Sony will sich nicht auf ein Betriebssystem für seine Smartphones festnageln lassen. Neben Android kommt für das Unternehmen weiterhin Windows Phone in Betracht. Allerdings muss Microsoft erstmal Marktrelevanz zeigen, so ein Sprecher des japanischen Konzerns. …mehr
Facebook, Amazon, Google: Je mehr wir uns im Internet bewegen, desto größer wird die Angst, was mit unseren Daten passiert. Eine Lösung heißt "Trust Design", der bewusste Umgang mit unseren Daten. …mehr
Der noch börsennotierte Softwareanbieter Quest hat einer Übernahme durch die Buyout-Firma Insight Venture Partners zugestimmt. …mehr
Besitzer des Samsung Galaxy S2 warten weiter auf die aktuelle Android-Version 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. Wahrscheinlich erst Mitte April beginnt der Hersteller mit der Auslieferung des Firmware-Upgrades für das Galaxy S2. …mehr
Nur zwei Drittel der hiesigen Firmen kommunizieren laut Eurostat online mit Behörden. Das neue Angebot, der Prozessdatenbeschleuniger (P23R), soll das ändern. …mehr
Erst stieg das Wasser, dann der Preis: Die Flut in Thailand traf die Fabriken der Festplattengiganten im vergangenen Herbst hart. …mehr
Das schwedische Design-Unternehmen Penclic hat auf der CeBIT eine Maus vorgestellt, die das Mausarmsyndrom (MAS) lindern soll. Die Lösung ist eine Computermaus in Form eines Stiftes. …mehr
Mit Spotify aus Schweden geht einer der international schon erfolgreichsten Musik-Streaming-Services ab morgen auch in Deutschland an den Start. …mehr
Nach Einschätzung der Marktforschungs- und Beratungsfirma Gartner verliert der "persönliche Computer" (PC) immer mehr an Bedeutung. An seine Stelle tritt die "persönliche Cloud". …mehr
In den zehnten Kalender-Woche 2012 gibt es einige Testversionen, Sicherheits-Updates und die lang erwartete Version 1.4 von Wine ist verfügbar. …mehr
In den USA ist das neue iPad wieder ein voller Erfolg von Apple. Wie US-Medien berichten, hat die Zahl der Vorbestellungen wieder die Erwartungen des Unternehmens deutlich übertroffen. Auch in Deutschland muss man bereits länger warten. …mehr
Der Iran und China haben die Internet-Überwachung nach einem Bericht der Organisation Reporter ohne Grenzen im vergangenen Jahr deutlich verstärkt. …mehr
Simfy hat eine weitere Finanzierungsrunde abgeschlossen und will im zweiten Quartal 2012 den Break-even erreichen. …mehr
Siemens-Finanzvorstand Joe Kaeser will einen Rückzug von Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) aus München nicht so einfach akzeptieren. …mehr
Angeblich steht der US-Nachrichtensender CNN vor der Übernahme des auf Internet- und Social-Media-Themen spezialisierten Blogs "Mashable". …mehr
Heutzutage muss es schnell gehen. Kein Unternehmen kann es sich leisten, Entscheidungen auf die lange Bank zu schieben. Nur wer die richtigen Informationen zur richtigen Zeit parat hat und damit real-time agieren kann, wird im Wettbewerb überleben. …mehr
Tablets liegen voll im Trend: Alle wollen eines. Aber nicht jeder will dafür 500 Euro ausgeben, die fürs iPad 2 fällig werden. Für die sparsamen Tablet-Freunde bietet Pearl das Touchlet X7G: Das Android-Tablet mit 7-Zoll-Bildschirm kostet 170 Euro. …mehr
Warum Budgetkontrolle für den CIO (nicht) so wichtig ist. …mehr
Die meisten Tablet-Hersteller eifern dem Apple iPad nach, Sony geht beim Tablet P einen anderen Weg: Das Android-Tablet besitzt zwei Bildschirme. Was das bringt, zeigt der Test. …mehr
Was Sie tun müssen, damit Sie schwierige Aufgabenstellungen entspannter angehen können, sagt Sabine Prohaska. …mehr
In der Unternehmenspraxis sind viele Arbeitnehmer systematischen Behinderungen vom Chef ausgesetzt, sagt Dr. Norbert Pflüger. …mehr
Nicht zuletzt aufgrund der zunehmenden Cloud-Lösungen gewinnt Outsourcing wieder an Bedeutung. Die Verhandlung entsprechender Verträge ist eine Herausforderung für Anbieter und Anwender. Beide Seiten müssen genau wissen, was sie voneinander wollen. …mehr
A 27-year-old man pleaded guilty on Saturday in a British court to hacking the website of a reproductive health services agency, obtaining the details of people who had registered on the website. …mehr
Spammers are abusing a Dropbox feature that lets users share a shortened link, directing people to websites selling questionable pharmaceuticals, according to security vendor Symantec. …mehr
After the Dow Jones Industrial Average climbed over 13,000 recently, San Jose Mercury News columnist Mike Cassidy made an impassioned case for including Apple in the index, a position he buttressed in part by citing an analysis by Adam Nash of Greylock Partners. …mehr
We evaluated each product in several different areas: Discovery and enumeration of devices and computers, support for a variety of device manufacturers and device types, global directory integration, graphical depiction of the network, monitoring of network node status (availability), performance and health, alerts and notifications when network problems occur, automated corrective actions, maintenance of trouble tickets (or integration with a help desk tool), support for virtualized environments and the production of useful, informative reports. …mehr
Last week's about The Google and its new got quite a response, ranging from "I don't get it, what's the fuss?," through to "I don't care, I have nothing to hide," and "it's been pretty obvious for years where this was all heading but very few people bothered to sound the alarm ... until now when it's too late." …mehr
A Sunday afternoon panel designed to address head-on privacy concerns stemming from so-called "big data" collection sparked passions even though both Facebook and Google, whose privacy practices draw most consternation from critics, declined to participate, leaving no one to take the side of industry. …mehr
