How many times have you seen an employee wave on by a customer when the “security device enclosed” in some item – be it DVD, CD, or clothing – sets off the alarm at the doors? Just a few weeks ago I heard one young lady explain the alarm away with “it must have be the CD I bought at th...

Until today, web developers creating SaaS apps have been faced with an ugly choice: use proprietary development platforms like Force.com or build an open solution from scratch. WaveMaker released the first open cloud development platform. WaveMaker 6.0 is a visual development platform ...

This is the first of multiple-part series of interviews with David where we’ll look into buyer personnas, marketing tools-to-use and ask the question of whether social media is simply a fad.

You might have already seen the announcement regarding the Virtual Computing Environment (VCE). We believe this is wonderful news for our customers and partners; and represents an unprecedented collaboration between three highly regarded leaders in the IT industry: Cisco, EMC with VMwa...

I was surprised to find an Amazon Web Services booth at the Microsoft PDC yesterday. They had nothing specific to say regarding additional Windows support or capabilities - at least not officially. What I did get was a wink-wink, nudge, nudge when I commented on Azure's integration wit...

Last year, as imploding credit markets roiled the economy, mutual fund organizations throughout the country took stock of their revenue prospects. It was clear that a change or two was in the wind at Denver’s Old Mutual Investment Partners, too. For Chief Executive Officer, D. Bruce Jo...

As reported in DBJ Associates, “The cost of not communicating to advisors and clients through their preferred vehicles (social media) does not make a lot of long-term business sense.” It may be difficult for FINRA to address the social media question since a search of “social media” in...

Many B2B companies know that they should be incorporating an ongoing social media campaign into their arsenal of tactics to generate leads and sales. But, as a business owner or marketing professional, half the battle is trying to get your head around the social media wave, the crushin...

Of course it is now a prerequisite to have a professional web presence for your business. More than likely, you spend time and treasure on this critical resource. But what about a blog? Blogging may just seem like a fad for techies (www.Gizmodo.com) or people that seem to have plenty o...

Or, to rephrase that famous Kennedy quote, "ask not what SOA can do for you, but ask what you can do to improve your business!" This is a really important question because I believe that the person seeking this information is not alone in attempting to identify real value of investing ...

The question is whether that impact is positive (a reduction) or negative (an increase).

One of the biggest threats to data integrity is the introduction of malicious content via SQLi (SQL Injection) attacks. Traditional database access methods don’t provide a lot ...

I got my Droid about five days ago, and immediately took it on the road with me, which meant I didn't have the quality time I wanted to settle into a nook and read Persian love poetry to it. But, I did get a sense of how it looks to ...

Well hello again!

After a week off with H1N1 (don’t get it, you really won’t like it), and another week or two catching up, I’m finally back in the saddle and there’s plenty to talk about – some of it stuff I should have been talking about weeks ago.

Today we’ll dis...

Deploy ESB if you really need integration solution for your Service Oriented Business Application.

3PAR, the leading global provider of utility storage, announced that TheLadders.com cut their total cost of storage in half by replacing their legacy storage infrastructure with 3PAR Utility Storage. The online job search website deployed 3PAR Utility Storage in conjunction with server...

It seems like every major vendor out there from hardware to software has a different definition of what cloud computing is. I’ve dabbled a little with the definition on here before, but it still seems like there is a general lack of consensus when it comes to definition. With that said...

I have been a long time donor to Kiva.org, a peer microfinance lending site that has been around for several years. When I first heard about it I thought it was an interesting idea and donated some money to fund a few different third-world start up businesses.

The talk at the Cloud Computing Expo this week in Santa Clara was all about enterprise cloud adoption. Is it real? Is it already happening? If so, who’s doing it, which applications are they running and which clouds are being tested? To a large extent, cloud computing is a victim of it...

eZ Systems, the world´s largest open source content management software company, announced today that former IBM and BEA executive Christoph Rau will join the company as CEO, effective immediately.

Mac OS X is a multi-tasking operating system that allows you to execute one or more processes at the same time. In some situations, you need to restart your Mac computer to clear several system processes to free system resources. This is the best solution to prevent system freezing. Bu...

