Starter Project

25 super handy apps for project managers

2011-09-10T01:18:00.001-07:00

In the old days of project management, paperwork, filing, and note-taking likely ate up hours of a project manager’s work day. But since the dawn of 2.0, those tasks are becoming increasingly less time-consuming and more efficient. A good project management app will take you a long way. Don’t know of any? Don’t fret—there are twenty-five incredibly useful iPad apps for project managers to drool over and incorporate into their daily routines.
See three of them below:

Idea Sketch—The simple interface allows users to doodle and send their drawings as links.
Dragon Dictation—This app can turn your voice memos into digital text notes. Transcription made easy.
Dropbox—Back up (and share) your files in the cloud. It also syncs with your iPhone/computer.

More on all twenty-five at Masters in Project Management.
All the top project management tips and tricks.

The complete Google+ cheat sheet [infographic]

2011-08-01T05:38:00.001-07:00

Via TechnoStreak.

A single spelling mistake can cut online sales in half

2011-07-15T22:49:00.001-07:00

London: Poor spellings in shopping websites is costing Britain millions of pounds in lost revenue, experts have said.
Charles Duncombe, director of the Just Say Please group that runs travel, mobile phone and clothing websites, said an analysis of website figures shows a single spelling mistake can cut online sales in half.
Duncombe said he was "shocked" when recruiting staff at the poor quality of written English, according to BBC. Sales figures suggest wrong spellings put off consumers who could have concerns about a website's credibility, he said.

"I know that industry bemoaning the education system is nothing new but it is becoming more and more of a problem with more companies going online," he said. "This is because when you sell or communicate on the internet 99 per cent of the time it is done by the written word."
Duncombe said it was possible to identify the impact of a spelling mistake on sales. He measured the revenue per visitor to the tightsplease.co.uk website and found that the revenue was twice as high after an error was corrected.
"If you project this across the whole of internet retail then millions of pounds worth of business is probably being lost each week due to simple spelling mistakes," he said. Spelling is important to the credibility of a website. "You get about six seconds to capture the attention on a website."
William Dutton, director of the Oxford Internet Institute at Oxford University, said that in some informal parts of the internet, such as Facebook, there is greater tolerance towards spelling and grammar.
"However, there are other aspects, such as a home page or commercial offering that are not among friends and which raise concerns over trust and credibility," said Dutton. "In these instances, when a consumer might be wary of spam or phishing efforts, a misspelt word could be a killer issue."

Should there be an app for that?

2011-05-18T01:19:00.001-07:00

By Patrick Gray

Summary

According to Patrick Gray, there are several opportunities in the mobile space for a CIO to increase his or her visibility within the organization.

As the cheeky advertisements on television indicate, there seems to be a mobile application for just about everything. From calorie counters to witticisms from your favorite Jersey Shore characters, no stone appears to have been left unturned.

Despite this seeming glut, there are several opportunities in the mobile space, and mobile provides a great opportunity for a CIO to increase his or her visibility within the organization.

When most people in corporate IT start thinking about mobile applications, they tend to think about internal applications first. Perhaps there are CRM or order entry systems that would be great in the hands of field sales representatives, or internal collaboration sites that would be compelling on an iPad. These are all great ideas, and worthy of some experimentation with the caveat that building platform-specific mobile capabilities may not be the best investment as the mobile space is still very much in a state of flux. Rather than focusing primarily on internal mobile apps, the true "gold in the hills" for most B2C companies is the consumer space.

Mobile applications present a unique marketing opportunity that we haven't seen since the early days of the Web. Marketers still haven't quite figured out how to fully leverage the mobile format, and consumers are far more forgiving than the jaded bunch that seems immune to banner ads, and adept at ignoring anything that smacks of online advertising. Mobile is also one of the few areas where you can get intimate with your customer, traveling in his or her pocket and, if you can build enough trust, even knowing his or her location down to a few meters.

This relationship of trust requires applications that provide some form of value to the customer, through some combination of entertainment, information, or financial benefit; perhaps in the form of discounts or coupons. While this is usually the domain of marketing, the CIO who can provide expert guidance to their colleagues in marketing takes on the guise of trusted advisor and business leader, rather than tech gatekeeper to be avoided until absolutely necessary.

As CIO, you bring several critical experiences to the table that can help your company get the most of its mobile advertising dollar. While marketing tends to be quite capable of working with third parties, CIOs have often spent entire careers outsourcing technical development. You can provide valuable guidance on the application development process, suggest ways to use existing mobile technology that are quick and cheap, or even capabilities your colleagues in marketing never knew existed.

In addition, you bring knowledge of the company's existing systems and data. Getting a compelling mobile application in the hands of your target customer is great, but if you never garner and analyze any information about that customer, the effort does little other than build mercurial "goodwill". By bringing your expertise to bear early in the application design process, you can ensure marketing's creative brings hard, measurable data into the company. A cute game that excites your customers is nice, but a cute game that integrates that customer into your existing promotions builds a relationship and "converts" them to your brand is far more exciting regardless of which corporate function you hold.

If you find customer-facing mobile applications might be valuable to your organization, spend a few hours brushing up on some of the technologies, and get a couple people within your IT shop to do the same. In all probability, there are already developers moonlighting on their own mobile apps, who would be extremely excited to brief you on what is going on in the space. Reach out to your colleagues in marketing. If they're worth their paychecks they are probably already making a move in the mobile space, and your expertise will be welcomed early rather than grudgingly engaged at the last possible moment.

Patrick Gray is the founder and president of Prevoyance Group, and author of "Breakthrough IT: Supercharging Organizational Value through Technology". Prevoyance Group provides strategic IT consulting services to Fortune 500 and 1000 companies.

Unraveling the CAB

2011-04-20T00:45:00.001-07:00

By Patrick Gray
Summary
A Change Advisory Board tends to get overcomplicated when it's implemented at many organizations. Here's how to avoid that.
A Change Advisory Board (CAB) is another good idea that tends to get overcomplicated when it's implemented at many organizations.
At its core, the CAB exists to provide a balanced analysis of any changes to a company's systems and processes and to provide a final "ruling" on whether a proposed change moves forward or is shelved. The CAB concept is promoted by some of the popular IT management methodologies, which overlay the conceptually simple concept with layers of formalities and a veneer of unnecessary complexity.
Scope changes are generally the only way to control costs on an IT project, with seemingly minor changes made by junior analysts often carrying six-figure price tags. With this fact in mind, the CAB is your best defense against these changes dragging your projects deep into the red.
With this objective in mind, consider the following two keys to implementing an effective CAB.
Representation and transparency are key
If a CAB is seen as primarily an IT function, it will rapidly become a bureaucracy to be avoided, sabotaged and dodged.
In all but the most mundane infrastructure projects, most of your IT projects will be done to impact your company's business. As such, many of the change requests will be business-related and impact finance, marketing, sales and operations and often are fundamentally business decisions of how to allocate scarce resources rather than purely technical decisions. Therefore, your CAB must have representation from each business unit that is respected and empowered to make decisions.
IT gets the same vote as other business units and, save for articulating part of the costs of each change and guiding the process, does not gain any additional power to influence the CAB.
With the right people on the CAB, an arbitrator is required for any stalemates that arise. Depending on whether your company is more operationally or financially oriented, this might be the COO or CFO or in some cases even the CEO. In any case, each person on the CAB has voting power and is at a high-enough level that the buck stops with them rather than their decision being subject to reevaluation and overriding by a superior. It should be clear who makes the decisions, and each item that comes before the CAB should be allocated a rapid time frame in which it will be evaluated.
At the end of the day, when change requests come to the CAB you want them to be decided quickly and the people and process behind the decision to be respected by the company, even if it is disagreed with.
Time is money
A CAB's value comes from two areas: respected and fair people and process, and timelines. If you have painstakingly recruited the right people, but your CAB takes four months to reach a decision, it will rapidly lose its value.
While some recommend quarterly CAB meetings, this is generally too long, especially if you are implementing large-scale projects like ERP or CRM systems. Monthly meetings of the CAB should be the baseline objective, and with some forethought, each can be short and effective. Send a summary of each change request, the facts around the issue, and any background in advance of the meeting, and actually CAB meetings can be about final fact finding, analysis, and decision-making rather than endless debates.
A good decision is often better than a great decision two months from now, so in the case where information is missing or the environment is unclear, document the assumptions that went into a decision and document any triggers that might cause the board to reevaluate the decision and move on. Major organizational projects can burn significant amounts of cash just waiting for a critical decision, so be sure to convey the very real cost of inaction.
With the right people, a transparent decision-making process, and a focus on making good decisions as rapidly as possible, the CAB can be a very valuable tool. Rather than an administrative hurdle, it becomes a tool for ensuring money is spent effectively, changes are evaluated in light of the company's core business, and projects are able to move forward in the face of competing priorities rather than spinning their wheels (and burning cash) waiting for decisions.
For the CIO, an effective CAB shows his or her peers that the CIO understands that IT exists to facilitate the company's business and also demonstrates the value an effective IT organization provides to the larger company. Each member of the CAB will see IT efforts tied directly back to their business benefit and grow to understand that IT is about far more than servers and software.
Patrick Gray is the founder and president of Prevoyance Group, and author of "Breakthrough IT: Supercharging Organizational Value through Technology". Prevoyance Group provides strategic IT consulting services to Fortune 500 and 1000 companies.

Salary, not 'fun perks', attract IT talent

2011-04-18T23:54:00.001-07:00

By Jamie Yap

Summary

A good pay package is still the best draw to attract and keep employees, note recruiters. However, tech firms say offering "fun perks" at work provides similar appeal.
Axer Goh, manager of contracting division at Robert Walters, highlighted to ZDNet Asia that the "ultimate factor" that motivates many job candidates is the money on offer. This is the first thing most potential employees would think of upon taking up a new role, she noted.
"I have yet to come across a candidate who is more interested to find out about non-monetary job perks than the pay package provided by a new employer," she said in her e-mail.
Annie Lim, manager of IT commerce at Robert Walters, added to Goh's observations, saying that as the job market in the technology sector continues to pick up, job seekers and employees are factoring higher salary increments in their decision-making.
Gavin Henshaw, head of Kelly IT Resources, a specialist division within recruitment firm Kelly Services, concurred that a competitive salary will always play an important part in an applicant's decision-making process.
He noted in his e-mail that non-monetary perks are usually considered by people as "luxuries and non-essential" and will not be able to help retain staff.
Goh, however, said additional perks do "help retain talent to a certain extent" as employees are less likely to be actively exploring external work opportunities if they are happy in their current workplace.
Companies dangle perks
Despite the recruiters' assertions that salary remains the top draw for most potential and existing employees, IT companies ZDNet Asia spoke to said that "fun perks" play an equally important role in attracting top talent.
Myriam Boublil, head of communications and public affairs at Google Southeast Asia, for one, said "people don't join or stay with a company for money only". It is with this in mind that Google is "committed to providing its employees with benefits that encourage work-life balance and make employees' time at work as enjoyable and productive as possible", she added.
Elaborating on the company's work philosophy, she noted that besides a "competitive compensation package, which comprises of salary, yearly bonuses, and equity grants", all Google offices, including Singapore, have game rooms with Nintendo Wii consoles and pool tables, massage chairs, and cafes offering free meals all day. All these features are included to ensure that "work is challenging yet fun", she said.
"Our people are our greatest assets and we will always look after them so they are able to keep creating, inventing, finding solutions and breaking boundaries," Boublil noted in an e-mail.
Google's employee-centric approach appears to have paid off. The search giant was ranked fourth in Fortune magazine's "100 Best Companies to Work For" this year.
Scott Morris, managing director at NetApp Asean, also emphasized that today's employees have "different priorities and an increasingly bigger pay packet can no longer ensure employee loyalty". Studies have shown that employees who are happy and have job satisfaction are productive, he added in his e-mail.
"Happy employees are more willing to ride through the tough times with the employer and have a greater sense of ownership. This, in turn, manifests itself in happy customers and partners, thus favorably contributing to our bottom line," Morris elaborated.
Ranked fifth in Fortune's list of top places to work for, data storage firm NetApp also has "simple practices [in its Singapore office] to make coming to work more fun" such as breakfast gatherings on Fridays, free espressos daily and fruits weekly, the executive noted.
Social gaming company Zynga also believes in providing incentives to employees to reward them for their work. Colleen McCreary, the firm's chief people officer, said Zynga is "proud to offers its employees [in San Francisco] great perks such as free weekday meals, haircuts, massages, and bringing their dogs to work."
"Offering fun perks is a way for Zynga to give back to our staff in special ways," she explained in an e-mail. "They work hard and we want to make sure they feel appreciated, rewarded and cared for."
Career progression also important
Beyond these fun perks though, Kelly IT Resources' Henshaw pointed out that other offerings such as training and career progression may be more beneficial to employees in the long run.
"A great working environment is a bonus, [but] it is of less importance if it is not matched with personal reward and benefit," he stated.
Morris concurred. He said that NetApp nurtures its people and provides opportunities for career progression and expansion within the company, which is why preference is given to internal candidates for new job offerings.
Boublil, too, stressed that "Google is all about learning and offers many training and career development programs and initiatives". For instance, its engineers are placed under a "20 percent time" program that allows them to work on independent projects which interests them yet does not fall under their usual job scope, she explained.

How to engage employees in the workplace

2011-04-18T23:36:00.000-07:00

What does it take for a company to become successful at engaging its employees? Socialcast created this infographic to explore this very question.
In the formula that makes up an organization’s success, a key factor is employee engagement. Top-performing companies know this. Human Resources departments know this. However, studies show that there is still an overwhelming number of employees who are disengaged in the workplace. What are the factors contributing to this issue, and how can companies address this challenge to improve engagement and ultimately the bottom line?
(Click on the infographic below to learn more.)

5 management tenets for every CIO

2011-04-13T00:15:00.000-07:00

By Scott Lowe,

Summary

It's far easier to keep the people you have than it is to hire new ones. Here are five management tenets that are critically important to staffing success.
Topics

Finding and retaining good staff is extremely difficult, but it's even more difficult when employees are working under unfair conditions.

In this blog, I'll outline five management tenets that I believe are critically important to staffing success.

1. Recognize that people want to do well, so treat them well
In general, your IT staff doesn't come to work every morning with high hopes for achieving mediocrity or failure. People want to do a good job, want to contribute, and want to know that their efforts mean something. Make that your guiding principle in all your dealings with your staff.

Frankly, this can be really, really hard sometimes, particularly as you get stressed out and are dealing with something that might seem trivial. It's more than likely that, at some point in your management career, you'll look back and realize that you handled a particular employee action pretty poorly. When this happens, the affected person deserves an explanation and an apology.

This actually goes both ways, too. If you've treated your staff well, it's more than likely that they'll treat you well, and if they treat you unfairly at some point, they'll realize it and make it right.

I was in this exact situation a few weeks ago. One of my guys had a particularly bad day, and at the end of the day, a tense situation arose and he took it out on me. Now, the guy is awesome at his job and we generally have a great working relationship, but it obviously still bugged me. However, the next morning, he called me up, we had breakfast, and he apologized.

Of course, this just provides further proof that I have the best IT staff on the planet.

2. Understand that people (usually) fire themselves...do it fast
For clarification, I'm not talking about layoffs here. This topic is focused solely on the act of firing someone.

Even if you've made the best possible effort to recognize that people want to do well and you've infused this idea into all the conversations you have with your people, not everyone will be able to stay on board with the organization. It's up to you (and, of course, your team) to create an environment in which they want to operate. Unfortunately, when it comes to voting people off the island, that duty usually falls to you.

I've written before that it's important that people not be surprised that they're being erased from the org chart--at least when it's for performance or attitude reasons. Obviously, no matter how egregious the performance or attitude problems and no matter how many warnings have been provided, at that moment when you break the news, there will be surprise. However, after the shock subsides and the person is able to look back through the lens of time, I believe that, in hindsight, that surprise factor will lessen.

On this point, too, always use the probationary period as it was intended. Most organizations have a probationary period during which either the employer or the employee can opt out of the arrangement with or without cause. In many cases, this is done for fit reasons (in either direction) or if the employer discovers that the person is missing a key skill, although this should be caught during the interview. It's much easier to take this step during the probationary period than it is later on.

I will admit that I have fired someone during the probationary period due to fit, and I will admit, it was probably one of the best decisions I've made. Keeping someone around that can't fit or can't carry his or her weight is a drag on the whole group.

3. Give feedback, ask for feedback, and mean it
I'll go on the record as saying that I truly despise the annual performance review process. I find it close to useless for everyone except HR. People should know where they stand throughout the year, not at just a single point in time.

If something is going really well during the year, make sure the person knows it--better yet make sure the whole team knows it. When I get a note from someone on campus praising one of my staff, I usually forward it on to the whole IT staff.

If something needs improvement, improve it. Don't wait for performance review time. It's not fair to the organization, and it's not fair to the employee. The longer you let something go, the more opportunity there is for resentment to build among the staff about the situation, so address it sooner.

Also, make sure to be able to accept feedback from the staff from time to time, too. This is incredibly difficult sometimes, but it leads to a much better and much happier staff. If you tell your staff that you're willing to listen to feedback, actually, you know, listen to it. Like I said, it's tough, but I'm far from perfect and even make mistakes every now and then. I'm very fortunate that I have a staff that is more than willing to tell me when they think I've blown it, and, in most cases, they do so in a reasonable, respectful way.

Obviously, there are times that I disagree with their assessment, but we have a positive enough working relationship that, in most cases, they're willing to accept it. Just as often, if not more often, they "win", although that's really too strong a word.

4. Say "please' and "thank you"...the golden rule applies
My kids have gotten pretty good at the whole manners thing, but it astounds me at how often people forget to take these basic steps in the workplace. My staff works their butts off to do the work that has been assigned to them. As is the case with most IT staffs, we get more and more work to do and the staff count isn't exactly skyrocketing. When I ask them to do something, it's generally accompanied by a "please" and, upon completion, a "thank you".

5. Don't be a pushover... be fair, but firm
You might think that the advice in this article makes it look like I'm recommending that you be a pushover. Nothing could be further from the truth. Instead, when it comes to working with my staff, I simply believe that the people who work so hard to make me (seriously, I'd fail without the people I have working with me) and the organization successful deserve to be treated well, listened to, and respected. That said, I do expect results. After all, this is a job.

On that front, over the past few months, my staff and I have overhauled our project prioritization mechanisms in order to ensure that we have sustainable workloads that still meet the needs of the organization. I work with each staff person to assess project plans and determine time frames, and then we commit to those time frames and I expect completion.

That said, life always throws curveballs, so we maintain open lines of communication and, when necessary, adjust project time lines. Recently, we had a project due at the end of the month, but due to "scope creep" that was outside our control on another initiative, the project had to be delayed. Due to the critical nature of the "creeping" initiative, it was an easy decision to postpone the deliverable on the original project, but that decision was made in concert with the staff people on the projects to make sure that everyone understood why we were where we were and what we were going to do to ensure success on both projects. In this way, we dealt fairly with the situation (i.e. didn't punish my person because some other department had a problem) while instituting a new deadline, which, by the way, was met.

Summary
It's far easier to keep people you have than it is to hire new ones. Although I do believe in making sure that new blood and new ideas come into the organization, that can happen through other natural attrition, so make sure that you treat your people with fairness and respect. They will be more successful because of it, and you will be more successful because of it.

Scott Lowe has spent 15 years in the IT world and is currently the vice president and CIO for Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri.

source: TechRepublic

Jailbreaking device paves way for malware

2011-04-11T07:58:00.000-07:00

By Liau Yun Qing

Summary

Mobile users root devices to gain better control over their gadgets and have platform choice, but doing so increases security vulnerabilities, note security experts.
Jailbreaking a device is similar to implanting malevolent code into the device, thereby increasing its vulnerability to malware, warns a security researcher, while another notes that ultimately, such efforts boil down to "personal choice".
In an e-mail interview with ZDNet Asia, Kwee Anping, senior technical consultant at Symantec Singapore, likened jailbreaking a device to exploiting vulnerabilities in an operating platform. "It is how malicious codes are typically installed on a gadget and it increases the risk of the device being infected with malware," Kwee said.
He pointed to the Ikee worm and a hacktool, which exploited third-party Secure Shell (SSH) utilities installed on jailbroken Apple iPhones. "While Ikee simply changed the infected device's wallpaper to a photo of singer Rick Astley, the hacktool could reportedly steal data on the device and connect back to the attacker, giving him control over the phone including the ability to download and install other malware onto it," he said.
He added that attackers are also able to change the root password of the affected device and prevent the owner from accessing the phone.
However, that does not mean non-jailbroken devices are not vulnerable to security risks, he noted.
The growth in smartphone and tablets and their increasing connectivity and capability means there is a corresponding increase in attention, targeting mobile platforms, from both threat developers and security researchers, he said.
Axelle Apvrille, senior mobile antivirus analyst and researcher at Fortinet FortiGuard Labs, added that even the closely-guarded Apple App Store is not immune to malware such as the Adware/LBTM app, which poses as a free application.
Other than viruses, both jailbroken and non-jailbroken phones are vulnerable to security holes in the device's browser, she added in an e-mail.
Jailbreaking to more choice
Despite the security risks, Apvrille said it boils down to "personal choice" in which users decide if jailbreaking their gadgets is worth the trouble. "People who are not at ease with technology won't jailbreak their device, and they are probably better off that way," she said.
"[On the other hand], those who are more familiar with computing devices can feel too limited in Apple's business model and wish to 'escape the jail'," she said. "Sometimes, it's also [about subscribing to] a philosophy, [such as] not being tied to a single vendor or having the possibility to use open source software."
Apvrille said: "In any case, by jailbreaking your device, you may be able to give more power over your device.
"But of course, with greater power comes greater responsibility."
She urged users who are looking to jailbreak their device to go through the manuals carefully. "It is critical to read README [files], release notes and installation notes to install [the jailbreak] properly," she said.
Apvrille cited the case of the iPhone/Eeki.A worm, which infected jailbroken devices of users who did not read an important recommendation to change their root password. Users who jailbroke their device but changed the password were not susceptible to the worm, she said.
Symantec's Kwee, though, is adamant that users should not modify their device.
"Consumers jailbreak their mobile devices believing that it expands the functional or customization capabilities. What they are unaware of, however, is that the process of jailbreaking a device through exploits is not very different from using exploits to install malicious code," he said.
Similar to desktop computers, the exploitation of vulnerabilities can bring more inconveniences than benefits as initially thought, and users of jailbroken devices would leave themselves open to malicious attacks, he cautioned.
Despite the security risks, some mobile users have not refrained from tweaking their devices. In fact, the jailbreak software for Apple's iOS 4.3.1 release was available less than two weeks after the update was launched.
One self-proclaimed "loyal" Apple fan, who jailbroke her iPhone two months ago, said she was not fully aware of the security risks but did hear from friends that such phones were more vulnerable to viruses and system crashes. The 22-year old allied healthcare worker, who declined to be named, said she jailbroke her phone mainly to access free apps and "themes" which are only available on jailbroken devices. Themes provide more icons, skins and wallpapers for the iPhone.
She said she decided to jailbreak her phone only after the warranty ended.
"With the warranty, if my phone crashes I can still get it replaced. But after the warranty expires, it doesn't matter," she said.
Manufacturers warn against jailbreaks
Hardware makers and software developers have made efforts to combat jailbreaks by limiting the warranty of jailbroken products or pursuing the legal route to stop jailbreakers.
"Users should be advised that the loading of unapproved software on a Motorola device can void the warranty," said a Motorola Mobility spokesperson in an e-mail interview.
"Motorola's primary focus is the security of our end-users and protection of their data, while also meeting carrier, partner and legal requirements," he said. "A majority of Motorola's Android-based consumer devices in the market today have a secured bootloader in order to meet these security needs."
Microsoft also implemented similar initiatives for its mobile OS. "Microsoft does not support Windows Phones that have been altered from manufacturer- and carrier-specifications, and we caution that such alterations can dramatically impact reliability, performance, compatibility and security," said a company spokesperson in an e-mail.
Asked what the company is doing to prevent jailbreaking, he pointed to a whitepaper on anti-piracy in the Windows Phone Marketplace.
"Developers fuel Microsoft platforms, and we understand the importance of intellectual property in these ecosystems. We have a long history of developing protection strategies for our software and services and those of third-party developers, Windows Phone 7 and Windows Phone Marketplace are no exceptions," he said.
When contacted, Korean consumer electronics giant Samsung declined to reveal specifics on how it is preventing users from jailbreaking its Android handsets. Winston Goh, the company's product marketing manager of telecommunications, told ZDNet Asia in an e-mail that such information is "highly confidential" and cannot be revealed to the public.
Goh did stress, though, that consumers who root their Android devices will have their warranty "rendered null and void".
"If we allow users to root our devices and, subsequently, those users [make tweaks to] their Samsung Android device that cause it to fail, then brings it back to our customer service centers for repair--it would be very difficult for us to diagnose and pinpoint the exact issue since we may not have any evidence of what the user actually did," said Goh.
"This could potentially tie up our customer service resources, resulting in less time and resources available for other customers with valid issues.
"While we appreciate the fact that Android devices are inherently very flexible devices, we do need to maintain a certain level of control for the sake of [delivering] more efficient product management and customer service process," he said.

A tale of two PMOs

2011-04-06T01:51:00.000-07:00

By Patrick Gray
Summary
The actual benefits and most effective way to set up your project management office are difficult to identify. Here's a look at two different PMOs–one an administrative service, the other involving portfolio management.
If you've spent any amount of time in IT management circles, you've likely heard of a program/project management office or perhaps been asked to set one up for your organization.
Like many ideas in IT management, the actual benefits and most effective way to set up your PMO are difficult to identify and, in the worst case, quickly descend into a sales pitch for tools and services that do little to build an effective PMO.
Rather than focus on the minutiae of establishing a PMO, let's examine two different PMOs, one of which is unfortunately far rarer than the other.
The "Italian Job" PMO
I spent about four months living in Italy, and perhaps some of the best advice I received during our first visit to look for an apartment was to expect that few services would work correctly, which would make our stay far less stressful rather than lamenting every little thing that went wrong or every minor administrative hurdle thrown in the way of daily life.
The Italians had a zeal for administrative formality that was impressive, with the lowest level bureaucrat sporting a color-coordinated uniform, to the police whose impeccable uniforms, shined boots, and myriad badges, patches and epaulets made other police forces look downright slovenly.
Many PMOs are analogous to this system, with form trumping function. In the best case, this PMO serves as an administrative clearinghouse, managing the various people and projects occurring within the organization and ensuring they don't step on each other's toes.
In the worst case, these groups place their "traffic control" duties to the side and focus on formalities. While these efforts are certainly well-intentioned, this PMO gradually accumulates reams of standards, policies, and out-of-control knowledge repositories that become overwhelming to anyone actually trying to get real work done.
A struggling project manager likely hears from this group only when issuing new pronouncements about which forms must be completed or threatening an "audit" to make sure documentation is complete rather than providing assistance or insight into how to right a struggling project.
For the CIO, this PMO tracks projects and presumably provides standard reporting about their status, but does little to deliver insight into how the projects relate to the company's overall business. While there is nothing wrong with an organization that provides this consolidated view, it has little impact on the organization other than an administrative function.
The Investment Management PMO
For the rare organization that takes its PMO beyond its administrative role, the most effective function is managing the company's portfolio of projects like an investment portfolio. Traditional project management is tightly focused on tracking objectives and costs, but misses the mark on tying those objectives back to a business result with an expected return, risk level, and time frame to achieve that return.
Much as one might sit with their financial adviser and discuss their goals, the CIO can sit with this type of PMO and discuss where he or she sees the business going in the coming months and years. Someone nearing retirement might focus on bonds and low-risk investments, just as a CIO in a stagnant industry or facing a severe economic downturn might focus on short-term, low-right projects. Like the financial adviser, this PMO can quickly point to which projects are more strategic and likely more risky and which are "bread-and-butter" maintenance and infrastructure projects.
When considering new projects, the Investment Management PMO can look at where they fit among the existing portfolio and suggest changes before the organization takes on too many high-risk projects or encourage bolder efforts when the competitive landscape demands it. Effectively, this PMO becomes the key means for the CIO to deliver business results and convey the value that IT brings to the larger organization beyond just keeping the infrastructure up and running.
The latter PMO is obviously the preferred option for most organizations, but the price of admission is perfecting the former. No one would want a disorganized investment manager who could not instantly identify which stocks and bonds you were holding, just as no PMO can move into portfolio management without being able to track and manage projects from an administrative perspective.
Building an investment management PMO requires careful care and nurturing from the CIO and a variety of talents beyond raw technical skill or project management techniques. A project portfolio requires what is effectively P&L responsibility, since projects frequently are a big slice of the IT budget and the only area where true business returns can be demonstrated, short of selling IT services as a product to external customers. If your PMO cannot brief you on the key business objectives of each project and the likelihood of delivering those business results, you are simply not getting the maximum value from your PMO.
Patrick Gray is the founder and president of Prevoyance Group, and author of "Breakthrough IT: Supercharging Organizational Value through Technology". Prevoyance Group provides strategic IT consulting services to Fortune 500 and 1000 companies.
Source: http://www.zdnetasia.com/a-tale-of-two-pmos-62208252.htm?scid=nl_z_tgtm

Agile reporting methods for project managers

2010-08-04T00:06:00.001-07:00

By Rick Freedman, Special to ZDNet Asia

Rick Freedman describes the four reports that PMs typically create at the end of each iteration of Scrum agile projects.

