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The InformationWeek July 2009 Archive « June 2009 | Main | August 2009 » |
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FCC Enters Google Voice Debacle, Investigating AT&T And Apple
Wow. Today, the Federal Communications Commission launched a formal inquiry over Apple's removal of the Google Voice application from the iPhone Apps Store. The FCC sent letters to AT&T, Apple and Google looking for answers on the matter.
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Microsoft Hosts Windows Mobile Developer Camps
Microsoft will be hosting a number of developer camps for its WIndows Mobile platform in the coming weeks in at least six cities around the world. If you develop apps to sell or work on them for your enterprise, you might want to check these events out. The targeted platform is Windows Mobile 6.5.
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Too Many Collaboration Platforms
Chatting in the lounge of our Global CIO virtual event this week, one CIO raised his concern about having too many collaboration platforms. A wiki here, e-mail alerts there, a SharePoint group there, and pretty soon the discussion’s fragmented, and IT has a bunch more platforms to support.
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When Online Marketers Betray
One day soon, some marketing company is going to go too far in its quest for short term gains, and betray our real identities to one of its customers. Or it will turn out that one of them has been doing it all along for years.
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Verizon Apps Store: No Bandwidth Hogs, Please
A Verizon Wireless spokesperson has indicated that the company plans to block applications that draw a lot of bandwidth from its V CAST Apps store. What, you thought Verizon was going to be more "open"? This and the Great Google Voice Debacle prove that "openness" is a fallacy and the walled gardens never came down.
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UK Government Tries Twittering By Committee
Reading about U.K. government guidelines for participating in Twitter, I'm reminded of a joke: A woman says to her workaholic husband, "We need more spontaneity in our marriage. Surprise me!" And the man says, "Great idea, honey! Why don't you prepare a list of ways that you'd like me to surprise you spontaneously, and then we can schedule a meeting to discuss it!"
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ReviewCam: Video Publishing Magnified
Magnify is a hosted solution for managing and publishing video on the web. It shares many of the traits that similar, competitive solutions have, but it's got two features that caught my attention. First (and this is a small one), it auto-tweets any new video you publish; second (and this is a big one), it lets you integrate your video with video on other public web sites. We've captured some of the nuances in a ReviewCam video.
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Apple To Patch iPhone Security Flaw [UPDATE]
According to U.K.-based network operator O2, Apple plans to distribute a patch for the iPhone's SMS security flaw as soon as this weekend. What's not clear is if the patch will be only for O2's customers or if Apple will update all iPhones. Update: iPhone OS 3.0.1 released to fix the flaw!
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iPhone Smackdown: TechCrunch's Arrington Versus Forrester's Colony
I hate to dive into the traffic-trolling antics of TechCrunch's Michael Arrington, but I will (and not just because I'm chasing clicks, too). In his post about why he's abandoning the iPhone, he's apparently coming around to the view I've espoused for years. Namely, there are better options out there. He's opting for an Android; I say Blackberry's better.
Continue reading "iPhone Smackdown: TechCrunch's Arrington Versus Forrester's Colony..."
Google's Global Dominance
While Google's search share of 60% in the U.S. will certainly be tough for Microsoft and Yahoo to attack, the challenge in many other major countries around the world will be even more daunting: Google's worldwide search share is 67%, according to ComScore.
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The CentOS Shakeup
A rift has opened within the ranks of the CentOS project -- a schism between the project's team and its leader that, to me, points up the differences between a "hobby" and a "professional" open source project.
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Can Wal-Mart Sell The Power Of The Sun?
I'm a huge fan of Wal-Mart and its passionate commitment to customers and its ability to do things at an unmatched scale and with unmatched efficiency. Even so, I'm not buying an investment advisor's frothy analysis of how Wal-Mart is looking to harness the power of the sun to become one of the country's largest producers – and sellers – of electrical power.
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Yahoo's Incredible Change Of Fortune
Only last year, Microsoft offered to buy the whole of Yahoo for a price of somewhere around $40 billion dollars. This week, Microsoft managed to get the part they really wanted, the search traffic from Yahoo visitors, for almost nothing. What was Yahoo thinking?
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Xbox's Project Natal Revamped For Offices?
The technology behind Microsoft's Project Natal, a future Xbox technology that employs voice recognition technology and uses a camera to recognize gestures and eliminate the need for a controller, could eventually make its way into the business world.
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Google Docs Gains E-Commerce Option
Google on Thursday released the Google Checkout store gadget, software that allows any Google Docs user to create an online store and sell items using a Google spreadsheet.
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The Potential of Virtual Desktops
I’ve been covering desktop virtualization quite a bit lately; it’s a pretty hot topic. After debugging the Matrix for the last 6 months in the InformationWeek Desktop Virtualization labs, I’m trying to free my mind and consider the potential uses of desktop virtualization beyond running MS Office, here’s some pretty cool ideas. Gaming companies, listen up.
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Is This Verizon's Android Phone?
Well, it looks like the specs and pictures have leaked of the first Android phone to be on Verizon Wireless' network, and this Motorola smartphone looks really, really cool. Hit the jump for details and a picture.
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Corporate Patch Management Lags In Maturity
If one of the most important disciplines necessary for keeping systems secure is a systematic vulnerability management program, why have so few organizations reached a decent level of maturity in their patch management efforts?
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Are Mobile Devices Closing The Digital Divide?
Mobile devices seem to be closing the digital divide. More and more people are getting online with cell phones, but the uptake is really strong with minorities according to a report by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.
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Microsoft Is Following Me On Twitter
I'll admit to experiencing a tiny ego frisson upon reading the email notification that Microsoft News is now following me on Twitter (and since I'll be Tweeting this, I assume someone at Microsoft News will feel the cool pleasure of a python having taken the measure of its prey).
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BlackHat Bombshell #2: iPhones And Other "GSM" Phones Open To SMS Hack
With one bombshell already having been dropped at the BlackHat Conference (that most implementations of SSL are configured to give up everything including logins, credit cards, etc.), researchers dropped another one today when they demonstrated how the SMS infrastructures of GSM-flavored operators such as AT&T and T-Mobile are hackable to the point that cell phones can be hacked and their users can be tricked into divulging confidential information.
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Motorola Delivers Profit, But What About Handsets?
Motorola announced its second quarter earnings and surprised more than a few by turning up a profit. This is certainly a positive sign, but Motorola has yet to deliver a winning handset this year. Or last year, for that matter.
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Black Hat Researcher Rains On Cloud Computing's Parade With Talk Of Vulnerabilities
iSEC Partners partner (and Black Hat researcher) Alex Stamos says there's really no such thing as cloud computing. According to him, it's just a trendy name to take your money. Regardless of what you want to call it though, the vulnerabilities inherent to it are very real. That was Stamos' message in a briefing he gave this morning at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas. Among the highlights of my podcast interview with him; Salesforce gets a gold star and Windows-based virtual machines are architecturally more secure than Linux-based ones.
Continue reading "Black Hat Researcher Rains On Cloud Computing's Parade With Talk Of Vulnerabilities..."
NASA's Next Mission: Cloud Computing
As NASA prepares for the return of space shuttle Endeavour and, beyond that, its next-generation Aris moon rocket, NASA's IT experts are thinking about what's next for the agency's data centers. An early adopter of cloud computing, NASA could play a central role in the U.S. government's move to virtualized, on-demand IT resources.
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Spin Control? Apple Explains Why Jailbreaking Is Bad
This is rich. A day after Apple's claims that jailblreaking iPhones can cause catastrophic harm became public, Apple updated its support page to explain exactly why jailbreaking iPhones a bad thing.
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Startup Helps IT Bill For VM Use
Apptio's newest service tackles chargebacks for server virtualization.
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Open Source: The Way, Not The Goal
I didn't make it to OSCON this year, so I missed out on more than a few nifty events. One was a panel chaired by Matt Asay of Alfresco, where he cited research to show that companies do switch to open source as a way to save money, but that there are other, much larger goals beyond that.
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LG's 'New Chocolate' Touts Sex Appeal
Today LG confirmed a long-rumored device, the BL40 "New Chocolate". This touch-based phone features a gorgeous four-inch display and more closely resembles an actual chocolate bar than any of its forebears did.
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Homeland Security Saves Millions In Microsoft, Oracle Licenses
The Department of Homeland Security, in a published update on its ongoing "efficiency review," reveals it was able to save $89 million in software licensing fees by renegotiating contracts with Microsoft and Oracle. Every other federal agency should be undertaking similar reviews.
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Small Businesses Should Move To Shared Storage Sooner
With the cost of direct attached storage (DAS) dropping and the capacity that it can deliver for those dollars increasing, you would think that the demand for shared storage is dwindling. Reality is that shared storage is on the rise and the biggest reason for its growth has little to do with storage management or even data protection. Those are nice side benefits, however the real motivator is server virtualization.
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Windows 7 Boosts Momentum For Microsoft And CEO Ballmer
With Microsoft's Windows franchise generating more than $10 billion in operating profit in fiscal 2009 despite the Vista disaster, Windows 7 has become a make-or-break product for Microsoft. So the optimism that CIOs and others have begun expressing for Windows 7 and CEO Steve Ballmer could very well signal a reversal in the giant company's stumbling fortunes.
Continue reading "Windows 7 Boosts Momentum For Microsoft And CEO Ballmer..."
AT&T Blocks Google Voice From iPhone
According to Daring Fireball, the AT&T has pushed Apple into blocking the Google Voice app from the App Store. This is just one more example of the carriers not getting it and trying to impose their petty restrictions on us for fear of becoming a dumb pipe.
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Black Hat Researcher Cracks Algorithm For Creating Social Security Numbers
Though it's not the bombshell that was dropped by Moxie Marlinspike, another researcher is here at BlackHat briefing attendees on how he cracked the Social Security Administration's code for creating social security numbers and how governments and organizations must respond now that SSNs are not secure in their commonly used contexts as passwords and identifiers (includes podcast interview).
Continue reading "Black Hat Researcher Cracks Algorithm For Creating Social Security Numbers..."
Black Hat: Fighting Russian Cybercrime Mobsters
McAfee and the FBI teamed up at Black Hat to discuss Russian online organized crime. The standing room only presentation was part fact and part hype. With a mission to publicize the FBI’s work, Russians were made to be some of the most organized and threatening of all cybercriminals. While this could be true, the connections to American and other hackers around the world were drawn and cannot be ignored.
