The InformationWeek September 2009 Archive
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Vivek Kundra: All Customers, All The Time

CIOs are an interesting lot, cast as both business and technology leaders. Get them talking about agile development, and the inner geek appears. Talk about net present value, and they grab their lapels and straighten their pocket squares. But today's CIO talks increasingly about the customer, and if our nation's CIO, Vivek Kundra is paid every time does, he might be able to help bail out both the banks and the car companies.

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Google Tries To Take The Typing Out Of Mobile Search

Performing searches on mobile phones -- especially those without readily accessible QWERTY keyboards -- can be a pain in the, er, thumb. Google recently made some changes to how local search works on mobile phones, and it requires fewer keystrokes.

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BlackBerry For Mac Out Friday

Research in Motion announced that native desktop software for managing the company's BlackBerry smartphones will be available as of this Friday, October 2, at 1 PM EDT. The software will bring Mac-based mobile workers the functionality that up til now they've needed to use a third-party app for.

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iPhone Ad Market Share Surges To 40 Percent

According to mobile advertising company AdMob, the iPhone's world-wide smartphone market share has reached 40% in just over two years. Meanwhile, competitors Nokia and RIM lost ground.

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Google Wave Ridden By Cybercriminals

Google Wave is being made available on Wednesday to 100,000 or so developers, early adopters, and Google Apps customers. Unfortunately, cybercriminals are making the most of the launch: They've rolled out a blackhat SEO poisoning campaign to turn interest in Wave into a computer infection.

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Tenacity Matters In E-Medical Record Projects

E-medical record projects aren't for the faint of heart. The conviction of a strong leadership team and a solid vision of the project's goals are keys to successful deployments. Just ask the folks involved with the EMR rollout at Fletcher Allen Health Care in Vermont.

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Cyber-Crime No Longer Smash and Grab

Typically, banking customers discovered they'd been victimized by cyber-crime when they discovered their bank accounts emptied. No more. According to this report, online thieves are getting craftier at covering their tracks to go undetected for longer stretches of time.

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MotionX Offers $3 GPS App For iPhone

The iPhone this week got a new entry in the fast-moving category of GPS software: MotionX-GPS Drive is by far the least expensive of the half-dozen alternatives, with a "holy cow!" low price of $2.99, with an annual subscription of $25. It's a heck of a lot cheaper than any of the alternatives.

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Zipcar App Is Brilliant Branding

The Zipcar iPhone app announced about a week ago is a great example of how to merge technology and marketing in order to deliver branding. More business would do well to follow the lead.

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Disaster Recovery: SMBs Think They're Ready. Symantec Says They're Not.

A new Symantec study of small and midsized business disaster recovery preparedness reveals a dramatic disconnect between DR beliefs and DR realities. Namely, most businesses are convinced they're prepared to recover from a disaster. Wrong.

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Join Our Windows 7 Wednesday Virtual Event: Path To Enterprise Adoption

In getting ready for Wednesday's 10 am eastern Windows 7 Virtual Event, hosted by the InformationWeek Business Technology Network (i.e., us, and you can register here), I've been trying to get a feel for just how rapidly enterprises will adopt the new operating system.

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BlackBerry Round-Up: TiVo And Mac Support Arrive

Today two interesting bits of information concerning BlackBerries became public. First up, TiVo has launched a new, free DVR-scheduling app for BlackBerries, and second, RIM has said BlackBerry Desktop Manager for Macs will be available Friday, October 2.

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Give Away The Platform, Sell The Tools

Here is a radical suggestion to fund the development of newly-emergent open source OS platforms: Keep the platform and as much of the other software on it free. Sell the development tools.

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Making Server Virtualization Storage More Scalable

Storage scalability in a virtualized environment is quickly becoming a concern for some data centers. Unlike the very predictable single server world which had a single application, single NIC card and single host bus adapter, the virtualized host can have dozens of virtual machines and multiple network interface cards. This leads to a very unpredictable and random workload that can push storage controllers to their limits.

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Sustainable & Green: The Color of Money

Having worked with an organization that got good press for saving money through an automated PC shutdown program, I've fielded a lot of questions from IT managers looking to make sustainability and green moves. I can consolidate my advice on the topic into two short points: First, remember that green is the color of money. Second, overseed.

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Solarwinds Tweaks IP WAN Voice Monitoring Tool

Increasingly, businesses are moving their voice traffic from the old telephone network to IP networks. However, this application is especially vulnerable to performance variations often found in IP networks. Solarwinds, which has been gaining acceptance by offering companies inexpensive, easy to deploy network performance tools, revamped its IP WAN tool to help companies meet this challenge.

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The Perils Of Relying On The Cloud

I rely more on the cloud as each day passes. GMail is my preferred email interface. Evernote houses most of my notes and web clippings. MyPhone keeps critical data backed up on my Windows Mobile phone. The cloud is awesome when it works, but when it is down, you may be temporarily cut off from your data. In the case of some Palm Pre users, when the cloud went down, it wiped their Pre's memory causing data loss.

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NYC Schools Overpaying For Proprietary Software

The PTA at my daughter's school spends $3,000 per year for an online learning management system. That's $3,000 every year that they shouldn't have to spend.

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The Verizon Hub Bites The Dust

Hi, my name is Eric, and I bought the Verizon Hub. I wanted to keep up with the Joneses and thought it would be really cool to have an Internet tablet in my kitchen. Turns out, I was wrong.

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Microsoft's Must-Have Software Release

While all the focus has been on Windows 7 lately, there's another piece of Microsoft software coming out this week that could make an even bigger difference to the Windows world: Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE). Athough I think MSE will be a great solution for most people, not everyone will be happy about this software.

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A New Generation Of Internet Lawmakers

I'm still stuck in the 90s when I think about elected officials using the Internet. Back in the 90s, elected officials had never even touched the Internet. They thought it was a sewer of child porn and terrorists, and their only reaction to it was to try to control it--or make it go away. Until recently, I thought of lawmakers as still being as naive as they were back then. But a brief conversation with Rep. John Culberson shattered my preconceptions.

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It's about the Tools Adoption Results

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Quick FAQ: Making Sense Out Of Moblin

Are you wondering what Moblin is and why you're hearing so much about it lately? Step right up, and we'll try to answer your questions.

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FileMaker Beefs Up Bento

Version 3 of Bento, the "personal database" from FileMaker, adds features that make it a good choice for Mac-based small offices and midsize businesses with modest database needs. Its close integration with existing Mac tools means that getting up and running is relatively easy.

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Motorola Cliq Will Cost $200

T-Mobile and Motorola said Tuesday the Android-powered smartphone would be available Nov. 2 for about $200 with a new two-year contract. I played with the Cliq when it was introduced earlier this month and liked it, but I think the companies may have shot themselves in the foot with the pricing.

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IBM Preparing Self-Service Software Infrastructure

IBM has been investing in cloud computing for several years, although Willy Chiu, VP of IBM Cloud Labs, acknowledges it may be difficult for those outside IBM to develop a picture of what its cloud initiative will finally look like.

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SaaS Vendor Workday Plans To Grow Big, Remain Independent

Workday, an important SaaS company to watch, has hired the former CEO of PolyServe, later acquired by Hewlett-Packard, as its new president. Yet this isn't a case of a startup hiring an experienced exec to shop it around. As Workday's Aneel Bhusri recently told me, "Dave Duffield and I largely control the company, and we did not start Workday to sell it."

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Do Phones Really Need A Mobile High-Def Connector Port?

Some of the world's largest phone companies -- including the likes of Nokia, Samsung and Sony Ericsson -- have banded together and formed the Mobile High-Definition Interface Working Group. The group's plan is to create a new, standardized port for mobile phones that can feed high-definition video and audio signals to HDTVs. Is this really necessary?

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More SaaS IT Service Management Options

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

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Security By Geography: Stop A Country With A Click

I'm hoping that it's more than a mere reinforcement of America's most unfortunate xenophobic tendencies, but TechGuard Security's new PoliWall ESE security appliances take a geographic approach to SMB security by filtering IP according to their country of origin.

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Wireless Technologies Help With Alzheimer's Care

As the Alzheimer's spreads, healthcare companies are developing wireless technologies to help caregivers look after their charges. The technologies monitor people with Alzheimer's to make sure they're not in trouble, with a particular focus on making sure that patients don't wander off.

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What IT Needs To Know About E-Discovery: Webcast

Join me tomorrow at noon Eastern for a Webcast on IT best practices for e-discovery. We'll cover policies, products and get real-world insight from e-discovery professionals.

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Diagnosing IT Problems In Healthcare

The ability to quickly trouble-shoot network and other IT infrastructure problems escalates as a top priority as healthcare providers replace paper patient records with electronic ones. It's bad enough when billing systems are down, but a hitch with a server running clinical systems could translate to delays in care if doctors can't access patients' medical records.

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Q&A With A Post-Microsoft Sam Ramji

Back when Sam Ramji announced he was leaving his position at Microsoft as director of their open source operations, I shot a couple of questions his way. He was on vacation at the time, but now he's back and has a lot to talk about -- about Microsoft, about open source, and about the two in combination.

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CNN's iPhone App Lets Everyone Be A Reporter

Today CNN took its commitment to mobile news a bit further by releasing a dedicated application for the iPhone and iPod Touch. For the news junkie, consider this new app to be your constantly available source for a fix. There's increased opportunities for the budding iReporter, too.

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Defending Our Ethos On Facebook

Yesterday I posted my outrage about a poll that appeared on Facebook asking if President Obama should be killed. Yesterday, I wondered how we should balance our needs for civility against the equally pressing need for everyone to have access to this kind of vehicle for expression and connection.

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HP Revamps Entry Level Ethernet Switch

HP has made inroads in the small and medium business sector by delivering low cost, easy to maintain Ethernet switches. The company revamped one of its entry level lines, so it is more secure, simpler to deploy, and more energy efficient. The products may appeal to companies who need high speed connections but are not yet ready to embrace 10G Ethernet networking.

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Dvorak Users Dislike Qwerty Keyboard Dominance In Phones

Fans of the Dvorak keyboard layout sing praises of how much faster you can type than you can with a traditional Qwerty keyboard, so named because of the order of the first six letters on the upper row. With a PC, it is pretty simple - you just need to plug in a Dvorak keyboard and you are ready to go. With a phone though, you really don't have that option, at least with a physical keyboard.

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Announcing 8 Launch Pad Quarter-Finalists

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Slideshow on Enterprise 2.0 Initiatives at Adidas

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A Wireless Edge? This Time For Real (Video)

The 802.11n task group formed in January 2004. Two weeks ago, it ratified the wireless standard. Two years ago, we started seeing implementations. The world works this way. If it was just a faster WiFi that would be unfathomable, but many predict this could be the true replacement of the wired edge network.

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webOS 1.2 Officially Being Pushed To Palm Pre Starting Today

News of webOS 1.2's impending arrival has been floating about the Interwebs for weeks now. Today, it's official. Palm announced that webOS 1.2 is available for the Palm Pre. There are improvements a-plenty. Check to see the changelog after the jump.

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Free Visual Voicemail For BlackBerries Available Via HulloMail

HulloMail first launched in the U.S. in July on the Android platform. Now, Hullomail is going after hardcore enterprise customers with a BlackBerry-compatible version of its free visual voicemail service. With Android and BlackBerry conquered, its next target is the iPhone.

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Getting A Grip On Health And Wellness Via The Web

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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Unified Communications: Guts & Bolts (video)

A common theme heard these days among enterprise architects is the increasing need to bring together network designers, application architects and information security teams for any sizable project, and that includes unified communications, especially because those communications often involve customers, not to mention many more parts and pieces.

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Mac Security A Myth? Really?

