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The InformationWeek June 2009 Archive « May 2009 | Main | July 2009 » |
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Benioff Offers Cloud Riposte: It's Not Just Fashion
Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, finally got a little revenge. He wasn't in the least spiteful. Rather, he was only guilty of repeating something his former boss, Larry Ellison, said about software-as-a-service and cloud computing. An audience of cloud cognoscenti at Structure 09 loved the performance.
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Apple Seeds iPhone SDK 3.1 To Developers
Today Apple began pushing out iPhone Software Development Kit 3.1 to developers of the iPhone platform. The new SDK has several new features that should make it easier for developers to create applications for the iPhone. The biggest new development is that the MMS feature is automatically turned on in 3.1.
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Microsoft's Security Essentials: A Promising Start
I've been using the beta of Microsoft Security Essentials, (MSE) having been one of the lucky few to grab it in the first few days before Microsoft closed the beta. Here's what I think so far: It's not flashy, it's not feature-rich, and its not a replacement for enterprise-class workstation security. Because of that, it has the potential to be a great solution for consumers and small businesses.
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Is The Pre Poorly Built?
There have been scattered reports that Palm's Pre smartphone is not holding up well. A few Pre users have been complaining that their screens are wobbly and can get easily cracked, the slider is poorly-designed, and the overall manufacturing is shoddy.
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30% Of Auto-Industy Supply Chain Will Die, Expert Says
With bankrupt Chrysler about to resume production and as both it and General Motors struggle with huge losses and drastic new ownership structures, at least 30% and perhaps even 40% of the suppliers that feed the U.S. automobile industry will not be able to survive, says a restructuring expert.
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Dell's MID Idea Is Kinda SAD
Later this year, Dell is reportedly going to sell a pocked-sized gizmo that can access the Internet, but won't offer telephony. In other words, it's working on inventing its own version of Apple's Newton.
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Bsquare: Why Wait? We Got Yer Flash For Android Right Here
Bsquare says, "Pshaw!" No need to wait until the end of 2009 to get Flash on your Android device. It is already offering Android developers support for Flash Lite 3.1 on ARM-based devices.
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Real-World Cloud Computing Applications
Anyone trying to understand the cloud computing phenomenon need only look at how cloud services are being used to get a better picture. The following examples demonstrate the cloud being used for everything from marketing campaigns to space exploration and scientific research.
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GPL Usage: Growing And Shrinking, Both
If the latest round of statistics are to be believed, the GPL -- the most popular license for open source software -- is undergoing a slow but fundamental shift. But if the same statistics are to be further believed, other licenses are also gaining ground on the GPL.
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Realizing Government 2.0
One of the most compelling attributes of Web 2.0 is that it transformed the static Interweb from something pushed at us to something that includes our inputs. The coincidence of Howard Dean's intelligent use of the Web, the rise of Facebook in public consciousness and Barack Obama's very technologically-savvy campaign has led to the expectation that Government 2.0 would quickly follow.
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Indian IT Firms Cutting Billing Rates At Unprecedented Levels
Indian IT services firms have been cutting their rates by 35% or even 40% as global clients continue to look for ways to reduce costs in the global economic downturn. The depth of this latest round of rate cuts is "unprecedented," according to an industry expert based in India.
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Firefox 3.5 Is Here
Right on schedule, Mozilla Corp. shipped Firefox 3.5 about a minute ago, at about 11:20 am Eastern time. The new version adds performance improvements, privacy features, support for embedded video, and more. It comes into the world facing a more crowded and competitive market than before, as alternatives such as Google Chrome and Safari have emerged as viable alternatives to both Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer.
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File Sharing And SMS Powers Come To Skype 3.0 For Windows Mobile
The latest version of Skype for the Windows Mobile platform adds some nifty new features. Users will now be able to swap files back and forth, and can send text messages to other mobile phones directly from Skype.
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BlackBerry Tour Hitting Verizon July 12 For $200
If you've been hankering for some BlackBerry Tour action from Verizon Wireless, it's time to get excited. The nation's largest carrier has launched pre-orders for the Tour, which will be in stores starting July 12. It will come in two versions: one with a camera, and one without.
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600 Apps For Windows Marketplace For Mobile Launch
When the new application store for Windows Mobile, dubbed Windows Marketplace for Mobile, opens it will have 600 apps to start with according to a Windows Mobile product manager at Microsoft France.
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The Go-To Geek, June Edition
Oh, sure, you may be a high flying enterprise architect, DBA, infrastructure engineer, or coder, but your friends and family all think: you work in IT. You love IT. And, "you must want to take care of my consumer grade tech needs because you love IT so much." Riiiight. How can you satisfy them and still have time for summer fun?
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So Long, And Thanks, Google Earth, For All The Fish
In the latest installment of what appears to an ongoing series in the technology press, criminals are using technology to commit crimes.
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SAP Looking At 35% Margins And Doubled Revenue By 2014
A leaked SAP strategy document says the company expects to reach an operating margin of 35% by 2014 and also expects current revenue to double during that five-year period. Right now, archrival Oracle has an operating margin of 51%, so it will be interesting to see how each side spins its profit story to its customers.
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Social Network Users Increasingly Under Siege
We all knew this was coming. As Social Networks gained in popularity, they'd become more juicy targets. Now we're starting to see some data.
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Top 10 Companies For US Patents In 2008: IBM Again #1
IBM was awarded 4,186 patents last year to lead the Top 10 list, marking the 16th straight year IBM has earned more US patents than any other company in the world. IBM's achievement that's more than 11 patent granted every single day for the entire year also marks the first time any organization has been awarded more than 4,000 US patents in a single year.
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Broadband Stimulus May Disappoint Thousands
The ball might finally get rolling tomorrow for the $7.2 billion in broadband stimulus funds, not a moment too soon where operators and Internet-starved rural communities are concerned.
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Will New Certification Criteria Fuel Open Source E-Health Records?
Till now, certification requirements for electronic medical records were pretty hefty, addressing hundreds of stringent criteria that comprehensive inpatient and ambulatory systems must meet in order to get a seal of approval from the Certification Commission for Health Information Technology, or CCHIT, a non-profit federally supported group.
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Apple's Snow Leopard: Bigger Than The iPhone 3GS?
While all the Apple buzz is about the iPhone 3GS, Snow Leopard is looking like much more important announcement for Apple. Both were announced at the company's Worldwide Developers Conference a few weeks ago, they're both significant steps forward for existing products. While the 3GS is sexier, Snow Leopard has under-the-hood improvements in the operating system that will help carry Apple into the future.
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Palm Kills Homemade Apps With Latest Pre Firmware
Palm has issued another firmware update for the Palm Pre. The latest version, 1.0.4, offers some minor security improvements and one unwelcome change: some homemade apps no longer work.
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Maximizing Block I/O Dollars With Thin Provisioning
Getting the most out of every storage dollar is critical in this economy and as we discussed in our last entry, viable options for optimizing file based primary storage are available now but as of yet solutions that can compress and deduplicate block I/O storage are not yet readily available. But all is not lost, there are things you can do to lower your primary storage block I/O costs.
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Stallman and Mono: Not As Mono-Lithic As You'd Think
Free software grand master Richard Stallman weighed in not long ago about Mono, the open source implementation of Microsoft's .NET. He's not against it in principle, he just doesn't feel it's a good idea to depend on it for anything, especially not the core GNU tools.
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Apple Reporting iPhone 3GS Shortages
It looks like the iPhone 3GS is a solid seller. Apple is reporting that the iPhone 3GS is out of stock at 29 of its retail stores (as of 6/26). Apple also recently launched a tool to let would-be iPhone buyers check the stock levels of the Apple Store near them.
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VM Management For Fun And Profit
I chatted up a group of IT pros running full tilt towards virtualization. They all seemed to have left their management hats at home... How 'bout you? We'd love to get your view on VM management.
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CIO Seeks Open Government In Brawling New York State Senate
Andrew Hoppin, CIO of the New York State Senate, is working to leverage information technology to get more people involved in politics. Politics needs more voices from the left, right, and center, he said. "Not just professional voices, the people paid to be there, but the people who are interested and have a concern about the workings of the legislators," he said.
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CIOs Don't Listen To Vendors Anymore, Says Salesforce CEO
During the global economic downturn, an IT industry that delivers too much complexity and not enough flexibility has lost a lot of credibility, says Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff, and a major repercussion has been the rise of the reference-account CIO as sales driver. Is your commission plan all set up?
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Google Ups File Attachment Capability Of Gmail
I just don't know how anyone can survive with the limits placed on email systems these days. I mean, where does Google get off thinking it is acceptable to limit Gmail file attachments to a mere 20MB. That's ridiculous. Wait, what? Google just changed it to 25MB? Oh. That's cool.
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T-Mobile Launch Events For New Phones
T-Mobile in the US is holding events in seven cities around the country for the impending launches of the HTC Touch Pro2 and HTC Dash 3G. The Touch Pro2 has been eagerly awaited by many, and the Dash 3G might be better known to you as the HTC Snap.
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Is Text The Only Way To Hold A Conversation?
Audio podcasts haven't seemed to take off like some expected. Video is great as a broadcast medium but it too hasn't taken off for conversations. Is text the only way to hold a conversation online?
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Windows 7 Pricing: How Much Lower?
For months, the news about Windows 7 has been encouraging. The product looks good, but the one thing we didn't know was how much it would cost. Now, we know that too -- or at least some of the picture.
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Think PCI DSS Stinks? Here's Your Chance To Deodorize
There's been plenty of complaints about the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), since it went into effect in 2005. Next week, stakeholders, will have a chance to do something about it.
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10 Essentials Of IBM's Cloud Computing Strategy
IBM recently made its most significant cloud computing announcement to date, which one executive compares to the launch of Big Blue's venerable System/360 mainframe 40 years ago. Following is my list of the top 10 things you need to know about IBM's emerging cloud strategy.
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China Should Hire Apple To Police Porn
The Chinese government has been having a rough month. The authorities there have been dialing back already limited Internet freedoms to discourage disruptive remembrance of the 20th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown. In early June, authorities let slip that starting in July PCs shipped in China would have to include Web filtering software called Green Dam.
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Mythbusters' Adam Savage Hit With $11,000 Data Bill From AT&T
Adam Savage, one of the mighty busters of myths on The Discovery Channel's Mythbusters show, is freaking out on Twitter right now. The target of his rage? AT&T, for slapping him with an $11,000 bill after he surfed the Web in Canada for a few hours.
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Sprint Goes For AT&T's Jugular, Targets iPhone Users In New Ad
Palm and network operator partner Sprint have leveled their sites directly onto iPhone users. The new ad reads, in part, "Your iPhone contract is up. Perfect Timing." Next to these words is a picture of the Palm Pre resting against an eaten Apple.