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Bombshell From Black Hat: Almost All Implementations Of SSL Are Configured To Give Up Everything
No edition of the Black Hat conference would be complete without a few security bombshells; The ones where attendees learn that a huge swath of their digital security -- previously thought to be totally secure -- is little more than a house of cards that, thanks to some Black Hat researcher, just came tumbling down. Here in Las Vegas, Moxie Marlinspike is one of those researchers and he's here demonstrating how SSL is that house of cards. Think your implementation of SSL is secure? Think again. It's time to go back to square one. (includes podcast interview)
Continue reading "Bombshell From Black Hat: Almost All Implementations Of SSL Are Configured To Give Up Everything..."
The Cell Phone Shortfall That Wasn't
Verizon just reported a big profit dip for the last quarter, and plans to cut 8,000 jobs. It's no news that companies are suffering in this rotten economy of ours, but am I the only one who was surprised that Verizon's results had next to nothing to do with cell phones?
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Verizon BlackBerry To Pack Wi-Fi
The spies over at CrackBerry said Verizon Wireless will soon be getting the BlackBerry 8530. The great thing about this is that this handset packs Wi-Fi. It's about freaking time.
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The Top 50 Global Enterprise App Vendors
Quick: in 2008, in the category of global enterprise apps, whose revenue was almost twice that of its rival's – SAP or Oracle? And if I offered to bet you a year's salary that Sage Group generated more revenue from global enterprise apps than did Microsoft and Salesforce.com combined in 2008, would you take the bet? AMR's list of the Top 50 app vendors offers the answers.
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Veiled: A Browser-based Darknet - Not for Porn, Says HP
For those living in a box, Black Hat is currently underway in Las Vegas. The first talk of the day I attended was by Bill Hoffman and Matt Wood from HP’s Security Labs. They discussed their browser-based darknet called Veiled. Billy is best known for his web security research while working for SPI Dynamics, acquired by HP, and authoring a book on AJAX security. Matt leads development on HP’s Scwaler and SWFScan security tools.
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Android Finally Getting Facebook App: Report
One of the things Google talked about recently was the need to make its Android mobile operating system more social. It looks like Android is about to take its first step in the "more social" direction with the arrival of a dedicated Facebook app.
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Black Hat Podcast: Popularity of Social Nets Puts Spotlight On Dangers Of Cross-Site Request Forgeries
Today is the first day of the infamous Black Hat Briefings taking place at the Black Hat Conference in Las Vegas and most of what the attendees will hear today is being presented publicly for the first time by the various researchers in the building. Today, for example, is the day that many researchers reveal their discoveries and exploits but in some cases, they hold back on the tools or details needed to replicate their research until the impacted vendors and organizations have an opportunity to address the vulnerabilities. Case in point: a team of researchers used NewsWeek.com as an example of a site that's vulnerable to dynamic cross site request forgeries.
Continue reading "Black Hat Podcast: Popularity of Social Nets Puts Spotlight On Dangers Of Cross-Site Request Forgeries..."
SaaS Under A Cloud Of FUD
Cloud computing is still a long way from becoming a mainstream technology because of persistent fears about security and reliability that are stoked by entrenched vendors at every opportunity.
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New York's Facebook Race Fracas
A young aide to a New York City politician joined the long parade of people who've learned the hard way that what you say on the Internet matters. Lee Landor, until recently deputy press secretary to Manhattan borough president Scott Stringer, posted comments on her personal Facebook page criticizing Henry Louis Gates and the President, and apparently defending racial profiling
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Don't Confuse Health IT Stimulus With Cash-For-Clunkers Program
My family's old minivan only has heat, no A/C. And I mean heat even in the summer. It won't turn off. We've spent hundreds (thousands?) of dollars on repairs over the years and don't want to pour any more money into this junk-box. So, the fed's program for trading in a clunker for a more fuel-efficient vehicle comes at a perfect time for us--as long as we don't make a hasty choice that really doesn't meet our family's needs looking ahead. That's the same position many healthcare organizations are in with the government's health IT stimulus program.
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Rackspace Launches Dedicated Cloud
The provider expands its cloud offerings with on-demand virtual machines running on dedicated hardware.
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Ballmer 1, Bartz 0 in Lopsided Microhoo Deal
Yahoo investors are burning their stock certificates to protest the company's search pact with Microsoft, pummeling YHOO down by 12% at one point Wednesday. No surprise there—this is an arrangement where Redmond gets the milk without buying the cow.
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U.S. Gov't: Thou Shalt Not Text And Drive At The Same Time
It finally happened. With texting-and-driving incidents gaining more and more national media attention, it appears as though the recent VTech study pushed the U.S. federal government into action. Today, lawmakers proposed a national ban on texting and emailing when behind the wheel of a moving vehicle. Will it work?
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Serious Internet Server Exploit Widely Available
The ubiquitous DNS server standard, Bind 9, is vulnerable to an exploit that has already been made public, the Internet Systems Consortium warned.
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On The FAA's Slow And Steady SWIM To Open Source
After my talk earlier in the week about open source in health care, I turned to a parallel discussion -- using open source in a federal agency that's long been hidebound by closed-ended legacy systems. Namely, the FAA.
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UPDATE: BlackHat, Kinda: 'Real' Black Hats Hack Security Experts
UPDATE: The rumor here is that the attacks did indeed happen, but the significance of it is actually quite small--not worth paying attention to, since attention is clearly what the attackers are seeking. More to come.
BlackHat, Kinda: Yesterday a hacking group released details (http://sh0dan.org/zf05.txt) of a number of successful attacks they conducted, apparently with the principal purpose of embarrassing some of the security industry's most well-known experts. The group claims that they collected about 75,000 passwords, including those of a few security experts speaking at the BlackHat Briefings today and tomorrow.
"Welcome one and all to the real Black Hat Briefings," reads the site. "Live from the underground, coming right at you free of charge."
Continue reading "UPDATE: BlackHat, Kinda: 'Real' Black Hats Hack Security Experts..."
Apple: Jailbroken iPhones Can Crash Cell Towers
As part of a legal battle against the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Apple submitted comments that claim jailbroken iPhones can lead to denial of service attacks and, furthermore, be used to take out cellular towers and the associated base stations. Pure FUD.
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SuccessFactors Up, Salesforce Down In Analysts' Forecasts
Maybe it's the law of big numbers, maybe it's marketing, maybe it's execution – but longtime SaaS poster-child Salesforce.com just had one analyst cut his rating estimates for the $1.2 billion company, while another analyst boosted his ratings and estimates for up-and-coming SaaS provider SuccessFactors. Which way are the clouds blowing?
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Unsheathing The Double-Edged Sword Of Black Hat 2009 In Vegas
"What I'm about to teach you could land you in jail and destroy your life and family if you choose to use it for nefarious purposes." These words and others like them have been repeated many times in the nearly 50 security classes being given during the training portion of Black Hat, now onto its fourth day in Las Vegas. The "classrooms" here at Caesar's Palace are filled with everyone from self-proclaimed hackers (their badges say so) to digital forensics specialists from the US government's most secretive agencies (their badges say nothing). There's even a male registered nurse/CISSP here (hmmmm).
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Texting And Driving - Just Say No
We've all talked on the phone while driving and it definitely a distraction to fiddle with dialing and have one hand permanently unavailable for driving. Many states have passed laws prohibiting using a cell phone while driving unless you have a hands-free headset. Texting has become more popular, especially with people updating their Twitter or Facebook accounts. Though not illegal in many states yet, texting is far more dangerous than just talking on the phone according to a newly released study.
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ReviewCam: Glue Sniffs @ Social Integration
Are you logged into Facebook? MySpace? Twitter? LinkedIn? What about your e-mail? Any Wikis? All at the same time? Are you crazy?! Now, if you could just take your social and business relationships with you around the web, getting and giving feedback, learning and sharing along the way . . . Glue, from two-year-old startup AdaptiveBlue, is just scratching the surface of this concept, and demonstrated its technology in our latest ReviewCam.
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I Want To See Firefox 7.0
The Mozilla Foundation has revealed some possible interface changes that might come with Firefox 4.0. The fiddling with tab placement and button functionality is probably smart, but it certainly isn’t visionary. I want to see the future.
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Strickling To Incumbent Carriers: Put Up Or Shut Up
In a small but important victory for public-private applicants, National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) chief Larry Strickling told incumbent carriers that they'll have to prove their cases just like everyone else if they want to challenge broadband grant proposals from smaller players.
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Verizon Spills Details About The V CAST Apps Store
Today, Verizon Wireless held a developer conference in San Jose. The big news? An app store is coming, and Verizon is working with RIM, Qualcomm, and others to make it happen.
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Will You Change Vendors?
It might have got lost in all the Avaya-Nortel reporting last week, but we had a No Jitter post that may have as much to say about the future of enterprise communications as anything the rest of us wrote about the big acquisition. Tom Nolle wrote a piece called, "How Light is the End of the Tunnel for Enterprise Spending?" in which he suggested that buying paradigms and the resulting customer-vendor relationships may be undergoing a fundamental shift as we work our way through and (hopefully) out of the recession.
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Medsphere's Open Source Health Upgrade
The other day I spoke with Rick Jung, COO of Medsphere, of the commercial open source health care software package OpenVista. Their mission: to get health care providers of all strata to use open source, save a bunch of money, and change the way we do this stuff for keeps.
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Cardinal Health's New CIO On Board Of Firm IBM Is Buying
It's been quite a week for former Motorola CIO Patty Morrison: first she's named CIO of $91 billion Cardinal Health, and then a couple of days later IBM agrees to acquire SPSS, on whose board she sits, for $1.2 billion. And third, tomorrow Morrison will be a featured speaker at our online Global CIO Summit virtual event: "Driving Business Value and Customer Value in the Global Economy."
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Novatel's MiFi Adds GPS, MicroSD And U.S. 3G Support
Today Novatel rolled out its latest rendition of the MiFi, the 2372. It covers all the major GSM-based mobile networks, including GPRS, EDGE, UMTS and HSPA. The MiFi 2372 takes things a bit further, however, with added storage capacity and a processor capable of running apps.
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Sprint Snags 5 Million More Customers In Virgin Acquisition
Today Sprint announced its intent to acquire mobile virtual network operator Virgin Mobile USA. The deal, valued at $483 million, will bolster Sprint's subscriber count by about five million pre-paid users.
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Enterprises Iffy On Windows 7 Migration
Being a big fan of Windows 7, I was surprised to find that there's no mad rush by enterprises to migrate to the new operating system, and that Microsoft's ending of support for XP is the biggest factor in pushing businesses to upgrade. These are the early results of a just-completed InformationWeek Analytics survey on Windows 7, of which I'll offer a partial peek, if you click ahead.
