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Google has removed what for many CIOs and IT professionals has been one of the last remaining hurdles to their adoption of Google Apps for business documents, spreadsheets, presentations and probably most importantly: email. Yesterday, the biggest of the cloud-based challengers to Microsoft and IBM-Lotus announced it now has a range of Blackberry-esque mobile device management features (including the ability to remotely wipe a smartphone) for iPhones as well as Windows Mobile and Nokia-based devices.

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January 2010 won't go quietly, nor will Techweb's Chief Content Officer, David Berlind and I in our second podcast version of The Fritz & David Show where we give some of our final thoughts no the Apple iPad, and summarize the announcements coming from Oracle this week.

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Being one of the lucky few to have scored a press pass into Apple's highly secretive launch event today, I will be live blogging the announcement with text and photos as it happens. So, starting at around 11:30 AM ET, be sure to refresh this blog entry (and refresh often) as I frantically attempt to bring you all there is to know about Apple's tablet (or whatever it is) in real time.

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On the eve of one of Apple's most yet anticipated product launches in history, McGraw-Hill CEO Terry McGraw pre-empted Apple CEO Steve Jobs when he let slip confirmation on CNBC (video below) that Apple is indeed launching a tablet later today (Jan 27, 2010). McGraw revealed that it will run on the iPhone OS as well as details of the company's dealings with Apple. Separately, tech gadget site Engadget.com has what appears to be some very convincing photos of the device which it estimates to be 9 or 10" in size.

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If you're a cloud computing startup, innovator, or just a developer who is tinkering with that pet cloud project in your "garage" and you're looking for some prime time exposure (including free exhibit space at Cloud Connect), then you should be thinking about putting yourself in the running for Launch Pad at Cloud Connect. I, along with fellow InformationWeek editors John Foley and Fritz Nelson, are among the 10 jury members and you only need know how to work Twitter to get started.

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Had the Chinese shot intercontinental ballistic missiles into 33 US-based businesses including those in the finance and defense industries as well as the Mountain View-based headquarters of Google, there would be no question in anyone's mind as to whether war had been declared on the US. Is there any difference now that a Chinese government-backed organization has cyber-attacked 33 US businesses? Let's be honest with ourselves. It was an act of war and it deserves more of a response from the US government than it is getting.

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From separate coasts, InformationWeek editorial director Fritz Nelson and I have been trying to launch the video version of the Fritz & David Show for what seems like forever. But technology has conspired against us. We're close, and we'll keep trying. But in the meantime, we've decided to offer the audio version of the weekly program that gives you a peek at how we talk about latest technology news and buzz amongst ourselves here at InformationWeek.

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Had Novell's director of public relations Ian Bruce not responded to my blog post about Google's choice to change Gmail's default transmission mode from the less secure HTTP (Web) to the more secure and encrypted HTTPS (Secure Web), I would have never seen his own blog post on Novell's Web site entitled On Google, e-mail security, and cloud. But I'm glad I saw it. It's evidence of how some vendors might be too quick to throw fuel on the fire of misinformation in order to draw positive attention to themselves.

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Kudos to the folks at Gmail who, in defaulting to a secure browser setting (as opposed to the previous insecure default) for sending and retrieving email, have decided to help users who may not know enough to help themselves. The new default (see screenshot below) tells the browser to access the Gmail service over HTTPS instead of the prior default, HTTP. This significant shift by Google is a reminder that there's probably more you can do to secure your organization's data and communications.

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From time to time, we in the trade press are asked by public relations firms to relay to them our perceptions of some company. In most cases, I've never even heard of the company which leads me to think that my head must be in sand (either that, or these solicitations are simply sly ways for obscure companies to get noticed). On the heels of announcing that AT&T is going to resell a Dell-branded Android smartphone, I thought about what I'd say if asked about Dell.

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Saying it's "almost as portable as a phone and as powerful as a PC" and that it's ideal for reading, surfing the web and taking entertainment on the go, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer revealed what he called "slate PCs" at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas yesterday. Due later this year, one slate he demonstrated comes from HP and runs Windows 7. Until now, even though "shipping" is a feature (the touch-enabled Win 7 OS is already shipping), Apple has been getting all the credit (even from Wall Street) for a tablet that officially doesn't exist yet. Perhaps things will tilt a bit now that Microsoft is out of the closet.