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Microsoft Snuffing Windows 7 In The Cradle
Those geniuses in Redmond seem to have decided that we'll pay just about anything to get rid of Vista, even if that means spending $119 to upgrade to Windows 7. By the way, that's $119 per user, not per household.
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Garmin Adopts Android And Windows Mobile
Garmin, a leading manufacturer of GPS devices, has announced that they are dropping their home-grown Linux OS in favor of Android and Windows Mobile for future phones.
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OpenSolaris: No Standing Still On A Moving Train
Yesterday I sat down on the phone with Larry Wake -- official title: Group Manager, Solaris Strategic Marketing -- to chat about OpenSolaris. I ended up with an answer to an unexpected question: How do you get people who use software measured in lifetimes of years and decades to move to software lifetimes of mere months?
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Nearly Half Of Americans Would Give Up Mobile Data To Make Ends Meet
According to a new report compiled by Strategy Analytics, 48% of Americans would dump their mobile data plan to save money. The poll also revealed that only 10% would consider dropping their broadband Internet.
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Report Confirms Texting While Driving More Dangerous Than Drinking And Driving
The dangers of texting from behind the wheel have been documented all-too-well by recent accidents involving texters. Now, Car and Driver magazine has proven just how dangerous it is: Drunk drivers have better reaction times than those sending texts while driving.
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Collateral Damage & The Browser Wars
With Microsoft's IE8 and Mozilla's Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate 2 both publicly available, there's been a fair amount of conversation about whether the functionality of these new versions will cause consumers to change browsers.
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Can Government Mandate Innovation?
An influential technology lobby wants President Obama to create an Office of Innovation Policy (OIP) to help spur innovation in the U.S. It sounds like the making of a new alphabet soup, but the idea has some merit.
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Oracle's Larry Ellison Touts Company's New Hardware Chops
In Tuesday's eagerly anticipated earnings call, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison might have been expected to talk about the company's $23.5 billion software business or its Q4 operating margins of more than 50%. But in a sign of the changing times, he talked not about software but instead about a hardware-based Oracle product that "is shaping up to be our most exciting and successful new-product introduction in Oracle's 30-year history."
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Google Commences 'Voice' Invites
If you've used or been using Google's Grand Central product, you've probably already switched to Google Voice. Now, Google is rolling out Voice to the masses.
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Could You Take An 'E-Mail Sabbatical'?
danah boyd, a social media researcher for Microsoft and all-around brilliant person, switches off e-mail entirely when she goes on vacation. She directs all her incoming mail to the trash, and sets her vacation auto-responder to let people sending mail know that she won't read it, and they should contact her when she returns from vacation. Could you do that? How do you handle e-mail over vacation?
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Life With A Bleeding-Edge Browser
Firefox 3.5 went to public release-candidate status earlier this week. But while the whole 3.5 branch was still under wraps, I was sticking my neck out and running the bleeding-edge nightly builds of the browser -- and was surprised at how un-beta it was.
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HTC's Sense UI Coming To Other HTC Android Phones? Not So Fast
The blogosphere has latched onto a short quote from HTC Peter Chou about its newly revealed Sense user interface for Android and whether or not it can be ported to other HTC Android phones. Chou's words seem to confirm that it can, but there's more to the story.
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Verizon Wireless Bows Another World-Roaming Smartphone From HTC
Today Verizon Wireless and HTC announced the Ozone, a Windows Mobile smartphone that works in the U.S. and around the world. Killer features include a slim waist line, camera and full QWERTY keyboard. All this can be yours for just $50.
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Google Adds Swipe Control To iPhone's Gmail App
Google has given the Web-based version of Gmail for the iPhone yet more powers. Now, users can swipe across an email to automatically archive it. That's great and all, but I'd really like to see Google develop an actual on-board email application for the iPhone instead.
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Make IT 'Storefront' A Reality With Service Catalogs
For large enterprises, the procurement of IT hardware, software, and services is in desperate need of an overhaul. Federal CIO Vivek Kundra would like to see the GSA provide a central location for ordering these services, and eventually to move its IT procurement processes away from schedules and toward what he calls a "storefront" model.
Continue reading "Make IT 'Storefront' A Reality With Service Catalogs..."
Maximizing The Storage Budget - Capacity Optimization
In this economy, maximizing what you have and cost justifying what you need now becomes a much sought-after skill. The IT budget and the storage budget along with it are not growing in many organizations and I often hear that the budget is the same but they are not allowed to spend right now, which is worse than the budget being cut. Regardless spendable IT dollars are a precious commodity.
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From The Useless Statistics Department - Palm Pre App Downloads
Now that the Apple App Store hit one billion downloads of third party applications after just nine months, other app stores will follow suit with their own app download progress. The application store for the Palm Pre has had one million downloads in less than three weeks. Or has it?
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Is Netflix's Core Business Doomed?
Netflix CEO Reed Hastings believes his core business of DVD rentals is doomed, somewhere around four to nine years from now, so he wants to migrate his brand to the transmission of digital content. Is he right?
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Obama Plans Brighten IT Prospects
If all you've heard is business complain that increased taxes and government regulation is driving investment and innovation abroad or is otherwise bad for business, you haven't been listening to IT vendors.
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Oracle Owns MySQL, But.... This Is Open Source Code
Oracle and MySQL are the favorite databases of developers who use the Eclipse open source programmers workbench. That's no surprise, I thought. Developers like to develop in free MySQL and deploy in Oracle, right? Actually, Oracle and MySQL are their two favorite deployment databases, contrary to what I would have expected.
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iPhone Hammers Blackberry In Crossover Purchase Preference
Among smartphone users who don't currently have Blackberries, only 14% say they plan to buy a Blackberry as their next smartphone. But among smartphone users who don't currently have an iPhone, 38% say the iconic Apple smartphone is the one they're going to buy. Eh, cut-and-paste, schmut-and-paste!
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Nokia Holding Fire Sales At U.S. Flagship Stores June 25
About 10 days ago, Nokia had a three-hour sale at its U.S. flagship stores, where it offered pretty steep discounts on a number of its popular phones. Tomorrow (June 25), there will be a repeat performance, this time lasting for five hours. Also, Europe's number one contract phone is revealed.
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Oracle Moves A 'Little Bit' Into Cloud Computing
Following his outburst against cloud computing last year, it appears that Larry Ellison has warmed up to the cloud computing model, if not the buzz phrase itself. Oracle's CEO yesterday said it's a goal to become the software industry's "number one on-demand application company."
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Palm Sells 150,000 Pres
In the three weeks since its release, Palm is estimated to have sold 150,000 Pres. There is still a bit of a backlog and strong demand, but it seems there is a steady supply of new devices keeping the waiting lists relatively short.
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Is America Losing The Social Networking War?
While Twitter and YouTube have proven strategic for election protesters in Iran, the US Defense Department is "way behind the power curve" on social networking, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said last week. Military leaders need to get on Facebook and other social networking sites themselves, to learn how they're used firsthand.
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Enterprise 2.0: Confronting Social Media's Dirty Little Secret
I'm encouraged that the dirty little secret of Web 2.0 and social media technologies is finally being openly addressed by early adopters and vendors alike. At the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston, there's been frank discussion this week of the question average users have been whispering (so that their bosses don't hear them): Namely, what can this stuff do for me that's actually useful?
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Pick Your Distro: Cutting-Edge, Bleeding-Edge, Blunting-Edge
You might remember Bryan Lunduke from his extremely pointed "Linux Sucks -- Let's Fix It" presentation of a few months back. Now he's aiming fighting words at Fedora over F11, and from that I've gleaned a few larger questions about what is the real role of any given Linux distribution.
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Say I Need More Bandwidth And I'll Bite Off Your Face
Its time to think differently. Mike Fratto, lead Analyst at InformationWeek Analytics, has a new report on improving delivery of applications by leveraging performance tools and appliances.
He does a great job digging into the challenges of managing application performance across a wide range of organizations. The report is based upon a survey of 267 tech folks across the US.
Continue reading "Say I Need More Bandwidth And I'll Bite Off Your Face..."
HTC Looks To Its Android-Powered And Flash-Toting Hero To Save The World
At an event in London today, HTC unveiled its latest Android-based handset, the Hero. On top of an impressive set of specs, the Hero boasts a brand new user interface from HTC called Sense. Oh, yeah, I almost forgot, Flash 10 is on board, too.
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Microsoft IE8 Hype Is Beyond Belief
Internet Explorer 8 is a very good browser, especially when compared to IE7 and (ugh) IE6. However, it still lags behind most of the other browsers in both performance and standards compliance. That doesn't seem to bother Microsoft, which has been pushing IE8 using hype that they rarely use even for Windows or Office.
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Embracing Project Inefficiency
I ran my local chamber of commerce's 5k this past Friday. Total time elapsed from leaving the office to going home: 90 minutes. Previous experience showed that I could change, travel, then run the same course on my own with half the total elapsed time: 45 minutes. Many participants of a large IT project would be seriously ticked off at a 200% inefficiency; but that would be silly.
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Google Endorses Health Data Rights
Google on Tuesday endorsed the Declaration of Health Data Rights, a set of principles designed to promote consumer empowerment, privacy protection, and data portability.
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AT&T Says Network Improvements On The Way
Anyone remember SXSWi? AT&T's cellular network in Austin was so overwhelmed by the huge number of iPhone users during the conference that it pretty much crashed. In response, AT&T opened up its 3G network across the 850MHz spectrum holdings it owns in Austin to boost capacity during the conference. It's about to do the same thing in NYC, Los Angeles and San Francisco.
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Your Malware-Infected Computer Is Being Traded Like A Stock
Finjan's most recent Cybercrime Intelligence report pulls the covers off a clandestine, underground network of buyers and sellers of a new and valuable commodity, your spyware infected computer! Read on for the details.
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Oracle Takes Share From SAP, But Is It Signing New Licenses?
Oracle's acquisition binge has allowed it to take customers and market share from SAP, analysts say, but their bigger focus is on whether Oracle can stem its recent declines in new-license revenue. We'll find out for sure later today when Oracle releases its quarterly numbers, but here's what some analysts are projecting.
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Google Offering 'Gmail Ninja' Lessons
Google wants you to be able to take on Uma Thurman (a.k.a., The Bride from the "Kill Bill" movies) -- and win. At least, as far as cleaning up your Gmail inbox is concerned. Starting today, Google has published a tutorial called "Become a Gmail Ninja." The goal? To become a master in the art of Nin-Gmail-su.
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HTC Firestone Leaks
HTC has a big announcement tomorrow in London, but there haven't been a lot of details. Some think it is the HTC Hero, an Android powered device. It may be something else entirely, or a combination of things. We've got leaks of the HTC Firestone for you. Here is the rundown.