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Bank Of America To Shut 600 Branches Due To Surge In Online And Mobile Banking
After two decades of aggressive expansion in the bricks-and-mortar side of its retail-banking business, Bank of America is reportedly set to close about 10% of its 6,100 nationwide branches as more and more consumers handle their banking needs online and with mobile devices rather than visiting their local branch. My only question is, why have they waited so long?
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Windows XP To Windows 7: All WET
This week my blogging colleague Serdar Yegulalp has laid out the Windows 7 upgrade options for both XP and Vista. Walt Mossberg laments that Microsoft hasn't provided an "upgrade install" to let users layer a brand new Windows 7 OS over a years-old crusty XP setup. True, but they've provided something better in my opinion.
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MS Opens Application Submission On Its Application Store
Microsoft has opened application submission for the Windows Marketplace for Mobile application store, which is for its Windows Mobile platform. WinMo 6.0, 6.1 and 6.5 will be supported, which means when the store launches, there will be tens of millions of potential customers. To make things interesting, MS is having a "Race to Market" challenge for developers where they will be able to earn prizes, money, fortune and fame.
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Hybrid Cloud Storage Startup Lands $6 Million
Egnyte, which blends local and online storage for SMBs, pulled in millions in VC investment today.
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What Not To Be: ‘Black Hole Cost Center’
As the CFO office's liaison for IT--associate VP of IT finance, to be exact--Bill Miller of Nationwide Insurance sees one of his jobs as making sure IT isn’t seen as a "black hole cost center."
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Verizon's FiOS Customers Get Free Access To Wi-Fi
If you are a customer of Verizon's fiber-to-the-home FiOS Internet service, you'll soon be able to access a number of public Wi-Fi hot spots for free. Too bad smartphones aren't supported.
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Unifying The Infrastructure
We've spent the last several entries discussing the unification of storage and there is one aspect of unification that I have not discussed; unifying the infrastructure. I do currently have a series of videos currently running with Information Week on FCoE so in this entry I'll just touch on the high points.
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Google Apps Dashboard Gets RSS Feed
Google's online services, like those offered by Amazon, Microsoft, or any other company, sometimes fail. Hopefully, failures don't happen often. But when they do, it's helpful to have information about what's going on.
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Obama's Twitter Conundrum
It turns out the White House doesn't hate Twitter as reported, or at least not as much, or at least not for very much longer.
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Hear 12 Top CIO Strategies At Our Online Global CIO Summit
Want to hear a dozen of the world's top CIOs discuss global strategies, top priorities, and board-level issues? Join us online this Wednesday, July 29, for the Global CIO Summit virtual event for a day-long program that lets you attend the panel discussions, ask questions, meet and network with peers. Click ahead to register and for more info on speakers and the agenda.
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New Android Features Appear In Donut Code
Google has made some more code available for the Android platform. The code brings with it a host of new and interesting features, including support for CDMA devices and a brand new camera user interface. It may not be Android 2.0, but "Donut" looks tasty indeed.
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Is This The Right Room For An Argument About Open Source?
Any discussion about open source that doesn't bristle at least some hairs isn't worth having. That doesn't make the other guy right -- but it does mean nobody's going to learn anything as long as we just pat each other on the shoulder. Some conflict is vital.
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Report: Apple's Tablet To Be Media Focused, Coming In September
Today, the Financial Times ran an interesting piece on the collaboration between Apple and the music industry to revitalize music sales. Part of the plan is to offer interactive booklets and other content as part of digital music sales. Oh, and consumers will access it all from a new, tablet-style device from Apple that has yet to be announced.
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How FriendFeed Will Generate Revenue
Earlier this month FriendFeed launched the next version of their API service. It got me thinking about how FriendFeed could generate real revenue and become a real-time search leader.
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Cardinal Health CIO Davids Replaced By Ex-Motorola CIO
Cardinal Health CIO Jody Davids is stepping down from the $91 billion company according to her own plan and will be replaced next week by former Motorola CIO Patty Morrison. Two interesting details around this transition: Morrison will not inherit the other half of Davids' former job – EVP of corporate shared services – and will report to the CEO, which was not the case for Davids.
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Wolfe's Den Vlog: Build A Liquid-Cooled Intel Core i7 PC
A liquid-cooled PC is like the Hummer of computers, which is why I've always wanted to build one. (Plus, it provides ample thermal support for overclocking.) This latest project came about because I wanted to top my last two quad-core builds -- 2008's QX9770 and 2007's QX6850 box -- and also because I wanted to check out the new Intel Core i7 processor. Click ahead to see a short video of the project's first phase, where I unbox the Thermaltake BigWater 760is liquid cooler.
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Congress Taking Steps To Secure Electric Grid
So the theory goes: one strategic Electromagnetic Pulse explosion (EMP) detonation over the mid-west United States could cripple the power grid, and even stop most electronic devices from a car's ignition to medical devices to radios and TVs to PCs from functioning. So what, if anything, are we doing about it?
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Network Computing Is Back!
You read that right. Network Computing, the only IT magazine For IT, By IT is back with the first digital issue (registration required) on WAN optimization and application delivery in a virtualized data center.
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Palm Pre Users Want Virtual Keyboard
It is as if Palm developed the Pre to be the antithesis of the iPhone in that it has a nice QWERTY keyboard, but in doing so, they left out any sort of virtual keyboard, and that can be just as frustrating as having a virtual but no physical keyboard.
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Is Technology Killing The Corporation?
If you've had an uneasy feeling over the past decade or three that things are going to hell in a handbasket, there might be some empirical evidence to support you.
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Business Travel … To A Telepresence Station
There’s an interesting tidbit in one of our articles this week, where an IT pro talks about traveling to another city to use a Cisco telepresence station for a meeting with executives in India. Commuting to telecommute -- sounds like something we should expect more of.
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Amazon Still Mum On Web Services Revenue
Financial analysts looking for details on Amazon Web Services in the second quarter were left unsatisfied yesterday. Amazon CFO Thomas Szkutak said AWS is growing "very nicely," but didn’t provide any information on the size or growth rate of the company's cloud computing business.
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Was Microsoft's Open Source Hand Forced?
The saga of Microsoft's contributions to the kernel just took another curious step. A key engineer with open source network-infrastructure company Vyatta indicated that Microsoft had no choice but to post the drivers as GPL. The implication is that they wouldn't have if no one had pointed it out to them.
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Motorola Gets Serious About Android Development With MOTODEV
Word has been circulating for a long time that Motorola is seeking out Android developers. Today, hearsay becomes fact as Motorola announces MOTODEV, a new program for Android developers to work more closely with Motorola.
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Google's Latitude For iPhone Is A FAIL On Many Levels
The Web burst into excitement yesterday when Google made its Latitude location-sharing service available for the iPhone. That excitement was short-lived, however, once users discovered the the "application" is limited to the iPhone's browser and isn't a stand-alone application at all. Turns out even the mighty Google will bow before Apple's demands.
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Help Wanted! Rental-Car Firm Is Hiring 19 App-Dev Managers
Bucking the rotten employment news that's become commonplace these days, Dollar Thrifty Automotive Group is looking to hire 19 applications-development specialists and managers by Sept. 1. The company is planning a face-to-face job fair and is also accepting applications online.
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Is There Really Interest In Windows 7?
Sometimes it’s hard to gauge whether or not a particular technology has real interest or just the native curiosity all IT professionals have when something is 'new'.
In the case of Windows 7, the interest is real. InformationWeek Analytics launched a research survey this week on organizations plans for Windows 7. Typical research surveys get 500 respondents; folks that are genuinely interested in the topic, not just filling out the survey to win an IPod.
How many have taken the time to review their plans and thoughts on Windows 7?
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Garmin: We're Shipping the Nüvifone! No, Seriously
A full 18 months after it was first announced, it appears as though Garmin-Asus is finally ready to ship the nuvifone. In case you've forgotten all about it, the nüvifone runs Linux and tightly integrates mapping and GPS features with those of a cell phone.
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Palm To Apple: Bring It! webOS 1.1 Fixes iTunes Sync On Pre
Today Palm made webOS 1.1 available for the Palm Pre. The changelog is outrageous. There's only one new application, but most of the Pre's systems see major updates. Oh, and Palm fixed the Pre's ability to sync with iTunes.
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Malware Counts: Uncomfortably Numb
McAfee's security research group Avert Labs shows a more than doubling of malware from the first half of 2009 compared with the same period in 2008: that's 1.2 million unique malware applications up from about 500,000 in 2008. With the numbers now reaching the millions in a six-month period -- does virus and malware counting really provide us any value anymore?
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An Opportunity For Windows 7
Walt Mossberg, the Wall Street Journal's gizmo guru, reviewed Windows 7 today and said it's the improvement over XP that Vista wasn't, and that it could be a dicey install for some consumers. Putting these two observations together could make for an opportunity.
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How CIO Szygenda Helped GM Get Out Of The Fortune-Telling Business
As General Motors CIO Ralph Szygenda winds down his legendary career, he'll be remembered for many things: shifting the focus of his team from IT systems to cars and customers; consolidating a near-endless array of systems, applications, networks, and processes; using arbitrage to create a flexible network of third-party IT services; and more. But to me, the biggest impact he had was in helping make GM relevant again by changing it from a mediocre fortune-teller to a real-time global business.
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AT&T CEO Admits It Won't Have The iPhone Forever
This week has seen the quarterly earnings reports from both Apple and AT&T -- partners in making and distributing the iPhone. The iPhone is clearly a hot seller, and AT&T knows the marriage can't (and won't) last forever.
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Would You Be Happy If A Human Being Were Transcribing Your Voicemail?
Spinvox has found itself amidst a scandal this week, as the BBC alleges that the company sometimes uses people -- not computers -- to transcribe voicemails from speech to text. This is disappointing, to say the least. Should you be concerned about your privacy?
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How Google Could Stymie Apple
Something few people could have foreseen is the impact that apps have on smartphone and feature phone sales; as the iPhone has demonstrated, apps really are the tail wagging the handheld dog.
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Oracle Acquires GoldenGate To Bolster Data Integration
Oracle has added real-time data-integration capabilities with the acquisition of privately held GoldenGate Software, enhancing its ability to ensure that vital business applications aren't disrupted during migrations and upgrades. The announcement confirms reports that we wrote about five weeks ago here in Global CIO.
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The Encryption Gap
Things that make us say "hmmm" include these stats: The percentage of respondents to our 2009 Strategic Security Survey rating encrytion as effective in reducing risk dropped from 57% in 2008 to 48% in 2009. Use of disk, file and backup media encryption ALL fell year over year by at least five percentage points. Backup encryption usage is down 10 points.