As the launch date for Windows 7 approaches, more and more articles about flaws in Mac security are hitting the Web. Should Mac-based businesses be worried?

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Facebook Promotes Tolerance/Intolerance

My initial reaction when I saw that Facebook hosted a poll asking whether or not President Obama should be killed was blind fury. Why haven't they stopped this? Where are the voices of outrage from national political leaders who stir up a hue and cry whenever someone allows a kitten to fall from a tree?

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AT&T 'Pleased' With MMS Roll-Out. Customers? Not So Much

Several weeks ago AT&T posted a video explaining that it wanted to be able to offer its iPhone customers the best possible experience once MMS (multi-media messaging service) was activated for the iPhone. According to the user complaints plastered all over AT&T's Facebook page, MMS was barely functional over its first weekend of availability. Is non-working service part of "the best possible experience"?

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Reducing The Storage Costs In Server Virtualization

One of the most expensive components of a server virtualization project is the storage which it is attached to. This is one of the reasons that VMworld seems more like a storage event than a server virtualization event. One of the key themes from vendors at this years event was reducing the storage costs in server virtualization projects.

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IBM Make Linux For Benefit Glorious Nation Of Kazakhstan

Jagshemash! Today I have news that IBM opened Linux development center in Borat's homeland of Kazakhstan. It hopes to make country open source capital for all of Central Asia-including the ***holes in Uzbekistan.

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Hacking Gets Physical

The guilty plea entered into federal court last week, by a contract IT worker, for disrupting a computer system used to monitor off-shore oil platforms shows that illegal hacking is likely to increasingly danger the physical world.

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Web Security In The Cloud

Are tight budgets crimping your ability to provide adequate web security to your organization? Can you afford $30/month per user instead? Don't lament if you can't afford a shiny new Bluecoat ProxyAV, you may be able to get the same level of service in a subscription based model.

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Making Linux Binaries Simple: Automate 'Em

If Linux doesn't change its attitude about prepackaged binary (read: closed source) software anytime soon, here's a suggestion: a generic software deployment system for Linux binaries.

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Apple: 2 Billion Apps Served And Counting

Another milestone for Apple and its iPhone Apps Store: Two billion applications have been downloaded from the Apps store by iPhone and iPod Touch users. Oh, and Apple was sure to make us aware that there are now 85,000 applications available.

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Can Windows 7 Go Viral?

It seems highly likely that most of your organizations will move to Windows 7 in the coming years, unlike your violent indifference to Vista. Along the way, there's a test of Win 7 to watch for: Will it go viral among employees?

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Palm Pre Free In The UK With Contract

The Palm Pre will hit the European market on October 16 and when it arrives in England, it will be free with a two year contract. This compares to $249.99 in the US, or $149.99 after a $100 mail in rebate. What gives? Why is the entry fee in the UK lower than in the US, or perhaps more importantly, why doesn't the Pre command a bit more respect in the UK?

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SMB Security Provider Sees $1 Billion Markets Becoming $100 Million Markets

Walter Scott, CEO of Malta-based GFI Software, says that a combination of decreasing bandwidth costs and increasingly cost-conscious small and midsize companies are changing the security landscape.

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Microsoft's Courier: It Could Happen

There was a lot of buzz last week about a new folding-tablet-style PC that Microsoft is supposedly developing. All of the reports seem to stem from a single Gizmodo rumor that includes a video demonstrating the interface. Whatever "Courier" is, there must be something to it because nobody makes a slick video like that for no reason.

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7 Ways To Save Money On Business Purchases

I'd like to share seven of my simple business travel and expense tips for startups that I've picked up over the years. It's critical in the current economic climate that we maximize every dollar spent on goods and services.

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Last Chance - E2 SF Early Registration Closes at Midnight PST

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Develop Once, Then Deploy To Your Cloud Of Choice

IBM's CTO of Cloud Computing, Kristof Kloeckner, says IBM has demonstrated software engineering as a cloud process. At the end of the process, a developer deploys his application to the cloud of choice. As of today, that cloud better be running VMware virtual machines. In the future, the choice may be broader.

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Unified Communications Still Cloudy

I don't know what term was in vogue when, I just know my generation has never stopped hearing about the concepts behind unified communications. Unified messaging. Convergence. VoIP. IP Conferencing. IP Video. Much of it is a reality today, but one thing it's not (yet) is unified. Our video whiteboard tutorial series attempts to get under the surface.

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Motorola Taps Nero For Android Syncing

The Motorola Cliq is going to be a highly-sought device when it's released later this year, but we haven't heard about how users will manage and sync their multimedia files. Motorola said Friday it has tapped Nero to craft its desktop media software, and, from what I've seen, it looks pretty good.

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Virtual Collaboration Tool Gets New Name, New Customers

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

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IT Lessons From Foiled Qaeda Terror Plot

Qaeda-linked terror suspect Najibullah Zazi left a digital trail a mile wide for federal investigators to follow, but stopping seems to have required too much luck and footwork.

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Online Bank Fraud: 5 Riskpoints Your Business Needs To Worry About

How much do you know about the security habits, practices, technologies policies of your business's online bank and other financial services and institutions? Odds are, if Terry Austin of Guardian Analytics is right, it's nowhere near enough.

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How To: Fix High-Capacity Hard Disk Formatting Problems

Thinking about a storage upgrade using one of the latest monster-sized hard disks? I have a tip to share that might save you a lot of trouble.

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iPhones Can Now Send MMS Messages

It's official: The iPhone can (finally, at long last, thankfully) perform a task that many other phones have been able to do since 2002. It can now send and receive multi-media messages. Here's a quick look at how it works.

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GPL Vs. Free Software Foundation

After my post about the GPL's day in court in France, a programmer friend noted he no longer used the GPL for anything, now that its instigator, the Free Software Foundation, has (in his view) gone off a cliff. Do other people see the GPL as tainted because of the FSF's rather stentorian views?

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Is Palm In Trouble If Verizon Passes On Pre?

Late yesterday, a rumor suggested that Verizon Wireless had decided not to sell the Palm Pre smartphone. Neither Palm nor Verizon has commented on the story officially. If it's true, though, what future awaits Palm?

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Google Looking To Acquire One Company Per Month

Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that with the worst of the recession behind us, his company will resume making acquisitions and hopes to complete one deal per month. While Schmidt didn't rule out large acquisitions, he did note, in an equivocation worthy of the Oracle at Delphi (as opposed to the equally acquisitive one at Redwood Shores), that such larger deals are "unpredictable."

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Ballmer: We Screwed Up With Windows Mobile

Windows Mobile 7 has been rumored for at least two and a half years and back then, everyone thought it would be ready to go by late 2008 or early 2009. Now it is looking more like mid-late 2010 and no one is happy about that, including Steve Ballmer, the Microsoft CEO.

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Perot Systems Is Not A Cool Computer

Steve Jobs and Michael Dell both abdicated from the big companies they'd founded, watched the businesses stumble, and then returned to their old jobs. It's at that point that the similarities between the two stories ends.

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Google's Dataliberation.org a Public Policy Blow for Freedom

I'll admit it, I was raised paranoid. So, part of me is highly suspicious of Google when the IT world seems like a bunch of crazed lemmings leaping to ADOPT GOOGLE'S SEXSAH NEW OFFERINGS RIGHT NOW. But Google, despite the fact that it is a Massive Empire, may well be the real deal when it comes to understanding what smart CIOs need. And frankly, they may be contributing to reversing a terrible public policy trend.

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Technology To Make Lithium-Ion Batteries Safer

We've all heard of laptop or phone batteries catching fire, or have even seen video of a battery igniting. Dell, Sony, Samsung and others have all issued battery recalls in recent years to take batteries out of circulation that were more prone to catching fire. It is not something you want going on in your pocket where you have your cell phone or on the tray next to you in an airplane. A Taiwanese researcher claims to have a new material that will reduce or eliminate the possibility of these scenarios.

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Launch Pad Round 1 Closes Tomorrow

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Survey Says: PCI DSS Compliance Not Strategic

That's right. A survey conducted by the Ponemon Institute, and backed by security firm Imperva, says that the vast majority of firms don't view the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) as a strategic initiative.

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How Much Should Smartphones Cost?

While writing about the Sprint Instinct HD today, I was kind of shocked that they were going to charge $250 for it after rebates and a new two-year contract. In the world of a $199 iPhone, and a $149 Palm Pre, I just don't see why anyone would want the less-capable Instinct HD. It points to an interesting pricing trend that is going to be a larger issue in the smartphone world over the next few years.

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DEMOfall: Crowdsourcing Brings New Life To Mapmaking

Two of the vendors who flaunted their wares at DEMOfall 09 are looking to use crowdsourcing to extend Internet mapping. Micello is looking to create maps for people getting around by foot, in shopping malls, university or office campuses, and city downtowns. Meanwhile, Waze offers a free turn-by-turn directions app built by outsourcing.

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Simple API Is Part Of A Rising And Open Tide To The Cloud

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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Mobile Round-Up: Android Edition

Here's a handful of some smaller Android-related tidbits that broke today. T-Mobile has lowered the price of the new myTouch 3G by a whopping 25%, the Motorola CLIQ is going to ship with a hefty number of pre-installed applications, and Google tweaked Gmail for both Android and the iPhone

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Secrecy Is A Stupid Way To Sell Software Security

It makes my day when someone out to "expose" the flaws in open-source software ends up doing exactly the opposite.

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Spammers To Idaho: You're The Tops!

Spam targeting is one of those categories you don't want to be Number One in, but somebody has to be. According to a new report from MessageLabs, the top spam targets in the U.S. live in Idaho. But the rest of the states aren't that much better off.

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Document Imaging, 90 Percent Off

Document Imaging Solutions, Inc., is making 50 copies of its DIS-Imaging Enterprise Edition, which normally sells for $26,000, available for $2,400 -- a discount of more than 90 percent. The offer is limited in time and number of sales, though.

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The Rise Of The Digital Superego

Gordon Bell, often described as "the Frank Lloyd Wright of the Internet," firmly believes we'll all be paperless and recording our lives digitally within a decade.

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A GPL Court Victory In France

Another test of whether open source licensing is enforceable in court has come. A French firm was taken to court for redistributing GPL-ed software minus its licensing and copyright information -- a big no-no.

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Samsung Brings High Definition Video Capture To Sprint

Those hankering for a hunk of high-tech, high-def video equipment need not look any further than the new Instinct HD from Samsung. This new phone packs a 5 megapixel camera, and can capture HD video. It can be yours for just $250.

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Bill Gates Calls Out China On Software Piracy In Business

In a Q&A session at Carnegie Mellon University this week, Bill Gates said two of the five most-profitable businesses in China don't pay for the software they use. And he said those are only two examples of a massive trend in that country.

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Implementing Power Efficient Drives

Most green storage methods really allow you to store more data in the same physical space, for the same amount of power consumption. To get serious about power efficiency you have to be able to turn things off. The ideal way to do this is have the drives either spin down or turn them off, but there is limited information about implementing power efficient drives.

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Google Adds 'My Location' To Windows Mobile App

Today Google unveiled a new version of its Google Mobile application for the Windows Mobile platform. It has added several new features, including My Location, which returns locally relevant results to end users.

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Motion Activated Headphones For Your Listening Pleasure

Sony Ericsson is working on a new headphone that is motion controlled rather than requiring you to fumble around for buttons. When you put both earbuds in, the music plays. Take out one earbud to pause the music or both to stop it. To answer a call, you have to remove both and then put one back in. Ok, this is getting complex, or at a minimum, it isn't very intuitive for some operations.

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Protecting Laptop Data: New bMighty How-To Guide

The data on your company's laptops may be your firm's most vulnerable asset. But the latest addition to bMighty's IT Management How-To Center can show you how managed laptop data-encryption and backup services can safeguard that data even if the laptop itself goes missing.