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The Cloud's Next Big Thing: Software Testing
IBM and Hewlett-Packard have jumped into the market for software testing in the cloud, a space where a handful of startups already offer alternatives to on-premises testing. It's an area of cloud computing where the barriers to entry are relatively low for developers and IT departments.
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Melody: Movable Type, Reloaded
It's always compelling news when an open source project of some renown is forked. It's twice as compelling when it's a fork of a project you use and rely on personally. I speak of Melody, a spinoff of the open-source branch of the blogging and publishing system Movable Type.
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IBMs Patent Lawyer: From Reform Advocate To Mr. Fix-It
When I was researching an article on the U.S. Supreme Court re-shaping patent law two years ago, everyone kept telling me I needed to talk with David Kappos, IBM's top patent lawyer. Guess President Obama got the same advice.
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Apple's MobileMe Helps Man Recover Stolen iPhone. Already
During Apple's WWDC keynote address, it was sure to talk up one of MobileMe's new features: Find My iPhone. It lets users track down the whereabouts of a lost or stolen iPhone. Turns out it's not just a fun exercise. It actually helps real people, such as iPhone owner Kevin Miller, get a stolen iPhone back.
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New York Best City To Lose A Smartphone
If once is a coincidence and twice is a trend, then I can confidently attest to the fact that if you're going to lose your Jesus Phone anywhere on earth, make it New York City.
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Enterprise 2.0 Panelists: Get On With The Cloud Already
In a "customer visit" session kicking off the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston Monday evening, executives from IBM, Google, and EMC laid out their companies cloud computing value propositions and then fielded questions from a handful of potential buyers. Much has changed -- and still much hasn't -- from the first "Evening In The Cloud" session at Enterprise 2.0 a year ago.
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Is Apple's App Store Closing Mobile Web?
Apple retains quite a bit of control over what is posted to the App Store and some are arguing that instead of the iPhone being a device that is open and allowing users to be limited only by their imagination, it is doing quite the opposite. Is the iPhone hegemony is closer to a walled garden than you might think?
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Citrix CEO Templeton Forecasts Consumerization Of IT
In yet another stark example of the type of fresh thinking CIOs need to embrace to overcome tomorrow's business-technology challenges, Citrix CEO Mark Templeton says IT organizations need to create self-service models to lower the cost of infrastructure and give employees more flexibility and power. He even says employees should be given the freedom to provision their own apps and services.
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Moto's Android Phones Hitting T-Mobile, Verizon
Looks like Motorola's super fun Android handset will be coming to T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless later this year, according to the folks over at The Wall Street Journal. It will be interesting to see how well these handsets are received, as Motorola has a lot riding on them.
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Google Does Good
If the U.S. government intends to file an antitrust lawsuit against Google, it had better act fast. Given the pace and profile of Google's philanthropic activities, the Justice Department may have to amend whatever legal documents have been prepared so far by changing the defendant's name to "Saint Google."
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Adobe Flash 10 Headed To Smartphone Platforms In October
Now this is some pretty darned good news. Adobe CEO Shantanu Naraye let it slip during an investor call that the company plans to debut Flash 10 for smartphones running the Android, Symbian S60, Palm webOS, and Windows Mobile platforms.
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Make Storage Strategic
How does your organization look at storage in the data center? Is it something you have to live with or is it something that can increase the organization's revenue or improve customer satisfaction? How do you make storage strategic to your organization?
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Did T-Mobile Wait Too Long To Introduce The myTouch 3G?
Today, T-Mobile announced its second Android device, the myTouch 3G with Google. Horrible name aside, the device has a decent spec list. But is the myTouch 3G too little, too late?
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LiberKey: That's Not Freedom, That's Shoplifting
After all the recent talk about "open-source leeches", it's sobering to come across an entity that sorely deserves the label. I'm talking about LiberKey, the creators of an open source application collection along the lines of PortableApps.com. If even half of what's reported about them is true, their lack of ethics or scruples is jaw-dropping.
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The Apple iPhone 3G S And The CIO
Not too long ago, a mythical CIO finally authorized the Blackberry for corporate use, and overnight was transformed from know-nothing whipping-boy to rock-star hero. But now comes the iPhone 3G S and the troops are threatening an all-out uprising unless they all get one. A real-life IT exec from the U.K. tells this tale of woe in "The CIO and the iPhone."
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An Unhealthy Obsession With Jobs
Apple says Steve Jobs will return to his position as CEO at the end of June. That ought to be enough to quiet rumors to the contrary. But ghoulish reporters, abetted at times by others shedding crocodile tears, are fixating on Jobs' ongoing health crisis like nobody's business.
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Apple: We Sold 1 Million iPhones Over The Weekend
According to an email I just received, Apple claims it sold one million iPhone 3GS's during its first three days of availability. That doubles what analysts had guessed Apple would sell. Apple also says more than 6 million people have downloaded iPhone OS 3.0.
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Hewlett-Packard Acquires HR Business-Process Outsourcer
Hewlett-Packard has acquired full interest in an HR business-process outsourcing firm formed as a joint venture between EDS and Towers Perrin in 2005 and called Excellerate HRO. Now that HP's wholly owned services unit, EDS, has full control over the venture, HP is likely to become more aggressive in courting outsourcing deals in the HR sector.
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Microsoft Joins The Click-Fraud War
Micrososoft recently announced that it was suing several companies that it claims have perpetrated click fraud on Microsoft ad networks. This ad fraud wasn't something detected by Microsoft. Instead, advertisers reported suspicious activity to Microsoft, which was spurred to investigate. That spelunking revealed companies gaming Microsoft's ad system for their own profit.
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Steve Jobs Reportedly Had Liver Transplant
Steve Jobs, who went on medical leave in January because of an undisclosed medical condition, had a liver transplant in Tennessee two months ago, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. He's on the mend and will be back at work at the end of this month -- which is to say, within 10 days.
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Google Street View Solves Crime
In the U.K. in April, a handful of residents of the village of Broughton blocked a car from entering their town. The driver was taking pictures for Google's Street View service and the locals were concerned about their privacy.
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Don't Let Iran's 'Twitter Revolution' Make You Stupid
In two short years, Twitter has gone from a startup to celebrity plaything. Now, in the case of the election demonstrations in Tehran, it's apparently a serious tool of U.S. foreign policy. This leaves IT managers in government and business with the important role of steering their organizations between the twin dangers that face any fashionable emerging technology: Irrational exuberance on the one hand, and excessive skepticism on the other.
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Razorfish Still Blowing Dot-Bomb Bubbles
While many of us are holding our collective breaths in the hopes that Web 3.0 (or, as Robert Scoble would have it, the 2010 Web) will help drag us out of recession, some remain intent on blowing dot-com-like bubbles.
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Decommissioned Storage Justifies Encryption
There are many reasons to justify storage encryption; tapes falling off the back of a truck on the way to a vault for disaster recovery purposes is one, but when it comes to disk encryption not many have made the effort to encrypt disk based data. While that disk array is in your environment it should be relatively secure, except from internal threats, but what about when you decommission a storage array?
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Palm Says No webOS SDK Any Time Soon
Today Palm published some information that is sure to leave many Palm Pre owners and webOS developers in dismay. The SDK -- tools necessary for developers to create applications for webOS -- won't be available until the end of the summer. That is not such great news.
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Open Source You Can Use, June 2009 Edition
This month's catch: the cutting- (bleeding?-) -edge editions of Chrome and VirtualBox, and an HTML editor comes back from the dead.
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Of Cloud 9 and The Importance of Parachutes
Back when I did a lot of security work, we used to joke around that single sign on should be called "single vulnerability". Maybe single provider cloud models should be called "single point of failure".
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AT&T: We Sold Hundreds Of Thousands Of iPhones BEFORE Launch Day
Lending more weight to Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster's predictions that Apple and AT&T will sell about 500,000 iPhones this weekend, AT&T claims that "hundreds of thousands" of customers preordered the iPhone 3GS before today.
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Is Bing Hurting Advertisers With Categorized Results?
Where possible, Microsoft's new Bing search engine provides categorized search results. The concept appears to be a good for users but what about for advertisers?
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Is Oracle Looking To Acquire GoldenGate For Data Migration?
Reports are circulating that Oracle will trump this week's acquisition of Conformia with the purchase of GoldenGate Software, whose data-migration and real-time integration tools are already widely used to link Oracle with Siebel and other environments.
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FLO TV To Integrate Into Windows Mobile Phones
FLO TV, owned by Qualcomm, is rolling out its service now that the switch from analog to digital has taken place in the US. Qualcomm is working with OEMs to integrate the service into mobile phones.
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What It Was Like To Buy A New iPhone 3GS Today
This morning I braved the gaggle (not a crowd, that would imply more people) and bought a new iPhone 3GS. The difference compared to last year's launch of the iPhone 3G was stark. I was in and out of there pretty fast (as should be obvious based on how early this blog is posted). Word of advice, if you didn't pre-order, go home now and try again later.
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iPhone 3.0 Software Sports Snazzy New Features, Sure: It Also plugs a Whopping 46 Security Flaws
The nearly four dozen security holes filled in the iPhone 3.0 software published by Apple yesterday have gone nearly ignored with all of the buzz surrounding the new features. But these flaws aren't anything you want to put on hold.
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Would You Pay $70 For 100MB Of Mobile Data?
Today Verizon Wireless introduced a new laptop dongle that can handle just about any 3G wireless network you care to throw at it. Too bad data plans start at $130 per month.
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An iPhone Ban Is Not A Product Plan
So, Microsoft has decided that it will no longer pay for mobile devices that have non-Microsoft operating systems. That includes not only the iPhone, but others like the BlackBerry and Palm Pre as well. Android phones are right out, too.
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Cloud Standards Will Emerge From Current Haze
What standards do you follow if you're interested in getting started in cloud computing? The short answer is, there are few clearly defined standards in what remains a loosely defined area. Nevertheless, the main outline is clear. Follow the leaders and follow the Web.
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CIOs Belong On The Board -- Or Else They're Just IT Managers
"Having faced the humiliation of having their IT budgets unilaterally cut, [some CIOs] are now in a tail spin that will ultimately have serious business consequences." Sound familiar? IT consultant Ade McCormack says that unless such CIOs are willing to accept the job of IT manager, they need to heed his "call to arms for a 21st-century CIO."
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An Open Kindle? We Dare Ya!
At first it seemed like Amazon had released the source code to the Kindle -- although, as it turns out, they haven't. Not really, anyway. One would think they've got nothing to lose by doing so, since the real value of the Kindle isn't in the device itself anyway.
