Mary Rodriguez

DOJ expands review of planned Microsoft-Yahoo agreement

2010-02-23T16:00:00.001-08:00

The U.S. Department of Justice has asked Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. to hand over more information regarding their proposed search partnership. Nina Blackwell, a spokeswoman for Yahoo, said both companies are cooperating with federal regulators. "[We] firmly believe that the information [we] will be providing will confirm that this deal is not only good for both companies, but it is also good for advertisers, good for publishers, and good for consumers," she added. A Microsoft spokesman confirmed in an e-mail to Computerworld today that the DOJ requested additional information, but added that it came as no surprise. "As expected, we received additional request for information about the agreement earlier this week," wrote the spokesman, Jack Evans. "When the deal was announced, we said we anticipated a close review of the agreement given its scope, and we continue to be hopeful that it will close early next year." Evans declined to disclose exactly what information the DOJ is looking for.

Microsoft and Yahoo announced late in July that they had finalized negotiations on a deal that will have Microsoft's Bing search engine powering Yahoo's sites, while Yahoo sells premium search advertising services for both companies. Microsoft officials contend that the deal with Yahoo will improve competition in the search market. The partnership, which was a year-and-a-half in the making , is aimed at enabling the companies to take on search behemoth Google as a united force. Matthew Cantor, a partner at Constantine Cannon LLP in New York and an experienced antitrust litigator, disagrees. He argues that since Yahoo will cease being a competitor in the search market, the DOJ is likely to say the Microsoft/Yahoo partnership is anticompetitive . In an interview today, Cantor applauded the DOJ's request for more information. "Most deals clear without a request for additional information. Cantor said last month that when Yahoo's own search tool disappears, only two major search engines will remain - Google and Microsoft's Bing.

This is not run-of-the-mill," said Cantor. "The government believes there are potential antitrust concerns raised here. Nonetheless, Blackwell told Computerworld that Yahoo is still hopeful the deal will close early next year. They would only request additional information if there was some kind of presumption that the deal will cause antitrust effects." Cantor added that he thinks it could take months for Microsoft and Yahoo to pull this new information together, perhaps until the end of this year.

FCC and DOT team-up, want high-tech cure for distracted driving

2010-02-18T06:04:00.000-08:00

The Federal Communications Commission and the US Department of Transportation are teaming up to develop what they called high-tech solutions to the growing problem of distracted or inattentive drivers. NetworkWorld Extra: Seven advanced car technologies the government wants now The DOT recently showed research findings by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) that show nearly 6,000 people died in 2008 in crashes involving a distracted or inattentive driver, and more than half a million were injured. The DOT and FCC said they will set up a working group to evaluate technology-based answers to the distracted driving problem and will improve outreach efforts to educate the public about the dangers of texting while driving, talking on cell phones while driving, and other distracting behavior that can lead to deadly accidents, the agencies stated. On any given day in 2008, more than 800,000 vehicles were driven by someone using a hand-held cell phone. "Across the board, federal researchers who have directly observed drivers of all ages found that more and more people are using a variety of hand-held devices while driving – not just cell phones, but also iPods, video games, Blackberrys and GPS systems.

Cell phones and texting are now the primary means of communication for many people, especially young adults. In particular, cell phone use for talking and texting is now more prevalent on our nation's roads, rail systems and waterways, carrying a dangerous potential for accidents," the NHTSA stated. NHTSA's research shows that the worst offenders are the youngest drivers: men and women under 20 years of age, the NHTSA stated. "We now know that the worst offenders are the youngest, least experienced drivers," said Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood in a speech recently. "Unfortunately though, the problem doesn't end there. We must work together to find solutions that will prevent crashes caused by driver distraction." In a recent speech, LaHood noted a number of actions the DOT is undertaking in the areas it can most change quickly: Make permanent restrictions on the use of cell phones and other electronic devices in rail operations; Ban text messaging altogether, and restrict the use of cell phones by truck and interstate bus operators; Disqualify school bus drivers convicted of texting while driving, from maintaining their commercial driver's licenses. Distracted driving occurs across all age groups and all modes of transportation, from cars to buses and trucks to trains. He also called on state and local governments to work with to reduce fatalities and crashes by making distracted driving part of their state highway plans, and by passing state and local laws against distracted driving in all types of vehicles—especially school buses.

The House recently approved the Advanced Vehicle Technology Act of 2009 with a goal of developing a wide range of scientific advances for cars including technology that could help with the problem if it can get out of the labs fast enough. On a technology level what can these agencies do? For example, an onboard computer system to monitor driving characteristics such as unsafe driving behavior. Such a system would monitor speed; following behavior; attention/inattention; fatigue symptoms; and general safety. According to a DOT report, feedback from such a system can be supplied to drivers in real-time or in the case of a commercial driver, provide carrier management a view into its driver's behavior. Crash avoidance technologies could mitigate negative effects of drivers using cell phones or other distracting devices but drivers using a portable touch-screen phone and examining a dashboard screen image at the same time could be further distracted, the Government Accountability Office noted in a report last year.

Representatives of the automobile industry have said that consumer training in the use of new technologies could be key to maximizing safety benefits, the GAO stated. Such systems could also create complacency that could exacerbate dangers.

How Wi-Fi attackers are poisoning Web browsers

2010-02-12T21:00:00.001-08:00

Public Wi-Fi networks such as those in coffee shops and airports present a bigger security threat than ever to computer users because attackers can intercede over wireless to "poison" users' browser caches in order to present fake Web pages or even steal data at a later time. Black Hat's most notorious incidents: A quiz He said it's simple for an attacker over an 802.11 wireless network to take control of a Web browser cache by hijacking a common JavaScript file, for example. "Once you've left Starbucks, you're owned. That's according to security researcher Mike Kershaw, developer of the Kismet wireless network detector and intrusion-detection system, who spoke at the Black Hat conference.

I own your cache-control header," he said. "You're still loading the cache JavaScript when you go back to work. "Open networks have no client protection," said Kershaw, who also uses the handle Dragorn. "Nothing stops us from spoofing the [wireless access point] and talking directly to the client," the user's Wi-Fi-enabled device. This means that an attacker can intercede to "poison the URL" of the victim so that he will see a fake Web page when they try to visit a specific Web site or try to insert a "shim" that could "ship your internal pages off to a remote server once you're in a VPN." The few defenses Kershaw suggested were continuously manually clearing the cache, or using private-browser mode. "Who knows how to clear the browser cache in an iPhone?" he asked. Knowledge gained from researchers over the past year, he said, is showing that browser-cache poisoning over Wi-Fi can be kept in a persistent state unless the user knows how to effectively empty the cache. "Once the cache is poisoned, it's going to stay there," Kershaw said. Kershaw acknowledged he doesn't know how widely attacks based on poisoning the browser cache via 802.11 actually are. This story, "How Wi-Fi attackers are poisoning Web browsers," was originally published at NetworkWorld.com.

But the potential for trouble is so evident he said he'd advise corporate security professionals to try to "forbid users from taking laptops onto open networks," though he admitted, "Your users may lynch you." He said some vendors, including Verizon, are looking at solving this problem with a custom client that is tied to specific operating systems. Follow the latest developments in security at Network World.

NASA: 2 rocket companies win $1.65M moon lander prize

2010-02-07T11:04:00.001-08:00

NASA said it will this week award $1.65 million in prize money to a pair of aerospace companies that successfully simulated landing a spacecraft on the moon and lifting off again. NetworkWorld Extra: 10 NASA space technologies that may never see the cosmos To win the prize, teams had to demonstrate a rocket-propelled vehicle and payload that could take off vertically, climb to a defined altitude, fly for a pre-determined amount of time, and then land vertically on a target that is a fixed distance from the launch pad. NASA's Centennial Challenges program, which was managed by the X Prize Foundation will give a $1 million first prize to Masten Space Systems and a $500,000 second prize to Armadillo Aerospace for successfully completing the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge.

After landing, the vehicle then needed to take off again within a predetermined time, fly for a certain amount of time and then land back on its original launch pad. Level 1 required a vehicle to take off vertically from a designated launch area, climb to an altitude of at least 150 feet, remain aloft for at least 90 seconds while traveling horizontally to a landing pad 300 feet away, then land vertically. The Challenge involved two levels of difficulty, with awards for first and second place at each level. The much more difficult Level 2 required a vehicle to take off from a designated launch area, ascend to an altitude of 150 feet, hover for 180 seconds, then land precisely on a simulated, rocky, lunar surface 300 feet away. The challenge required exacting control and navigation, as well as precise control of engine thrust, all done automatically, NASA stated.

For both Levels 1 and 2, competing teams had the option to refuel their vehicle before conducting the required return level to the original starting point, all within a two-hour-and-15-minute time period. The rocket's engine needed to be started twice in a short time with no ground servicing other than refueling. Masten Space Systems met the Level 2 requirements by achieving accurate landings and captured the first place prize during flights of their "Xoie" (pronounced "Zoey") vehicle Oct. 30 at the Mojave Air and Space Port. This represented the technical challenges involved in operating a reusable vehicle that could land on the moon. Masten also claimed a $150,000 prize as part of the Level 1 competition.

Armadillo placed second in the Level 2 competition, earning a $500,000 prize. Armadillo Aerospace was the first team to qualify for the Level 2 prize with successful flights of its Scorpius rocket Sept. 12 in Caddo Mills, Tex. An awards ceremony for the winning teams will be held at noon on Nov. 5 in Washington, DC.

Intel CTO: Machines could ultimately match human intelligence

2010-02-01T21:00:00.001-08:00

Will machines ever be as smart as humans? The notion of a technological "singularity," a time when machines match and surpass human intellect, has been popularized by thinkers such as inventor and author Raymond Kurzweil, who commonly cites Moore's Law in his arguments about the exponential growth of technology. Intel CTO Justin Rattner thinks that someday, they might.

Rattner's views on the singularity are sought after, given that he is CTO of the world's biggest chipmaker and the head of Intel Labs, the company's primary research arm. So yeah, at some point, assuming all kinds of advances and breakthroughs, it's not inconceivable we'll reach a point that machines do match human intelligence." Already, scientists are working on placing neural sensors and chips into the brain, allowing people to control prosthetic limbs with their own thoughts. In a recent interview with Network World, Rattner said he has "tried to sidestep the question of when [the singularity] might occur," but says machine intelligence is constantly increasing due to laws of accelerating returns, "of which Moore's Law is perhaps the best example." "There will be a surprising amount of machines that do exhibit human-like capabilities," Rattner said. "Not to the extent of what humans can do today, but in an increasing number of areas these machines will show more and more human-like intelligence, particularly in the perceptual tasks. This is likely to become a "relatively routine procedure" in a few years, Rattner said. Rattner's views are also held in high regard in the world of supercomputing, of course, and he will deliver the opening address at the SC supercomputing conference in Portland, Ore. in November.

Rattner said that while many commentators are preoccupied with the far-off singularity, he concerns himself more on how laws of accelerating returns "are real" and could lead to amazing advances in technology, including augmentation of the human body. "Assuming that interface technology progresses in an accelerating way, the possibilities of augmenting human intelligence with machine intelligence become increasingly real and more diverse," Rattner said. Nearly 80% of the world's 500 fastest supercomputers use Intel processors. But Rattner says the supercomputing industry is already looking forward to the era of the exaflop - 1,000 times faster than a petaflop. The world's first petaflop machines, capable of performing one thousand trillion calculations per second, came online just last year. Rattner says the fundamental technologies behind a future exaflop machine could be demonstrated by the middle of next decade, and - depending on government investment - the first exaflop machines could become operational in the second half of the decade.

