BlackBerry addiction levels; and there's more info about the BlackBerry Niagara.
Continue reading "BlackBerry Round Up: Storm Firmware, Addiction App, Niagara Update..."
The Palm Pre Is On Its Way To The U.S.: Report
According to a report on everythingpre.com, the first shipment of Palm Pres has left Hong Kong and is headed east. Is the Pre's release imminent?
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CIOs and Risk: Not Me, Must Be The Other Guy/Gal!
My parents used to love telling me how, when I was a lad of about two or three years old, I would gleefully throw my two older brothers under the bus whenever my mom or dad inquired about a broken lamp or a spilled soda.
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Verizon Uses Microsoft To Make Apple Jealous
Wow. It looks like the rumor-mongering is getting out of control. Fresh off the talk that Verizon Wireless and Apple are getting hot and heavy about bringing out a CDMA iPhone, the Wall Street Journal is reporting Big V is talking with Microsoft to create an iPhone rival. Somehow, I don't think Apple's shaking in its boots.
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The Mystery Of SIP Trunking
I've gotten accustomed to the hot issues in our industry being about things other than, strictly speaking, technology: What's the future of Nortel? What's the future of Unified Communications? Will Microsoft beat out Cisco? Are the "legacy" vendors doomed?
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Google Not Connecting Swine Flu Dots
Google's map of swine flu outbreaks is useful if you need a geography lesson, but it's not doing much to help people figure out where the disease is heading next or, more importantly, how it got started in the first place.
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Amazon Acquires Stanza E-Book Reader: Superior Selection Meets Superior Software
The other day, I tweeted that it would be awesome if the Amazon Kindle store sold books through the Stanza iPhone app. Yesterday, Amazon acquired Lexcycle, the company behind Stanza. I must never use this power for evil.
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Is Demand Slowing For Amazon Web Services?
In the first quarter of 2009, Amazon's net sales surged 18% to $4.9 billion, fueled by sales of electronics and other general merchandise, which jumped 38% compared to a year ago. Holding the company back, however, was its "other" sales category, which grew only 8% and includes revenues from Amazon Web Services.
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Working Together To Avoid The Patently Absurd
Patent reform may be in the air, but it'll be some time before the real fruits are reaped. In the meantime, we have to maintain our own guard against unfairly-granted patents, something the Open Invention Network's doing proactively with, for instance, the patents at the heart of the Microsoft / TomTom lawsuit.
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Richard Stallman Slams SaaS
If you're known by the enemies you keep, then Software as a Service received a boost the other day when it was bashed by Richard Stallman, the free-software GNUru. Stallman is such a control freak about his particular vision of software "freedom" that he says the following about SaaS: "You must not use it!"
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IBM to OEM Brocade Switches. It's IBM vs HP.
IBM and Brocade jointly announced that Big Blue will be selling Brocade network switches branded as IBM Ethernet switches. The agreement extends the existing IBM/Brocade OEM deal for SAN equipment. A lot of people will see this as a reaction to Cisco's UCS launch, but according to IBM, nothing is further from the truth. I think it pits IBM against HP.
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More App Stores On The Way
Software maker Handmark has created a new platform of software designed to aid carriers and device manufacturers launch application stores for their phones, as reported by the Kansas City Business Journal.
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Just Because Security Budget Takes A Hit, Doesn't Mean Security Has To
At last week's RSA Conference in San Francisco, there was as much talk about the economy as there was on IT security. And while the show appeared to pull a healthy number of attendees, at times the show floor seemed filled with more vendor reps and consultants, than IT buyers. But a few studies released last week show while vendor's may like to hype fear, the infosec economy certainly isn't all gloom and doom.
Continue reading "Just Because Security Budget Takes A Hit, Doesn't Mean Security Has To..."
Man Thumbs 400 Page Novel On F Train
If you consider yourself a Blackberry ninja, able to pound out email after email on the device, even you might be humbled by what Peter Brett did. He thumbed his first novel while riding the F train.
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Satyam Installs SAP And Its Employees Get Well-Deserved Praise
Most of Satyam's 40,000 employees, who had nothing to do with the financial fraud that nearly destroyed the company earlier this year, have spent the past three months dutifully serving their customers and fulfilling their professional obligations. So it was nice to see a big client lavish praise on Satyam's employees upon completion of a complex SAP project vital to India's security and national defense.
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BI (Business Intrusion) Software Needs A Reality Check
Here's the ideal scenario for a retailer: you visit XYZ.com and search for a book on how to avoid annoying marketing scams. They go, hey Michael, your wife's birthday is coming up in a few days and we noticed she was cruising lingerie at Victoria's Secret. She's also buying a pair of tickets to the Dominican Republic on Thursday. Why don't you surprise her with this nice pair of high-heeled sandals that we have in her size. We know yellow is her favorite color.
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Google: We're Not Like Pirate Bay
In the wake of a Swedish court's decision to imprison the operators of The Pirate Bay, a Web site that helps users search for BitTorrent files in the same way that Google handles general Internet file searches, Google wants to make sure everyone understands that it's no Pirate Bay.
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Cloud Vendor Cassatt Faces The End
Cassatt, a six-year-old enterprise software company, is "close to the end" of operations, according to Forbes. Cassatt had positioned its data center management software as a platform for private clouds, but the startup's steep licensing fees are apparently more than IT departments are willing to spend in this economy.
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Sprint Insider Spills Dirt On The Pre
Despite the anticipation from smartphone fans, Palm and Sprint have kept mum about a lot of Pre details. We still don't know the price, release date, app store infrastructure, and a host of other things for a device that's supposed to launch within a few months. Fortunately, a rouge Sprint employee has a blog that leaks some more information.
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Forget The iPhone, Job Listing Points To Android Phone On Verizon's Network
A new job posting has appeared that suggests Verizon Wireless is considering Android devices for its network. Specifically, the job title is "Android Device Expert." Does that mean Verizon is ready to rock the Android?
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The Ultimate I/O
Researchers have sent a Twitter message by simply thinking it via a setup that read a user's thoughts, and then translated them into text. The folks at Twitter should embrace this experiment, and at least two of the wild possibilities it suggests.
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The Trend Towards Open Source: It's There, But Not Inevitable
I spent most of last week and the whole of my weekend knee-, hip-, and finally neck-deep in Ubuntu 9.04 for an upcoming feature on the OS. I had my problems with it, and from that had a philosophical "what exactly are we trying to accomplish here" moment (shilling for rant). But after the dust settled, I had a better picture of how all these platforms complemented each other.
Continue reading "The Trend Towards Open Source: It's There, But Not Inevitable..."
Twitter Backlash Bubbles Up
I was going to weigh in with yet another opinion about whether microposts reminiscent of that 1970s ad -- "if u cn rd ths msg, u cn gt a gd jb" -- presage the post-literate future or are instead our decade's pet-rock moment. However, what's more interesting is the brewing battle over whether Twitter backlash is for real or just a made-up story attempting to throw cold water on the popular Web 2.0 time-suck.
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Virtual Appliances for Amazon's Storage Service
Vembu Technologies lets managed service providers resell storage services on top of Amazon's cloud.
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Will SSD Delay FCoE?
In a recent entry we discussed the impact of Solid State Disk (SSD) on the IO infrastructure. Where SSD may have the most significant impact is on the adoption of 8GB fibre vs. Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE). SSD has a performance profile that is worthy of the 10GB speeds of FCoE but will FCoE be adopted quickly enough by IT prior to SSD on 8GB Fibre establishing a foot hold?
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Apple And Verizon In iPhone Talks: Report
USA Today is reporting that Apple and Verizon are in "high-level" talks with one another to bring a CDMA version of the iPhone to market come 2010, when Apple's exclusivity deal with AT&T expires. I don't believe it.
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Samsung Shows Off Its First Android Phone
Today, Samsung made good on its promise to deliver a smartphone based on Google's Android platform. It announced the i7500, its first foray into the world of Android. How does it compare to HTC's hardware?
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Infosys, Wipro, And Tata All Seek To Hire More Non-Indians
Infosys, Wipro, and Tata are all looking to hire more non-Indian workers to allay protectionist concerns and to recast their image as creators of jobs rather than relocators of jobs, and Wipro's plans include a second U.S.-based development center. But an ill-advised comment from the head of HR at Infosys could make this effort much more contentious than it needed to be.
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Microsoft Product Improvement Is Not Innovation
Wow. To those who say that there are no Microsoft fans, the messages from my last blog entry prove you wrong. One of the complaints was my assertion that Microsoft does not innovate anymore; perhaps the problem is in the definition of that word. To me, slow but steady improvement in existing products and services isn't innovation, it's maintenance and support. Those are important things, no doubt, especially to existing customers, but they're not the same as innovation.
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Gotta Go? These Three Bathroom Finders Can Help
Sometimes you need to find a public restroom while out and about. In some cities, it's easy to find a bathroom, while in others -- including New York City -- it's pretty difficult. Here are three tools that can help you when you're in need.
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Amazon Says CIO Interest In Its Cloud Services Is Surging
Amazon says CIO interest is rising rapidly in its enterprise-caliber Amazon Web Services, and that commitment for the new business starts at "the very highest levels of the company."
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Red Hat Sponsors Forum On Open Source In The Cloud
It's often seemed obvious to me that clouds and Linux go hand in hand. Amazon's EC2 started out running workloads under Linux in a modified open source Xen file format. So why couldn't the operation of the whole cloud be based on open source code?
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Mobile Roundup
This week has been packed with financial results from all the major tech companies, and AT&T, Samsung and Apple look like the big winners on the mobile phone side so far. But with all the earnings reports, a few interesting tidbits may have slipped by you, and I'll walk through them after the jump.