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Public Can 'Participate' In NASA's Lunar Mission
NASA's launch of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite marks one of the space agency's first "participatory missions," says Chris Kemp, CIO of NASA's Ames Research Center. From their backyards, as well as from Moon-gazing tools from Google and Microsoft, the public will be able to view high-resolution images of our celestial neighbor.
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Analyst: iPhone To Trounce Palm Pre In First Weekend Sales
Last year, Apple and AT&T sold about one million iPhones the first weekend it became available for sale. This year, analysts predict half that much, but still believe it will easily surpass the Palm Pre's sales figures.Update: Line already forming in NYC!
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TweetDeck On iPhone #NotFail
TweetDeck, the popular Adobe-based client that enhances your Twitter experience partly by, well, keeping you off the Twitter.com site, is now available as an iPhone app.
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I Wish The NASA Brand Wasn't Worthless
Did you know that NASA plans to launch two unmanned probes to the moon today, in preparation for the return of astronauts to its surface in a decade or so? Yup, I didn't either. How did the idea of exploring space get so uninteresting and irrelevant?
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AT&T Simplfies Wi-Fi Log-In On The iPhone
One nice thing that AT&T has done for its iPhone customers is give them free access to its Wi-Fi hotspots. The log-in process, however, is so heinously annoying that many just give up. Now, iPhones will automatically connect to an AT&T Wi-Fi hotspot, no clumsy log-in required.
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Remote Desktop On Your Mobile Phone
Sometimes you need access to your PC but that doesn't mean you have to carry your laptop with you on a short trip. You may be able to access your PC or servers right from your smartphone. Here are but a few ways to accomplish this.
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Robert Scoble And The New Digital Divide
Robert Scoble thinks that too many people, especially small businesses, aren't benefiting from the fruits of Web 3.0, or Web 2010, "or whatever you want to call it," as he said to me this evening at an event hosted by Rackspace (his blog's current sponsor) at the New York Stock Exchange.
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Apple May Kill Pre's iTunes Sync
One of the neat features about the Palm Pre is that customers can use iTunes to transfer and manage media files. It looks like Apple is not too happy about that, and it released a veiled warning that this feature may not last long.
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Another Hot Market For SaaS: Business Intelligence
Popular applications for software-as-a-service include CRM, expense management, human resources, and Web analytics. But now were seeing a sudden burst of activity around business intelligence SaaS. Makes sense, since BI software is popular right now, and shares characteristics with the aforementioned apps that make it right for cloud computing.
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AT&T Attempts To Appease iPhone Owners, Changes Upgrade Policy
Poor AT&T. It has been on the hot seat pretty much ever since Apple announced the iPhone 3GS. Responding to overwhelming feedback from iPhone customers, AT&T has made it more affordable for some iPhone owners to upgrade.
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Open Source Was Just The Beginning
If Tim O'Reilly's comments in a recent podcast are on the mark, the future of software won't be open or proprietary, or even revolve around software at all. It'll be about open, user-aggregated data, and how we get there will become increasingly unimportant.
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Socialism Hits Home As BusinessWeek Asks, Should CIO Pay Be Limited?
At the end of a recent article detailing the 2008 compensation packages of the five highest-paid CIOs with #1 on the list having earned $24.65 million BusinessWeek asked the rather bizarre question, "Do you think limits should be set for CIO pay?" After reading the article a second time, I think BusinessWeek wants the answer to be yes.
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Google Enables More Contact Fields In Gmail
One of Gmail's weaknesses is that it has not supported all of the fields that a particular contact may have...until today, that is. Google fixed that. Google also recently explained why some Outlook plug-ins won't work with Google Apps.
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How Secure Are SIP Trunks?
We've had a very lively discussion going on over at No Jitter, in response to a post by Matt Brunk about security of SIP trunks. We've also got a Webinar coming up with Acme Packet on technical obstacles to SIP trunking, in which security is sure to be one topic of discussion (register here). We also got a brief discussion of security in SIP Trunking from Richard Shockey of the SIP Forum, as part of our Virtual VoiceCon session on SIP Trunking last week (go here if you missed that session or any other part of the event).
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U.S. Gov't Asked Twitter For Help with Iran
A State Department official asked Twitter to postpone scheduled downtime to keep a channel open for Iranians protesting the country's contested election, according to the NY Times.
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iPhone OS 3.0 Coming Today At 1PM EST?
Owners of the iPhone and iPhone 3G are likely awaiting today's arrival of iPhone operating system 3.0 with baited breath. Be prepared to stick it out for a few more hours. Reports suggest it will become available to everyone at 1 PM EST / 10 AM PST.
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A Windows Phone For $50 Or Less From Acer
We've known for months that Acer was going to release several smartphones running Windows Mobile, and now they are going to do it for $50 or less. With smartphones coming down in price so much, will feature phones be squeezed out of existence?
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Apple Fires Shot Across Palm's Bow Over Pre iTunes Syncing
The Palm Pre syncs seamlessly with Apple's iTunes software. Palm touted this as one of the Pre's neat-o features. It does this by tricking iTunes into believing the Pre is an iPod. Turns out, Apple may not like that too much.
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Why Businesses And Individuals Aren't Racing To Go Green (And What To Do About It)
As one of the head counselors of Energy Camp (Tom Raftery of Greenmonk fame is the other; blog, Twitter), I pay pretty close attention to anything colored green; green organizations, green initiatives, green events, green vendor programs, green news, etc. It was only after the last Energy Camp at Interop in Las Vegas that it dawned on me why the overall green movement gets only pockets of traction, and what we should do about it. Hopefully, someone in Obama's administration is listening.
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Oracle Wins Strategic Deals With HBO, Abercrombie & Fitch
Oracle has landed two significant new deals: with HBO to help it shift more IT spending away from internal operations and more toward content creation and customer engagement, and with Abercrombie & Fitch to create a global single instance for store merchandising and operations as the retailer undertakes a global expansion.
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Green Tech In Survival Phase
CIOs are more challenged than ever to cut costs, do more with less, and "go green" (whatever that means, exactly). But identifying the IT hardware, software, and services that fit the bill is a challenge in and of itself.
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It's Not AT&T's Fault
AT&T is responsible for the imperfections of iPhone user experiences, and has failed to take the steps to satisfy developers, according to recent news reports. I can't believe I'm saying this, but I'm not sure it's AT&T's fault.
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To Mono Or Not To Mono
Open source seems to attract -- or maybe breed -- controversy, both from without and within. This week there's been a good deal of noise on the role of Mono -- the open source implementation of Microsoft's .NET framework -- in Linux. Is it a legitimate worry or much ado about nothing?
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Twitter Squeezes Through The Bottleneck
Twitter has proven once and for all that sometimes less is more, that David can beat Goliath, and maybe even that the bigger they are, the harder they fall.
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AT&T Clarifies GoPhone Plans For The iPhone 3GS, To Have 'Limited' Supply
In response to a stirring brou-ha-ha kicked up yesterday, AT&T is attempting to douse a fire regarding iPhones and GoPhone plans before it spreads too far. Also, it looks like AT&T retail stores will have limited supplies of the iPhone 3GS at launch.
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Hewlett-Packard's Randy Mott Tops List Of 5 Best-Paid CIOs
HP CIO Randy Mott, who last year completed a sweeping transformation of HP's IT operations that flipped the ratio of IT spending on maintenance/innovation from 80/20 to 30/70, tops a list of the five best-paid CIOs at public companies in the U.S. Other public companies whose CIOs made the list: Best Buy, State Street Corp., American Express, and JC Penney.
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Why Is The Army Unblocking Some Social Media Sites, But Not Others?
The U.S. Army ordered network managers to stop blocking soldiers' access to some social media sites, including Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter. But why is the Army apparently allowing access to some social networking sites, like Facebook, but not others, like Facebook's competitor MySpace?
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Is That A Cloud On Healthcare's Horizon?
Cloud models are starting to provide an attractive option for large and influential regional medical centers to get lots of small, local, laggard doctor offices trading in their paper patient files for electronic medical records. Are there clouds in your forecast?
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iPhone 3GS Is Already Shipping To Some Who Pre-Ordered
It's on! Some of the first people who pre-ordered the iPhone 3GS have received notification that their phones have shipped. The cool part? Delivery dates are scheduled for June 17, two days before everyone else can get their hands on it.
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How To Pay Less To Upgrade To The iPhone 3G S
Owners of the current-generation iPhone 3G were in for a bit of disappointment when Apple announced the iPhone 3G S last week. When the new device goes on sale Friday, owners of the current-generation iPhone 3G will have to pay more for the new device than first-time iPhone owners. But 3G owners can still save money upgrading to the new 3G S -- here are some angles to explore.
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RIM Finally Gets Around To Announcing The BlackBerry 9630 Tour
Today Research In Motion confirmed the existence of the BlackBerry 9630 Tour, a device that's been a blogosphere favorite for months now. Similar to the Storm, the Tour's stand-out feature is its support for both EVDO Rev. A and GSM/EDGE/HSDPA cellular networks. Too bad there's no Wi-Fi. Expect to see it at both Verizon and Sprint in July.
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Dell's New Android Based Cell Phone?
Based on a very blurry picture, Engadget thinks this may be a shot of a new cell phone by Dell running Android.
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Apple Issues Java Security Updates For OS X 10.4, 10.5
Apple released security updates today for Java for Mac OS X for Java SE 6, J2SE 5.0 and J2SE 1.4.2 on Mac OS X 10.5.7 and later. The unfortunately reality is that Sun fixed these flaws more than six months ago. Why did Apple take so long?
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IBM CEO's Description Of Big Blue Used Against It In Court
IBM CEO Sam Palmisano recently told institutional investors, in a very pointed fashion, that IBM is "not like the other companies in the IT industry" because it's transformed itself. And so when IBM sued one of its VPs to prevent him from joining Dell, the VP defended his legal right to make the move by using Palmisano's own words as proof that Dell should not be regarded as a competitive threat to IBM.
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AT&T: iPhone MMS Feature To Come 'At No Extra Cost'
Anyone worried that AT&T was going to charge a price premium for the ability to send picture and/or video messages can breath easy. AT&T recently noted that it won't charge more to add the feature.
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Google Has Bigger Fears Than Bing
Google co-founder Sergey Brin, as The New York Post, tells it, is "so rattled by the launch of Microsoft's rival search engine that he has assembled a team of top engineers to work on urgent upgrades to his Web service."
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Tehran, Twitter, And Human Connections
Twitter and Facebook can help us strengthen our real-world connections with each other. We see that in our ordinary lives, every time we use Twitter or Facebook to arrange to have a cup of coffee with a friend or business associate. More seriously, these connections are being drawn in blood on the streets of Tehran.