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Seeing Pink? More Like Seeing Red. Microsoft's Pink Phones Pose For Photos

Someone leaked some photos of what are supposed to be Microsoft's first foray into smartphone hardware. The "Turtle" and "Pure" will be made by Sharp and will run Windows Mobile software. If you're seeking inspirational design, however, look elsewhere. These two phones are, well, take a look.

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You Got Chrome In My Internet Explorer

Hmmm, this is interesting. Google's had spotty luck trying to push its Chrome browser to users, but now it's come out with Google Chrome Frame to embed Chrome's functionality inside Internet Explorer. What a sweet Peanut Butter Cup of an idea.

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Project Management In The Cloud (ReviewCam)

Project Management, which is, by its nature, a collaborative activity, is perfect for the cloud. To be sure, there are plenty of offerings now. We took a more in depth, hands-on look at TrackerSuite, a pure-play, hardcore project management suite from Automation Center.

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Does Network Neutrality Stifle Innovation Or Boost It?

The sky is falling, to hear the incumbent carriers and their industry association shills, because the FCC under new chairman Julius Genachowski is going to enforce network neutrality provisions.

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Oracle CEO Ellison Vows To Whip IBM In Hardware

In a rare public interview, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison pledged to give IBM the same sort of beatdown in the hardware business that Oracle's given IBM in the software business. Short-term, though, he said Sun-his not-so-secret anti-IBM weapon-is losing $100 million a month.

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Oracle Mulls Shift To Subscription-Based Pricing

Oracle, it seems, is trying to hammer out a strategy to more heavily embrace the most radical faction of the SaaS movement, one that completely upends the traditional software vendor profit model: Subscription-based pricing. If what Oracle said Tuesday in a Web event is true, this could be a huge shift for the software giant.

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Here A Beta, There A Beta

Over the last week I've been either tracking or actively beta-testing several open source projects which are worth a quick rundown here. Read on for more.

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Wipro Expands In UK, Names Ex-CEO Of SAP To Board

Wipro Technologies has opened a new UK headquarters in London and expanded its suburban Reading facility to add centers of excellence and support customer projects. With 26% of its revenue coming from Europe, Wipro needed to enhance its regional capabilities and decided to focus on the UK since it is home to several major Wipro customers.

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Microsoft: Expect 30 WinMo 6.5 Phones By End Of 2009

Microsoft has high hopes for its forthcoming Windows Mobile 6.5 platform. According to remarks made by a Microsoft executive, so are handset makers and network operators, as more than 30 devices running Windows Mobile 6.5 are primed to hit the market by the end of 2009.

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Enterprise 2.0 is a Crock, But Only Kind-Of

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Credit Card Compliance Still Poorly Practiced

A new survey from Imperva and the Ponemon Institute finds that despite the rising number of data breaches, many companies still do not fully adhere to compliance standards. And many of those that are protecting credit card information are neglecting security when it comes to other, equally sensitive data. Smaller businesses may be having the most trouble with the standards.

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Now You Can Melt The 14th Dimension

SGI is retailing what looks like the first "personal supercomputer," and the $7,000 or so price tag isn't too much to pay for the power to warp space-time from the comfort of your desk, it is?

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Palm Smacked Down By USB-IF Over iTunes Spat

An industry organization, the USB Implementers Forum, has flipped the tables on Palm after the company sought relief from the on-again/off-again ability to sync the Palm Pre with iTunes. Rather than agree with Palm's point of view, the USB-IF has scolded it, saying Apple has a right to protect its software.

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AT&T Bundling Wireless And Wired Services

Just about every cable TV provider in the US offers bundles that include cable TV, phone service and high speed internet service. Now the phone companies are getting in on the act. AT&T is offering a new service called Talk, Text & Surf that combines DSL internet and both wired and wireless phone service.

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Security Software Market Remains Strong

While the growth of the security software market took a hit this year, along with most every other market segment, it's still pegged to grow 8 percent, year over year, according to a market research firm. There's also stronger growth ahead.

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The Search For A Perfect Corporate Password Policy

What qualifies as a safe and sane password policy for your business? A recent blog post serves up some interesting answers to this question.

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Why Microsoft Should Make Windows 7 A Free Upgrade

It's time to set Windows 7 free -- at least for Vista users. Anyone who is using Vista should be able to upgrade to the corresponding version of Windows 7. For nothing. No questions asked.

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Oracle Accelerate Adds MidMarket BI, CRM On Demand, And More

Oracle Accelerate, the company's 3-year-old effort to address midsize companies, has extended its tool set to include Demantra for advanced demand planning, Agile for product lifecycle management, Siebel CRM, and Transportation Management. And the apps will now be available via SaaS as well.

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Google Chrome Infests Internet Explorer

Imagine for a moment what would happen if Adidas or Reebok began giving away free shoe liners for the ostensible purpose of making Nike shoes comfortable enough to wear. It would be something of a slap in the face to Nike.

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Google's Picasa 3.5 Gains Face Recognition Features

Google recently made a new version of Picasa available for desktop computers. Picasa 3.5 adds a nifty new feature in that it can group together collections of pictures based on the faces in them.

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Google Pushes Further into the Enterprise

E-mail has become the lifeblood for many companies. Increasingly, employees are traveling outside of the corporate office and need ways to stay in contact with it. In response, Google broadened the reach of its Google Apps, so they can now exchange information with Apple iPhones and Windows Mobile cell phones.

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Microsoft DRM Patent Could Revive Peer-to-Peer Music Nets

Here's an odd twist that might give new life to the dying horse of music digital-right management. Microsoft has just been awarded a U.S. patent for a distributed DRM system -- it works over peer-to-peer networks -- which uses encrypted public and private keys as the licensing mechanism. This is significant because, while centralized music stores like Apple's iTunes have forsaken DRM, the Microsoft patent would enable peer-to-peer networks to reemerge as viable, albeit protected, content sources.

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AT&T Prepping iPhone Users For MMS Launch

AT&T has begun sending text messages to iPhone subscribers reminding them that multimedia message services will be turned on starting Friday, September 25. As if they had forgotten.

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Federal Government Wrestles With Crowdsourcing Problems

The problem with letting everybody contribute ideas to an open forum is that everybody does. White House-led open government initiatives are learning that lesson, as forums set up to let American citizens contribute suggestions for government actions are being hijacked by potheads, conspiracy theorists, and anti-Scientologists.

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White House: We're Not Stalking You On Facebook

Advertisers may be stalking you on Facebook and trying to learn your predilections, sexual, socio-political, and otherwise, but Big Brother isn't on the case quite yet.

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Google Pushes Push Gmail To iPhone And Windows Mobile

I got one word for you: Hallelujah! Today, Google finally upgraded Google Sync to include push Gmail services on the iPhone and Windows Mobile devices. Why the cries of joy? This means Gmail will be delivered instantly rather than pulled at 15, 30, or 60-minute intervals.

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Linux And The 'B' Word: Bloat

If Linus Torvalds himself is saying that the Linux kernel is bloated, something's wrong. Or is it just a matter of expectations and perspective?

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Retail CIOs Raise Funds, Ideas To Help 400M At-Risk Children

While there are lots of conferences featuring CIOs exchanging innovative ideas and strategic insights, a January event featuring 10 top retailer CIOs will be raising money and awareness for 400 million at-risk children around the world as part of a truly strategic ROI effort: the Retail Orphan Initiative.

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Microsoft Pink Rumors Just Will Not Die

Once again there are rumors swirling around on Microsoft's supposed Project Pink, which is Microsoft's own entry into the phone world. No, not just the operating system, but the hardware as well. Could the software giant be ready to release their own phone, potentially upsetting their OEM partners like HTC?

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Welcoming Tammy Erickson as Keynote for Enterprise 2.0 | San Francisco

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Think Your Anti-Virus Is Working? Think Again

Most enterprises and Web users probably think that if they simply keep their anti-virus systems up to date, that they're in good shape. A pair of reports published by NSS Labs today dispels any such notion.

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The Power To Cloud Men's Minds

Will Apple take on building a business mobility support system in the cloud? Here's why they won't, and why they shouldn't.

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Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and Google Wave Featured in Enterprise 2.0 Keynote Line-Up

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SaaS Holds Big Appeal For Midsize CIOs

"Two years back, I thought [SaaS] was the stupidest thing. But we've finally started seeing some applications that make sense," says Peter Larsen, manager of information technology at National Frozen Foods in Seattle.

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Iranian Phone Spoofing, Fake Twitter Accounts And Trust

An Iranian living in the U.S. called a friend of mine who lives here in New York and said, "I see on my caller ID that you tried to call me. What's it about?" As you've no doubt guessed from the title of this post, my friend had done no such thing. A few weeks later, the same thing happened with another Iranian living in the U.S.

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New Avaya Unified Communications System For SMBs Focuses On Role-Based Solutions

Avaya IP Office Release 5 offers small and midsize businesses 6 different versions of UC for different kinds of workers, from telecommuters to customer service agents.

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FCC Chairman Endorses Net Neutrality Concepts

The battle between Internet Service Providers and consumer advocacy groups reached an important milestone. New FCC chairman Julius Genachowski threw his weight behind initiatives designed to prevent ISPs from blocking or penalizing bandwidth intensive traffic, such as video files, and ordered them to manage their networks in a more transparent manner.

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Social Business: Why The 'Enterprise 2.0' Moniker Is Wrong

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Prediction: Motorola To Bow 10 Android Handsets In 10 Months

Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowdhry recently published a note to investors wherein he suggests that Motorola will be launching up to 10 new mobile phones -- all running Google's Android system -- during the next six to 10 months. Balderdash or 'bout right?

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Dell's Acquisition Of Perot Helps Healthcare Push

Dell's $3.9 billion acquisition of Perot Systems will help fortify Dell's pursuit of new customers in the healthcare industry, a sector that's been getting a lot of attention from Dell--and its competitors--in recent months.

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Apple Tackling iPhone OS 3.1 Battery Issues

Apple offered iPhone OS 3.1 to users several weeks ago. Since updating to the new software, many users are reporting poor battery performance. Apple has acknowledged, via its support forums, that it is investigating the matter.

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Dell Buys Perot: Told You So!

Three months ago, Global CIO asked, "Dell Needs To Make An Acquisition-But Which One?" We listed 15 prospects from financial analysts, and from those we picked Perot Systems as the best fit for Dell. This morning Dell bid $3.9 billion for Perot, and we hope all you sharpies who followed our advice will enjoy the 68% premium Dell's paying for your Perot shares.

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Free Doesn't Mean Free From Criticism

Last week I wrote about an open source utility with an interface that I thought needed work; commenters on the article slammed me for being critical. Sorry, I don't think free software and open source has a future in a world where it's somehow immune from criticism because it's free.

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Classifying Green Storage

There is an ever increasing emphasis by storage suppliers on the power efficiency of their systems. There is also an increasing interest from IT managers on making their environment more power efficient. This is being driven not so much by the desire to be environmentally sensitive, but more because an increasing number of data centers simply can't get more power to the building.

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The Fallacy Of Femto Cells

Today, AT&T launched a public trial of a femto cell product in the Charlotte, N.C., market. AT&T expects users to pay $150 for the device, and then $20 per month for (unlimited voice) service that AT&T should already be providing as part of users' service contracts. Sprint and Verizon are doing something similar. The rub is, the wireless companies should be begging end users to adopt femto cells and reducing service costs of those who do...not the other way around.

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University Of Texas Moving Into Second Life

The University of Texas launched a year-long, state-wide initiative to use Second Life in the curriculum for all 16 of its campuses, experimenting with using the platform as a means of providing innovative, low-cost undergraduate instruction involving students, faculty, researchers and administrators.