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Despite Economy, One-Quarter Billion Phones Sold During Q1
The global economic slowdown has seemingly impacted every company out there to some degree. The economy has been an ongoing factor in the performance if the world's handset makers, but that didn't stop more than 250 million people from buying new phones in the first quarter of 2009.
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VMware Lands Two Customer Deals Over $20 Million Each
Despite overall slumping revenue from first-quarter enterprise license deals, VMware said it booked two of the largest such deals in its history with a major outsourcing vendor and another in the defense sector. The company also released some stats on the number of virtual machines some of its biggest clients are now managing.
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Federal CIO Vivek Kundra Sees Potential Of Cloud Computing
Cloud computing has a supporter in Federal CIO Vivek Kundra, who told me in an April 23 interview that he saw potential for big savings with the cloud approach. In fact, the fed's information portal, USA.gov, is being moved to a cloud-computing infrastructure within weeks.
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How The Defense Department Should Use Social Media
The National Defense University recently released a report on how the Defense Department can benefit from social media. They did a really nice job of it too -- they're a good set of rules, not just for government, but for any organization.
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Wikipedia At Risk From Financial Meltdown?
We've all come to take important free online services like Wikipedia for granted, and sleep soundly with the knowledge that much of the work done keeping them relevant is done by volunteers. But that neglects the fact that Wikipedia and other services still need to pay for servers, storage, power and other fixed costs.
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Hold Your Breath And Say 'Sun!'
A good deal of the noise over the Oracle/Sun acquisition centered around what would happen to all the flagship software products on Sun's side -- OpenSolaris, Java, MySQL. Look no further than Monty Widenus, the original MySQL developer and founder of MySQL AB itself, for the word on that -- and the word is, frankly, not good.
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Google Brings TIFF And PowerPoint Viewer To Browsers
No PowerPoint? No problem! Google has added the ability to view TIFF and PPT files directly from the Web browser without the need to install additional software.
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RIM Tweaks Facebook 1.5 To Clear Up Bugs
If you rushed to download Facebook 1.5 for your BlackBerry when it first became available earlier this week, you might have noticed a few glitches. You're not alone. RIM has already issued a minor update to the application to smooth out the problems.
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One Billion Served
The iPhone App Store has served up its one billionth app. This is an impressive achievement in the eight to nine months the App Store has been open. The numbers though have certainly been bolstered by downloads of apps that do little more than give a giggle or a grin shortly after downloading, only to be deleted a few hours later, like the iPint (fake beer app) or iFart (self-explanatory).
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Google Conceives Toolbar Labs, First New Feature Is My Location For Desktop Browsers
Google has added a new lab to its series of feature-generating experimental workshops. Toolbar Labs will work on new features for the Google Toolbar. Its first official day on the job, it is introducing a new feature for desktop browsers that automatically makes them location aware.
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IBM CFO: We Had 62 Unix Competitive Displacements In Q1
Earlier this week, IBM reported declines in many parts of its hardware business. But in spite of the broad hardware downturn, CFO Mark Loughridge said IBM convinced 62 CIOs to rip and replace Unix systems in the quarter, and that Linux MIPS were up more than 50%.
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Microsoft's Model Is Not Working Anymore
This week's contrast between Apple and Microsoft couldn't be any sharper. Both companies announced their quarterly results in the past week, and the simple summary is that Microsoft was down and Apple was up. The story behind those opposite financial directions, however, reveals some disturbing and continuing weaknesses in Microsoft's business model.
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Yes, We're Talking Mainframes
Sure, much of our audience is thinking "Seriously dude? You're bumming me out. I've been working for a few hours and I almost have my iPhone virtualized. I'm gonna have, like, three iPhones running on one phone." But if you're one of the select few who sees the real future of virtualization, have I got a survey for you.
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Social Networks A New Security Frontline
USA Today ran an interesting story about how cybercriminals are using social media in greater numbers to attack users. What started as a trickle last year has quickly sprung to an open fire hydrant, as criminals turn to low-paid grunts to crack captchas.
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Is Oracle Starting To Look Like Blockbuster?
I know I'm going to get a lot of flack for what I'm about to say, but when Oracle announced earlier this week that it would acquire Sun Microsystems, I immediately thought of Blockbuster Video.
Continue reading "Is Oracle Starting To Look Like Blockbuster?..."
Oracle Purchase Of Sun Yields New Competitive Advantages
Oracle's grab for Sun is "an astounding move" that will enhance Oracle's ability to compete against Microsoft, VMware, IBM, and others, a new analyst report says. The three gems are infrastructure, channel-partner ecosystem, and the missing ingredients to offer robust cloud and virtualization solutions.
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Craigslist Victim's Favorite Band? The Killers
The Web lets us go beyond the headlines and find out more about names in the news. Psychos and victims now leave behind a digital trail that offers greater insights into who these people are, or were. In a sadly ironic twist, Facebook reveals that one of Craigslist murder victim Julissa Brisman's favorite bands was a rock group called The Killers. It also shows that in most respects she was a typical young woman--and that's troubling.
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The Open Source Name Game
Dana Blankenhorn at ZDNet has proposed another name for open source. He wants to call it "democratic software." Me, I'd rather it just be good software, no matter what label we put on it or what development method we use.
Continue reading "The Open Source Name Game..."
Apple Is Already Selling A Netbook
Don't let Apple COO Tim Cook fool you. During the company's earnings call yesterday, Cook did everything but pick up a netbook and set it on fire, kick it across the room and spit on it.
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EU Approves Price Caps On Internet Access
According to Reuters the European union is going to put price caps on text messages and data usage for users that roam in the area. This should be welcome news to travelers that try to keep in touch when overseas.
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Google Makes Shopping Easier With iPhone And Android App
Starting today, Google is now offering a mobile version of Google Product Search for the iPhone and Android smartphones. The idea is to make gathering product information easier while on the go.
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Mac Sales - Not As Bad As They Could Have Been
First of all: I want to know what they're smoking in Cupertino -- and where I can get a duffel bag full of the stuff? The famous Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field is apparently strong enough to enclose the company in an economic boom, even as the rest of the world is going through the toughest times in at least a generation.
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Alltel Nabs CDMA Version Of BlackBerry Pearl Flip
Alltel's customers just got one more BlackBerry to choose from. Starting early next month, Alltel will be selling the BlackBerry Pearl Flip 8230 for $80.
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DeDupe Team Up
There is a growing trend in storage lately, the concept of a manufacturer tapping another developer to help them compete in the market. This allows two smaller suppliers to team up against the larger suppliers. One of the best examples of this is NAS vendors adding deduplication functionality to their systems.
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T-Mobile USA And HTC Have Sold 1 Million G1 Android Phones
The HTC G1 has passed an important milestone in the U.S. T-Mobile's recently released quarterly report shows that one million of the devices have been sold to customers in the U.S.
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IBM CFO Tells Analysts Oracle Plus Sun Changes 'Nothing'
Asked during a quarterly presentation to financial analysts for his reaction to Sun's decision to be acquired by Oracle after discussions with IBM broke down, IBM CFO Mark Loughridge offered a mild variation of "fuhgeddaboudit" by saying that in the ongoing competition for CIOs' decisions and dollars, the Oracle-Sun combination changes "nothing."
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PBS On The FRONTLINE Of Digital Nation
FRONTLINE, the investigative program from PBS, is producing a documentary you can watch online months before it's finished, and even influence in mid-course.
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Wireless, Life Sciences Winners In VC Deals
Venture capital funding may have dropped overall in the first quarter of this year, but not all sectors suffered as seen by the multimillion dollar deals granted to the likes of Meru, Beceem, Stokes, Lavante, iScience, and Ausra.
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JC Penney CEO And CIO Put IT At Heart Of New Strategy
Retailer JC Penney's CEO and CIO are telling analysts and shareholders at today's annual meeting that IT has moved front and center in the company's strategy. The company is pushing traditional IT infrastructure management to third parties and is focusing its 1,100-member IT team on exciting, delighting, and extracting revenue from customers.
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How To Vet Technology Startups
The release of InformationWeek's Startup 50 raises the old question: Should IT departments do business with startups at all? The unequivocal answer is yes, and here's my advice on how to pick the right ones.
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AT&T Hates On The Palm Pre, And Apparently Has A Short-Term Memory
AT&T sent around a memo that extols the iPhone and bashes the Palm Pre. This type of document has surfaced in the past, and will surely show up again. The idea is to give sales associates arguments to use in favor of an AT&T phone rather than a competing model. Palm's Pre was sure to see this type of treatment at some point, and here it is.
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Where Is Open Source?
No, not "what", but "where". As in, check out this nifty map courtesy of Red Hat that shows levels of open source adoption in different countries around the world. It's eyebrow-raising research, not least of all because the results go against a couple of conventional wisdoms about open source.
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Facebook 1.5 For BlackBerries Goes Live
If you're an avid Facebook user and are accessing it from your BlackBerry, there's good news from Research In Motion. The latest version of the application was made available today, and it includes a host of key new features. Updated!
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Symantec Acquires Startup 50 Company
Mi5 Networks, which makes a Web security appliance, will be integrated into Symantec's product line later this year.
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Cellular Network Cards Miss Market Opportunity
Sprint has released their new 2-in-1 Aircard 402. The card works in both a PCMCIA II slot or the newer ExpressCard slot. For someone that may have multiple laptops to work with, this may be very handy. As I look at my netbook though, an Acer Aspire One, maybe not so much.
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Podcast: AMD Loss Obscures Aggressive Chip Plans
AMD's persistent economic challenges -- it just reported a first quarter loss -- have obscured its very real technology story. The scrappy chipmaker remains on track with an aggressive Opteron server-chip roadmap, which will see its six-core Istanbul processor fielded in the next several months, and its 8- and 12-core designs coming in 2010. I talked about Operton recently with Vlad Rozanovich, who heads up AMD's enterprise sales efforts in the United States. Read on to access the podcast.