Before we explore specific agile reporting methods, it's important to return to fundamental principles and refresh our motivations for project status reporting.

No project manager (PM), agile or traditional, denies that stakeholders deserve visibility into the project for which they are paying and on which they are relying for added business value. Any disagreement is one of degree and focus.

In traditional project management, we often spend a significant amount of our development time either trying to predict our development path or trying to track our path against these predictions. We frequently find ourselves pitted against our own predictions as we report to our customers ("You said you'd be 56 percent complete, but you're only 42 percent complete...what went wrong?").

One of the unspoken misfortunes of traditional project methods is that the PM and the team typically start out behind and in trouble and get progressively deeper and deeper into "task debt", destroying the team morale and diverting the PM from productive leadership activities to justification and detail obsession.

Read more »

The new world of risk management for PMs

2010-05-12T00:26:00.001-07:00

By Rick Freedman, Special to ZDNet Asia
Wednesday, May 12, 2010 12:22 PM

Read suggestions about how IT PMs should change their approach to risk in this new environment where everyone is more conscious of risk management.

After a long risk management session, in which the project manager (PM) tries to get the team to consider all reasonable risks and opportunities, the PM will ask the wrap-up question, "Are there any other risks we haven't captured?"

Some sarcastic wag will inevitably respond with what he considers to be an out-there scenario: "The building could blow up!" or "The next great depression might start!" The point of these remarks is usually to chide the PM to stop taking everyone's time spinning improbable scenarios of disaster and just let the engineers get on with their work.

If the twenty-first century has taught us anything, it's that these out-there predictions have a nasty habit of occurring. In fact, the incidence of these improbable events, and their obvious impact, has inspired a theory that is described in the best-selling book "The Black Swan" by Nassim Taleb.

The author's proposition, in short, is that the human brain is wired for pattern recognition and so it sees patterns and narratives where none exist. This gives rise to the fallacy that we can accurately predict the future from the past and that events will follow the patterns that we have recently observed.

Read more »

Have a global change project? Start by understanding remote offices

2010-04-28T01:14:00.000-07:00

Successfully implementing global change projects, whether they involve a massive worldwide software package or "soft" changes like a new process or policy, involve a unique set of challenges.
Not only are you faced with the usual gauntlets of scope, timeline and budget, but unique additions like language, culture and the "headquarters dynamic" rear their heads, derailing the most well-intentioned efforts if they are ignored. The headquarters dynamic is one of the more interesting of these challenges and represents the relationship between corporate headquarters, which generally initiates a change project, and the field offices, which are usually on the receiving end of these efforts.
Sir, yes, sir!
Traditionally, most companies implementing large-scale global projects assume a command-and-control model, with headquarters marshaling resources, setting schedules and essentially dictating orders to field offices.
You don't need an advanced degree in international relations to imagine that this usually breeds discord and resentment; field offices see the initiative as yet another grand scheme cooked up in the "ivory towers" at headquarters, with little regard to local operating, legal and resource constraints.
At best, regional offices begrudgingly comply with headquarters' fiat and promptly look for the best way to modify, work around, or altogether disregard the results of the change effort.
The opposite model is to issue what amounts to "suggestions" to local operating entities and hope that they follow through. Like the hundreds of e-mails we each receive offering advice and mild threats if some new policy or procedure is not obeyed, most of these end up promptly filed in the nearest rubbish bin.
What is needed is a model that takes into account the unique assets of field offices and leverages the operational and administrative powers of the home office as an asset rather than an overbearing administrative headache.
Understanding the remote office
Using the headquarters dynamic as an asset rather than a liability requires some understanding of the conditions in the field office.
Most field offices have less staff than headquarters and are more tightly focused on core operational activities like sales, marketing, manufacturing and logistics. Since these offices are usually established as a beachhead in an attractive market, they are generally lean and mean and focused tightly on getting the maximum results with the minimum amount of resources. As such, creative ways of doing business are often developed, and models that could benefit the company as a whole may be lying about undiscovered.
Many remote offices take pride in the success they have achieved, without the additional perceived overhead that exists at headquarters. Key to leveraging the headquarters dynamic is to acknowledge the good work frequently done in the field and seek out any best practices that can be incorporated into a global model.
In addition, rather than trying to deploy a "one-size-fits-all" solution to every global problem, consider two or three "standard" processes that accommodate a wide variety of statutory requirements, volumes of business, and varying staff levels. Usually what works at headquarters or a major regional hub is vast overkill for a local office that works in dozens of transactions rather than thousands.
The obvious way to ensure regional voices are heard is to incorporate regional personnel on the planning and deployment teams. Not only will their thoughts and field experience prove invaluable, but seeing multinational faces rather than yet another team of "drones from HQ" on the next change project will instantly instill confidence and credibility that local concerns are being aired and accounted for.
Making a friend of HQ
Perhaps the best role of headquarters in a global project is to serve as a global clearinghouse of knowledge, people and dispute resolution. Most failed global projects are rooted in a poor understanding of the headquarters dynamic, usually with the home office underestimating the complexities of field operations or simply turning a blind eye to their requirements and attempting to implement an overly complex solution in the name of "global standardization".
When headquarters is seen as having an open ear and working to transparently resolve disputes that are bound to arise in the course of a global project, the field will eventually see headquarters as a trustworthy asset to the change effort, rather than a monolith bent on implementing ill-conceived projects that get in the way of local operational activities.
For more on the role headquarters should play in a successful global change project and other tips on global projects, please download the free white paper: "Conquering the World--Delivering Globally".
Patrick Gray is the founder and president of Prevoyance Group, and author of Breakthrough IT: Supercharging Organizational Value through Technology. Prevoyance Group provides strategic IT consulting services to Fortune 500 and 1000 companies.

via zdnetasia

RIM: Carriers want users on Wi-Fi

2010-04-27T23:19:00.001-07:00

ORLANDO, FLORIDA--The ability to route calls over Wi-Fi to the company PBX (private branch exchange) on BlackBerry phones will not alienate carrier partners, but be a welcome feature for the latter, says Research in Motion (RIM).
The new platform, called BlackBerry Mobile Voice System (MVS) 5, was announced Monday in a press briefing at the WES 2010 show. One of the highlighted features is the ability to allow users to make calls over their company PBX systems via any Wi-Fi network. Prior to this update, the phones were able to perform this function only over 3G.
This allows BlackBerrys to bypass a carrier's data network, and also costly roaming services whether it be voice or data, by connecting a user directly to the company's PBX. This is so long as there is a Wi-Fi network available.
Alan Brenner, senior vice president for the BlackBerry platform, said this move will not alienate carriers.
In an interview with ZDNet Asia, Brenner emphasized the phone maker's relationship with operators: "We do all of our business through carriers."
The cost savings from the new feature, he said, will present another reason for companies to get BlackBerrys, resulting in more business for carriers.
Wi-Fi offloading has also become an increasing aspect that carriers are looking into, as their networks feel the load strain of data-hungry smartphone users, Brenner added.
"Carriers will benefit from offloading of their networks to corporate networks. Call quality is also clearer over Wi-Fi," he said.
The update will be available to users mid this year.
Native apps more compelling
Irvin Nio, U.K.-based infrastructure architect with CapGemini, said his company is looking into enabling native access to its internal enterprise apps on BlackBerry phones. However, he added that the development tools available to his staff are behind in comparison to what is available for other platforms such as Windows Mobile.
Nio, who spoke to ZDNet Asia on the sidelines of the WES conference, said his users are asking for BlackBerry devices, but he is still "looking into how to make BlackBerrys more than just e-mail devices".
With native support for the company's ERP (enterprise resource planning) system available on other mobile platforms, Nio's team needs to get its BlackBerry support to catch up, he said.
Push e-mail--once synonymous with BlackBerrys--is now "commoditized" and available on other mobile platforms, so tight enterprise app integration is the next differentiator, he said.
Brenner said RIM offers developers three ways to make apps for BlackBerrys. Java apps are native and able to tap the phone's native functions through APIs, allowing the most control for developers, he said. Web-based apps are allowed, although these are not permitted to access APIs and are therefore more limited in function.
The third app type is the widget, which is based on Web apps, but which have some APIs available and can call up native device functions, he said.
Brenner said a number of RIM's customers have built BlackBerry apps for their SAP ERP systems, but these are Web-based. He could not say for certain if any have built native Java ERP apps, though these tools are available to developers.
Victoria Ho of ZDNet Asia reported from the WES 2010 show in Orlando, Florida.

Exploits not needed to attack via PDF files

2010-04-06T03:33:00.001-07:00

Portable Document Format (PDF) files could be used to spread malware to clean PDF files stored on a target computer running Adobe Acrobat Reader or Foxit Reader PDF software, a security researcher warned on Monday.
Jeremy Conway, product manager at NitroSecurity, created a proof of concept for an attack in which malicious code is injected into a file on a computer as part of an incremental update, but which could be used to inject malicious code into any or all PDF files on a computer.
The attack requires the user of the computer to allow the code to be executed by agreeing to it via a dialog box. However, the attacker could at least partially control the content of the dialog box that appears to prompt the user to launch the executable and thus use social engineering to entice the computer user to agree to execute the malware, said Conway.
Turning off JavaScript would not prevent the attack. It also does not require that the attacker exploit a vulnerability in the PDF reader itself.
The PDF reader incremental update capability "can be used as an infection vector", said Conway. The attack "does not exploit a vulnerability. No crazy Zero-Day (exploit) is needed to make this work."
Conway's proof of concept attack takes advantage of the same weakness in PDF readers that security researcher Didier Stevens of Belgium discovered a week ago and explained on his blog.
Stevens was able to launch a command and run an executable within a PDF file using a multi-part scripting process. As a result of that research and blog post, researchers at Adobe and Foxit Software are investigating ways to mitigate the risks from such attacks, according to ZDNet Asia's sister site ZDNet.
An Adobe spokeswoman did not have a comment on Conway's hack, but ZDNet posted Adobe's comment on Stevens':
"Didier Stevens' demo relies on functionality defined in the PDF specification, which is an ISO standard (ISO PDF 32000-1:2008)," the statement said. "Section 12.6.4.5 of the specification defines the /launch command. This is an example of powerful functionality relied on by some users that also carries potential risks when used incorrectly. The warning message provided in Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat includes strong wording advising users to only open and execute the file if it comes from a trusted source. Adobe takes the security of our products and technologies very seriously; we are always evaluating ways to allow end-users and administrators to better manage and configure features like this one to mitigate potential associated risks."
Foxit provided ZDNet this comment:
"Foxit takes every security concern seriously and we focus our engineering resources at determining the cause of the problem and coming up with a complete and safe solution. Upon hearing of a possible security concern, our development team went to work and a resolution was determined in less than 24 hours and an updated version of the Foxit Reader will be made public in the next 72 hours."
The problem results from the PDF reader software allowing executable files to be opened or launched from within the program, according to Conway. "Most users don't use that additional functionality," he said.
He suggested that PDF software firms could provide a "minimalistic" version of the PDF readers that do not allow other types of programs to be launched and allow users to decide which specific types of executables they want to be able to open within the program.
This article was first published as a blog post on CNET News.

APAC personal PCs see double-digit growth

2010-04-06T03:32:00.003-07:00

Following a down in the first three quarters of 2009, the Asia-Pacific branded personal workstation (PWS) market finally grew 14 percent year-on-year in unit shipments, with gains driven mainly by key markets such as China and Australia, says a new IDC report.
PWS shipments in the region had suffered double-digit declines over three consecutive quarters, but beat the analyst firm's forecast for Q4 2009 by growing 11 percent sequentially.
Mujin Kang, IDC senior market analyst of Asia-Pacific enterprise hardware research, described China as a "pivotal" driver in the regional market, accounting for 42 percent of total shipments in the quarter.
Kang pointed to education as the fastest-growing vertical at 59 percent year-on-year due to the strong uptake of computer-aided design (CAD), computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) and digital content creation (DCC) solutions. Although manufacturing held on as the region's largest vertical for branded PWS, he noted in the report.
Rajnish Arora, IDC research director of Asia-Pacific enterprise servers and workstations research, said vendors are now trying different tricks to boost sales and revenue in a changing landscape. "The key competitive differentiator for vendors is their ability to quickly bring to market highly optimized hardware platforms that seamlessly run a broad selection of packaged applications," he said.
IDC also listed HP, Dell and Lenovo as the top three branded PWS vendors in the region. For 2009, HP had a market share of 52.2 percent similar to a year ago, although this registered a 12.5 percent drop in year-on-year unit growth.
In second place was Dell with 38.6 percent, a decrease of 41.7 percent market share in 2008 and a 19 percent decline in year-on-year unit growth.
Lenovo's market share rose 8.1 percent from 4.5 percent from the previous year, and was the only one among the trio to enjoy a 51 percent year-on-year unit growth.

Mass market 4G handsets only in 2012

2010-04-06T03:32:00.001-07:00

4G long term evolution (LTE) mobile phones are unlikely to hit markets within this year or next, even as carriers rush to set up their LTE networks, according to market analysts.
One primary barrier is the lack of support for legacy voice services within LTE, limiting the 4G network to data use for initial implementations, said Adam Leach, principal analyst at Ovum.
In a report he sent to ZDNet Asia, Leach said the lack of consensus within the industry regarding voice over LTE will likely result in early4G handset models being deployed over existing 2G and 3G network for voice, while data will be routed over LTE.
Voice can be delivered over LTE's IP-based network natively via IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem), the older method of circuit switching that is currently used by 2G and 3G networks. Alternatively, operators can implement a VoIP (voice-over-Internet Protocol) application to tunnel voice traffic over LTE.
Daryl Chiam, Canalys senior analyst, said in a phone interview with ZDNet Asia that operators will also prioritize mobile broadband data usage with early LTE rollouts via devices, such as external modems.
"Several operators are prepping their LTE networks for initial rollout by the end of this year, but realistically we'd still have to wait another 12 to 14 months for commercial LTE network availability," Chiam said.
Leach said early adoption of LTE devices will likely come in the form of external modems such as dongles and PC cards, before users move to LTE-embedded devices such as laptops and mobile Internet devices (MIDs).
Ovum predicts voice-enabled LTE handsets will be a market reality only in the first half of 2012.
Once these handsets are available, Leach said shipments will grow at a CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of 163 percent between 2010 and 2014 to hit 75 million devices in 2014.
Chiam noted that it is "too early to tell" when 4G handsets would eclipse 3G handsets in sales.
Operators already on trial
Some telcos in the Asia-Pacific region have embarked on LTE pilots.
Singapore's three telcos MobileOne (M1), StarHub and SingTel announced their LTE trial networks earlier this year. M1 said last month it would be ready to unveil commercial services on its network by early 2011, according to reports.
Taiwan's Chunghwa Telecom announced in December last year it had embarked on a plan to set up a trial LTE network.
When contacted, two manufacturers--Nokia and HTC--preferred to keep mum on their LTE handset plans.
Last week, Samsung said it would release an LTE handset for trial in some U.S. cities by the end of the year.
According to a report posted in May last year, LTE chipset manufacturers will launch their first chips designed for portable modems and PCs. This means handset manufacturers will get dedicated chips only later--and certainly not in time for this year, it added.

Does the best IT job exist?

2010-03-30T03:29:00.001-07:00

Even though being a systems engineer nets you what has been deemed the best job in the United States, recruitment experts in Singapore point to the ups and downs of being an IT professional.
Earlier this month, a study conducted by Focus.com ranked being a systems engineer as the best job in the U.S., ahead of other professions including physician assistant, college professor and nurse practitioner.
While local experts ZDNet Asia contacted were unable to pin down a specific IT role that should be the most sought after in Asia, they did offer some thoughts as to the pull and push of various industry positions, based on indicators such as remuneration, work hours and job security.
Demand for role and job security
The good: Tay Kok Choon, head of strategic sales development at JobStreet.com Singapore, told ZDNet Asia in an e-mail that the general demand for IT skills remains "very high". This, he explained, is because aside from traditional application development, many industries such as healthcare depend on IT professionals to improve their customer care and services.
Brian Richards, who heads Kelly Services' IT resources business unit, also noted that those in "hard-core" technical roles or who have specialized skills tend to be recession-proof. "For example, deploying top talent [to develop] efficient applications and provide effective support for systems would be even more important during a downturn when dollars and cents and productivity are closely scrutinized," he said in an e-mail.
The ugly: The more "generic" skills, such as project management, tend to be vulnerable during an economic downturn, added Richards.
Pay, perks and progression
The good: According to Richards, IT jobs within the financial services and IT consulting sectors tend to accord higher salaries, even though bonuses in these verticals saw a "noticeable dip" in 2009 due to the economic slowdown.
Perks and incentives, he said, tend to be higher in specialist areas such as information security, as skill sets are not readily available but nonetheless critical. Another group that receives better perks is senior project or program managers whose roles have a direct impact on business operations.
IT candidates, Richards added, can "pursue careers purely along the technical path, eventually moving into middle- to higher-level positions such as IT director, CIO and CTO, regardless of whether they come from support, infrastructure or application development backgrounds". They may also broaden their experience by taking on "hybrid" roles that require technical skills as well as functional, domain or business experience. Such expertise could eventually lead them to assume senior positions such as COO.
According to Robert Walters' Global Salary Survey 2010 released in February, there will be upward salary adjustments for several IT positions in Singapore this year. The designations include IT risk and compliance director whose salary range is expected to be from S$160,000 (US$113,840) to S$280,000 (US$199,220), up from S$150,000 (US$106,725) to S$250,000 (US$177,875) in 2009. Service delivery managers can also look forward to remuneration of S$130,000 (US$92,495) to S$160,000 (US$113,840) in 2010, an improvement over S$120,000 (US$85,380) to S$140,000 (US$99,610) last year.
When it comes to contract positions, Axer Goh, Robert Walters' manager for IT contract division, said IT specialist roles are the most highly paid in Asia. Those in these roles also have the luxury of selecting projects and working in a new environment with every assignment.
JobStreet.com's Tay noted that many IT roles have a regional responsibility which allow employees to develop softer skills, such as managing cultural and solutions diversity.
The ugly: Robert Walters' Global Salary Survey 2010 stated that roles including director for service delivery, EAI (enterprise application integration) middleware specialist and software engineer can expect to see their maximum salary dip by about S$10,000 to S$20,000. No reasons were given for this forecast decline.
Working hours
The good: Kelly Services' Richards said non-IT support roles tend to operate within office hours, even though the average number of hours worked a day is around 10 to 12.
The ugly: "Occupational hazards" of IT professionals, he noted, revolve around work hours. Firstly, tight timelines and thin budgets typically call for IT professionals to clock longer hours and face tighter timelines than their counterparts in business roles. Major IT systems implementations also typically happen during non-working hours over weekdays, weekends and public holidays so as to minimize business downtime.
IT support jobs also tend to incorporate shifts due to the "follow the sun" nature of system support roles in global organizations, added Richards.
JobStreet.com's Tay pointed out that IT professionals need to be not only fast, but also thorough in their work. "The QA (qualitative analysis) process that was deemed applicable traditionally may no longer be sufficient in today's context. An IT professional needs to stay alert [and] be passionate about his role to reduce incidents of mishap," he said.

Five features of a good password manager

2010-03-30T03:28:00.001-07:00

Given the number of different sets of login credentials we need, especially online, managing strong password policy for your entire computing life may feel like an insurmountable challenge. But there are some tips and tricks that may be used to ease the procedures of secure password management.

A rough approach that many use involves nothing more than maintaining a text file full of passwords that is kept encrypted, so that none of the passwords stored in the file ever really needs to be memorized. They are all accessible by way of a single password, which is used to decrypt the file’s contents when a password is needed.

Such an approach is a bit clunky for many, however. Smoother methods of managing passwords securely exist, most commonly in the form of a type of program known as a "password manager".

Numerous examples of such tools exist, of varying quality and effectiveness. Different people have different needs, and the plethora of options ensures that something "close enough" to one's needs is almost certainly available. Even failing that, there is always the option of just using an encrypted file.

Unfortunately, many people are unaware of the importance of using strong passwords that are unique in each context where a password is needed. Even if they are aware of these measures to protect their private data and login credentials, many of them do not see much value in further protecting such passwords when storing them locally.

Finally, even among those who are aware of all the above considerations, many people do not consciously think through all the implications of the design and feature set of a given password manager when they select it, beyond the basics of ensuring that it encrypts stored passwords.

A number of key characteristics of a password manager are very important for securely managing passwords:

* Encryption: Stored login credentials should always be stored in an encrypted form, using peer reviewed, heavily tested, strong encryption, so that even if the device used to store the passwords is stolen the thief is unlikely to be able to recover passwords.
* Secure resource usage: A number of possible vulnerabilities involving unsecured resource usage are possible. For instance, using secure memory that will not be written to a pagefile or swap partition on disk guards against the danger of a decrypted password being dumped onto the disk where it can be recovered later by a malicious security cracker.
* Self-contained functionality: A lot of software is not written with absolute data security in mind, and it often should not be written that way if the intended functionality of the application presents no need for such security. This does mean, however, that any password management software should not trust the security of outside applications. What good is using secure memory if the decrypted passwords will just be passed directly through another application that stores everything in tempfiles that may never be explicitly deleted?
* Usability: Quick, simple, and easy use of the day-to-day functionality of the password manager is important for ensuring that the password manager actually gets used regularly. If it is not at least nearly as easy to use for all of a user's common password needs, it may get neglected in favor of less secure options.
* Verifiable design: Just as encryption that does not trust the user is not trustworthy, the same is true of software that handles any part of one's secure data management needs. This is especially true of something like a password manager, which manages the data used to access other applications that also need to manage data securely. To ensure that the software is trustworthy, it should be verifiable--which means that the source code is not only available for scrutiny, but verifiably the same as the source code used to produce the actual executable program itself. Security through visibility requires open source software. Ideally, security software should use copyfree licensing policy.

These five criteria are of fairly universal value for a general purpose password manager, and should probably be considered by everyone designing a password manager or selecting one for personal use. Other features may also be desirable, many of which involve suitability for a particular user's workflow, and the specific uses to which a password manager may be put, as contrasted with the specific uses to which another person might put a password manager.

For your particular needs, this short list of considerations will surely not be the only things worth considering, but it should offer a good start.

Chad Perrin is an IT consultant, developer and freelance professional writer. He holds both Microsoft and CompTIA certifications and is a graduate of two IT industry trade schools.

Sneak peek at the (totally awesome) new Photoshop

2010-03-28T03:23:00.000-07:00

News just in that Adobe Creative Suite 5 will be released on April 12th, with shipping expected to start a month later.
As usual, CS5 will combine the very best features in graphics, video and Web design for professionals, for an extortionate price.
That said, have a watch of this video of just one of the new Photoshop’s capabilities. You will be blown away. This makes light work of what previous would have taken hours, maybe even days of work.
If you’re low on time, skip through to 2.50.
[Note: YouTube is Down which is why you might not be able to play this video.]

via John Nack on Adobe via Techmeme

Legacy keeping IE6 in enterprises

2010-03-26T02:43:00.000-07:00

Some big Internet properties are dropping support for Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) 6, but a "don't fix it if it ain't broke" mentality continues to keep the aged Web browser in enterprises, says analyst.
Hydrasight's research analyst, Vu Long Tran, said in an e-mail interview that IT departments need a solid business case to justify upgrading Web browsers enterprise-wide, as well as to deal with the risks of making changes deemed unnecessary.
"Despite many of the benefits of later versions of Web browsers, change management and regression testing issues still consume the majority of thoughts and concerns of enterprise IT departments," said Tran.
Web browsers are also often tied to enterprise upgrade cycles, he said, adding that businesses are likely to upgrade to newer browsers that come with new OSes. He noted that Hydrasight estimates 80 percent of enterprises in the Asia-Pacific region are still running Windows XP, and IE6 numbers are tied to that OS.
According to Net Applications data from February this year, IE6 had a 21 percent share of the global market, ranked almost on par with the latest version, IE8. IE7 stood at 14 percent, with Microsoft browsers taking a 61 percent share of the overall market.
Tran said a primary reason for companies to continue using IE6 is to maintain support and stability of existing corporate systems.
Financial institutions ZDNet Asia contacted agreed, noting that this was the primary reason they were still running IE6. Alluding to the need to support legacy systems, these sources, who declined to be named, said they would be sticking to IE6 until their companies are forced to make an upgrade through vendor initiatives.
Upgrade by app requirements
Jason Yeh, regional IT manager for Kellogg Company, said in an e-mail that the company upgraded to IE7 a year ago, prompted by requirements of its Web applications.
Kellogg's global IT policy does not allow its users to download other browsers, said Yeh, who is based in Taiwan.
Paul Loke, senior assistant director of computing and information systems at the National Heritage Board, said the Singapore statutory board had also moved to IE7 as part of the country's government-wide initiative to operate within standardized environment, dubbed SOEasy.
Employees are also not permitted to download their own browsers, said Loke. "This is to reduce our manageability issues [such as] increased testing, and the standardized environment will allow us to roll out patches quickly and easily, in cases where urgent fixes are needed," he explained.
IE and Firefox browsers are supported internally, he added.
Tan Teik Guan, CTO and CEO of Singapore-based Data Security Systems Solutions (DSSS) Asia, said the company does not enforce browser choices on its staff.
Its employees also run multiple browser versions to test the company's Web-based products, Tan said, adding that most of the company's users prefer Mozilla Firefox.
According to Tran, organizations should not rush into upgrading Web browsers but must instead, concentrate on maintaining systems and ensure they are fully patched.
"We do not recommend a major wholesale upgrade of the Web browsers inside organizations, where upgrades are not linked to a complete desktop upgrade or overhaul," he said.
Lack of ongoing support
But, there has been pressure by the Web community to kill off IE6.
Google in January announced it would drop support for IE6 on its Google Apps and YouTube Web properties. Earlier this month, a group of Web designers also held a mock funeral for IE6.
However, Tran noted that Google's announcement will have minimal and gradual impact on enterprise users since enterprise vendors will ensure support for the most common denominator--the Microsoft family of browsers.
Furthermore, the main priority for IT organizations is in maintaining the overall computing environment, and not about managing benefits of individual applications such as the Web browser, the analyst explained.
Microsoft has been actively pushing the latest version of its browser IE8, since its launch in March last year.
In an e-mail to ZDNet Asia, Richard Francis, Microsoft's Asia-Pacific general manager for Windows Client business, said IE8's features offer "significant productivity gain" over the competition.
Its security features will also defend PCs against Web attacks, said Francis, quoting NSS lab study data that showed IE8 blocked 80 of all "socially-engineered" malware and phishing sites.
Nonetheless, he noted that the browser also comes with a "Compatibility View" feature to support pages on older versions of IE.

via zdnetasia

CiviCRM: Open Source Nonprofit CRM

2010-03-24T07:14:00.001-07:00

While dealing with salesforce.com I came across a lot of experts comparing it with another open source (customer) relationship management solution, CiviCRM. I had CiviCRM on my list of Top 10 CRM software. It is a web-based CRM tool basically designed to meet the needs of advocacy, non-profit and non-governmental groups. CiviCRM allows organizations to use a for-profit sales tool on nonprofit CRM purposes. The CiviCRM is also used by many NGOs including Amnesty International , Creative Commons and the Wikimedia Foundation. Let's get into the CiviCRM to delve more into it.
Here are some of the important features that should be considered before evaluating CIviCRM

Easy customization

CiviCRM forms allows the organizations flexibility to choose the information they gather from the constituents. The user can configure custom forms using data fields according to the configuration they require.