Here is my initial thought: are you kidding me ? David's theory is that the adoption of Cloud Computing would be far more "acceptable" (aka politically correct) if we didn't have executives like Unisys's Richard Marcello saying: "We were able to eliminate a whole bunch of actually U.S....

HFS Wrapper is a popular and reliable Mac OS X file system. The HFS+ volume could be made to contain within the HFS file system volume in a way that make it look like the HFS volume and not the HFS+ volume to your system

Infrastructure 2.0, from a purely developmental standpoint, is about APIs. It’s about offering up the functionality and capabilities of a wide variety of infrastructure – network, storage, and application network – to be externally controlled, integrated, and leveraged for whatever pur...

This week I begin a new series of video screencasts for Dell’s IT Expert Voice Web site. The site has all sorts of useful information for corporate IT folks that are interested in migrating and using Windows 7, and my humble part will be to produce a regular series of videos similar to...

The SMS message was desperate. AJ sent the plea “If I have to see one more picture of a cloud in a PPT I might lose it…” After two days of presentations at the Cloud Computing Conference and Expo, where companies tried to bring the audience up to an Intro to Clouds 101 level, some at...

Day One of the Cloud Computing Conference and Expo is in full swing. First off, it took me nearly 30 minutes to find parking. For some reason the top level of the parking structure of the Santa Clara Convention Center was closed off. Not sure why. Then I walked through the San Jose Hya...

Now that we have determined the best geographic location for our data center, it is time to evaluate local facility options. The business concept of industry clustering is valid in the data center industry. In most locations supporting carrier hotels and Internet Exchange Points your...

The scene is a deserted office park in Los Angeles after hours. I am driving around, trying to find the spot that my IT manager friend left an envelope for me. Inside the envelope is a disc with a secret IBM software program that is about to give me one heck of a scoop for [...]

Embedding tags in books is probably the most obvious way to connect print content with online content so it's surprising more book publishers are not following Rough Guide's lead. Their new coffee table book, Earthbound: a Rough Guide to the World in Pictures is tag-enabled.Each image ...

So, the first week "on the air" went very well. Not an easy week, but remarkable good. We rapidly increase our midstock and microstock collection of royalty free images and this keeps our hands busy all the time. The infrastructure we choose for www.pixamba.com is extremely versatile a...

The number of submissions grows daily, hope it will keep going this way. The MIN upload size went down from 6 MP to 4 MP, thus helping our contributors to submit many stock illustrations that were prepared for other stock agencies at smaller sizes. We also have found and fixed a few si...

I am very excited to show you up some initial results of our hard work for quite a long time. Pixamba.com opens it doors for the contributors and image buyers. You are warmly welcome to join us and start selling your photos and illustrations with Pixamba. We offer high resolution stock...

First, and friend par excellence, is Jeff Blackwell of SalesPractice.com. Even though we don’t know each other well, he fell in love with Buying Facilitation® and my decision facilitation model quite a while ago, believing that Buying Facilitation® completes the sales model – with inte...

Data center selection is an exercise in compromise. Everybody would like to have the best of all worlds, with a highly connected facility offering 24x7 smart hands support, impenetrable security, protection from all natural and man-made disasters, in addition to service level agreemen...

Although my presentation focused on individual contributions, these lessons also apply to how businesses benefit by contributing to FOSS. When a business approaches a project they should attempt to build a symbiotic relationship with the community. Such a relationship involves followin...

Today is finally the day that Umoo tournaments is coming out of private beta and into the public arena. I can now set up my own tournaments with a larger crowd, maybe I can push the magic “Invite my Facebook friends button’. Currently, I mostly play Fun games, without any entry fee tha...

This blog is part of a new educational initiative to foster a deeper understanding of the capabilities and issues involved with administering FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) to deliver concrete business benefits. Although our subject will sometimes become technical, we will strive...

Sony Ericsson has time and again come up with exciting and rather different looking gadgets. They have revolutionized the music phone segment with the Walkman series, created waves in the camera phone segment with Cyber shot series apart from introducing exciting touchscreen phones. Th...

Describing today’s enterprise IT environment as “complex” would be a gross understatement all things considered. The intricate model needed to support day-to-day business operations boggles the mind, with much of the complexity attributed to evolving applications, and the way people us...

Here’s a Echo3 application in 3 steps