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More Issues Facing BlackBerry Tour, RIM Yanks Firmware Update

Last week, the BlackBerry Tour faced some public scrutiny due to its trackball. Beyond that, RIM officially approved new firmware for the Tour...and then yanked the update after it caused even more problems for end users.

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The Kill Switch In Windows Marketplace For Mobile

Windows Marketplace for Mobile is the new application store for Windows Mobile devices that should launch on October 6 with Windows Mobile 6.5. Like other application stores, users will be able to go online, right from their device, and buy any number of applications for their device. If, for some reason though, Microsoft decides a particular app should be removed, the store will have the ability to remove it from users devices as well.

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Verizon Wireless Addresses BlackBerry Tour Issues

Last week an analyst said in a research note that the BlackBerry Tour, made by Research In Motion and sold by both Sprint and Verizon Wireless, was seeing huge return rates due to faulty trackballs. Both Sprint and Verizon have responded to the report.

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Security Just Got A Lot More Complicated

Last month, security investigators stumbled across a new an innovative variety of malicious software. Named Induc, it's been hiding out there -- undiscovered -- for more than a year. Now that researchers can find Induc, they believe it's one of the top 100 most common viruses.

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IBM System Must Handle Each Hour More Data Than In WWW

A proposed giant new telescope will stream incomprehensibly large volumes of data to a computer IBM has agreed to build. The trick is how to handle the data torrent captured by the kilometer-square lens, which is expected to generate more data in a single hour than currently exists on the entire World Wide Web.

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Four Factors Changing The SaaS Landscape

A "future of software" panel at our InformationWeek 500 conference offered several fresh insights into why the software-as-a-service landscape is changing. Here are four.

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Another Take On Freemium -- From LogMeIn

In today's feature story, online businesses talk about the plusses and minuses of offering free online services -- and then transitioning them to paid services. Coincidentally, I had a conversation on the very same topic this week with Michael Simon, CEO of LogMeIn. For Simon, there are no minuses, only plusses.

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Microsoft Steps Up To Squash Malicious Advertising Threat

While the move by Microsoft to file five civil lawsuits to help fight malicious online advertisers, the winning bet is probably not going to be on this having a big impact on malicious advertising any time soon. There's just too much money being made.

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Sprouter Provides A Collaboration Community For Entrepreneurs

Toronto-based Sprouter provides a networking and collaboration community for entrepreneurs. This morning I met with Sprouter founder and CEO Sarah Prevette to learn more about the service.

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Oracle Vs. IBM,: Desperate Measures, Desperate Times

In the Sept. 11 story, "Oracle Fights IBM Poaching With Ad," I wrote that Sun used to lead the Unix server market, now IBM does, with HP second. That was once true but the reality is more complicated. HP has slipped to number three, and Sun is number two; therein lies a tale.

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Mobile Roundup: The Verizon Has Bad Smartphones Edition

It was a relatively light week in the mobile industry, although Samsung rolled out a new Omnia phone, Apple and Google are playing "liar, liar" about Google Voice for the iPhone, and Palm finally dumped Windows Mobile. In this week's roundup, I'll pontificate on why Verizon's smartphone lineup is lacking, as well as touch upon a few more interesting stories.

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Now Accepting Orders For The xpPhone

This phone has been a long time in the works and now it is available for preorder, though they still have no price for it. The selling point of this phone is that it doesn't run a mobile phone operating system, but rather a full blown version of Windows XP. Think of it as an OQO, but smaller and with phone hardwire built in. A good idea at one time, does this phone still make sense today?

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IW500: Making IT Sexy Won't Attract Kids

Are young people staying away from tech careers because young people are foolish and shallow, concerned only with big bucks and glamour? Or are there smarter reasons? The answer to that question will determine how best to attract young Americans into tech careers in the future.

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Marines' Social Media Ban Bad For Morale

The Marine Corps' ban on Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, and other social media could hurt morale more than it helps security, a public policy researcher said. "The ban is at odds with realities of the 21st-century military," said Chris Bronk, a research fellow at Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy.

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Why Are Software Updates Such A Pain In The Butt?

Some recent Mozilla stats go a long way towards explaining a major problem with desktop software security. But maybe they don't go far enough.

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Q&A With Haiku OS's Jorge Mare

Earlier this week I talked about Haiku OS's alpha 1 release (not beta, my mistake!), and thought I'd dig past the FAQ and get answers to some of my own questions about this remarkable new, free-and-open OS that's aimed squarely at the desktop.

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VC Funding Is Dead? Tell That To Eight Newly Wealthy SaaS Startups

Venture capital funding is at a historic low, yet at least eight software startups announced VC funding in the past two weeks for a total of more than $60 million. Their products are all very different, but they have one thing in common: they're delivered in a software-as-a-service model.

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Obama Opening Door To Technology Innovators

Big businesses like Verizon and AT&T might be gnashing their teeth about the Obama Administration's policies and priorities, but small businesses and innovators should be rubbing their hands with glee.

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Live Chat With A Cybercrook! Popup Talk Latest Scam

Phishers have always counted on volume and automation to generate revenues: scam mails by the millions, proliferating malware links, a deluge of devious and deceptive tools designed to grab info from the unsuspecting. Now they're using chat to pluck their pigeons one-on-one.

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MDOP Smoothes Path For Windows 7 Deployment

Microsoft is firing on all marketing guns as it moves to create an adoption groundswell for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. For enterprise users, another key piece of the ecosystem is about to fall into place. That would be the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) 2009 R2, a multi-tentacled toolkit containing virtualization technologies and a bunch of management tools.

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AT&T Expands Remote Tech Support Push -- With Help From Intel VPro

Last week, AT&T TechSupport 360 expanded coverage from very small businesses to companies with up to 50 employees. This week, AT&T joined with Intel to announce a new level of support for computers equipped with Intel's VPro technology.

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Top 10 Best Technology Ideas. . . That Really Aren't

At bMighty.com, we know that it's only too easy to get seduced by technology. A new innovation, a slick piece of hardware, a smart software feature, or seemingly fabulous application appears, and everyone jumps on the bandwagon. Sometimes, though, we wish we'd looked before we leaped.

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Palm (Finally) Dumps Microsoft

Palm's first quarter numbers are in. The smartphone maker sold 823,000 devices during the first quarter, though the company declined to say how many of them were the new Palm Pre. Another nugget to come from the earnings call was this: Palm will no longer make Windows Mobile smartphones.

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i-Mate, Smartphone Maker, Shutters Doors

i-Mate's story came to a bitter end this week, as the one-time manufacturer of Windows Mobile smartphones officially locked the doors and told employees not to come back.

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Twitter Succeeds At InformationWeek 500 Conference

I'm back from the InformationWeek 500 Conference, where we integrated Twitter into the proceedings. It's commonplace at other conferences, but it was a bit of a risk for us, because it was the first time we'd tried anything like it, and because the InformationWeek community is just plain not early adopters of social media. But it turned out that Twitter integration was a success, significantly exceeding expectations.

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Do Twitter Users Really Want To Make Phone Calls?

Today Twitter is rolling out a new beta service that will allow users to call one another. Calls will be limited to just two minutes, and users need to follow each other. Celebrities beware?

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iPhone, Twitter Fight Swine Flu

The NBC Nightly News did a report about how the iPhone, Twitter, and Google are being used in the fight against swine flu and other diseases. The technology includes an iPhone app from Children's Hospital in Boston, and tools to use Google Searches and Twitter messages to map outbreaks.

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An Ugly Clonezilla Success Story

Last night I migrated a Windows 7 box to a new 1 terabyte drive, thanks to an open source tool named Clonezilla. It was a success, but the whole time I kept saying to myself the same thing again and again: "Wow, this program is ugly."

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FCC To Repel Charge Of The Cuckooberries

A disparate bunch of advocacy groups are trying to save the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) from the onslaught of the Cuckooberries.

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Trackball Problems Plaguing BlackBerry Tour

According to an analyst, the BlackBerry Tour is seeing huge return rates at Sprint and Verizon Wireless stores. What's the problem? Failure of the trackball.

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Oracle Zaps SAP's Apps Slump

Oracle president Safra Catz said Oracle's database revenue grew more slowly than normal in Q1 in large part because of slumping sales via some Oracle resellers, "most notably SAP, who is selling less database because its applications business is down 40%." Yikes-you don't often see Oracle spank its own customers, but then again SAP is no doubt a very special case.

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Amazon, Others Will Develop Government Clouds, Too

Google, wisely, showed up at the U.S. government's cloud computing announcement this week with a plan to offer cloud services tailored to the needs of government agencies. You can bet that Amazon, IBM, Microsoft, Salesforce, and other cloud providers will follow suit.

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Backup Vs. Recovery

One thing suppliers and analysts are quick to point out is that when it comes to data protection it is not about how well you backup, it is about how well you recover. That sounds very catchy and for the most part is accurate. I believe however, that backup is an equally important part of the data protection puzzle. It is after all poor backup strategies that make recovery so hard and unpredictable.

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First Impressions With Sprint's Android Phone

Sprint's first Android phone, the HTC Hero, goes on sale in just a few short weeks. I was able to spend some time with it recently. The hardware feels great and HTC's Sense user interface gives the system software a bit of pinache.

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Meet Your New Enterprise App, Information Intake Management

Some enterprise teams that I work with, when confronted with the question, "what do we do with this new social networking thingy" immediately shoot back, "we're getting killed with emails -- we can't deal with the information we have." It's not that new social information isn't useful. It's that when you're already drinking martinis from a firehose, somebody offering you a cosmo is ironically tragic.

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Windows Mobile 6.5 Gets Multi-Touch Device

I love to be proven wrong on occasions and this is one of those times. Just yesterday I went over the minimum specs of the new Windows Mobile 7 phones and one of the features is support for multi-touch screens. I figured though that that feature would pretty much eliminate the possibility of upgrading a WinMo 6.5 phone to WinMo 7 since the soon to be launched 6.5 version from MS doesn't support multi-touch. That may have been an erroneous assumption.

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Systems Infected Tend To Stay Infected

Think most PC and end point infections are quick hits? Think again. Research released today shows that once infected, systems tend to stay that way for a long, long time.

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Thoughts On Opera Mini 5 For BlackBerry

Opera Software released the beta version of its Mini 5 browser earlier today, and I've spent a little time with it on my BlackBerry. Research In Motion fans will be happy to know there is finally a good browser for their favorite e-mailing machine.

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Health IT Is Part Of Senate Committee's New Healthcare Reform Bill

The Senate Finance Committee today released a mark-up version of its new healthcare reform bill. The America's Healthy Future Act has several technology provisions, including a proposal for bonus payments related to health IT programs.

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Google Revisits Crowdsourcing With reCAPTCHA Acquisition

In its second acquisition this year, Google has bought reCAPTCHA, a company that provides CAPTCHA images as a barrier to online fraud.

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Whatever Happened To The Idea Of Instant On?

It takes too long for many of today's most popular mobile devices to boot up. While some people are more patient than others, I contend that 60 seconds is way too long for a mobile device to boot. Let's take a look at how some of today's tech stacks up.

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Bert Sandie, Electronic Arts Invited to Speak at Enterprise 2.0 Conference

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Government Cloud Likely To Start Slow

The federal government's new cloud computing "storefront," apps.gov, has garnered a lot of hype. However, it'll take time and effort to actually gain traction as well. Apps.gov, meet FISMA and cultural resistance.

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Windows Mobile 7 Chassis Spec Emerge

More details are coming out about the eagerly anticipated Windows Mobile 7 platform. All phones are not created equal and it is something end users pick up on quickly. Carriers and manufacturers want to minimize cost and maximize profit while I am sure Microsoft and consumers would prefer their device perform like a Porsche 911 GT3 on steroids. Microsoft is now taking a more active roll in ensuring that even if the phone that bears their operating system doesn't perform like a Porsche, it won't mimic that of a Chevette either.