You'd need a 500-megawatt nuclear power station to run the thing." The industry will have to move that number down to something practical, perhaps tens of megawatts, Rattner said. But this still depends on overcoming limitations in today's computing architectures. "Now that we've achieved petascale computing, there's all this interest in getting the next factor of 1,000," Rattner said. "But we can't get there with today's technology, largely because of power considerations. But the work is just getting started. "We've got a lot of really big engineering challenges," Rattner said. "Today, we just don't know how to get there."

iStockphoto guarantees its collection

2010-01-27T11:03:00.001-08:00

Starting today, iStockphoto, the micropayment royalty-free image, video, and audio provider, will legally guarantee its entire collection from copyright, moral right, trademark, intellectual property, and rights of privacy disputes for up to $10,000. The new iStock Legal Guarantee, delivered at no cost to customers, covers the company's entire 5 million-plus collection. Recently however, Vivozoom, another microstock company, took a similar action to guarantee its collection. Additional coverage for an Extended Legal Guarantee totaling $250,000 is available for the purchase of 100 iStock credits. "Our first line of defense has always been-and continues to be-our rigorous inspection process," said Kelly Thompson, chief operating officer of iStockphoto. "The Legal Guarantee is simply an added layer of protection for our customers, many of whom are using microstock more than ever before." Although common for traditional stock houses, such legal guarantees have not been standard in microstock because of the low prices. iStock says that files purchased and used in accordance with its license will not breach any trademark, copyright, or other intellectual property rights or rights of privacy.

And, if a customer does get a claim, iStock will cover the customer's legal costs and direct damages up to a combined total of $10,000. iStock customers can increase their coverage for legal fees and direct damages up to a combined total of $250,000 by purchasing the Extended Legal Guarantee via the iStock credits (which costs between $95 and $138). iStock expects that this program will be popular with a very small percentage of sophisticated media buyers with very specific needs, and considers it to be a value-added service to customers rather than a major source of revenue.

Intel: Don't look for one device to do it all

2010-01-22T02:00:00.001-08:00

Business people and consumers looking for one electronic device that can take care of all their needs have false hopes, according to researchers at Intel Corp. Genevieve Bell , an Intel Fellow and director of user experience, explained that an all-in-one device - that includes a phone, an Internet connection, a pager, a camera, a calendar, a GPS system and other capabilities - probably couldn't do anything exceptionally well. But scientists at Intel's research facility in Pittsburgh say they do expect that personal devices will one day become ... well, much more lovable.

And, she added, if a person lost the device that did all those tasks, he or she would have a really bad day. "I'm not sure any device can carry all that weight," Bell told Computerworld in an interview at the Pittsburgh lab. "I would love to get to a world where I only have one device. But it would just never work. Your handbag would weigh less. I think we'll actually have more devices." Bell said that replacing laptops, smartphones, pagers and other everyday systems with a single device simply is too much convergence. "Thinking we'll have one device that does everything is like our fetish with having paperless offices," she added. "It's jut not going to happen. As human beings, we are never just one thing.

The problem with convergence is we converge around the object and not the experience. We are employees. We are children. We are partners. We are members of churches and social groups. My phone doesn't know any more about me today than it did the day I got it.

We'll need different devices for different things." Intel CTO Justin Rattner added that while there likely won't be an all-in-one device, new more personalized systems should be emerging from development labs soon. "It's going to be about getting devices that know me," said Rattner. "That's something we think is really important. Think of the calendar in your phone as a soft sensor. He also expects that next-generation phone will recognize traffic jams on his work route and then send an alert that he needs to leave early and provide alternate routes. " Devices need to become more like personal assistants," he added. "They need to become more assertive. The device should understand [from items posted in its calendar] what my day is like and whether I need vehicle navigation or I need to read something before an important meeting. [The cell phone] has all this information and it still doesn't do all that much for me." Rattner said he looks forward to a time when an embedded camera in cell phones can recognize the owner, and whether someone else tries to use it. That's one way these devices will become more lovable." Andrew Chien, vice president of research at Intel and director of future technologies research at Intel Labs, said he wants to one pick out the devices he'll need for the day much like he picks out his clothes. "One of the reasons why we have mixed feelings about our devices is that they should be more like my wardrobe," he explained. "I go to the closet and pick out my clothes. I should have the best devices and know they're going to work together." The more seamlessly devices can work together, the more specialized they can become, Chien said.

We're going to get to a world where people can pick the best device for whatever function without worrying about them working together. Instead of needed data being stored in a single device, that information should be easily shared between devices so they can each offer strong functionality. But people are less in love with many of the devices that deliver the Internet to them. And that connectivity and shared data would make Rattner's vision of smart digital assistants come to life. "Will your phone directory information be in your earpiece or your handset or in your laptop or your shoe heel?" asked Chien. "It shouldn't matter where it is." Bell said the goal is to develop devices that can fend off viruses, hold a long charge, fit our bodies better and can take the punishment doled out when rolling around in the bottom of a handbag. "People love, love, love the Internet," Bell said. "It's an integral part of our lives. We need to develop devices that people can love too."

Juniperâs enterprise business hums in Q3

2010-01-16T16:04:00.000-08:00

Juniper Networks (JNPR) can thank its enterprise business for third-quarter results that exceeded expectations. Profits came in at $122.5 million, or 23 cents per diluted share, an increase of 21% quarter-over-quarter but a decrease of 28% from the third quarter of 2008. Still, the results were better than the $800 million in revenue and 21 cents per share earnings Wall Street was expecting. For the period ended Sept. 30, Juniper recorded revenue of $823.9 million, an increase of 5% sequentially but a decrease of 13% from the same period a year ago. And that's due to a 10% sequential growth in Juniper's enterprise business, which was "better than expected," according to Juniper CFO Robyn Denholm.

Johnson added that the IBM-branded Juniper products offered under a recent OEM arrangement are now available. Juniper's answer to Cisco in the data center: Stratus Project CEO Kevin Johnson said those results for the enterprise business represent "a starting point for a level of momentum" Juniper believes it can achieve in that market. "Our vision of the data center architecture of the future is resonating," Johnson said in a conference call with analysts. Juniper's EX LAN switching line, which debuted in the first half of last year, accounted for $50 million in sales in the quarter and is on a $200 million annual run rate. The MX debuted in 2006. The SRX firewall, which was unveiled a year ago, is on a $100 million annual run rate. The MX series Ethernet router, deployed mostly in carrier networks but also in some enterprise data centers, is on a $400 million annual run rate. Together, the EX, MX and SRX product lines accounted for $180 million of Juniper's $634 million in product revenue in the quarter. "We are executing better, and that's coming mainly from the US," Johnson said of the enterprise results in the quarter.

We're share takers in the enterprise market, we've got a lot of upside. Sales were particularly strong in the US federal government marketplace. "We will continue to throttle up execution globally. As the economy improves, enterprise investments will improve, but at a slower rate than service providers. "The level of buzz with customers in the enterprise continues to grow," Johnson added. "It's indicative of our opportunity. SLT revenue was a record for the quarter at $229 million, Denholm said, an increase of $11 million from 2008's Q3. In general, Juniper sees the economy and its business improving. "Our visibility has improved in key areas of our business," Johnson said. "We're in an economic recovery. But we've got to execute and engage with customers." Juniper experienced increased sales of its Service Layer Technology products – traditionally enterprise security and WAN acceleration gear – to service providers in Q3 as well. The pace varies across geographies" with improvements domestically, stabilization in Asia and a slower uptick in Europe.

For the fourth quarter, Juniper expects revenue of $860 million to $895 million, and earnings per share in the 23 cents to 26 cents range.

Startups trying to change the SAP consulting game

2010-01-10T19:04:00.001-08:00

A pair of startups, including one led by a former top SAP executive, are betting that SAP customers want more flexible ways to purchase consulting services and find answers to problems. The main difference between Vivido and traditional consulting contracts is that customers can purchase help a la carte, and can get it faster, he said. Greg Tomb, who was CEO of SAP North America before leaving the vendor early this year, recently formed Vivido Labs, which offers remote help-desk service provided by a roster of experienced SAP professionals, Tomb said. A large systems integrator may demand a minimum length of engagement or be unable to immediately put qualified help on the job, he said.

The system works well for the experts, many of which are veterans and "tired of traveling," Tomb said. "It gives them the ability to make extra money and get in front of new customers. ... These people love working through the hard problems," he added. About 1,000 SAP consultants have expressed an interest in working with Vivido, but the company has selected an initial group of about 400 for now, according to Tomb. Following feedback from initial customers, Vivido is now tweaking its platform to ensure customers can name a preferred consultant if desired, rather than be assigned one randomly from a group specializing in a particular area, Tomb said. However, a customer that is just about to hit the switch on an implementation might want to call in Vivido's experts to serve as a last-minute extra set of eyes, he added. Vivido is focusing on customers whose SAP implementations are already up and running and need help with configuration issues or other "post-go-live" problems, Tomb said.

In addition to remote help, Vivido is attempting to build up a large repository of white papers, how-to guides and other information relating to specific areas of SAP software. Meanwhile, startup CumulusIQ, based in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, is taking a somewhat different approach to remote support. The materials undergo a thorough vetting process by a team of SAP "scholars," according to Tomb. Customers submit questions to the company's "SAP Help Desk in the Cloud," after which an answer is "crowdsourced" by a virtual team of consultants. "You could potentially have 20 experts looking at an SAP issue anytime day or night, whereas with a traditional dedicated help desk, you might only have one person helping you at a time," cumulusIQ CEO Monty Kalsi said in a blog post. We're going to recover into a different world," he said. "Part of what's changing is stuff around systems integrators and consulting in the enterprise space. Vivido and CumulusIQ are creatures of the recession and its pending aftermath, according to Jon Reed, an independent analyst who tracks the SAP jobs market. "Basically, when you look at the impact of this economy, business models are never going to return to the way [they] were.

Companies want more innovation."

NASA spacecraft crash into the moon

2010-01-02T10:04:00.001-08:00

NASA' Lunar CRater Observing and Sensing Satellites (LCROSS) took dead aim and crashed into the moon around 7:31 am ESD. Watching the results on NASA TV, scientists were pleased with the impact of the two satellites. LCROSS is made up of two spacecraft. The impact of the $80 million LCROSS satellites into the moon was to create what the space agency hopes is an ice-filled a debris plume that can be analyzed for water content.

The first, known as the heavy impactor Centaur separated from the main LCROSS satellite at 9:50 EDS and rocketed toward the moon's surface, burrowing at least 90ft into the moon's surface and throwing up an estimated 250 metric tons of lunar dust. NetworkWorld Extra:10 NASA space technologies that may never see the cosmosTop 10 cool satellite projects According to NASA, as the debris field should rise above the target area, known as the Cabeus crater, and is exposed to sunlight, any water-ice, hydrocarbons or organics will vaporize and break down into their basic components. Following four minutes behind, the remaining LCROSS spacecraft flew through the debris plume, collecting and relaying data back to Earth before it too crashed into the lunar surface, burrowing in about 60ft, NASA stated. These components primarily will be monitored by the visible and infrared spectrometers. The spacecraft's visible camera will track the impact location and the behavior of the debris plume while the visible radiometer will measure the flash created by the Centaur impact, NASA stated. The near-infrared and mid-infrared cameras will determine the total amount and distribution of water in the debris plume.

The LCROSS science payload consists of two near-infrared spectrometers, a visible light spectrometer, two mid-infrared cameras, two near-infrared cameras, a visible camera and a visible radiometer. While previous space missions have found some water in the moon's dirt, LCROSS is expected to definitively answer how much water might be there. NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which launched with LCROSS June 18, will observe the plumes, as will the Hubble Space Telescope and observatories on Earth. In the end the idea is that should the US or others ever try to establish a human outpost on the moon, the might be able to use the water present on the moon rather than having to transport it up there. Click here to view a photo of the microchip containing the names as engineers prepare to install it on the spacecraft.