As noted, a number of initiatives under consideration in Congress and at the SEC are intended to make life a bit easier for smaller companies. One just got a bit closer to reality. …mehr
Paul Knight of Fletcher Building has a clear view of what CIOs are focusing on this year -- looking at any opportunities to reduce cost and streamline processes using IT.It will, however, involve a deep dive into what Knight refers to as "the old chestnut of, how do you align IT and business strategy?""It is about staying engaged with the business to ensure you remain relevant. Otherwise, you just become a cost," says Knight. "IT can add value and can save money particularly when the focus is reducing budgets because of the efficiencies it can bring in."He says the economic climate also provides an opportunity for IT to look at "synergies" that can be delivered through business technology. "When the business is growing rapidly, the focus is on customer and simply moving products through the business as fast as they can possibly move it. The business has become more interested in sharing and collaboration when the pressure is on."Knight is working on a range of projects that will enable collaboration across the Fletcher Group, which is the number one private organisation in the MIS100 list of top IT user organisations in New Zealand. Collaboration is vital in the context of Fletcher, which he describes as a completely decentralised organisation. "We are a business made up of smaller businesses," he says, referring to the more than 40 businesses in the six divisions of the group. "Each business can range from $20 million turnover to $1 billion turnover, each of those businesses has its own leadership business teams that include finance and IT."The strength of our decentralised structure is that our businesses are competitive, very focused on their customers and cost. They are light on their feet, they are agile they can move quickly," says Knight. "My role is much about facilitating as it is about doing."Fletcher uses a range of collaboration tools throughout the entire group. There is a SharePoint site where all the IT managers list the projects they have recently completed or are working on. "We ask people to put up there projects that may be of value to the members of the group, like a CRM or videoconferencing systems," says Knight.Fletcher has communities of practice (COPs) which draw on staff in New Zealand, Australia, North America and Europe. They are virtual teams and use a combination of SharePoint, videoconferencing, and web cast to share information and tackle group projects. "It is something we are continuing to do better, as new tools come out so constantly," says Knight.He says that in order for COPs to work well, they need strong governance around them. "We put a lot of emphasis on COPs for understanding who the players are, where they live, what are their priorities, what are they trying to achieve, how they are going to work together what the outcomes are. We try to understand that before we put an IT system in place to support them.""You can have great technology and if you don't have that common understanding, the technology just doesn't work," he says.This year, Fletcher Group is moving to telepresence, and this will allow him to meet both New Zealand and Australian IT managers at the same time.The executive team was the first to trial the system, using the Cisco telepresence facilities in Auckland. "We had people online from Melbourne and Cincinnati using their meeting rooms," says Knight. "I have high hopes that will change the ways we communicate with each other."An area he is focusing on is governance. "We aren't driving a singular IT strategy from New Zealand," explains Knight. "Each business has its own strategy. To support that business strategy, my role is to ensure things are being executed consistently and in line with our policies."A lot of what I do is policy setting and ensuring that projects are executed for the right reasons and stand a higher chance of success than they might do otherwise, understand risk and mitigating that risk."In the area of procurement for example, Fletcher has group-wide deals with vendors and these apply to both local and offshore offices. This enables the company to get a better price from a provider, for instance, through a group rate.Knight meets with the IT managers -- around 20 -- of Fletcher businesses in New Zealand every month. These meetings last from two to three hours. He also meets the offshore IT managers every month, through Skype or by phone. Each of the IT managers report into the leadership team and have a "dotted" line reporting to Knight. He says customer facing systems will continue to be key themes in the next 12 months and beyond. "How do we use IT to better work with our customers, to better add value to our customers?"Knight says the end users of their products are rarely direct customers. He uses the example of one of Fletcher's products, GIB board. The company does not sell it to the business or the builders directly but it would like to "reach out" to these end customers so they are aware of the product and its capability. "Our customer is successful when they are able to buy our products fast," says Knight. He cites their work with a Fletcher company in Australia, Fair Dinkum Sheds. Fletcher has written an app for the distributors which they use to sell Fair Dinkum products. The end customer can look at the options for buying a shed in real time and just press a button