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For CIOs, Clouds Are The Fourth Column

Clouds are transforming IT; that's not news. But regardless of your cloud computing agenda, clouds are already affecting your IT plans, because they give IT executives a cudgel with which to bludgeon traditional software and infrastructure providers.

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Steep Climb For Microsoft's Next Open Source Advocate

Sam Ramji, Microsoft's credible open source spokesman, is leaving to join a startup and return with his family to the San Francisco Bay area. All Microsoft has to do is find a replacement. Ramji tried to push a mighty boulder up the mountain and got it at least to the first ledge. How will his successor fare?

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IBM Adding 240 Jobs In Vermont

IBM is hiring manufacturing and maintenance workers at its Vermont chip-making plant in response to strong consumer demand for cell phones and DVDs using IBM electronic components. The new hires will push total employment at the Essex Junction plant to about 5,000.

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HP Strengthens Integrated Server and Switch Line

The design of IT equipment is about to dramatically change. No longer will data center servers, network switches, and storage area networks be sold autonomously. Instead, the different devices will be consolidated into integrated devices, and HP has made it clear that it wants to be a player in this market.

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Dare To Make Them Care

There's a hard truth to be learned about making most computer users care about open source: they won't care. But that's the beginning of wisdom, not the end of it.

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India Has Its Own 'H-1B' Problem

U.S. worker groups complain that Indian outsourcers import too many employees to this country under the H-1B visa program. Ironically, Indian professionals-and New Delhi-are now stressing over the throng of talent from the People's Republic that is accompanying Chinese business contracts into the Subcontinent.

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New Google Service Nothing To Flip Over

Google's new Fast Flip is a half-baked attempt to solve two problems with one service, which isn't entirely a bad thing, since half-baked is in many cases better than raw.

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Cisco's New NetSec Hotrods Run Linux Under The Hood

Cisco is launching a major new push into the small-business network security market. And Linux lies at the heart of the company's strategy.

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Opera Mini 5 Brings Support For Touch Screens

Opera Software lifted the curtains on Opera Mini 5 Beta, a brand-new version of the browser for mobile phones. Aside from a refreshed design, the biggest new features for this version of Opera Mini are support for touch screen devices and a more usable Speed Dial tool.

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Blockbuster Confused Retailing With Technology

Blockbuster's slow, painful stroll into a digital sunset continued yesterday with an announcement it will close more than a third of its stores, proving yet again that the company's confused vision is its most intractable foe.

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Cloud Security Still Not 'Major Priority'

Cloud computing has broken into the mainstream of enterprise IT, but adoption remains fragmented by industry, and acceptance among administrators is far from unanimous.

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Welcome to Reality, New York Times

Last weekend, some users were unpleasantly surprised to find that the New York Times was serving up malware ads of the type you might expect to find on a sleazy blog site. The ads showed a fake virus scan and tried to force the user to install a fake virus cleaner.

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Android 1.6 'Donut' Revealed By Google

Today, Google bowed the next version of Android, its mobile operating system. "Donut" is the name given to this version of Android, which is otherwise known as 1.6. New features? You betcha. Android 1.6 brings support for CDMA phones, more screen resolutions, more APIs, better camera software and improved device search.

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IW500: Cracks In The Enterprise Software Model

A panel of software industry veterans at the InformationWeek 500 conference today argued that the old, on-premises enterprise software model is nearing the end of the line. Taking its place: Web-based software and cloud computing.

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iPhone Security Fix May Reveal Longstanding Vulnerability

The latest release of the OS for iPhones and iPod Touches breaks the Microsoft Exchange Server compatibility of many existing devices. In doing so, it may have revealed that businesses that trusted Apple's assurances about the devices' security were misled.

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Archos Intros Android Tablet

One of my complaints about Android so far is that it has been put on some pretty wimpy hardware, but Archos has finally given the Google-backed OS some horsepower with the Archos 5 Internet Tablet. Any Android fan should take a look at this powerful little device.

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Microsoft Launches Mac Office Business Edition

The new Office:Mac package includes all the usual suspects, with enhancements for online and network collaboration. It replaces the existing standard retail package, while the Special Media Edition is dropped from the lineup.

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Verizon's Android Phone To Arrive Within A Few Weeks

Anyone disappointed that Motorola only announced one Android handset last week and not two need not fret for too long. Motorola will announce its second Android-based device within a few weeks, and you'd better believe that Verizon Wireless will be the one to sell it.

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Vendor Offers 'No Excuses' Guarantee For Docs To Get Fed's Rewards

The federal government's definition for "meaningful use" of health IT won't be finalized for several months. But that's not stopping EMR software and business services provider Athenahealth from guaranteeing clients that they'll be getting their health IT stimulus checks from the feds.

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Amazon CTO Vogels: The 4 Types Of CTOs

Amazon CTO Werner Vogels sees four types of CTOs, including his own role as a "customer facing CTO."

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MidMarket CIOs Not Embracing Windows 7

A panel of CIOs at the Midsize Enterprise Summit West in Los Angeles showed remarkably little interest in quickly moving to Microsoft's new operating system.

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Celio Redfly Gains BlackBerry Support

Anyone remember the Celio Redfly Mobile Companion? This device connects a smartphone with a laptop-like display and keyboard. The Redfly Mobile Companion works with Windows Mobile devices, and now, the Redfly will support BlackBerry smartphones. A mobile professional's dream come true?

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Cisco Refreshes Its Small Business Pro Lineup

As Cisco continues to evolve its efforts to reach small businesses, it's rolling out new security and collaboration technologies, including security appliances, routers, and VoIP phones.

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A Skeptical Look At The Linux Server Botnet

When The Register ran news of a "Linux botnet" out in the wild, the bloviation did fly: See? Linux really isn't that secure! But odds are this has nothing to do with Linux security per se, and everything to do with the biggest and most notorious security hole of all: bad system administration.

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WinMo 6.5 Smartphone From HTC Sports 4.3-Inch Screen

The leaks across the Internet continue. The latest smartphone to be exposed comes from HTC. Codenamed "Leo", this Windows Mobile 6.5 device features a massive 4.3-inch display that packs 800 x 480 pixels.

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Breaking Up Isn't Hard To Do

Yesterday, Google announced that it has a small team of engineers working in Chicago to make it easier for users to quit its various services. This is a novel and smart approach to building its brand.

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Help Arrives to Secure Mobile Devices

The latest round of cool smartphones has turned them into favorites among consumers. Increasingly, they are bringing these devices to work, regardless of whether or not their employers have sanctioned their use. Consequently, small and medium businesses need help securing these devices and Good Technology wants to provide it.

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Jive Software Wants to Watch

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GPS Accuracy Without A GPS Chip

More and more phones today come with GPS chips that onboard software can tap into for location based services such as mapping, geotagging photos or just announcing your location via Twitter. The older a phone is though, the more likely it is to be lacking a GPS chip. Soon, that may be irrelevant.

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jQuery Conference 2009

This year's jQuery conference was held over the weekend, hosted at Microsoft's offices in Cambridge Massachusetts. If the tweets are any indication, the conference was a great sucess.

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SQL Vulnerabilities Continue To Plague Web Security

A gray-hat hacker with a reputation for outing corporate Web site vulnerabilities says he's uncovered SQL injection flaws in the Web site of RBS WorldPay. RBS responded, saying no customer data was accessed.

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Let The Business Mobile Price Wars Begin!

Firing the first shot, Sprint rolls out new Business Advantage plans that could put pressure on other carriers to offer better deals.

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Samsung Wants To Be Big Player In Business IT

ChannelWeb reports that the Korean consumer electronics powerhouse is planning new PCs and laptops along with a move into commerical IT services. The company could be an important new option for SMBs, and the competition could help keep prices down.

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iPhone MMS Roll-Out Gets Off To A (Weird) Start

Reports have started filtering in from iPhone users that MMS is now active on their iPhones. AT&T contends that a software update is necessary to make the feature work, and that software won't be available until September 25.

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Filtering Government 2.0

We're apparently not quite sure if too much citizen intervention in our government's life is a good thing or not, to judge by Anand Giridharadas's piece in this weekend's New York Times Week In Review.

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Hospitals Are Helping Docs Defray EMR Costs, Challenges

Are hospital-sponsored e-medical records the best way to get lots of doctors using these systems in their offices quickly and affordably?

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Haiku OS Alpha 1: Simple Is Beautiful

After years of quiet but steady development, Haiku OS finally has its first public alpha. Here comes a new competitor for the desktop -- not just with Windows or OS X, but Linux,too.

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New York Times Malware Problem: All The Scamware That's Unfit To Post

This weekend's eruption of popup antivirus scam ads on The New York Times site offers a couple of opportunities, the most important of which is to remind your employees of the increasing aggressiveness of rogue antivirus malware.

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SSD Drives OPEX Savings Too

Solid State Disk (SSD) is often the solution to drive up performance of a particular application, increasing response time to users and thereby increasing revenue or productivity. There can also be significant CAPEX savings by implementing SSD, what is often missing from the discussion is the operational or OPEX savings that comes from implementing SSDs.

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LG Announces Android Phone, Forgets To Share Details

Today LG announced its first Android handset, the GW620. Not only does the device have an amazingly boring name, but LG managed to say absolutely nothing about it. Why the mystery, LG?

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IBM Prepares To Pull The Plug On Microsoft Office

According to a recent news report, Big Blue is officially giving Microsoft Office the boot in favor of its own Lotus Symphony business productivity suite.

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Facebook Page For Government Launches

The federal government launched a Facebook page to give agencies tips and impetus to set up and run their presence on Facebook. The page offers links to agency pages already on Facebook, guides, and updates to government Facebook activity.

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Deutsche Telekom - Sprint Nextel Merger Rears Its Head Again

A new report by the U.K. Telegraph says that Deutsche Telekom (T-Mobile USA parent company) is seriously preparing to make a bid for Sprint Nextel. The merged companies could become the nation's second-largest carrier. We've seen this story before. Could such a marriage really save either company?

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Social Computing and Politics

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Windows Mobile Update Story Gets Better

Like any mobile platform, Windows Mobile has its strengths and weaknesses. One of the weakest areas is the upgrade story, or rather, the lack of much of a story at all. I can just about count on one hand the number of devices graced with an upgrade from one WinMo version to another, but that will be changing with WinMo 7.

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IW500: Is Twitter Ready For IT?

One of the more interesting conversations I got into at the opening reception of the InformationWeek 500 Sunday night was with a man who came to me with fire in his eye, challenging me whether I thought Twitter is a useful tool for business IT. I think he was surprised at my view: I think so, but I don't know for sure.

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Change Is A Red Herring

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Adagio Tea: Steeped In Twitter, Facebook

I just bought a new shipment of loose tea from Adagio Tea, and saw first-hand how they use Twitter and Facebook for social media marketing. Adagio lets you follow the shipment of your package on Twitter, and also provides you with a simple, but clear incentive to get you to promote them on Facebook.

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Unified Communications, Take 1

The best thing about my job is hanging out with smart people. I had that opportunity last Friday when I attended the filming of a series of videos on unified communications.

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Fixing Login Inconsistencies In Google's Services

Over the past few weeks I've been keeping track of the different ways each Google service handles login procedures. I would have thought that once I am "cookied" by a Google service that all services would authenticate my session in the same manner but this is not the case.

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Pigeon Transports Data Faster Than ASDL!

A carrier pigeon thrashed a local ASDL service in transporting 4 gigabytes of data 60 miles in a South African showdown watched by several billion (well, actually, a few hundred) people around the world on Facebook and Twitter. In the two hours it took the pigeon to deliver its memory-stick payload, the ASDL service was able to transmit only 4% of the data.