NASA also notes that through the agency's "Send Your Name to the Moon" initiative, the spacecraft carries a microchip with nearly 1.6 million names submitted by the public. If all goes well, the LCROSS mission would be a huge boost for NASA which has been under the gun of late. NASA is still struggling to develop a solid business case-including firm requirements, mature technologies, a knowledge-based acquisition strategy, a realistic cost estimate, and sufficient funding and time-needed to justify moving the Constellation program, witch includes the two main spaceflight components, the Ares I Crew Launch Vehicle and the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle, forward into the implementation phase, the GAO stated. In September, the Government Accountability Office slammed the future of the manned space flight program. In addition, the recent Review of United States Human Space Flight Plan Committee said in its preliminary report on the future of NASA said: '[NASA] is perpetuating the perilous practice of pursuing goals that do not match allocated resources.

It really is rocket science. Space operations are among the most complex and unforgiving pursuits ever undertaken by humans. Space operations become all the more difficult when means do not match aspirations." Want to compare network applications products? The committee's report was bleak too but ultimately how its results are interpreted will determine the future of any manned space flights. Visit the IT Product Guides now.

Internet TV could boom in the next few years, study says

2009-12-27T21:00:00.000-08:00

Internet-enabled TV sets could see wider adoption in the next few years as viewers get comfortable with the idea of running widgets on TV screens, according to a study released by Ernst & Young on Thursday. TV widgets are designed to pull selective content from the Internet to complement TV watching. Widgets - or mini-applications - are already being used in devices like mobile phones and computers to run light applications, and those applications could reach TV sets, the analyst firm said in the study.

For example, users can view weather information on TV or buy products advertised on TV from online stores. Web-connected TV shipments could total less than 500,000 in 2009, but top 6 million by 2013, E&Y said in the study, citing statistics from Parks Associates. Many consumers consider it an "appealing" idea to mesh TV with information from the Internet, according to the study. Widgets could also be the glue that brings together Internet and TV content. Many Web sites and technology companies are developing an ecosystem to bring content from the Internet and TV together. Broadcast TV is already competing with the Web for viewership, and widgets could facilitate content searches through both mediums, giving more entertainment options to viewers.

Myspace.com, for example, has developed a widget that blends TV with its social-networking offerings. Users don't need to rely on a browser to access MySpace content. TV watchers could exchange e-mail messages or browse photos on MySpace by activating a widget at the bottom of the TV screen. TVs and chips, for instance, are also being developed to build Web-enabled TVs. Sony, Samsung and LG have said select flat-panel high-definition TV models would be able to run widgets or download movies from online entertainment services like Netflix. Intel is also working with companies like CBS and Cinemanow to bring widgets to TVs. Web-enabled TV has struggled over the past 15 years since Time Warner Cable launched the iTV service in Orlando, E&Y said. Intel last week announced the CE4100 media processor, which enables the use of Internet and multimedia applications on TVs, Intel said.

Ever since, it has seen many iterations, with companies like AOL, BSkyB, RespondTV, Hewlett-Packard and Apple trying to bring the Internet to TV through devices like set-top boxes or adapters. Widgets for TV use also need to be adopted by television programming and cable operators. The success of widgets depends on applications that users will want to have on their TVs. For example, one-click access to on-demand content from online movie stores is well-suited for widgets. The operators will look to monetize widgets by developing an ad sales model around it, which could face some challenges, the study found. Conflicting advertising could also appear on a TV screen and widget at the same time, which could affect ad sales models.

For example, viewers could migrate their attention from TV shows to widgets, which could affect the ratings of a program.

Cisco results top estimates

2009-12-22T11:04:00.001-08:00

Cisco Systems on Wednesday posted first-quarter results that far exceeded Wall Street's expectations, though revenue and profits were down from a year earlier. Likewise, earnings per share for the quarter came in $0.05 better than expected, at $0.36. The non-GAAP figure excludes expenses, charges and other one-time items. Revenue for the quarter ended Oct. 24, the first of Cisco's fiscal year, was US$9.0 billion, compared to the $8.74 billion expected by financial analysts, according to a poll by Thomson Reuters. Sales in the quarter were down 12.7 percent from a year earlier.

On a sequential basis, revenue was up 6 percent from the fourth quarter, while earnings per share were up 16 percent. "Our Q1 results continued to reflect strong sequential growth trends that meet or exceed expectations during normal economic times," Cisco CEO John Chambers said in a statement. "We view the improving economic outlook, combined with solid execution on our growth strategy, as creating unparalleled opportunity to drive more value into the core of the network. The non-GAAP earnings per share were also down, by 14.3 percent. Simply said, we believe that key market transitions across collaboration, virtualization and video will drive productivity and growth in network loads for the next decade, and are evolving even faster than expected. "A new model of productivity based on collaboration is clearly emerging, and we believe this may be the most profound opportunity for businesses in our 25 years as a company," Chambers added. Cisco's board had previously authorized up to $62 billion in stock repurchases. Cisco also said its board of directors authorized up to $10 billion in additional repurchases of its common stock.

There is no fixed termination date for the repurchase program. The remaining authorized amount for stock repurchases under this program, including the additional authorization, is approximately $13.1 billion.

Obama warns against turning away 'the best and the brightest'

2009-12-17T02:00:00.001-08:00

At the White House jobs summit held yesterday, President Barack Obama warned against closing the door on foreign students, calling them one of the country's "greatest competitive advantages." Some, he said, could even create the next Intel Corp. in the U.S. Obama didn't mention the H-1B visa or cite any of the pending visa legislation in Congress in his remarks, but by referring to foreign students as the "best and the brightest," he used a phrase widely used by supporters to defend and opponents to deride the H-1B visa program. That's not America's strength," Obama said. "Our strength has always been in saying 'yes' to the rest of the world, inviting ideas and different cultures and commerce. Obama opened up on the need to admit foreign students in response to a fairly broad query from a summit participant about the need to ease visa regulations for cultural and academic use. "I think it is important for us not to get into a bunker mentality. We have not seen the same kinds of openness, I think, over the last several years that I'd like to see," he added, according to a White House transcript of the remarks.

Suddenly you've got a whole new generation of folks who are creating Intel or other extraordinary businesses." Obama added, "If those students start seeing a closed door, then we are losing what is one of our greatest competitive advantages." Over the last two months, H-1B visa demand has been swelling again after lagging for several months . If recent demand continues to grow, the legal cap of 85,000 visas for fiscal 2010 will be reached in a matter of weeks, if not sooner. Addressing the issue of foreign students specifically, Obama said, that, "one of the great things about this country is we get the best and the brightest talent to study here, and once they study here they start enjoying the intellectual freedom and the entrepreneurship, they decide to stay, and they start new businesses. H-1B visa demand typically tracks the economy, and Friday's jobs report showing a loss of only 11,000 U.S. jobs in November, compared to 741,000 in January, may well explain why the pace of visa petitions has picked up. The increase in demand for H-1B visas may also be signaling renewed interest in offshore outsourcing by U.S. firms, which could lead to domestic job cuts. The White House called the November jobs numbers a "dramatic improvement" over recent months. Moreover, companies that have already cut U.S. workers may turn to overseas labor to help meet increasing demand, which in turn could increase demand for the visas by offshore firms.

A survey of 80 financial services firms conducted by NelsonHall, an outsourcing advisory company, found that that 37% of enterprises expect to increase their use of offshore outsourcers over the next year, after a relatively flat year. At the same time, offshore outsourcing appears poised to pick up. Andy Efstathiou, director of the banking sourcing program at NelsonHall, said financial services companies need to increase their ability to meet transaction volumes while cutting costs. But these integrations also provide an opportunity to restructure processes so that some can be delivered remotely, added Efstathiou. Bank mergers are increasing opportunities as well for financial firms to increase offshore work, at least temporarily, to integrate the businesses.

Microsoft technology reduces network redundancy

2009-12-11T16:04:00.001-08:00

Researchers at Microsoft Research India have developed a compression and redundancy elimination technology that can operate as a host service in enterprise systems without the use of accelerator devices over a WAN. The project is called Coconet for Content Compression in Networks. Microsoft researchers estimated that about 75 percent of the bandwidth saved using redundancy elimination devices on a WAN comes from removing redundant byte-strings from within each client's traffic, Ramachandran Ramjee, project leader of Coconet, said in a telephone interview on Monday. The researchers monitored access links at 11 corporate enterprise locations for several days, as well as the access link of the University of Wisconsin, which had some of its students collaborate on the project. This kind of redundancy, described by the Microsoft researchers as intra-user redundancy, consists, for example, of the same user getting different versions of the same files from a server, or going to the same Web sites repeatedly to get an update, Ramjee said.

Many large companies, having branch offices across the world, are consolidating their IT resources in a few locations to save on administrative costs, Ramjee said. "Instead of putting servers in each branch office they are consolidating in a few data centers in a few locations," he said. This pattern presented the opportunity to move the redundancy elimination function to software running on end hosts on the network, reducing the need for deployment of expensive accelerator devices, or other redundancy elimination "middle-boxes" on the WAN, according to Ramjee. A result of this move is that what used to be traffic on the LAN from a user's PC to a server in the branch office has now become relatively expensive WAN traffic, according to Ramjee. The software developed by Microsoft Research India has been designed to be asymmetric so that the processing is done at the server, Ramjee said. The move for consolidation has increased demand for products like WAN accelerator devices, which among other things also reduce redundancy in network traffic, he added.

It does not conflict with encryption on the network, because the removal of a redundancy at the server end is done before encryption, he added. This ensures that the technology can also be used when the client is a resource-constrained device like a smartphone, Ramjee said. The software runs on general purpose servers and requires a typical cache size of about 10MB on the server for each client, and another 10MB at the client end. The host service can identify and suppress redundancy as small as 32 bytes in the packets, according to Ramjee. The technology developed by Microsoft Research India does not, however, address "inter-user" redundancy which arises when many users request the same data.

If any bytes are found to match between a data request and previous data transmitted, the server indicates that the data is already on the client and redirects to it, he said. Besides WAN accelerator boxes there are other technologies that handle that, including the BranchCache feature in Windows 7, Ramjee said. Ramjee also claimed lower latency for the Microsoft Research technology, as it can work around the limitation that TCP breaks down packets before sending them.

Desktop virtualization cheat sheet

2009-12-06T07:00:00.001-08:00

Server virtualization is well on its way in corporate data centers and desktop virtualization is following fast behind. Here's a roundup of our most recent desktop virtualization/virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) coverage: ARTICLES FAQ: Desktop virtualization There's huge interest in desktop virtualization technology, due to its promises of improved security, manageability and flexibility. The pace of desktop virtualization deployment is only expected to speed up now that Windows 7 is on the scene and client-hosted virtual desktop offerings are emerging.

Here are some details on how the technology works and why it might be a fit for your company. While that is partly true, companies need to be aware of how the two technologies differ, industry experts caution. Weighing the pros/cons of desktop virtualization Successful server virtualization deployments lead many IT managers to believe desktop virtualization would provide the same benefits. Windows 7 and Desktop Virtualization: The New Tools It seems as if every vendor is putting out new products or touting old products designed to help make Windows 7 a good platform, or to cement justification for desktop virtualization projects. Sales may take off, but the desktop PC may not have much to do with it. Window 7 may spur virtual desktops, on and off the iPhone Predictions from analysts and virtualization vendors that desktop virtualization will take off during 2010 may be off the mark.

Three caveats for desktop virtualization Before moving to any flavor of desktop virtualization, consider these issues: the network; management; security. Virtual desktops ripe for deployment, hindered by cost Desktop virtualization, with its promises of improved security, manageability and flexibility, may be on the verge of huge adoption, some experts are predicting. Disaster Can Inspire Quick Move to Desktop Virtualization A major disaster led the University of Texas Medical Branch-a sprawling campus of hospital and office buildings in Galveston plus a spray of clinics and smaller facilities all over Texas-to shift virtual desktops from a fringe technology to its main platform. But as with many new technologies, there is a catch. Companies choose VDI to fit existing infrastructure Enterprises are choosing desktop virtualization offerings from Symantec Corp., VMware Inc., Citrix Systems Inc., Microsoft Corp. according to the vendor's area of strength - and how it fits with the infrastructure they already have, according to one Canadian analyst.