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Contractor's Widow Seeks $25 Million From Iraq
It's bad enough her husband was murdered outside Baghdad. Now, the widow of a contractor who provided IT and military hardware services for the reconstruction effort claims the Iraqi government stiffed the man's firm for $25 million.
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What Microsoft's Open Source Gestures Really Mean
I've already commented on the meaning of Microsoft's contributions to the Linux kernel and releasing extensions for Moodle, but after going over what I wrote I thought some more analysis of the present and future of Microsoft's open source strategies are worth talking about. And no, pigs are still not flying, although they're getting mighty light-footed.
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Apple's Investment Star Wanes As iPhone Its Only Growth Area
For five straight years, Apple's stock price has performed magnificently as Steve Jobs' company has created a series of brilliant products. But a Wall Street Journal columnist argues that with declining revenue for both iPods and Mac computers, Apple must now pin all its hopes on the iPhone's ability to slug it out in an "industry of mutual assured destruction."
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TerreStar Satellite Test With Windows Mobile Phone
TerreStar has announced that they have successfully completed a call using mobile handsets with their recently launched satellite. How does a phone network sound that would be accessible from virtually anywhere?
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Resurrected! 7 Technologies That Won't Stay Dead
They're ba-a-a-ack! Despite being superseded and left for dead, a few hardy technologies keep springing back to life. Sometimes that's a good thing. Sometimes not so much...
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Google Round-Up: Wave, Gmail, Docs
Here's a collection of blurbs about some Google goings-on that may not have gotten a lot of notice. Wave will soon be available for testers; Gmail will auto-unsubscribe users from mailing lists; and Docs sees more updates.
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Please Stop Making Watch Phones
So, Samsung introduced the "world's thinnest" watch phone today, and it does have a ton of features. While there's some Dick Tracy-inspired appeal, I really don't think we need these types of phones.
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Un-Unified Storage
The last few entries we have been covering aspects of unified storage. The bottom line is that unified storage has it’s place and many organizations can benefit by having these systems, but where does this leave storage platforms that essentially do one thing and do it well?
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ReviewCam: CrowdSPRING's Creative Bazaar
I'm a sucker for anything I can try before I buy, so I am now officially a glutton for crowdSPRING, a suckling newborn (14 months) in the marketplace of, well, online marketplaces; and in this case, a marketplace for creative design talent which -- let's face it -- we all need at some point. LG recently used crowdSPRING to design a new mobile phone, giving away $80,000 in awards according to the company's co-founders.
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Amazon Web Services Secrets Revealed
Amazon.com exercises tight control over information related to its cloud computing business, a source of frustration to anyone trying to get a complete picture of Amazon Web Services. So I went in search of information from other sources. Here's what I found.
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'Meaningful Use' of E-Health Details Getting Worked Out
While the nation has been abuzz with healthcare reform talk lately, some big progress is being made on the healthcare IT front. The policy group advising the U.S. health department on the criteria healthcare providers must meet to qualify for more than $20 billion of stimulus rewards for using e-health systems has completed an important chunk of its work.
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Are Wireless Network Operators Protecting Your Privacy? Nope. Verizon CEO Punk'd
All enterprises should be concerned with the security of the mobile devices their employees carry. Not only is sensitive work information stored on there, but so is personal information. At some point, however, others have to be trusted to provide secure services and protect enterprise and end-user information. One customer not satisfied with the way wireless companies are protecting -- or not protecting -- our data took his fight to the front lawn of Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg.
Continue reading "Are Wireless Network Operators Protecting Your Privacy? Nope. Verizon CEO Punk'd..."
IBM Aids Returning Veterans
IBM has teamed up with American Corporate Partners to provide career development and mentoring services for veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's a laudable effort in its own right, and makes a lot of sense given the hi-tech nature of today's military.
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Venture Capitalists Putting More Money Into Startups
Investments rose 15 percent in the second quarter of 2009, with IT earning the most VC dollars. But funding remains significantly low compared to previous years.
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Twitter More Important Than The Web?
Twitter continues to change the way people do business, and more importantly, how customers relate to businesses. We've already seen large corporations like Comcast use Twitter to monitor what their customers think of them, but small companies can also use it to great effect.
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Hilton Hotels CIO Tim Harvey Exits; Hilton Was #2 On IW500
Hilton EVP and CIO Tim Harvey has left the company one year after Hilton was recognized as #2 in the InformationWeek 500 ranking. Hilton didn't give a reason for Harvey's departure, which follows a decade-long tenure marked by promotions and industry recognition. Did the recent addition of responsibility for corporate shared services dilute Harvey's ability to focus on CIO leadership?
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Red, White And Blue -- And Open
The group's name: Open Source for America. The group's mission: revolutionize the way we govern ourselves, from IT departments on outwards. Or at least just the IT departments.
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HTC Adopting Qualcomm's BREW Platform, Ramping Up Android Mix
HTC is known chiefly for its Windows Mobile smartphones. It also happens to be the only company with Android handsets for sale at the moment. Why, then, would it dip its toes into the mass market by adopting Qualcomm's BREW platform?
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Matt Mullenweg And Dries Buytaert Probably Separated At Birth
When it comes to open sourced content management platforms and their creators, there's no question about the celebrity status that WordPress and its young founder Matt Mullenweg have ascended to. If offered an opportunity to interview Mullenweg about some news, I'd undoubtedly jump on it. But when I was offered the chance to do the same with Dries Buytaert, my initial response was "Dries who?" Once I realized "Dries, the creator of Drupal," I didn't hesitate (podcast below).
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Samsung Mobile Internet Device Runs Windows Mobile 6.1
Samsung will be shipping its mobile internet device (MID) sometime in August. It will run Windows Mobile 6.1 and be capable of using WiFi and WiMAX, but won't have any cellular capabilities nor any voice calling features.
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News We Already Know: Federal Agencies' Faltering IT Security Efforts
The Government Accountability Office has found "persistent weaknesses" that may leave federal agencies open to cyber-attacks, the GAO reported today.
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Amazon Can't Keep Its Kindle Promises
After reaching into some Kindles and deleting several copyrighted books, Amazon now says they made a mistake and won't do something like that again. No doubt, this whole affair has been a massive PR disaster for Amazon. But what happens if unauthorized copyrighted content finds its way into Amazon's catalog again?
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Giant Telescope Will Redefine The Real End-To-End Visibility
A group seeking to build the largest and "most capable and advanced telescope ever constructed" hopes to open this stunning 30-meter window into the past by 2018 in Hawaii. Astronomers believe the massive telescope will let them "study light from the earliest stars and galaxies" and "test many of the fundamental laws of physics." And that's end-to-end visibility you can believe in.
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BlackBerry Storm 2 Has 'Clicking' SurePress Touchscreen
File this under: "Oh Snap!" The spy shots seen earlier this year of the BlackBerry Storm 2 appeared to indicate that the much-maligned clicking SurePress touchscreen was gone. A new video reveals, however, that the clicking screen is still there, much to the bemoaning of the Interwebs.
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Yahoo Redesigns Homepage, But Not Enough
With better than expected second quarter earnings, a new homepage, and renewed rumors of an impending Microsoft deal, Yahoo appears to be getting back on its feet.
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An Alternative To Startup VC
The rate of venture capital investment in startups over the first three months of 2009 was down over 50% over the same period last year, according to stats released yesterday by PricewaterhouseCoopers.
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Toshiba TG01 Passes Through FCC
Beyond things like the Palm Pre and the BlackBerry Tour, AT&T seems to get the good smartphones. That may be changing though, as the Toshiba TG01 has passed through the FCC for a CDMA carrier (Sprint or Verizon), and this phone is a beast.
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How Big Will Avaya Go?
This week's big UC news, of course, is the announcement that Avaya is bidding $475 million to acquire Nortel Enterprise Solutions out of bankruptcy. You can follow all the latest news on No Jitter; but there's another couple of No Jitter posts, not directly related to Nortel, that I want to call your attention to. These have to do with purported interest on the part of Silver Lake partners, the private equity firm that owns Avaya, in potentially acquiring Tandberg, the video solutions company (Sulkin here; me here).
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Can Microsoft Win By Channeling Its Inner Burger King?
Microsoft is pursuing the Burger King store location strategy, announcing that it will basically shadow Apple's retail stores with stores of its own. It has doubled down on that approach by snagging Apple's former vice president of real estate, George Blankenship.
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A Tale of Two Open Sourcings, Canonical and Adobe
Two announcements, both things offered as open source, have come from entirely different corners of the industry. In one corner is Canonical -- the Ubuntu folks. In the other is Adobe, a name not normally associated with open source, but there are signs they're working to change that.
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Report: Zer01 May Be Vaporware Afterall
Remember Zer01? It recently announced the launch of its new, national unlimited wireless voice and data services for $70 per month without actually launching any services. Why not, you ask? Because the whole organization appears to be nothing but smoke and mirrors.
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Death Of DRM Means Rise Of Anti-Counterfeiting Wars
You think the drug wars are bad? Then just wait until we've got SWAT teams, empowered by the upcoming ACTA anti-counterfeiting trade agreement, taking down the local DVD duplicating operation. It'll make anti-DRM advocates long for the grandma-suing ways of the RIAA.
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BlackBerry Messenger 5.0 Available To Everyone
An unofficial version of BlackBerry Messenger 5.0 has been leaked and it is compatible with most BlackBerry smartphones. The new software offers a host of improved features for the mobile messaging maniacs out there.
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Mayo Clinic Blog Blasts Obamacare
No less a revered, tech-savvy institution than the Mayo Clinic has come out swinging against President Obama's national healthcare agenda. "The real losers will be the citizens of the United States," warns the clinic's official blog. The problem: The plan fails to employ data to gauge whether publicly-funded providers are earning their money or operating Dickensian patient mills.
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Will Employees Demand Google Chrome OS?
There’s a feeling when walking into a store that caters to your passion—for a clothes horse in Nordstrom, a deer hunter in Cabela’s, or a foodie in Trader Joe’s. You feel like the place was made for you. That’s the emotion Google Chrome OS will have to trigger to get into businesses.
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Windows Mobile 6.5's UI Fixes Run Deep
We've all seen pictures and even video of Microsoft's new Windows Mobile 6.5 platform that shows big fat menus that even the pudgiest of fingers could manipulate. I was worried though that this feature might only be skin deep, but it seems MS has made a real effort to make the feature available throughout the device.
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Is Your Cloud App Ready For 100,000 Users?
Ninety percent of companies don't put their Web applications or sites through performance tests, according to Tom Lounibos, CEO of cloud testing specialist Soasta. Which companies have taken that extra step? Soasta is introducing a certification program to sort out the testers from the non-testers.