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Might As Well Face It, You're Addicted

The human brain constantly seeks rewards. Sometimes that reward-seeking gets out of hand in the form of addiction. We're all familiar with addiction to cigarettes, alcohol or drugs, but some people now believe there's an new addiction: The Internet. Now there's a rehab for it.

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Cryptographic Keys Focus Of Next-Gen Net Security

Against the backdrop of rising malware threats and organized cybercriminal rings, a national cybersecurity initiative is taking shape which will bring a "locked down" mentality to the way we authenticate users, apps, and anyone or anything that touches a network. I'm talking about the Cryptographic Key Management (CKM) project that is being run out of the National Institute of Standards and Technology's Computer Security Division.

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Students (Your Future Employees) Like Macs

According to a survey touted by Windows-on-Mac vendor Parallels, 36% of undergraduates plan to purchase a Mac, and many of them plan to run Windows software on it. SMBs might want to consider planning to accommodate such flexible platform choices in making their IT decisions -- after all, these students will be in the workforce within five years.

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Mobile Roundup, The Nokia, Pre, AT&T Edition

Another big week in the mobile world with the Palm Pixi being announced, the iPhone finally getting a date for MMS, and Motorola showing off its first Android phone. The busy week also means there were a few stories I couldn't get to, and I'll dissect them after the jump.

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Is Twitter Hard-Balling Users?

Twitter is starting to lay the groundwork for an actual business model by making some changes to its terms of service (TOS).

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Ethics, Integrity, and Playing Nice

As security professionals we are paid to know how to do bad things. We must know how to do these bad things in order to defend from bad people. What separates us from the criminals is our integrity. We hack for the good of humanity.

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Twittering The InformationWeek 500

We're going to try something at the InformationWeek 500 conference next week: we're livetweeting the conference on Twitter. That's old hat to the Web 2.0 crowd, but it will be new and (hopefully) exciting to our enterprise community.

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Google Voice Gains Better SMS And Gmail Support

This week Google quietly updated some of the features within Google Voice. One new feature enables threaded SMS messaging conversations within Gmail, and the other eases the pain of listening to voicemails from within Gmail.

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ReviewCam: Sychron's VDI

Sychron is a compelling platform for provisioning and managing virtual desktops, and while it can make managing VMWare's ESX and Microsoft's Hyper-V much easier, it is also going up against capabilities both companies offer. In our latest ReviewCam, we took a hands-on look at some of the product's capabilities and they seem pretty impressive.

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What Is E-Mail Worth To Your Company?

These days, small businesses have a wide range of e-mail options, ranging from on-premise Microsoft Exchange servers to cloud-based Web mail -- and everything in between. And prices range as widely as the technology, from free on up.

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Getting Your Hands On ARRA Cash

The coordinators for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 have a lot of money to give out--$44 billion to be precise--and healthcare IT managers can improve their odds of getting it by making their applications broad and simple, according to the chairman of the Healthcare Information Technology Standards Panel.

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The Motorola Phone That Isn't A Phone

Motorola's new Google Android-powered Cliq smartphone (called Dext everywhere else in the world) will offer intriguing new social media tools. I think it should go to town with the new utility.

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Steve Ballmer Goes Ape Over Microsoft Employee's iPhone

At a recent company meeting, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer spotted a Microsoft employee wielding an iPhone. Ballmer snatched the iPhone from the employee, ridiculed the employee (visible on a jumbotron), and pretended to stomp on the device.

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Yahoo CEO Stock Sale: $10M Bonus For First Year?

During her first half-year as Yahoo! CEO, Carol Bartz has sold more than 138,000 shares of Yahoo! stock for almost $2 million. That's all squeaky clean and above board, but shareholders deserve to know why their new CEO is selling what they're holding-and the excellent money manager Eric Jackson offers some compelling conclusions on guaranteed compensation versus performance-based compensation.

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Improvements In Mobile Device Radio Reception

Anyone that has had several mobile phones knows that not all phones receive their radio signals at the same strength. You can be in the same place with two different phones and one will perform well while the other may show fewer bars and have a bit of static or short periods where the caller cuts out. Clearly the design of the phone and internal antenna affects reception as much as the carrier you are using.

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Infrastructure Uptime: A Useless Report

I got a question yesterday from a large organization's IT leadership asking for recommendations on how to report infrastructure uptime to a governing board. The answer? Your governing board doesn't care.

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Hands-On Impressions Of The Motorola Cliq

Motorola introduced its Android-powered Cliq smartphone today, and I was able to get my grubby hands on it at a press event in San Francisco. Overall, I was really impressed with the device but do have a few concerns.

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Motorola Cliq Video Demo

I was able to spend some time with the Motorola Cliq today. The hardware may not be perfect, but it's pretty good. More than the hardware, however, Motorola has demonstrated that it "gets it" with MOTOBLUR, its new vision for contact and social network management.

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Interview with Dries Buytaert

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Microsoft's CodePlex: Open, Meet Proprietary

What's this? Microsoft forming its own open source foundation? Apparently, yes.

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Check Out Audio Books With Your Windows Mobile Phone

You can check out books from your local library to listen to on your phone. No, I don't mean books on tape or CD that you can rip to your device, I mean actual digital copies that you can borrow. Now you can do it right from your phone via the OverDrive Media Console for Windows Mobile.

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Gov 2.0: Cloud Computing As Government Panacea

Two of the most influential people in the cloud computing market -- Amazon CTO Werner Vogels and General Services Administration CIO Casey Coleman -- talked today at the Gov 2.0 Summit about cloud computing's high potential as a cheaper, better way of delivering IT resources. Such enthusiasm, however, is tempered with lingering questions about security, interoperability, and organizational barriers.

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New Warnings On EMP Threat

More than 800 people registered for a conference being held in Niagara Falls, NY to discuss the possible nightmare outcome of an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack on the continental U.S. A fix is startlingly cheap, but remains ignored.

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Motorola Announces Cliq Android Phone With MOTOBLUR

Today Motorola announced its first Android handset, called the Cliq. The Cliq is a sideways slider with a full touch screen and QWERTY keyboard. It also features Motorola's new contact and social networking service called MOTOBLUR.

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Who Are Those Evil Dudes At Google Anyway?

The growing kerfuffle over Google's settlement with the Author's Guild concerning the digitization of books is just the most recent proof that Google has become the new Microsoft where regulators on both sides of the Atlantic are concerned.

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Politics In 140 Characters Or Less

Congressional bluster is fast making its way into the Web 2.0 era. Case in point: Rep. John Culberson, R-Tex., who spoke at the Gov 2.0 Summit on Wednesday.

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Whiteboard Video: Privileged Identities

Every time I'm around information security people I get scared. Their understanding of the potential for vulnerability is daunting enough, even when they aren't consistently flaunting the dangers. Lieberman Software's president, Phil Lieberman, must have started at least 30 sentences with "But what's really scary . . . " We were just missing the marshmallows and hooting owls, and all we were talking about was managing passwords.

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Cisco Rival Woos Wall Street: Can It Walk The Talk?

If Blade Network Technologies can deliver even half of what it's promising, it will give some of Cisco's Wall Street clients something to think about when they look to buy network switches. Blade's CEO says his company crushes Cisco on latency, power consumption, and TCO. (He also says one ox can outperform 1,000 chickens.)

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The End Of The Storage Volume

Traditional volumes have been around as long as we have had file systems, but now may be the time to pronounce the end of the storage volume. As data centers get larger and storage systems are populated with more and more physical drives they are growing into a storage manager's nightmare. There are just too many volumes of drives to be managed effectively.

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IBM, Dell, HP Top Tight Server Market

While server technology is proceeding apace -- see my column, "AMD, Intel Remake Servers From Processor Up" (here) -- shipments themselves are being challenged by the overall economic environment. That picture is apparent in the latest worldwide server market report from Gartner, with results from the second quarter of 2009. One bright spot is that blades sagged less than any other segment.

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EMC Triples India Investment To $1.5 Billion

EMC Corp., which spent $500 million on its operations in India over the past five years, plans to triple that investment to $1.5 billion over the next five years to enhance its support of customers in India and to expand its R&D work and global services capabilities.

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VMware Feels Growing Pains Of Being A $1 Billion Firm

In a relatively brief period, VMware has gone from a small company to 2008 revenues of $1.9 billion. At VMworld in San Francisco, I got a sense of how that rapid growth leads to growing pains. For one thing, some of your best customers prefer your little competitors to you.

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Lunch With Salesforce.com And Twitter

Salesforce.com put on a fancy lunch spread at the Four Seasons Hotel in San Francisco this afternoon to celebrate the launch of its Service Cloud 2 upgrade, and Twitter was invited. But I already blogged that... so I was more interested in what the cloud computing and social media bigwigs had to say about customer service. And they didn't disappoint.

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Snow Leopard Not A Game Changer: The View From IT

Enterprise IT executives say they're stuck with Windows, despite Snow Leopard's support for Microsoft Exchange. SMBs, on the other hand, have more freedom to accommodate their employees' preferences.

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Palm Pixi Gets The Hands-On Treatment

I had a chance to spend some time with the new Palm Pixi this afternoon. It's small, light, and perfect for users who prefer the candybar form factor with ready access to the QWERTY keyboard. I found the smaller screen size and lack of Wi-Fi to be detractors, however.

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Making The Case For Feature Phones

I've long thought that features phones like the Samsung Rogue were on their way out because low-cost Android devices or other smartphones would eventually make their way down market. After conversing with Frank Meehan, CEO of INQ Mobile, I may be reconsidering that stance.

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Desktop Death Watch: Don't Hold Your Breath!

Yet another pundit has proclaimed the death of the desktop. I'm not planning to send any flowers just yet.

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Google Wave To Create 'Explosion Of Innovation'

It's hard to talk to people about Google's Wave without enduring a certain amount of eye-rolling. So I take comfort in seeing that Dan Woods of Evolved Technologies is taking it seriously.

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NetworkComputing Live On TechWeb TV Thursday

It's time for another episode of TechWeb's Valley View, our live web TV show. We're taking a decidedly hard core turn toward a more demonstrable and hands-on version in deference to the re-launch of Network Computing, complete with Whiteboard Tutorials and ReviewCam demos, covering topics such as storage infrastructure, virtualization, cloud computing, WAN acceleration, and disk storage security.

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ReviewCam: OpenCalais -- "Semantic Plumbing"

When we look back, years from now, this decade's Internet Search may seem prehistoric. Perhaps that's why so many companies (including the usual suspects) have begun working toward an enlightened future. Thomson Reuters is one such company, and its OpenCalais project provides what the company likes to call semantic plumbing; you can see what that means in our ReviewCam.

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InformationWeek Analytics Has A New Home

It's both a tough time and an exciting time to be in IT. It's exciting because the systems and services that IT offers business can provide true competitive advantages.

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Apple Announces iPhone OS 3.1 And iTunes 9

Today in San Francisco, Apple made several music-related announcements, some of which concerned the iPhone. iPhone OS 3.1, which will be available today, offers several new features for the iPhone. iTunes 9 will finally offer a much-sought-after feature -- the ability to manage iPhone applications within iTunes itself.

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Verizon Offers Mobile Management Help

How can you control the growing number of smartphones making their way into your enterprise? Finding an answer to that question has been keeping IT managers up at night. Verizon, one of the nations largest carriers, has decided to try and help small and medium businesses solve that problem.

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webOS 1.2 Primed To Hit The Palm Pre, Possibly Today

Sprint's support site has published a list of changes, fixes and features for webOS 1.2, which may possibly be pushed out to end users today. The changelog is pretty ridiculous. See what's new after the jump.

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Wordpress Hack And Other Patch Problems Demand Patch Policies

The recent Wordpress hack, affecting older, unpatched versions of the blogware, as well as the raft of critical patches Microsoft released yesterday make this a good time to review -- or implement! -- an effective patch policy.