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Lego, Rock Band Building Up Business
I can shred to "Detroit Rock City" and my cowbell is perfect on "Don't Fear The Reaper," but soon I'll have to learn new licks -- make that bricks -- now that Lego's getting onstage too.
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NSA Does Not Want To Lead U.S. Cybersecurity Efforts. This Is Good News
Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander told a packed security audience here at the RSA Conference 2009 that the National Security Agency wants to help support the nation's critical IT security infrastructure efforts as part of a "team" effort. And that the NSA isn't interesting in the job of running the security of the critical IT security infrastructure.
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Oracle Purchase Of Sun A Monster Step Backward, CIO Says
The CIO at Case Western Reserve University, which uses Sun's MySQL open-source database as well as Oracle databases, says the Oracle takeover of Sun is "a monster step backward for those of us who are committed to sustaining open source," according to The Wall Street Journal.
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Windows 7 Starter Edition Is A Non-Starter
Despite the flagging economy, the netbook category has shown encouraging growth over the past year. Well, it's been encouraging at least for companies like Asus and Acer that have built tiny notebooks that people are eager to buy. Netbooks have mostly been a challenge for Microsoft, though, which has struggled to find a version of Windows that will run on these tiny systems.
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U.S. Fighting Cyber-Spy Threat
UPDATED Spies have breached project plans for a vital U.S. fighter jet project and the Air Force's air traffic control system, reports the Wall Street Journal, hot on the heels of an earlier WSJ report detailing infiltration of the U.S. electrical grid by the Chinese and Russian governments.
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Google Gives Users Fractional Control Over Search Results For 'Me'
I admit it. I've Googled myself. My guess is that you have, too. It's not because we're egomaniacs, but that we're curious to know what turns up. The problem is you couldn't control the information Google delivers about you -- until now.
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CIO Will Advise Feds On $20 Billion Health IT Bill
John Glaser, CIO at Partners Healthcare, will be heading down to D.C. the week of May 4, to begin a six month stint helping to hammer out details of the federal government's $20 billion stimulus programs for health IT.
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What If Cisco Acquires EMC
An intriguing idea, isn’t it? Outlandish, you say? Maybe, maybe not. The fight for the data center is on. Brocade acquired Foundry solidifying the storage giant in the data center. HP ProCurve's One program forms a solid partnership to round out data center components. Oracle's acquisition of Sun gives Oracle data center hardware and software as well as Java, Sun’s virtualization platform, and their identity management software. Cisco buying EMC makes sense.
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Is IBM Looking To Acquire SAP To Match Oracle/Sun?
Facing the prospect of all-Oracle stacks featuring Sun servers running Solaris OS on top of an Oracle database with all reporting through Hyperion, IBM might be considering a bid for SAP, a securities analyst speculates. He even cites a 2006 comment from SAP co-founder Hasso Plattner that only three companies would make ideal matches for SAP: Google, Microsoft, and IBM.
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'Born To Go Fast', Bluetooth SIG Formally Adopts 3.0+HS Specification
Today the Bluetooth Special Interest Group officially unveiled the long-awaited Bluetooth 3.0+High Speed specification. The real news is that, moving forward, Bluetooth 3.0-equipped devices will be able to blast data back and forth at 24Mbps.
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Twittering And YouTubing To A Better Iraq
Executives from Web 2.0 darlings including Twitter, YouTube, and WordPress are on a U.S. State Department tour of Iraq, looking for ways that social media can help. The tools, if used wisely, could be helpful at bringing people together and organizing in the war-torn country.
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Sun's Deep Tech Bench Is Biggest Asset For Oracle
The most interesting omission I've seen in all the nattering about Oracle's planned acquisition of Sun Microsystems is discussion of whether the technical talent at Sun will mesh better with their new masters than they would have had the acquiring party been IBM. My counterintuitive answer is, yes.
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Sun's Big Flameout
Oh, man, did I ever had a bad feeling something like this would happen. Sun went from being a possible acquisition for IBM -- a company that could have done right by them across the board -- to being snapped up by Oracle, who are most likely going to take the hardware portion of Sun and throw the software over its shoulder.
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IBM's Hardware Slump Bodes Ill For Sun-Oracle
Fresh off their $7.4 billion deal to acquire Sun Microsystems, Oracle execs likely paid close attention to IBM's first quarter results Monday, given that Big Blue sells many of the same tech goods and services for which Sun is known. The news wasn't so good.
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Is AT&T Having A Fire Sale On iPhones?
AT&T recently dropped the price of refurbished 3G iPhones to the meager sum of $150. The price drop, along with a bevy of new features being uncovered in iPhone OS 3.0, have fueled speculation that AT&T is clearing out stock to make room for the next-generation iPhone.
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Disappointed In Thin?
In a recent review of Symantec's 2009 Stop Buying Storage Survey, an odd result on thin provisioning might get overlooked. 42% of users are essentially disappointed in their thin provisioning investment, and another 37% only indicated seeing moderate improvement. If you aren't in the small group that saw significant improvement, you may have invested in the wrong thin provisioning technology.
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Windows Mobile 6.5 May Launch Not Likely
Last week, there was a ton of news that Windows Mobile 6.5 would launch May 11. This came from an announcement on the Windows Mobile blog. It seems though that the word "launch" wasn't the right word, and there won't be a May 2009 launch for the anxiously awaited mobile platform.
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Hospital CIOs: 'Impossible' To Balance Cuts, EHR Funding
Most hospital CIOs are facing a second round of 2009 IT budget cuts but must somehow begin funding electronic health records projects or face penalties in the form of reduced government subsidies. Two-thirds of CIOs say that balancing act is impossible.
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Calif. State University Virtualizes To Save Power
I dialed in recently to an online technology discussion sponsored by Wikibon.org, a community of technology professionals. Speaking was Rich Avila, director of server and network operations at California State, who said saving power wasn't a fuzzy, feel good goal for him. It was a necessity.
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For Want Of A Working Keyboard
While most everyone else was wrestling with the specter of Oracle swallowing Sun, I was wrestling with something a little more prosaic: getting my laptop keyboard to not die every time I took my system out of suspend mode while running Ubuntu 9.04 RC. Sometimes all it takes is one thing to wreck your enthusiasm, and I consider a dead keyboard on resume to be a real killjoy. In the aftermath of all that monkeying, I asked myself a question: What is the real goal of desktop Linux anymore, anyway?
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Introducing InformationWeek's Startup 50
Innovation is alive and well, as demonstrated by the companies on our first-ever list of 50 compelling young technology companies
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Mad Scientists In Google Labs Cook Up Two More Services
The engineers in Google's Labs have crafted two more services that they think will be helpful to the average Joe or Jane. The first will help image searchers find "similar" results, and the second will list all news in chronological order.
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Oracle Plus Sun Could Trigger Huge Growth In India
The CIO of a major Indian bank already doing significant business with both companies says Oracle's acquisition of Sun "will bring a lot of value" to his company, and the CIO of an Indian retail chain expects the acquisition to lower his costs for bundled solutions by up to 15%.
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RightScale Trends Right With Hybrid Cloud Support
Cloud computing management company RightScale, whose services companies use to manage and deploy resources in Amazon Web Services and other clouds, aims to be able to manage private and hybrid public-private clouds, starting with support for Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud.
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Oracle's Acquisition of Sun Changes Identity Management Landscape
Oracle's stealing Sun at the altar of a possible marriage with IBM not only saves Oracle from a long-standing partnership going stale, but also significantly bolsters Oracle's security capabilities.
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Angelina Jolie's Latest Love Is The Palm Pre
Shock jock Howard Stern may have picked a BlackBerry over the Palm Pre, but the unreleased device has captured the heart of actress Angelina Jolie.
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An Open Letter To Oprah: How To Get Good At Twitter
Dear Oprah: Looks like you've signed up for a Twitter account. That's terrific. Welcome! I've enjoyed Twitter for more than two years now, so let me offer you a couple of tips for making your Twitter experiences enjoyable and productive.
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Developers: Palm's webOS Is The Bomb
Some developers who've gotten a head-start working on applications for Palm's webOS have indicated that they like what they see. A lot. Pandora's CTO noted, "Everything about the Pre feels like it's 'future-oriented,' not an iPhone-inspired knockoff."
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Microsoft's Windows 7 "Starter" Could Be A Brand Stopper
Microsoft is reportedly taking a version of its XP OS intended for entry-level PCs, and repurposing its post-Vista incarnation to run netbooks. Its name and functionality do little good for the company's brand.
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Federal IT Dream Team Faces Hard Realities
With President Obama's appointments of Aneesh Chopra as federal CTO and Jeffrey Zients as chief performance officer, and with Vivek Kundra in office as federal CIO, the pieces are in place for the United States to raise the bar on IT strategy and implementation in government. The trio represent a dream team of IT innovators, but it's solving the tough challenges of the here and now by which they must also be judged.
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Security Concerns Using Personal Devices For Work
A surprising number of people use their personal phone for work to one degree or another. If it is for the occasional business call, most companies have nothing to worry about. If, however, they are using the phone to access corporate resources or store company information, it can be cause for concern. Tech Republic has a post with some interesting statistics on this unauthorized use of personal phones for company business.
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How The Kindle Will Save Newspapers
The Kindle is changing a lot more about reading habits than we realize, writes Steven Johnson in a brilliant piece in today's Wall Street Journal. It is doing for books what the Internet (and Google) have already done for newspapers by making books and their contents instantly available. But the changes it will bring to all forms of publishing are even more profound.