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Verizon To Limit Device Exclusivity Agreements
Verizon is going to be shortening the time it keeps an exclusivity agreement for a particular device for the benefit of smaller cellular carriers around the country, namely those with 500,000 subscribers or less. That's good new for those that don't need a national carrier.
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Cisco Upgrade To Outperform Is Led By North American CIOs
Citing "steady, modest improvement throughout the quarter" from enterprise customers in North America, a prominent securities analyst has upgraded Cisco's shares from neutral to outperform and bumped up his revenue forecast by $210 million for Q4. Are we seeing signs of the bottom?
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RIM Shows Apple Some Love, Bringing BlackBerry Desktop Software To Macs
If you're a Mac user and also a BlackBerry user, this is great news for you. Research In Motion has officially announced that it is going to offer a Mac-compatible version of its BlackBerry Desktop Software in September.
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The Forgotten Part Of Storage Unification
The focus of storage unification has for the most part been protocols. Leveraging a NAS to also serve up a SAN protocol (fibre or iSCSI) and as I discussed in my last entry there is definitely a place for that. The forgotten part of storage unification however is unifying all the storage that already exists in the data center; this is typically done through a form of storage virtualization.
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Online Transparency's Double-Edged Sword
The Obama administration will quickly find out that online transparency is a curse as well as a blessing, especially if the transparency is only half-baked.
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T-Mobile G1 Gets Android Update, But 'Donut' Is A No-Show
Beginning over the weekend, T-Mobile USA began pushing out a minor firmware update for the HTC G1 Android phone. Unfortunately, all it does is fix bugs -- no new features are installed. This begs the question, why haven't we heard a peep about the Donut update for Android and what new features will it introduce?
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Firewall for Virtual Machines Adds Speed and an IDS
Startup Altor Networks launches a new version of its VM firewall that's built for speed and includes an intrusion detection engine from Sourcefire.
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IBM's Green Shoots: Government, Healthcare, India
IBM's remarkable second quarter results revealed that growth markets still exist—if you know where to look for them and are positioned to take advantage. Big Blue under Sam Palmisano has both those boxes checked.
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Microsoft Contributes To Linux Kernel -- And It's Not April 1
"That'll never happen." I'm learning not to say those words, because never is a long, long time. How about, for instance, Microsoft contributing GPLed code to the Linux kernel? Well, guess what.
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How Microsoft And Habit Abetted Twitter Hack
Unfortunately, we all know a lot more about Twitter's business plans than we'd like, since TechCrunch made the ill-conceived editorial decision to publish the stolen contents of files it received from a French cybercriminal.
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Help Shape Our Win7 Coverage
Seems like every pundit has a take on the upcoming Windows 7 OS. But instead of squawking at you, InformationWeek Analytics wants to listen. And clearly, you want to talk: Our Win7 reader survey got more than 800 responses in just a few days.
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Developer: webOS SDK Ain't Got No Gaming Chops
There was big excitement last week when Palm finally released a beta version of the Mojo software developer kit for its webOS mobile platform. Now that it has been in the hands of developers for a few days, they are beginning to discover why the SDK is still in beta.
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Top Indian IT Firm Tata Says Client Cuts Have Hit Bottom
Many large corporations have stopped cutting back on IT spending, according to Tata Consultancy Services' CFO. "The decline has been arrested," said the Tata executive.
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Do Bits Respect International Boundaries?
Last week, some users of the Amazon Kindle reader got a nasty surprise. If they had purchased either Orwell's Animal Farm or 1984, Amazon had deleted it from their Kindle and (how considerate) refunded the purchase price to the user's account. Kindle users may not have read the fine print that allows Amazon to do that, but it still applies nonetheless.
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ReviewCam: Delve Into Video Publishing
Publishing video is exciting, but it's not easy. It requires a hefty infrastructure to store and deliver it, and systems that can manage and organize all of that video content. Video hosting and content management is big business these days and new companies are constantly emerging in this space. I had a chance to take a look at Delve Networks' offering, and while it offers most of the basic features that others do, it has some pretty compelling aspects to as well.
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Podcast: McAfee Super Sizes Its McMarketing
I've always admired McAfee. Its customers and product reviewers typically have great things to say, its CEO, Dave DeWalt is smart and humble and laughs at himself easily. Those things all matter. But now it seems marketing and corporate messaging are getting in the way and I am growing concerned that maybe there's not much innovation left or, like any decent company growing up before our eyes, it aspires to raise its profile but is doing so through song and dance instead of technology innovation.
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U.S. Agencies Think About Establishing Cloud Nodes
Tim Grance, program manager for cyber and network security at National Institute of Standards, says standards are essential to cloud computing. And among those standards must be additional standards for moving virtual machines from cloud to cloud, something we still lack.
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Five Key Developments In Cloud Computing
Google News offers thousands of headlines on the topic of cloud computing. With so much happening in this emerging market, which developments are the ones that really matter? Here are a handful of recent events with long-term implications.
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Mobile Privacy - How Much Do We Give Up Voluntarily?
There are a ton of cool features and services available for smartphones today. Location based services is one of the most interesting, but in doing so, you are giving the service provider an alarming amount of information about you whether you know it or not.
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Verizon Wireless Wants BlackBerry Storm Users To Slack Off
Slacker Radio is one of my favorite mobile applications -- for both the iPhone and BlackBerry Storm. It lets users create their own radio station and listen via streaming and even caching on the device's memory. Verizon Wireless wants to spread the music, and is pushing out the Slacker Radio application to all Storm users.
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Open Government Initiative Gets Mixed Reviews
It's comforting to note that even the Obama White House faces the same problems in jump-starting Web 2.0 initiatives that the rest of us face: Not enough people participating, and, of the people who do participate, many are looking to hijack the forum to serve their own agenda.
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Google: Yo, Docs Is Under Construction. Deal With It
On the Official Google Docs blog, Google posted an entry with the headline "Pardon our Dust." This is Google's way of saying that change is on the way, with a brand new interface due to appear on Google Docs in short order. Anything interesting? You betcha.
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Google Solicits Broadband Plan Ideas
Google is asking us to submit ideas for a national broadband strategy that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), led by chairman Julius Genakowski, is required to present to Congress in February 2010.
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Despite Poor Reviews, Nokia N97 Tops Sales Chart In The U.K.
Well, I'll be durned. Vodafone in the U.K. recently posted a list of its top 10 selling phones. Sitting at the very top is the Nokia N97, which has received less than favorable reviews. Fluke, or are non-geeks just not as picky?
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An Android Of Your Very Own
If you've been curious about Google Android but aren't up for a) dropping the cash to buy an actual mobile device to run it on or b) hacking the existing codebase to make it run on your notebook, someone's just saved you a lot of trouble. Welcome to the first Android live CD.
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Capricorn One, The Sequel
NASA has announced that it has restored footage of the Apollo 11 moon landing, and I'm just waiting for the conspiracy nutcases to go to town with it. I wonder if the resulting noise might be a benefit to NASA's marketing?
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Three Services To Help You Move More Effectively
Moving across the street or across the country is always a pain. I've moved several times over the past few years and have found several services to make the process easier and more affordable.
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Rimini Street Taking $200M Out Of Oracle And SAP Pockets
Continuing to snatch Oracle and now SAP customers with half-price maintenance and support contracts, Rimini Street is morphing from gadfly to high-flier as its annual run rate approaches $200 million and it accepts a $10 million private-equity investment to fuel global expansion. Is it too late for the big boys to pull out the fly-swatter?
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Anti-Virus Firms Investigating Sexy-View Smartphone Worm
In yet another example of how mobile malware is gaining momentum, a new variant of the Wily worm is making the rounds. It's spreading through text messages and researchers warn it may be a smartphone botnet in the making.
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With MIT's Trash Track, Garbage Is Gone But Not Forgotten
We tag and track our laptop computers, our cars, and even our dogs. Now researchers at MIT are working on a project to track paper coffee cups, and last night's takeout food containers -- our trash.
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Can An Office Suite Be Too Powerful?
The new Microsoft Office 2010 looks like it will have lots of new features and a consistent ribbon interface across the entire product suite. There's better integration with mobile devices, and even a free browser-based subset of the suite. Are these the tools that all users need to do their jobs?
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What App Stores Benefit Smartphones Best?
As Apple hits its one trillionth app download sometime today before lunch (or some other ridiculously high number that starts to lose meaning at some point) and other app stores are on the way from a number of other players, it strikes me that Apple has the right formula, but not because it is Apple or the iPhone, but because it is drop dead simple to understand for the consumer.
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BlackBerry 5.0 Browser To Include Tabbed Browsing
The iPhone and Palm Pre have a leg up on other smartphones in one crucial department: they both offer tabbed browsing. Word across the Interwebs today says that the browser in OS 5.0 will finally bring tabbed browsing to BlackBerries.
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Government And The Consumer Effect
Last week at an employee town hall meeting, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was faced with a question that executives in commercial businesses have been facing for years. Why can't employees use the technologies with which they are most familiar?
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Video: Google Chrome OS Isn't Challenge To Microsoft
The significance of Google's Chrome OS announcement is not the OS itself -- remember, it's not an actual product yet. Rather, it spotlights the shift away from laptops to netbooks and smartphones. Laptops are still corporate tools. But once applications and data are in the cloud, enterprises will ditch the costlier computers and get with true lightweight platforms.
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Do You Need Unified Storage?
As discussed in our last entry, unified storage is all the rage right now in the storage industry; it is essentiality the combining of NAS with a block protocol, like iSCSI or traditional fibre channel. The question is however do you need unified storage?
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Is There Anywhere Google Won't Add 'MyLocation'?
Yesterday, Google made the iPhone just a bit more useful for providing locally relevant search results in the browser itself. Google has been on a tear lately, adding its My Location feature to many of its applications and services. This begs the question, what is Google going to add My Location to next?
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Will IBM Earnings Indicate Bottom -- Or Free-Fall?
The not-so-good news is that IBM is expected to reporth declining revenue for the fourth straight quarter this afternoon. The good news is that the percentage decline expected for this quarter versus last quarter is almost flat, leading some analysts to speculate that the struggling economy might be bottoming out. The bad news? If they're wrong, it means we're in a free-fall.
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Palm: You Want Mojo? Go Ahead, The webOS SDK Is All Yours
A-ha! Today, Palm said that it is making the software development kit for webOS publicly available to anyone who wants it. This is huge news for Palm Pre owners and those interested in developing for Palm's webOS.