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PlainView Systems Launches Medical Marijuana Marketplace

It's a long way from Cheech & Chong. PlainView Systems launched its Compassionate Care Marketplace, a secure system to allow suppliers of medical marijuana to buy weed, with full accounting of the transaction for state and municipal compliance.

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Survey Reveals Healthcare CIOs Are Seeking Tech Talent

The healthcare industry plans to increase IT hiring about 5% in the fourth quarter, according to a new report. The figure might not appear to be blockbuster, but it's above the national average. Overall, CIOs across many industries plan to add zero tech people to their staffs in the near term.

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UK's Mobile Phone Merger Good For Customers?

The merger between the UK's Orange and T-Mobile mobile carriers was touted this week with the usual promises about benefits for customers. I can't figure out how the equation adds up.

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New Intel Xeon 3400 Processors Lead To New Dell SMB Servers

The new 3400 series Xeon server processors are designed for 1U entry-level servers, and Dell has responded with four new 1-socket servers using the new chips, starting at less than $600. Plus new NAS storage and 28 new power supplies.

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Security: An Apples-To-Open Comparison?

Here is a question which has been bothering me for some time now, and which doesn't stand much of a chance of resolving itself. Is comparing the much-vaunted security benefits of open source software to similar proprietary apps a false comparison?

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Open Meets Closed - And 2.0 Comes of Age at WhoRunsGov.com

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Meet The Palm Pixi, The Second WebOS Phone

I guess Palm has a penchant for making their big announcement very close to Apple's big events, as they've just announced its follow-up to the Pre. The Palm Pixi is the company's second webOS smartphone, and this pretty device is coming to Sprint.

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Salesforce.com Upgrades The "Service Cloud"

Service Cloud 2 adds the new Salesforce.com Answers and brings Salesforce.com Knowledge and Salesforce.com for Twitter out of beta and into general availability.

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AT&T Pushes Network Upgrades

Last week I blogged on the cost AT&T has incurred in being the exclusive carrier for the iPhone in the US market. I've received a response from AT&T's Blogger Relations on some of the issues raised. The cost is still high, but AT&T has reaped a few benefits that aren't as readily obvious, and some of those will in turn benefit their customers.

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Art King from Nike Invited to Speak at Enterprise 2.0 Conference

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SMBs Aware Of Benefits Of Power Management, But Not Doing Much About It

A new survey by Dimensional Research for KACE reveals that smaller companies are more likely to understand the cost benefits of desktop power management, but less likely to have a green initiative in place.

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Google Lets Privacy Imperil Book Deal

Google's ongoing inability to anticipate the privacy concerns surrounding its services is baffling. The company should know better by now, given its ongoing struggles with Street View and search privacy.

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Sprint Puts The Kibosh On $100 Palm Pre Promotion

If you thought the news from earlier today was bad, this is worse. Mere hours after announcing a promotion to sell the Palm Pre for $100, Sprint has said that the promotion was run "in error" and it cancelled the program.

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Gov 2.0: Beyond Transparency

As the Gov 2.0 Summit gets underway in Washington, I will be looking for examples of how government agencies are moving beyond the low-hanging fruit of the Government 2.0 movement and onto the hard stuff -- process overhaul and new efficiencies.

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Kathleen Culver-Lozo and Greg Lowe from Alcatel-Lucent Invited to Speak at Enterprise 2.0 Conference

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Check Out The BlackBerry Onyx

The first official press photo of the BlackBerry Onyx came out today, and it looks very, very nice. This messaging powerhouse will be similar to the BlackBerry Bold, but it will add enough new features and design changes to keep BlackBerry fanatics happy.

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The Efficiency Roadblock To Virtualization

In my last entry we discussed some of the challenges storage presents to expanding the level at which companies deploy virtualized servers. There is another, potentially larger roadblock to virtualization; staff inefficiency.

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Cisco Pumping $2 Billion Into South Korean Tech Firms

Looking to get in early on dynamic new businesses and technologies while also boosting its Asia/Pacific revenue, Cisco has invested $32 million in a South Korean tech-centric private-equity firm as part of a 5-year strategy to invest $2 billion in that company's tech sector.

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Desperate Act? Sprint Drops Palm Pre To $100

Yikes. This reeks of desperation. In order to spur sales and help sign up new customers, Sprint has effectively dropped the sales price of the Palm Pre to just $100. Even at $100, can it help save Palm and Sprint?

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NATO Looking To Build Virtual HQ

Today is the deadline for developers to submit proposals to build 3D virtual software replicas of NATO headquarters in Europe and America, to be used for training and meetings, and improving staff communication and productivity.

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Verizon Wireless Rolls Out New Phone And Painful Pricing Scheme

Samsung's TouchWiz-toting touch phone -- the Rogue -- went on sale today with Verizon Wireless. This feature-laden phone only costs about $100, but it is the first feature phone (non-smartphone) to require a minimum monthly data plan with Verizon.

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Mid-Market Heroes: SMBs Say Color Really Does Make A Difference

Printer companies are always talking about how color printing can make a difference to small and midsize companies -- making marketing materials more effective and .... Frankly, the arguements always sounded like little more than semi-desperate attempts to sell more toner.

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GOP: Obama Uses 'Diabolical' Tech For School Speech

Candidate Obama would have known what to do if someone wanted to stop him from spreading his message. His unprecedented use of text messaging, Facebook and other social media supported more traditional communications means (if email can be considered traditional) to propel his campaign.

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Open Invention Network Snags Microsoft Patents

The title says it all: the Open Invention Network, an open source coalition "formed to promote Linux by using patents to create a collaborative environment", has grabbed up a few of Microsoft's patents.

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Snow Leopard Could Be Apple's Vista

Apple's Snow Leopard has some serious bugs. So what? Every major operating system upgrade has bugs. However, it's possible that Snow Leopard is buggier than that, that it will prove to be a lemon and a drag on the company as Vista was for Microsoft.

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IBM Chief Economist Says Recession Is Over

IBM chief economist Philip Swan says the U.S. recession is over and that our economy will reap a "productivity dividend" that, if sustained, could lead to "an awful lot of upswing in the economy."

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HTC To Ink Europe With Its Tattoo Android Phone

This morning HTC announced yet another new Android phone. This budget-friendly device, dubbed the Tattoo, might be diminutive in size, but it packs a lot into its little shell.

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Mozilla's Fennec Alpha 3 For Windows Mobile Is Out

The fight for mobile browser share continues to heat up as the smartphone market grows. While most current Windows Mobile devices have, by default, a weak browser compared to the competition, the platform has among the richest third party clients to rectify the situation. You should be familiar with, and perhaps even use, Mozilla's desktop client, Firefox. The improvements in Alpha 3 may make the mobile version worthy of your Windows Mobile device.

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Adventures with Snow Leopard

Based on my experience, businesses should not be afraid to upgrade to Snow Leopard. But they should be prepared to deal with a few cleanup tasks, so they shouldn't do it on deadline and should work out any kinks on a non-mission-critical machine first.

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Patch Tuesday: Five Critical

Security managers and operation teams will be greeted with a handful of significant Microsoft patches when they return to work Tuesday afternoon. Unfortunately for them, the most aggravation and the significant danger may come from the patch that isn't on the docket.

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CIO Turns Down $120K Raise, Sticks With School And Cisco

Wichita State University CIO Ravi Pendse has attracted $10 million in research funding from Cisco for the school's Advanced Networking Research Center in the past five years. So when a huge school from the ACC tried to woo him with an eye-popping raise of $120,000, Pendse said thanks but no thanks.

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BlackBerry Storm 2 Pwns Original Storm At Typing

More video of the BlackBerry Storm 2 has been posted to YouTube. This particular footage shows how well typing works on the new hardware from RIM. The Storm 2 kills the original Storm when it comes to typing speed and accuracy. Check it out.

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Old Wordpress Sites Exploited And Security Questioned

Apparently this weekend, a major exploit attack has been taking place on old versions of self-hosted blogging platform Wordpress. If you are using Wordpress for your blog, you should update immediately.

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Wolfe's Den Vlog: SAP BusinessObjects Explorer Brings BI To Masses

I caught up with SAP recently during their customer tour to roll out their hot new, intuitive Business Intelligence product, and shot a short video demo. SAP BusinessObjects Explorer is billed as a venture into real-time BI. What that means is it enables non-power-users -- as in, sales and marketing folks looking for quick data runs -- to extract useful information via simple, Google-like queries.

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Is Windows 7 Software, Or Tupperware?

Yesterday I got an interesting email from Microsoft, inviting me to host a Windows 7 launch party to help Microsoft celebrate in late October. Party hosts get a free copy of Windows 7 Ultimate and an opportunity to win a PC.

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7 Times As Many SMBs Use Twitter To Find Deals

Warrillow & Co. says small busineses are a whopping 700% more likely to use use Twitter than other social networks when looking for promotions and discounts.

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IBM's Branding Keeps Its Big Idea A Secret

IBM is building technology systems to help utilities and municipalities better manage resources. It thinks the water business could be worth $20 billion in five years, yet it has been running ads to make sure that nobody knows about it.

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Miles Appel, Kaiser Permanente and Gia Lions, Jive Software Invited to Speak at Enterprise 2.0 Conference

Continue reading "Miles Appel, Kaiser Permanente and Gia Lions, Jive Software Invited to Speak at Enterprise 2.0 Conference..."

AT&T: We're Working Really, REALLY Hard To Improve Our Network

Late last night one of my contacts at AT&T forwarded me a video. It was of himself. In the video he attempted to explain just what's going on behind the scenes as AT&T tries to boost the capabilities of its network to meet the demand hurled at it by the iPhone and other smartphone users.

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VMware's Hidden Ally, The Economic Downturn

It's no secret enterprises are making heavy use of virtualization in the data center. Market research shows their leading provider is VMware. With Microsoft offering virtualization in Windows Server 2008 and other free alternatives available, it's hard to see how VMware's grip will last. But VMworld offered a glimpse of why it may.

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A Fact-Based Defense of Enterprise 2.0

Enterprise 2.0 is often nothing more than a faith-based attack on hierarchy and organization, or so it must often seem. It's the gist of a recent piece by the estimable Dennis Howlett that was picked up by noted Enterprise 2.0 evangelist and Harvard Business School professor Andrew McAfee.

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IBM Supercomputer Saving Energy But Greenies See Red

The law of unintended consequences strikes again: a $50 million U.K. supercomputer designed to model weather patterns and watch for climate change has turned out to be an electricity-guzzling heat sink that has the greenies seeing red. But the managers of the country's most-powerful computer say its overall impact has cut emissions by 20 million tons.

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BlackBerry Desktop Manager For Macs Leaks Out

Mac-using BlackBerry fans rejoice! In July, Research In Motion announced that it would offer a Mac-compatible version of its BlackBerry Desktop Manager software. The official release is slated for later this month, but the 1.0.0 version has hit the Internet.

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Google Round-Up: Gmail Themes, Docs Forms, Ninja Tips

As part of its never-ending pursuit of perfection, Google has rolled out some updates to a few of its services. Gmail now has more themes, there are new tools to use when creating forms in Docs, and Google has more tips on how to be a Gmail ninja.

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Open Source No Defense Again Brain Drain

Which is worse: losing a visionary, or losing the people who make visions possible? The ongoing drama of Sun's acquisition by Oracle may tell us.

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On Windows Mobile 6.5 and 7.0

Windows Mobile 6.5 will be launching in just a few weeks now and there have been a number of OEMs jumping on board, including HTC and Samsung. Now comes word that LG Electronics is jumping in with both feet. As for Motorola, don't count them out just yet.