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Google Maps For Android Now Voice Powered
In the latest addition to the Android version of Google Maps for Mobile, users can now speak their search queries rather than typing them in. Google also made a bunch of other tweaks that make the overall experience better.
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Apple And The Magical Retail Experience In Its Global Stores
A professional investor who's used PCs for 20 years relates the superb retail experience he had at the Apple Store in Tokyo, and emphasizes the power of atmosphere and interpersonal interactions in driving brand equity, revenue and customer engagement. After buying, he wondered, "What excuse could I find to visit my new friends in Ginza, and buy something else from them?"
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Google's Video Tag Controversy
Love it or hate it, YouTube has become the de facto video presentation portal for, well, everyone. Now comes some worried discussion about what format YouTube may support when HTML 5 and its <video> tag make their debut.
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Solving Storage Performance Problems
When an application is slowing down because of poor storage I/O performance, the first step most IT professionals will take to solve the problem is to increase the physical drive count on the RAID group assigned to that application. How do you know when this will work and what are the best ways to implement this?
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People, Not Twitter, Cause Iran Vote Investigation
Contrary to popular opinion, Twitter isn't reporting on Iran or the Swine Flu or calling people names. Twitter didn't cause Iran's supreme leader to call for an investigation of the election results. People did that.
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Microsoft Drops Reimbursement For iPhone Data Usage
Microsoft is cutting back on some perks for its employees, including being reimbursed for data plans that are primarily used for business. Unless, that is, the employee is using a Windows Mobile phone.
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SAP Turns To SaaS 'To Avoid Extinction,' Says BusinessWeek
A Google News search on "SAP" turned up this headline attributed to BusinessWeek: "SAP hits on-demand SaaS button to avoid extinction." But that silly headline and equally silly article weren't written by BusinessWeek they appeared on a new BusinessWeek site where readers post stories from other sites. With outcomes like this, is SAP the one that should be worried about extinction?
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Microsoft Free Antivirus: It's About Time
This week, Microsoft confirmed that it would soon be releasing a free antivirus product that can run Windows versions all the way back to XP. That puts the company on target to deliver the product, code named Morro, that they announced last November to replace the paid OneCare product that meet its end this month.
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Nokia Accidentally Outs The E72 On YouTube
File this one under "Oops!" The Nokia Conversations Web site recently posted a 90-second promotional video that details the unannounced E72 enterprise smartphone. It looks great.
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How Technology Can Help Your Business Weather The Great Recession
bMighty went out into the trenches to dig up real stories of how actual businesses are using technology to survive ITE (in this economy). Plus: 21 easy ways to cut IT costs without hurting your business.
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Google Goings-On
There's so much going on at Google that it's not always possible to cover it all. What follows are some recent developments that may be of interest but didn't get much attention. And this isn't a complete list. I've omitted the developments in the many foreign countries where Google does business.
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Cloud Computing Vs. $100 Million Data Center
Citizens of Holyoke, Mass., had reason to celebrate this week as the governor of Massachusetts and other dignitaries--including Cisco CEO John Chambers, EMC CEO Joe Tucci, and the presidents of Boston University, MIT, and the University of Massachusetts--announced plans to build a $100 million data center in their town. It's an ambitious proposal, but is it necessary?
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IRS Says It Wants To Help You SAVE Money On Cell Phones!
An anonymous IRS official has leaked some comments about a proposed tax-code change that could make it less expensive for businesses to comply with tax laws governing deductions for cell phones. Forgive me if I'm a tad suspicious, but when was the last time that the IRS did anything to save any money for anyone? And why did the comments have to be made anonymously?
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Samsung May Be Behind Bigfoot's Tracks As It Stomps Over To T-Mobile
Last month, T-Mobile announced that it would be introducing its second Android-based handset "really soon." The implication was by the end of June or early July. We know that HTC is holding a special event in London June 24, but new reports suggest that Samsung's "Bigfoot" device may be the Android handset T-Mobile is getting ready to launch.
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Candidate Obama Beat President Obama At Web 2.0
When Barack Obama was running for President, he made aggressive use of Web 2.0 and social media, but as president he's been more cautious. Why? The Center for American Progress, a liberal policy and advocacy group, has the answer: It's a lot harder for a sitting president to use social media than it is for a candidate.
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Microsoft Not Going Down In The Fifth
Microsoft sees itself as a boxer refusing to throw a match for the fixers -- or in this case, the EU Competition Commission. But in reality, Microsoft is a palooka throwing a tantrum because the boxing commission won't let him fight with a roll of quarters in his fists anymore.
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Is Palm Delaying The Pre's Follow-Up Device?
Reports of a second device from Palm based on webOS have been floating about the Internet since April. Now, claims have appeared that suggest Palm is going to hold off releasing it until 2010 -- if at all.
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Cisco SAN Share Slumps As HP And IBM Switch To Brocade
Cisco's recent entry into the server business has caused two of its former partners, HP and IBM, to retaliate by buying more high-end SAN switches from Brocade rather than from traditional supplier Cisco. The result: "a landslide shift in market share in just one quarter."
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Google Gooses iGoogle For Android And iPhone
Today Google rolled out a new version of its iGoogle page for the Android and iPhone platforms. New features include the ability to access more of your tabs and improved gadget support for interacting with your content.
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Ubuntu's New Goal: Ten Seconds To Boot
The newest word from the Canonical camp about future features for Ubuntu Linux is booting to a desktop in, get this, ten seconds. If they can do it, great! But I suspect another reason might be to do an end run around the rather flaky state of power management in Linux.
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Confessions Of A Palm Ex
It's ironic that I had made the decision to totally abandon the Palm platform just as the Pre was announced. For me, Palm's efforts were just too little, too late. I had put up with the complete lack of updates, the poor memory management, the frequent crashes. the fleeing developers, and hung on in desperate hope that a real platform might emerge. But finally, Palm, I started seeing other people. And it's working out fine, thank you, and I don't want to get back together.
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Will A Leaner And Meaner Yahoo Be Better?
News broke this week that Yahoo has hired a cost-cutting specialist as its new CFO, with references that he'll help "...weed out the bureaucracy that has been dragging down its profits." Is that what Yahoo needs to fix?
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41 Percent Of Consumers Choosing Smartphones
In North America, 41 Percent of consumers are said to be choosing smartphones instead of feature phones or plain old cell phones with little more than texting and a camera. That is good news, but it means the carriers need to invest in the networks.
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Don't Buy Computers This Month
According to a leaked memo, Microsoft will be offering free upgrades from Vista to Windows 7. Unfortunately, the offer doesn't start until June 26. The lesson? If you planned to buy a new computer this month, don't. Wait for Windows 7.
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Microsoft Tops IBM And Oracle On R&D Spending -- Combined
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says his company will spend $9.5 billion on R&D this year. That's almost 50% more than IBM's $6.5 billion, and it's more than the combined R&D spending of IBM and either Oracle ($2.7 billion) or Google ($2.8 billion). And almost nine times as much as Apple's $1.1 billion. Is Microsoft deriving equivalent multiples in business value?
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Internet Faces Threat Of Breaking Apart
The threat to the Internet posed by excessive consolidation, driven by big Internet service providers, has been thoroughly discussed. But consolidation isn't the only threat facing the Internet -- the network might also fragment, returning to the days of the 90s when we had proprietary networks like America Online, CompuServe, and Prodigy, and communications between them was difficult, according to a former Obama advisor.
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SuccessFactors' CEO On SAP's SaaS Strategy
After I wrote about SAPs new SaaS strategy Wednesday, several SAP competitors sent emails slamming the strategy. Not an unusual response from competitors, right? But I did accept the offer to talk to Lars Dalgaard, CEO of SuccessFactors, which just landed a massive deal for 420,000 seats of its talent-management SaaS with longtime SAP partner Siemens AG. This conversation, I thought, might be interesting.
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Is Twitter The New Wikipedia?
Watching Ashton Kutcher beat CNN to a million followers must have created a strain of Iago's green-eyed envy among mainstream media folks, which may be why they've been so quick to pounce Twitter's recent hiccup.
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Thin Provisioning Reduces The Cost Of Failure
When vendors talk about thin provisioning you will hear how it reduces CAPEX and how it increases storage admin efficiency. What you don't hear very often is how thin provisioning can reduce the cost of failure.
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Palm Pre's Costliest Component Is Its Display
iSuppli is at it again. This time the company has broken down the new Palm Pre. According to its breakdown, the touch display cost $39.50, by far the most expensive piece of the device.
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Ex-DHS CIO: Hackers Hit Us A Million Times A Day
World War III will be fought with computers, a former Homeland Security IT chief is warning. In fact, he said, preliminary salvos are already underway.
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The Skinny On Where And When To Get The iPhone 3GS
If you don't care about upgrade fees and want yourself some of that hot new iPhone 3GS action come June 19, here's what you need to know if you want to score.
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Linux Kernel 2.6.30's Band of 'Open Sorcerors'
The newest version of the Linux kernel, 2.6.30, went out into the wild on the 9th. I took a peek at the "what's new" document and saw plenty of evidence that the kernel's becoming a place where Big Software has come to contribute.
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Isilon Debuts New Appliance to Speed Backups
The Backup Accelerator appliance works with Isilon's NAS cluster to speed up backups of file-based data.
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AT&T Being Unfairly Hammered Over iPhone Upgrade Fees
iPhone 3G owners are in an uproar that they won't be able to enjoy the steep discounts being offered to new (or qualifying) AT&T customers when the iPhone 3GS goes on sale next week. Get over it. This is the way the cell phone industry works, and you signed a contract. Know what your responsibilities are before you sign, and then remember that you need to honor your legal responsibilities (and not cry about it).
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More Tales From The Crypt
Sometimes you just have to accept defeat. Such was the case for a friend of mine who recently spent a great deal of time pondering how a corporate rival always seemed to be a step ahead, knowing things he shouldn't have known and one-upping him at almost every turn. This friend asked me to drop by and scan his PC, and guess what I found........
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UBS CTO Out After 10 Weeks As IT Becomes 'Pooled Service'
UBS CTO and head of IT Peter Sany is leaving the company after about 10 weeks on the job and all you CIOs out there please take note: UBS's CEO said ongoing cost cuts include "pooling services such as information technology." Is that how your company views you and your IT operation: just another commodity service, like HR and facilities, waiting to be pooled?
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Web Apps Over Native Apps?
About a month ago, I wrote that there are too many mobile platforms for developers to effectively keep up with. My answer was that there are too many platforms for smartphones, at least six at last count. What if the answer was quit building native apps and put everything on the web?
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Hakia Tells Bing That They Invented Categorized Search
Earlier this month Microsoft launched their updated search engine named Bing. Search startup Hakia claims they invented "categorized search".