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The Pre Isn't An iPod
Apple just plugged the software hole that let owners of the new Pre smart phone sync with iTunes, and Palm Inc. is crying foul. I'm siding with Apple on this one.
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Outsider, Insiders, And Open Source Solipsism
Funny how things feed back into each other. Just the other day, a book recommendation from a friend that was not at all related to computers made for an interesting parallel with a discussion elsewhere about open source vs. closed minds -- the closed minds being those of some open source advocates.
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Michael Arrington Should Step Down
By publishing documents stolen by a hacker, Michael Arrington has proven he doesn't have the judgment necessary to run a news organization. He should have the decency to step down.
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Apollo 11 Astronaut: U.S. Needs More Science Grads
Michael Collins, who forty years ago piloted Apollo 11's Columbia command module while fellow astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin explored the surface of the moon, says the U.S. is no longer producing enough science and engineering graduates to meet the demands of research organizations like NASA.
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Taking A Deeper Look At Nokia
“What is Nokia's presence in the market place?” asked Nokia's Tero Ojanpera at a dinner meeting in San Francisco Tuesday. If you ask some in Silicon Valley, the answer is that they are “irrelevant,” but taking a deeper look reveals an interesting story of a global company that is in the midst of a huge strategic and philosophical shift.
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Does Spam Work For IT Services?
A new study finds a shocking 12% of people have replied to spam because they’re interested in the product or service. Seriously. Which makes me wonder--do some of you respond to those unsolicited offers for “Romanian PHP, Java, ASP, & .NET Software Outsourcing” I regularly get in my e-mail box?
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Can Tech Companies Do The Right Thing?
I'm all for holding companies responsible for their actions, but sometimes it's hard to predict how those actions play out.
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Google Shrinks Chrome Updates With 'Courgette'
Part of Google's security strategy for Chrome involves the use of 'silent updates,' browser patches downloaded without specific authorization by the user. It's a controversial practice because spyware and malware also download files without the express consent of users.
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Apple Kills Palm Pre's Ability To Sync With iTunes
Well, it happened. Apple updated iTunes to version 8.2.1. According to the changelog, it offers bug fixes and "addresses an issue with verification of Apple devices." In other words, "Buzz off, Palm Pre. You ain't no iPhone."
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RIM Round-Up: Tour Flying Off Shelves And Storm 2 Inches Closer To Release
Here's a collection of stories about Research In Motion and its Blackberries for a sunny summer afternoon. According to reports, the new BlackBerry Tour is a big hit and moved lots of units since its July 12 debut. Also, Verizon's inventory system has added more clues about the Storm 2.
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If It's Patients Vs. IT Industry, IT Industry Will Lose Every Time
In The Perfect World, we'd all have electronic health records that are complete, portable, and secure. But here in the real and imperfect world, the government's aggressive injection of itself into an already bewildering situation is pitting patients versus the IT industry. Or as the headline over an excellent news story asks, "Who really profits from digital medical records?"
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iPhone Developers Get Another OS 3.1 Beta And SDK
Late on Tuesday, Apple offered iPhone developers yet another beta of iPhone OS 3.1 and beta of iPhone OS 3.1 SDK. Now that the OS has been in developers' hands for a while, details about the new features are emerging.
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Open Source Law Gets Its Own Journal -- Finally
Analysis of open source from a legal perspective has typically been the domain of websites like Groklaw, or the occasional column in a law journal. Now there's a whole journal focusing exclusively on the legal issues that arise from open source: the International Free and Open Source Software Law Review, or IFOSS L. Rev., for short.
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Do People Want An Uber Device?
I think we've all at one time or another looked for an uber device, the mobile device that does everything we want, replacing the multiple gadgets we currently carry around. However, is that really what people want given the realities of physical size and technological limitations?
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Oracle Exec Wins Award As Chief Customer Officer Of The Year
A small organization whose members are Chief Customer Officers has named Oracle CCO Jeb Dasteel as its Chief Customer Officer of the year. While that's clearly a nice bit of recognition, we need to bear in mind that the voters were a few dozen other CCOs. Wouldn't it be interesting to see what Oracle's actual customers feel about the job Dasteel has done?
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Microsoft Beats Amazon By A Whisker In Cloud Pricing
Microsoft has disclosed pricing on its forthcoming Windows Azure services, and in one small but significant way, Microsoft has undercut rival Amazon on pay-per-use fees. Amazon charges 12.5 cents per hour for a bare bones Windows Server instance; Microsoft's list price is 12 cents.
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Google Calendar Gets Labs Of Its Own
Gmail has had Gmail Labs for a while now. Gmail Labs are a great place to try out experimental Gmail features if you are so inclined. The mad scientists who are Google's engineers have cooked up an entirely new set of Labs, this time for the Google Calendar.
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Fifteen-Year-Old Says Jeff Goldblum Is Dead
The Internet is afire on account of the immortal words of fifteen-year-old Morgan Stanley intern Matthew Robson: "teenagers do not use twitter."
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Cloud Computing Joins Pop Culture
Last week, PBS's NewsHour with Jim Lehrer reported on cloud computing, even attempting (not quite successfully) to describe a multi-tenant architecture. Yesterday, my 67-year-old mother-in-law explained to me this concept she read about called "cloud computing." It's finally happened: Cloud computing has entered pop culture.
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War Is Hell? Not So Much, According To Air Force
The Air Force describes how it's using social media to counteract Internet propaganda by terrorist organizations. And they use social media to get the message out about social media, telling the story in a 10-minute YouTube video.
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Official: MyBlackBerry Forums Launching Tonight
If you're a fan of end-user forums and use them to seek out new information, post questions, or whine about your problems, Research In Motion has one more for you. MyBlackBerry, a community site for BlackBerry users, is going live tonight around Midnight Eastern Time.
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News Of Solaris's Death Is Greatly Exaggerated
Sun's got a long, hard road ahead of it as a new sibling in the Oracle family, but I'm not inclined to believe the recent doomsaying that Solaris, or OpenSolaris, is about to be kicked out of the house. If that happens, it won't be for years yet, if at all.
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Microsoft Marketplace To Support WinMo 6.0 and 6.1, Taking App Submissions July 27
Good news for Windows Mobile fans. Microsoft revealed a few more details about the Windows Marketplace for Mobile, set to launch later this year. Perhaps the best kernel of wisdom gained is that Windows Marketplace for Mobile will support devices running Windows Mobile 6.0 and 6.1 by the end of 2009.
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Microsoft Mobile 2010 Coming To A Smartphone Near You
Just about everyone who cares now knows that Office 2010 is well underway and they may even have downloaded the Tech Preview for testing. The PC isn't the only platform getting improvements with 2010 though. Microsoft Mobile 2010 is a series of programs and services for smartphones and had a number of new features as well as enhancements to existing one's.
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Browser Security Takes Center Stage This Patch Tuesday
Microsoft today issued a Security Advisory about a previously undisclosed vulnerability in Office Web Components Spreadsheet ActiveX control (OWC 10 and OWC11). The flaw is exploitable without any user interaction required, and attacks are underway.
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Can Businesses Avoid The Windows 7 Switch?
According to a recent survey, almost 60 percent of businesses say they have no plans to switch to Windows 7. Another 34 percent said they'd be waiting until the first service pack before making the switch. There is, however, another event that may force the hand of businesses -- the sunset of Windows XP.
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Samsung Files Patent On Different QWERTY Keyboard
Samsung has filed a patent on a flip-out QWERTY keyboard designed to work with touch screen devices. Touch is fine, but for some things, a physical keyboard just cannot be replaced by a virtual onscreen keyboard.
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Google Says 'Free' Isn't An Antitrust Issue
On Friday, Dana Wagner, senior competition counsel for Google, published a post on Google's Public Policy blog that asks the question, "Is free an antitrust issue?"
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What Is Unified Storage?
What started as a whisper has now become a roar. All of a sudden every storage vendor you talk to has Unified Storage and all of a sudden you MUST have it. All of which begs the question, what is unified storage and do you need it?
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Gmail Labs Now Certifying Emails From eBay And PayPal
Because so much spam and phishing email comes from entities pretending to be either eBay or PayPal, Google thought it was worth protecting Gmail users from attacks. The latest Gmail Labs tool will make absolutely certain that any emails that hit your inbox from eBay and PayPal are actually from eBay and PayPal.
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Did Google Push The Panic Button?
I didn't agree with everything David Pogue wrote in his glowing review of Bing last week, but I did agree that Google would try to duplicate or surpass any improvements Microsoft would bring to search.
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How To Integrate Web Video Into Your Facebook Fan Page
When I set out to integrate TechWeb TV video into our InformationWeek fan page on Facebook, I was surprised to find no way to do it, unless your video is hosted on Facebook itself or on YouTube. Fortunately, a company called ffwd.com volunteered to build a tool for us. It works great, and you can use it too.
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Google Has Sweet Tooth, Plans Donut, Eclair And Flan Updates For Android
After Google dropped its Chrome OS bomb last week, there were a lot of questions about Android's future. Have no fear, says Google's Andy Rubin. Chrome OS and Android have different futures, and Android's is full of sweet updates -- including three more updates to the mobile OS this year.
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On Giving Away Microsoft Office
There are a few ways to see Microsoft's plans for a free web-based version of Office. One, it's self-competition; two, it's competition with open source software; three, it's competition with other web services. Which one matters most?
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LG Launches An Apps Store, But Shows No Love For The U.S.
As LG had previously indicated, it is set to launch its own version of an apps store for mobile phones on July 14. When the store opens, it will have over 1,400 apps available for Windows Mobile phones. Too bad LG has no plans to open the apps store in the U.S.
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Want To Follow Google On Twitter? Here Are All Of Google's Twitter Accounts
If you're like me, you not only follow friends and colleagues on Twitter, but official Twitter accounts from companies, too. Just in case you're interested in a few more interesting Twitter accounts, here are 45 different official accounts from Google.
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Target Requires Driver’s License Scan For Restricted Items
Sure, I traded my smoking habit for a Nicorette gum habit, but does that mean I should be forced to have my driver’s license physically swiped through the register to buy an age restricted item? I don’t think so, but retailing giant Target certainly does.
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Real-Time Product Launch Recap
A variety of companies launched (or updated) services today that are all attempting to become leaders in the "real-time" space. Here's a recap of some of the services.
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Miscellaneous Mobile Musings For The Second Week Of July
Aside from a few really big stories this week, there have been lots of little tidbits of knowledge shared via the Interwebs. Here's a running list of the smaller things that might have missed out on getting headlines of their very own.