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Google Says Foreclosure Searches Up 42%, Bankruptcy 53%
Noting that its search engines have become a reflection of the state of the economy, a Google exec said year-over-year searches on foreclosures are up 42%, bankruptcy 53%, and unemployment more than 100%. But the aggregate search data also reveal areas of growth and opportunity, he said.
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Intel Speaks Truth To Healthcare (Plus, Video On Their $250-Million Alliance With GE)
My latest video takes you behind the scenes at Intel's announcement of its $250-million healthcare alliance with GE. But what interested me even more than the launch product (a monitoring system for seniors) was the bold language by Intel CEO Paul Otellini and GE chairman Jeff Immelt, neither of whom minced words in saying the U.S. healthcare system is broken.
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EBay: Disruption Isn't Always Good
This month marks the one-year anniversary for eBay CEO John Donahoe, who replaced Meg Whitman in April 2008. In his earlier position as president of eBay Marketplaces, Donahoe already had the reins of eBay's biggest division. During that era, he was talking about "disrupting ourselves before we get disrupted," and he seems to be carrying that philosophy with him. But is eBay's kind of disruption really a good thing for eBay or its customers?
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I've Been Exploited
Earlier this week, I converted my main blog from the Drupal content management system to Wordpress. Within 24 hours, I was exploited.
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Open Source You Can Use, April Edition
This episode: OpenOffice gets another revision to the right of the decimal point, Remote Desktop becomes that much less crucial, and one of the original wikis.
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Oracle ERP Project Survives Cuts At $1.5B Metals Company
While the global recession has forced a 119-year-old metals company to cut $65 million out of this year's operating budget, the company is committed to funding the completion by year's end of an Oracle ERP implementation essential in its evolution to a global supply-chain provider or products and services. The payoffs will include operational enhancements as well as costs savings well into the future.
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Citrix NetScaler Gives Servers, Planet A Break
If it's true that spam is killing the planet, then Twitter is one of its henchmen. And so are Flash, Flex, Ajax, AIR, Silverlight -- they're all soldiers in a zombie army of Watt-chompers.
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SSD And The Infrastructure
In a recent blog on InformationWeek's sister site Internet Evolution, David Vellante's "Flash Drives Set to Give Internet a Performance Boost" suggests that fibre drives might be replaced by flash drives within the next three years. In our presentation last year on "The State of SSD" we made a similar prediction. Since David and I agree that this is a forgone conclusion, what will the impact of a rapid acceleration be on the infrastructure?
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Balancing The Personal And Professional On Facebook
The CIO of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center advises her peers to get over their fear of Facebook and other social networks, and learn to use them effectively. Participating in social networks can help you build your career, connect with peers, and share ideas, says Linda Y. Cureton. Her advice is good, but not always easy to follow -- particularly balancing the personal and professional.
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Forget Street Views, Google Maps Adds Webcams
Webcams are everywhere. Many are in public places, such as Times Square, or the Akihabara district in Tokyo. They are often used for weather or traffic observation (OK, and maybe people watching, too). Now, you can enable a layer of webcams within Google Maps.
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Time Warner Backs Off Bandwidth Caps... For Now
Time Warner cable backed off its controversial plan to gouge hapless consumers after vigorous opposition from consumer groups and local New York politicians.
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Cloud Computing Gets A Much-Needed Reality Check
McKinsey & Co.'s conclusion that cloud computing is twice as expensive as do-it-yourself data centers is welcome news. Even though McKinsey brings some shaky assumptions to its analysis, it's the kind of cold slap of reality that IT departments need if they're to avoid betting too much, too soon on the cloud.
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Google's Schmidt Talks Up Android's Future, Suggests 2009 Will Be A Big Year
During Google's recent quarterly earnings conference call, CEO Eric Schmidt spent a few moments addressing Google's mobile phone platform, Google. He said there's be some significant announcements regarding Android and implied that things are looking good.
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Verizon CEO Talks Smack About Sprint, Hints At 4G iPhone
Verizon Communications CEO Ivan Seidenberg recently said during an interview that he can't understand Sprint's current strategy, and predicts Sprint to implode at some point. He also said that a 4G iPhone is a possibility once Verizon gets its LTE network up and running.
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Anti-Cloud Hype Is Hype
Cloud computing might not be all things to all people -- at least not yet -- according to a confidential PowerPoint presentation by McKinsey & Co. analyst Will Forrest. That's not news to anyone serious about managing enterprise IT, but it becomes O.J. Simpson Bronco chase-worthy in the hands of bloggers who give the profession a bad name.
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Are Your Software Vendors Force-Feeding You Needless Stuff?
Are your enterprise software vendors trying to make their problem – revenue targets – your problem by force-feeding you add-ons and modules and services you don't want or need? CIOs say this "value-destruction" approach manifests itself in three specific ways, according to Forrester VP Ray Wang's latest installment in his five-part series, "It's The Relationship, Stupid!"
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Linux In Your Ear: Getting Louder, Or Softer?
Time to revise another assessment. It looks like it isn't going to be a question of "will your next phone run Linux?" but "which Linux is it?" Between Android branching out into set-top boxes and both Panasonic and NEC pulling the covers off new LiMo-driven phones (and Motorola also in that running), the mobile market's becoming a Linux market ... even if the word "Linux" is still not likely to garner more than a blank stare from most people. After the Year of the Linux Desktop, here's the Year of Linux As A Soft Power.
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Listen to InformationWeek On The Unofficial Apple Weblog Podcast
I was honored when Michael Rose, an editor at one of my favorite Apple blogs, The Unofficial Apple Weblog, asked me to appear as a special guest on TUAW's weekly live Internet radio show. Listen here.
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Motorola: Former CFO Wiped Laptop WIth Data Destruction Program
An interesting new twist has come to light in the case of the "unjustly fired" ex-chief financial officer at Motorola. The latest shot taken by Motorola at Paul Liska is an accusation that he destroyed material evidence.
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Culture, Not Tech, Is Barrier To Enterprise 2.0
Technology isn't the biggest obstacle to implementing Enterprise 2.0 -- rather it's overcoming cultural attachment to the old ways of doing things, said Walton Smith, an in-house authority on Enterprise 2.0 at government IT consultancy Booz Allen Hammilton. Employees have gotten accustomed to working with knowledge silos and using e-mail as the primary collaboration tool, and they will quite reasonably be reluctant to change business practices that have served them well for a long time.
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Survey Suggests Palm Pre Will Be A Flop
A new survey conducted by ChangeWave Research shows that only 4% of those polled are interested in buying the Palm Pre at some point in the next six months. Most would rather have a BlackBerry or iPhone. Time for Palm to panic?
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Report: Cybersecurity Tops Government IT Agenda
Among the many projects competing for attention in government IT, cybersecurity is far and away the top priority, according a just-released InformationWeek Analytics survey of government technology professionals. Over the past few weeks, we've had several reminders of just why that's the case.
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A New Twist On Player Wars
A company called doubleTwist offers a free, single media platform to support all of your music players, cell phones, cameras, mobile game devices, and any other transfer challenge of getting digital stuff onto or off of your computer. It's a big idea.
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Google's Gain Is Yahoo's Pain
On Wednesday, comScore released preliminary figures for the U.S. search market for the month of March. Google's share climbed, while Yahoo's sunk.
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Verizon Breach Report Challenges Conventional Wisdom
Verizon Business' most recent 2009 Data Breach Investigations Report is a must-read report if you're involved in IT. The authors are quick to point out that the report is not a "state of security" report, but an analysis of breaches from Verizon Business' Risk Team and therefore based on in-the-field findings. The report winds up with recommendations. How many is your company following?
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SAP Performs Heart And Lung Transplant On Australian Bank
SAP Australia, bestowing anthropomorphic status on the old term "rip and replace," says it is performing a "heart and lung transplant" for Commonwealth Bank as it and Accenture replace brittle systems more than 40 years old. The new systems, SAP says, will let Commonwealth crank out new financial products "in days" instead of "in months and months and months."
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A Reminder To Think Before Submitting
Last November I posted an article titled, "Always Think Before You Submit." It seems it's time for a refresher.
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Coders Stuff Android 1.5 Into The HTC G1
Google just announced the availability of Android OS 1.5 for developers, but that hasn't stopped the hacking community from porting it to existing Android hardware. If you're a G1 user and want to power up some Cupcake action, read on.
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Linux Netbooks And Their Stumbling Blocks
First it was "the desktop." Now it's "the netbook" -- as in, what's the big proving ground for Linux vs. Windows going to be? And the latest hotly-debated bit of conventional wisdom is whether the Linux-based netbooks just don't cut it compared to their Windows cousins. The real problem seems to be who's willing to do more to bring regular users in.
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Health IT Adoption Still Faces Big Challenges
The U.S. government's nearly $20 billion health IT stimulus program will boost adoption among health care providers, but health industry CIOs say some huge hurdles lie ahead before the nation realizes significant payback.
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Additional Funding Vital In VC Deals
Second and third rounds of financing for startups often come at critical times, as three different IT software firms found out this week.
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Surprise! You're Not To Blame For Security Breaches
Unglue those USB ports. Unchain your laptop. Feel free to leave your smartphone at the airport. If there's a security breach at your company, it's unlikely to be your fault.
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RIM CEO Defends The Storm During Interview, Hints At Future Touch Devices
Research In Motion co-CEO vigorously defended the BlackBerry Storm in a recent interview. He also said that the Storm is RIM's first touch device, suggesting that others might follow.
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Neither Demi Moore Nor Twitter Saved Anybody's Life
I love Twitter, and I think Demi Moore is reasonably likable and talented, but it's ridiculous to give either the online service or the semi-retired movie star credit for saving the life of a San Jose, Calif., girl who was threatening suicide.