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Cisco Feeling Understimulated By 'Buy American' Policy
Seeking to gum up America's expansion into the 21st century by advocating Industrial Age processes, a labor union is demanding that Cisco and Alcatel-Lucent deconstruct their global supply chains to prove by hand that only U.S.-made components are going into a $7.2 billion government-funded project to expand broadband access. Cisco is finding these nativist policies to be anything but stimulating.
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Google Fine-Tunes Gmail For Android And iPhone
Just a month ago Google made some really nice changes to the browser-based version of Gmail for the Android and iPhone platforms. Today, it takes things a little bit further, by (you guessed it) speeding things up.
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Are Smartphones For The Rich? Price Tags Ranging Up To $700 Say So
Despite the current economic gloom, smartphone makers are rolling out wave after wave of new products with killer features -- and killer price tags. If you've got some cash burning a hole in your pocket (we're talking $500 and up), maybe one of these devices is for you.
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Kiva Introduces U.S. Microloans
Internet microlender Kiva is extending its services to U.S.-based entrepreneurs for the first time.
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Poor ECM 'Destroying American System Of Justice'
The shabby state of most enterprise content management implementations, combined with lady Justice's thirst for electronic documents, has made it so that "only the rich and Microsoft can afford to litigate," in the words of attorney Ralph Losey, who specializes in legal applications of technology.
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Companies Looking To Hire CIO 2.0
After months of gloom and doom, are companies again hiring new CIOs? Some executive recruiters say yes. And apparently, some of those employers want an upgrade.
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Paglo Monitors Amazon EC2
SaaS startup Paglo has added monitoring for Amazon's cloud to its IT search and management service.
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SkyOS's Linux Experiment
I've been writing on and off about using the Linux kernel as a base for OS projects with closed but stable and centrally architected designs. Here's such an experiment already in progress: SkyOS.
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Candor: A Sustainable IT Culture
More than ever, IT managers are tuned in to change management and handling the consequences of bad changes. But IT managers would do well to remember two maxims: He who shoots the bearer of bad news will quickly join the ranks of the uninformed. And, those who do nothing are also likely to break nothing.
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Looking For A Mobile Strategy -- Think SOA First
Business Services are key to a successful mobile strategy.
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Details On Samsung Omnia II
If you came to this post looking for more information on either the Pre or the iPhone, you came to the wrong place. There are other platforms out there, and this one is about Windows Mobile.
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Apple, AT&T Kick Loyal Customers Where It Hurts
I don't expect special treatment when I've been doing business with a company for a while, I'm generally content to be treated the same as anyone else. But I don't expect to be treated worse than other customers, to get the small half of the pie, the ice cream cone that somebody dropped on the ground. And yet that's what AT&T and Apple are doing with loyal iPhone customers.
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Global Investments Spur U.S. Jobs And Wages, Economists Say
When American companies expand their operations outside the U.S., those global investments lead directly to the hiring of more workers in the U.S. at higher wages because the companies become more successful and competitive, according to a new study from Harvard and Berkeley. To you nativists who'll howl like roasted cats at such objective research, there's an old saying: you can look it up.
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Google Delivers Quick Search Box To Mac Platform
Today Google announced a new desktop search client for Apple computers. The Google Quick Search Box will search the local drive, the Internet, Twitter -- pretty much everywhere -- all directly from the desktop.
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The Department Of Energy's Woeful IT Energy Audit
Energy is a big deal in the Obama administration. Billions of dollars in the economic stimulus package are earmarked for upgrading the power grid, paying for alternative energy credits, and developing clean energy sources. On Tuesday, a 'cash-for-clunkers' bill intended to get gas guzzlers off the road rolled through the House. But at the Department of Energy, it's been business as usual.
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Remember That Filters Allow You To Brew Coffee
The Chinese government's recent requirement that its PC manufacturers add Internet filtering software to its machines has got free speech advocates pretty riled up, and with good reason. But I wonder if it matters, in the end.
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3 Things Apple Is Doing Right With The iPhone 3GS Roll-Out
Apple obviously learned a hard lesson from the iPhone 3G launch. This year, as it prepares to make iPhone OS 3.0 and the iPhone 3GS available, it has taken crucial steps to avoid the debacle that caused outrage last year.
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Cloud Computing Goes Global
Three far-flung research organizations have joined the cloud computing test bed run by Hewlett-Packard, Intel, and Yahoo. The locations of these new converts--in Russia, South Korea, and Malaysia--provide more evidence that cloud computing is quickly becoming a global phenomenon.
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5 Things The iPhone 3GS Is Still Missing
The iPhone 3GS brings some much-needed improvements to Apple's mobile computing device, but still manages to leave out some key technologies and features. Here are five that I could think of off the top of my head.
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A New Fedora, Size 11
Version 11 of Red Hat's Fedora Linux has hit the streets. I'm downloading it as I write this, although rather than simply picking through its feature set, I find myself thinking more of what each successive major-distro release means for Linux as a whole.
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Gone Google
At the Clift Hotel in San Francisco, Google is busy trying to convince a group of journalists that companies love Google Apps. The setting speaks of success -- the Spanish Suite at the Clift is the sort of complex that would house a Saudi sheik's entourage. The message is that Google means businesses.
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When Pain Is Written Into The IT Project Plan
In a complex, multi-year business-technology transformation, everyone knows there will be problems. Yet most don't do what Rockwell Automation CIO Mike Jackson did: Put that reality in writing at the start of the project plan. Here's how and why Jackson and his fellow leaders did that.
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iPhone Hysteria Will Trigger Microsoft Acquisitions
The 'Net was aTwitter last week after Microsoft revealed an October debut for Windows 7. All the pundits weighed in on the software maker's next big OS. For about five minutes. Then Palm unveiled Pre, Apple rolled out iPhone 3G S, and suddenly it was "Windows what?" And that's why Redmond must, and will, make a major acquisition sooner rather than later. It's the only way it can get back in the game.
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Mobile Sync Solutions Evaluated
Funambol has reviewed 12 mobile sync solutions targeting mobile cloud solutions, taking into account costs, features, devices supported and more. If you are looking for a phone or a sync solution for your existing phone, this report could aid you in your decision making.
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SAP Tops Oracle And IBM, But Siemens Picks SaaS
While SAP today had to enjoy announcing a rip-and-replace deal over Oracle and IBM for a utility client, it also had to sit by and watch as longtime SAP global strategic partner Siemens not only overlooked SAP for a whopping 420,000-seat workforce-management license but also selected a SaaS vendor to boot. This is surely not a business for the faint of heart.
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Microsoft's Unwelcome Firefox Support
After winning the Great Browser War back in the 1990s, Microsoft tried hard to pretend that there wasn't any other browser than Internet Explorer. Even today, many Microsoft sites still don't work properly unless you use IE. Yet the market share for other browsers, particularly Firefox, has been hard for even Microsoft to ignore. It's gotten to the point where Microsoft not only has to acknowledge that there are other browsers, but even support them.
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Sprint: Palm Pre Broke Sales Records (But We're Not Saying What That Record Was)
A press release just landed in my inbox from Sprint. The headline? "Sprint Sets Sales Record With Weekend Debut of Palm Pre." I anxiously dove into the email for the nitty-gritty details...only to find that there were none.
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AT&T Comes Clean (Sort Of) On iPhone MMS Support And Tethering
According to an AT&T spokesperson, support for MMS is coming soon, as is a tethering plan. These features won't be available when the iPhone 3GS launches, however, because AT&T is in the middle of conducting "system upgrades."
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iPhone 3G S Still Falls Short For Business Use
The 3.0 OS on the new Apple iPhone 3G S will make it easier for developers to push enterprise application updates to users iPhones. Still, if Apple were truly interested in making the iPhone successful in business, it would be doing more.
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Twitter Offers Mixed Verdict On Apple iPhone 3GS
The infinite, self-referential loop which is the modern Web came into relief Monday, on the occasion of Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference. Fanboys gathered in San Francisco at WWDC's keynote for the introduction of the iPhone 3GS. So many people were tweeting, though, that I felt more plugged in online than I would've if I'd been there live. The tweets gyrated wildly between tweeters bored with the phone and those who were fanboyishly enthusiastic.
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Apple Announces The iPhone 3GS
Apple on Monday confirmed nearly every rumor of the last few months and announced the iPhone 3GS. The 32GB model will cost $299 and the 16GB model will cost $199. More details after the jump.
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Should Microsoft Buy Palm?
Analyst Andre Kitson at Juniper Research is recommending that now is the right time for Microsoft to buy Palm, giving the huge software company access to Palm's design and engineering team, many of which came from Apple. Does this make sense thought for Microsoft?
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The 10 Safest Places In The World For Outsourcing
Last week we shared an outsourcing expert's list of "The 10 Riskiest Places In The World For Outsourcing," but for those IT organizations looking for a slightly less exuberant outsourcing adventure, today we're happy to offer you that same expert's list of the world's 10 safest locations for outsourcing. Hint: none of the 10 safest is in India.
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Cloud Storage's Next Move: Archive
Cloud storage for the most part is being used today as a backup medium or for collaboration, but the next big step and where cloud storage may be at it's best is an archive repository to meet the enterprise's growing data retention and compliance demands.
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Apple WWDC: Standing In Line
InformationWeek is live on-site in San Francisco at the Moscone Center for Apple's WWDC keynote. The air is practically crackling with energy. As of 6:30 AM PST this morning, the line wrapped around the Moscone West building.
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Computers Key To Air France Crash
It's no secret that commercial airplanes are heavily computerized, but as the mystery of Air France Flight 447 unfolds, we need to come to grips with the fact that in many cases, airline pilots' hands are tied when it comes to responding effectively to an emergency situation.
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Hackers Claim To Have Pwned US T-Mobile. As In: Everything.
It's not the kind of forum post an executive would like to see created about their company. It's not a leaked rumor about an upcoming product or service, or even a ranting upset customer. Nope. It's a group claiming to have controlled portions of your IT network for a long time.
And they published what looks to be proof of the breach. T-Mobile is investigating.
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Some Linux Critiques By Way Of A Solaris Dissenter
Not long after my post about the newest rev of OpenSolaris, a programmer friend called me to dissent. He'd tried OpSol, too, found it sorely lacking, and from his comments I found a criticism that now applies to Linux as well.
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Companies Selling Off Captive IT Shops In India To Outsourcers
A rapidly growing number of Western companies are selling to outsourcers their India-based "captive" software and IT operations because the model is no longer profitable or the sellers need cash or both. One U.S. outsourcer said it's done six such deals this year and has 15 more in its pipeline.