to order, and the order goes to Fletcher. "It is one example where we use the technology to help our customers be more successful."Knight says Fletcher continues to acquire companies, from the corporate office buying a big business such as Crane, to one of their member companies buying another business. "We are very diverse geographically in terms of our markets," he says, which is why the focus on customer facing systems will continue. Like many CIOs, consumerisation of technology is something that Knight and his team are working through. There are different layers for bring your own technology, he says, but at Fletcher, "the one that is coming out and is most immediate - whether we like it or not - is the strong desire by many of our employees to use their phone of choice". It could be an iPhone or Android and they want to use it for work. "Gone are the days when phones are so expensive that you just have one and you want it to be provided by work," says Knight.Save for some roles like sales where the contact between the staff and customer is the telephone number, Knight explains Fletcher is willing to take the staff number and put it in the corporate network. "When they leave we will remove it from our network and give it back to them.""What is more of a challenge is ensuring we can connect a variety of phones to our network in a way that doesn't threaten our network from a security point of view and is sufficient and cost effective.""You can configure an Android phone badly and it will burn lots and lots of data just doing nothing, just roaming and downloading GPS information. If you don't configure these things properly they can cost you money.""That is just phones and we recognise we need to move beyond that," he says. "Should we be allowing people to bring their own laptops, their tablets, their PC of choice in connecting to our system? And if it is a good idea, how do you manage that?" Cloud technology, particularly Salesforce, is also being increasingly used across business units in the group. "We are increasingly using different forms of cloud technology. It requires different skills, introduces different problems. Simply managing access to your systems is an example. Back in the good old days when you had no cloud technology, if you wanted to have somebody access the system you created an account on the network. These days you have to create an account for your network, and the Salesforce network [system], or whatever. The management of security and access needs to be tackled in a different way."Mobility is also impacting the way Fletcher works with customers. For example, builders use their mobile phones and even tablets for business. So they are developing apps where builders can use mobile devices to show customers their different products and finishes. "The consumer can then be excited about the possibilities for the products. It gives our products a fresh and modern look," says Knight.When Fletcher staff were working with the Earthquake Commission on the remediation work in Christchurch, the EQC developed an app to run on the iPad. When the assessors and their staff went to the site, they carried their iPads and entered the details on these devices. "Five years ago you would not be able to do that," he says, "so mobility continues to be an area of interest and growth."On the shifting role of the CIO, he says, it is about working with the business to ensure the business understands the capability of IT, and to work with the business to support the development of their business strategies.He also attends informal get-togethers with his CIO colleagues. "You have to develop a decent network of other CIOs and other business people not just in your industry. If you are looking at customer intimacy, banks are good at that; the fast food market has been leading the way in supply chain optimisation.""I am not a believer of IT strategy to be developed in isolation," he says. "IT is very much a part of the business. I don't think we can lead and have the business follow. And I don't think business can lead and IT will follow. They have to work together." …mehr
Social tools debuting at the enterprise level face many pitfalls that can derail even the best laid plans. A few IT leaders speaking at the Consumerization of IT in the Enterprise Conference and Expo in San Francisco last week revealed some of these social danger zones. …mehr
NBC Universal Media's publishing division has begun re-using its extensive video archives collected over decades to place video clips inside new e-books that will be sold on a variety of tablet platforms. …mehr
Your iPhone is more than just a phone; it's also a 3G modem, able to pull down data at broadband speeds. Alas, it's no good at sharing: Unless you pay your carrier a king's ransom (i.e. $20 per month or more) for Personal Hotspot capabilities, you can't leverage that 3G goodness on any other device. …mehr
Barnes & Noble Inc.'s naming of former cable television executive Michael Huseby as CFO is part of a drive to shift the largest U.S. bookstore chain toward a technology-based future. …mehr
Let's say you're a tech novice who's shopping for a tablet. Your goal is to buy you've been hearing so much about. …mehr
At $20, GS-Base 9 is very inexpensive and requires virtually no prior database knowledge to use. Furthermore, it uses a number of metaphors and options which should be very familiar to those comfortable with spreadsheets, a fact that makes it useful to a large set of business users who rarely venture away from Excel. Indeed, it shares many of the functions and syntax found in Citadel's inexpensive, but functional, . …mehr