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Secret CIOs: Top Intel, Military Execs Talk Tech
An extraordinary group of CIOs from the CIA, NSA, FBI, DoD, and other intelligence and defense agencies convened for lunch Monday and these seldom-seen CIOs shared some plans for 2009: cloud computing, upgraded desktops and network apps, and lots of integration and collaboration. Check out our photo gallery for a look at these generally publicity-shy CIOs whose work defines "mission-critical."
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Time Warner Cable Fights For Its Monoply
I am one of those people who believes in universal access. I think it is desirable for those of us living in urban/suburban areas to subsidize telecommunications to rural areas. Subsidies help build out and maintain our telephone network resulting in a net benefit. So subsidizing broadband roll-outs with government funds a good as well. Too bad Time Warner and others are trying to strong arm the FCC into supporting a tacit monopoly with public funds.
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Apple Offers Third Beta Of iPhone OS 3.0 To Developers
Late yesterday, Apple made a third beta version of iPhone OS 3.0 available to its developer base. The changes are minor, but the continued refinement shows that Apple is moving forward at a quick pace.
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Dell In Rumored Talks With China Mobile
Dell is rumored to be in talks with China Mobile according to this article. It has been reported that Dell would be getting into the mobile phone business but those rumors generally focused on a North America plan. They may be headed to China instead, and have their first phone ready to go before 2009 is over.
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AT&T: Dear Apple, Please Let Us Have The iPhone All To Ourselves For Another Two Years
Well, here's a shocker. We finally learn that AT&T's exclusive distribution deal with Apple expires in 2010. That would be good news -- if AT&T weren't already trying to extend its exclusive iPhone deal until 2011.
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This Week In Patent Insanity
The past week has delivered yet another example that our patent system is horribly broken. On April 9, a jury found that Microsoft infringed on Lucent/Alcatel touch-screen patents. But wait! On April 13, news stories reported that a March 26 re-examination by the US Patent Office said aspects of the patent were "an obvious variation of know-how that was public."
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With More Urgency Than Usual, Apply This Month's Batch of Microsoft Patches
Exploits are already out in the wild for a number of the vulnerabilities patched just today.
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How To Take (Yet Another) Beating
Is there any company in this industry that takes more of a drubbing from all sides -- its own customers, the competition, its ideological opponents -- than Microsoft? Especially when it's in the form of Microsoft's open source guy, Sam Ramji, in a room (and in front of an audience) with Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin and Sun dev veep Ian Murdock. These sorts of things inevitably turn into a round of MS-bashing, but I give them credit for keeping their chin up.
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Is OQO About To Fall Victim To The Economy?
According to recent reports, things aren't looking so good for ultra-mobile PC maker OQO. Its model 2+ has yet to make it to production, and word is that retailers have canceled orders for the next-generation mini-PC.
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Most Americans Reluctant To Bank Online With Cell Phone
KPMG recently did a study of how consumers in the US engaged in online banking. The report said that 85 percent of those that participated in the survey "believe mobile banking is important but they do not want to pay for it" while 91 percent have never even tried use their bank's site through their phone.
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EMC Launches New High-End Storage Platform
Symmetrix V-Max, which targets high-end virtualized data centers, offers more capacity and lower power consumption than its previous high-end product.
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Wipro To Enter Cloud Computing Market
IT services vendor Wipro Technologies plans to enter the cloud computing market over the next three to six months. Wipro CTO I Vijaya Kumar laid out the strategy in an interview with me yesterday.
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Google Preps Next Version Of Android Software, Now WIth More Cupcake
The long-awaited 'Cupcake' branch of Android code has finally been folded into the main version of the mobile platform from Google in the form of Android 1.5. Google is offering developers an early-look at the latest rendition of Android.
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SAP Buried Under 9M Pages Of Docs In Ex-Client Lawsuit
Waste Management's year-old lawsuit claiming its $100M SAP implementation was a "complete failure" shows the ugly side of E-discovery: SAP says that in a two-week period its former client sent 8.6 million pages of documents and 575,000 pages of emails and attachments. Even worse – oh yes, it gets worse – SAP has had 25-30 attorneys reviewing documents "continually" for six months.
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Thinking Machines Need To Be Dumb
Machines have started making independent scientific discoveries, according to two reports made public a few weeks ago, perhaps heralding the start of true artificial intelligence. I think machines need to be dumb before they can ever be smart.
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Amazon: 'Embarrassing And Ham-Fisted' Error Removed Listings For Gay-Themed Books
After more than a day getting beaten up on Twitter and blogs, Amazon.com issued an explanation for why gay- and lesbian-themed books were removed from sales rankings and made harder to find in searches. The company said it was an "embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error," adding that the error wasn't limited to gay- and lesbian-themed books; some 57,310 titles in several broad categories were effected.
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A Healthy Regard For FOSS
Fred Trotter writes about open source software and medicine, and recently blogged about a meeting he had with the CCHIT regarding their support for open source in their certification program. It's eye-opening stuff for anyone currently involved in the debate about how government and medicine should use open source (mandatory, optional, etc.)
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Primary Storage Optimization Compromises
Primary file system storage optimization, i.e. squeezing more data into the same space, continues to grow in popularity. The challenge is that the deduplication of primary storage is not without its rules. You can't dedupe this, you can dedupe that and you have to be cognizant of the performance impact on a deduplicated volume.
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Get Ready To Patch
Organizations need to prep for a pretty significant set of patches that are scheduled to be rolling out from Redmond tomorrow. It's the most security patch updates from Microsoft in nearly six months.
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What A Concept! Chain Has IT Report To Chief Concept Officer
Some CIOs grouse about reporting to the CFO, and while that approach seems to ensure insular and risk-averse thinking, at least most people know what the CFO does. But how about when IT reports to the Chief Concept Officer?
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YouTube Will Steal $471 Million From Google In 2009
Google's acquisition of YouTube hasn't exactly paid off. According to Credit Suisse, YouTube will bilk Google for about $711 million this year in operating costs, while it will only bring in a projected $240 million in ad revenue. Time for Google to heave YouTube out the door?
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Blocking Cell Phone Signals In The Driver's Seat
In an effort to get some people to stop talking when driving, an inventor named Fred Wenz has been working on a device that would block cell phone signals in the driver's seat of the car. They have a provisional patent according to this article. I'm not sure about you, but I am not keen on the idea of using this technology for a number of reasons.
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Microsoft To Amazon: We'll Fix Windows Licensing
In a surprising admission, Microsoft president Bob Muglia says Microsoft's licensing arrangements with Amazon Web Services and other cloud service providers are both too complicated and too expensive. "We'll fix that," Muglia promises.
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Predicting The Palm Pre Premiere
The frenzy surrounding the forthcoming launch of the Palm Pre has been building in intensity over the last few weeks. According to reports, Sprint has put the kibosh on employee vacations in May, suggesting that the device may launch next month.
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White House Lags On Promise To Post Bills Online
The Cato Institute has called on the White House to do better and deliver on its promise to post all non-emergency bills online for five days before President Barack Obama signs them.
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Worm Hits Twitter Over Easter Weekend
A multi-day attack infected numerous user accounts on the popular micro-blogging platform. Reports say malicious code is still active.
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Ex Moto Exec Airs Dirty Laundry
Motorola's former CFO, Paul Liska, claims the company purposely misstated financial documents regarding its handset unit, and that he was unjustly fired for trying to blow the whistle.
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Google Health Records Reveal Grossly Inaccurate Info
Google Health users are finding stunning inaccuracies in medical records imported from primary-care physicians and hospitals because Google takes some information from insurance billing records that use broad and imprecise codes to describe patient treatment. One electronic health-records expert says "this kind of information should never be used clinically." Feeling better?
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New York Auto Show 2009 Fizzles (But I've Posted Lots Of Car Pictures)
Cash for clunkers. I couldn't help thinking about that possibly upcoming government car-purchase incentive program, as I walked the floor the other day at the press preview of the 2009 New York Auto Show. Because free money would be the only thing that could get me excited about what I saw on display at New York City's Javits Center. I can only hope that the state of the auto industry is a lagging indicator, because if it's not, well. . .
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Don't Jump To Conclusions About Amazon Homophobia
Amazon.com is learning that customer service and public relations is a 24x7x365 job in the age of Twitter, as consumers are becoming outraged over reports that the company is unfairly censoring books with gay, lesbian, transgender and bisexual themes.
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Black Hat Europe: Interesting InfoSec Research Ahead (Be Afraid)
I always enjoy the Black Hat sessions. The conference leans much more on the technical side of things, more so than the humungous brochure-fest known as RSA. Black Hat Europe is next week April 14th through 17th. And while I won't be able to (unfortunately) attend, there's a number of sessions I wouldn't miss if I was able to hope a flight to Amsterdam.
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Mac Versus Windows: Just A Price Thing?
If you listen to the recent critiques of Microsoft's ad campaigns, it seems like the fourth time is going to be the charm. First Microsoft delivered the Seinfeld-Gates disaster, then the "Mojave" and original "I'm a PC" snoozefests. This time around, though, Microsoft is gaining traction with the idea that Macs are overpriced and the "Apple Tax" is not worth paying. There's just one little problem with this approach: it belittles Microsoft's contribution to what makes a PC.
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Want VC Funding? Throw Out Your Business Plan
It sounds counterintuitive, but you're better off investing in your idea, building your social network, and attracting potential customers than spending hours refining how a plan looks on paper.
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The Dead Star Blues
Open most any tech-related publication and headlines smack you in the face about the imminent demise of Sun. Or the reasons why Sun has failed. Or what could be done to save Sun. In short, it's what most decently clued-in people have been talking about for years now. So why not just let Sun die?