ROI is one of the main selling points, but desktop virtualization requires significant upfront costs and it can easily take three or four years to realize financial rewards. VMware bolsters desktop virtualization product VMware's View desktop virtualization offering boasts new remote desktop protocol Citrix desktop virtualization push: any device, any location Citrix says its latest desktop virtualization software will give users access to high-definition desktops from any location and from just about any device, including PCs, Macs, thin clients, laptops, netbooks and smartphones. Here's a baker's dozen. OPINION/BLOGS A Guide to Microsoft's Dizzying Array of Desktop Virtualization Offerings Microsoft offers no fewer than five desktop virtualization technologies - depending on how you define the term. Desktop virtualization start-up Wanova emerges from stealth mode A desktop virtualization start-up called Wanova emerged from stealth mode having secured $13 million in funding to build technology for managing and protecting mobile and remote desktops. SLIDESHOWS Best desktop virtualization software VMware, Microsoft, Parallels and Oracle/Sun offer products that allow end users to run multiple operating systems on a single client machine. 13 Desktop Virtualization Tools Virtualization stalwarts and start-ups alike are aiming for the desktop. The impact of VDI Some challenges associated with implementing a virtualized desktop infrastructure Liquefying IT Though centrally executing and managing desktop images offers many benefits to both IT and end-users, the potential impact on the network and other underlying data center infrastructure should not be overlooked. AUDIO/VIDEO Desktop virtualization key to reduced power consumption By moving to a virtualized desktop client, IT shops can ditch power-hungry 300 watt desktops in favor of juice-sipping 75w thin clients.

Also see: 100G Ethernet Cheat Sheet That switch has a number of backend benefits as well, says Nemertes' Andreas Antonopoulos, who sees big things for desktop virtualization in 2009 Desktop Virtualization Cheat Sheet compiled via Network World and its sister publications.

10 Gigabit upgrade helps college modernize network

2009-11-30T21:03:00.001-08:00

While the tech industry looks ahead to 40 Gigabit Ethernet and 100 Gigabit Ethernet, lots of IT shops are still undergoing the transition to 10 Gig networks. At the College of New Jersey, a school with 6,000 students, the IT staff upgraded its core network to 10 Gigabit bandwidth one year ago to improve performance and replace out-of-date equipment. "With 10 Gigabit, it seems like its time has come," says Alan Bowen, who currently serves as the college's manager of IT security and was previously the network systems engineer. "Its price per port has come down." The college has been buying network equipment from Extreme Networks for almost a decade and was ready for an upgrade to the vendor's new switches last year. (Extreme last week dismissed CEO Mark Canepa and 9% of the company's workforce, in an effort to improve the company's bottom line.) "Our issue for upgrading was that we had aging equipment," Bowen says. "This equipment was installed in August 2000, and this stuff ages in dog years. The new 10 Gigabit capabilities help deliver performance to widely used applications, like a student information system, e-learning systems, and payroll. "We need Internet connectivity to our users. It was well past its prime." The college spent about $300,000 for upgrades including Extreme's BlackDiamond 8800 Series 10 Gigabit Ethernet switches, as well as the vendor's Summit X450a switches for a new distribution layer to create redundancy throughout the campus network.

We do a lot of Web 2.0 stuff that's mostly hosted on campus," and use software-as-a-service applications from outside the network, he says. Gigabit Ethernet is still good enough for many academic and residential buildings, he says. Internet bandwidth is the college's biggest limiting factor, Bowen says, but he didn't need 10 Gigabit speeds throughout the whole network. For many users, "the demand isn't there for faster bandwidth," Bowen says. "When we look at port utilization, we hardly ever see more than 100 megabits of throughput." For the upgrade, Bowen stuck with Extreme because a big-name vendor like Cisco probably would have been two-thirds more expensive, he says. Adoption of 10 Gigabit Ethernet is increasing rapidly, with worldwide vendor revenue jumping from $384 million in 2004 to $1.2 billion in 2006 and up to $2.5 billion in 2008, according to Dell'Oro research. Another important factor for the College of New Jersey was Extreme's Ethernet Automatic Protection Switching (EAPS) technology, which provides rapid recovery after link and node failures.

A standard for 40 and 100 Gigabit Ethernet is being considered by IEEE, and is on track for approval in June 2010. Products should hit the market by the second half of 2010, according to Extreme Networks. Today, 10 Gigabit Ethernet is becoming pervasive in the core network, whereas Gigabit Ethernet is still ruling the edge, according to the vendor. "One of the factors for 10 Gigabit migration is cost," Nguyen says. "If I want to make an investment and upgrade the network today, I want to make sure that investment will last for five to seven years." Follow Jon Brodkin on Twitter: www.twitter.com/jbrodkin Customers are still buying more 1 Gigabit products than 10 Gigabit, but revenue for 10 Gig should more than double by 2013, says Huy Nguyen, director of convergence technologies for Extreme Networks.

5 things missing in VMware's new virtual desktop app, View 4

2009-11-25T12:00:00.001-08:00

With VMware Inc.'s release of View 4 last week, the company is promising two things: Full desktop performance at a desktop price tag. Moreover, the cost of building out a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), including servers, storage, network bandwidth, thin clients and software licenses, has generally outweighed potential savings in IT labor and security costs. Desktop virtualization requires huge amounts of data to be constantly streamed from server to client.

That is a "huge, huge change" in View 4, asserted Rick Jackson, chief marketing officer for VMware. Moreover, the "acquisition cost barrier" has been "neutralized." "I don't see how a CIO with a large desktop population doesn't look at this," Jackson said in an interview this week. View 4 is so efficient that some apps run faster virtually than when loaded from a local hard drive, he said. For all the sizzle, analysts cite five ways the steak isn't fully cooked. 1. Bandwidth bandwidth bandwidth. Chris Wolf, an analyst with the Burton Group, said he and his clients have tested the View 4 beta.

View 4 uses a new compression protocol called PC-over-IP (PCoIP) licensed from Teradici Corp. Over local area networks, PCoIP "performs very well," he said. Also, PCoIP natively encrypts all data traffic, according to Wolf, meaning that companies can't use WAN traffic accelerators such as those from Riverbed Technology Inc. But PCoIP is still enough of a bandwidth hog that trying to deliver high-definition video or support multiple monitors to remote users or branch offices over wide area networks remains "impractical," Wolf said. Finally, VMware doesn't offer a VDI appliance, such as those from Kaviza Inc. , to enable acceptable remote performance, said Wolf. One way that VMware could deliver better performance to remote desktop as well as mobile laptop users is by allowing View 4 to run locally and synchronizing only occasionally.

That forced some of Burton's clients, for now, to rule out View 4 for development centers in India, he said. 2. Lack of local virtualization. That's what VMware's Client Virtualization Platform (CVP) will do. That is later than Citrix's equivalent, called Xenclient, is scheduled to arrive, said independent analyst Brian Madden, as well as already available apps from Neocleus Inc. and Virtual Computer Inc. Problem is, VMware announced CVP more than a year ago and doesn't plan to deliver it until the middle of next year, Jackson said. Such client hypervisors "will be a big, big deal for 2010," he said. 3. Full Windows 7 support.

He declined to offer a timetable but Madden expects VMware to be targeting June next year. Despite being released weeks after Windows 7, View 4 still only offers beta support for Microsoft's latest OS, said Raj Mallempati, a product marketing manager at VMware. But planning for PC deployments can take years, meaning that VMware could be too late for some enterprises that have already started their planning. "You want to get in real early so you can be part of any PC migration project," Wolf said. No one is making solid plans until the middle of next year," he said. Madden somewhat disagreed. But "VMware needs to have their stuff together by then, or else they are screwed." 4. Lack of application personalization.

Think bookmarks, passwords and Web site history in your Web browser, or the macros and settings and list of recently opened documents in Microsoft Word. Where Madden criticizes View 4 is its inability today to let users keep their application preferences and history. VMware announced at VMworld in September that it is licensing the Virtual Profiles software from RTO Software. That "is just another reason I'd chill for six months," Madden said. 5. Unless you go big and compromise, costs are higher than advertised. There's no timetable for when it will be integrated into View 4, said Mallempati.

VMware is partnering with EMC Corp. and Cisco Systems Inc. to deliver an all-in-one server-storage-software package that doubles the number of virtual desktops to 16 per server CPU core, resulting in a cost of $750 per PC. (see PDF white paper) That compares well with the typical $600 to $800 cost of buying a new Windows 7 PC. And going with View 4 allows customers to slice their annual desktop operational costs by half, Jackson said. To attain $750 per PC, the VMware-EMC-Cisco solution requires companies to deploy it to at least 2,048 users, Mallempati confirmed. There are two big caveats, however. That results in a minimum outlay of $1.54 million. But Madden said desktop virtualization remains a "limited niche use case," restricted to deskbound, always connected employees such as financial traders, call center workers, and the like.

Wolf said he has some clients looking to roll out desktop virtualization in a big way in the next three to five years: 40,000 users for one company, and 150,000 for another. Coming up with at least 2,000 workers willing to be moved to desktop virtualization may be a stretch for many companies. That's all fine and good, Wolf said, but it increases companies' operational costs, sometimes significantly, as they deal with failing hard drives and fans, and support the PC's native operating system. For another, VMware-EMC-Cisco's $750-per-desktop calculation assumes that companies recycle existing PCs into thin clients for View 4, Mallempati said. Buying new thin client devices from vendors such as Wyse Technology Inc. to reduce administration and service overhead will add about $450 per user for multimedia-enabled devices, he said.

Wolf's conclusion? "Price is still a significant barrier to adoption."

Five Reasons Windows XP Has About a Year to Live

2009-11-20T00:04:00.001-08:00

For all the stories about enterprises holding off on Windows 7 deployments, Windows XP's dominance in the enterprise is at the beginning of the end, says one industry analyst. Windows 7 Bible: Your Complete Guide to the Next Version of Windows Indeed, Windows XP still powers almost 80 percent of commercial PCs, according to a survey of 665 IT decision-makers that was part of the Forrester report entitled "Windows 7 Commercial Adoption Outlook." Nevertheless, many factors point to XP's demise. This will not happen overnight, writes Forrester analyst Benjamin Gray in a new research report, but there are enough reasons for IT managers to "shake the status quo, and finally end Windows XP's corporate reign." XP, now an eight-year-old OS, "has delivered the compatibility, security, and reliability that firms had hoped for and to this day remains the desktop standard for most businesses and government agencies," Gray writes. Two-thirds (66 percent) of the 655 surveyed IT decision-makers from North American and European enterprises and SMBs are planning to migrate to Windows 7 eventually, although most don't have firm plans yet.

Forrester also urges that companies should prepare for employee requests for Windows 7 as it becomes more popular with consumers. Additionally, the research shows that 51 percent of respondents plan to have Windows 7 as the primary OS on their PCs within 12 months. Here are five other key factors that Forrester believes will loosen Windows XP's grip on the enterprise and make way for Windows 7. Businesses Are Supporting Old Infrastructure Forrester's Gray writes that because of the recession, IT managers needed to lower costs by extending the life of existing desktops and laptops. For global companies that support thousands of apps, compatibility testing can take up to 18 months. Many also held off on hardware upgrades because they wanted them to coincide with a Windows 7 deployment. So if they've been testing in anticipation of Windows 7's release, full deployments will conclude by the end of 2010. Windows XP Support Is Waning Since April of this year, Windows XP SP2 has been in the extended support stage, which means support is no longer free and only includes security updates and patches.