Custom fields

The users can set up their own custom data fields apart from the fields provided in standard constituent record.

Custom code

With CIviCRM the users can create their custom code that will initiate actions, calculations etc within the fields.

CRM integration

CiviCRM can be deployed on Drupal and Joomla! content management systems. This allows integration with other CRM systems.

Task Management

The organization using CiviCRM can chalk out new tasks and get them completed. Specific tasks can be assigned to each staff members. The task will appear on the dashboard of the employee.

Geocoding

CiviCRM offers a native integration for Google or Yahoo! It Maps API to geocode for all the contacts as they are created.

Pros

CiviCRM is one the perfect set ups when it comes to non-profit organizations. It is really intuitive to provide out of the box service for such organizations. CiviCRM offers in-built donation pages as well as event registration. It shows better opportunities for extending relationships. It is easy to create groups and smart groups easily in CiviCRM.

Cons

CiviCRM is not too adept with data management. This can be a hindrance for organization looking for extensive data management requirements. Reporting is a concern with CiviCRM. It doesn't integrate membership and payment information with Quickbooks. It also lacks use an external report-writing package that allows easy creation of custom reports.

Competitors

Salesforce.com is one of core competitors. CiviCRM is no comparison to the much more sleek and polished salesforece.com.Further, Salesforce.com thrives with huge ecosystem add-on that are missing in CiviCRM. Mot significant difference between the two software seems the member management out of the box. But, for a nonprofit set up that has a different approach to data management, CiviCRM could be a better selection.

Conclusion

Despites it's shortcomings CiviCRM has a core nonprofit design that makes it perfect for nonprofit organizations. If you have something more to provide, give in. .

Microsoft Dynamics CRM vs. Salesforce.com : An Unbiased Review‏

2010-03-24T07:12:00.001-07:00

Salesforce.com:

Salesforce.com is a leading company in Contact Management Software. They provide customer relationship management by allowing companies to organize and get reports that is going to streamline the business and makes the business more profitable.

Advantages:

It provides customers with host of solutions like customer analytics, document application, marketing automation etc
The software offers the most flexible CRM solutions that serves almost all business needs. On- demand application is made easier because of the range of services it provides. You can consider it as the backbone of on - demand application and that is the reason for its huge number of users.
The tool can be installed easily across a wide range of departments and in turn achieve customer satisfaction. You can integrate it with other customer solutions.
You can easily assess your business data using Sales force's sales force automation . For the sales department, it allows them to clearly study the sales data and provides them the idea to effectively manage sales activities with the result like more sales deals are closed, costs are reduced and time and effort is saved.
Sales force's tightly integrated solutions helps users work more efficiently and add some value of every part of the customer lifecycle.
Sales force provides the advantage of multi channel service with easy usage, customization etc. Using this software company can handle from inquiries to lead management.

Disadvantages:

No on-site CRM capability (on-demand only).
It has no vertical functionality and few vertical add-ons available for customers
The integration capabilities are limited with existing productivity software and line-of-business applications
The price is twice compared to Microsoft Dynamics on line solution.

Microsoft Dynamics:

Microsoft Dynamics CRM online, an on-demand customer relationship management service which is hosted and managed by Microsoft. The software provides marketing, sales and service through a web browser or directly into Office or Outlook.

Advantages:

5 GB of storage versus 1 GB in Salesforce.com Professional Edition
100 workflows versus none in Salesforce.com Professional Edition
Total cost of ownership is $44 per user, per month versus $65 per user per month for Salesforce.com Professional Edition
Your choice of a hosted CRM, on-premise CRM, or hybrid CRM deployment model
Web Browser Interface
Unlimited users vs five users allowed in the SalesForce.com Group Edition.
Mass email capabilities.
Microsoft Excel integration which is not available in Salesforce.com CRM
Easy integration with Microsoft tools whereas salesforce.com is difficult to integrate with Microsoft tools.
Capable of accessing data offline.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM is designed to allow customers to easily customize data types, workflows, role-based views through solution capabilities and standard Web services.

Disadvantages:

It does not provide support for power dialing and voice messaging.
The feature to record sales message and to track a customer through sales message is not available.
This is windows only application
There is a restriction for web interface
There is basic hardware requirements (3 servers) to run the software

Handy Tools to manage projects

2010-03-17T09:23:00.001-07:00

Events are indeed projects or at least they should be managed as such.
Here is yet another free list that will help you to be more productive.
Remember to save it in your del.icio.us for future reference and to let others know through StumbleUpon.

Too Many Ideas-Not Enough Action? Time to Use Actionmethod

2010-03-17T08:11:00.000-07:00

Actionmethod is another Project Management related...

ACTION STEPS: Creating

Action Steps are tasks that need to be completed. Each Action Step should start with a verb: "Call Y," "Follow up with X," "Buy a gift for Z."

Create an Action Step with the click of a button.

ACTION STEPS: Delegating

The Delegate feature allows you to use Action Steps to keep others accountable. Create, delegate and track progress.

When you create an Action Step you can delegate it to anyone with an email address.

Once an Action Step is delegated, you can monitor progress to ensure completion.

When someone delegates an Action Step to you, it appears in your Inbox where you can accept or reject it.

ACTION STEPS: Managing

Filters and dragging allow you to organize and manage your action steps by priority, due date or any system that works for you.

When you check-off an Action Step (once you complete the task), it moves to "completed."

You can quickly view all Action Steps, or view by project or group of projects, color, target, or search term.

You can drag and drop to reorganize and prioritize.

PROJECTS

All of your items in Action Method Online are organized by project. A project could be a client, a specific project at work, a party you're planning -- anything.

If you are within "Action Steps," "References," "Backburners," "Discussions," or "Events" you can view each of those items by project.

Or you can view all of the elements in a project at once.

REFERENCES

References are notes, links, files, sketches - any information related to a project that gives context to your Action Steps.

References can store notes, links, and files

With the Introductory Plan, you can create References by entering or pasting key information into the text box, or adding a link to a website or shared document.

With a Premium Plan, you can upload and share files and attachments

BACKBURNERS

Backburners are the brilliant ideas that you want to come back to later, but are not yet actionable.

You can quickly create Backburners

Then assign them to a specific project.

DISCUSSIONS

Discussions enable you to manage ongoing conversations across all of your projects with anyone that works with you. All relevant communications (shared documents, solutions to problems, feedback, decisions) are in one place, for optimal project management.

Discussions are organized by project and can involve any number of people.

Discussions are fully searchable

With a Premium Account, you can attach files to a discussion. They appear within your post, and in this attachment list.

EVENTS

Events are the key occasions/meetings/milestones/etc toward which you (and your team) are working. Events can be used to coordinate deadlines for Action Steps, aiding project management.

After you create an Event, you can then assign Action Steps to the Event (all the things that need to be accomplished by the time of the Event).

INBOX

Your Inbox receives all Action Steps that people delegate to you as well as any References, Backburners, Discussions, and Events that are shared with you.

When someone delegates an Action Step to you, it appears in your inbox.

ACTIVITY FEED

The Activity Feed records everything you do on Action Method Online. You can also view others' activity if they choose to share it with you.

Everything within the Activity Feed is fully searchable by keyword.

You can change your preferences to only see certain activity (e.g. Action Steps)

You can share selected projects in your Activity Feed with other users of Action Method Online.

You can see the Activity Feeds of those who choose to share it with you.

NAGGING AND APPRECIATING

Communication is the key to action, so use the simple Nag and Appreciate features to let other users know what you have to say.

Nagging allows you to send a quick reminder to another user of Action Method Online. It's a friendly way to push projects forward.

The opposite of a nag! Spread the love.

ACTION STEPS: Target Date (optional)

When necessary, you can add a "target targdate" to Action Steps (due date), to ensure timely completion.

ACTION STEPS: Time Tracking (optional)

Time Tracking allows you to assign to an Action Step the amount of time necessary for completion.

You can view how much time the Action Steps in a specific project will take.

Teambox - A Project Collaboration Tool

2010-03-17T07:52:00.000-07:00

Teambox A place for your team in Twitter-like project collaboration tool.

Share tasks, messages, files. Get notified by email. Real group collaboration for your projects!

Five reasons why Teambox is a perfect fit

1-minute setup. Just like using GMail, you don't need to install anything.
Anywhere, anytime. Access your data from any computer.
Secure. We use enterprise-class servers to host and backup your data for you.
Evolving. Teambox is being constantly updated with new features.
Inbox-driven. You can be notified by emails from activities in your projects

Project Overview

Quickly review all the activity in your project. Follow activities to see the whole thread. Let others know what you're doing.

People Permissions and InvitationsProjects are only accessible to their members. Invite your co-workers and control permissions.

You can invite new users by putting in their email, or invite existing users by putting in their login name

Conversations

Conversations are a better way of communicating than email. They're threaded by topic and always available online. People following a conversation will receive emails about them.

Task lists

It's easy to know what needs to be done and what has been completed. Find which is the next step, and who's responsible. All your tasks in a glance.

Task StatusesTasks are made of series of comments. Each time you comment, you can update the Task's status. Tasks are open when somebody's assigned to them. Mark them as completed or rejected when you're done, and attach the results of your job.

Task Archiving

Once you mark a task as complete or rejected, you can archive it to unclutter your project view.

Files

Share files of any size with your team!

Profile Page

View what somebody has been doing lately. View their contact details.

Profile Settings

Complete your profile so others now how to contact you. This information is only visible to people in your projects.

Project Settings

Projects have simply a title and URL.

Project Archiving and Deletion

Once you're done with a project, you can archive it for future reference or delete it.

The Big Picture

2010-03-17T07:33:00.000-07:00

The Big Picture on Project Management...

more on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/thebigpicdotorg#p/u/0/VK1gxhERVtM

An intuitive web based project management tool- 5pm

2010-03-17T07:30:00.000-07:00

Try 5pm Looking for a better way to stay organized?

5pm can be your central location for project and task management, team collaboration, time tracking, reporting and more...

Chipmakers seek growth via smartphone team-ups

2010-03-17T07:22:00.001-07:00

With the adoption of smartphones increasing exponentially, chipmakers have identified this market as a key battleground. Collaboration and the ability to provide customization will be key to differentiating their customers' offerings as a means to gain market share.
Research firm, IDC, stated in a February release that the number of smartphones shipped in the last quarter of 2009 hit 54.4 million devices, a 39 percent increase on the previous year's figures. Its analyst, Flint Pulskamp, added in an e-mail that the smartphone semiconductor BOM (bill of materials) revenues will reach US$18.86 billion, and this is about 42 percent of the total mobile phone BOM revenue of US$44.57 billion expected this year.
It is in this growing market that chipmakers such as Globalfoundries, United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC) and Intel are looking to play and succeed in.
Said Jason Gorss, spokesperson for contract chip manufacturer Globalfoundries: "We see wireless applications and devices [such as smartphones] as the most strategically important market to fuel our long-term growth. The race to deliver chips with higher performance, more features and functionality, and increased power efficiency is more competitive than before."
To make a mark in this competitive arena, Globalfoundries, which entered the fray only in 2009 but has become one of the top contract chip manufacturers worldwide, is looking at collaborations with key partners to boost its standing.
Gorss told ZDNet Asia in an e-mail that the company will be partnering closely with industry leaders in mobile processors such as ARM to deliver system-on-a-chip (SoC) platforms. This will allow mobile device manufacturers to adopt new technologies faster and with "more compelling increases in performance and power efficiencies".
"For example, our latest collaboration on 28-nanometer HKMG (high-K metal gate) technology and ARM's Cortex-A9 delivers an approximate 40 percent improvement in performance, while reducing power consumption by 30 percent," he added.
However, fellow foundry player UMC is taking a different path. According to the company's spokesperson, it is working very closely with various customers to come up with customized products that will meet their needs.
"Most customers need differentiated technology to distinguish their products from others, and we are demonstrating our capability to tailor processes to fit our customers' needs," said Richard Yu, corporate communications manager, UMC, in an e-mail response.
He added that the company's revenue share from communication products "was more than 60 percent" in the fourth quarter of 2009, and it is hoping to evolve its business and technologies through customer feedback and interaction.
According to Adam Leach, Ovum's practice leader for devices, chipmakers should focus on "high-performance architectures that can scale up to meet demanding needs of multimedia and gaming, yet can conserve battery life and scale down when performance is not needed".
He also thinks Intel, which only recently announced its move to enter the mobile chip field, will have to play catch-up with current market leader ARM. The latter possesses the rights to the chip design used in most smartphones and licenses that technology to manufacturers such as Globalfoundaries, according to the New York Times.
"Intel has some way to go before it can match the power and performance ratio of chips manufactured using ARM's architecture, and it will take a few years before Moore's Law will allow [the company] to compete," said Leach in his e-mail. This reiterates the point made in an earlier ZDNet Asia report on Intel's intentions for the smartphone market.
Responding to this, Intel spokesperson Barry Sum said of the chip giant's strategy to playing this field: "We are using a combination of architectural, design and leading-edge manufacturing process enhancements, as well as feature integration to build the right products for the right segment, at the right price.
"We're comfortable with our approach and believe Intel Atom to be a compelling alternative for delivering the full Internet experience today and in the future. The software compatibility of the Atom platform also makes it possible to run all of the richness and interactivity of the Internet that we have come to expect on a PC," he added.

SEA semicon market chips in at No. 3

2010-03-15T02:51:00.003-07:00

The 2010 outlook for the semiconductor industry in Southeast Asia is rosy, underscored by increased investments in wafer fabs and photovoltaics (PV), according to new estimates from global industry body Semi.
In a statement Friday, Semi said the region's materials industry encompassing semiconductors, displays and PV markets will reach US$7.1 billion in 2010, making it the third-largest global market after Japan and North America.
The Southeast Asia semiconductor capital equipment market is also expected to grow 65 percent over 2009 to US$2.3 billion this year, the association added. Last year, the capital equipment market saw a dip of 46 percent year-on-year.
"We believe the region is in economic recovery and positioning itself well for the next growth cycle," said Terry Tsao, president of Semi Taiwan and Southeast Asia. "Traditionally, Southeast Asia is the leading hub for semiconductor final assembly and test. However, recent investments in wafer fabs have transformed the region into a major player in front-end manufacturing as well."
The PV industry is also poised for steady growth during the year. Globally, solar installations will rise by 51 percent, with several new PV manufacturing facilities in Malaysia and Singapore slated to begin production from 2010, Semi said.
The industry body, however warned that the semiconductor industry may not be ready for an anticipated period of long-term sustained growth. It suggested that falling revenues and downsizing over the last year might affect the ability of companies to obtain funding quickly enough to support business expansion, product innovation and human capital investments.
Last month, research analyst Gartner said worldwide semiconductor revenues in 2010 will increase 20 percent over last year, to reach US$276 billion. Demand for DRAM (Dynamic random access memory) will drive semiconductor growth, the analyst firm said.

South Korea may ban Android Market

2010-03-15T02:51:00.001-07:00

The government of South Korea has warned Google to take action on unauthorized games content found on Android Market, or risk having its service banned in the country, according to a news report.
South Korea's Games Ratings Board officially notified Mountain View, Calif.-based Google to remediate the situation, and comply with the country's regulation requiring all video games to be rated by the Board before release, reported Chinese news agency Xinhua on Thursday.
According to the Board, there are currently about 4,400 unrated games accessible on the Android Market.
"We have confirmed a number of game content available to South Korean users on Google's Android market has not been rated by the country's board," the Games Ratings Board said in the letter. "If Google fails to make any corrective measures, we may have to completely shut down the Android marketplace in South Korea."
The report added that both Motorola and LG Electronics released Android-based smartphones in South Korea in the last two months, with more releases scheduled in the coming months.
In an e-mail Monday to ZDNet Asia, a Google spokesperson confirmed receipt of the letter from the Korean agency, and said the company is currently reviewing it.
The apps market has seen a resurgence over the past year, with research firm Ovum predicting that users will download some 18.6 billion mobile apps in 2014, generating US$6 billion in revenue.

NXP bets on tech to solve 'societal' needs

2010-03-15T02:50:00.003-07:00

Amid a changing world filled with challenging issues such as depleting energy and food resources, NXP Semiconductors is looking to utilize its experience in analog and digital technology to produce tools aimed at mitigating these problems.
Headquartered in the Netherlands, the semiconductor company has identified four "mega trends"--energy, mobility, security and health--on which to focus its development efforts, said René Penning de Vries, NXP's senior vice president and CTO. It is hoping to leverage its ability to offer products and services that would meet these "societal" needs, he added.
To do so, NXP is banking on its high-performance mixed signals (HPMS) technology to produce "optimized, niche solutions" for everyday living.
"HPMS basically is a set of optimized technologies, which are augmented with digital signal processing, that NXP uses to introduce efficient, smart solutions to meet today's needs," de Vries told ZDNet Asia in an interview.
For instance, he noted that there is a cheaper alternative to the electronic road pricing (ERP) system Singapore currently uses, which comprises electronic toll gantries erected around the city-state.
Cars can be implanted with a chip so that the vehicle can be tracked via global positioning systems (GPS). This will enable local authorities to determine road usage patterns of any time of the day, plan out a flexible tariff system, as well as provide car owners a one-time bill collectively for the number of times they enter a "tolled" area. This way, there will be no need to build gantries, he said.
"The data sent out by the chip can also be secured by NXP's proprietary technology known as 'Smart MX', which is used in securing credit cards, too," de Vries said.
As for mobile phones, and smartphones in particular, de Vries said most of the company's efforts are still in "the research and development stage".
However, he added that NXP is focusing on audio technology in this device segment.
For example, by utilizing Micro-Electro-Mechanical System (Mems)--the integration of mechanical elements, sensors, actuators, and electronics on a common silicon substrate through microfabrication--technology, there are now ways to filter out "ambient noises", he said.
de Vries cited an example of how drivers in India tend to use their car horn liberally while on the road, making it noisy to make a call in such situations. "Using our technology, we are now able to filter out the sound of these car horns when making phone calls," de Vries said.
Asked about producing processing chips for smartphones, he said NXP is not involved in this line of business as "it requires huge volumes [of sales] to recoup the initial expenditure". The company is instead focusing on what it does best, which is primarily in the field of HPMS, he added.
de Vries noted that NXP has also come up with a technology based on solar cells, aimed at preventing energy wastage.
He explained that currently, photovoltaic cells within a solar panel are stacked atop one another, and if one of them is shaded--whether by trees, buildings or even bird droppings--power efficiency of the entire panel can drop by between 20 and 30 percent.
To circumvent this problem, NXP has introduced individual photovoltaic cell power converters so that even if one or a few cells are shaded, the rest of the cells in the solar panel can still convert energy optimally, de Vries said.
"What we aim to achieve with HPMS is to measure, calculate and communicate the various electronic data that we have, to bridge the gap between societal trends and new devices and processes," he said.

Microsoft races to plug IE hole after exploit code released

2010-03-15T02:50:00.001-07:00

Microsoft said last week it is testing a patch to fix a new hole in Internet Explorer 6 and IE 7 following the release of exploit code on the Internet.
With the announcement it seems increasingly likely that the company will be issuing a patch for the hole before the next Patch Tuesday in about four weeks, if the testing of the patch goes quickly.
Microsoft warned about the hole, which it said was being targeted in attacks and could allow an attacker to take control of a computer, in an advisory on Tuesday. The next day, Israeli researcher Moshe Ben Abu released exploit code for the vulnerability after using clues in a McAfee blog post to find existing exploit code and pinpointing the weakness from there.
"We have seen speculation that Microsoft might release an update for this issue out of band. I can tell you that we are working hard to produce an update which is now in testing," Jerry Bryant, senior security communications manager lead at Microsoft, wrote in a post on the Microsoft Security Response Center blog.
"This is a critical and time-intensive step of the process as the update must be tested against all affected versions of Internet Explorer on all supported versions of Windows. Additionally, each supported language version needs to be tested as well as testing against thousands of third party applications," he wrote. "We never rule out the possibility of an out-of-band update. When the update is ready for broad distribution, we will make that decision based on customer needs."
Microsoft included workaround information in its initial advisory on the hole, which does not affect IE 8, and on Friday updated Security Advisory 981374 to add more information on workarounds following Ben Abu's work.
"With today's update, we have added a Microsoft Fix It to automate this workaround for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 customers," Bryant said. "As always, customers should test this thoroughly before deploying as certain functionality that depends on the peer factory class, such as printing from Internet Explorer and the use of Web folders, may be affected."

Indonesian schools first to get MultiPoint OS

2010-03-10T01:04:00.004-08:00

An Indonesian school was the world's first to sign up for Microsoft's Windows MultiPoint Server 2010, the software giant announced.
Microsoft said on Tuesday at the Asia-Pacific Regional Innovative Education Forum, it has made a deal with Bandung Elementary School in West Java, Indonesia for the school to be equipped with Microsoft's server OS product on HP hardware.
Microsoft announced Windows MultiPoint Server 2010 last month, aimed at allowing educational institutions to stretch their computing dollar. Several manufacturers have signed up to build products based on the software, such as HP's MultiSeat range of computers.
Another Indonesian school, the Harapan Ibu Islamic School in Jakarta was the second to sign with Microsoft. One of its ICT development team members, Mico Kelana Perdana said setting up the host PC to 10 computers took 10 minutes, and noted additionally that the school had tried out product for two weeks before deciding to sign on.
Camille Mazo, director of business development at Microsoft's unlimited potential group in Asia said educational institutions need access to affordable computing, and aims to bring down management costs for their ICT departments.
The server OS, which allows one host PC to be shared among users using different terminals can help schools lower their total cost of ownership on hardware, maintenance and energy, said Mazo.
Similar deployment has been made available by U.S.-based NComputing which provides a virtualization software that allows one single PC to be shared by several users.
Microsoft also announced a S$1.35 million (US$0.96 million) deal over three years to set up a innovation center with Singapore's Media Development Authority (MDA) and the National Institute of Education (NIE).
The School Technology Innovation Center will focus on the development and research of new educational approaches, classroom solutions and products to improve educational outcomes in the region.
Microsoft has pledged to provide technology and trainers. The NIE will provide training, and the MDA will oversee a new media-centric framework for teaching, Microsoft said.
Social network for teachers
Microsoft also made its Partners in Learning Network site available to the Asia-Pacific region today.
The Web site is a social networking resource aimed at allowing educators to collaborate with peers around the world, and is part of the software giant's larger Partners in Learning outreach to educational institutions globally.
James Bernard, worldwide director of Microsoft Partners in Learning, announced the launch of the site at the Asia-Pacific Regional Innovative Education Forum today, noting that the company hopes to attract two million users by next year.
Bernard said Microsoft is working on localizing the network in different languages within the next 12 to 18 months.

Microsoft warns of zero-day IE hole on Patch Tuesday

2010-03-10T01:04:00.002-08:00

Microsoft warned of a new vulnerability in Internet Explorer 6 and IE 7 that has been targeted in attacks, and released fixes for eight holes in Windows and Office as part of Patch Tuesday.
The company issued Security Advisory 981374, which addresses a privately disclosed vulnerability. The hole could allow an attacker to take control of a machine if a user visited a malicious Web site, Microsoft said.
There are some features that could mitigate the effects of an attack. For instance, all supported versions of Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Outlook Express, and Windows Mail open HTML e-mail messages in the Restricted sites zone by default, the company said.
"Protected Mode in Internet Explorer on Windows Vista and later Windows operating systems helps to limit the impact of the vulnerability as an attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability would have very limited rights on the system," the advisory said. "By default, Internet Explorer on Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 runs in a restricted mode that is known as Enhanced Security Configuration. This mode sets the security level for the Internet zone to High. This is a mitigating factor for Web sites that you have not added to the Internet Explorer Trusted sites zone."
The advisory also provides information on workarounds. Microsoft suggests that IE 6 and IE 7 users upgrade to IE 8 immediately.
"For the second time in three months, Microsoft has also issued a warning about a new IE zero-day bug," said Andrew Storms, director of security operations for nCircle, referring to the IE hole that was exploited in the attacks on Google and other companies late last year and disclosed by Microsoft in January. "There's no doubt that this new bug will be fodder for the ongoing security discussion that is a key part of the browser wars."
In its Patch Tuesday preview on Thursday, Microsoft said it would issue two bulletins rated "important" on Tuesday to fix eight vulnerabilities in Windows and Microsoft Office products. Details are in the company's Security Bulletin for March.
The first bulletin for March, MS10-016, addresses a vulnerability in Windows Movie Maker that could be exploited by getting a user to open a maliciously crafted Movie Maker project file.
"Both Windows XP and Windows Vista ship with affected versions (2.1 and 6.0 respectively). Version 2.6 is also vulnerable and can be freely downloaded and installed from the Web," Jerry Bryant, senior security communications manager lead at Microsoft, wrote in a blog post on the Microsoft Security Response Center. "Customers who install 2.6 on any supported platform, including Windows 7, will be offered the update."
The vulnerability also affects Microsoft Producer 2003, a free download with limited distribution. "At this time, we are not offering an update for Producer 2003," the blog post said. "While we continue to investigate Producer 2003, we recommend that customers either uninstall the application or apply an available Microsoft Fix It to disassociate the project file type from the application to add an extra layer of security."
The second bulletin, MS10-017, affects all currently supported versions of Microsoft Office Excel, as well as Office 2004 and Office 2008 for Mac, the Open XML File Format Converter for Mac, supported versions of Excel viewer and SharePoint 2007. A successful attack exploiting the hole would require a user to open a maliciously crafted file.
Meanwhile, the Malicious Software Removal Tool was updated to include Win32/Helpud, a Trojan that steals log-in information for popular online games.
Microsoft also re-released MS09-033, a bulletin for a hole in Microsoft Virtual PC and Microsoft Virtual Server, to add Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 to the list of affected software.
The software giant said it is continuing to monitor threats in connection with Security Advisory 981169 related to a hole in VBScript affecting older Windows systems that Microsoft disclosed publicly on March 1.
Although proof-of-concept code exploiting the hole has been released publicly, Microsoft said it was not aware of any active attacks. Customers using Windows 2000-, XP- and Server 2003-based systems are advised to apply the workarounds. Customers running Windows 7, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, and Windows Vista are not affected.

Cisco's big announcement? A new router

2010-03-10T01:04:00.000-08:00

Cisco is reminding us that the heart and soul of its business is still the humble router. In this case, maybe a not-so-humble router.
On Tuesday the company announced the CRS-3, its next-generation Internet router for the world's largest Internet service providers. Cisco may have overhyped the announcement just a tad. After a two-week countdown to an announcement that it said would "forever change the Internet," the company unveiled what looks like an upgrade to its existing "core" router called the CRS-1.
While the hype machine may have failed to deliver something truly revolutionary, Cisco's announcement is still significant. The new router offers 12 times the traffic capacity than its older-generation routers offer. It's three times faster than the older CRS-1, which was introduced in 2004. And it can handle 322 terabits of traffic per second, or simultaneous video calls for every person in China, the company said.
The new router, which starts at $90,000, will be sold to the world's largest Internet service providers. These aren't your run-of-the-mill ISPs selling 10 Mbps broadband service to consumers. These companies, such as AT&T, Verizon Communications, Level3, and Sprint, are the Internet service providers that aggregate and shuttle the bulk of the nation's Internet traffic across what is known as "the Internet backbone."
When the new Cisco routers are installed, the average broadband consumer likely won't notice anything new. But over time, they will see the benefits of the upgraded infrastructure. The Cisco CRS-3 will allow these Internet backbone service providers to increase capacity so that new applications, especially video-based applications, like high-definition TV, video conferencing, and 3D TV, can be offered to the mass market.
Cisco CEO John Chambers said this new router will serve as the foundation of the next-generation Internet that will see tremendous growth due to video.
"Video is the killer app," he said. "Video brings the Internet to life and most of the devices that will be coming on the network will evolve quickly into video. "
Chambers said just looking at the devices and applications that were at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January and Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in February are a good indication of what is to come in the future. And he said all these products feed into the Internet, which will load the network with more traffic.
"Whether it was gaming or video or tablets or ESPN bringing 3D sports to TV, it's about video," he said. Chambers added that this video traffic, along with other data intensive applications for things such as health care, will require more bandwidth than anyone could have imagined a short time ago.
Indeed, the new router will play a significant role in enabling all kinds of new applications and services to be rolled out. And as the access broadband networks get faster, more capacity will be needed in the backbone of the Internet to accommodate the traffic. Several broadband providers are already offering 50Mbps and 100Mbps broadband service to consumers. Google also recently announced that it plans to build ultra-high speed broadband networks to test new services and applications that use 1Gigabit-per-second speeds. And if history has taught the industry anything, it's that when more bandwidth is made available, applications quickly come online to use it. Once consumers start using high-capacity applications that necessitate these speeds, infrastructure equipment deep in the Internet backbone will have to be in place to support the flood of traffic.
While the scale and speed of the new CRS-3 is impressive and definitely takes the Internet to a new level of capacity, will it really "forever change the Internet?" as Cisco billed the announcement.
The Cisco's announcement is more of an incremental upgrade to the company's existing product, the CRS-1. IP routing is Cisco's bread and butter. It's not surprising that the company has developed yet another big router to keep up with growing Internet traffic demand.
Zeus Kerravala, a senior vice president at the market research firm Yankee Group, agreed. But he said the announcement is still very important to the growth of the Internet and future innovation of new applications.
"There is no way that a routing announcement could live up to the hype that Cisco created," he said. "But if you look down the road, when consumers want to watch multiple channels of high-definition video and 3D programming, and as more mobile apps come onto 4G wireless networks, companies like Cisco and its rival Juniper Networks need to push the envelope in terms of routing engineering."
As for Cisco's consumer strategy, which this announcement was rumored to be about, we're still waiting for a killer set-top box or some other revolutionary product that will truly change the Internet as we know it.

