Has Google purchased another stuffed moose head?

By Dan Blacharski, ITworld.com

I know a few people who have more money to spend than they do common sense, and they usually end up with a garage full of useless bric-a-brac, unused exercise machines and fancy coffee makers they can't figure out how to use. The question at hand: Is Google in the same category as my careless acquaintances? Certainly, Google's YouTube acquisition qualifies as a purchase somewhat akin to the stuffed moose head that sits in the attic. It probably seemed like a good idea at the time, but now that they have it, what can they do with it? Last week's buzz was all about Google's $3.1 billion acquisition of DoubleClick. Has Google purchased another stuffed moose head?

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Going forward, going backward, changing

By Sean McGrath, ITworld.com

What is the nature of progress in IT? When we say that IT is progressing through all these endless revolutions and waves and eras and generations and 2.0's and 3.0's...what do we mean? Let us draw a simple mental picture.

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Network management Vegas style

By James Gaskin, ITworld.com

No, this doesn't mean management is a crap shoot, or that you get free drinks when you're losing. It does mean I attended the Altiris ManageFusion07 user conference in Las Vegas earlier this month, and learned some interesting things from users and resellers (and even Altiris executives).

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Hack-A-Mac Contest and the Mac Faithful

By Dan Blacharski, ITworld.com

There is plenty of righteous indignation around the blogosphere this week in response to the CanSecWest "hack-a-Mac" contest. Of course, the inevitable happened, and a software engineer named Shane Macaulay, along with his associate Dino Dai Zovi, won the prize, hacking into a MacBook through a zero-day security flaw in Safari. The response varies from "say it ain't so!" to just plain "it ain't so." Unfortunately, regardless of platform, denial is the biggest security flaw of all.

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Whatever happened to security policies?

Matt Rodgers, Computerworld Australia

Is it just me, or does it seem like the most basic security policies appear to be breaking down in enterprises everywhere?

A few weeks ago one of our very own employees picked up a briefcase that an HSBC employee left on a Sydney train and found inside the banking details, names and home addresses, as well as other personal financial information of over 100 HSBC Australia customers.

Similarly, a recent audit found that the U.S. Internal Revenue Service had over 400 laptops lost or stolen in the past three years. As a former Yank who's familiar with the harsh rectitude of the IRS, I find this particularly disconcerting. My gut feeling is that if an agency like the IRS, which wrote the book on how to conduct painful audits, can't get its security policies right, who can?

Read the full article here.

High performing organizations

By James Gaskin, ITworld.com

Back in the 80s, research analysts trumpeted how "lean manufacturing" companies performed better and produced more using such techniques as Just In Time inventory. Now, the ITPI (IT Process Institute) is trying to apply serious research to see why some IT organizations function well and others wobble.

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The web and the word processor

By Sean McGrath, ITworld.com

In one form or another, I do words for a living. I spend part of my time writing words (as I am doing right now). I also spend part of my time writing complex sets of words (known as 'computer programs') to manage other complex sets of words (known as 'enterprise content').

On an almost daily basis I must address the question of how best to organize content so that it can be managed effectively. On an almost daily basis I find myself oscillating between two distinct-yet-closely related worlds...

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HP's Small Business Products Good for Corporate

By James Gaskin, ITworld.com

On March 28th, HP released a batch of new products aimed specifically at small businesses with 1 to 99 employees. But the label on the ads doesn't keep smart enterprises from buying the products. Most interesting and appropriate are the new laptops and the new small server.

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Digital Gear: Mobile services skyrocketing

By Agam Shah

With stronger interactive and multimedia features, mobile phones are enabling more services to be delivered to a user's hand. Here are three, all still in beta, that you should give a try -- or at least keep an eye on.

April's coolest gadgets

By Martyn Williams

If you're like me then no matter how many new gadgets you see some still make you say "wow" when you first see them.

This month it's an impressively small digital TV tuner that's doing the trick. It's hard to believe but the Telebit tuner card has everything you need to receive mobile digital TV all built into a little box on the end of an SDIO card.

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YouTube's Thailand videos: Free speech or hate speech?

By Dan Blacharski, ITworld.com

The posting of an offensive piece of vandalism on Google-owned YouTube, directed against the Thai monarchy and the people of Thailand, has sparked a firestorm of armchair commentary, mostly from people who know nothing about it.

Read the full article here.

I'll push and you pull. The mashup approach to application integration

By Sean McGrath, ITworld.com

The phenomenon of mashup applications on the web intrigues me. The applications themselves are fascinating enough but on top of that you have the richly painted canvas of reaction and opinion from the IT community. In a scene reminiscent of a busy Hieronymus Bosch painting, many voices speak at once. Many reactions take place all at the same time, evidencing delight, horror, exacerbation in equal measure.

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An iPod virus?

By Robert McMillan

Kaspersky Labs says it's discovered the first virus written for the iPod. A great headline, but a really lame virus.

It's called Podloso, and even Kaspersky admits it "does not pose a real threat." It has no malicious payload and cannot be launched automatically, heck it can't even spread, Kaspersky says.

Read more...

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Re-purposing: the new king of content?

By Sean McGrath

Here is the theory which, for the purposes of this article, I am going to refer to as the 'old model':

Content is king. If you own content, you can monetize every human head that views/hears that content.

This model has worked extremely well for a long long time now. Content is poured on to some form of physical media having been emitted by some sort of carbon-based life form (i.e. a performing artist/domain expert). Every human head viewing/hearing the content pays separately and possibly per viewing/hearing. The bigger the audience, the bigger the monetization. This is a very scalable business model as long as three conditions hold.

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Storage Survey

By James Gaskin, ITworld.com

HP just paid for a survey of 1,200 mid-sized firms with between 100 and 1,000 employees spread across seven countries. According to the executive summary, respondents want to improve customer satisfaction (86 percent) and improve product quality (81 percent). How storage can do that, I don't know, but companies also worry about business continuity, upgrading servers, and price. But the details between countries in the survey surprised me.

Read the full article here.

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