All support for Windows XP SP2 and SP3 will end in April 2014. Windows XP Availability Will Get Pinched The ability to buy Windows XP machines will change after Windows 7 becomes generally available this week, Gray writes. Next July, XP SP3 will enter extended support as well. With the release of Windows 7's first service pack, scheduled to be a year or so after its initial release, OEM licenses bundled with every PC will no longer have downgrade rights to XP. This means that to deploy Windows XP on a new PC, companies will have to purchase volume license copies of Windows along with the new PCs or use existing, unused Windows volume licenses. Some features that Forrester recommends IT departments prepare for include: DirectAccess, which lets remote workers connect to corporate networks without the use of a VPN; BranchCache, which speeds up access to networks in remote offices that are away from corporate headquarters; BitLocker To Go, an extension of the BitLocker hard-drive encryption feature introduced in Vista that will now protect removable devices like external hard drives and USB thumb drives; AppLocker, which aims to protect users from running unauthorized software; and federated search, which promises to simplify access to data across local and remote networks. Business Reasons Encourage Upgrade to Windows 7 Forrester has found that the enterprise features in Windows 7 will help companies improve networking and security and ultimately cut costs.

Improved Client Virtualization Can Accelerate Deployment Plans Windows 7 ships with Windows Virtual PC and Windows XP Mode, which provide the ability to run apps not yet compatible with Windows 7 in an XP-compatible virtual machine. Shane O'Neill is a senior writer at CIO.com. Moreover, customers with software assurance agreements can use MDOP (Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack), a subscription-based suite of apps that includes virtualization technologies allowing IT pros to deploy and manage virtual images, "thus removing the last barriers to deploy Windows 7," writes Gray. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/smoneill. Follow everything from CIO.com on Twitter at twitter.com/CIOonline.

Microsoft pushes Bing in China with mobile portal

2009-11-14T15:00:00.001-08:00

Microsoft stepped up promotion of Bing in China with the launch of a Web services platform for mobile phones this week, a possible step toward challenging the dominance of Google and Baidu.com in the country. Bing has not caught on in China and Microsoft has done little to promote it in the country. The Microsoft portal, an effort to spur use of its services in a market crowded by local competitors, offers downloads of mobile clients for Bing and Windows Live Messenger, along with instructions on how to use Microsoft services, including Hotmail, from a mobile phone. However, Bing, launched in June, has grown quickly in the U.S. and attracted about 9 percent of online searches there last month, according to Internet monitoring companies.

Baidu and Google together account for as much as 95 percent of online searches done in China, leaving Yahoo, a range of local search engines, and any new players like Bing to compete for the remaining slice of the market. China's online search market is dominated by local player Baidu, with Google in a distant second place. The Bing mobile client lets users search for local information such as maps, restaurant locations and weather forecasts. Bing has strong potential but will face difficulty competing with Baidu and Google in the near term, said Ben Cavender, senior analyst at China Market Research Group in Shanghai. Microsoft "will continue to strengthen and expand the service scope of its mobile Internet products," the company said in a statement.

While Baidu and Google have well-established search services for free music downloads that keep Chinese users coming back, Microsoft so far has done little to localize Bing, Cavender said. Bing did not make a list of China's top 10 most-visited search engines in August, as posted on the Web site of local online traffic analyzer CR-Nielsen.

Internet TV could boom in the next few years, study says

2009-11-09T05:05:00.000-08:00

Broadcast TV is already competing with the Web for viewership, and widgets could facilitate content searches through both mediums, giving more entertainment options to viewers. Myspace.com, for example, has developed a widget that blends TV with its social-networking offerings. Users don't need to rely on a browser to access MySpace content. TV watchers could exchange e-mail messages or browse photos on MySpace by activating a widget at the bottom of the TV screen. TVs and chips, for instance, are also being developed to build Web-enabled TVs. Sony, Samsung and LG have said select flat-panel high-definition TV models would be able to run widgets or download movies from online entertainment services like Netflix. Intel is also working with companies like CBS and Cinemanow to bring widgets to TVs. Web-enabled TV has struggled over the past 15 years since Time Warner Cable launched the iTV service in Orlando, E&Y said.

Intel last week announced the CE4100 media processor, which enables the use of Internet and multimedia applications on TVs, Intel said. Ever since, it has seen many iterations, with companies like AOL, BSkyB, RespondTV, Hewlett-Packard and Apple trying to bring the Internet to TV through devices like set-top boxes or adapters. Widgets for TV use also need to be adopted by television programming and cable operators. The success of widgets depends on applications that users will want to have on their TVs. For example, one-click access to on-demand content from online movie stores is well-suited for widgets. The operators will look to monetize widgets by developing an ad sales model around it, which could face some challenges, the study found. Conflicting advertising could also appear on a TV screen and widget at the same time, which could affect ad sales models.

For example, viewers could migrate their attention from TV shows to widgets, which could affect the ratings of a program.

On Facebook and Twitter: Your Medical Troubles?

2009-11-03T20:00:00.001-08:00

Next time you're recovering from trip to the emergency room, keep an eye on the young doctors tending to you. A survey of medical schools published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that 13 percent of respondents reported breaches of doctor-patient confidentiality, and 60 percent reported "unprofessional content" posted online. They might be chatting about your case on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and blogs.

Many of the unprofessional postings cover the kinds of things you'd expect from young folks, such as drinking and obscenities. According to the Associated Press, one of these incidents described a patient's case on Facebook, and another involved a student requesting an inappropriate relationship with a patient. But in some instances, students went into detail about cases, to the point that patients could be identified. Survey responses came anonymously from school deans, so while instances of confidentiality breaches are rare, it's likely that more violations aren't being reported. Most of the medical students that behaved badly online were given a warning, but 7 percent of cases resulted in expulsion. For example, the study's lead author, Dr. Katherine Chretien of the Washington, D.C., VA Medical Center, searched YouTube and found students playing a prank with a dead body, though it's not known whether the body was real.

The bigger concern is that 62 percent of the medical schools don't have policies to govern how students are allowed use social networking sites. As anyone who's vented about work online knows, sites like Facebook and Twitter can be a good outlet. And the vast majority of those schools aren't actively working on the issue, either. It can even be productive, but students need to be told when they enroll that discussing medical details online is off limits.

Google Editions Embraces Universal E-book Format

2009-10-29T12:05:00.001-07:00

Google will launch an e-book store called Google Editions with a "don't be evil" twist. This will allow content to be unchained from expensive devices such as Amazon's Kindle e-book reader. Unlike Google's biggest competitors Amazon and Barnes & Noble that rely heavily on restrictive DRM, Google will not be device-specific - allowing for e-books purchased through Google Editions to be read on a far greater number of e-book readers that will flood the market in 2010. Google's e-books will be accessible through any Web-enabled computer, e-reader, or mobile phone instead of a dedicated device.

However, as democratizing as this sounds, it's still unclear how many people are ready to curl up with a Google Editions title on their laptop or smartphone, instead of the traditional paper format? Under Google's payment scheme, publishers will receive about 63 percent of the gross sales, and Google will keep the remaining 37 percent. Google Editions: The Basics The new e-book store will launch sometime during the first half of 2010, and will have about 500,000 titles at launch. Google also hopes to offer Editions titles through other online book retailers. Google may also create deals to sell Google Editions books directly through a book publisher's Website, but no details have been announced for how that scenario would work, according to Read Write Web.

In this scenario, online retailers would get 55 percent of revenues minus a small fee paid to Google, and publishers would get 45 percent. Google Editions as Web Apps? Unlike titles offered through e-readers, Google Editions books would not have to be accessed through a dedicated reader or special application. Google's e-books would reportedly be indexed and searchable like many books are now through Google's Book Search, according to Reuters. Instead, any device with a Web browser will be able to access a Google Editions book.

To me this sounds like Google wants to turn the e-book, or more accurately the e-reader, into a Web App. After you purchase and access your online book for the first time, it will be cached in your browser making the book available when you're offline. Considering Google's push with its yet-to-be-unveiled Chrome OS and the Chrome browser, turning books into Web Apps isn't a particularly surprising move. Whenever Google gets involved with any new business, the immediate assumption is that the company will be able to reshape the market. But is Google Editions a Game-Changer? From the sounds of it, Google's plans may do just that, since it will make reading and accessing e-books nearly universal on almost any device that can get to the Web.

Google's use of the Web browser as an e-reader may make it slightly easier to access an e-book than these other retailers since Google will essentially shun the ePub and PDF formats. However, Google is not the first company to deliver e-books to your PC. Companies like Buy Ebook and eBooks.com already do this, and the online social publishing site, Scribd started selling e-books earlier this year. But one hurdle Google can't overcome is the fact that you'll be reading your book on a computer screen. Part of the reason Amazon's Kindle gained so much attention when it launched was its attempt to overcome this deficiency by using E-Ink technology, which tries to emulate the look of the printed page. A common complaint about e-books is that reading them is much harder on a regular computer display. Sure, alternatives like the iPhone's Kindle application, and other e-reading apps for smartphones have met with some success.

NASA: Moon bombing provides 'the data we need'

2009-10-24T02:00:00.001-07:00

Despite the disappointing lack of a visible debris plume, NASA scientists say they have the data they need to figure out if there's water on the moon after their space probe crashed into a lunar crater early this morning. Soon after that initial crash, the second half of the spacecraft, which had separated into two pieces last night, hurtled through the kicked up debris, grabbing data about the matter, and then it too crashed into the crater. At 7:31 a.m. EDT today, the first half of the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite , known as LCROSS, slammed into a deep and permanently dark crater on the south pole of the moon. It's a double whammy that NASA hopes can help it determine whether there is water on the moon.

It would be far cheaper and easier to drill water on the moon than have to haul it up from Earth. "We have the data we needed to address the question of water," said Anthony Colaprete, the LCROSS principal investigator for NASA. "The science team will analyze the data this afternoon. NASA is still hopeful to one day create a viable human outpost on the moon, a goal that would benefit greatly from a discovery of water on the moon. We just have to sit back and be careful. We saw something and that's heartening. We don't want to make a false negative or a false positive claim. We're going to take our time and build up a case for water." While NASA "saw something," fans of space exploration didn't see what they had expected this morning.

Some have questioned whether the crashes even caused a debris plume and whether any helpful data will result from the experiment. NASA had been promising live images of the impact and resulting debris plume but images on NASA TV were live only until moments before impact when it turned to black. Colaprete noted that the images streamed out for video were not what the second half of the spacecraft would have detected as it flew its own path into the crater. "I knew we were going someplace where you expect the unexpected," he said, adding that scientists did record a spectra, or light waves, after the crash. "I'm not convinced we haven't seen ejecta. I certainly hope we can dig something out of there that will be telling." Faith Vilas, director of the MMT Observatory in Arizona, said the observatory's telescope was focused on the lunar crater during the crash and did not detect a debris plume. Stay tuned. She added, though, that the plume could have occurred nonetheless. "We didn't see a thing.

The orbiter is expected to send its own analysis of the debris plume back this morning. We didn't see any obvious sign of an impact," said Vilas. "In choosing this crater for impact, the spacecraft went 2 kilometers deep so a lot of the plume would have been shielded from view by crater walls." S. Pete Worden, center director at NASA's Ames Research Center, said it had been an exciting morning. "LCROSS showed that low-cost, innovative missions can excite the public and do good science," he added. "It expands and continues our exploration into the solar system." The LCROSS spacecraft, which blasted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on June 18, went aloft with its companion satellite, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter . As the Atlas V rocket that carried them lifted off, a NASA spokesman called it "NASA's first step in a lasting return to the moon." The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter , which has been in orbit around the moon since late June, was 50 kilometers above the moon's surface during this morning's impact. The LCROSS spacecraft, aside from being a projectile, was a vehicle heavily loaded with scientific gear. The instruments were selected to provide mission scientists with multiple views of the debris created by the hull's initial impact. According to NASA, its payload consisted of two near-infrared spectrometers, a visible light spectrometer, two mid-infrared cameras, two near-infrared cameras, a visible camera and a visible radiometer.