HP sues Asian firms for patent violations

2010-03-10T01:03:00.001-08:00

Hewlett-Packard has filed a suit against four companies based in Hong Kong and Taiwan, accusing the defendants of patent infringement, according to various reports.
The suit, filed in a federal court in San Francisco, alleges the Asian companies also converted over 300,000 genuine HP printheads from its facilities in Asia and sold these components globally as products manufactured by Hong Kong-based Mipo, Bloomberg said on Monday.
Other than Mipo, the defendants are Taiwan printer cartridge maker MicroJet Technology, Hong Kong-based PTC Holdings and SinoTime Technologies, a U.S. affiliate of Mipo.
Separately, the Wall Street Journal said Monday that HP has accused MicroJet of infringing six of its patents in ink cartridges. MicroJet sold these under its own name or as part of generic or custom-ordered cartridges sold to other companies including Mipo and PTC.
Mipo put products that were said to have infringed HP patents for sale online, on sites such as Amazon.com and Craigslist. The lawsuit also indicated that HP representatives purchased such products from Amazon between April and June last year.
The WSJ added that HP is seeking legal muscle to bar the defendants from selling the products it alleges to have infringed HP patents, as well as from using the Palo Alto company's products. It is also seeking to claim triple the damages incurred as a result of the infringement, in addition to other monetary awards.
A MicroJet spokesperson told Bloomberg the company's lawyers are looking into the situation, adding that HP had not contacted MicroJet prior to the suit. He confirmed that Mipo is a MicroJet customer, but said the company had no relations with SinoTime or PTC.

Apple to chop template-based apps

2010-03-08T23:20:00.000-08:00

Apple's new stand on template-driven applications will mean iPhone apps generated through automated tools may soon be barred from the App Store, says a blog post.
According to a blog post from Mobile Roadie founder Michael Schneider, Apple is clamping down on apps which duplicate mobile Web sites or blogs.
Mobile Roadie offers a tool which generates mobile apps for the iPhone and Android platforms, and is touted by its founders to be able to put an app together from scratch "in minutes".
While Schneider's blog post has been taken down, other blogs online have noted its salient points: "cookie cutter" apps will no longer be accepted in Apple's App Store. Meanwhile, Schneider's team has been offered suggestions on features that can be added to the company's product.
According to a TechCrunch report which followed, a fellow automated service from Appmakr has also been instructed on how to beef up its tool, so Appmakr's users will be able to gain entry into the App Store.
The service will add new features such as instant notifications, in-app purchases and offline access, in order to differentiate users' apps from what could otherwise be produced for a mobile browser, said the report.
Jimmy Yap, who has an iPhone app version of his blog, iMerlion, told ZDNet Asia in an e-mail interview that he was careful to pack additional functionality into the app when it was developed.
Here, the iMerlion app has an app directory, which the blog does not, said Yap.
"I think [Apple's decision] is a great idea. Developers are complaining that there are too many apps on the App Store, making quality apps hard to find," he said.
He pointed to SingTel's "disappointing" iPhone version of its InSing Web portal, which is identical to the portal's mobile version.
Yap's app was made by 2359 Media. He hinted that a new version of the app will take advantage of the iPhone's location-aware capabilities.
Medialets CEO Eric Litman offered TechCrunch a possible reason for Apple's crackdown: "Apple wants iPhone apps to be superior to Web experiences because they are extremely sticky and drive people specifically to buy the iPhone over competing smartphone platforms.
"Apps that are too simple or largely indistinguishable from the Web, other apps or particularly other apps on other platforms send the message to end users that the iPhone app ecosystem might not be particularly special."
Apple has been on a drive to clean out the App Store. Last week, it pulled Wi-Fi detection apps, saying these infringe on the use of private APIs, although it did not specify which. Prior to that, Apple banned apps containing sexually-suggestive material, which it said was in response to complaints from users.
Separate from the on-device App Store, Apple maintains a list of 4,413 mobile browser-based apps, at time of writing.

Simply Software Simply Invoice v2.3.1.5

2010-03-08T02:55:00.001-08:00

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How LSS affirms agile programming practices

2010-03-03T03:49:00.001-08:00

Joe Goss examines how the Define Measure Analyze Improve Control and agile software development methodologies address the eight areas of waste defined by Lean Six Sigma.

At the University of Wisconsin-Madison where I work as a senior business analyst, we recently completed a third year of using Lean Six Sigma (LSS) to improve administrative processes. (LSS is a combination of Six Sigma ideas with lean manufacturing.)
By using the LSS methodology, we were able to reduce wasted effort, minimize wait times, and improve overall process outcomes. Independent of that effort, we began slowly implementing agile programming practices and now recognize the improvements it offers within the context of software development. In this column, I'll explore the similarities between the effect of LSS on a process and the effect of agile programming practices on software development.
Note: This blog post is also available as a PDF download.
If we think of software development as a process, then LSS could be used to improve the waterfall software development life cycle. For this purpose, it is useful to think of processes in the context of its component pieces; LSS identifies five component pieces: suppliers, inputs, process, outputs, and customers. To help you translate a manufacturing process into a software development process, it will be useful to review Table A.
Table A

	Suppliers	Inputs	Process	Outputs	Customers
Manufacturing	Vendors	Raw materials	Assembly	Product	Consumers
Software development	Stakeholders	Requirements	Development	Software application	Users

The Agile Manifesto is an excellent starting point for understanding agile core principles. The Wikipedia entry for Agile Software Development provides basic information about the history, practice, and suitability of this software development discipline.
LSS defines two overall methodologies: one for developing a new project or process design and one for improving an existing process. Since the focus of this column is on improving a process, I'll cover the latter of these two methods.
The Define Measure Analyze Improve Control (DMAIC) methodology is commonly used to identify problems in a process, measure key data attributes of concern, analyze the resulting data, improve the process, and control the future state process to reduce defects.
One of the standard tasks in this methodology is the assessment of process waste. Since waste reduction is also a core principle of agile software development, let's examine how the two methodologies (i.e., DMAIC and agile software development) address the eight areas of waste defined by LSS. Table B compares a poor manufacturing process to some of the failings of traditional waterfall software development.
Table B

DMAIC-identified waste category	Waste category definition	Wasteful manufacturing processes addressed by LSS	Wasteful software processes
Transportation	Unneeded movement of materials supplied as input to a process	Raw materials travel a great distance from the supplier to the manufacturing site.	Project team and customer fail to communicate directly with one another about business requirements.
Inventory	Materials queued waiting to be processed	Excess stores of raw material may cause some loss or decay of inventory.	Comprehensive waterfall software requirements specification document is produced for an evolving business.
Motion	Unnecessary movement of people and equipment in the production process	Worker routinely steps away from the production line to retrieve raw materials.	Members of the development team are not located in a shared physical work space.
Wait time	Nonproductive time waiting for a production step to resume because of shortages or downtime	Worker must wait for a previous step in production to be completed.	Developer fails to ask peers for help in addressing a thorny, critical path development issue.
Overproduction	Producing more output than is required (e.g., just in case it is needed)	Worker creates more output than the next step in the production line can handle as input.	Developer adds extraneous features to the software, thinking the customer might like the additional features.
Overprocessing	Excessive work to produce a product	Worker adds excessive refinement to the output.	Developer needs to rework portions of the software.
Defects	Return of output to correct flaws in the product	Customer receives a defective product.	Customer identifies defects in the production software.
Skills	Underutilized skilled staff or inadequate staff skills	Inadequately trained production workers cause safety concerns or slow the rate of production.	Inadequately trained staff slow software development.

Table C describes how even agile "light" helps eliminate waste in the development process.
Table C

LSS waste category	How agile "light" reduces waste
Transportation	Synchronous, on-demand communication among developers and customers Customers work face-to-face with developers in a common development work space.
Inventory	Requirements and software specifications are provided to developers as needed, allowing the team to more readily adapt to changing or evolving business requirements.
Motion	A common work area is provided for developers. Daily "stand-up" meetings reduce the need to visit each developer's office.
Wait time	Common development area reduces need for asynchronous communication through phone tag or e-mail. Short, overlapping cycles of analysis, development, testing, implementation, and customer feedback minimize wait time.
Overproduction	Daily "stand-up" meetings expose extraneous development effort. Maximizing the amount of work not done reduces developers' incentive to "gold plate".
Overprocessing	Daily "stand-up" meetings identify difficult development problems and coordinate resources to resolve them.
Defects	Requirements-driven testing by developers reduces the incidence of defects and downstream effect. Paired programming reduces incidence of defects. Integrated testing and frequent software builds increase the probability that defects will be found early.
Skills	Tight integration of development team promotes sharing of skill sets. Adequate training reduces the need for heroic effort to save the project. Periodic self-evaluation by the development team identifies the need for additional training or support.

Conclusion
In identifying and eliminating waste in a process, the disciplines of LSS DMAIC and agile development share many attributes. While agile practices focus narrowly on improving the software development process, the broad discipline of LSS DMAIC is often used to improve manufacturing and business processes. By highlighting these similarities, it may help you to bring agile development to your organization, particularly if LSS is well established in your organization.

Apple sues HTC over iPhone patents

2010-03-03T03:46:00.001-08:00

Apple is suing phone maker HTC and has filed a complaint with the U.S. International Trade Commission, alleging that the Taiwanese company is infringing 20 Apple patents related to the iPhone.

"We can sit by and watch competitors steal our patented inventions, or we can do something about it. We've decided to do something about it," Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO, said in a statement Tuesday. "We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours."
The patents that Apple alleges HTC is infringing are related to the iPhone's graphical user interface, and the iPhone's underlying hardware and software design. The company is asking for a permanent injunction, which would prevent HTC from importing and selling infringing devices in the United States. Apple also said it is seeking damages, but it did not specify an amount.
HTC said it was caught off-guard by the legal action. In a statement earlier Tuesday, the company said it had heard of the complaints only through media reports and Apple's press release. The company said it was reviewing the filings. Until it completes its review, a company representative said she is unable to provide "comment on the validity of the claims being made against HTC".
Early posturing
"HTC is a mobile-technology innovator and patent holder that has been very focused over the past 13 years on creating many of the most innovative smartphones," the company said in its statement. "HTC values patent rights and their enforcement, but is also committed to defending its own technology innovations. "
Apple has been around the patent infringement block many times with regard to its iPhone, which quickly became both a technological and a cultural touchstone when it debuted in January 2007. But its lawsuit against HTC marks the first time it has aggressively initiated infringement accusations against another phone maker without being prompted.
It's also interesting that Apple has chosen to target HTC in this suit and not other cell phone manufacturers, such as Motorola, Samsung Electronics, or Palm, which have also built phones initially touted as "iPhone killers".
Another interesting point is the fact that Apple did not name software makers Google or Microsoft in its filings. In its complaint to the International Trade Commission, Apple named 12 phones that it claims use technology that infringes its patents. Five of those phones--including the Nexus One, which is sold directly by Google--use Google's Android operating system. And seven of the phones named in the complaint use Microsoft's Windows Mobile software.
Neither Google nor Microsoft were named as co-defendants in the federal patent case or the ITC complaint. This may be because the technology in question is software that HTC layers on top of the operating systems. If through the course of this case, Apple targets software features that are inherent in either the Google Android or the Windows Mobile operating systems, then Google and Microsoft would be forced to defend the technology in their operating-system software.
Typically, when a company licenses its technology to another company for use in a product, there is an indemnity clause that requires the licensor to defend its technology, should it come under legal attack. This is what happened in a patent case that Lucent Technologies filed against PC makers Gateway and Dell in 2003.
Microsoft, which was not named in the original suit, ended up joining the lawsuit because the infringement claims in the lawsuit had to do with MP3 and MPEG video-encoding and compression technologies that were supplied in Windows software running on the Gateway and Dell hardware.
This case has dragged on for years. In 2007, a San Diego jury found for Alcatel-Lucent and against Microsoft. And Alcatel-Lucent was awarded a record-breaking US$1.52 billion in damages. Microsoft appealed. Part of the case ended up getting thrown out. But another part of the case continues to this day and is still unresolved.
"The Alcatel-Lucent-versus-Microsoft case is analogous to this one because in each case, Microsoft provides software to hardware vendors, and the hardware vendors are the ones getting sued," said Jason Schultz, director of the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic at the University of California at Berkeley School of Law. He explained that two main questions need to be answered to know if Google and Microsoft will eventually be pulled into the dispute.
The first is whether Apple's infringement claims include technology in the underlying operating-system software supplied by Google and Microsoft. And the second is whether indemnity is included in the licensing agreements between Google and HTC,k and Microsoft and HTC, respectively.
"Even without specific agreements requiring them to jump in, Google and Microsoft may defend their technology, anyway," Schultz said. "If Apple is successful with its suit, it could have a chilling effect on the promotion of Android and Windows Mobile phones."
Google wouldn't comment specifically on the case, but it said it would defend its technology.
"We are not a party to this lawsuit," a Google representative said in an e-mail. "However, we stand behind our Android operating system and the partners [that] have helped us to develop it."
A Microsoft spokesman declined to comment.
iPhone's days in court
Since the iPhone's arrival, Apple has been the target of several patent infringement lawsuits. The company has been accused of copying multitouch technology, visual-voice mail technology, and digital-camera and imaging technology.
The most bitter battle for Apple so far has been against Nokia, the world's largest maker of mobile phones. In October, Nokia filed a suit against Apple claiming it is infringing on 10 of its patents related to its wireless handsets.
Apple countersued a couple of months later, claiming that Nokia is infringing 13 of its patents.
In December, Nokia lodged yet another complaint against Apple with the U.S. International Trade Commission, alleging that Apple infringes seven Nokia patents "in virtually all of its mobile phones, portable music players, and computers." The alleged patent infringement is connected to key features in Apple products, including user interface, camera, antenna, and power management technologies.
Meanwhile, Kodak recently filed complaints with the International Trade Commission against Apple and Research In Motion related to digital-camera patents. The photo company claims that the camera technology used in Apple's iPhone and RIM's BlackBerry to preview images infringes on a digital-imaging patent owned by Kodak. The lawsuit was filed concurrently with the U.S. International Trade Commission and in U.S. District Court in Delaware.
Technology companies have increasingly been filing patent infringement cases with the ITC because the process there tends to move much more quickly than in the federal court system.
"ITC cases are much faster and can be over in 18 months," said Steven Lieb, a patent lawyer and partner at Frommer Lawrence & Haug, a New York law firm. "You can't get damages, but you can get injunctive relief."
But Schultz said faster isn't necessarily better.
"A lot of mistakes can be made when you're burning through documents as quickly as you do in an ITC case," he said. "Judges and administrative folks in the ITC cases handle things on the fly. So while you get a decision much faster, it's not always a better decision. It's something to be watched."

Software AG wants to be 'Apple' of BPM

2010-03-03T03:45:00.001-08:00

Software AG is hedging its future on producing user-friendly products and courting users by way of a "Facebook" for the business process management (BPM) community, said the German software vendor's CEO, Karl-Heinz Streibich.
Speaking at a press conference here Monday, Streibich said: "Ease of use can translate to a quantum leap in market share."
He likened the company's intention to democratize BPM tools to Apple's iPhone, which he said captured new smartphone users. "That's what we want to achieve in the B2B (business-to-business) space," said Streibich.
Customers have been requesting more worker-friendly interfaces, he said, noting that in BPM pilot projects conducted, ease of use often translated to customer acceptance.
"BPM is a business concern, so you have to speak the language of business users [so that] BPM can and will be used by non-IT business users," he added.
The company is also planning to release on Tuesday a social network around the BPM theme, called ARISalign.
Peter Kurpick, Software AG's chief product officer, said the social network will provide a "Facebook of BPM" aimed at reaching out to users and help more office workers discover business processes.
The ARISalign platform is available as a browser-accessible site and via the iPhone, with plans to add other smartphone platforms to the list, Kurpick said. The endeavor is aimed specifically at regular office workers, not technical personnel, he added.
Process workflows that have been put together on the Web platform can be exported to Software AG platforms WebMethods or ARIS, or the XDPL (XML Process Definition Language) standard, which is be supported by software from other vendors.
ARIS (Architecture of Integrated Information Systems) is a framework that encompasses design, deployment and management of business processes, including a methodology for business process modeling and management. The language was released by IDS Scheer, which was acquired by Software AG in July 2009.
Another tool for ARIS is a natural language search tool similar to Web searches, called ARIS Rocket Search.
Wolfram Jost, Software AG's IDS Scheer chief product officer, said of the search tool: "We know easy-to-use search from the Internet, and this is translated into our [ARIS] dashboard."
Software AG also intends to fully integrate ARIS and WebMethods, which it acquired in April 2007, into its portfolio this year.
Toward the end of this year, data will be interchangeable and can be synced across three of the company's products: BPM suite WebMethods, Web-based business process modeling tool ARIS Business Architect, and SOA repository CentraSite, said Kurpick.

EMC-Intel to embed cloud security, compliance

2010-03-03T03:44:00.000-08:00

EMC, RSA, VMWare and Intel have announced a new collaboration to introduce a framework encompassing security and compliance for cloud computing in the enterprise space, revealed key executives.
At a media briefing here Monday, before the start of this year's RSA Conference, executives from the various companies detailed plans to utilize Intel's new Westmere processing chip, which will feature a new platform called "Trusted Execution Technology (TXT)". This technology will provide authentication for every step of the boot sequence, from verifying the hardware configurations and initializing the BIOS, to launching the hypervisor, according to the partners.
This "trusted computing infrastructure" concept will be based on a hardware root of trust that will come with Intel's latest chip and encryption technology, secure virtualization environment, security information and event management, and GRC (governance, risk and compliance) management software, the companies said in a joint statement. This comes after EMC's January acquisition of Archer Technologies, which provides GRC software.
EMC acquired RSA in June 2006 and VMWare in December 2003.
"Today, most organizations have little to no visibility of what's occurring within the infrastructure layers of clouds, making it impossible to verify their security," Pat Gelsinger, president and COO for EMC's information infrastructure products, said in the statement. "Together, our companies are demonstrating that internal and external clouds can be visible, measurable and reportable for the secure management of a company's most important business processes."
Speaking to ZDNet Asia after the briefing, RSA CTO Bret Hartman noted that the TXT technology is an "expansion" of an earlier Intel iteration known as the "Trusted Platform Module". The TXT was developed specifically for the Westmere processor, he added.
"We're putting together all the current physical technologies and infrastructure of EMC, RSA and VMWare and together with Intel's contribution, create a commoditized product that will provide companies a granular, in-depth look into their IT systems in the future," Hartman said.
By securing the entire stack down to the hardware, companies can bypass the problems of running their applications over legacy systems and other unsecured hardware infrastructure, he explained.
He noted that this system will also enable IT administrators to specify applications that can run over the cloud, and prevent unrecognized software from running on companies' cloud networks, whether public or private.
However, no specific product launches have been lined up yet, Hartman said. "Hopefully, we will see products in the market within a year or so," he said.

Microsoft warns of zero-day hole for older Windows

2010-03-03T03:42:00.001-08:00

Microsoft warned of a new hole on Monday that could be exploited by attackers to take control of older Windows systems running Internet Explorer and for which proof-of-concept exploit code has been released publicly.
The vulnerability affects Windows 2000-, XP- and Server 2003-based systems. It exists in the way that Visual Basic Scripting, or VBScript, interacts with Windows Help files, Microsoft said in its security advisory. VBScript is an Active Scripting language for executing functions embedded in Web pages.
In an attack scenario, victims would somehow be lured to visit a malicious Web site that displays a specially crafted dialog box, Microsoft said. The box could prompt visitors to press the F1 key, which would install malware on the visitor's computer when pressed. The F1 key is used to bring up the help function.
Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 are not affected. The issue is mitigated on Windows Server 2003, where IE Enhanced Security Configuration is enabled by default.
The advisory includes several workarounds, including advice to avoid pressing the F1 key when prompted by a Web site, restricting access to the Windows Help System, setting Internet and Local intranet security zone settings to "high" to block ActiveX Controls and Active Scripting, and configuring IE to prompt before running Active Scripting or disable Active Scripting in the Internet and Local intranet security zone.
Microsoft complained in its advisory and a statement that the vulnerability was not responsibly disclosed. The hole was revealed last week and proof-of-concept code was released by iSEC Security Research.
Anyone believed to have been affected by the hole can visit Microsoft's Consumer Security Support Center Web site.

XP and Windows 2000: Time running out on support

2010-03-02T03:11:00.000-08:00

Some of Microsoft's older operating systems will soon take another step towards the end of their lifecycles.
Businesses using Windows XP will need to upgrade to Service Pack 3 (SP3) of the operating system by July in order to continue receiving support from Microsoft.
Although XP is currently in its extended support phase, which runs until April 2014, users will need to be using a supported service pack to be eligible for this. The cut off for XP SP2 support is 13 July 2010 while support for XP SP1 ended in October 2006.
XP users will need to install SP3 through the Windows Update online service. Those not using XP SP2 will need to install this before downloading SP3.
XP SP3 will be supported for 24 months after the release of any additional service pack or until the end of the extended support phase - available to Software Assurance subscribers - in April 2014.
Microsoft will inform users of the need to upgrade in a number of ways. As well as the Windows Blog, the company is revamping its windows.com website to inform customers about the end of support for XP SP2 and prompt them to take action.
When users visit a Microsoft website, the website will detect if they are using XP and direct them to the relevant section if they need to install service packs.
July 2010 will also herald the end of support for Windows 2000 which was first released a decade ago.
Meanwhile, support for the release to manufacture version of Vista, will end on 13 April 2010. Users running Vista without any service packs will need to install one by this date with Microsoft suggesting they upgrade to the latest version, SP2.

Europe 'will not accept' three-strikes in global treaty

2010-03-02T01:33:00.002-08:00

The European Commission has pledged to make sure the Acta global treaty will not force countries to disconnect people for unlawfully downloading copyrighted music, movies and other material.
The assurance from the office of the trade commissioner, Karel De Gucht (pictured), is the strongest statement on Acta (the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) to emerge from the new Commission since it took office earlier in February.
"We are not supporting and will not accept that an eventual Acta agreement creates an obligation to disconnect people from the internet because of illegal downloads," John Clancy, De Gucht's spokesman, told ZDNet Asia's sister site ZDNet UK last week.
Read more of "Europe 'will not accept' three strikes in Acta treaty" at ZDNet UK.

Pentagon OKs social media access

2010-03-02T01:33:00.000-08:00

The U.S. Defense Department has made its peace with social media.
Long skittish about forums such as Facebook and Twitter, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) says that it is now OK with social-networking services and other interactive Web 2.0 applications. A memorandum released last week makes it official policy that the agency's nonclassified network will be configured to provide access to Internet-based capabilities across all Defense components, including the various combat branches.
That's not to say that the Pentagon is embracing all of the free-wheeling nature of blogs, tweets and online video. Soldiers, sailors and airmen will still be expected to refrain from activities that could compromise military actions or undercut readiness.
"Commanders at all levels and heads of DoD components will continue to defend against malicious activity on military information networks, deny access to prohibited content sites (e.g., gambling, pornography, hate-crime related activities), and take immediate and commensurate actions, as required, to safeguard missions (e.g., temporarily limiting access to the Internet to preserve operations security or to address bandwidth constraints)," the Defense Department said in a news release.
The Pentagon says it recognizes that social networks, among other Web capabilities, are useful tools for interaction both within the Defense Department and between the agency and the general public. It is also satisfied with the balance it has struck between network security and use of Internet-based tools.
And it also acknowledges that an either/or decision between security and information sharing is impractical.
"If you look at either one individually, you will fail," said David M. Wennergren, deputy assistant secretary of defense for information management and technology. "You will have great security, but no ability to access information sharing. [Or] if you think only about sharing, you will run into issues of operational security and letting bad things into your system. So you can no longer think of them as two separate subjects."
The military has been using social-networking tools for some time, but policies have not always been consistent across the branches, and officials over time have wavered on how much they were willing to let individuals engage with the likes of blogs, YouTube, Facebook, and the like.
"Facebook is heartened by today's decision to begin to allow our nation's men and women in uniform and civilian employees across the Department of Defense responsible access to social media, which plays an important role in people's daily lives," Facebook said in a statement.

End draws near for Windows XP SP2 support

2010-03-02T01:07:00.002-08:00

Some of Microsoft's older operating systems will soon take another step towards the end of their lifecycles.
Businesses using Windows XP will need to upgrade to Service Pack 3 (SP3) of the operating system by July in order to continue receiving support from Microsoft.
Although XP is currently in its extended support phase, which runs until April 2014, users will need to be using a supported service pack to be eligible for this. The cutoff for XP SP2 support is 13 July 2010, while support for XP SP1 ended in October 2006. XP users will need to install SP3 through the Windows Update online service. Those not using XP SP2 will need to install this before downloading SP3.
Read more of "XP and Windows 2000: Time running out on support" at Silicon.com.

US suit accuses Sony, LG, others of price fixing

2010-03-02T01:07:00.000-08:00

Major optical disc drive (ODD) players including Hitachi, LG, Samsung, Sony and Toshiba, have been accused of price fixing by a U.S. electronics retailer, which has filed suit against the companies, according to various reports.
East Haven, Conn.-based Prisco Electric Company last week initiated an antitrust suit with the Californian Northern District Court against the Japanese and Korean makers, alleging the vendors colluded since October 2005 to "fix, raise, maintain and stabilize the price of optical disc drive products sold in the United States", V3.co.uk said in its report.
"These defendants have a long history of engaging in anticompetitive conduct, such as Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM), Thin Film Transistor Liquid Crystal Display (TFT-LCD) and Cathode Ray Tube (CRT)," Prisco added in the filing.
The retailer also claimed the disc-drive makers tapped trade organization forums to meet and negotiate agreements to keep prices of CD, DVD and Blu-ray drives used in products such as Sony's PlayStation 3 and PCs, artificially high, reported Computerworld.
"When the price of ODD began to dip, the defendants entered into an illegal agreement to prevent competitors from entering into the market and to keep prices at a supra-competitive level," Prisco noted in the suit.
According to the filing, the defendants own over 90 percent market share of the U.S. ODD market, which is worth billions of dollars a year.
The Computerworld report added that Prisco was looking for triple damages, as well as an injunction against the companies involved to stop future price fixing activities. The retailer, however, did not give a specific amount.
In a lawsuit, triple or treble damages is a term used to denote the plaintiff's request for the court to award triple the amount of actual damages incurred.
In October 2009, the U.S. Department of Justice Antitrust Division issued a subpoena to Sony subsidiary, Sony Optiarc America, as part of its investigation into anticompetitive practices in the optical disc drive market.