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Palm's Touchstone Charger: $5 Worth Of Parts, $65 Worth Of Overhead
The Touchstone charger is one very cool accessory for the new Palm Pre. It uses inductive charging technology so the Pre can charge wirelessly just by resting on top of the Touchstone. Sounds high-tech, right? It is. But the parts only cost Palm $5. Your price? $70.
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Former Hacker Named To Homeland Security Advisory Council
The Obama administration has said it wanted to bring a new approach to government, and a renewed emphasis on national cybersecurity efforts. And maybe that's what the administration was shooting for when it appointed Jeff Moss (also known as "Dark Tangent") and founder of the annual DefCon and Black Hat hacker conferences to the Homeland Security Council.
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Java Will Survive But Hold The Applause For The Rest Of Sun
Scott McNealy received a standing ovation at JavaOne in what was possibly his last appearance before the mammoth Java user group--last, that is, before Sun disappears inside Oracle once the $7.4 billion acquisition is complete. So why, if McNealy was such a celebrated leader, is his company being swallowed up?
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Apple's New 'iPhone Video': I Told You So
I hate to be a whiny blogger -- I know; are there any other kind? -- but with news swirling that Apple is set to call its third-generation funky mobile device the iPhone Video, what can I say except I told you so? Back in February, I was first to uncover hints about video, in a patent document, and posted the news in Apple Planning Video-Call iPhone.
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Research Identifies Misconceptions About Cloud Computing
Theres an assumption that its mostly small and midmarket companies that are interested in cloud computing, since they dont already have huge IT infrastructures, while large companies want to keep everything inside their own firewalled data centers. But new research from Forrester indicates that conventional wisdom is wrong.
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Why Vista Was A Loser, and Why Windows 7 Won't Be
Okay, Microsoft has made it official. Windows 7 launches on October 22. Just in case you're wondering -- and you might, given Microsoft's track record -- they mean 2009. This time, though, it really seems like Microsoft is ready to ship.
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Verizon Pre? Not As Soon As You Think
As a Verizon Wireless subscriber, I was stoked to hear Big V will be getting the Palm Pre in about six months. But now Sprint's CEO is saying that Verizon is full of it.
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IBM, Microsoft, And The Myth Of 'Our Jobs'
Emboldened by President Obama's desire to punish global corporations for employing workers outside the U.S., the nativists are screeching once again about the ongoing threat to "our jobs." But that begs the question of just what exactly "our jobs" are: with 70% of IBM's employees based outside the U.S., and 40% of Microsoft's outside the U.S., just whose jobs are they anyway?
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OpenSolaris Still Shines
With all the gloom-and-doom about Sun in the air, it almost went unnoticed that they have a new rev of OpenSolaris out in the wild. I took a quick end-user-experience peek.
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Mobile Phone Running Windows XP
Technology Group, a Chinese company, launched a mobile phone at Computex that runs Windows XP. This is the OS that just won't die. Netbooks gave XP a reprieve, at least until Windows 7 ships, and now at least one phone is running XP. Could this OS have a life into the next decade?
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New iPhone To Be Called iPhone Video: Report
According to a screen capture from an AT&T support Web site, the new iPhone will be called the iPhone Video. Will it be the video-capturing and -editing powerhouse that's been rumored for nigh half a year now?
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What Is Deduplication And Why Should You Care?
A couple of days ago I was speaking at an event in Dallas and was reminded that sometimes those of us in storage get too wrapped up in, well, storage and that IT professionals have other things to worry about than just storage. I asked the audience how many of them had done anything with deduplication. Only 30% had, although 100% wanted to know more.
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Vevo Kills The Internet Star?
Sony, UMG, and YouTube have announced plans for a music video site, called "Vevo." It's bringing back memories of how MTV "killed" the radio star.
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Orkut User? Google Has A New Mobile App For You
Fans of Google's orkut social network now have a better way to interact via their mobile phones. Google recently introduced a full orkut application for devices that can run Java.
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Eli Lilly, NASA Build Eucalyptus Clouds
Eucalyptus Systems, the startup behind the open source cloud computing software, has identified its first two customers: NASA and Eli Lilly. That's an impressive start for a company that's barely three months old.
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Google Turbocharges Picasa Web Albums
Google has taken it upon itself to make some improvements to its Picasa Web Albums product. You know Google, it's all about speed -- and speed is what makes the refreshed version of Picasa Web Albums better.
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Can Search Understand?
At Google's Searchology event last month, VP of engineering Ubi Manber said that the current challenge in search is understanding people. Google doesn't understand yet, but he said the company is off to a good start.
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Microsoft Squashing Six Critical "June Bugs" in IE, Windows, and Office Apps
The software maker said today that it deliver a total of ten patches next week, which is about average for a Patch Tuesday. Six of the 10, however, are rated critical.
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Obama Protectionism Blasted By Microsoft's Ballmer And Symantec's Thompson
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Symantec Chairman John Thompson say the Obama administration's plans to revise tax policy on foreign profits will force U.S. companies to move more employees overseas due to the higher cost of business and lower profits such policy would trigger.
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RIM Acquires Dash Navigation
Research In Motion has confirmed that the company recently acquired Dash Navigation for an undisclosed sum. Gee, what would a smartphone company want with a company that makes GPS-based navigation units?
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The Wrath Of Apps
Not only do we have to deal with human beings judging us (not to mention our superegos nagging us at every turn), it turns out that software is carping at us from the other side of the screen.
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IT Fusion Centers
In the wake of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, law enforcement and national security establishments determined that traditional information sharing methods among public safety, intelligence, and emergency management agencies no longer met the information needs of those communities. Thus was born the concept of a Fusion Center.
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White House Seeks Input On Transparency
The Obama administration wants to know what you think about government transparency. Deputy CTO for Open Government Beth Noveck issued a call for input Wednesday about the government's efforts to make more information available to the public.
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Apple May Leave Palm Alone With Pre iTunes Support
Palm has announced that the Pre will support iTunes, faking the software into thinking a genuine iPod is attached. When I first heard this I assumed Apple would sue to have this stopped and even start tweaking the iTunes software to block connections with the Pre. Now some leading analysts think Apple may just leave Palm alone and let the syncing continue.
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My Open Source 'Leech' Is Your Open Source User
By my own tally I count at least two articles in the past week on the subject of "open source freeloading": those who use open source to build new IP but don't give back to the community. Hot subject, and by no means cut-and-dried.
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World's Riskiest Outsourcing City: Does Bogota Deserve It?
On Monday I wrote about a list compiled by outsourcing experts showing that Bogota, Colombia, is #1 on their new list of the riskiest cities in the world for outsourcing. Some followup research about Bogota has me wondering just how these outsourcing experts formed their opinion of the Colombian capital, which several other sources describe as a safe, business-oriented, and forward-looking city.
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What's Behind Intel's $884 Million Wind River Acquisition
On the face of it, Intel's announcement that it's going to buy embedded-software vendor Wind River Systems for $884 million is just another ho-hum corporate acquisition. But the back story is much more interesting: This Intel's umpteenth attempt to diversify beyond PC processors. This time they hope they've got it right, by acquiring a company with expertise in the software which powers emerging mobile devices like handheld Web browsers.
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Did Walt Mossberg Just Confirm The New iPhone Is Going To Be Announced Next Week?
Most of the tech world's heavy-weights have offered their opinion on the Palm Pre. That includes the Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg. In one instance, however, he refers directly to the "new iPhone to be introduced next week." Um, oops?
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Bing Is Worth A Fling
I've spent some quality time with Microsoft's new search engine this week, and it's definitely worth a look. To really give Bing a chance, make it your home page and/or default search engine for a while. It's not the same to do just a few "play" searches; use it for your day-to-day search needs and compare them to Google every once in a while.
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Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About The Palm Pre Is In This Post
InformationWeek's full review of the Palm Pre will be live soon. Until then, feast your eyes on eight separate videos that explore the Pre hardware and webOS, the phone app, the contacts app, the messaging apps, the music app, the camera app, the browser and the App Catalog.
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Trade War With India Looms Over Protectionist IT Legislation
A Senate bill aimed at limiting some H-1B visas will hurt the competitiveness of American companies, jeopardize ongoing projects, trigger a trade dispute with India, and prove to be "misguided and dangerous," say Indian IT execs. Anyone else foresee a Pyrrhic victory from all this protectionist grandstanding?
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Google Makes Nice With S60, Offers Full Google Mobile App
Google has several different versions of the Google Mobile app for smartphone platforms such as the iPhone and Windows Mobile. Now, Google coughed up a version for S60 devices. Let the rejoicing begin.
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Expert: Cyber-Czar Will Be 'Underwhelming' Choice
The Obama Administration is set to introduce a "cybersecurity coordinator" to help the United States craft policies that will beat back hostile incursions into public and private databases and systems, but hasn't made his pick known yet.
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Which Has A Higher TCO, iPhone Or Pre?
Oh, those crafty folks over at BillShrink.com. They've put together a comparison tool that pits the iPhone head to head with the Palm Pre. BillShrink isn't comparing features. No, it is going to tell you which has the lower total cost of ownership. UPDATED, 6/5/09, 6:15PM.
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Top Indian CEO: Most American Grads Are Unemployable
OK, before you get your knickers in a twist, let's put the CEO's comments into context. Vineet Nayar, the highly respected CEO of HCL Technologies, one of India's hottest IT services vendors, was speaking this morning in New York City to an audience of about 50 customers and partners when he related a recent experience with an education official in a large U.S. state.
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AMD Looking Like Server Winner With 6-Core Istanbul Opteron
Two just-in reports suggest AMD has a success on its hands with its new 6-core Istanbul. Early tests are showing that the processor, which is a drop-in replacement on mobos supporting quad-core 'Shanghai' Opterons, delivers great performance while being very power-efficient.
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Did Computer Failure Bring Down Air France 447?
Speculation abounds following a plane crash. Mechanical flaws, terrorism, pilot error, and weather are the usual suspects. But in the tech age, where even your toaster is digital, IT systems must be added to the list. In the the Air France disaster, there's a particularly urgent need for government authorities to eye the aircraft's on-board computer system as a possible culprit.
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Twitter Finds A Place On The Battlefield
The Pentagon is tweeting from Afghanistan, providing followers with a mix of battlefield news, excerpts from officers' speeches, and self-promotion. Kudoes to TechNewsWorld for breaking this story, which has not been widely reported. However, the article contains an odd mix of sharp analysis in some places and, in other places, snap judgments that are simply wrong. You see this kind of criticism of social media a lot, and it's frustrating. TechNewsWorld seems to like the idea of government using social media to communicate, but find the actual implementation icky.
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Is Moblin Headed Up Or Just Sideways?