NEC reaches out with iSCSI midrange storage

2009-10-17T22:04:00.001-07:00

NEC is expanding its midrange storage line with a new iSCSI array aimed at companies with midsized storage needs. NEC designs its products to offer enterprise capabilities at lower prices than big names such as Hewlett-Packard and EMC. That value proposition was just what Accutech, a digital media wholesaler in Ventura, California, was looking for. The company is not especially well known for storage in North America, though it supplies equipment that some other vendors sell under their own brands.

Accutech bought NEC's new D3i platform about a month ago in the process of virtualizing its data center, said systems administrator Chris Crawford. Accutech bought the NEC D3i as storage for all those virtual machines. The company is centralizing about 15 servers with local storage into four larger servers with virtual machines, using VMware ESXi. The aim is to reduce the data-center administrative burden, cut power consumption and ensure reliability. Accutech's needs aren't as big as for some larger enterprises. It bought two linked D3i storage platforms, one with 12TB of capacity and one with 2.4TB, and is only using about 20 percent of the total capacity now.

The company distributes items such as blank CDs, digital tapes and printer toner to stores and resellers around the country. Accutech rejected the faster Fibre Channel standard for iSCSI (Internet Small Computer System Interface) because the former would have cost about four times as much, Crawford said. "Fibre Channel is way faster, but iSCSI is more than fast enough for us," Crawford said. NEC's 30-day return policy was another selling point. The company's two-person IT department researched its options for about 18 months and found that only NEC fit its budget. After taking delivery of the D3i about a month ago, Accutech put it through its paces. "We threw everything at it at once," Crawford said.

With the data for all its virtual servers stored on the D3i, Accutech isn't susceptible to a single point of failure, Crawford said. The results met its expectations. The storage array itself has multiple built-in redundancies, including two RAID arrays, four power supplies and four network interface cards, he said. The D3i is an iSCSI counterpart to NEC's D3 Fibre Channel system and is designed for enterprises like Accutech that have medium-sized storage needs but don't need Fibre Channel. The storage platform is the heart of the centralized data center. "I can connect, disconnect and reconnect servers until I'm blue in the face" and the data center will keep running, he said.

It has been on sale since April but is being formally announced on Tuesday. For its next-generation storage platform, coming in early or mid-2010, NEC is looking at offering both types of interfaces in the same system, though it hasn't heard demand for that from customers, said Josh Eddy, product marketing manager for the Advanced Storage Products Group of NEC Corp. of America. A minimum configuration with three 500GB drives is priced starting at US$6,406. The system can scale up to 144TB of capacity, with a price of about $100,000. Although IP (Internet Protocol) storage network technologies such as iSCSI are gaining in popularity, Fibre Channel still dominates in large enterprises. Also on Tuesday, NEC will introduce thin provisioning capability for its D8 enterprise platform, the first of NEC's storage platform to get that capability. It is a software option for the D8 that costs about $8,300. NEC hasn't yet seen demand for thin provisioning in its other products, Eddy said.

Thin provisioning allows administrators to provision storage capacity for a particular purpose without having to buy and install the entire amount at once.

Three data storage start-ups buck trend, grab $28 million in venture capital

2009-10-12T13:00:00.001-07:00

Three data storage start-ups have landed more than $28 million in first-round funding from venture capitalists, a rare feat in an economy that has punished new vendors looking to obtain financing. 10 biggest network venture capital deals from Q2 The multi-million dollar financing rounds went to Avere Systems, a Pittsburgh-based network-attached storage (NAS) company; GreenBytes, a de-duplication vendor in Ashaway, R.I.; and Sonian of Needham, Mass., maker of a cloud-based e-mail archiving and disaster-recovery service. Early stage vendors have suffered as much as anyone, because a lack of successful IPOs and acquisitions has forced investors to put resources into existing companies longer than expected, leaving little left over for true start-ups. Venture capitalists have dramatically reduced spending on computer networking companies in the past couple years. There seems to be good reason to lower investments in storage companies: Storage software revenue is down worldwide compared to last year and storage hardware revenue is down 18%. But Avere, GreenBytes and Sonian were able to secure Series A financing in funding rounds announced this week: $15 million went to Avere, $8 million went to GreenBytes and $5.6 million went to Sonian. "In the current economy, the bar on new investments is extremely high," says John Jarve, Menlo Ventures managing director, in the Avere announcement.

Avere was founded in January 2008 and is led by CEO Ronald Bianchini, a former senior vice president at NetApp and co-founder of Spinnaker Networks, a storage grid company acquired by NetApp. All three start-ups are focused on making storage use more efficient, a key concern for enterprises grappling with expanding data volumes. Avere calls its technology "Demand-Driven Storage" and says it will consist of NAS products that let customers "scale storage network performance independently of capacity," reducing costs and space and power requirements. GreenBytes, featured in Network World's Companies to Watch series last year, makes de-duplication storage appliances designed for both primary and secondary storage tiers. Avere, which received its funding from Menlo and Norwest Venture Partners, says it will release its technology in the fall of this year.

The company, founded by CEO Robert Petrocelli in 2007, says its GB-X Series appliances allow "real-time, on-the-fly de-duplication of file blocks as they are stored, expanding the scope of applications into primary storage, as well as backup." GreenBytes' funding round was led by Battery Ventures. The company offers a 99.99% data retention service-level agreement. Sonian, founded in 2007 by CTO Greg Arnette, built its hosted e-mail archive platform with a grid computing architecture designed to eliminate single points of failure. Sonian, which received funding from Prism VentureWorks and Summerhill Venture Partners, was named a "cool vendor" in archiving by Gartner this year. Follow Jon Brodkin on Twitter: www.twitter.com/jbrodkin

Site offers Facebook account break-ins for $100

2009-10-07T02:04:00.001-07:00

Security vendor PandaLabs has discovered an online service offering to help those so inclined to hack into any Facebook account they choose for a price: $100. However, those who sign up for the service could find themselves becoming the victims instead, PandaLabs warned today. Users of the service are required to first register with the site and then provide an ID of the Facebook account they want hacked, said Luis Corrons, technical director of PandaLabs. The Facebook hacking service, which is delivered via a professional looking Web site, was discovered by PandaLabs earlier this week.

Users who enter the ID and click on a "Hack it" button are then presented with the username of the owner of the Facebook account. But to actually get the password, the user is then required to send $100 via Western Union to an individual in Kirovohrad, Ukraine. They then have the option to "Start Facebook hacking." Those who follow the instructions are eventually told that the hack was successful and a password for the account was retrieved. It's not clear whether sending the money will yield any login and passwords, Corrons said. The site contains an FAQ section, which claims the site has been in business for more than four years.

But the way the site has been designed and the ease with which a potential client can interact with it lends it a certain degree of credibility, he said. The site even provides a link to a Webmoney account that in fact does appear to be four years old, Corrons said. At least as of the last time PandaLabs inspected the site, it was not downloading or distributing any malware and seems to have been set up purely to scam those seeking to gain illegal access to Facebook accounts, Corrons said. However the domain itself appears to have been registered by someone in Moscow only a couple of days ago, he said. "We've been looking at it and we are 99.9% sure it is a ruse," to get people to pay up money in exchange for what they think will be legitimate Facebook credentials, he said. Those who do fall for the scam are unlikely to go to law enforcement to report it, he noted.

iStockphoto guarantees its collection

2009-09-30T04:00:00.001-07:00

iStock says that files purchased and used in accordance with its license will not breach any trademark, copyright, or other intellectual property rights or rights of privacy. And, if a customer does get a claim, iStock will cover the customer's legal costs and direct damages up to a combined total of $10,000. iStock customers can increase their coverage for legal fees and direct damages up to a combined total of $250,000 by purchasing the Extended Legal Guarantee via the iStock credits (which costs between $95 and $138). iStock expects that this program will be popular with a very small percentage of sophisticated media buyers with very specific needs, and considers it to be a value-added service to customers rather than a major source of revenue.

FBI building system that blows away fingerprinting

2009-09-24T18:05:00.001-07:00

TAMPA – The Federal Bureau of Investigation is expanding beyond its traditional fingerprint-focused collection practices to develop a new biometrics system that will include DNA records, 3-D facial imaging, palm prints and voice scans, blended to create what's known as "multi-modal biometrics." Slideshow: The changing face of biometricsHow the Defense Department might institutionalize war-time biometrics "The FBI today is announcing a rapid DNA initiative," said Louis Grever, executive assistant director of the FBI's science and technology branch, during his keynote presentation at the Biometric Consortium Conference in Tampa. This multi-modal NGI biometrics database system will hold DNA records and more. The FBI plans to begin migrating from its IAFIS database, established in the mid-1990s to hold its vast fingerprint data, to a next-generation system that's expected to be in prototype early next year. Grever said that fingerprints and DNA appear to be the most mature and searchable biometrics possibilities, but the FBI is working to include iris-scan records among newer biometrics technologies to identify criminals and terrorists.

The FBI's current IAFIS database remains a workhouse; it processes about 200,000 daily transactions from its 370 million 10-fingerprint records, and it just crossed the 250 million transaction mark. The plan is to share this data with authorized U.S. and international investigative partners, as the agency does today. The next-generation FBI database system is under design by MorphoTrak and is expected to include DNA, iris scans, advanced 3-D facial imaging and voice scans among its multi-modal biometrics. The goal is to drop from a roughly two-hour response time for IAFIS urgent requests to less than 10 minutes. Lower turnaround times for delivering information over wide-area networks are planned.

But FBI officials acknowledged there's still a lot of research and development that needs to be done to reach its NGI goals. The FBI is cosponsoring research with the Department of Defense, which has a similar goal. One goal is to develop a rapid DNA analysis method that would provide DNA analysis in less than an hour, as opposed to several hours or even days. Kevin Reid, section chief for the biometrics service section at the FBI, said the FBI also wants to establish a service-oriented architecture for NGI, but it's not clear when this would be in place to provide services related to biometrics information-sharing. The FBI, under the DNA Fingerprint Act of 2005, is now allowed to collect reference-sample DNA material for biometrics analysis purposes at the time of booking, Grever said. "DNA has become a powerful and timely tool," said Grever, adding there are no "privacy or civil liberties issues beyond those associated with fingerprints." The FBI is already moving into new areas, including setting up a palm-print repository and searchable databases for scars, marks and tattoos that it will be collecting.

Company hosting Joe Wilson fundraising site recovers from DDoS attack

2009-09-19T09:00:00.001-07:00

A company providing online payment-processing services for U.S. Rep. The attack on Piryx began Friday afternoon and lasted into the early hours of Saturday morning and temporarily disrupted a Wilson fundraising effort that was underway at that time. Joe Wilson (R-S.C) is back online after being disrupted by a distributed denial-of service attack over the weekend. Piryx CEO Tom Serres said.

Piryx is a nonpartisan Austin, Texas, based start-up that provides services to help political candidates and nonprofits manage online campaigns and fundraising. It also knocked out services for about 150 other Piryx clients, Serres said. Serres said the company was contacted by Wilson's office last week and asked to manage online donations from supporters rallying behind the congressman after he shouted "You lie!" during President Obama's address to Congress on health care reform Wednesday. Such attacks are designed to render servers and networks inaccessible by flooding them with useless traffic. Hours after the company began hosting Wilson's homepage on its servers, Piryx found itself the target of a distributed denial of service attack, Serres said. The attacks appear to have been directed at the joewilsonforcongress.com site, Serres said.