A server virtualization project success story

2010-02-24T23:16:00.001-08:00

Westminster College's VMware ESX-based server consolidation project is in place and running very smoothly. Its CIO details their solution and discusses why it's a success.

Westminster College's recently completed virtualization project is the second part of what began quite a while back as an ad hoc way to retire some critically aging servers.
The servers were still hosting Web applications that we were in the process of phasing out; as such, we didn't want to buy new servers and completely redeploy those services, so we put into place a couple of VMware ESX (3 & 3.5) servers and used PlateSpin's physical-to-virtual (P2V) software to remove the potential of hardware failure from the equation.
The beginning
In early 2007, shortly after my arrival at Westminster College, it became apparent that my plan to phase out an existing portal application was going to take a whole lot longer than I had hoped.
The supported services were intertwined in many different processes; in fact, three years later, we're still running one of the applications in production, but it's the last one.
Supporting this portal application were a couple of really, really old servers that were well past their warranty expiration date. On top of that, completely redeploying the portal application was one of the last things I wanted to do since it was only tenuously held together, and the people that had implemented the solution were long gone and had left behind only basic documentation.
I also wanted to reduce the number of servers we were running in our small data center; even the older servers were running at only a fraction of their capacity but still needed to be replaced on some kind of cycle and be plugged into electrical outlets consuming power.
The desire to move to newer hardware without breaking the bank, reduce electrical consumption, and not have to redeploy all of our existing services led to the phase one virtualization rollout. Once we had that solution in place, we ran in that configuration for a while. Over time, we virtualized a number of newer servers as well, also using the P2V method. As new services were brought on line, we generally deployed them on one of the virtual hosts.
The hosts were simple containers to house virtual machines and were not connected to a SAN; all of the storage was local. That said, these were Westminster's first steps into VMware and, they accomplished the necessary goals at the time.
Next steps
Over the years, I've become a big believer in the "virtualize everything whenever possible" motto. The great success of the first phase led me to decide to expand virtualization to encompass everything that we could, but I wanted to do so in a much more robust way.
Our initial foray did not implement any availability methods, which was fine for the purpose, but as we moved into our "virtualize everything" mode, we needed SAN-backed ESX servers and a bit more robustness. To achieve our availability goals, we wanted to make sure that we didn't have any single points of failure.
To that end, everything is redundant, and we've deployed more servers than are necessary to support our current virtual workloads. We have room for growth, which we will need.
Again, we're a small environment, so the architecture is pretty simple, but here's what we have:

An EMC AX4 SAN--iSCSI, dual controllers, 12 x 300 GB SAS + 12 x 750GB SATA. Fully and 100 percent redundant.
3 x Dell M600 blade servers, 2 x 2.66 GHz Quad Core Intel Xeon processors, 32 GB RAM each, 6 NICs each (chassis houses 6 x Dell M6220 switches--1 for each NIC in each server)
- 2 x NICs for front-end connectivity
- 2 x NICs for connectivity to AX4 (iSCSI)
  - Each of these is connected to a separate Ethernet switch.
  - Each NIC connects to a different storage processor on the AX4.
  - Each storage connection resides on a different physical network card.
- 1 x NIC for vMotion
- 1 x NIC for Fault Tolerance

We're running 28 virtual machines across these three hosts. Of the processing resources we have in this three host cluster, we're using, on average, about 10 percent of the computing power available to us (Figure A), so there is plenty of room for growth, and we have no worries about performance if one of the physical hosts fails.
On the RAM side, we're using just over 30 percent of the total RAM available in the cluster, but I think we can bring that down by paying more attention to how individual virtual machines are provisioned (Figure B).
Figure A

We're using about 10 percent of our computing resources. (Click the image to enlarge.)
Figure B

We're using a bit over 30 percent of the RAM resources of the cluster. (Click the image to enlarge.)
In figures A and B, note that there are two periods during which we experienced a problem with vCenter that affected statistics gathering. Also, while each machine has 32 GB of RAM, one of our hosts has Dell's RAM RAID capability turned on, which helps protect the host in the event of a RAM problem. As a result, that server reports only 24 GB of available RAM.
Due to having host-level redundancy, we'll be disabling this feature during a maintenance window in order to have the benefit of the full 32 GB of RAM.
In Figure C, you'll see a look at the full infrastructure. The 50 and 51 are simply internal identifiers.
Figure C

The whole ESX environment. (Click the image to enlarge.)
This summer, we'll make some changes to our environment to increase overall availability, including:

A migration from our single-server (physical) Exchange 2007 system to a multi-server (virtual) Exchange 2010 environment. The only service that will remain physical is unified messaging.
We're using SharePoint for a lot of stuff, including our public-facing Web site. Our existing SharePoint environment consists of two servers: a dedicated database server and the MOSS server running the other components. As we explore SharePoint 2010, we'll more likely than not migrate away from the physical SharePoint infrastructure as well.

Even if I have to add additional ESX hosts to support newer initiatives (though I don't think I will), the availability advantages are too great to ignore.
The virtualization project at Westminster exceeded all of my original goals. We've been able to very easily extend the life of aging applications, reduce power consumption, increase availability, and make a huge dent in the budget for equipment replacement in the data center.

Sunderland is Facebook capital of Britain

2010-02-24T06:50:00.001-08:00

LONDON - Sunderland has emerged as the Facebook capital of Britain.
Dr Aleks Krotoski, presenter of BBC2 series The Virtual Revolution, discovered that the northern city's online population is 24 per cent more likely to visit the social networking site to chat with pals or play online games than the UK's national average, reports the Mirror.

There are more than 23 million users Facebook users in Britain.
Sunderland band The Futureheads has attracted 8,100 fans to their Facebook page, while 5,350 users have signed onto the city's World Cup 2018 site.
Durham, Oldham, Manchester and Llandudno are other cities in the top 10 Facebook users list.
The bottom 10 were in Scotland, with Kilmarnock and Motherwell having the fewest users.

Reunion dinners are like project work

2010-02-22T00:33:00.000-08:00

Merry metal Tiger year! If your family observes the lunar new year, you would have had the traditional reunion dinner over this past weekend.

As we trickled back to work after the long weekend, my friends and colleagues exchanged updates about our family reunions--always an enthralling experience for most, to say the least. Don't even get me started on mine.

It's a pity that as we grow older, family gatherings seem to get fewer and reduced to just the obligatory once-a-year lunar reunion. And even that annual get-together may seem like a chore for some.

I thought about why that happens and saw some parallels with the corporate world.

When we were eager young kids and our parents themselves young, family gatherings were fun, enjoyable and an opportunity for the children to talk about a new toy and the adults to exchange parenting tips.

As time passes and the children turn into adults, and the adults turn into jaded retirees, our families become more nuclear and we no longer see value in family reunions. Host families grumble about having to spend money and time prepping reunion dinners that everyone else gets to enjoy at their expense.

Even potluck dinners become a chore, where some insist on showing up empty-handed and the others complain about why they were allowed to show up empty-handed.

And yet, in every family, there's usually a "campaigner", the one who's most enthusiastic about getting everyone together and who evangelizes the importance of blood ties. And let's not forget the "black sheep", the loafer who celebrates sloth and gobbles down family feasts without chipping in a single cent, or sweat.

As I thought about it, I realized I'd just described the corporate environment in some places, particularly in relation to project work that involves several team members across the various departments in the company.

At the start of a project, everyone's fresh and new, and super enthusiastic about getting the ball rolling...keeping the ball rolling, however, is another matter altogether.

There's also usually a project lead, the one who spearheads the collaborative effort and urges everyone to do their part and meet deadlines. And there're the black sheep, the ones who sit back, relax, and let others do most of the work, and still expect to be credited when the project is completed. And there are then the disgruntled lot who do their share of the work and get upset when their teammates don't.

Whether it's about reunion dinners or IT projects, it's very easy to get complacent, get caught up in the daily grind and lose sight of the key objective.

In any project work that involves multiple parties, and personalities, there will always be differences--be it in aptitude or attitude. It's not practical to expect everyone to have the same level of competency and to get along all the time, every time.

Over the years, I've on occasion handled tasks that should have been under another's purview. I did so for various reasons, whether it was because they couldn't cope with the load or weren't able to manage the work.

When I get asked why I'm helping to cover "someone else's ass", I usually reply that my main goal is always to get the job done. It's about identifying the bottlenecks and helping to fix the clogs so that at the end of the day, the job gets done and the key objective is achieved. So I don't really care if someone's behind is exposed...maybe he needed some fresh air...

Reunion dinners are like that, aren't they? Ultimately, the goal is to renew family ties and help ensure our kids will still be able to recognize their relatives when they meet them on the streets.

Sure, not everyone is going to contribute the same portion of money or sweat or time. But those who do give should do so without expecting any fair returns, and those who don't should be accepted as they are, imperfections included.

After all, isn't it better to live life without grudge?

Judge in Google Books case says no ruling Thursday

2010-02-22T00:27:00.001-08:00

U.S. Federal Judge Denny Chin kicked off the much-anticipated Google Books hearing Thursday morning by making one thing clear: there will be no quick ruling in the case.
"I'm going to say right off, I'm not going to rule today," Chin said, highlighting the droves of written submissions that have come in from passionate parties on all sides of the case. "I'm going to listen to opinions carefully and I'm going to ask a few questions."
And that he's already done in morning testimony, which has been going on for more than three hours before a crowded courtroom and overflow room. For example, he interrupted an attorney testifying for Microsoft by pressing him on why Sony, a competitor, is all right with the proposed settlement, but Microsoft isn't.
Some of the other groups and businesses that have testified so far include the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Amazon, the National Federation of the Blind, and the Center for Democracy and Technology.
The proposed settlement being debated in the case--reached between Google and the Authors Guild and Association of American Publishers--would allow Google to partially display in-copyright but out-of-print books alongside books authorized by publishers and public domain works in Google Books.
The deal would make Google the only organization in the U.S. explicitly authorized to make digital copies of out-of-print yet copyright-protected books, much to the dismay of many authors and privacy advocates.
Potential competitors, however, object to the unique rights that Google has been granted based on the class action status of the lawsuit, with authors upset over Google's decision to scan their works without asking permission. Privacy advocates fear corporate oversight of what books people are reading. And the U.S. Department of Justice has twice expressed "antitrust" concerns over the proposed settlement.
Stay tuned for more coverage from the hearing.

Dell earnings: Enterprise spending rebounds

2010-02-22T00:26:00.004-08:00

Dell reported a better-than-expected fourth quarter as enterprise sales rebounded. The company said that it was "cautiously optimistic” that commercial IT spending will improve throughout the year ahead amid “ongoing signs of stabilization".
Dell reported fiscal fourth quarter net income of US$334 million, or 17 cents a share, on revenue of US$14.9 billion, up 11 percent from a year ago. That sales tally was US$1 billion more than Wall Street expected. Non-GAAP earnings were US$544 million, or 28 cents a share, a penny ahead of Wall Street estimates.
For fiscal 2010, Dell reported net income of US$1.43 billion, or 73 cents a share, on revenue of US$52.9 billion, down 13 percent from a year ago (statement).
Read more of "Dell earnings: Enterprise spending rebounds" at ZDNet.

Yahoo and Microsoft get search deal OK

2010-02-22T00:26:00.002-08:00

Both the US Department of Justice and the European Commission have said there are no issues to prevent Microsoft and Yahoo going ahead with their search deal.

The 10-year deal makes Yahoo the salesforce and Microsoft the search platform for their combined search. The deal was announced in July 2009 and is expected to start being implemented in the next few days. All global customers and partners are expected to have been moved to the combined system by early 2012.

The deal is aimed at taking market share and revenues from Google, which currently has around 75 percent of the market worldwide.

Read more of "Yahoo and Microsoft get search deal OK" at ZDNet.

Chip-and-PIN flaw to be investigated by industry body

2010-02-22T00:26:00.000-08:00

The body that oversees the technology behind chip-based payment cards is to investigate chip-and-PIN security, following claims that the protocol has been broken.
The specification body, EMVCo, said it will analyze a paper by researchers from Cambridge University, who demonstrated an attack with a valid payment card that did not require a valid PIN to be entered to complete a transaction.
EMVCo, owned by American Express, JCB, MasterCard and Visa, said those debit- and credit-card payment companies will also scrutinize the paper.

Tablet commandments for PC makers

2010-02-18T00:14:00.000-08:00

The Apple iPad is expected to help rejuvenate the tablet industry, with other PC makers also looking to cash in with their own slate products. But, what will it take to emerge leaders in a market that is gradually getting crowded with players eager for a slice of the pie?
According to research firm In-Stat, the global table market is projected to move some 50 million units in 2014, with Apple's upcoming slate expected to inject an additional US$4.1 billion into the semiconductor industry.
PC manufacturers such as AsusTek, Hewlett-Packard, Dell Computer and Micro-Star International (MSI) also announced plans or revealed prototypes at last month's Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in a bid to assume first-mover position in the nascent market segment.
However, what will it take for these players to succeed in this space? ZDNet Asia spoke to industry watchers and players who highlight key factors that should go into designing and producing tablets to stand out against the competition.
Identify target audience
According to Lilian Tay, principal analyst of client computing markets in Gartner's technology and service provider research group, the key consideration is the target market.
"As the slate or tablet [market] is still evolving, there are many sub-market usages that manufacturers can consider," Tay said in an e-mail interview. She added that while design specifications such as battery life or user interface are key factors, manufacturers can better cater their designs if they know which user segments the device will have more demand in.
In the education market, for example, manufacturers would have to offer devices that are more rugged to cope with the faster wear and tear due to increased usage, she explained.
"[Manufacturers] need to demonstrate how the device can fit into the lifestyles of people who already own a smartphone and a notebook," Tay said.
Determine form factor
Phil McKinney, HP's vice president and CTO of personal systems group, noted in a recent video interview his company looks to address issues on form and function. "[What's] the right size, what's the right form factor, and what are the capabilities [this tablet should have]," he explained.
McKinney added that HP had been exploring the possibility of producing a tablet PC for the past five years and actually "built physical hardware"--about 60 units--which were distributed to consumers to gather feedback.
Based on results from this exercise, he characterized this evolving product segment, in terms of size, as: "North of what a smartphone is, and smaller than a netbook and notebook."
Content is king
If there is one thing Apple's App Store and Amazon's Kindle e-reader demonstrated, Gartner's Tay noted, it is that manufacturers with access to the most content will generate demand for their devices.
AsusTek Computer is one such manufacturer that is exploring ways to "link or enrich content" with any potential tablet device it plans to introduce.
"How to develop or cooperate with content providers will be important when considering the software and hardware that will be embedded in a tablet device," said Jessie Lee, global public relations lead from AsusTek's marketing planning division.
McKinney concurred, noting that consumers are not simply looking for a dedicated device such as the Kindle or Sony's Reader, but one that capable of providing "immersive kind of experiences".
"[Users tell us] 'I want to browse. I want to be able to watch my movies. I want to be able listen to my music. I want to be able to read magazines and do books.' So these devices [should not only have] reading capabilities, but also give you that rich media," he said.
User interface gaining importance
In an earlier interview with ZDNet Asia, Dell's Asia-Pacific general manager for consumer business Ian Chapman-Banks, said the "physical keyboard experience", which is absent in touchscreen mobile computing devices such as the iPad, remains a key element for users.
This, and other user interface (UI) elements such as a capacitive touchscreen that iPad and Fusion Garage's JooJoo device feature, are key considerations prospective tablet makers will have to consider, noted Tay.

ARM, Globalfoundries outline 28nm SoC platform

2010-02-17T23:58:00.000-08:00

ARM and Globalfoundries have released details on their upcoming system-on-a-chip (SoC) platform, which they say will combine "PC-class performance" with the portability and longevity of smartphones.
The companies revealed the details on Monday at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Their SoC platform is based on ARM's Cortex-A9 processor and Globalfoundries' 28nm manufacturing process, and will be used in smartphones, tablets and smartbooks.
The 28nm manufacturing process will allow devices built on the platform to have 40 percent more computing performance, 30 percent less power consumption and 100 percent greater battery life than devices built using existing 45nm processes, the companies said.
Read more of "ARM, Globalfoundries outline 28nm SoC platform " at ZDNet UK.

Body scanners may be illegal, says rights watchdog

2010-02-17T23:57:00.001-08:00

The use of full-body scanners at airports could break UK laws on discrimination, race relations and privacy, the government equality watchdog has warned.
The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) said in a statement on Tuesday that the government needs to take immediate action over the scanners, which allow airport security personnel to view travellers as though they were naked.
The statement follows a request from EHRC to home secretary Alan Johnson in January, seeking justification for the government's profiling and body-scanning plans.
Read more of "Body scanners may be illegal, says rights watchdog" at ZDNet UK.

RIM to offer free BlackBerry Enterprise Server

2010-02-17T23:56:00.001-08:00

Research In Motion will soon begin giving away a free version of BlackBerry Enterprise Server.

BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) Express will be made available as a free download in March, RIM chief executive Mike Lazaridis announced on Tuesday in a keynote speech at Mobile World Congress.

BES Express, which comes with free client licences, is server software that makes it possible to synchronise BlackBerry smartphones with Microsoft Exchange or Windows Small Business Server systems.

Read more of "RIM to offer free BlackBerry Enterprise Server" at ZDNet UK.

Microsoft Issues Fixes for Outlook 2010 Beta Bug

2010-02-17T23:47:00.001-08:00

Microsoft on Thursday announced fixes for its Outlook 2010 beta to address an e-mail message bloat problem.
The bloat stems from the use of numbered and bulleted lists in e-mail messages. Outgoing messages containing such lists will bulk up with "redundant CSS definitions." Consequently, mail services that limit the size of incoming messages may not display the messages correctly, according to Microsoft's Outlook 2010 blog.
Patches for both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the Outlook 2010 beta can be accessed here.
The fixes actually apply to Microsoft Word 2010 beta and are also available via the Microsoft Download Center as Knowledge Base article KB980028. Microsoft's Jeanne Sheldon explained in the Outlook 2010 blog that "though the problem is most readily manifested in Outlook, the root cause is in Word 2010."
Applying the patch will eliminate the bloat caused by future incoming messages, but it does not fix e-mails already received. Microsoft recommends running Outlook 2010's "conversation clean up" feature to reduce the mailbox size. The clean up feature removes older message threads while retaining the most current message in a thread, as described in this blog.
Microsoft fixed this bug in the release candidate version of Office 2010, according to a blog. However, the general public doesn't have easy access to the release candidate version as it was privately released to testers earlier this month.
The Office 2010 beta can run on the same hardware that was used to run Office 2007, according to Microsoft. Older versions of Office do not have to be removed before installing the beta, but Microsoft adds a couple of caveats. First, the Outlook 2010 beta does not play well with other versions of Outlook installed on the same machine. Second, SharePoint Workspace (formerly known as "Microsoft Office Groove 2007") does not coexist with earlier versions.
Microsoft recommends selecting the "custom installation" option of the Office 2010 beta installation program if users want to exclude Outlook 2010 and SharePoint Workspace to avoid conflicts with older versions of those programs. Otherwise, the "express installation" option will add those applications.
Important details to know before installing the Office 2010 beta are described in this blog.
Office 2010 is expected to become generally available in June. Betas for a number of Microsoft's 2010-branded products were released in November.

Microsoft Affirms BSOD, Halts Windows Patch

2010-02-17T23:46:00.003-08:00

Redmond is once again looking into chatter about Microsoft security patches causing "screens of death."
This time the patch in question (MS10-015) was for a long-unaddressed Windows kernel bug that could enable elevation-of-privilege control by an attacker. The patch, which was contained in Tuesday's mammoth security update, was based on a security advisory that Microsoft released in late January.
According to this discussion thread on a Windows forum page, when Windows XP users applied the kernel patch, all they got was blue screens after they restarted their operating systems. Some users had to reopen Windows in "safe mode," while others simply got blue screens followed by error messages, according to comments on the thread.
The screens-of-death complaints in the forum thread reflect the experiences of XP users. However, Microsoft described its patch as important for Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7 for 32-bit systems. The Windows kernel exploit has been present in all 32-bit Windows versions since Windows NT, which means the bug has been accessible for about 17 years.
Microsoft admitted in a security blog that restart issues are associated with its MS10-015 patch, and that malware on a system can cause the problem. To that end, many in the security community believe that a rootkit may be blocking the patch installation and triggering the instances of "blue screen of death" (BSOD) shutdowns.
"The possibility that the reported BSOD problems, associated with the recent Microsoft patches, are related to a malware rootkit makes a lot of sense," said Andrew Storms, director of security operations at nCircle. "As a result of their extensive quality control and testing processes, Microsoft has a terrific track record of releasing solid patches. No one expects Microsoft to test installing patches on a system that already contains malware though."
Because of the snafu and pending investigation, Microsoft has temporarily pulled security bulletin MS10-015 from automatic release through Windows Update. However, the patch still remains on Microsoft update sites for administrators to download and test.
"This issue with the patch is a prime example of why administrators should test each and every patch they deploy them to their systems," said Jason Miller, data and security team leader for Shavlik Technologies. "Microsoft tries to ensure the functionality of each patch, but it cannot be guaranteed with so many different systems and scenarios that are affected by the patch."
For those with the BSOD problem, the Windows forum moderator for Microsoft, Kevin Hau, suggested that users "boot from your Windows XP CD or DVD and start the recovery console." Hau then referred Windows users to this Knowledge Base article for more details on how to reboot safely.

Microsoft Releases Anti-Piracy Update for Windows 7

2010-02-17T23:46:00.001-08:00

Microsoft plans to release an update for Windows 7 today to counter software piracy.
The new Windows Activation Technologies Update continues anti-piracy technologies initiated with Microsoft's Windows Genuine Advantage program in 2006. In a Windows blog post, Microsoft's Joe Williams described the update, which validates Windows 7 copies, as a means of keeping customers' PCs secure.
"The update will determine whether Windows 7 installed on a PC is genuine and will better protect customers' PCs by making sure that the integrity of key licensing components remains intact," wrote Williams, who is general manager of Genuine Windows.
Windows Activation Technologies will detect more than 70 known and potentially dangerous activation exploits.
Initially, the update will run validations every 90 days, at which time Windows will download the latest "signatures" -- similar to an anti-virus service, according to Williams. On computers running authentic software, the update will run in the background and will not be noticeable to users.
However, if the core licensing files have been tampered with, or are disabled or missing, the update will run a check and repairs weekly. In addition, "periodic" dialog boxes will pop up that offer two options: get more information or acquire a legitimate copy of Windows. The update will add reminders for users of nongenuine Windows 7, including changing the desktop to a plain background with a watermark. Desktop icons will be left intact after that change is made, according to Microsoft.
The update will be distributed first to the Home Premium, Professional, Ultimate and Enterprise edition users. It will be available online at www.microsoft.com/genuine starting Feb. 16 and on the Microsoft Download Center beginning Feb. 17. It also will be offered as an "important" update on Windows Update later this month.
Enterprise customers will be able to import the update into Windows Server Update Services through the Microsoft Update catalog.
Williams stressed that the update will not reduce Windows functionality. Customers who choose to not install the update will continue to have access to benefits afforded to genuine Windows users if the copy they are running is genuine, according to a Microsoft spokesperson by e-mail.
Compared with Microsoft's Genuine Advantage effort, this update is notable in that it tries to get customers to contact Microsoft for validation, said Michael Cherry, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft, in a telephone interview.
"When they first started this, there were some definite issues in the way in which it worked," Cherry said. "If it felt you did not have a valid copy, it might reduce the functionality until you showed you had a legitimate copy."
This update also varies from previous efforts because it includes both activation and validation components.
In a ZDnet blog posting, Ed Bott wrote that he gave Microsoft an "F" for its Windows Genuine Advantage efforts in 2006 and 2007, followed by a C+ in 2008. More recently, he wrote, activation issues have become a nonissue, and false-positive reports are practically nonexistent.
The update aims to shut down counterfeiters who sell fraudulent Windows 7 packages to consumers. According to Cherry, few businesses intentionally purchase counterfeit software or computers with pirated software. The update will alert them if they do.
Privacy advocates have criticized Microsoft for its past anti-piracy efforts, particularly requiring the Windows Genuine Advantage update for Windows XP users in 2006. Now the update is voluntary and users can decide not to install it. It also can be uninstalled at any time.
Williams stressed that the update will not jeopardize privacy. "The information we receive from PCs during these checks does not include any personally identifiable information or any other information that Microsoft can use to identify or contact you," he stated.
Cherry said that Microsoft is trying to balance making sure that people have legitimate copies against being obtrusive.
"Microsoft is working very, very hard to not collect any personally identifiable information about you in this process," Cherry said. "Piracy is a big enough problem that for a relatively modest investment, this is going to give them returns."

Verizon CTO says 4G service is on track

2010-02-16T21:59:00.005-08:00

Verizon Wireless is on track to offer its 4G wireless service later this year, the company's chief technology officer said here Monday.
Dick Lynch, an executive vice president and CTO for Verizon Communications, said during a press conference here that Verizon Wireless is on track to launch its commercial LTE (long-term evolution) service this year. The gathering was hosted by the GSM Association, which puts on the Mobile World Congress.
Lunch said Verizon Wireless is in the final testing phase, or "Phase 4," of its LTE technology. Within 60 days he said he expects testing to be completed in Boston and Seattle. After those trials are complete, Verizon will be ready to announce commercial deployments.
Verizon announced its plans to launch its LTE network in 2010 at the Mobile World Congress last year. The company has said previously that it will launch the service in 25 to 30 markets throughout the United States by the end of 2010. The company is using 700 MHz that it acquired in a Federal Communications Commission auction.
Initially, Verizon Wireless will offer USB air cards that access LTE for its laptop customers. Cell phones and other mobile devices with embedded LTE will be introduced later. That said, Lynch and other executives from the European carrier Orange as well as from equipment maker Ericsson, said that LTE handsets will be introduced sooner than anyone had anticipated.
Lynch said getting voice to work over LTE has been particularly challenging. But that challenge is getting resolved as Verizon and other members of the GSMA announced Monday they are supporting a standard that uses IMS technology to deliver voice services over LTE. Still, more work needs to be done.
Until a solution is complete, Verizon will use its CDMA network to provide voice services. And the LTE network will be used for data. Eventually, when voice over LTE becomes a reality, Verizon will use that technology.
Verizon will also have to integrate EV-DO into its LTE offering to ensure that customers can switch to the 3G EV-DO network when the 4G LTE network is not available. Even though Verizon is being aggressive in building its network, it won't happen overnight.
The next bit of news consumers can look for from Verizon is pricing. Verizon hasn't yet detailed plans for how much it will charge to use the new 4G LTE service.

Ballmer banks on Windows Phone 7 for the future

2010-02-16T21:59:00.003-08:00

Steve Ballmer hopes "7" will be Microsoft's lucky number as the company restarts its mobile business with the release of Windows Phone 7.
On Monday, the CEO of Microsoft and his team of Microsoft executives took the wraps off the latest version of the Windows Mobile operating system at a press conference here at the Mobile World Congress. The new Windows Phone 7 is a fresh start for the company in mobile.
"There's no question that a year and a half ago we had to rethink everything," Ballmer said.
Instead of revamping Windows Mobile software, which first came out in 2002, Microsoft decided to start from scratch. The result is a completely new look and feel to previous generations of Microsoft Windows Mobile software.
The new Windows Phone 7 is primarily designed for touch-screen smartphones. It offers graphic "tiles" that let users get multiple views of their information. The goal was to create software, and a user interface, that was much more useful--and intuitive. For example, the new software integrates data such as pictures, e-mail, music, video, and contact numbers from the phone and other places (social-networking sites or multiple music services or e-mails) into easy-to-access "tiles" or virtual buttons on the phone.
Even though Microsoft is still a leading provider of smartphone software, its market share has slipped over the past several quarters. Competitors such as Apple with the iPhone, Research In Motion with its BlackBerry devices, and now Google with Android phones, have taken share away from Microsoft.
Apple and RIM have taken a different approach to the market than Microsoft has. Those companies build both the software and hardware for their phones, which has provided them more control and some edge in terms of getting new features out across an entire product line. It's also made it somewhat easier for developers to come up with new applications for these devices.
Andy Lees, senior vice president of mobile communications for Microsoft, admitted during the press conference Monday that Microsoft had questioned its strategy of not building its own hardware and instead selling software to phone manufacturers.
"We considered a lot of different things over the past year and a half to two years," he said. "We even considered building our own phone."
Instead, Lees said the company decided that working with partners offered far more value.
That said, Microsoft recognizes the need for more hardware consistency, and it plans to work closely with hardware manufacturers such as LG, Samsung, HTC, Sony Ericsson, and others to make sure there is commonality in devices. For example, Microsoft is setting standards within its partner group for screen size. It will also require that devices use the same kind of sensing technology.
In addition, it's working with carrier partners to ensure more consistency in service offerings.
From a developer's perspective, this sounds great. But it also sounds like it limits manufacturers and carriers when it comes to how they can differentiate their products. And it's unclear how handset manufacturers--which are already struggling to differentiate their products from one another--will handle the requirements.
On Sunday, at a press event here, Sony Ericsson's CEO said the company plans to eventually become operating-system-agnostic, providing consumers with a user interface that has a look and feel unique to Sony Ericsson.
Ballmer argued that the new version of its OS will offer stricter sets of criteria for devices and services using the software, and that would ultimately lead to more innovation from its partners.
"We needed a model to raise the bar and give our partners a chance to show their unique capabilities," he said. "I think it will create a bigger pool of opportunity for everyone. And when we look back, there will be greater diversity and innovation when you work from a higher foundation instead of everyone replumbing things from the lower levels of user interface."
The new Windows Phone 7 phones are expected to hit the market in time for the 2010 holiday shopping season, Ballmer said. He also said AT&T and Orange have been selected as special carrier partners. The company plans to deliver Windows Phone 7 devices on all four major U.S. carrier networks.