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Webcam Captures Burglars
The Internet gets plenty of blame for facilitating crimes, but it deserves at least as much credit for solving them. Consider the case of 43-year-old Jeanne Thomas of Boynton Beach, Florida, who was at work in Fort Lauderdale on Wednesday, watching her home through a live video feed from a desktop Webcam, when she saw two intruders enter her house.
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Twitter Conquers The Universe, With Help From NASA
After conquering the Earth, Twitter is now colonizing space. NASA is using Twitter to communicate about its efforts. Among NASA's extensive social media initiatives: Astronaut Mike Massimino is Twittering training for his fifth and final space shuttle Atlantis mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope. @Astro_Mike is a mission specialist and spacewalker for a mission scheduled to launch May 12.
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Apple: Nearly 1 Billion Apps Sold
What the what?!? Apple recently posted a page on its Web site counting down to its billionth application sold via the iTunes App Store. The current count is at 928 million and change. Whoever downloads the 1 billionth app will win, among other things, a 17-inch MacBook Pro.
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Tax Time: Spending $200B To Comply With IRS Lunacy
The IRS itself says that in 2009 American taxpayers – individuals and corporate – will spend about 880,000 man-years complying with a tax code that has exploded to 3.7 million words. The agency calculates 2006 compliance cost American citizens and companies $193 billion, meaning that this year our challenged economy will burn through at least $200 billion to march to the mad music of the IRS.
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Gmail Labs Now Powers Inline Image Insertion
Google has always been generous with the size of attachments it allows Gmail users to add to their emails. Today, Google offers a better tool for those who want to insert an image into the body of the email itself.
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Sun Should Sell, Too
I wrote a few days ago that I think Twitter should accept pretty much any offer that comes from Google, presuming one comes at all. In other words, it should do what Sun failed to do.
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Optimize Cloud Storage, Flash Storage And Deduplication
In our last entry we discussed the growing importance of efficiency. Tools and better storage systems can help make IT Administrators more efficient. The other option is to keep throwing new technology at the problem. Cloud Storage, Flash Storage and Deduplication are great examples.
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California Dreamin', Part Two: 14 IT Projects For $6.24B
Two months ago, California CIO Teri Takai explained how she was bringing that state's madcap IT strategy and staggering IT budget under control. No doubt they're making progress but it's still frightening to look at its list of 111 approved and under-construction IT projects, particularly the top 14 that will cost $6.24 billion and take 91 years to complete.
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InformationWeek Government Site Launches
We've just launched our new InformationWeek Government site -- a collection of timely news, insightful commentary, and high-value content in the form of analytics reports and downloadable PDFs geared specifically to the government IT decision maker.
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Facebook Hedges On Charging Users
Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg says that the social networking company doesn't plan to charge users... yet.
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What Is A Smartphone?
The New York Times published an article this morning on a few smartphones coming to market that are aiming at the iPhone. While these phones have some interesting features, they don't run any operating system that you'd be familiar with. Can a turbo-charged feature phone earn the title of a smartphone?
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Open Source Cost Surveys, Revisited
I got a lot of great feedback regarding yesterday's post about needing some kind of standard way to gather data about cost savings / ROI / TCO / [your buzzword here] when switching to open source. Based on a little more discussion and thought, I have some more ideas about what form something like this could take.
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Recession Special: Virgin Mobile USA Touts 'Pink Slip' Program
Pre-paid mobile phone service providers are taking advantage of their low-cost plans to reel in new customers during these tough times. Virgin Mobile's latest pitch is that it will pay for up to three months of cellular service if you lose your job.
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Suppliers: Apple Orders 100 Million 8GB Flash Chips
File this under: Whoa. According to DigiTimes, Apple has placed orders for up to 100 million 8GB NAND flash memory chips. Gee, what would Apple want to do with that many chips?
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Latest Gmail Feature: Time Zone Stamping
Any professional who travels regularly knows that time zones can play havoc with communications. In order to help keep you from replying to people in the middle of (their) night, Gmail Labs now lets you see the time zone from which emails are sent.
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Efficiency A Key Objective For 2009
2009, more so than any year, IT professionals are looking for ways to drive out costs. Technologies like deduplication, compression and server virtualization all try to lower the IT expenditures and these technologies have been successful at doing just that. The challenge however is that each of these technologies potentially compounds the challenge of making IT Operations more efficient by putting more workload in the same space.
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Blackberry App World Rocks
The Blackberry's progression into a mobile platform which puts the iPhone to shame continues apace with RIM's new Blackberry App World. So now Blackberry has added the one ecosystem component it was lacking in its competition with Apple. And I have to tell you, App World rocks.
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5 States + Feds Still Wasting Time Over RFID Paranoia
Five states plus the federal government are looking to regulate the use of RFID due to misplaced fears of obliterated privacy. In a world jammed with surveillance cameras, cellphone-cameras, and imminent smart-grid brains that will scold you for using more electricity than some bureaucrat thinks you should, this paranoia over RFID goes beyond silly to absurd.
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VC Deals: Google's Singh Cassidy, JiWire
Google's loss is Accel Partners' gain as Sukhinder Singh Cassidy has joined the venture capital firm as its new CEO-in-Residence. Does the position include access to a world-class cafeteria?
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Lawsuits Won't Save The AP's Business Model
The AP's peevish bid to become, as TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld puts it, "the RIAA of the newspaper industry," is off to a bad start.
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Are You Breaking Text Etiquette? Is There Such A Thing?
Everyone approaches the way they use their mobile phone somewhat differently, but that doesn't mean there shouldn't be some basic rules involved. That's especially true when it comes to using text messages for enterprise communications.
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U.S. Grid Vulnerability Likened To Pre-9/11 Airline Security
The nation's infrastructure may be crumbling, but in one sense, it might be too advanced for its own good. Or rather, advanced without having the right precautions in place.
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Will Microsoft Ship Windows Mobile 6.5 Before It Is Ready?
I read a post yesterday that was speculating that Microsoft may ship Windows Mobile 6.5 before all of the intended pieces were put in place and then rely on the update mechanism to release patches and updates after it ships. I have no idea if that is the plan or not, but if it is, I actually find it encouraging.
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Yahoo Offers iPhone Messenger App
Yahoo recently made a stand-alone version of its Messenger instant messaging application available for the iPhone. How does it compare?
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Make Open Source Cost Surveys An All-For-One Venture
Ask ten different companies about their cost-savings experiences when switching to open source, and you get ten different breakdowns according to ten different timelines and metrics. Shouldn't we have something a little more consistent than that?
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Obama's Online Town Hall Was A Failure Of Crowdsourcing
President Obama's recent online town hall meeting was a masterful example of using social media to build support for himself and his policies. But that's only part of what he should be doing with social media. He also needs to use the technology to really let regular citizens drive government, and that just didn't happen at that meeting. Instead, citizens tried to take the wheel -- and the White House grabbed it back.
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LBS Developers On Symbian And Palm's WebOS: No Thanks
Skyhook Wireless recently polled developers of location-based services and found that less than 10% of them are interested in creating applications for the Symbian and webOS platforms. Can smartphone platforms succeed with such little developer support?
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Car Pictures, Part 2
Here's another crop of pictures from my New York Auto Show Fizzles post.
Click here to go back and see the previous set of pictures.
Continue reading "Car Pictures, Part 2..."
Car Pictures, Part 3
Here's another crop of pictures from my New York Auto Show Fizzles post.
Click here to go back and see the previous set of pictures.
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Car Pictures, Part 4
Here's another crop of pictures from my New York Auto Show Fizzles post.
Click here to go back and see the previous set of pictures.
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Car Pictures, Part 5
Here's another crop of pictures from my New York Auto Show Fizzles post.
Click here to go back and see the previous set of pictures.
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Car Pictures, Part 6
Here's another crop of pictures from my New York Auto Show Fizzles post.
Click here to go back and see the previous set of pictures.
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Google's Schmidt Seeks To Defuse Newspaper Tensions
After I wrote my column on the battle between AP and Google (see Web No Longer Wants To Be So Free), Google CEO Eric Schmidt has weighed in with a speech attempting to defuse the tension.
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Car Pictures, Part 7
Here's another crop of pictures from my New York Auto Show Fizzles post.
Click here to go back and see the previous set of pictures.
Continue reading "Car Pictures, Part 7..."
Oracle Just Doesn't Understand Cloud Computing: Benioff
"One day they want to be the cloud leader, the next they don't want to have it at all. One day cloud computing is ridiculous, the next day they're saying that they're the dominant player." So said Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff as he kicked off CloudForce London by kicking Oracle's cloud cred to the curb.
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Car Pictures, Part 8
Here's another crop of pictures from my New York Auto Show Fizzles post.
Click here to go back and see the previous set of pictures.
Continue reading "Car Pictures, Part 8..."
Car Pictures, Part 9
Here's another crop of pictures from my New York Auto Show Fizzles post.
Click here to go back and see the previous set of pictures.
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Car Pictures, Part 10
Here's another crop of pictures from my New York Auto Show Fizzles post.
Click here to go back and see the previous set of pictures.
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Car Pictures, Part 11
Here's the final crop of pictures from my New York Auto Show Fizzles post.
Click here to go back and see the previous set of pictures.
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VC Deals: Fusion-io, DoubleTwist, Socialcast
Several Silicon Valley startups are celebrating fresh infusions of cash this week as the venture capital economy may be showing signs of a comeback.
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SaaS Might Be Best Choice For Mobile Workforce
Salesforce.com on Tuesday introduced a scaled-down version of its mobile software for use on smartphones, including BlackBerry, iPhone, and Windows Mobile. It's offered a full-featured mobile app for a few years, and one designed specifically for the iPhone since last year. But most interesting is how these apps demonstrate that the SaaS model works exceptionally well for businesses wanting to deploy mobile software to their workforces.