Initially, the traffic generated by the DDoS attack was manageable but soon Piryx began noticing "massive bandwidth spikes" that knocked its servers offline, Serres said. At the time the attacks started, the site was handling about 100 transactions per minute and had already collected more than $100,000 from people who wanted to contribute to Wilson's campaign, he said. The data center hosting Piryx's servers confirmed that it was the victim of a DDoS attack. After several failed attempts at mitigating the attacks, filters to block the traffic went into place early Saturday morning. At its peak, the DDoS flood generated about 1 gigabit of traffic per second, which is about 1,000 times the normal traffic on Piryx, Serres said.

Service has been normal since then, he said. The incident appears to be one of the rare instances of a politically motivated attack against a Web site in the U.S. said Kirsten Dennesen, an intelligence analyst with Verisign Inc.'s iDefense Labs. It's not known from where the attacks originated, but Serres said it appears to have been initiated by those opposed to Wilson's comments, he said. "It was clearly politically motivated to take down Wilson's ability to raise funds online," Serres said. The attention attracted by Wilson's comments, especially through social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter, appears to have contributed to the attack, she said. "One question is whether there are going to be any response attacks," she said.

2009-09-13T16:03:00.001-07:00

It's hard to find anyone who likes audio conferences. Or play Facebook Scrabble and check e-mail until it's their turn to talk. Sure, worker bees can put themselves on mute to chat with fellow cube dwellers.

Yes, for true lows in productivity, the fuzzy, disembodied, dial-in audio conference is hard to beat. Office voice mail, cell phone voice mail, office e-mail, personal e-mail, texting, instant messaging, social media communiques. And what about all those mail and messaging systems anyway? Make it stop, you cry! At its most basic, UC makes real-time communication systems, such as instant messaging, share information with non-real-time systems, such as e-mail or voice mail, and runs them over the same network. Unified communications won't do that, but depending on which communications and messaging systems you integrate, UC could make it better.

Ideally, there is one simple interface or dashboard for users to access these systems. Using voice over IP to cut the traditional phone bill (the foundation for UC) doesn't hurt, nor does reducing travel costs as employees meet in video or audio chats rather than fly to faraway hotel conference rooms. With UC, CIOs aim to speed up communication and collaboration internally and perhaps raise customer satisfaction externally. About 31 percent of 466 organizations surveyed recently by Forrester have deployed some form of unified communications. In Forrester's survey, 42 percent of respondents who said they weren't investing in UC cited lack of money or the absence of clear business value to justify the investment. Half of those who haven't say they are investigating or piloting UC, up from 30 percent in 2007. Yet UC isn't on fire this year, as the recession continues to batter IT spending.

To read more on this topic, see: How to Get the Most From Unified Communications and Video Conference Software Now Works with Other Apps. "Certainly it does make sense to connect voice mail, e-mail and mobile systems," says Jerry Hodge, senior director of information services at appliance distributor Hamilton Beach. "Unfortunately, the current economic situation has limited my aggressiveness in moving forward." The same is true at movie-rental chain Blockbuster and food and beverage maker Shaklee, their CIOs say. The Original Social Networking UC has evolved from a back-room effort to simplify networking by, for example, running data and voice traffic on the same infrastructure, to applications that let employees share information no matter the device in front of them. Still, if you have money and want to move forward with UC, early adopters have advice about planning projects and measuring returns. Well, almost. But it's coming, predicts Steven John, CIO of manufacturing company H.B. Fuller.

We're not quite at the point yet where a BlackBerry, say, can get you into any corporate system and connect you to any colleague. The rise of consumer social networking platforms such as Facebook, Flikr and Twitter reinforce daily the desire among corporate employees to strip the friction from communicating at work, too, John says. Presence, meanwhile, is moving from a cool, gadgety technology to real corporate tool. He says he feels that heat and is studying potential UC systems, but he hasn't yet decided on any. That's when computer devices detect each other and indicate the fastest or preferred way to reach the person on the other end. One simpler UC move is to integrate voice mail and e-mail so that users can listen to e-mail or read voice mail.

It's like instant messaging for every kind of connection you might make to your corporate network or, if configured for it, the public Internet. Another is to allow instant messaging or document sharing during video conferences. Autodesk went whole hog into Cisco's TelePresence system, which involves super high-quality video conferencing that can connect up to 48 locations at once, along with on-screen, interactive data sharing. According to Autodesk VP of Strategic Initiatives Billy Hinners, the ultimate in video istelepresence technology. Cisco calls it an "immersive" experience-think Star Trek's Holodeck.

Autodesk spent $350,000 to outfit its first six-person TelePresence room. Of course, the price for such a system is steep. It runs 15 rooms now, ranging from two-person to 12-person sites, and spends about $10,000 per month on networking costs. "Cost savings was not a big driver for us," Hinners says. Subsequent installations have also been aimed at improving sales communications and efficiency as well as reducing travel and carbon emissions. Rather, the company initially wanted better collaboration between software designers and engineers in the United States and its 1,000-plus software engineers in Shanghai to pump out products faster at an improved quality.

Employees embraced the technology right away, he says. UC projects are some of the most technical ones that CIOs have to contend with today, integrating data and voice in ways that some IT groups have never done before. Time booked in the TelePresence rooms for regular video conferencing has become "a precious commodity." In fact, if there is any project for which success depends on users rather than IT guiding the planning and rollout, it's unified communications. But communicating is, by nature, a personal act. What you really want are users who push for a UC project, says Michael McTigue, CIO of Saint Barnabas Medical Center.

Foisting upon people unwanted changes to how they talk and type to each other makes people uncomfortable, says Don Lewis, president of consultancy Strategic Intersect. "You think all you're doing is taking away someone's phone and giving them another one but you're not," says Lewis. "Changing the button they push to forward a call to someone is hugely disruptive." Is There a Doctor on the Device? The hospital group-which provides cardiac services, burn treatment and organ transplant among its offerings-wanted to speed up the time for doctors, nurses and technicians to reach each other. Indeed, the archaic process of dialing a beeper, hoping the page goes through, waiting for the recipient to get it and call back slowed communications, and therefore reaction time during critical situations, McTigue says. The time-honored pager method was no longer good enough. Fifteen minutes might pass before a physician could reach someone in the telemetry group to order machines to monitor a given patient's heart rate, blood pressure and breathing. "Everyone was looking for a communications vehicle that would give better turnaround time," he says. In March 2007, Saint Barnabas launched a pilot of Vocera Communication's badge devices.

Walkie-talkies, while quick, didn't pan out because the crackly speakers made the hallways noisier and they ran through a lot of batteries. The 2-ounce rectangles are worn on a lanyard around the neck or clipped to a collar or pocket. A nurse might press the activation button and speak into it the name of a physician who is needed to check a medication order. They allow hands-free voice communication. Via a wireless network, the device pings a database to look up the doctor's name and relay the call. Saint Barnabas spent $500,000 for devices and software for 450 concurrent users, starting with the telemetry group.

The doctor taps his button and speaks to respond. That 15-minute wait time plunged-responses now take nine to 15 seconds, McTigue says. Within nine months, the hospital spent $250,000 to add another 300 concurrent users, giving 2,700 employees access to the system. Such dramatic results convinced the hospital to get as many of its 3,000 employees on the system as quickly as possible. IBM managed the initial training, helping new users enunciate and speak directly into the Vocera device. The training helped get Saint Barnabas to a high rate of calls recognized and completed on the first try: 83 percent.

In the emergency room, where there's more noise than in other parts of a hospital, the staff uses headsets rather than dangling the device at chest level. Seventy percent is more typical, McTigue says proudly. They had to fiddle with wireless access point configurations to get all areas hot. "If you don't have tight infrastructure, the application will get a bad name," he warns. Along the way, the hospital worked with IBM, Cisco and Vocera to identify and fix wireless dead spots in stairwells, elevators and the lead-walled radiology area. The system works only on campus but the hospital is testing a Vocera smart phone with the same capabilities for off-campus use.

The hospital expects to connect 1.5 million to 2 million calls through the system, eliminating the need for one full-time switchboard operator, according to McTigue. Yearly operating costs are $75,000 to $85,000, mainly for Vocera software maintenance, he says. The hospital has saved another $70,000 by getting rid of its backup phone system used during power outages. Payback from UC projects doesn't typically come from savings on networking equipment because those prices are low already, says Lewis of Strategic Intersect. The wireless Vocera system replaces a traditional dedicated circuit for that old emergency system. But hard returns can be calculated: Obviously, meeting virtually can cut travel costs.

Softer results, Lewis says, can also be important: By merging voice mail, e-mail and BlackBerry messages, your sales organization may save 30 minutes every day. Setting up call center staff to work from home, but access integrated voice, e-mail and document capabilities frees up physical room at the company for other uses. How valuable is that in productivity and morale? The more people on the system, the faster and more frictionless their communication. Try It, They'll Like It As the experience at Saint Barnabas shows, unifying the communications for lots of people at a company can be more beneficial than unifying communications for only some people.

In a hospital, that can save lives. Woods Bagot, an architectural design firm with offices in Dubai, Hong Kong and London, among other cities, has built elaborate buildings worldwide. At a corporation, that can make money. Recent projects include the oval dish-shaped campus of the United Arab Emirates University, a mixed residential and commercial district in Shenzhen, China, and the Cesaria beach resort in the Cape Verde islands. Exchanging drawings is key for an architecture firm, of course.

In 2007, the board at Woods Bagot decided that it wanted the company to operate like one big studio no matter where its clients, engineers and architects lived. But the people who work at Woods Bagot are visual thinkers, so any new communications tools would have to let them see each other, not just share data and documents, says CIO Nectarios Lazaris. "Being a design firm, we don't sit in a boardroom and look at Excel spreadsheets," he says. "We walk around and interact with people." Not to mention swap 3-D visualization files that are a couple of gigabytes unto themselves. Same with Polycom's Web conferencing product, he says. He tried at least five products, including Microsoft Live Meeting, whose video quality users found poor. Lazaris chose Microsoft Office Communicatorfor desktop video conferencing and collaboration, products from Tandberg for boardroom video conferencing and Blue Coat's software for secure Web connections.

The first test came when a week after the video system went live, the Woods Bagot board opted to try the new toy instead of meeting in person. "It was a nervous time for us," he says, noting that Blue Coat had people on-site to troubleshoot should something go wrong during the pivotal meeting. He was impressed that Blue Coat sent engineers-not salespeople-to Woods Bagot during the decision phase and let them stay as long as needed during and after launch. The company saved $450,000 by not flying the 12 board members to Sydney or providing their accommodations for that meeting as well as the remaining ones planned that year, Lazaris says. The technology lets Woods Bagot work with cream-of-the-crop designers and architects residing anywhere in the world, according to Lazaris, which is a point the firm makes in presentations to potential clients. But it was the experience that sold the board. "When they see their investment in play, that's a bigger win than trying to show them a PowerPoint that says, 'I saved you $450,000,'" he says.

He says it's gotten the firm work it might not otherwise have won. "This is not follow-the-sun like in outsourcing. Volvo Group wanted a better way to work across time zones with colleagues who don't necessarily respond to e-mail-however red-hot urgent it's marked, says Magnus Holmqvist, director for the IT innovation center at the company. We're not handing over projects but collaborating in a live environment," he says. "It's comforting to them." How UC Helps IT The mere thought of coordinating a global supply chain project will send many IT managers quivering under their project management software and spreadsheets. Volvo Group makes Mac trucks and Volvo busses and construction equipment; Ford now makes the famously rectangular cars. Previously, various team members would meet every 12 weeks to test versions of the new SAP and Red Prairie applications they are building.