Adobe bringing AIR to smartphones--Android first

2010-02-16T21:59:00.001-08:00

dobe Systems, hard at work bringing its Flash technology to mobile phones, announced Monday that it's also working on making the same move for a related programming foundation called AIR.
AIR, short for Adobe Integrated Runtime, is a foundation for standalone applications that use Flash or Web technology. Examples of AIR applications include the New York Times Reader and the TweetDeck for advanced Twitter usage.
Adobe plans to release AIR for Google's Android operating system for mobile devices in 2010, the company said at the Mobile World Congress show in Barcelona. Also at the show, Adobe announced that it's joined the LiMo Foundation to bring Flash to Linux-based mobile phones.
Adobe plans to release Flash Player 10.1 for smartphones in the first half of 2010.
The San Jose, Calif.-based company demonstrated AIR on a Motorola Droid phone, including the Tweetcards Twitter application, a "South Park"-style avatar creator, and Adobe's Connect Pro software for screen-sharing and videoconferencing.
AIR for mobile will use Flash Player 10.1, a beta version of which Adobe said was just released to partners and programmers.
"AIR leverages mobile-specific features from Flash Player 10.1, is optimized for high performance on mobile screens and designed to take advantage of native device capabilities for a richer and more immersive user experience," Adobe said in a statement. Specifically, AIR for mobile devices will support multitouch interfaces, gesture inputs, accelerometers for motion and device orientation, and geolocation for detecting position.
Flash is ubiquitous on computers but comparatively rare on mobile devices; AIR hasn't achieved Flash's penetration even on desktops. But if Adobe can persuade mobile-phone makers to support it, or persuade phone owners to install it on their own, it could open up cross-platform advantages for programmers who want the same or similar versions of a program to run on different types of equipment.
However, Adobe has its share of challenges spreading Flash and AIR to mobile devices. Although Flash Player 10.1 will run on many smartphones, it won't run on arguably the highest-profile model out there, Apple's iPhone. The absence of Flash on the iPhone and iPad has put Adobe on the defensive, and the company has begun sharing more details on its plans to improve Flash.
Motorola, whose newer Droid models of Android phones compete with the iPhone, endorsed Adobe's moves.
"We look forward to seeing AIR come to the Android platform and developers creating applications that will delight our end-users," said Christy Wyatt, Motorola's vice president of software applications and ecosystem, in a statement.
Adobe isn't giving up on the iPhone. In a blog post by Adobe's Michael Chou, the company also touted several iPhone games written with its upcoming Flash Professional CS5 Packager for iPhone software, which lets programmers write Flash applications that run on iPhones without Flash installed.

Apple bans hackers from App Store

2010-02-16T21:58:00.001-08:00

After a long battle with hackers who have been successful at jailbreaking the iPhone from one version of the OS to another, Apple is now taking a more personal approach to locking down the device. It's been reported that known iPhone jailbreaking/unlocking hackers have had their Apple IDs banned from Apple's App Store.
One of those hackers is Sherif Hashim, who recently found an exploit in the latest iPhone OS version 3.1.3 that could unlock the baseband version 05.12.01. Sherif now gets a message saying that his Apple ID is banned for "security reasons" each time he tries to access the Apple's App Store.
Baseband is the component that controls the connection between the phone and the mobile network; when unlocked, it allows the phone to work with any GSM carrier. Apple tends to release updated firmware for this chip specifically in order to relock iPhones that have previously been unlocked.
The exploit hasn't been released yet, though it has been confirmed that it works by DevTeam, a group of hackers that develop methods to jailbreak and unlock Apple's handheld devices.
Other hackers have also reported that their Apple IDs have been banned. It seems that this action of Apple's is merely a warning, as these hackers can always just create another Apple ID and access the App Store that way. It would be a lot harsher if Apple decided to ban their devices.
The latest firmware of the iPhone OS, version 3.1.3, apart from relocking any jailbroken phones, doesn't seem to offer much improvement. Instead, it has a few battery and sync issues.

Google CEO comes to Barcelona in peace

2010-02-16T21:56:00.003-08:00

Google CEO Eric Schmidt extended an olive branch to wireless-network operators as he took the stage Tuesday afternoon at the GSM Association's Mobile World Congress.
Schmidt delivered his speech hours after the CEO of the world's largest mobile operator, Vodafone, suggested in his own keynote address that Google was getting too powerful in the mobile value chain. Earlier in the day, Vittorio Colao warned the telecommunications industry that companies controlling 70 percent to 80 percent of a market, such as Google in mobile search, should raise the attention of regulators.
Schmidt, whose company has had a contentious relationship with some mobile operators, did not respond to fears of monopolistic behavior. Instead, he focused on how he saw Google and the wireless industry working together to deliver services to consumers. Google wants to partner with wireless operators and application developers to make sure that consumers get a good mobile Web experience, and all the partners involved make money, he said.
"Ultimately, these businesses will succeed to the degree that they stay end-user-focused," Schmidt said. "And the best partnerships start from that, and not from dividing the industry or restricting what people do." He added that the best partnerships are also the ones in which all parties involved make lots of money serving consumers.
Google, which has been adding more sophisticated and data-intensive applications to its cache of products, has often garnered suspicion among mobile operators, as it moves further into the industry, not only with search applications but also with its focus on the Android mobile operating system and on hardware such as the Nexus One smartphone.
Google also raised eyebrows a couple of years ago, when it bid on wireless spectrum in the United States. Ultimately, Google did not win wireless-spectrum licenses and admitted, once the auction was over, that it had only bid so that the price of the wireless licenses reached a point where a special open-access provision was triggered in the rules.
Eyebrows were raised once again last week, when Google announced that it was going to launch an experimental fiber broadband network capable of delivering 1 gigabit of data per second.
But during the question-and-answer period of the presentation, Schmidt assured worried Mobile World Congress attendees that Google comes in peace. He said he disagreed with one audience member's assertion that Google is trying to make wireless operators "dumb pipe providers."
"We feel very strongly that we depend on the success of the carrier business," Schmidt said. "We need a sophisticated network for security and load balancing."
Schmidt explained that carriers' sophisticated billing relationship with customers is key. He also emphasized that carriers would offer support and education, serving as a basic platform for mobile services. Google will also serve customers, he said, but it will rely on customers sharing their information with Google to get better search results, more accurate location data, and more relevant applications.
Another point the Google CEO tried to get across: Google is not looking to compete with wireless operators.
"We are not going to be investing in broad-scale (communications) infrastructure," he said, adding that Google's fiber network trial and the company's investment in WiMax 4G wireless provider Clearwire are designed to help advance high-speed networks.
He also addressed concerns that Google is trying to limit how operators can manage their networks through its efforts to lobby for Net neutrality regulation in the United States.
"We understand at a fundamental level [that] wireless networks have constraints," he said. He went onto explain that wireless operators should not be choosing winners and losers when services are offered, and he conceded that current bandwidth constraints may require operators to move to a tiered pricing model.
"As people consume massive amounts of data, operators will be forced to tiered pricing to deal with the top 1 [percent] to 5 percent of users consuming 70 percent of the bandwidth," he said.
Even though Schmidt acknowledged that operators need to figure out ways to better manage their networks, he made it clear that they should not deny network access to bandwidth-intensive applications, point blank. Instead, he said operators need to find ways to accommodate user demand on their networks.
"We should embrace [changes in end-user behavior]," he said. "And we should figure out a way to make money from it together, instead of blocking it."

Digital ID beneficial for biz credibility

2010-02-16T21:56:00.001-08:00

Consumers would be more willing to visit a corporate Web site and transact online if they trust the company, and this comfort level can be achieved by enterprises adopting digital identification (ID).
This is the sentiment of industry watchers such as Willy Lim, the co-founder of NetProfitQuest, a Singapore-based service training provider that does certification for social media marketing. Lim pointed out that digital IDs are "important for both individuals and companies to prove that they are who they say they are online".
While he acknowledged that such identification methods are still "in the early stages", this verification standard will gain more importance as more people transact online, "especially with the rapid adoption of smartphones like the iPhone".
This perspective is echoed by Thomas Crampton, leader of Ogilvy's Digital Influence team in Asia Pacific, who said: "Knowledge about who somebody is engenders a higher level of trust when taking part in a transaction or exchange."
He backed the assertion by pointing out that beyond Facebook and its Facebook Connect service which allows its users to login to partner sites using a standardized password, others such as Twitter are following suit with features like verified accounts. And this is becoming a "trend".
Crampton responded in an e-mail that "an increasing number" of people are looking to manage their online profile, and this is indicative of the importance of having digital IDs.
However, not everyone agrees with this stance. IBM Singapore's country manager of software, Tan Jee Toon, said: "Our view is that sharing digital IDs makes sense within a community of interest, but is rarely relevant outside of that community. As such, we do not believe there will be a universal ID that can be used for all transactions on the Web."
He cited in his e-mail response the analogy of having a physical ID card that is issued by an international body for everyone, which should be trusted worldwide. Unfortunately, Tan said that this has not happened because each country has its own community of interest, which is why we have only nationally-recognized ID cards.
Digital IDs not safe enough?
Tan also noted that "user-centric digital IDs" are currently used only for accessing consumer online sites. However, enterprises are concerned about protecting confidentiality, intellectual property and business transactions. With so much of their business value at risk, organizations will demand a higher level of identity assurance, including "identity proofing and stronger authentication", which digital IDs may not provide.
He added that the legal framework does not "easily support arbitration" in cases where an enterprise is compromised due to a breach in a digital ID assigned by a third-party service provider. Tan also questioned whether it should be the company or the provider that should be liable.
"These technologies represent opportunities for the ID provider and its partners that share a community of interest. It allows them and their users to sign in once and go everywhere within the community, but that does not mean it is suitable for all enterprises," he said.
However, this was disputed by JanRain, a turnkey provider of digital IDs which stated that though the adoption of digital IDs within the enterprise space "has not picked up as quickly as on the open Web", companies such as SAP are adopting the use of OpenID. This is the decentralized authentication protocol that JanRain is using to allow companies to access Web accounts with.
The spokesperson for the company said: "By storing password information at a centralized source such as Google, Facebook or Yahoo, user information is protected by constant security audits and enhancement. The alternative is sharing a password with disparate sites that most likely will not maintain the same high level of security."
IDs won't replace company Web sites, blogs
When asked if digital IDs will take over corporate Web sites or blogs as the main tool for engaging their online audience, Ogilvy's Crampton thinks not.
"Blogs and company Web sites will serve as the first filter for finding businesses, but verifiable digital identity will help people make the final preference between two similar offers," he said. "Digital IDs will grow alongside [these platforms]."
NetProfitQuest's Lim agreed, saying that digital IDs do not give further insights into what the company is doing, its corporate culture and other such objectives and overview.
"Such understanding can only come from the company’s blog posting, social media conversations and its engagement with its online communities," Lim said.

PayPal explains Indian service suspension

2010-02-12T02:19:00.003-08:00

PayPal has confirmed that its recent service suspension involving local bank transfers and personal payments to and from India, was the result of the country's revised licensing rules.
In a blog post Tuesday, Anuj Nayar, director of global communications PayPal explained that the latest incident in India was a response to enquiries local regulators posed, specifically, on whether personal payments constitute as remittance into India.
According to Nayar, who also posted a comment on ZDNet Asia's report on the issue, personal payments to and from India will be suspended for at least a few months until the company resolves questions from the regulators. Meanwhile, personal payment senders will need to find another payment method, he added.
Local bank withdrawals should be available to customers within the next few days, he said. PayPal will restore money into the accounts of Indian customers who have recently initiated withdrawals and these users will receive reimbursement for any withdrawal fee charges.
Customers with a negative balance due to PayPal's reversal of payments should contact the sender, and arrange for the payment to be resent if the amount was transacted for goods or services, Nayar explained. This can be done by selecting the "Send Money" tab and selecting "Purchase", he said.
Nayar added that only personal payments should have been reversed. Customers who believe their payments were mistakenly reversed should request for the payment to be sent again. Customers who still face problems can contact PayPal customer support.
The service suspension had evoked a myriad of comments from ZDNet Asia readers, several of whom expressed anger over how the service was terminated without notification.

Wireless@SG goes places with new engine

2010-02-12T02:19:00.001-08:00

-The country's government-funded free Wi-Fi service, Wireless@SG, has opened a location-based engine to allow developers to build location-aware apps and services over the network.
At a press briefing here Thursday, the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) demonstrated the new Centralised Location-based Engine (CLBE), aimed at enabling a slew of new services such as advertising, friend-finding and searching for nearby retail outlets.
This is made available today through a new process it calls Seamless and Secure Access (SSA), where users need to download an authentication application from the IDA to get connected to hotspots marked "Wireless@SGx". This differentiates the hotspots from the traditional Wireless@SG hotspots, which require users to go to a Webpage in order to sign in.
Wireless@SGx hotspots will allow automatic logins through mobile devices and PCs, and also link user profiles to the CLBE. This allows location-aware apps and services that can call up the CLBE database to push alerts and advertisements to users.
Users will not be able to opt out from receiving these ads but can choose to continue using the traditional Wireless@SG hotspots for connectivity, without the additional apps and services, according to operators present at the briefing.
iCell Network CEO Ken Chua said the company has been able to upkeep a profitable service through advertising, and is looking to the new platform to increase advertising revenues as well as additional revenues from services provided atop Wireless@SG.
For example, Chua said, Wireless@SG may take a cut from a cashless transaction or taxi booking through the SSA.
Developers wanted for location-based apps
Alex Tan, product development head at MobileOne (M1) Connect, said Wireless@SG operators are looking to court developers to build third-party apps for their individual dashboards.
The network's three operators--iCell Network, M1 and SingTel--offer their own versions of the SSA installer, which will come with app dashboards carrying app selections unique to each operator. Users are allowed to use any of the three dashboards--or all of them, if they so choose.
As a result, Tan said the operators are looking to attract developers in order to differentiate their service offerings.
M1 has also been tasked to host and manage the CLBE, which it will make available to developers via APIs (application programming interfaces). According to M1's Web site, interested parties should apply to M1 and will be charged S$200 (US$141) per month for access to the CLBE.
Tan said the mobile operator is anticipating heavy usage to the tune of "hundreds of thousands" of API calls to the CLBE database, and has made the necessary capacity provisions on the backend.
He added that developer-submitted apps will first be screened by operators, before they go through a final approval process with the IDA, for inclusion in the app dashboards.
iCell's Chua said the operator receives 10,000 new sign-ups every month, with approximately 50 percent of users accessing its network through mobile devices.
Wireless@SG's speeds were upgraded from 512Kpbs to 1Mbps in September last year. In addition, the IDA last June committed S$9 million (US$6.3 million) in the wireless network over four years, pledging to provide the wireless broadband service for free until March 2013.
Launched in 2006, Wireless@SG encompasses 7,500 hotspots located across the island-state and supports some 1.5 million users, as of December 2009.

Five tips for tackling a one-time project

2010-02-10T04:38:00.001-08:00

Don't let a one-time project derail your career. An IT consultant shares tips on how to successfully manage a "once-in-a-career" event.

The CIO informs you that you've been selected to lead a special project that will impact your IT organization. When the CIO reveals the focus of the special project, you realize that you have no knowledge or experience related to the project. Everyone is watching, and many of your colleagues are not on board with the new direction that your project will take your IT organization.
To avoid derailing your career, here are five ways to tackle the project.
1. Make the project a priority from the start.
Even if you do not want to run the project, go ahead and accept the job; the faster you embrace the challenge, the faster you can make a realistic assessment of what you will need to do to be successful or to at least avoid failure.
Also, the time you spend resisting the assignment is time you'll need to get over the learning curve on your new challenge. You have been given the job, and taking on the tough projects is one of the key hurdles to achieving the CIO role and beyond.
Look at your planned professional activities in the immediate future and consider which activities you can delete from your calendar. You will need to delegate some noncritical activities to your managers and staff. Your staff may not like it, but everyone has to pitch in to navigate this specific career challenge.
Maximize the time you can commit to your project, because you'll need every minute.
2. Commit talented people to the project.
Managers and staff available in IT organizations to commit to special projects may not be high performers. They are available for a reason, and other managers are often willing to assign their least desirable staff to your special project. Mp>You do not want a poorly staffed team for a career-critical project. You will need to make some hard decisions early on to free up some of your top talent to commit to the project. If you cannot control the project staffing, carefully interview each person assigned to the project to understand what he or she can contribute.
When a new project requires knowledge you do not currently possess, you will need to make managers and staff who work best in unstructured environments available for the project. While you will eventually need to carefully structure, plan, and execute your project, your initial project time will involve some level of unstructured learning. You need your team to be able to adjust quickly as you form a vision for the project and take this vision into tactical execution.
3. Get over the learning curve as fast as possible.
We all see our special projects as unique, but your project has likely already been executed at numerous companies, government agencies, nonprofits or universities. While the Internet provides access to a vast variety of information, it is also a data landfill where you can lose critical time sifting through mountains of raw information to get to the critical knowledge you need to succeed.
You should use your professional and personal contacts, as well as publicly available information, to cull lessons learned on how other organizations tackled similar projects. Social networking tools, such as LinkedIn, provide a forum where you can ask questions in specific communities to quickly gain knowledge.
For example, if your challenge is an IT service management (ITSM) implementation, there are a number of ITSM communities on LinkedIn where you can ask intelligent questions to narrow your search for relevant information. There is also excellent project information on the Web sites of a number of IT consultancies and industry trade groups. Tap professionals who have faced the same challenges you face and ask for input.
4. Plan the project work but adjust quickly.
You are committed to the project, you have gathered a good team, and you have a handle on some good lessons learned from similar projects executed at other organizations; the next step is to treat this project like any other project you have executed.
Develop a charter to define the project, support the charter with a detailed project plan with committed organizational resources, develop key milestones, and have a clear vision for what success would look like at project completion.
As you begin to execute the project, unexpected challenges will occur despite the initial project planning; be willing to quickly adjust to these challenges as you go. You'll gain knowledge as you progress in the project, and you'll probably realize that you made some faulty assumptions at project inception that need correcting. Adjust your project plan and keep moving.
5. Keep communicating.
I've seen many IT managers derail their once-in-a-career projects by failing to communicate with any of the various groups who are impacted by, or directly involved in, the project.
The CIO and other senior leaders do not want to be surprised by a project that has gone off track from the original project plan and is failing. Senior leadership should not learn of any challenges or potential failure from anyone other than you. Be proactive in communicating successes and challenges to the leaders of your IT organization.
You also need to keep IT managers and staff who are potentially impacted by your project informed. If this group will ultimately be responsible for executing the outcomes of your project, the earlier you engage them in the process, the better. Many project managers fail to keep up timely, focused communication while executing a project, and the project flounders in implementation.
Once-in-a-career events represent opportunity, as well as risk, to your career. Embrace the challenge, and you will give yourself the best opportunity for success!

Google's social side hopes to catch some Buzz

2010-02-09T23:55:00.001-08:00

Google is determined not to be left behind by the social-media revolution.
The company wants to take what it does best--organizing Web content by relevancy--and apply it to social media, perhaps the most disorganized segment of the Web. Google Buzz is its most ambitious attempt to do just that, marrying the Gmail Web interface with status updates and media-sharing technology in an attempt to convince the social media addicts of the world to spend more time on Google's sites than on competitors like Facebook or Twitter; generating valuable data in the process.
"It has become a core belief of ours that organizing the social information on the Web is a Google-scale problem," said Todd Jackson, Gmail product manager, demonstrating Google Buzz at the company's headquarters a day before Tuesday's event. An astounding amount of social-media content is produced every day, across Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and personal blogs, and Google's faith that it could one day index and organize the entire Internet has been shaken by this explosion in Web content.
Somebody has to try, according to Google engineers. "A lot of the world's information is what's happening with my friends," said Bradley Horowitz, vice president of product management at the company. "We can't achieve (Google's) mission unless we solve these parts of that problem."
However, they see not only an opportunity to unify the social Web and make things easier for users, but a chance to erode Facebook's advantage in the reams of user data it has amassed behind closed walls that Google--and Google's advertisers--can't see. The only way they'll be able to do that is by creating a system that is as compelling and easy to use as Facebook.
Google is attempting to do this by taking Gmail, one of its more popular products, and integrating Buzz directly into the Gmail interface. Users can link their Twitter, Flickr, Picasa, and Google Reader accounts to their Buzz streams to see information produced by friends on those networks, as well as updates posted directly to the Buzz stream.
Google thinks it can build a competitive advantage in social media by focusing on relevancy and ranking within a social network. For example, Buzz users will be able to see all the content produced by those who they are following, but they'll also be able to see content produced by people they aren't following if their friends "liked" or commented on that content.
They'll also be able to train that algorithm by clicking "Not interested" on these "recommended" status updates if they don't wish to see that particular type of update again. Google thinks users might see an advantage if they can lower the ranking of oft-repeated types of content--such as the what-I-had-for-breakfast update--without having to banish that friend's content from their feed.
The idea is to take the thinking behind core Google concepts such as PageRank and quality score and apply it to social media, and Buzz is an early example of that process at Google, Jackson said. Expect to see further updates, as Buzz fits right into Google's classic strategy of launching a product as soon as possible and making constant updates.
Getting Buzz when you're on the move
And on the mobile side of the world, where social media can be combined with location, Google wants to allow phone users to see a wealth of data about what's happening around them and get in on thelocation-aware services bandwagon.
Google Buzz for Mobile will essentially be a competitor to services like Foursquare and Gowalla, allowing users to "check in" by updating their Buzz status with a Google Maps link to their location. You'll be able to do this right from Google's mobile home page, and Google is also releasing a Web application for Google Buzz that will work on iPhones and Android phones.
And within Google Maps for Mobile, the company's improved mapping application, users will be able to see public Buzz content posted from mobile phones around their location, said Vic Gundotra, vice president of engineering at Google. That includes quick reviews of restaurants in the area, updates on traffic snarls further along the route, or anything else imaginable.
For those who haven't drunk from the Foursquare pitcher just yet, bear in mind that the location part of a Buzz status update is opt-in: you'll have to manually declare your location, and can post Buzz updates without having to share your exact whereabouts.
This brings up a key factor in how Google is pitching Buzz. In order to attract users, it has to offer enough privacy safeguards to allow them to live their online lives in a semi-private fashion. But it also wants to open up that data to the wider Web, where it can be analyzed and dissected to glean information about trends that advertisers demand.
One of the issues with a service like Facebook is that so much of its content is walled-off from search engines and the general public. That's nice for users, but bad for search engines and marketers, and so Facebook has gently tried to encourage its users to open up their profiles.
Buzz users can choose to make a new post public or private before publishing. Public messages are distributed to one's followers, but they are also posted to one's Google Profile, where they can be searched, indexed, and viewed by anyone. Private Buzz messages can be sent to an unlimited number of subgroups within one's follower list, separating work contacts from drinking buddies, family and groups of friends that don't travel in the same circles. That would appear to give enough cover to those who want to make their online lives semi-public, but also placate Google and its advertisers' hunger for data on how people are spending their time both online and offline.
Buzz will take some time to gather the momentum that other social media sites have enjoyed. For example, one key omission is the inability to update those external services from within the Buzz stream: you can't update your Twitter feed with your status with a Buzz post, even though you can see what your Twitter contacts are doing in Buzz.
Google said it was working on that feature, but declined to say why it decided to leave that out at launch. Presumably, the company would prefer to build a network within Buzz that keeps those updates in house, at least at first. But those who have already established themselves as frequent Twitter users might not see a lot of value in a service that doesn't allow them to post to Twitter.
2010 is an important year for Google's social media strategy. The company has hired several veterans of the social Web to build out a new team, and executives promised a lot more to come with services like Buzz over the course of the year to erase the memories of Google as a social-media also-ran.
The problem, however, will be the increasing backlash Google is seeing from the general public over how much data the company already controls on their online habits. Will they want to take it a step further? If not, Google's social skills will have taken another hit.

Indian IT market to regain 'normal' growth

2010-02-09T21:59:00.003-08:00

The IT market in India is expected to grow at about 15.5 percent in 2010, returning to a "new normal rate" after last year's turbulent economic environment, according to a new report.
In a report titled "India IT Market Predictions 2010" released Monday, Manish Bahl, research manager at Springboard Research, said the growth would be spurred by organizations initiating new large-scale projects over the course of the year. These initiatives will require significant IT infrastructure-related investments, he noted.
Springboard Research estimates show that India's domestic IT market recorded an 11-percent year-on-year growth in 2009, down from the 14.1 percent it projected in February 2009.
Going forward, there is great interest in cost-cutting measures as CIOs in India focus on allocating around 75 percent of their budgets to "keep the lights on", added Bahl. The report pointed to a noticeable shift in enterprise IT spending from focusing on new investments to streamlining costs and improving internal efficiencies.
Reaching out beyond large enterprises to small and midsize businesses (SMBs) will be "key to success" for vendors of remote infrastructure management, desktop management and other managed services, Bahl noted. However, he added that vendors can expect to cater to "very cautious and increasingly skeptical set of IT buyers and prospects".
The report indicated that data center transformations, IT manageability advancements, software-as-a-service (SaaS) and virtualization investments are also helping companies drive "economies of scale" by reducing operational expenditures, both from the business and IT perspective, while increasing productivity.
The report also listed the top 10 trends that will share the IT market in India this year:
1. Business enhancement with existing vendors and geographic expansion will drive strong focus from India's IT channel community.
2. Analytics and the advent of "intelligent solutions" will drive new business value.
3. Rural India IT solutions will make steady headway via public- and private-sector investments.
4. Business leaders will drive the proliferation of SaaS applications.
5. A wave of innovative new payment technologies emerge.
6. Desktop virtualization to gain more acceptance in the enterprise.
7. Government projects will fuel smart card technologies.
8. Mobile social networking goes mainstream.
9. Convergence of computing platforms accelerates.
10. Online developer platforms and communities are the new ecosystem battleground and epicenter of application innovation.