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Sadly, Baseball Emerges From Age Of Technology Innocence
Professional baseball scouts as well as managers and, yes, fans, will be soon have access to technology allowing them to measure the heretofore unmeasurable and forever-debatable: who is the best shortstop in all of baseball? Is it Derek Jeter or Omar Vizquel?
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Google Adds MyLocation To Desktop Browsers
The MyLocation feature of Google Maps for Mobile has been available for smartphones since late 2007. Now, using the W3C Geolocation API standard, Google Maps can pinpoint the location of your desktop PC.
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The Problem With Open Source Equivalency
It's remarkable how the same article can contain both prescient insight and things that make me slap my head in dismay. In this case, it's a piece about the way open source software has eaten into commercial offerings, but it draws a distinction between proprietary and open source that might well not exist.
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Journalists Get Left Out By Social Media
When Sarah Palin resigned as governor of Alaska, she gave a cursory announcement to journalists, then moved on to tell her story directly to her supporters using Twitter and Facebook. This is the latest example of traditional journalists being disintermediated by government and other newsmakers, and it will make a big difference in the careers of IT managers (and me too, as a journalist).
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Google Researching Time Travel
Buried in Google's announcement that it is developing an OS called "Chrome" was a brief mention that its go-back function would be an actual time travel app, raising issues far beyond a potential competitive threat to Microsoft.
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Tipster: webOS 1.1 Coming To A Pre Near You
According to PreCentral, the Palm Pre will soon see a new version of webOS. The 1.1 bump will bring several new features, chief among them much better policy and security controls for Exchange.
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Dell To Launch Android Based Web Device
At some point Dell will actually launch another mobile device after having discontinued its line of Windows Mobile based Axim's a few years ago. While there have been rumors of it being a phone, it may actually be an internet device running Android.
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Google Chrome OS: Not A Windows Killer
Google's announcement of Chrome OS has created a lot of excitement, and of course lots of speculation about what Microsoft will do. Here's my speculation about one thing that Microsoft won't do: Significantly change Windows any time soon.
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Nokia Exec: The N97 Will Beat The iPhone 3GS
I love it when company executives talk smack. This time around, Nokia UK managing director Mark Loughran said that the iPhone 3GS is a disappointment to many, and the N97's superior camera will push it ahead of the iPhone. I have one question for Loughran, "Have you even used the N97?"
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Volunteers Will Screen Stimulus Applications
The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) is calling for "qualified" volunteers to screen applications for the $4.7 billion it has to spend as part of the $7.2 billion broadband stimulus package.
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iPhone 3GS Upload Speeds Limited To Paltry 384Kbps
Real-world speed tests and component tear-downs reveal that the iPhone 3GS can upload data at a pokey 384Kbps. That stinks. What gives, Apple?
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Miguel de Icaza On Microsoft's C# Community Promise: 'The Right Direction'
Earlier in the week before everyone went all Google-eyed, I did a quick back-and-forth interview with Miguel de Icaza -- lead programmer for the free .NET implementation, Mono, and leader of the GNOME desktop project --about Microsoft and their Community Promise for C# and the CLI.
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Why Google Chrome OS Will Fail
Google Chrome OS is a blogger's dream product. It's a lightweight operating system designed for fast bootup and running Web applications. It's based on Linux. And it's designed to stick Microsoft in the eye—everybody loves to stick Microsoft in the eye. But in reality, I don't see Chrome OS as having much appeal. This is a product that's doomed to fail.
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Where To Start With SSD
Solid State Disk is a mature, stable technology poised for widespread adoption in enterprises of all sizes. It solves performance and power issues that mechanical drives can not. Most data center managers, large and small, have an eye on this technology but are not exactly sure where to start with SSD.
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UK Spy Chief's Embarrassing Photos Teach Social Media Security Lesson
The wife of Sir John Sawers, the new head of British spy agency MI6, caused a stir when she posted personal family information to Facebook, including an unflattering photo of the middle-aged bureaucrat wearing nothing but Speedos swim trunks while on vacation at the beach. It's a silly, tabloid story—but it also teaches a serious lesson about social media security.
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Purported Screen Shots Of Chrome OS Emerge
Little more than 24 hours after Google announced Chrome OS, the Internet has delivered what are reported to be screen shots from the up-and-coming operating system from Google. Are they real? Who knows, but they sure are pretty. The report also includes a walk through of how the OS works.
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Did You Ever Play Asteroids?
I ask because Universal Studios recently beat out three other studio bids to win the rights to develop Atari's "Asteroids" arcade game into a movie. It hopes your dim memories will make you want to see the flick.
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Wikipedia Officially Launches Mobile Site
The online encyclopedia Wikipedia has officially launched their mobile site. It has been in beta for quite a while but now it is on a new server and considered good enough to call it done.
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Check Out Sony Ericsson's Android UI
Word leaked over the weekend about Sony Ericsson's first Android-powered smartphone and it looked like a winner. Well, today we've learned that the company will be layering on its own custom user interface on top of the Linux-based OS, and it also looks pretty good.
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Eric Schmidt, Google's New OS And My Mom
On the same day that Google announced the Chrome OS, my mother announced that she was no longer going to take the paper version of the of Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, forgoing a 75 year tradition for the online version, which she admits is not all together satisfying.
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T-Mobile's myTouch 3G To Have 3 Separate Email Clients
Just in case one email client on your smartphone isn't enough for you, T-Mobile is going to load the HTC myTouch 3G with not one, not two, but three distinct email clients. Here's why.
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Call To Probe Virginia Outsourcing Deal
Virginia's largest newspaper is calling for a public inquiry into a troubled outsourcing contract that has resulted in the firing of the state's CIO.
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Google's Chrome OS Threatens Linux, Is Good For Microsoft
Google's announcement late Tuesday that it's developing a lightweight operating system based on the Chrome browser sounds great at first. But the more I looked into the meager information available, the less attractive the offering seemed. The first problem with the operating system is that it's vaporware; it's not going to be available for more than a year. Also, it threatens to fragment the Linux community, crippling Linux in exactly the way Unix suffered more than a decade ago.
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T-Mobile Talks Up Personalization Of The myTouch 3G
Today in New York, T-Mobile and HTC re-announced the myTouch 3G to tech journalists. A big part of the presentation was about how the myTouch can be personalized and made to fit the user's lifestyle and needs.
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GoogleOS: It's WebOS, Actually
It's finally happened. Google's dived headfirst into the desktop operating system game, just like people speculated they would. And from the sound of it, it's an OS where the main user-interface metaphor is the web. Pass the aspirin.
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Why Google's Chrome OS Doesn't Surprise Me One Bit
When Google first announced Android in late 2007, I began to wonder if Google would stop at smartphones. Then Google announced the Chrome browser in late 2008, which, from the very beginning, showed the underpinnings of a full operating system. Google's Chrome OS for netbooks, announced late yesterday, is the logical next step for Google to take.
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Will Cyber Attack Promote Einstein?
Government Web sites were subjected to a denial of service attack over the past few days, which may have the unintended consequence of helping the Obama Administration sweep away privacy concerns as it begins implementing a controversial cybersecurity plan.
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DOJ Opens Antitrust Review On US Carriers
The new administration in Washington is flexing its antitrust muscle and one of the industries the Department of Justice is looking at is carriers in the US, specifically as to whether device exclusivity agreements are anti-competitive.
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Google To Launch Chrome OS
I was just about ready to fall asleep when Google had to drop a bomb on the industry. The search giant will be launching a full-fledged operating system for netbooks in the second half of 2010. Yes, this is a big deal.
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VMLogix Gets Ready For The Hybrid Cloud
Sameer Dholakia of VMLogix is not the most prominent spokesman for virtualization. But his firm's product, LabManager, supplies a strong core function--provisioning the virtual server. Furthermore, VMLogix doesn't care whether it’s a VMware, Citrix or Microsoft virtual machine, making Dholakia one of the few CEOs with a vision of a multi-hypervisor future.
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Google Apps Graduates From Beta
Bowing to pressure from its enterprise clients, Google has finally removed the beta label from Google Apps. For Gmail, the oldest component of Google Apps, this marks the end of over five years in beta.
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Twitter: Saint And Sinner
Twitter is at the heart of yet another controversy, this one involving Internet viruses and spam.
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Using CRM To Keep Doctor Relationships Healthy
In most sectors, CRM products are used for managing customer relationships. But for some health care organizations, CRM is helping to manage and grow relationships with physicians.
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Google: No More Beta For Gmail, Docs, Calendar And Talk
File this under "Whoa!" Today, Google announced that it is removing the "beta" label from its core productivity applications, including Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Talk.
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Could You Sell Yourself In 160 Characters?
A company based in Wales is looking for a new marketing employee. Rather than seek out resumes the traditional way, the company is asking prospective employees to sell themselves in one text message. Text messages are limited to 160 characters.
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HTML 5's Video Tag Runs Aground
Seems like just the other week there was the strong possibility of vendor-neutral support for video as a standard element in HTML 5. Now it's all up in smoke no thanks to disagreement on what codec to implement as the base standard, and disagreement over a free-and-open spec vs. a for-pay spec.
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Placing Former Employees On Legal Hold
Legal hold is a term used to set aside certain data to make sure it is not altered while a legal case is being settled. One of those situations is employee termination. The chances are there for the employee to file a wrongful termination lawsuit and for the data center that means placing exiting employees' data on legal hold.
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Palm Pre Sales Reports Not Meshing
It's hard to know who to believe in the case of the Palm Pre. Sprint says the device has been a stellar seller. Some analysts agree, suggesting that as many as 300,000 had been sold by late June. A new report, however, says things aren't as rosy as Sprint wants us to believe.
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An Uphill Battle For Windows Mobile
There is no doubt Microsoft is in a position it doesn't like to be in regarding Windows Mobile. It isn't leading in market share, and quite often, when you read articles and reviews on smartphones, Microsoft's mobile platform is often omitted from the commentary. Microsoft faces an uphill battle to get the operating system back on center stage.
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Zero-Day Hits Microsoft DirectShow
Microsoft today issued an advisory to its customers warning them that a new vulnerability in Microsoft Video ActiveX Control affecting Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 is currently being actively exploited. The software vendor has issued a work-around.
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Is Internet Explorer Share Really Plummeting?
This week, TechCrunch trumpets that Internet Exporer is bleeding market share. Since March, IE has lost more than 11 percent of its users. It's an incredibly devastating exodous, in essence giving a vote of no-confidence to Microsoft browsers. Then again, maybe it's all a big misunderstanding.
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Is This Sony Ericsson's First Android Phone?
We all know Sony Ericsson has been working on an Android smartphone, and the alleged specs and pictures leaked out over the weekend. I have to say, this thing looks like a winner.