Behind the scenes, Moblin's taking off. Both MSI and Acer have tapped Intel for the netbook-friendly distro to power future editions of each of their products. So what's to stop history from repeating itself -- i.e., Windows (7) gobbling up Moblin there, too?
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MIT's Low-Power Radio Chip Apes Human Ear
Now hear this: MIT engineers have built a radio chip modeled after one of nature's most intricate designs: the human inner ear.
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Why There's No Luxury Mobile Phone Market
Sony Ericsson has revealed its new luxury phone brand, Satio, which will go on sale for $800 or so later this year. I'm not at all clear on who is going to buy it.
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NYSE CIO Sees IT Revolution In Evaluating And Accepting Risk
The New York Stock Exchange's IT organization is "accepting alternatives that [it] never ever would have considered a year ago" because budget pressures are forcing its CIO to go with unorthodox approaches that last year would have been met with "That is too crazy. That is risky. That makes no sense." Is this a revolution or spurt evolution?
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Opera Cruises Past iPhone To Take Mobile Browser Lead
In the month of May, Opera surpassed the iPhone to become the most-used mobile browser worldwide. How long can Opera hold onto the top spot before the iPhone recaptures the lead? Probably not all that long.
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Call For Leaders In Gov 2.0 Innovation
The organizers of a new event on greater transparency, collaboration, efficiency, and participation in government--the underpinnings of the Government 2.0 movement--plan to showcase leading examples of Gov 2.0 in action. The event, called the Gov 2.0 Expo Showcase, is encouraging government-technology architects, managers, and other leaders to step forward with their real-world projects.
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Microsoft's Bing Search For Mobile
This week Microsoft revealed Bing.com to the world as its new search engine, or as MS likes to call it, a decision engine. It is a new way to search the web and can provide some interesting results. MS wasted no time in setting the engine up to work with mobile devices.
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Tweet Your Vacation Status. Get Burglarized?
Any of us who regularly use the micro blogging site Twitter do it all of the time: we broadcast our whereabouts in real time. It's kind of the point of the entire Twitter experience. Yet, this video podcaster believes he may have been robbed because of his Tweeting his vacation status.
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It's 6 O'Clock -- Do You Know Where Your Cloud's Data Center Is?
A comment that I liked on cloud computing came out of Sun's CommunityOne conference June 1 in San Francisco. It was from Tim Mather, a member of a panel on "Securing the Cloud--Why, What and How?" He said: "The trust boundary has moved with cloud computing but no one is clear where to."
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Hands-On With Sony Ericsson's Phones
Sony Ericsson was nice enough to stop by the office today and they were packing some goodies. I got a little hands-on time with the recently-announced multimedia phones, and I was pleasantly surprised.
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Best Buy's Inventory System Paints Bleak Picture For Palm Pre Seekers
According to the inventory system over at Best Buy, there are not going to be a lot of Pres on hand when the device launches on Saturday. Just how bad will it be?
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Pre Excitement Building
It looks like there is a lot of anticipation in some circles for the Palm Pre which is due to be released this coming Saturday, June 6. People are going to a lot of effort to make sure they get their hand on one.
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T-Mobile To Have More Android Phones
Not very much of a surprise, but a T-Mobile representative told me this morning that the carrier would have a follow-up to the G1 in early summer. While the company did not say what handset they would be carrying I have a good idea of what it will be.
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IBM's Cloud CTO Hints At What's To Come
As IBM's recently named cloud computing CTO, Kristof Kloeckner has had four months to craft a cloud computing strategy, and it's becoming clear that IBM's plans go well beyond what the company has delivered so far. "We see huge opportunity in this space," Kloeckner told me during a visit to Big Blue's headquarters.
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RIM And Apple To Grab 66% Of Cellphone Profits, Report Says
If you're a CIO thinking about which mobile phones to deploy across your enterprise, you need to check out a Deutsche Bank analysis showing that RIM and Apple will grab huge percentages of the industry's total operating profits this year. Apple's share of those profits will jump from 20% in 2008 to a projected eye-popping 31% in 2009, but guess what RIM will do even better.
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iPhone Round Up: Location-Aware Browser, Video Chat, Multiple Models
In the build up to next week's keynote at Apple's WorldWide Developers Conference, iPhone reports are coming fast and furious. The latest include speculation that the new version of the iPhone will include a location-aware version of the Safari browser, the ability to conduct video chats, and new models will range from 4GB to 32GB.
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EMC Bids For Data Domain - User Impact
A week ago I wrote about the user impact of NetApp buying Data Domain. Today we are back at it with EMC making a bid for Data Domain. The first take away for a user: Data Domain has to be one of the safest technology purchases you can make. Clearly the company has something that other companies want, and it's not likely to go anywhere anytime soon.
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Bing Ain't Got That Thing
Microsoft has let the Bing out of the bag a couple of days early (it is scheduled to go Live tomorrow), so I took it out for a test run, using a few search terms that came to mind, and then comparing that to results on Google.
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On Reports Of Amazon's Open APIs
You might well have heard by now -- from one of a number of sources -- that Amazon is "contemplating" or "investigating" making their various web APIs into open source ventures. I can sum up the impact of this in six words: instant cloud standard, and let people tinker.
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Nokia's N97 Shipping Worldwide In June
Today Nokia officially announced that it is shipping its long-awaited N97 multimedia device this month. The high-end smartphone, which has a touch screen, should be available in some 75 countries around the world by month's end.
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Citigroup Former IT Chief Won't Get Millions He Was Promised
Citigroup former head of technology and operations Kevin Kessinger is one of five former Citi top-level executives who were promised severance packages totaling $100 million but will receive only about $50 million because of the company's concern over "a public backlash," the Wall Street Journal reports. Question: does Citi have a contractual right to make such a move?
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Info Tech Enrollment Booming At Universities In Australia
Several universities in Australia are reporting sharply higher demand for IT degrees just several years after the dot-com crash threatened to put the kibosh on info tech as a viable career. And it's particularly good to see these schools offering interdisciplinary programs that blend intense IT education with parallel immersion in commerce, science, medical, and legal curricula.
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Microsoft Innovation For Sale
Could Microsoft's ability to produce intellectual property be the company's future salvation? A few weeks ago I complained that Microsoft wasn't innovating. Yet the book Burning the Ships talks of Microsoft's burgeoning intellectual property treasure chest. How can both be true?
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IEEE ICAP Takes On Standards Conformance
The IEEE-ISTO (International Standards and Technology Organization) held its first conference on product certification and conformance at their IEEE headquarters in New Jersey. The goal of the IEEE Conformity Assessment Program (ICAP) is to provide support to other IEEE standards groups, test labs, and industry groups in developing conformance tests. Its a first step on a long road for the ICAP.
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Sony Ericsson Embracing MicroSD?
It looks like Sony Ericsson has been hit with a big can of sanity, as it may be moving away from its M2 memory standard in favor of a microSD card. Hopefully this means the company is moving away from the proprietary roots that Sony stubbornly continues to champion.
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Apple Plugs A Heap of Buffer Overflow Vulnerabilities
The software maker plugs 10 significant security vulnerabilities in its QuickTime media player, as well as flaws within iTunes. A number of flaws could lead to denial of service conditions, or remote exploit. Looks like most of these flaws affect Mac OS X, Vista, as well as XP SP3.
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Canola's GPL Trick
The name Canola probably makes you think of vegetable oil, but it's also the name of a newly open sourced media-center application for tablet-style PCs that run Linux. And whenever something is newly open sourced, that almost inevitably means close attention is paid to the terms of the licensing.
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While GM Reinvents Itself, U.S. Battery Makers Are Just Getting Started
On Monday, the U.S. took a 60% ownership in General Motors and President Obama described the government as a "reluctant" owner of the new company. That's exactly how I felt about the family station wagon when I was in high school.
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Jive Leapfrongs SaaS, Lands In Cloud
Are we moving to a post-SaaS world? One social networking software vendor says yes. Let's see if other software vendors--and enterprises--agree.
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Best Buy To Employees: Yes, We're Running Out Of iPhones
Here's another clue that may indicate Apple plans to introduce a new iPhone at next week's WWDC event in San Francisco. Best Buy has issued a memo to its store employees, noting that iPhone supplies are dwindling, and they may run out altogether.
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The 10 Riskiest Locations In The World For Outsourcing
The list, built around concerns over terrorism, pollution, and geopolitical tensions, includes cities from a range of countries that could otherwise constitute a round-the-world tourism dream: Thailand, Jamaica, South Africa, Brazil, India, Israel, the Philippines, and Colombia. Read on to see if your company's global outsourcing map matches up with this list of the world's10 riskiest locations for outsourcing.
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Smartbooks: Blurring The Line Between Smartphone And Netbook
Some companies like Qualcomm and Nvidia are going one better than netbooks when it comes to power savings and small form factors for mobile computing. These devices will use chips based on the ARM architecture instead of the current chip favored by netbooks, the Intel Atom. ARM should be a name familiar to you as it is the chip that powers most of the smartphones currently available, including those running Android, Windows Mobile and the iPhone.
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White House Further Restricts Stimulus Lobbying
U.S. President Barack Obama's administration is cracking down -- even more than it revealed in March -- on lobbying for funds under the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act.
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Can Backups Be Made Obsolete?
Backups have long been a source of pain and frustration for enterprises of all sizes; they are constantly causing problems because the growth and value of data is increasing faster than the network's ability to deal with that data. The problem keeps many IT professionals awake at night and most surveys indicate a low confidence in the ability to recovery from a disaster, but how can backups be made obsolete?
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Next-Gen iPhone Screen Shots Emerge
The Internet has delivered what purport to be screen shots of the new iPhone. They appear to confirm what had previously been rumored new features, such as a compass and video capture. But are they real?
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Red Hat Sees Strong Demand For Cloud Computing
As many as 50 of its customers have begun building private compute clouds using Red Hat Linux, says Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst. A few are investigating "semi-private clouds," in which they plan to share IT resources with trusted partners.
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Samsung Beats Sony Ericsson To 12-Megapixel Punch
Today Samsung announced the Pixon12, a 12-megapixel monster that will be the first such high-end cameraphone to actually hit store shelves. It highlights the growing race to pack in as many pixels and features into phones as possible.
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Twitter At The Vanishing Point
For months, we've heard that Twitter, the fastest-growing social network this side of Facebook, was at the tipping point of relevance. Well, maybe it's more like the fastest growing social network this side of MySpace.
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We Have Seen The Future Of The Auto Industry And It Is Software
With the U.S. auto industry in shambles and the government transferring ownership of it to the autoworkers' unions, one analyst says the only salvation lies in retooling the entire car industry around the model of the IT industry: electric cars built with off-the-shelf hardware and differentiated by software.
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