SAP leadership change just 'business reality'

2010-02-09T21:59:00.001-08:00

The departure of SAP CEO Leo Apotheker is simply a reflection of "business reality and part of business life" and will not impact customer relationships, says the company's Asia-Pacific top exec.
Stephen Watts, SAP's new president for Asia-Pacific and Japan, told ZDNet Asia in an interview here Tuesday that Apotheker's resignation this week is not expected to affect customer confidence and he remains especially bullish about the region. Effective immediately, the CEO left his post and seat on the company's board after his contract was not renewed.
While Apotheker's tenure was stung by lower sales and earnings over the last year of the economic downturn, Watts said SAP has forecast a 4 percent to 8 percent recovery in revenues this year, with the Asia-Pacific region expecting to fare closer to the 8 percent-mark.
"Southeast Asia as a whole had the strongest quarter last year in the company's history," he said, pointing to China and India as "growth engines" that saw an average of 46 percent increase in the same quarter.
Watts said SAP's market share in the region is currently the "largest of the application software vendors", where it takes 40 to 50 percent of the market in Southeast Asia. It has the largest share in Japan, he added, and is the largest multinational vendor in China--behind local provider, Ufida.
Business intelligence pulling customers
According to Gartner figures released mid-2009, SAP's share of the North American ERP (enterprise resource planning) software market stood at 26 percent in 2008. For the BI (business intelligence) market segment, IDC ranked SAP's BusinessObjects global market share top, at 20.4 percent.
Of SAP's revenues in the Asia-Pacific region, ERP software accounts for half and BI contributes to the remaining half, Watts said. "BI will be the fastest mover for us [in the region."
He explained that the high expectation in BI stems from several areas: small companies that are beginning to streamline processes, as well as keen interest from the public sector, thanks to stimulus package spending by governments last year.
Utilities was the strongest growing vertical for SAP in the region last year, with governments looking to modernize operations with investments in billing, smart metering and process integration, said Watts. "The [utilities industry] provided a very material investment across the region," he added.
In an interview last year with ZDNet Asia, SAP said BI was providing an inroad to organizations for the vendor's main ERP product. Organizations were particularly interested in BI's quick returns and comparably smaller investment commitment, compared to embarking on a larger ERP implementation, SAP said.
Watts echoed these sentiments, nothing that BI's "short and sharp" implementations help demonstrate a quicker and predictable investment rollout, of within a six month-span, for enterprise customers.
Beyond BI, companies want smaller, phrased investments across their enterprise implementations, he added. "Boards want to see results faster. The expectations of technology are higher, and this creates a [higher] level of immediacy," he said.
Watts took over the role of SAP's Asia-Pacific and Japan president in January from his predecessor, Geraldine McBride. Prior to that, he served as the region's chief operating officer.

The enduring cipher: Unbreakable for nearly 100 years

2010-02-09T01:13:00.000-08:00

One cryptographic cipher has been mathematically proven to be unbreakable when it is used correctly, but it is only very rarely used. Chad Perrin breaks down the one-time pad cipher.

It seems to be a truism of cryptography that any cipher, no matter how strong it is considered to be in its heyday, eventually becomes a weak cipher.
What people fear when they use the current favorite strong cipher is that someone will crack it--will find a shortcut that greatly reduces the time required to use brute force calculation to decrypt something without the key.
Even if a cipher is never broken, and we forever-more need the same average number of CPU clock cycles to decrypt something encrypted by a given cipher without using the key; it still takes less time every few months to achieve the same goal than it did a few months ago. This is because computers keep getting faster, allowing us to squeeze the same number of CPU clock cycles into a shorter period of time.
Ever-more complex and clever algorithms are designed to provide ever greater resistance to brute force cryptanalysis, and to replace older algorithms that have been broken or otherwise become obsolete. It is always an arms race--privacy against the attempt to penetrate that privacy.
Amongst all the wreckage of the broken and rusty ciphers that have fallen by the wayside through history, one cipher has endured for the last 93 years. It is called the one-time pad.
In 1917, Gilbert Vernam developed a cipher known as the Vernam Cipher, which used teletype technology with a paper tape key to encrypt and decrypt data. The result was a symmetric cipher that was quite strong for its time.
U.S. Army Captain Joseph Mauborgne realized that by using truly random keys, where no part of the key was repeated (except perhaps at random), the Vernam cipher could be made much stronger.
From the idea of using paper tape keys, a pad of paper with rows of random letters or numbers on each page as the means of recording keys was developed. Two copies of the same pad could be given to two people, and by using each character on each page only once (and destroying each page as its last character is used to encrypt or decrypt a message), they could pass encrypted messages between them without fear of an intercepted message ever being decrypted without the help of the key.
Because of the technique of distributing key stream data on pads of paper, this cipher became known as the one-time pad.
Claude Shannon, known as the father of information theory, mathematically proved the unbreakability of the one-time pad cipher when it is used properly--including destroying any pages containing used key data so that it will not be used, and so that unauthorized copies of any messages cannot later be decrypted if someone gets his hands on your used pages from the pad.
The same concept for key management can be employed digitally, of course, with the proviso that one must be very careful to avoid letting the inherent weaknesses of computers introduce flaws into the one-time pad system. For instance, expensive data recovery operations might be able to reconstruct "deleted" files, including used one-time pad data. There are things you can do to help obscure such data when simply deleting files is not enough, but one must be careful.
The one-time pad cipher can be extremely inconvenient at times, which is why it is not used more often. We do actually need theoretically weaker (if cleverer) ciphers, such as AES/Rijndael and Twofish because of that inconvenience:

Because the one-time pad cipher is a symmetric cipher, both parties to an encrypted communication must have the exact same key data. For certain use cases for encryption, this makes a one-time pad completely useless, because to securely exchange the key data so both parties have it, one must have a secure means of sharing data that would work just as well for sharing the eventual messages themselves. Only in cases in which you do not know what messages you will need to send, and where you will not be able to use whatever secure means was used to exchange the key data (such as physically handing it to the person) at the later time, is the one-time pad cipher useful.
A one-time pad encryption key must be as long as the message it is used to encrypt and decrypt. Thus, if you want to encrypt or decrypt a three gigabyte file, you need three gigabytes of one-time pad key data.
The same one-time pad data can not be shared securely among more than two people; for example, in cases where different messages will be sent between some recipients of the key data, which should not be readable to other recipients, using the same one-time pad amongst all of them subverts the security of the cipher. By contrast, with an asymmetric cipher you can provide the same public key to dozens of people, and they will all be able to use that same public key to encrypt messages for you without any fear the other people who have the public key will be able to read it--as long as the cipher is not broken and the state of the art of computing technology does not advance enough to reasonably brute force decrypt the messages. This is because when something is encrypted with the public key, only the associated private key can be used to decrypt it.
Reusing a key potentially breaks the security of the one-time pad cipher because it suffers a known-plaintext vulnerability. Kerckhoffs' principle states that a cryptosystem should be secure so long as the the key remains secret, but where the encrypted and unencrypted (plaintext) versions of a given message are both known, the key can be derived in the case of the one-time pad cipher. This is not a problem if each string of key data is used only once, because if the plaintext is captured by the "enemy" you have already lost the game anyway. If a key is reused, however, one message's plaintext can be used as part of the set of tools used to determine the key for decrypting another message. The moral of the story is: Don't use a given one-time pad key more than once. There is a reason it is called a "one-time" pad.
When the last of your one-time pad is used up, you cannot securely send messages back and forth--encrypted using that same cipher--any longer unless you securely exchange new random key data. This kind of thing can really cramp your style when trying to communicate with someone on the other side of the world.

Other factors come into play in making use of the one-time pad cipher impractical in some circumstances, too, but these should give you a good start on seeing why other, theoretically weaker ciphers are still important.
The way the one-time pad works is deceptively simple. It involves merely comparing each of two datums, such as two letters or numbers, and using that comparison to produce a new datum. This is done for every such datum in the message you want to encrypt. The process of performing this comparison is simple and easy, one datum at a time, and (relatively) computationally cheap. A simple operator known as the XOR operator can be used to perform such a comparison. In its simplest form, the XOR operator as applied to binary numbers works something like this:

First, you need a message. Let's use the word "short" as our message. Yes, that is a short message.
Next, you translate that message into a binary representation. Using ASCII encoding to translate the word "short", you end up with the following string of ones and zeros:
```
0111001101101000011011110111001001110100
```
The last thing you need is a key that is exactly as long as the message. In this case, let's use this string of ones and zeros as our key:
```
0110010101101010001110010010011101100100
```
Finally, with the XOR operator, you basically perform a simple subtraction. Where the first character in each case is a zero, you see that 0 - 0 = 0. Similarly, the second character in each is a one, and 1 - 1 = 0. Where one character is a one and the other a zero, though, you get either a 1 or a -1 result. If you take the absolute value of the result, that means that both will give you a 1 result. Thus, subtracting and taking the absolute value provides the following:
```
0111001101101000011011110111001001110100
0110010101101010001110010010011101100100
----------------------------------------
0001011000000010010101100101010100010000
```

Of course, there are no ASCII translations for some of those groups of eight binary characters in the resulting string of ones and zeros, so it is difficult to represent the data in a concise form. Using ASCII encoding is well-suited to computer use, but the traditional number-and-letter approach to implementing the one-time pad cipher is much better suited to analog, by-hand translations.
The core algorithm for the one-time pad cipher is obviously incredibly simple. It is only in designing the rest of the software that surrounds this algorithm, and finding the right use case for the cipher, that the real problems of secure cryptographic software development arise. On the other hand, if it absolutely, positively has to be securely encrypted, the one-time pad is the only cipher that is provably unbreakable when used properly--given our current understanding of mathematics.

Facebook takes over display ads from Microsoft

2010-02-09T00:08:00.003-08:00

Microsoft said last Friday that it has lost the remainder of Facebook's display advertising business as the social network will now handle all of the graphical ads on its site.
"We made the mutual decision that Facebook would take over responsibility for selling display advertisements on its own site," Bing general manager Jon Tinter said in a blog posting. "We have been working together on advertising for a long time, creating the best experience for (Facebook) users and advertisers. Given the kinds of advertisements that make sense within a product as unique as Facebook, it just made more sense for them to take the lead on this part of their advertising strategy."
The deal represents a scaling back of a 2007 pact in which Microsoft invested US$240 million in Facebook and became "the exclusive third-party advertising platform partner for Facebook", serving up display ads, in addition to search results. Microsoft had already lost some of the international display ad business in recent months.
However, Microsoft also said that it is expanding its search advertising partnership with Facebook, with Bing serving up more detailed search results and being used for Web search internationally, in addition to the U.S.
"We have deepened our joint work together on web search to provide even more compelling experiences to Facebook users with Bing," Tinter said. "As part of this expanded cooperation in search, our two companies will soon provide Facebook users with a more complete search experience by providing full access to great Bing features beyond a set of links, including richer answers combined with tools that help customers make faster, smarter decisions."

Authors Guild: We don't want to be like RIAA

2010-02-09T00:08:00.001-08:00

The Authors Guild agreed to a controversial settlement with Google because it feared repeating the mistakes that the music industry has made in dealing with digital works, it said last Friday.
Google and the Authors Guild have struggled to get final approval of a settlement granting Google the right to continue a 6-year book-scanning project than has digitized 12 million titles. Objections to that settlement from authors and academics have been heated, and despite revisions, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) continued to object in principle to the settlement last Thursday, saying "the (revised agreement) purports to grant legal rights that are difficult to square with the core principle of the Copyright Act that copyright owners generally control whether and how to exploit their works during the term of copyright."
With that in mind, many have wondered why the Authors Guild chose to settle the case rather than fight it out in court and clear up the issue of whether or not Google's decision to scan out-of-print yet copyright-protected books really is allowed under fair-use laws. The reason is simple, the Guild said in a blog post last Friday: legal victories haven't stopped copyright infringement in other forms of digital media.
"Copyright victories tend to be Pyrrhic in the digital age," the Guild wrote. If the Guild had prevailed in its suit against Google, it said it believed that copyright infringement would have just moved elsewhere, just as court victories won by the RIAA (the Recording Industry Association of America) over Napster led to the rise of services like Kazaa and others.
And if it had lost, the Guild said it couldn't have guaranteed copyright protection for in-print books, which under the settlement Google is not allowed to scan without an agreement with the rights holder. "Nothing gets illegal file-sharing going quite so much as millions of unsecured digital works floating around the Internet," the Guild wrote.
At least musicians can go on tour and sell concert tickets to performances of their works; that's not exactly an option for authors, the Guild wrote. "For most authors, markets created by copyright are all we've got."
It's hard to determine what Judge Denny Chin of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York will decide later this month when the parties come together for a hearing on whether or not to approve the settlement. The statements by the DOJ make it clear that the U.S. government believes Google and the plaintiffs are overstepping their bounds in creating an agreement that awards unique rights to Google.
But the Authors Guild doesn't think there was any other way to ensure that authors receive compensation for their work and avoid the "Napsterization" of the book publishing industry.
"Protecting authors' interests has always been our top priority: in this case a timely harnessing of Google was the best way to do it."

Oracle releases out-of-band patch for server hole

2010-02-09T00:07:00.001-08:00

Oracle has released a patch for a server flaw that can be exploited over a network without the use of a username or password.
The patch addresses a vulnerability in the Node Manager component of Oracle WebLogic Server, and affects the latest versions of the software, Oracle said in an advisory on Thursday.
It is highly unusual for Oracle to release an out-of-band patch for a critical flaw, as the company usually prefers to release critical patch updates every three months.
Read more of "Oracle releases out-of-band patch for server hole" at ZDNet UK.

Microsoft to Fix 17 year Old Bug

2010-02-05T09:15:00.001-08:00

Microsoft is due to release a patch in its Feb Security update for 17 yr old computer bug which was associated with DOS Operating System. The software glitch was originally detected in Windows 3.1 and then it got carried over to the subsequent windows version. The bug was discovered by a Google Security Researcher and the old bug invloves with a utility that allows newer versions of Windows to run programs that date from the DOS era. He was able to exploit the same utility in Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 and 2008 as well as Windows Vista and Windows 7.

The software giant is also going to release patches for five other critical windows bugs that allow hackers to steal the identity of the Windows PC and run their own programs in it. The fix also includes patches for Office XP, Office 2003 and Office 2004 for Apple Macintosh machines. This is not a big security update for Microsoft in the recent times. In October last year, they released patches for 34 loopholes and eight of them are serious in nature.
There was an important security update from Microsoft in Jan this year regarding a security loophole in Explorer which was thought to be used by cybercriminals for the recent attack on Google. The security researchers also reported a problem this week. The attackers are able to see the files at the user's PC by using theInternet Explorer. Microsoft already made a security news about the problem and is expected to fix it in the future version.

Five agile project management migration tips

2010-02-03T09:20:00.001-08:00

Rick Freedman shares five tips for PMBOK, CMM-style shops considering agile migrations. He also recommends an agile PM book that he says is a must-read.

I've written previously about the ideas and philosophies that form the foundation of agile project management. The history of project management, especially as it applies to IT, has resembled a pendulum, swinging from the lax controls and do-it-yourself ethic of the early mainframe "glass room" to the rigorous methodological controls and formal software development life cycles (SDLCs) of Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK), Capability Maturity Model (CMM)-enforced practices.
Many IT shops have fought painful ideological and cultural battles to make the transition to disciplined project management; in my career, I've seen the Project Management Institute (PMI) certification evolve from an obscure and unknown credential to a virtual requirement for employment in many organizations.
We've also seen CMM certifications become critical differentiating factors, especially for offshore IT service providers, who have used CMM Level-5 certification as an "assurance factor" to help Global 500 firms feel comfortable outsourcing to far-off partners.
I've developed project management offices and project management methodologies for large IT firms and service shops, and I'm a strong advocate of adding these disciplines to the corporate toolkit to improve delivery consistency and process excellence.
Now that I'm working with firms to train them in agile methods and to help them migrate to agile, however, I'm finding that these same disciplines that brought such strong benefits in project success rates can also be an impediment to agile adoption. Many firms have committed so completely to PMBOK process flows and CMM best practices that many of the core concepts of agile development, such as "barely sufficient" documentation and change-friendliness, seem like heresy.
In fact, I've had people in my Agile Project Management classes tell me that their perception of agile is that the key message is "everything you know about project management is wrong". While this may in fact be the message of some purists in the agile community, I'm much more of a pragmatist, and my counsel to firms migrating to agile methods is that, not only can agile and traditional project methods co-exist, but in fact, in most organizations and for most projects, a hybrid approach is key to success.
Bridge to agile PM
In her outstanding book "Software Project Manager's Bridge to Agility", Michele Sliger walks readers through the PMBOK and relates agile concepts to the well-known Project Management Institute (PMI) knowledge areas and process areas.
Sliger's key message is that both the agile and traditional project management camps have misconceptions about the ideas and capabilities of the other side. Some PMI-focused PMs and organizations believe that PMI and the PMBOK don't support agile methods, and that migration to agile automatically means abandoning PMI ideals.
Conversely, some agile proponents believe that PMPs are so committed to "predictive" project methods that they can’t become agile. By relating the key practices of traditional PMOs, such as time, cost, and risk management, to agile approaches that address the same requirements in a slightly different way, Sliger demonstrates that the foundation disciplines of project management remain intact as your enterprise becomes agile, and that only some tactics and approaches change. For any enterprise considering migration from PMBOK-style project methods to more agile approaches, Sliger's book is a must read.
Agile lessons learned
From my experience in the trenches, some of my key lessons learned for PMBOK, CMM-style shops are the following points:

Sell: Evangelizing the benefits and features of agile methods and ensuring that the sponsorship exists to make this often wrenching and difficult transition are prerequisites. Each of your audiences will need a different sales pitch; managers need to understand that agile teams can plan, that we do estimate, and that we can create a long-term strategic roadmap that gives them the information they need to budget and set expectations (ideas that conflict with agile myths). Development teams need to internalize the leaps in self-direction, creativity and maturity that working in an agile environment can enable. Many agile teams observe that the expectation of self-direction encourages them to take responsibility and ownership of their commitments, and to develop mature skills like facilitation and negotiation. And PMO managers need to understand that their hard-won battles for discipline and consistency were not in vain.
Train: A robust training program for all audiences is the next key element of a successful transition to agile. The language is different, the development life-cycle is different, and the foundational philosophies of iterative development, constant customer involvement, minimal project management "ritual", and change-friendliness must be understood and embraced for the organization to be united and prepared for the evolution ahead.
Pilot: Many organizations transitioning to agile select specific projects, typically suitable for an agile approach due to their innovative nature and their need to quickly respond to changes in the technical, business, or competitive landscape, and run them as "skunkworks" outside the standard PMO line of command. This allows development teams to quickly sidestep some of the process overhead that often accompanies SDLC-compliant programs, without requiring the organization to change its sanctioned approach without proof that agile works, and is suitable culturally for the company. To give a negative example, I recently worked with a team that is experimenting with agile methods, but is still also required to comply with strict PMO documentation and process requirements. This "double duty" is not a fair test of agile methods and, in fact, dooms agile to fail as it requires even more overhead, such as both burn-down charts and Gantt charts, and both story-driven and task-driven project plans.
Reflect: Once the team has a few agile projects under its belt, honestly reflect on what was best and worst about these efforts. These retrospectives should focus on the process of delivery and the actual deliverables, and should concentrate on the idea of balance and adaptiveness. Which elements of the existing, PMBOK-compliant methods must stay, because they add real value and also provide the predictability and comfort level management needs? Which agile methods have demonstrated that they can enhance the creativity and self-motivation of the team, and boost the collaborative spirit between the development team and the business sponsors?
Adapt: Adaptiveness is, in my view, the key to successful agile implementations. In fact, Jim Highsmith, a signatory of the Agile Manifesto and the author of the influential book "Agile Project Management", uses the language of "adaptive development" as his core explanatory term for these methods. The agile approach that any enterprise adopts must be adapted to fit the culture, the risk profile, the history and the preference of all the affected audiences. By experimenting with agile methods in some key "skunkworks" projects, honestly assessing their successes and challenges, and looking for the right mix and balance for your organization, your chances of a successful migration increase substantially.

Just as many firms took a long time to evolve from the "glass house" of mainframe development to the disciplined approaches of SMM and PMI, firms should expect migration to agile to be a process, not an event.
Small steps are more easily digested by all audiences, and, although they may not bring the quantum leap in innovativeness and speed that a rapid agile adoption might, they make up for that by being acceptable and comfortable, and by preparing the way for success iteratively and incrementally, and iterative and incremental improvement is what agile methods are all about.
Rick Freedman is the author of three books on IT consulting, including "The IT Consultant". He is a director in the Global Services Division of NEC America, and a trainer and course developer in the Agile Project Management practice of ESI, the international PM training company.

Alcatel-Lucent: WiMax lost against LTE

2010-02-02T22:43:00.003-08:00

The mobile industry has clearly chosen LTE (long-term evolution) over WiMax for the next generation of mobile broadband connectivity, a senior Alcatel-Lucent executive has said.

Patrick Plas, Alcatel Lucent's chief operating officer for wireless, said on Monday that the company is "not putting a lot of effort into [WiMax] any longer", adding that upcoming LTE launches by companies such as Verizon showed "a clear direction taken by the industry towards LTE".

Plas is not the first to point out that LTE (the long-term evolution of 3G) is now firmly in the roadmap of most operators--even WiMax backers have acknowledged that their chosen technology is more likely to serve niche markets. It is, however, interesting to hear a telecoms hardware vendor, which still makes and markets WiMax equipment, say it.

Read more of "WiMax lost against LTE, says Alcatel-Lucent", which was first published as a blog post, at ZDNet UK.

Mozilla weighs privacy warnings for Web pages

2010-02-02T22:43:00.001-08:00

Unless you speak lawyerese as a second language, a Web site's privacy policy can seem as incomprehensible as the loudspeakers on New York City subways.
The organization behind Firefox, the world's second most popular Web browser, has embarked on an ambitious project to change this. Instead of forcing people concerned about privacy to scroll through pages of "notwithstanding anything to the contrary," the Mozilla Foundation is designing a standard set of colored icons to reveal how data-protective--or how intrusive--Web sites are.
It does seem a bit odd that, in the era of the iPad and cars that nearly drive themselves, technologists have been unable to puzzle out a better way to display that privacy information. The Mozilla Foundation's tentative solution is to employ the leverage it has through Firefox, used by something like 350 million people worldwide, to convince publishers to disclose their privacy practices in a standard way that would be displayed in a Web browser's address bar.
"The most important thing we can be doing now is to create the information architecture which defines what people should care about privacy," said Aza Raskin, head of user experience for Mozilla Labs. A list of eight categories used for brainstorming includes whether the Web site shares information with third parties, whether data are retained after use, whether data are encrypted, and whether collected data are personally identifiable.
The Mozilla Foundation's eventual goal is to create icons as easy to understand as care labels on a shirt that say whether it should be dry cleaned or washed in cold water. Using the letter P inside a circle has been discussed, even if it bears an unfortunate resemblance to the ubiquitous blue signs for parking lots, as has borrowing icon ideas from Creative Commons. (The project is unrelated to the ad industry's recent announcement of a blue "i" icon for behavioral advertising.) At a meeting last week in Mozilla's headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., a few dozen attendees including representatives from the Federal Trade Commission began to sketch out how a standard for privacy icons would work. "They were thinking that you might have several icons in the address bar for each site," said Seth Schoen, staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "Maybe they would be showing things that were good about that site's privacy practices, and maybe they would be showing things that were bad about that site's privacy practices."
Mozilla Labs' Raskin has been forthright about using privacy icons in the Web browser as a tool to reward and punish. Raskin wrote last month that: "If Firefox encounters a privacy policy that doesn't have Privacy Icons, we'll automatically display the icons with the poorest guarantees: your data may be sold to third parties, your data may be stored indefinitely, and your data may be turned over to law enforcement without a warrant, etc."
Didn't P3P do this already?
The challenge for the organization will be avoiding the problems that plagued P3P, or Platform for Privacy Preferences, an earlier effort to convince publishers to rate their own sites in a standard manner. Almost from the moment of its launch more than a decade ago, P3P began a long slide into irrelevance, and today major sites like Google.com, Apple.com, CNN.com, and Twitter.com do not use P3P to summarize their privacy policies.
At the time of its creation, though, P3P enjoyed the enthusiastic support of the World Wide Web Consortium and Internet icons like Tim Berners-Lee, who predicted that the technology will become the "keystone to resolving larger issues of both privacy and security on the Web." In an echo of what's being planned for Firefox today, Microsoft said in 2001 that Internet Explorer 6 would require ad networks to adopt P3P if they wanted their Web technology to continue to work with the new browser. One explanation for why P3P died is that it was too complicated; the final specification tops out at a novel-length weight of 49,000 words, while the complete text of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland is only 29,000.
Or perhaps there was little actual demand on the part of Internet users, who have been known to divulge their account passwords for a chocolate bar. P3P's backers did include tech firms that hoped it would head off burdensome government regulation; when the early threat faded, so did P3P's support. (Lending credence to that theory are the vicious attacks on P3P by privacy activists clamoring for new laws, who dubbed it "pretty poor privacy" at the time.)
Few noticed when a P3P working group officially abandoned the idea in 2007, admitting in a note that "there was insufficient support from current browser implementers." An August 2009 article quoted Rigo Wenning, the editor of the final P3P draft, as saying: "We did not manage to convince the browsers, that is the big failure."
How three privacy categories grew to 17
Lorrie Cranor, a member of the P3P working group who has done extensive work on privacy statements as a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University, says that the challenge of distilling complex and customized privacy policies into a few icons could be insurmountable. Cranor should know: At AT&T, she once created an Internet Explorer plug-in called Privacy Bird--it looks like the offspring of a duck and a parrot--that turns green when a Web site is privacy-protective and red when it is not.
"No matter where you draw the line about what's in and what's out, there are companies that just miss, and they argue that their practices aren't really so bad they should be labeled as 'bad,'" Cranor said. "And they have some unique business model that requires using data in some way that makes perfect sense to them--and consumers would understand it too if only we created a special category for them to use to explain it."
Then, Cranor says, the next thing you know is that the original two or three categories have ballooned to 15 or 17 categories to account for all of those situations. "And then the categories are so fine grained and confusing that companies misclassify themselves and users can't distinguish them anyway." (If firms agree to a few simple categories, Cranor adds, the Mozilla plan would be "feasible.")
The privacy icon project is part of a broader effort to ensure that Web users can control their own online experience, and is still "embryonic", says Mark Surman, executive director of the Mozilla Foundation. The plan is to "bring lawyers and product people together, but also as this unfolds it will be designers, user testing," Surman said. "Our bigger interest is that users take control of their online lives."
Mozilla is acutely aware of the problems that bedeviled P3P. Not having industry adoption is "a fail condition", says Mozilla Labs' Raskin. "Our thinking right now is that unlike P3P or the Creative Commons approach (when) you force everyone to use a template privacy policy...when you use a privacy icon, it's only making a very small tangible scope-able claim about use of data."
Another possible obstacle is inherent in self-rating: major Web sites like Google, Yahoo, and Facebook may decide that their own privacy policies drafted by their own lawyers are fine even though they trigger red warning icons in Firefox. Meanwhile, a phishing site run by the Russian mafia could falsely claim that it protects your privacy absolutely and be recommended in green by a Web browser. Or the privacy ratings may not be broad enough to capture reality.
Some of these issues can be glimpsed through PrivacyFinder.org, a P3P Web search tool created by Cranor's group at Carnegie Mellon. It awards the U.S. Department of Homeland Security a perfect rating of four out of four green boxes. But Yahoo receives a horrible rating of one of four green boxes. (FDIC.gov is awarded three out of four; National Public Radio receives two of four.)
Mozilla still has yet to resolve "the question of whose privacy policies the icon is for," said Berin Szoka, director of the center for Internet freedom at the Progress and Freedom Foundation. "Is it the publisher, or third-party ad networks on the page?"
"If you rely on the publisher to do this, they can only describe their own practices," said Szoka, who attended last week's meeting. "The problem is if you actually expect a publisher or first party to do that, you're making them responsible for knowing, and liable for, whatever any third party such as a Web analytics firm, a cookie, or an ad network is doing. It's not just as simple as describing what kind of data collection that's going on with your page."