San Jose is casting a vote of confidence in municipal Wi-Fi from the heart of Silicon Valley, planning a new, free network just a few years after such networks were declared all but dead. …mehr
The Samsung Galaxy S Blaze 4G may not be the latest and greatest Android phone, but, with a 3.97-inch display, it might just be the antidote we need for increasingly larger screen sizes. …mehr
With last week's , Apple provided the missing link in the company's lineup of iLife mobile software. Two years after it introduced the iPad, Apple has released a version of iPhoto made especially for mobile devices. The new app is a full-service viewing, editing, and sharing tool for both the iPad and the iPhone. …mehr
When Motorola unveiled the DROID RAZR MAXX smartphone at the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January, the sleek, high-end handheld stole much of the show's mobile-buzz. It also undoubtedly caused recent DROID RAZR buyers' blood to boil. That's because the RAZR MAXX, released less than three months after the , is almost identical to its predecessor, with one very significant difference: The RAZR MAXX packs a huge, fixed battery pack that addressed the original DROID RAZR's battery life issues. …mehr
Norwegian browser maker Opera took me out to dinner last night, and we talked about what the company has been up to. In a nutshell, Opera - the only browser maker located outside the US - says it's doing well. …mehr
Yahoo is accusing Facebook of copying a range of technologies that the flagging search company invented, in a lawsuit that alleges the social media giant infringes 10 patents. …mehr
There seems to be no end in sight to the slew of new cases announced for Apple's third-generation iPad. Since , we've already had roundups-- and --of new gear. As we continue to watch for more new iPad-protection products, here's our third roundup, with all its device-saving splendor. …mehr
A Tennessee official is blaming inadequate training, ignored warnings and unwise technology choices for ongoing problems with an installed software system used by the state Department of Children's Services. …mehr
At one of the startup showcase panels here, I discovered , a real-time communication app that makes connecting with people by voice or simpler than I've seen in any other service. Since I'm always looking for apps that might seriously disrupt the cellular calling juggernaut of the big wireless companies, I was interested. …mehr
Yahoo is accusing Facebook of copying a range of technologies that the flagging search company invented, in a lawsuit that alleges the social media giant infringes 10 patents. …mehr
It's not every day that you get to roam around a city as a Mech and absolutely annihilate everything in your path. I've dreamed of watching robots battle robots ever since I was old enough to know what robots were. …mehr
To-do lists are great for keeping track of the myriad little tasks we must accomplish every day. "Submit expense reports," "Take cat to vet," "Buy coffee," and so on. But what about the really big things--the dreams we want someday to come true? A to-do item like "get company onto Fortune 500 list" or "write prize-winning novel" may look a bit silly. But such lofty goals are made up of numerous subgoals, each of which can probably be broken down further. Goalscape Desktop (89 euro, $117 on March 12, 2012) is a tool for realizing your goals that does away with the list metaphor and uses an innovative circular interface instead. …mehr
A few weeks ago, I wrote that photography is often called "painting with light." In response, a reader asked me what you do when there isn't any--light, that is. Well, unless you're shooting inside a closet or at the bottom of a mineshaft, there's always some light around. Your job as a photographer is often to make the most of whatever light you have access to. I've explained how to get the , but there's a way to maximize the natural light in your scene as well: Using your camera's ISO control. …mehr
Take the power and flexibility of a wiki (like Wikipedia), wrap it with a friendly Windows installer, and make it run as a local application, no server needed. You've got Zim (free): a personal open-source wiki for managing your knowledge, tasks, and calendar. You can even get the , put it on a USB stick or in a folder, and take it with you on the go. …mehr
Exchange traded funds, or ETFs are on a tear these days. Some $95 billion flowed into U.S. ETFS during the first eleven months of 2011, . That compares to $34 billion that went to mutual funds. And the researchers predict 15% to 20% growth this year. …mehr
Aggressive companies looking to boost their operations and widen their reach are beefing up systems and technical manpower by getting help outside their organizations, taking in innovative services and products from various service providers or loyally through just one. IT outsourcing. It's not a new practice in the business industry. Almost everyone's doing it. But what can IT outsourcing really do for your company? Will IT outsourcing work for your business as it successfully did for other companies or will you find yourself increasing your business pains in the process? …mehr
If you use Microsoft Word (or a similar word processor), you probably know well enough how to save a document. You click Save, choose a folder, give the document a name, and then click Save, OK, or whatever. …mehr
Due to a reporting error, the story "SXSW panel heats up over big data privacy concerns," which ran on the wire Sunday, gave an incorrect title for Molly Wood. She is executive editor at CNet.com. …mehr