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HulloMail Seeks To Convert Google Voice And Smartphone Users
Since Apple introduced the concept of visual voicemail to the common man back in 2007, other companies have been quick to offer similar -- and often superior -- voicemail systems. The latest comes from HulloMail, a company that promises to "liberate your mobile phone from archaic voicemail."
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Video: iPhone Tips And Tricks
Even if you didn't get a new iPhone recently, you did. In addition to rolling out new the new iPhone 3GS hardware last month, Apple introduced its iPhone 3.0 firmware update for free for all iPhone users, and at a nominal cost for users of the iPod Touch. Version 3.0 has so many new features, it's like getting a new iPhone. Watch this video for some tips and tricks on getting the most from the new software.
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RIM To Offer Gmail Plug-In Supporting Threaded Email And More
Research In Motion has its own beta program called the BlackBerry Beta Portal. Those qualified to enter the beta program will be rewarded with access to the latest up-and-coming features for BlackBerry devices. The latest beta should stir some excitement for Gmail users, because it supports threaded email conversations.
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Better Feedback From iPhone Touchscreen
Help may be on the way if you are one of those iPhone users that doesn't like the lack of tactile feedback from the on-screen QWERTY keyboard. No, there isn't a new iPhone on the way with a real keyboard, at least, not that I know of. Apple has filed a patent to provide "localized tactile feedback" on a touchscreen.
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Live Free Or Die Hard ... Er, Free
Mark Cuban has a way of making people listen even if what he says turns them off. This definitely applies to a blog post he made over the weekend: people who live by free are gonna die that way, too.
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What Sarah Palin Teaches Us About Social Media
Sarah Palin's abrupt resignation on Friday wasn't a surprise to anyone who follows her on Twitter or Facebook, and that's all the former vice-presidential candiate really cares about.
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Nokia: What? Us? Build An Android Phone? LOL!
The big buzz over the holiday weekend was a report from the Guardian in the UK, which asserted that Nokia was going to ditch its Symbian-based smartphone operating system and build new phones using Google's Android instead. This morning, Nokia flatly denied the story.
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Will FriendFeed's New Search Equal More Real-Time Spam?
Social message board service FriendFeed announced the launch of their new search engine this week. Will this new search engine see a huge increase in spam?
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Enjoyed The July 4th Fireworks? Skip The Waledac Movie
After a few weeks of low activity, the infamous Waledac botnet is lighting things up once again. This time, its hook is the promise of a "fabulous" July 4 video on YouTube.
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Why I'm Dropping Bing For Google
It's been about a month since I started a Bing experiment, and it's gone pretty well. Search results are about as good as Google, sometimes better. After a month, though, I've decided to go back to Google. The problem isn't with the search results quality; it's all the other things that Bing doesn't do -- and some things it does that I wish it wouldn't.
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Video: Talking About Firefox 3.5, Apple's Snow Leopard, The Return Of Steve Jobs, & More
I sat down with my colleague Fritz Nelson and we talked about some of the big headlines this week: the release of a new version of Firefox, why the Snow Leopard operating system is more important to Apple than the iPhone 3GS, Steve Jobs's return to work after six-month health-related leave of absence, and Windows 7. Watch after the jump.
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Alpha Version Of Skyfire Released To Limited BlackBerry Testers
Skyfire has made some waves in the mobile browser market on Windows Mobile and S60-based devices. Its key feature is Flash, which lets users of those devices view embedded video content on Web sites such as YouTube and Hulu. Now, Skyfire is working on a better browser for BlackBerries and the alpha testing is underway.
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Universal Internet Access: Not As Simple As It Appears
Internet advocates have been saying for years that America needs policies to ensure "universal access," but that's a more complicated goal than just saying "everybody should have access to the Internet." A former Obama advisor says government needs to determine what levels of access should be universal—how fast is fast enough? And another part of universal access is making sure the Internet doesn't fragment into multiple, mutually incompatible networks.
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317 Percent Growth? In NAC? Huh?
This week Enterasys announced its NAC business had grown 317 percent year over year, which seemed unfathomable given Dark Reading's report (using Infonetics research) that NAC appliances have been hardest hit by this year's economic woes.
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Storage Compute Flexibility Can Maximize Storage Dollars
Storage compute is the amount of processing power that the storage system/array has to be able to handle storage I/O tasks. How powerful your storage processor is directly affects how many drives can be sustained by your system while maintaining full performance and how long it will be before you need to add an additional storage system. The flexibility and efficiency of storage compute engines can maximize the storage dollars you have in your budget.
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AT&T Memo To The Troops: iPhone 3GS Best Seller Ever!
According to a recently leaked internal AT&T memo, June 19, termed "iLaunch day 2009," was AT&T's best sales day ever. That's funny. Wasn't the iPhone 3GS launched on the same day? Oooooooh.....
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The Canonical-Eucalyptus Private Cloud Combo
A few months ago, Canonical and Eucalyptus Systems aligned their product development to create an integrated cloud-software-on-Ubuntu-Linux stack. The startups are now collaborating on service and support, giving IT departments a new option for creating internal cloud computing environments.
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A July 4th Thank You To Our Military, And Especially The Extraordinary Krissoff Family
Two highly educated and accomplished sons join the United States Marines to defend their country. One is killed in Iraq; the other still serves there. The 61-year-old father – an orthopedic surgeon – gets an age waiver to enlist and now serves as a combat surgeon near his son. The mother – strongest of all – supports and prays for them from home. Meet the remarkable Krissoff family, whose story reminds us all of the debt we owe our military families.
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Apple: Yeah, OK, Maybe The iPhone 3GS Is Overheating. But It's Your Fault
Owners of the new iPhone 3GS have been reporting sporadic issues with the device since its release on June 19. One of the problems noted is that the device tends to overheat. Apple recently recognized the issue by publishing a warning on its iPhone support pages, but it claims "operator error" is the real culprit.
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Google Retools Contacts In Google Apps With New APIs
If you're an enterprise user of Google Apps, here's some good news for you. The biggest new feature is a user profile API that gives enterprise admins way more power to manage all the users within their own domain.
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64-Bit Firefox: What's Your Hurry?
After installing 64-bit Windows on one of my test machines, I scurried around to see what 64-bit desktop applications are available in the open source world. Firefox is one of them, but not officially -- at least, not yet. The reasons for this are not what you might think.
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Bing's Fake Twitter Glitter
Leaving aside for the moment the question of whether we really need real-time search, I'd like to dispense with the notion that Bing is now providing real-time search of anything relevant on Twitter.
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Let's Win NYC's Apps Contest!
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has announced a competition for developers to create apps out of 80 data sets from 32 city agencies. He wants to improve government transparency and accountability, and stimulate development of the digital media industry.
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Social Network Gadget Site Launches - GDGT
Normally we talk about phones and services related to them in this blog but today I'm going to mention a new website for gadget lovers called gdgt. The site is a mix of social networking, a wiki, tech forum and review site. What's not to love?
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How U.S. Government Spends $200M Daily On IT
Federal CIO Vivek Kundra has shown outstanding leadership in creating easy-to-use websites that let taxpayers see how their money is being spent (or wasted) by the federal government's vast array of IT projects. But after looking at outlays for $38.6 billion in "major investments, I almost – but not quite – wished Kundra had kept some of these ugly and depressing details out of sight and therefore mercifully out of mind.
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Google Grants Gmail More Label Control
Google has overhauled the way users can interact with their labels. The changes include a new location on the Gmail homepage for labels and as well as the ability to drag and drop emails directly into labels.
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Startup Puts Logs In the Cloud for Search and Storage
Paglo announced a new service that lets IT send and store logs in the cloud. Logs can be searched and analyzed on demand.
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ReviewCam: My Firefox 3.5 Picks & Pans
The latest version of Firefox is a solid upgrade, adding performance improvements, geolocation, better tab-handling, and a new privacy mode to help keep your addiction to Cute Overload a secret. Take a look at this video, where we put Firefox 3.5 through its paces.
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Can Merck CIO Avoid Conflicts Of Interest As Member Of Netezza Board?
Should CIOs join the boards of directors of IT vendors? By joining the board of Netezza, Merck CIO J. Chris Scalet will gain unmatched insight and input into the strategic plans of a key IT partner, and Netezza gets front-line customer expertise and cachet. But many vendor-customer relationships go through rough stretches or even dissolve altogether -- will Scalet be able to equitably fulfill both sets of responsibilities?
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The Cost Of Free, Revisited
At the New Yorker, there's a review of Chris Anderson's new book Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Tipping Point author Malcolm Gladwell. The points made in the article, while not aimed directly at die-hard open source advocates, might well have been. Free, as Gladwell puts it, is just another price.
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Nokia's N97 Gets Massive Firmware Update Promising Bug Fixes
Today Nokia made a new firmware version available for the Nokia N97. The update installs a huge list of fixes, including stabilized widgets, better photo gallery control, and fixed user interface transitions. Long story short, upgrade ASAP if you can!
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Making Sense Of Broadband Stimulus
Vice President Joe Biden is in Pennsylvania today to kick off the Administration's $7.2 billion broadband stimulus program, announcing the release of the federal agency regulations, also known as the Notice of Funds Availability (NOFA), that set eligibility rules.
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Biggest Blunders Of 2009 -- So Far
Before we pack up our laptops, Blackberrys, and various chargers for the holiday weekend, let's take a moment to reflect on what has come to pass over the last six months.
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Wolfe's Den Vlog: SAP BI Goes Social With Clearspace
I've just posted a short video about SAP's deal with Jive Software, which lets you embed dynamic analytics widgets inside your blog posts. I mean "dynamic" not in the sense of multicolor whiz-bang (which usually aren't) charts. I'm talking serious Crystal Reports graphics, so you can showcase Business Intelligence (BI) with multiple data slices before your entire company, right there on the corporate Clearspace wiki.
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Dell Needs To Make An Acquisition -- But Which One?
In a rapidly changing IT market, Dell has stood pat for a while as competitors have jumped into virtualization, the cloud, software, networking, and services. A few financial analysts feel Dell needs to quickly regain the confident aggressiveness that made it a global powerhouse earlier in this decade, and here are some acquisition targets they think will enable Dell to make that leap.
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Barnes & Noble Matches Amazon eBook Prices
A few months ago Barnes & Noble purchased Fictionwise, the owner of eReader.com, which is one of the most popular ebook stores on the internet. Pricing used to be similar to that of a physical book store, that is to say all over the place. Now they are matching Amazon's Kindle pricing of $9.95. In fact, they are slightly beating Amazon when you include the eReader reward program.
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