Intel late but serious in smartphone fight

2010-02-02T22:42:00.001-08:00

Intel's may be late into the mobile chip game, but its industry alliances and upcoming products mark the chipmaker's earnestness to tap the business, an analyst pointed out. He also noted that while the chip giant has the ability to allocate resources for R&D and execute its mobile strategy, its moves may not be enough to unseed market leader ARM.
Francis Sideco, iSuppli's principal analyst for wireless communications, said that industry tie-ups in 2009 with the likes of LG and Nokia show Intel's "intent and seriousness" toward the mobile business.
At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last month, Intel executives showcased the LG GW990 smartphone powered by the chipmaker's Moorestown platform. The successor to the current Atom-based platform, Moorestown includes a system-on-a-chip and is slated for the first half of 2010.
"If the chip/phone works as [claimed], the LG win and resulting commercial release could go a long way toward Intel proving that [it has] a viable solution for the mobile device segment which requires full-day battery life of at least 10 hours or more with typical usage," he noted. "This, in and of itself, will not be enough to topple ARM-based dominance in this segment, but does herald Intel's real entry into the market."
The chipmaker, he acknowledged, is "behind" in the game and "there is always some disadvantage to that". On the other hand, Intel has the R&D resources "to catch up in a relatively short period of time if it really wants to", as well as the ability to execute.
As a chip architecture player, Intel faces stiff competition from ARM which is acknowledged as the market leader for the architecture behind mobile applications processors. ARM partners chipmakers such as Qualcomm to launch processors like the Snapdragon used in devices including Google's Nexus One.
But Santa Clara, Calif.-based Intel is king in the x86 computing segment, and the company points out that phones are essentially becoming "small pocketable computers that happen to make a phone call".
In an e-mail, an Intel spokesperson said: "In 2008, over 125 million mobile consumer handheld devices were sold in the portable media, portable gaming, portable navigation, enterprise verticals and related categories. Most of these devices were based on a proprietary vertical software stack, were not connected and did not take advantage of the innovation on the Internet.
"As these devices become connected and embrace the open Internet, we expect them to require performance, value software and Internet compatibility, and be more computer-like--this is Intel's strategy and strength."
The Moorestown platform will kick off Intel's pursuit of smartphones, "where the primary usage is Internet-based", he added. Besides LG and Nokia, the chipmaker has also announced Moorestown partnerships with Aava Mobile, Compal, EB, Inventec, Open Peak, Quanta and Wistron.
According to the Intel spokesperson, the company's 32-nanometer Medfield product scheduled for 2011 will be more squarely targeted at the smartphone segment.
Mixed reactions from rivals
When contacted, a Qualcomm spokesperson welcomed Intel's entry, but did not comment further beyond an e-mail statement.
"Qualcomm has a long legacy of success in the development of 3G wireless technologies, and as always we believe competition is ultimately good for consumers and fosters global industry growth," the statement read.
James Bruce, wireless segment manager at ARM, noted that Intel will inevitably "make some inroads into the mobile market", but argued that the performance and power consumption of its rival's mobile processor architecture cannot match up to ARM's.
The competition's business model, he said, also runs "counter to what works in this market".
"Today as a consumer, you can buy a smartphone that meets your needs and your price point with a true diversity of choice, from the hardware to the software and features. This diversity and rate of innovation in smartphone development have been enabled because of the multiple silicon providers, with their own unique advantages, allowing handset manufacturers to differentiate their offerings," he pointed out. "This could not happen if the handset processor [came] from one supplier.
"In the ARM world we talk about enabling diversity and innovation, while in the Intel world they focus on 'de-fragmentation' built around one ordained solution," he continued. "Which approach is more exciting and better for the consumer?"
According to Bruce, ARM will reveal details of its roadmap over the next few months. He added that the company is confident it will "continue to be at the heart of the best devices", even as the continuum of mobile and personal computing devices expands.

Global cell phone sales on the rise

2010-02-02T02:17:00.001-08:00

Sales of cell phones around the world rebounded in the fourth quarter, indicating that the recession may be over for the beleaguered mobile handset market, according to figures compiled by market research firms.
Global handset shipments were up 10 percent to 324.4 million units in the fourth quarter of 2009 compared to 293.8 million phones during the same quarter a year ago, said Strategy Analytics. This is the first quarter of growth the industry has seen since the third quarter in 2008.
Other research groups have also observed similar trends. ABI Research said it saw mobile handset shipments in the fourth quarter of 2009 grow about 15 percent compared to the third quarter of 2009.
But stiff competition is squeezing the average sale price of devices, which fell 2 percent to US$117.55 during the fourth quarter, ABI Research said.
Nokia and Samsung Electronics each increased market share during the quarter. Nokia's market share jumped to 37.7 percent of the market. And Samsung increased its market share to 20.5 percent.
Nokia and Samsung weren't the only ones seeing strong growth. Other handset makers saw shipments increase. LG Electronics even broke fourth-quarter shipment records. Apple, which makes the popular iPhone, nearly doubled shipments of its smartphone compared to last year. In the fourth quarter, Apple shipped about 8.7 million iPhones compared with about 4.4 million shipments a year earlier.
But some phone makers still experienced some trouble. Motorola, which refreshed its product line in 2009, managed to lose market share, according to ABI Research. Sony Ericsson also saw its market share decline.
Analysts attributed to the uptick in shipments to increased consumer confidence in the fourth quarter and increased demand for smartphones that allow consumers to access the Internet on the go.
Still, compared to 2008, the total number of shipments for 2009 was down about 4 percent. But a strong end to 2009 signals that the worst could be behind the industry as consumers start spending again.

Dell to open more Asian outlets

2010-02-02T02:16:00.003-08:00

Dell Computer is targeting to expand its retail strategy with plans to open more brick-and-mortar shops in the Asia-Pacific region, according to a company executive.
Citing figures from the company's 2009 internal survey, Ian Chapman-Banks, Asia-Pacific general manager for Dell's consumer business, said one third or 33 percent of consumers worldwide were planning to upgrade or purchase new computers this year. To tap this demand, the PC maker will be focusing on the rollout of its retail footprint across the Asia-Pacific region, Chapman-Banks said in an interview with ZDNet Asia Monday.
Dell previously marketed itself as the poster boy for a direct online sales model but began its foray into the retail market in 2007, opening several outlets across the globe including Singapore and Taiwan.
"Dell has a phenomenal presence online, and what we want to be able to do is give everyone the same experience through brick-and-mortar shops," Chapman-Banks said, adding that this has been the company's philosophy for the past two years.
He named Australia, Korea, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam and New Zealand, as some countries in which Dell has been building up its retail network.
The rationale behind this push is the focus on the "path to purchase", he said. Consumers these days tend to check products online before meeting up with family or friends and heading to a retail outlet to get a hands-on experience of the product and purchasing it, Chapman-Banks said.
Reuben Tan, IDC's Asia-Pacific senior manager of personal systems research, agrees. "The direct business model [of selling products online] doesn't really work in Asia, and Dell has probably recognized there are lots of untapped potential using the indirect retail channel. But, it's a hard balance to finetune," he told ZDNet Asia in a phone interview.
Strong 2009 performance
According to Chapman-Banks, Dell had a positive showing last year, clocking a 24 percent fourth quarter year-on-year growth in the Asia-Pacific PC market, excluding Japan, which includes desktop and laptop computers.
"We're pretty pleased with our performance. Obviously, everyone looks back on [2009's] first quarter nuclear winter, and to grow over 2008 makes Dell [employees] in Asia very motivated."
However, Tan noted that the 24 percent figure seemed "aggressive", compared with the growth projection for the overall market. He said the PC industry's growth rate last year is estimated to be 12.4 percent, based on forecast figures for the fourth quarter of 2009. Shipment numbers for the quarter are still being finalized.
The IDC analyst attributed Dell's performance to strong uptake in PC sales in markets such as China, India and Thailand.
Asked if Dell will introduce new products in the tablet computer sector, following Apple's announcement of the iPad last Wednesday, Chapman-Banks acknowledged that there is currently "a thirst for smaller screens" among consumers.
However, he noted that the "physical keyboard experience", which is absent in touchscreen mobile computing devices such as the iPad, remains a key element for users. As such, demand for netbooks will continue to exist, he added.

Mismatch between biz needs, tech deployed

2010-02-02T02:16:00.001-08:00

Top IT professionals in the Asia-Pacific region are aware of challenges their companies face but are not addressing these issues with the appropriate deployment or investment, according to a new survey by Frost & Sullivan.
Released Friday, the study revealed that IT executives recognized the importance of Web applications in driving their business as well as the seriousness of Web-based security. However, bandwidth dependence and fallacies still exist and application security is still not well understood, noted the report.
Commissioned by F5 Networks, the survey polled CIOs and senior IT decision makers from over 300 enterprises in six Asia-Pacific markets--China, Hong Kong, Singapore, India, South Korea and Australia--and five verticals: financial, telecommunications, government, manufacturing, and IT.
Some 44 percent of respondents believed utilizing more bandwidth was the best way to boost application delivery. The survey noted that this bandwidth-dependence fallacy ranked highest among respondents in India, followed by China and Singapore.
According to Jason Needham, senior director of product management at F5 Networks, this mindset came from the past when bandwidth was difficult to come by. "But now, with users and applications going over greater distances, increasing bandwidth does not solve problems such as latency and packet lost," Needham explained in an interview with ZDNet Asia.
Kunaciilan Nallappan, regional product marketing manager at F5 Networks Singapore, added: "This [mindset] ignores the fact that by having technologies like caching and compression at the server site, we can also solve the problem [of low bandwidth]… The technology built within the application delivery controller is not exploited as much as we thought it would."
Mismatch in security investment
The survey also showed that over 70 percent of respondents viewed Web applications security as very important. However, 61 percent believed that using network firewalls alone was adequate in preventing Web attacks, said Nallappan, who noted that in reality, businesses would need to implement a firewall at the applications level as well.
"The network firewall protects against common network-related threats such as virus and signature-based attacks, while the application firewall protects against fraudulent behavior," he added, pointing to the recent attack on Google as an example of attack on the application level.
Needham added there was a mismatch between security expenditure and where attacks occurred in an enterprise. "Globally, about 75 percent of security expenditure goes to [network] firewalls but today, about 75 percent of the attacks are at the [Web] application level," he said.
The Frost & Sullivan survey noted that China had the most deployment of network firewalls, but these respondents did not demonstrate a high level of awareness regarding the importance of implementing a firewall at the Web application level.
Singapore and India were the top adopters of Web application firewall, the survey found. This adoption was also highest among respondents in the telecommunications and financial service verticals.
The study also showed that close to three-quarters of respondents wanted more than two features in a single application delivery platform. However, there was a disconnection with reality as enterprises in the survey were buying point-products instead of a converged unified platform, said Needham.
He attributed this problem to IT departments working in silos where, the security and application teams, for example, would focus on resolving issues separately. "They end up looking at point problems and buying a device [to resolve that problem] or taking a wrong approach to their problem."
The survey also determined that enterprises believed cloud computing could increase their agility and scalability, but were hesitant about adopting cloud applications due to concerns over security, loss of control and performance.

Checks to curb latest SEO tricks

2010-02-01T00:57:00.001-08:00

Unethical tactics employed by companies utilizing search engine optimization (SEO) tactics such as link farms and loading Web pages filled with irrelevant keywords, are not welcomed by search engine operators. This declaration was issued by two market players.
Asked if organizations such as content farms are outsmarting its system by flooding the Web with low-quality content to earn high-click rates, a Microsoft spokesperson said the company "prefers quality over quantity" to manage its Bing search engine.
"Backlinks, also known as 'inbound links', should be relevant to the page being linked to, or relevant to an SEO's domain if they are being linked to the homepage," he told ZDNet Asia in an e-mail interview. He pointed out that backlinks from sites considered to be authoritative in their field are rated to be of higher value than those from "junk sites".
Bing does prevent Web sites from appearing in its search results if they use techniques such as using hidden text or links within their Web page or create link farms to artificially increase the number of links, the Microsoft executive added. However, he did not elaborate on how the checks were implemented and executed.
Google adopts a similar stance, according to a company spokesperson. He explained that a site's ranking in its search results is automatically determined by computer algorithms that incorporate hundreds of parameters. "Our algorithms are effectively designed to prevent people from manipulating the rankings of competitors in our search results," he added.
Yahoo, also a major player in the search market, declined to comment when contacted.
Farming for content
Both companies' response might be deemed timely, especially following reports that some sites are turning into content farms to improve their SEO standing.
In a blog post on ReadWriteWeb, Demand Media and Answers.com are quickly blazing up the chart of top Web properties in the United States. Citing September 2009 figures from research firm ComScore, Answers.com climbed from 26th to 13th position over just two months, while Demand Media spiked from 24th to 15th over the same period.
According to ReadWriteWeb, Answers.com has 38 million pages of content on its site--much of which is user generated--while Demand Media churns out 4,000 new pieces of content a day. It further noted that the swift climb by the two sites suggests that "to succeed in the content business on the Web, you should pump hundreds of pages of content every day, preferably thousands".
Blog site TechCrunch described the phenomenon simply as: "The rise of fast food content is upon us, and it's going to get ugly."
Wired magazine also published a report noting that Demand Media created three specialized search algorithms to pick out the most sought-after subject matters and keywords that Web users are searching for at any given moment. It then uses the results, and assigns these keywords to a dedicated pool of freelance writers who would rush out content, written around the keywords, to be published online.
"Nearly every freelancer scrambles to load their assignment queue with titles they can produce quickly and with the least amount of effort--because pay for individual stories is so lousy, only a high-speed, high-volume approach will work," Wired said.
Disputing allegations that the company was a "low-paying content mill", Demand Media's senior vice president of content,Jeremy Reed, said: "In this day-and-age of publishing, where so many decisions are driven by the need to cut or eliminate costs, we've gone to great lengths to develop a community of really qualified writers and put them in a position and environment to create quality articles."
All content has value
According to an industry analyst, there will always be users who appreciate online content regardless of its quality.
Chris Perrine, COO and executive vice president of Springboard Research, said in the field his company plays in, "more is more" with regard to information.
Unfiltered search results provide its researchers with the most details and information they need for their jobs. "For the research field, you would want a wealth of information, and sometimes even a sub-par article can lead a researcher to a new piece of information or insight," Perrine told ZDNet Asia.
He noted, however, that other industries' requirements may differ. For instance, a marketing manager looking for media coverage may be hindered by the mass of information he would have to sort through on the Web. There is also a "difference in value" between the Wall Street Journal's content, for instance, and those aggregated by a random site, Perrine added.

Mobile fragmentation challenges Facebook

2010-02-01T00:55:00.003-08:00

Facebook needs to "beef up" both its mobile Web site and mobile products as fragmentation is a major challenge on the mobile platform, according to director of Facebook Mobile.
Henri Moissinac, director of Facebook Mobile, told ZDNet Asia in an e-mail interview that his team's key goal is to "enable any user, in any country, language, phone, data plan, to be able to access Facebook via mobile when they are away from their desktop".
In mobile, fragmentation is a major challenge, said Moissinac. "Should we invest our energy on building applications for smartphones for sophisticated users? Or should we invest our energy in deploying a simple, fast, cheap SMS (short messaging service)?"
Moissinac said the team tries to "carefully balance" its priorities between Facebook's browser-accessible mobile Web site and availing smartphone apps and SMS notifications, to cater to the fragmented mobile ecosystem.
"We think we have a great set of apps, but we will do even more in 2010," he noted. According to Moissinac, the mobile site has been "considerably improved" to be faster and easier to use.
Moissinac also talked about Facebook's recently-launched iPhone and Android apps. He said that both versions feature "deep integration" of users' ondevice address books. The iPhone version syncs the profile pictures of a user's friends with local profiles, while the Android version copies contacts' phone numbers and profile pictures into the device's address book.
In addition, the company is "aggressively deploying" its SMS service globally, he said.
On whether Facebook Mobile would overtake the Web version in usage, Moissinac said both services would co-exist as users tend to use both together.
In a report released Tuesday by Opera, Facebook overtook Russian-language social networking site VKontakte as the top social networking site visited through Opera's mobile browser in 2009. VKontakte ranks high on the list because of a high adoption rate of Opera Mini in Russian-speaking countries, the report noted.
Opera's report said unique users of Facebook on Opera's mobile browser grew more than sixfold over 2009.

Is eBay facing seller revolt?

2010-02-01T00:55:00.001-08:00

eBay's latest move, some of the auction site's devotees say, is straight out of the Ministry of Truth's playbook.
The company made an announcement last week about lowering the listing fees for items--even though, in many cases, final value fees will be raised. The company's discussion forums simmered with outrage over the executive decision, and frustration over the lack of other options for auction-style e-commerce.
"What a joke," commented one person on the eBay Seller Central forum, asking for advice about transferring the items from an eBay "store" to another auction site. Another suggested putting together an April Fool's Day protest.
eBay representatives say that these opinions come from the minority. "A lot of the sellers that we're talking to are very, very happy with these changes," said Todd Lutwak, eBay's senior director of seller experience. He said it gives a better array of options for different kinds of sellers. "What we've done with these price changes is, we've segmented the seller population and then we've provided those segments with what we feel are better options to meet their needs."
Here's the math: Individual eBay items with a starting price of 99 cents or less no longer have a listing fee, and if they don't sell, the seller pays nothing; but if they do sell, the final value fee is 9 percent with a maximum of US$50. Previously, it had been 8.75 percent for the first US$25, and 3.75 percent after that. For more serious eBay sellers who purchase subscriptions to run "stores", final value fees have been altered so that they start at a lower threshold, but in some cases can ultimately get higher. eBay piloted these changes in some European markets starting in 2008 (with success, representatives say), and later added some U.S.-based beta testers whom it's showcased in a new promotional site explaining it all, called "The Best Place To Sell".
"People who have store subscriptions, who sell thousands of items a month, are being advantaged," explained Alan Lewis, who worked at eBay as a product manager for five years and now serves as the platform manager for Auctiva, a site that makes tools for eBay sellers. "(This) continues the direction that they've been going for the past couple years, which is catering more and more to large sellers...It's something that makes sense for eBay. They just have to deal with the consequences. If they are bringing on larger sellers, there will be consequences for smaller sellers."
An eBay pundit who goes by the handle "AuctionWally" wrote a blog post in which he speculated that the fee changes "will benefit the savvy consumer of collectibles, antique and unique items as this plan brings a lot more product to the marketplace with low starting bids," and that "this stuff can be more like reading tea leaves than a flow chart, but it looks pretty good from an auction seller's perspective, and just as nice for most store sellers." Still, many of Wally's own commenters disagreed with him--some with extremely strong language.
Granted, when a company makes a product change announcement, it's the ticked-off ones who are the most vocal. But those dissatisfied sellers sure want to be heard.
"The lower announced listing fee decreases are absurdly trivial to the extreme, and will cause eBay to become more cluttered than ever with overpriced, worthless stuff that people will put purely on speculation that some fool will bite," an Alexandria, Virginia-based antiques dealer related to CNET in an e-mail. "I have been selling on eBay since 1997 and I know eBay like the back of my hand. It is a true love-hate relationship."
Any community site--particularly one where members may be making a profit by participating in that community--is sure to experience some dissent when changes are made. For eBay, however, the uproar from some sellers about this week's fee changes was more vociferous than usual. It amounted to Orwellian doublespeak, some claimed; and the "Best Place To Sell" microsite was little more than propaganda.
"Maybe eBay thinks a simple and transparent 'spin' that they are trying to offer will work--dropping their listing fees, which are small, and then upping the final sale fees from 3.5 percent to 9 percent--and just slip by all their sellers," said Northville, Mich.-based eBay seller Bill Wever, who says he has used the site for over a decade and owned eBay stock since its initial public offering in 1998, in an e-mail to ZDNet Asia's sister site CNET.
"After reading (this week's) announcement, I will be expanding my presence on other sites and will be significantly reducing my presence on eBay," another seller e-mailed to CNET on the same day the fee changes were announced. "It never ceases to amaze me that eBay management seems to dismiss or disregard how constant change negatively affects their fee-paying sellers. Last year, there were two major change announcements. This year there will be three."
At the center of the mayhem, really, is a problem that eBay has had a rough time with in recent years: It obviously wants to make a profit. That profit comes from commission fees, and those commission fees are biggest coming from the sales of relatively expensive goods by well-established sellers--many of whom pay a subscription to operate "stores". Hiking up listing fees has had a noticeable impact on eBay's quarterly earnings in the past.
"All the things that they've done in the past couple years have been to bring more large sellers onto the site and bring them the economic incentives to do so, and they really haven't done anything for small sellers," said Alan Lewis of Auctiva, which targets smaller-scale sellers.
And eBay has been feeling the pressure for years. It made some arguably poor acquisition choices in the past half-decade that ultimately resulted in the selling off of properties like Skype and StumbleUpon, all of which dealt a blow to shareholder confidence. Plus, online auctions are no longer the hub of deals that they used to be: An increasingly diverse cornucopia of e-commerce innovations has emerged in recent years, from handmade-goods emporium Etsy to fire-sale deal-a-day outlets like Woot and Gilt.
But the flip side of this is that eBay still has a lock on auctions. It smoked out much of its would-be competition years ago, and many of its sellers deal in niches that are better off operating as auctions rather than flat-fee sales that could be handled over Amazon or Craigslist. eBay can make many of these controversial descisions and rest assured that it still owns the market.
"All of us have been hoping for someone else, perhaps Google or Amazon, to step in and provide true competition, but that has not happened," said the antiques dealer from Alexandria. "It would require a huge investment to do a proper worldwide advertising campaign to get something going."
eBay admits that the most recent changes will make the auction process more expensive for some sellers, but stands by its decision.
"There are cases in which this new fee structure is actually more expensive than what they were paying before," admitted eBay's Lutwak, "but the fact is, what (the sellers) asked us for is they want the lower risk associated with lower fees on the front end, and that they were willing to pay the final fees."
eBay hopes to extend an olive branch in the form of new buyer-protection coverage that it says will make buyers more comfortable spending money on eBay, particularly in large amounts--and that sellers will make more money as a result. "Coupling these two messages not only shows that we're making some adjustments to the fee structure but that we're also making major investments as a company to ensure that our customers are coming back more," said Kellie Cobaugh, manager of the buyer protection program.
eBay, after all, has seen this sort of mutiny before. Two years ago, after eBay raised seller fees and chose to prohibit sellers from leaving feedback about buyers, sellers organized a weeklong boycott The company ultimately weathered the storm. Around the same time, it attempted to mandate the use of its PayPal payment system for Australian customers--and then backed down amid protest.
Todd Lutwak suggests that sellers protesting the new regulations take a look at their own tactics for profit. "If you see that these changes do not have the impact on your business that you want, I would re-look at your eBay strategy," he said, pointing out that the new "Best Place To Sell" site has a listing fee caluculator for members to try. "There could be another selling approach that might be more beneficial to you."
Some sellers agreed. Rhonda Shrader, a San Francisco-based eBay seller who has "a half-time job" selling primarily women's clothing on the auction site, thinks she'll ultimately benefit from the listing fee changes and thinks that other sellers should figure out how they can, too. "I think for any small business person, any change in your macro and micro environment is going to cause you to react. I'd rather spend time doing that than complaining," she said.
"Sellers with strong business acumen will adapt to new (rules) and find ways to thrive," an eBay seller who goes by "Compulsive Collector" announced on Twitter. "As for others? Survival of the fittest, and all that."
But frustrated sellers scoffed at that thought.
"Given the current announced changes, coupled with eBay's history of revisions after changes roll out, it is impossible for a seller to build a business strategy that lasts longer than a few months," one said via e-mail.

Youth Olympics: Major IT milestones to date 'met'

2010-01-29T07:22:00.000-08:00

IT plans for the inaugural Youth Olympic Games (YOG) to be held here this year have made progress and on track with scheduled deadlines, according to Atos Origin, the company responsible for building and operating IT infrastructure and systems at the Games.
The team has, to date, met major milestones outlined in the project, Yan Noblot, program manager at Atos Origin, declared in an interview with ZDNet Asia. The 34-year-old is the YOG chief integrator and has been involved in several Olympics such as the Athens 2004 Olympics, 2006 Winter Games in Torino and the initial phases of Beijing 2008 and London 2012.
A veteran Worldwide Olympic Partner, Atos Origin was appointed the overall IT lead by the Singapore Youth Olympic Games Organising Committee (SYOGOC) in December 2008 and is also responsible for building the Games Management System (GMS) and the Information Diffusion System (IDS). It currently has 34 employees dedicated to the YOG, with manpower ramping up closer to the event.
The IT services vendor, Noblot said, has since put into "production" several modules under the GMS to support preparation for the Games. It also launched in December 2009 an integration lab to work more closely with other participating sponsors. YOG technology systems are now hosted in a data center in the eastern part of the island-state.
In the near term, disaster recovery plans that include the identification of a redundant data center will also be finalized, he added. The Technology Operations Center (TOC), which serves as the IT command center during the YOG, will also be ready. The games will run over eight days from Aug. 14 to 26.
Compared to Beijing 2008's TOC, the Singapore center will be smaller, Noblot said.
Tapping social media
But while the YOG is generally acknowledged to run on a smaller scale than the summer and winter Olympic events, it has its unique differences.
Due to the lower median age of YOG participants, Noblot noted, there is significant emphasis on new media such as social networking and mobile applications. "Atos Origin as the primary integrator not only has to provide real-time information to those new applications, but we also have to support them," he said.
One example is the "Digital Concierge for Singapore 2010" app, which will be pre-loaded on Samsung's Omnia Lite B7300 smartphones for athletes and selected team officials to use during the Games. As a result of enhancements to the IDS, real-time schedule updates and results will be pushed to the phone via the Digital Concierge app, he said.
The Games will also introduce new events in some sports, as well as a new competition format, he added. In soccer, for instance, teams can comprise players of different nationalities and this creates additional requirements on the IT infrastructure, he explained.
According to Noblot, Atos is currently working with Omega, SingTel and Samsung to prepare the IT deployments needed for the YOG.
The PC vendor is expected to be Acer, which is the appointed sponsor for both the Vancouver 2010 and London 2012 games, and the company's logo is already visible on the official YOG Web site.
Noblot acknowledged that Atos Origin has been using computing equipment from a particular vendor, but the sponsor has not yet been identified by the SYOGOC.

M'sia govt touts 95 percent OSS adoption

2010-01-29T07:21:00.001-08:00

Some 95 percent of Malaysia's government agencies have adopted open source software (OSS), but the remaining 5 percent have not warmed to the concept--and is unlikely to anytime soon, according to a government official.
During her presentation at the GovTech 2010 conference here Thursday, Tan King Ing, deputy director of ICT policy and planning at the Malaysian Administrative Modernization and Management Planning Unit (Mampu), said some 400 government agencies in the country have adopted OSS. The Mampu was set up in 2002 as part of the government's ICT masterplan, to explore the use of open source software (OSS) in the public sector.
While open source adoption efforts began in earnest in 2004 with 50 agencies, implementation figures began ramping up sharply in 2008 when the Mampu introduced migration and documentation support to move government workers from proprietary office software to OpenOffice.org, said Tan.
In 2008, the Mampu said 281 agencies had adopted OSS. By mid-2009, this figure rose to 71.1 percent.
Elaborating on the 5 percent that have not adopted OSS, Tan said these are "very small and far flung [user groups], without much IT resources or personnel". She noted a lack of enthusiasm on their parts regarding OSS because of the need for expertise to perform the migration.
She added that during a Mampu survey of government agencies, this 5 percent of users also indicated that they did not plans to adopt OSS in the future. And the Mampu is not expecting them to, either, Tan said.
Path to open source self-sufficiency
Describing the Malaysian government's path to OSS, she said most government agencies infrastructures were standalone proprietary legacy systems that did not interoperate.
The start of the initiative was also marked by "so much skepticism" toward OSS, prompting Mampu to drive five pilot projects to spread user acceptance, she said.
She added that, on hindsight, governments looking to follow in Malaysia's footsteps would better manage by adopting a broad implementation roadmap, including preparing proprietary business partners for such a significant change.
With the large majority of government bodies currently on OSS, the Mampu's next goal is to help these agencies achieve self-sufficiency so that they would be able to support their own OSS implementations, and write their own in-house applications, said Tan.
"We want Malaysia to become a technology producer, rather than exclusively technology consumers," she said.

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CRM integration

Task Management

Geocoding

Pros

Cons

Competitors

Conclusion

Microsoft Dynamics CRM vs. Salesforce.com : An Unbiased Review‏

Salesforce.com:

Advantages:

Disadvantages:

Microsoft Dynamics:

Advantages:

Disadvantages:

Handy Tools to manage projects

Project Management Software

To do lists

Mind Mapping

Paper

Blogs

Presentations

Books

iPhone

Blackberry

Online Communities

Too Many Ideas-Not Enough Action? Time to Use Actionmethod

Teambox - A Project Collaboration Tool

Five reasons why Teambox is a perfect fit

Project Overview

Task lists

Task Archiving

Files

Profile Page

Profile Settings

Project Settings

Project Archiving and Deletion

The Big Picture

An intuitive web based project management tool- 5pm

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Wednesday, May 12, 2010 12:22 PM