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India Outsources Election To U.S.
For those who believe outsourcing represents a one-way passage to India for American jobs, here's an interesting tidbit: Authorities on the subcontinent have hired a big U.S. software company to help manage national elections.
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Skype Needs A Reboot
The idea of Skype promoting itself as a business tool is ludicrous. It's a pretty bad experience at the prosumer level and I can hardly imagine a business putting up with its inadequacies.
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Google's Gmail And Calendar Apps On iPhone and Android Updated, Given Offline Access
Today Google rolled out new features for both its Gmail and Calendar applications. Gmail gets a refreshed look and iPhone and Android users can now edit their Google Calendars when on the go.
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Give A Little, Get A Lot ... But How Much?
The term community contribution is one of those phrases in the open source world that's gone from being shopworn to downright fly-blown. Everyone talks about it, but less often do we dig under the skin of those words to extract a little true meaning from them. Given that Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier is moderating a panel on the subject of community contributions at the Linux Foundation's Collaboration Summit this week, I thought I'd chew Joe's ear about this subject and ask him a few questions.
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Top-Paid U.S. CEO Hauled In 10X More Than India's
Noting that the Indian economy continues to grow while the U.S. is in its 17th straight month of recession, a business article from India focuses on the irony behind the enormous disparities in CEO pay in the two countries that often results in U.S. top execs earning more than 10 times as much as their peers in India.
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RIM Already Working On Storm 2, Adding Wi-Fi?
According to reports, RIM is hard at work on a sequel to its touchscreen BlackBerry. Unofficially dubbed the Storm 2 by the blogosphere, the big upgrades include a new screen and Wi-Fi.
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Twitter Should Take The Offer
The blogosphere was all atwitter over the weekend with news that Google is close to offering a lot of money for Twitter. I know I'm going to get dinged for saying it, but I think the company's founders should take the offer, whatever the price.
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T-Mobile To Put Android On Non-Mobile Phone Devices
T-Mobile, the first carrier in the world to build a phone with Google's Android platform, is breaking new ground again. This time they are putting Android on a home phone and a tablet computer according to an article in the New York Times.
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Register.com Suffered Massive Denial-of-Service Attack
Anyone dependent on domain name registrar and hosting company Register.com, for either hosting their Web site or e-mail, learned first hand the pain of a distributed denial-of-service attack.
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Windows XP, The Zombie Operating System
We had to hear it from AppleInsider: Windows XP still won't bite the dust when Windows 7 ships. Given the source you might think it's a joke, but Microsoft confirmed the news today. Hewlett-Packard, among others, will be offering downgrade rights to its customers even after Windows 7 becomes the latest and greatest offering from Microsoft.
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Google Rushes To Chrome's Defense
Seeking to avoid a repeat of the outcry last September over rights-grabbing legal boilerplate in its Chrome Web browser End User License Agreement (EULA), Google promptly shot down a Saturday post on Slashdot that claimed the company reserved the right to filter Internet sites displayed in Chrome.
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IBM Outsourcing Deal With India's Bharti Triples To $2.5B
The explosive growth of Indian telecom client Bharti Airtel is driving a similar explosion in the value of the $750M, 10-year outsourcing contract Bharti signed with IBM in 2004. With Bharti adding 3 million customers a month, the size and scope of its IBM partnership has expanded dramatically and could push the 10-year value of the deal to $2.5B.
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How Is It Possible That Motorola's New CEO Earned The Highest Salary Of All CEO's In 2008?
According to a survey recently conducted by the New York Times, Motorola's new CEO, Sanjay Jha, took home the biggest paycheck -- a startling $104 million. While most of it came in stock options, it is striking because of Motorola's complete flame-out over the course of the last two years.
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Using Hootsuite To Manage Corporate Twittering
I'm continuing to find HootSuite to be a valuable tool for managing multiple Twitter accounts. This morning, I worked with it to keep track of what people are saying about InformationWeek online, and to help my colleagues connect with new contacts on Twitter. If you're in an organization where multiple employees have their own Twitter accounts, and there's also a Twitter account for the brand, you might find some of my experiences useful.
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Google Health Bolstered By Addition Of CVS
Today Google and CVS announced the addition of CVS's pharmacy to its growing health network. Google Health can now reach the pharmacy records of 100 million people.
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The Sky Isn't Falling For Media
Rupert Murdoch made himself an unlikely hero to media professionals last week by declaring war on what he called Google's infringement of media intellectual property.
Continue reading "The Sky Isn't Falling For Media..."
Can Windows Mobile 6.5 Recapture Some iPhone Limelight?
Windows Mobile 6.5 has been garnering a lot of attention since it was formally announced at Mobile World Congress in February and more details were shown at CTIA last week. This is not the OS Microsoft was hoping for - that will be Windows Mobile 7 due to be released in 2010, but don't let that detract from what Windows Mobile 6.5 has to offer.
Continue reading "Can Windows Mobile 6.5 Recapture Some iPhone Limelight?..."
Scrounging For Sun's Next Suitor (If There Is One)
You say Java, I say Solaris -- eh, let's call the whole thing off. So much for Java (or OpSol, or even OpenOffice) becoming an IBM brand. The more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea: where else are you going to find a second home for all that where the people "get" open source -- and there are other business models apart from hoping really hard that everyone comes around to your way of thinking?
Continue reading "Scrounging For Sun's Next Suitor (If There Is One)..."
Reports: Next-Gen iPhone To Have 802.11n, FM Radio, Video Editing
More reports about what we can expect to see in the next-generation iPhone continue to float across the Internet. The latest include 802.11n Wi-Fi powers, FM radio capabilities and the ability to edit and upload video.
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Video: Intel's Sean Maloney Talks Nehalem, And More
In the wake of last week's Nehalem server chip launch, I sat down with Intel chief sales and marketing officer Sean Maloney for a wide-ranging discussion. Maloney gave me -- and you -- some food for thought. A recession, he says, isn't the time to halt technology spending. OK, so there's a self-serving (server?) aspect to this observation -- Intel sells processors. But that doesn't mean Maloney's incorrect in pointing out that businesses need to position themselves for the recovery.
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NYC Board Of Ed's Algorithm Not Academic
Thousands of New York City parents are spitting mad because their kids are among the 7,000-plus who didn't get matched to a public high school.
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Astronomers: Dark Matter Guides Universe's Structure
A 10-year study of 100,000 galaxies close to our own offers compelling proof that long-hypothesized "dark matter" does exist and is in fact a guiding force behind the structure of the universe, a team of Australian, British, and American astronomers revealed this week.
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Three Applications That Monitor Real-Time Analytics
Back in February I wrote about the importance of monitoring real-time analytics for your product, service or blog. Now I'd like to share three applications that provide real-time analytics and statistics.
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Microsoft Prefers Visa
Planning on landing a job with Microsoft during these hard economic times? They're still hiring despite the cutback of 5,000 positions announced earlier this year. But who are they hiring? To paraphrase a commercial for a popular credit card, it might be best to bring your visa card. Because Microsoft doesn't take just anyone for a position, and they don't take American expertise.
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Government 2.0
The concept of openness is integral to the definition of Web 2.0 as a set of principles, but until recently, the largest source of information that one would want to be open -- the government -- wasn't particularly interested in openness.
Continue reading "Government 2.0..."
Apple Buying 3.2- and 5-Megapixel Sensors For Next iPhone: Report
Taipei's DigiTimes filed a report today that suggests the next version (or versions) of the iPhone will have much more powerful cameras. I can only hope that this is true.
Continue reading "Apple Buying 3.2- and 5-Megapixel Sensors For Next iPhone: Report..."
CTIA: Video Demo Of QuickOffice For The iPhone
I had the chance to sit down with QuickOffice this week and get a hands-on run through of its upcoming QuickOffice product for the iPhone. You want full Word and Excel viewing and editing capabilities on the iPhone, QuickOffice is your answer.
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AT&T Taxing The Mathematically Challenged
AT&T is testing a new service plan for netbooks that sounds suspiciously like cell phone plans, typically costing $50 for the hardware and $60 per month for service.
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Amazon Cloud Saves Day For Australian Govt. IT Project
Australia's federal government started building a site that would let Aussies compare prices at various grocery stores, but the project was a disaster – "a basket case" and "a complete, useless farce," said one MP. And now an Australian integrator plans to completely rebuild the site using Amazon's EC2 cloud with ties to Google Maps. Sounds like on this deal, the technology will be the easy part.
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CTIA: RIM Updates BlackBerry App World. Already
If you downloaded Research In Motion's new App World for your BlackBerry and have had a few problems with it, you're not alone. Users have reported connectivity and other issues. RIM has responded swiftly with an update to App World.
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Desktop OS's, Not Mobile, To Rule Netbook Market
I've seen a lot of speculation and opinions recently that mobile operating systems like Android will take over the netbook market, pushing Windows aside. HP is already playing with Android on their netbooks. It has been tried before. I don't see that happening in the near or far future.
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Who Are Washington's Top Twitterers?
Twitter is almost as popular in Washington as lobbyist-funded junkets. Elected officials use Twitter as a channel to talk directly with the people, communicating from fact-finding missions to Baghdad and during the State of the Union Address. Sen. John McCain even did a Twitter interview. But who are the top political Twitterers? I've compiled a quick-and-dirty list here; if I'm leaving anyone out, please let me know.
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How Is Open Source Like The Large Hadron Collider?