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Yesterday, on the way home from my interview of Free Software Foundation founder and president Richard Stallman, I listened closely as Slate's Farhad Manjoo told NPR's Neal Conan the facts about Apple's forthcoming tablet PC: that there are no facts. Well, there's one. Apple's brand has gotten so powerful that everyone including the stock market is putting faith in pure vapor as though the tablet mode of Microsoft's Windows 7 doesn't matter. Nary a mention. What gives?

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After carrying-on for many years an on-again, off-again email-only relationship with Free Software Foundation president and founder Richard Stallman (or "Chief GNU-isance" according to the FSF staff), I finally met him today for a face-to-face interview. While the interview was actually for a larger project we're working on here at InformationWeek, we spent a considerable amount of time talking about the issues he wrestles with every day. One of them is GNU and the highly misguided usage of the term Linux to describe what is really GNU/Linux. Stallman, GNU, and the FSF deserve some credit and we (including distributors such as Red Hat and Novell) should all pay it to them.

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Monty Widenius continues his campaign to save MySQL from falling into Oracle's possession with a script that would have been suitable, perhaps, for the Perils of Pauline. The whole problem with "saving" MySQL at this point is that its most outspoken defenders chose to sell it to Sun, a firm on the brink of collapse.

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You can't help getting the impression from Kerrie Holley, IBM's CTO of its SOA Center of Excellence, of how much the idea of services remain the underpinning of what we're trying to do. That's true whether you're talking about restructuring the enterprise data center, implementing a simple Web service, invoking software-as-a-service such as Salesforce.com, or go straight to cloud computing.

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Non-profit organizations count on the giving, holiday spirit for end-of-year fundraising campaigns, but with the tight economy, generosity is being rationed by many people. Children's Hospital Boston is hoping a new text messaging campaign underway will drive smaller donations that will add up all year.

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Yahoo Pipes is a way to mash up RSS feeds and Web pages into combined information, apply rules and filters, and publish it. When it launched Feb. 7, 2007, the Pipes API worked fine in principle. But as "Daniel" said from the audience at a San Francisco panel this week, Pipes wasn't ready to scale.

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What's different about cloud computing versus the forms of computing that have gone before? It's really just a matter of scale, isn't it? The Google or Amazon.com or eBay data centers are maybe a little bigger than a big enterprise data center, right? Wrong. One answer lies in an example like Hadoop.

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Five copies of "Behind the Cloud" have arrived at my desk, two intended for fellow IW staffers and three for me, an embarrassment of riches. It's Marc Benioff's book on how Salesforce.com was created and built into a successful company. I am reading it avidly… but some disclosures will apparently have to wait for the sequel.

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Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, says "the cloud" is a phenomenon that is bigger than the advent of the PC. I think he's almost got it right. Cloud is bigger than the PC Revolution, but it's big in part because it incorporates and extends the PC revolution to Internet server clusters. The cloud owes more to the PC than Eric acknowledges.

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What's the first thing you should do if you're thinking of developing software for cloud computing? At ZendCon, Zend Technologies user group yesterday, three members of a five member panel answered the same way: adopt Simple Cloud API, the open source cloud services interface.

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Whether your company's data center is a couple of servers stashed in a closet or a gleaming, state-of-the-art climate-controlled facility, you're still facing the same set of challenges: how to keep the IT lights on while controlling costs, take advantage of new technologies to stay competitive, and position your company for an economic recovery in the midst of the toughest times for IT that many of us can remember.

On Wednesday, October 21, 2009, help is on the way.

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You've got a cough and a fever--and haven't had your flu shot yet. Could you possibly have H1N1? Microsoft has launched a new website to help you assess whether you've got swine flu.

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There's a bit of news coming out of Amazon today. The company is dropping the price of its existing basic Kindle (the smaller form factor one, not the larger $489 Kindle DX) from $299 to $259 and introducing a third Kindle that's the same as the basic one, but that's $279 and can roam internationally. This is a huge boon to both international travelers and people living in countries where the 3G CDMA 1x-EVDO radio technologies found in the original Kindles (basic and DX) don't work. Given the ambiguity in the...