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Roadblocks To Virtualization

After the initial rollout, server virtualization projects often get stuck as managers and administrators begin to cope with how successful the first phase of the project was and begin to try to grasp how they can increase the number of systems that are virtualized. There are two big roadblocks to a high percentage of virtualization in most data centers; cost and efficiency.

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Red Hat's Virtualization Game Plan Looks Like A Winner

Red Hat Enterprise Linux isn't just for enterprise users. And neither are the virtualization tools baked into Red Hat's latest release.

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Google To Revamp Android Market

It looks like those leaked screenshots were true, as Google is preparing to upgrade the Android Market. At first glance, the changes don't seem monumental, but it could help quell some of the complaints we've been hearing lately.

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Google Books Metadata Includes Millions Of Errors

The Google Books database is riddled with errors, millions, of them by Google's count.

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Mobile Round-Up: Palm Apps, Bluetooth, Ovi Store, N97

Here's a collection of smaller stories that may not have gotten a blog post all to themselves. Palm has added a whopping 12 new apps to the Apps Catalog. Bluetooth headset usage has plummeted. The number of Ovi Store users is surprisingly small. The N97 is set to get a major firmware update.

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Stewart Mader and Thomas Vander Wal Invited to Speak at Enterprise 2.0 Conference

Continue reading "Stewart Mader and Thomas Vander Wal Invited to Speak at Enterprise 2.0 Conference..."

Businesses Don't Expect 100% Availability With Gmail

There's been plenty of blogging, twittering, and general hand-wringing about Google's Gmail outage Tuesday. But rather than extend this into yet another philosophical discussion about the viability of cloud computing, let's keep this in mind: Businesses who've signed on for Gmail don't expect perfection. In fact, both Google and Microsoft only agree to 99.9% uptime for their online email offerings.

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EMC Acquires Kazeon, Stiffs StoredIQ

The storage giant buys an e-discovery vendor, but not the one I expected.

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Is Salesforce Gunning For Google?

For years, the rumor was that Google was going to buy Salesforce.com as a way of breaking into the enterprise space.

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Scientific Linux: A Distro For More Than Labs

Here's further proof there really is a Linux distribution for every need out there: Scientific Linux. The name alone should speak volumes about its intent and design, but as always there's more under the hood.

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AT&T Status Update On MMS For iPhone

After several months of waiting (or two years for some, depending on how you look at it), AT&T has announced that on September 25, MMS will roll out to their 3G and 3GS iPhone customers.

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Thieves Clear Out Apple Store In 31 Seconds

A smash-and-grab attack on a New Jersey Apple Store nets thieves 23 MacBook Pro laptops, 14 iPhones and nine iPod touch handhelds in a quick 31 seconds. If they can rob a locked Apple Store that quickly, you can bet thieves can make off with employee hardware just as easily.

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Sprint Lands HTC Hero, Its First Android Phone

Today Sprint announced that it will begin selling the HTC Hero Android phone on October 11 for $180. The Hero has been slightly redesigned for Sprint, and features HTC's Sense UI and a multitouch display.

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Best Buy Sees Jump In PCs, Mobile, Flat Panels

While it might not be time just yet to break out your Ethel Merman version of "Everything's Coming Up Roses," Best Buy shares were trending up on an analyst report that the retailer is seeing strong sales of mobile phones, computing devices, and flat-panel TVs.

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How Will Opera 10 Go To 11?

"These go to eleven," says Spinal Tap's Nigel Tufnel as he describes the added capability of his guitar amps to go "one louder" than ten. I was reminded of the quote when I thought about Opera 10, which was released this week.

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Happy Birthday, Chrome; Now Get To Work!

A year ago, Google surprised the industry with its Chrome browser. Even the announcement was innovative, using a comic book to have the Chrome crew describe the design and goals of the new browser. Some recent news seems to indicate that Google is ready to put Chrome to work in an area that's critical to the company's future.

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Snow Leopard vs. Windows 7, Continued: Fighting The Last War

The operating system battle is a diverting sideshow, but the real battle is going to be over the next hardware platform. SMBs may not have embraced netbooks yet, but how will they feel about the iTablet?

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SMB And ERP: No Longer Mutually Exclusive Terms

It has been a very good week for open-source ERP developers -- and for small businesses that can benefit in a big way from the solutions they offer.

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Avaya-Nortel: The Pushback

Any big combination, whether it's a merger or an acquisition, is tough to pull off--tough, but not impossible.

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Latest Mobile OS From Microsoft Cannot Turn the Tide

Microsoft launched the Pocket PC in 2000 and really turned the tide in the mobile device market, long before there were smartphones. Palm was the leader, but due to advances by Microsoft and Palm resting on their laurels way too long, Microsoft became a dominate player in the PDA market. The PDA market though has all but vanished and smartphones have taken their place. Now Microsoft finds itself the underdog, and its latest release, Windows Mobile 6.5, won't be enough to turn the tide.

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Will The Rush To Health IT Create Talent Shortages?

As part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the federal government is funding numerous new technical assistance centers to help doctors and hospitals deploy e-medical records systems. That should fill some support needs. But won't many doctors require more hand-holding and won't most hospitals need tech people working closely with clinicians on-site? Where will all this talent come from?

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Storage Vendors Cater To V-SMBs

At VMworld this year there is a lot of emphasis on making the storage easier and less expensive for the small to medium sized businesses that are taking their first steps into the server virtualization market. The focus of these storage vendors is on driving down costs and driving out complexity.

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California Government High On Twitter

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is turning to Twitter to get ideas on how to help the financially struggling state. He's asking residents to tweet ideas for improving California, which the government is compiling on a Web site, Myidea4CA.com.

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Sony Ericsson: Xperia X2 To Run WinMo 6.5, Too!

The wireless industry is officially having a Big Day. Hot on the heels of HTC's Touch2 announcement, comes Sony Ericsson swinging for the fences with a Windows Mobile 6.5 phone of its own. The Xperia X2 seemingly has it all and rocks the most insane spec list ever.

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Why I Opted Out Of The Google Books Settlement

After long and careful consideration, and with a deadline looming, I chose to opt out of the Google Books settlement. Sorry, Google, this time you were evil.

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Gmail Outage Says More About Google Than Clouds

The hand-wringing over yesterday's Gmail outage was as predictable as it was wrong-headed.

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HTC Touch2 To Be World's First WinMo 6.5 Smartphone

HTC decided to step on Nokia's toes today by making a fairly weighty announcement of its own. The HTC Touch2, which will be available next month, will be the first smartphone to run Microsoft's Windows Mobile 6.5.

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Facebook Bug Month

A researcher plans to unveil a raft of Facebook vulnerabilities in September, one every few days or so. Which means a regular reminder to remind employees and staff to take care when social networking.

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Nokia World 2009: N97 Mini, X6, X3 Handsets Intro'd

Today at Nokia World, the largest handset maker kicked things off with a bang by announcing three new multimedia handsets. The N97 Mini takes the N97 down a notch, the X6 kicks things touch-screen style, and the X3 will slide its way into your heart.

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New CIO At Univ. Colorado: Big Raise, Big Expectations

The University of Colorado has just recruited from Harvard a new CIO described by his new boss as "one of the great IT minds in higher education." That's a nice intro-but, if you want to see something really nice, check out the raise he got over the previous CIO, plus his IT budget and staff size.

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Gmail Goes Down  Again

Google has been aggressively positioning its Gmail mail service as an alternative to Microsofts Exchange line and had a great deal of success in the small and medium business sector. However, the services reliability has been an ongoing concern, and it was knocked offline once this week.

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New Salesforce.com Contact Manager Edition Designed For VERY Small Businesses

The new Contact Manager Edition of Salesforce delivers several Salesforce.com features for managing business contacts and customers, for $9 per user per month -- but only for 1-2 users!

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Windows And Linux Users Get Another Great VM Option

Parallels, Inc. is a company best known for its Mac-based virtualization software. This week, however, it finally delivered an updated version of its Windows- and Linux-based products.

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Google Wave To Admit Schools And Businesses This Fall

Google Wave, the strangely compelling mixture of e-mail and instant messaging that was demonstrated at the Google I/O developer conference in May, will admit a limit number of school and business users this fall, with general availability promised next year.

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ReviewCam: Sharemethods Cloud-based Document Management

Document management. Boring, but necessary, right? Just to spice it up, put it in the cloud on Salesforce.com's App Exchange platform or Oracle's OnDemand Suite, and what you get is document management that starts to mean something from a customer-centric point of view. What you've got is Sharemethods.

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Program Aims To Erase Doubts About Health Data Security

A new certification program could make it easier for healthcare organizations to decide whether their IT security products meet their compliance needs.

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iPhone Battery Life Still Weak, Mophie Juice Pack Helps

A new report compiled by Strategy Analytics says that while most iPhone owners are pleased with their devices, they aren't so happy about battery performance. Though the iPhone doesn't have a user-replaceable battery, there are options out there. Enter the Mophie Juice Pack Air.

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30,000 Job Openings For SAP Consultants, SAP Official Says

An SAP official said today that 30,000 job openings exist worldwide for SAP consultants to support the needs of the company's 82,000 customers and their 12 million users across the globe.

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Maytag Crosses Popular Blogger, Gets Spun Dry

It's always been a bad idea for consumer companies to get celebrities angry, because celebrities have millions of fans, and can rally those fans to fight. Now, with the Internet and social media, it's easier for people to achieve celebrity and the power to significantly damage companies. That's a lesson that Maytag is learning the hard way, from blogger Heather Armstrong, who writes Dooce.

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Oracle Sees A Threat In Rimini Street

Apparently the third-party software maintenance firm known as Rimini Street, which Oracle and SAP have claimed is no threat to their businesses, is indeed a threat. Oracle has filed court documents requesting Rimini Street to produce information about its business, which it says could be a "carbon copy" of TomorrowNow, the company at the center of Oracle's lawsuit against SAP.

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Android Dev: No Money To Be Made In Android Market

Larva Labs recently released its sales figures for Google's Android Market. The results are less than encouraging. For the month of August, Larva averaged sales of just $62.39 per day -- and it has four apps for sale. Um, what's going on here?

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Sharp Offers Japan-Only Linux Mini-Note

Linux is always looking for new markets, and now it might have one via the ultra-small notebook space: Japan.

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Craig Newmark Discovers No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

What's Craig Newmark's "real sin?" It turns out that his transgression isn't, as the cover of the recent Wired would have it, "refusing to evolve," but rather of pride, an old fashioned desire to do some good.

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Wal-Mart Flexes Web Muscle By Adding 900,000 New Items From Outside Retailers

On the same day it created 1,500 jobs in deeply depressed Michigan by announcing seven new stores, Wal-Mart also revealed it is expanding the scope and scale of Walmart.com by offering on the site almost 1 million new items offered by other merchants. How about your company: are you innovating or standing pat?

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Windows Mobile 6.5 To Street On October 6

Finally. Today, Microsoft announced that it will fully launch Windows Mobile 6.5 and the Marketplace for Windows Mobile on October 6. Network operators AT&T, Sprint and Verizon are on board, as are phone makers HP, HTC, LG, Samsung and Toshiba.

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Aerohive Networks Attacks Wi-Fi Network Overloads

Wireless communications have become quite popular in small and medium businesses. As companies rely more heavily on these connections, it has become difficult to make sure that there is sufficient bandwidth to support important applications. To address that problem, Aerohive Networks enhanced its network monitoring tools.

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A Worm In The Apple For AT&T?

AT&T scored a big win when it became the exclusive supplier of the iPhone in the US. They have had the deal for a little over two years now and it should extend well into 2010. You'd think after selling over ten million devices so far, it would be a huge win for both Apple and AT&T. You'd think. Right?

Continue reading "A Worm In The Apple For AT&T?..."

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