Answer: you start using it, and it sucks everything else up into a black hole. If that sounds like a cheap shot, consider this column by Gene Quinn of IPWatchdog.com: "Open Source Race to Zero May Destroy Software Industry." That's a scary headline if there ever was one, and I read the piece with the growing sense that I had Heard This One Before. I had, just in a different skin.
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SGI, Once Mighty Graphics Giant, Gobbled Up For Pittance
For anyone with an historical perspective about our industry, the demise of Silicon Graphics Inc. is a scary example of the truism that great technology is no insulation from the changing vagaries of the marketplace. (Also, that iffy business decisions don't help.) Still, remembering the heyday of this one-time maker of the absolute coolest workstations on the planet, it's sad to see it acquired for a paltry $25 million.
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The New IT Manifesto: 10 Steps For Transformative CIOs
In this week's Global CIO column, I've proposed 10 steps CIOs should take in transforming their organizations in anticipation of inevitable post-recession requirements from CEOs for IT to take an even greater role in driving revenue, increasing customer loyalty, and boosting profits. Maybe these 10 steps will help you frame out your own "New IT Manifesto."
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CTIA: Nokia Says Wimax Is Going To Fail
Nokia's head of sales and manufacturing Anssi Vanjok, recently said, "I don't think the future is very promising [for WiMax]." Nokia ended production of its WiMax-equipped N810 Internet Tablet several months ago. Is he right, does WiMax have a real future?
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Microsoft: The Most Interoperable Company In The World?
Like the late comic Rodney Dangerfield, Microsoft doesn’t get any respect. On Wednesday, at the Web 2.0 Expo, Stephen Elop, president of Microsoft's Business Division, tried to convince a skeptical Tim O'Reilly and an audience full of open standards sorts that Microsoft is, as he put it, "the most interoperable company in the world."
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Are We Getting Con-Ficked?
Conficker, the super virus that was going to bring down the Interweb, seems to have flopped -- unless, in true horror film tradition, it isn't really dead.
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CTIA: First Look At Palm Pre Emulator
Palm recently announced that it will provide an emulator for webOS on the Palm Pre that will allow Palm users to port their legacy apps from the old Garnet OS to webOS. This is a necessary step for Palm, and I was able to get a nice walk through on video.
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Gmail Gets New Search Powers From Google
The latest feature added to Gmail's Labs is the ability to perform more efficient searches in your inbox. Search queries will now auto-complete as you type, and Google has added more search operators
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HootSuite Helps You Juggle Multiple Twitter Accounts
I manage two Twitter accounts: My own, and InformationWeek's. Until now, that was a bit of a clumsy process, involving logging in and out multiple times a day, checking search terms multiple times a day, and using two or three separate Web-based tools to perform necessary tasks with varying degrees of efficiency. Then I discovered HootSuite.
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How The Web Doesn't Bring Us Closer
As the G20 world leaders come together to deal with this most global economic crisis, the world's connected as never before by Internet communications, collaboration, and transactions. Yet none of that helps me understand something like this week's "bossnappings," as fired French workers hold their managers hostage, and that's a cultural gap the Internet won't soon breach.
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Ubuntu Server's Ambitions No Longer Cloudy - Er, Murky
Yesterday I sat in on a conference call with Steve George, director of the Enterprise group at Canonical, to get more of an idea where they're headed with Ubuntu Server 9.04 and beyond. It's helped make clear what Canonical's ambitions are for Ubuntu as a server -- something that has been slightly dim even for Ubuntu / Canonical supporters.
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EMC Reboots Archiving Software
New SourceOne platform takes a modular approach to archiving content and focuses strongly on electronic discovery.
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Salesforce.com And NetSuite Get Chummy
Salesforce.com and NetSuite announced Thursday "partner applications" to connect their SaaS systems. It's about time the two biggest vendors in CRM and ERP SaaS presented a united front on integration. Still, the announcement is more symbolic than technical, since these partner capabilities already existed.
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Windows Marketplace for Mobile Only For WinMo 6.5
There has been a lot of discussion about Microsoft's application store, dubbed Windows Marketplace for Mobile since its official announcement at Mobile World Congress in February. The latest bit of info on the application store is it will not work on any existing platforms.
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Populist Anger Isn't Supposed To Be Cute
The Transport Workers Union of American ("TWU") has launched a playful-looking web site (http://americanexeccheck.com), in hopes of prompting outrage over executive pay generally...and, in particular, the potential bucks American Airlines' top execs might make.
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Archiving Your Way To Efficiency
In an earlier post, You Can't DeDupe IT Administration, I discuss the problem with optimizing primary storage. While it is incredibly valuable to be able to squeeze more data into less storage footprint, from an administrative standpoint you still have to manage the data, there is limited increase in efficiency. Archiving however, especially disk based archive can provide tremendous gains in efficiency.
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Cloud Services (Or Whatever) To Surpass $56 Billion This Year
Some people say that cloud computing is nothing new, a bunch of old ideas and existing technologies repackaged with the latest buzz words. Gartner puts the cloud services market at $46 billion last year, jumping to $56 billion this year and $150 billion by 2013. Call it what you will, that's a remarkable growth projection in the thick of a recession.
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ConocoPhillips And Harrah's Put CIO Positions On Ice
A $240 billion energy company and the world's largest casino company, each deeply dependent on IT in every facet of its business, say they don't plan to fill their recently vacated CIO positions. Is this (a) a quirky coincidence, (b) a short-term savings plan, (c) a sign of things to come, or (d) mistake they'll soon regret, or (e) a chance to create new titles that better reflect current responsibilities?
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Web 2.0 Warning: Don't Put All Your Facebook Apps In One Basket
Here's a lesson I learned, painfully: Be careful which Web 2.0 providers you get in bed with, because the software underpinning you're relying on today to help you do the next big thing could be turned off tomorrow when the company realizes it's got to focus its efforts elsewhere, like maybe to snare some of that elusive stuff called revenue.
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Web 2.0 Expo: Five Companies To Watch
When it comes to pressure, Launch Pad is not for the squeamish. You have to be willing to expose your company's soft underside in 5 minutes. So, who are this year's chosen five at Web 2.0?
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CTIA: AT&T Offers A Netbook For $50
If you're looking for a netbook on the cheap, AT&T has a deal for you. It is now selling a wider range of netbooks, with some starting at just $50. Of course, don't forget to add $1,440 for the cost of the necessary data plan.
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CTIA: QuickOffice For The iPhone Is Awesome
Today at the CTIA wireless trade show, I was able to see a demonstration of the new QuickOffice software that will be available for the iPhone later this month. Instant verdict: epic win for enterprise productivity!
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CTIA: Celio Lets Your PC Become Your Smartphone
Celio, maker of the Redfly mobile companion device, has trotted out some new beta software that lets you access your smartphone's applications from your PC.
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Conficker's Not A Blessing For Linux
In the last few days before the Conficker worm's alleged conquest of the known world on April 1, a bunch of Linux and open source blogs have ruminated about the possibility that this would be another nail in the Windows coffin. See? Windows is horribly insecure! Linux is not! Watch people defect from Windows in droves! ... And that silence you hear is me trying hard not to die laughing.
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Web 2.0 Helps Protect Californians Against Toxic Substances
Shell Culp, CIO of the California Department of Toxic Substances, describes how the agency uses blogs, message boards, and wikis to help protect California's citizens against dangerous chemicals. The agency uses Web 2.0 tools to support programs including the new Green Chemistry Initiative requiring manufacturers to provide a list of potentially hazardous chemicals included in products, similar to food product labeling.
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Game Consoles Hit Milestones Toward What Goal?
Both Sony's PlayStation 3 and Microsoft's Xbox 360 reached sales milestones in Japan last week -- 3 and 1 million units, respectively -- but I'm not sure I understand the long-term strategy for game consoles.
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Entrusting China With Our Internet A Bad Idea
Greed still triumphs over common sense and the common good, despite everything we've learned from the meltdown of our financial institutions.
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ReviewCam: Apture Takes Hyperlinking To A New Context And Depth For Any CMS
At Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, I had a chance to catch up with Apture CEO and founder Tristan Harris to "shoot" a ReviewCam movie of Apture's innovative cloud-based hyperlinking service that seems to automagically work with any content management system. What's special about Apture is how frictionlessly it adds new levels of context and depth when hyperlinking something (e.g.: text) in ways that the native CMS (egg: WordPress) could never do and it does this (a) by adding only a bit of Javascript to your templates and (b) without even having to go into your CMS's content authoring console. For end users of your content, the results are just as slick.
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CTIA: Meet HTC's Snap, Successor To The Dash
HTC announced the HTC Snap this morning at CTIA. This is the BlackBerry-esque style phone that includes a fixed QWERTY keyboard and lacks a touch screen.
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CTIA: First Look At RIM's BlackBerry App World
RIM's take on the mobile application storefront came to full realization overnight with the launch of BlackBerry App World. I downloaded the application and took it for a spin. Instant verdict: Not bad.
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ReviewCam: At Web 2.0 Expo, Kosmix Demos Its Mashup For Researching Topics
I've been at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco all day "shooting" ReviewCams of sites and services that claim to fit into the Web 2.0 category. One such demo that I captured on video (see below) is essentially a search site that's designed for especially for people who are researching topics and who would prefer to have their search results organized in a way that's conducive to learning about some subject matter rather than just wading through pages of search results. Kosmix.com may be worth a try if you want to get smart about something in a hurry (instead of looking for a needle in a haystack).
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$167M IT Project For Vets' Medical Care In Shambles
An IT project for military patients at Veterans Affairs hospitals has wasted 8 years and $167 million without producing a single usable application. Federal CIO Vivek Kundra could make a huge impact by jumping into this ugly mess and reversing this shabby and inexcusable treatment of our wounded veterans. Step one: fire every IT manager even remotely involved.
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