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Back in the day, the people at Microsoft who were responsible for bringing the world Office for the Mac (the Macintosh Business Unit) fancied themselves as outcasts on the company's sprawling Redmond Campus; Outcasts with something to prove. When a new version was on the way, they'd parade into my office talking smack as though they just left the Windows version of Office lying on the canvas after a knock-out blow. They'd proceed to demonstrate how the Mac's underpinnings enabled functionality that the Windows Office guys could only dream of. So, why, after the Mac has come so far, does MS-Entourage suck so bad.

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IBM is wading into online email service, a space where Google, Yahoo and Microsoft already have big presences. Is IBM staging a kamikaze run, giving itself one more place where Lotus Notes will show it's got difficulty competing? Is there a method to this madness? Why does IBM have its head in the clouds?

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Eolas Technologies has announced a new patent infringement suit, the defendants of which reads like a Who's Who list of big tech and consumer brands. Eolas is the company that filed a patent infringement suit and ultimately prevailed over Microsoft for the latter's inclusion of plug-in capability into Internet Explorer. In today's lawsuit, Eolas says that Adobe, Amazon, Apple, Google, Sun, eBay and many others (complete list below) are infringing on a patent awarded just this month (that didn't take long!).

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If you suspect your extra-cranky baby has an ear infection on a Saturday afternoon, but his doctor isn't back in the office till Monday, a walk-in clinic--like the kind springing up in places such as retail pharmacy chains--can be a convenient place to get the ear checked. But if it's the middle of the night, what do you do?

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AccelOps' latest software release adds new features for network and data center service management, both for premises and SaaS deployments.

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Open enrollment season starts soon and unfortunately for many organizations, that'll mean informing employees that they've got higher healthcare co-pays and deductibles starting in January. But for some employers, this year's open enrollment season brings some innovative twists to their benefits offerings, thanks to the web.

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Qwaq rebrands itself as Teleplace as it continues to preach the gospel of virtual worlds for business collaboration.

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What's notable about the open source project announced yesterday, Simple API for cloud computing, are the names that are present, IBM, Microsoft and Rackspace, and the names that are not: Amazon, for one, is not a backer, and let's just stop right there.

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One could say that when it comes to IT and healthcare, President Obama is taking some of his own medicine. Obama isn't only pushing healthcare providers to adopt IT; Obama is skillfully using technology to promote his healthcare reform plans.

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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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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.

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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).

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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)

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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.

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"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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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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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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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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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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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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Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, finally got a little revenge. He wasn't in the least spiteful. Rather, he was only guilty of repeating something his former boss, Larry Ellison, said about software-as-a-service and cloud computing. An audience of cloud cognoscenti at Structure 09 loved the performance.

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Firefox 3.5 went to public release-candidate status earlier this week. But while the whole 3.5 branch was still under wraps, I was sticking my neck out and running the bleeding-edge nightly builds of the browser -- and was surprised at how un-beta it was.

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As one of the head counselors of Energy Camp (Tom Raftery of Greenmonk fame is the other; blog, Twitter), I pay pretty close attention to anything colored green; green organizations, green initiatives, green events, green vendor programs, green news, etc. It was only after the last Energy Camp at Interop in Las Vegas that it dawned on me why the overall green movement gets only pockets of traction, and what we should do about it. Hopefully, someone in Obama's administration is listening.

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Love it or hate it, YouTube has become the de facto video presentation portal for, well, everyone. Now comes some worried discussion about what format YouTube may support when HTML 5 and its <video> tag make their debut.

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Jan Carlzon, former CEO of Scandanavian Airlines (SAS) and author of the bible on customer satisfaction (Moments of Truth) would be rolling his eyes right about now if he could have heard the telephone conversation I just had with a US Air. I've just learned that despite holding a US Air-issued Dividend Miles card (pictured below) in my hand (the one to which I've been applying my last 15+ years of US Air travel), I am a figment in US Air's imagination. Neither I nor any miles I've traveled with the air carrier exist.

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Mozilla's Prism entered public beta testing on Friday, a milestone marking the software's readiness for general use and the convergence of local computing with the cloud.

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