InformationWeek: The Business Value of Technology

14 Cool Mobile Apps From Uncle Sam
From a NASA app that keeps you up to date on space news to a Smithsonian app that shows what you'd look like as a caveman, federal agencies have cooked up innovative mobile apps for iPhone, Android and BlackBerry users. Here are 14 of the most popular.
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My Mistake: 10 CIOs Share Do-Over Worthy Moments
Leading CIOs share the decisions that they'd still like to take back. Check out their lessons learned from mistakes on costs, culture, career path, and more.
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100 Years Of IBM: 25 Historic Milestones
IBM this week celebrates 100 years of innovation and business optimization. From punch cards to the S/360, from tabulators to teraflops, from CEO Watson to supercomputer Watson, IBM has a unique history. Take a visual tour back through the decades.
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10 Tips: Improve BlackBerry PlayBook Battery Life
Get more juice from your RIM BlackBerry PlayBook tablet using these battery-saving pointers.
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12 Brawny Business Intelligence Products For SMBs
Business intelligence isn't just for the big boys anymore. Check out our short list of star SMB options, from easy-to-deploy SaaS choices to affordable versions of the biggest BI suites.
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Samsung Chromebook: Hands-On Visual Tour
Finally, the Samsung Chromebook Series 5 surfaces. Early verdict: This beautiful, slightly pricey gadget adds elegance to Google's Mobile OS.
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Apple iCloud Purchasing First Look
Apple's iCloud will give you the ability to see all apps you've purchased on any of your iOS devices and download them to your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch without a wire in sight. Join BYTE executive editor Brian Burgess for a look at the service that will show you what to expect.
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50 Most Influential Government CIOs
Check out InformationWeek's Government CIO 50, our power list of top government CIOs--ranging from the NSA's technology chief to innovators at the state and city government level. They've got vision, clout, and sometimes, billion-dollar IT budgets. But most of all, these CIOs are known for delivering tangible, measurable results. Here's an inside look at the government technology leaders and their approaches to unique IT leadership challenges.
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Apple WWDC Visual Tour: First Look At iCloud, Lion, iOS 5, And More
Fresh from Apple's WWDC event, see images and details on Apple's iCloud service, Lion OS, iOS 5 for iPhone and iPad and other goodies unveiled by Steve Jobs. InformationWeek.com's Fritz Nelson brings you the latest from the company known for design style as much as substance.
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Sony Xperia Play Teardown
UBM TechInsights looks inside the Android-based Xperia Play from Sony Ericsson, the first "PlayStation Certified" smartphone.
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Nimble Contact Integrates Connections Across Mail, Social Networks
LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks have supplanted business cards for keeping track of important contacts and Nimble Contact utilizes the information and communications in these networks to keep contact info current.
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14 Leading Social CRM Applications
Social CRM is a double-edged sword. It gives businesses a tremendous opportunity to easily communicate with consumers, rapidly answering questions and responding to concerns. But it also gives companies more chances to slip-up or to be perceived as being unresponsive or uncaring. That is why a growing number of organizations are stepping beyond the confines of traditional customer relationship management and incorporating social media into the next wave of CRM implementation.
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Gmail Add-On Boosts Support Features
The Shared Inbox add-on for Google Apps Business accounts is designed to provide improved help desk and customer support ticket features for businesses using Gmail as their main communications platform.
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InformationWeek Analytics Presents: The Best of Interop 2011
Well, the votes are in and once again we're pleased to bring you the top new products that appeared at Interop 2011 Las Vegas. Every year, my fellow judges and I are delighted to be able to review and compare some of the hottest technology available, and this year was no exception. This year we had 135 qualified entries for Best of Interop, and in reviewing the nominees this year the trend seems to be a focus on a number of great products to allocate, secure, manage, and improve the performance of what's becoming an increasingly extended IT environment. In previous years, the emphasis was on providing many of the underlying technologies for virtualized and cloud resources, but for 2011 a number of the contenders for Best of Interop are looking at ways to provide better visibility and control of these distributed types of services. Recent headlines about service outages in the cloud just reinforce the need for products and services that not only enable the use of distributed resources, but protect and provide contingencies for cloud workload interruptions; whether they are internal or external to your enterprise. -- Steven Hill -- Lead Judge, Best of Interop 2011
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IT Salaries: 9 Ways We've Changed (Or Not) From 2001's Heyday
What a decade it's been for U.S. IT professionals. They rode the tech-fueled boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s to great heights, then crashed hard in the recessions of 2002 and 2008-2009. We have data from our annual U.S. IT Salary Survey dating back to 2000, so we thought now would be a good time to look back and compare today with the boom that was early 2001 -- the peak of salaries, raises, and perks, according to our data. We look at changes in economics and in attitudes, using data drawn from 18,201 respondents in 2011, and 19,206 in 2001.
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Inside Interop 2011 Hot Stage
Three months of planning the Interop network. Two weeks staging the equipment and preparing the network. Dozens of people from as many vendors all focused on putting together a network that will go live for six days. Glenn Evans, Interop network project lead and benevolent dictator, works with the vendors and volunteers to design, build, troubleshoot, and manage the InteropNet.

The hot stage is when all of the planning comes together. The InteropNet team documents every detail, down to where patch cords are connecting, ensuring that when the equipment is moved to the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas, it can be rolled to position, connected, and powered on in preparation for the exhibitors showing up and the show starting.

After the equipment is moved to the convention center, engineers check the equipment, reseating cables that might have come loose and fixing any problems that occurred. Much of the work after that involves running the network, including getting exhibitors connected and resolving any issues they may have.
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RockMelt Boosts Facebook, Twitter Integration
The RockMelt Web browser, which is based on the Google Chrome engine, is designed to be a tool for surfing the social Web. With deep integration into Facebook, along with capabilities to work with Twitter, RockMelt makes it possible to have a constant view into your social connections while using websites and Web applications.
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12 Hot Mobile Medical Apps
Mobile medicine is everywhere. There's the iPhone app that lets you cut away images of muscle layers to see what lies beneath, an e-health record system for the iPad, and a smartphone-based blood pressure monitor. Here are a dozen innovative ones.
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