An IT team of 70 people around the world are working on a project to streamline Volvo's spare-parts supply chain, which reaches 60,000 mechanics in 180 countries. Early this spring, Volvo started virtual test rooms online, using Microsoft Office Communicator and Hewlett-Packard's TestDirector quality-check tool running over VoIP. So far, half of the in-person meetings have been eliminated, but plane trips have been reduced by more than half because the technology is so good, Holmqvist says. He declines to say how much money Volvo has saved in travel costs but says the system has cut carbon dioxide emissions by 630 tons-about the equivalent of taking 250 cars off the road for a year. Even people in the same city sometimes opt to attend meetings virtually rather than trek across town. Don't underestimate the mileage, so to speak, that you may get from promoting the green ROIof cutting travel, Homqvist says. "People don't feel too good about flying across the Atlantic when we know we have climate change going on. Linking that idea to cost-cutting has helped IT get the new technology more eagerly accepted across the company, he adds. "That is real." Homqvist predicts work quality and productivity will rise because employees will spend less time planning meeting logistics and traveling. "Our perception is that we're already earlier on these test-suite sessions.

But people feel much better about eliminating those kinds of meetings," he says. Instead of a 12-week cycle, we may reduce the cycle." Defining the ROI Some organizations, however, aren't seeing the returns they expected on UC projects. The softer benefits of smoother collaboration are hard to quantify and therefore, Dewing says, hard to justify. Or rather, they don't know how to tie a dollar figure to them, says Henry Dewing, a principal analyst at Forrester Research. Especially now.

It's hard to pin down the dollars generated or saved by faster project completion or product launches, Dewing says. Twenty-four percent of the telecommunications and networking managers surveyed by Forrester say they aren't getting all the benefits they expected from UC. Another 11 percent said they didn't know whether they were or not. John, the H.B. Fuller CIO, isn't sure yet what mix of tools will produce the best return. The adhesives company does business in 100 countries, with offices in 36. The pressure is on John to find technological ways to overcome such geographic diversity, he says. As a $1.5 billion company, Fuller's revenues aren't huge but its global footprint is.

But he doesn't want to jump too quickly. But standardizing hardware is something Fuller has only recently started to do. For example, it's easier to unify communications when PCs and laptops are standardized, in part because tweaking the configurations takes less time. He doesn't want to buy more products than he needs. How about accessing your computer calendar by voice, over the phone?

Say a Fuller engineer in China views a document created by a U.S. counterpart and can hover over his colleague's name with his mouse to automatically dial that person for a PC-based call. That's the kind of razzle dazzle UC application vendors pitch that isn't available in, say, SharePoint, Microsoft's document sharing and collaboration system. "It's fun, fancy, very sexy but is it needed? One part of the calculation, he says, will be trying to predict how much bandwidth different combinations of UC technologies would eat and whether the network costs will be worth the UC benefits. Would that be a competitive advantage?" John wonders. He hasn't reached any conclusions yet, but a product like SharePoint might provide enough collaboration for Fuller employees so that a big UC investment isn't necessary. "That's what we're debating." Loomis, the armored car company, has been installing UC components for two years, expecting to cut telecommunications costs and make some business processes more efficient.

Wayne Sadin, Loomis' CIO, began contemplating UC a few years ago, when the company was outgrowing its existing phone systems. But first, the company had to lay some infrastructure. Loomis had acquired several smaller armored car companies along with their mix of different PBXes. Loomis replaced those PBX systems at headquarters and, so far, a little more than 10 percent of its 200 branches with Cisco VoIP. Now those tasks can be done by Loomis' own IT staff, centrally. "You just call the help desk. If a branch's voice mail needed reprogramming, they had to call local providers who would drive over to do the work for $100 to $200 an hour, Sadin recalls. It's 10 minutes of work or even one minute of work," he says.

In 2007, Loomis finished putting its Microsoft Exchange e-mail system on VoIP. Meanwhile, Microsoft Office Communicator supplies video conferencing, instant messaging and presence, including a BlackBerry IM client. Not paying PBX vendors for move, add or change orders is a big part of Loomis' ROI, he adds. Employees can forward voice mails as if they were e-mail and they don't have to log in to separate voice mail, e-mail and BlackBerry messaging systems, Sadin says. When Pacific Medical Centers put in VoIP to let data and voice traffic run unified on its network, it had to rearrange some job responsibilities, says consultant Lewis, who was the hospital's CIO at the time. A Unified Mind-Set Melding all of these capabilities takes some forethought and, perhaps, changes to how the IT group works together and with outside vendors.

Network administrators, for example, had to learn to plan for spikes in traffic during peak application usage times as well as for telecommunications. But as UC takes root, CIOs and IT staff must make sure those different vendors coordinate their work, he says. For many companies, separate vendors supply networking gear, servers and software. For example, Loomis planned to upgrade Cisco's Call Manager administrative suite last spring, in part to more fully integrate Cisco phone handsets with Microsoft's Office Communications Server. But the morning of the scheduled upgrade, the teams discovered that the need for a schema change to Microsoft's Active Directory got overlooked.

Loomis' network and server teams planned and tested the upgrade with a local VoIP consultant for two to three months. The upgrade was aborted. Do you Tweet. Loomis tried again in late August, after the Active Directory tweak was tested and rolled out. "I guess the phone-oriented vendor didn't realize how carefully our server team guards Active Directory from untested changes," he says. "The hardest thing about integrating communications is integrating people's mind-sets." Senior Editor Kim S. Nash can be reached at knash@cio.com. Follow me on Twitter @knash99. Follow everything from CIO Magazine @CIOMagazine.

FCC will have tough time reining-in burgeoning wireless industry

2009-08-21T18:03:00.001-07:00

With word that the Federal Communications Commission will next week begin to take a broad look at the wireless industry and how it is regulated, one wonders: What took so long?

The Government Accountability Office pretty much wondered the same thing in June with a report on the FCC's handing of the wireless industry. That report, which was none-too-popular at the FCC, said the agency needed to reexamine its handling of a number of growing problems. The key areas of concern from the GAO report:

Billing: Complexity of wireless billing statements leads to lack of consumer understanding. Bills contain unexpected charges and errors.

Terms of service contract: Consumers are subject to fees for canceling their service before the end of their contract term (early termination fees), regardless of their reason for wanting to terminate service, and effectively locking consumers into their contracts. Consumers are not given enough time to try out their service before having to commit to the contract. Carriers extend contracts when consumers request service changes.

Explanation of service: Key aspects of service, such as rates and coverage, are not clearly explained to consumers at the point of sale (when they sign up for the service).

Call quality: Consumers experience dropped or blocked calls as well as noise on calls that makes hearing calls difficult. Consumers experience poor coverage, which in rural areas may be the result of lack of infrastructure and in urban areas stems from lack of capacity to manage the volume of calls at peak times.

Customer service: Consumers experience problems such as long waits, ineffective assistance, and insufficient resolution to problems.

Some other interesting facts from the GAO survey/report:

GAO estimates about 21% of wireless phone users who contacted their carriers' customer service were dissatisfied with how their carriers addressed their concerns; FCC's efforts to handle complaints are an important means by which consumers may be able to get assistance in resolving their problems. However, the results of the GAO's survey of 1,143 randomly selected consumers, suggested that most consumers would not complain to FCC if they have a problem that their carrier did not resolve. Specifically, the GAO said that of 13% of wireless phone users would complain to FCC if they had such a problem and that 34% do not know where they could complain.
In response to the areas of consumer concern noted above, wireless carriers have taken a number of actions in recent years. For example, officials from the four major carriers, Verizon Wireless, AT&T, Sprint Nextel, and T-Mobile, reported taking actions such as prorating their early termination fees, offering service options without contracts, and providing Web-based tools consumers can use to research a carrier's coverage area, among other efforts. In addition, according to CTIA–The Wireless Association, the wireless industry spent an average of $24 billion annually between 2001 and 2007 on infrastructure and equipment to improve call quality and coverage.
The GAO estimates that about 19% of wireless users wanted to switch carriers since the beginning of 2008 but did not do so. Then 42% of these wireless phone users who wanted to switch but did not because of the early termination fee.

The GAO plans to complete a full report in the fall and expects to make more recommendations then.

The GAO has tweaked the FCC in the past. Last year in fact it issued a report highly critical of the way the commission handled some of the 454,000 complaints it received between 2003 and 2006 saying the agency needs to improve how it tracks and responds to consumer, safety and service complaints.

The FCC didn't like the report disagreeing with the way its research was conducted and saying it already has implemented measures to address concerns.

Regarding the complaint process, FCC officials told the GAO that the agency's role in addressing complaints, as outlined in the law, is to facilitate communication between the consumer and the carrier and that FCC lacks the authority to compel a carrier to take action to satisfy many consumer concerns. Thus, it is not clear if the intended outcome of FCC's complaint handling efforts is resolving consumer problems, fostering communication between consumers and carriers, or both.

In its hearing next Thursday, the FCC will examine three key aspects of the wireless industry. In the first portion of the meeting, the FCC will consider ways it can better "support and encourage further innovation and investment" within the wireless industry. In the second portion, the FCC will assess the state of competition within the wireless market. And in the final portion, the FCC will discuss whether carriers can do more to disclose relevant billing information to their customers.

Verizon offers free service to help developers test for Microsoft ATL flaw

2009-07-29T20:01:00.000-07:00

Verizon Business is offering a free scanning service to help software developers more quickly determine whether any controls and components they built using Microsoft's Active Template Libraries (ATL) are vulnerable to the issues identified in the emergency security update issued by Microsoft on Tuesday.

The scanning service, along with a self-diagnostic questionnaire, is available online. It is designed to scan compiled code and produce a list of properties where the ATL vulnerabilities might exist, said Russ Cooper, senior security strategist with Verizon Business.

Microsoft's ATL is used by software developers to create items such as Active X controls for Windows systems. Microsoft yesterday issued an emergency security bulletin for several remote code execution vulnerabilities in the public versions of the ATL included with Visual Studio. The update was timed to beat a scheduled presentation today at the Black Hat Security Conference, where researchers are planning to release more details about the flaws. At least one attack using an ATL vulnerability has been seen in the wild, according to Microsoft.

Verizon's code-testing service gives developers who have used ATL in their controls a way to determine which part of their code they need to be checking first so they can prioritize any remediation efforts, Cooper said. It is a "really complex situation" trying to find out whether controls and components developed using ATL can be exploited, he said. The conditions under which vulnerable code might be exploited "aren't obvious on the surface," he said. "We can look for snippets of code inside the finished code that help us identify if [the control] has the potential to be exploited."

Though the scan can help developers identify potential issues much faster than a manual scan would, Verizon's code tester does not eliminate the need for a manual code review, Cooper said. Nor does it offer any guarantee against false positives or false negatives.

"If you know how the code is written, it will tell you if the code is affected or not", but a final determination still needs to be based on manual inspection he said. Verizon plans to compile a white list of controls and components that were scanned and found not to be vulnerable to the ATL flaws. But to get on the white list, developers will need to first attest that they also completed a manual code review and found no vulnerabilities, he said.

The free scan is available only to the owners, licensors or authorized users of the software that needs to be tested. Those wishing to scan their code using the Verizon service will also need to have Windows Live ID and the software's Code Signing certificate.

Google's 'My Location' Tracks PC's Location on Google Maps

2009-07-10T13:00:00.001-07:00

Google is making it easier for you to find out where you are, with the introduction of My Location for the desktop. First introduced in late 2007 as a tool for Google Maps for mobile, My Location made it easier to find your way around town by triangulating your position based on surrounding cell towers. My Location for the desktop uses WiFi access point information instead of cell towers, but just like the mobile version, My Location on the desktop drops a little blue dot onto your approximate location in Google Maps.

As Google pointed out in its blog post, My Location for the desktop can be a great tool when you arrive in an unfamiliar town and want to get an idea of where you are. Just click on the dot in the upper left-hand side of the map between the zoom and pan tools, and, after you authorize Google to continue, your location will appear on the map. Google says it takes your privacy very seriously and will never use your location information without your permission.

Once Google has located you, it's easy to survey your surroundings and get a sense of where you are. If you're in town for a conference, you can see how far you'll have to travel to get to your meetings or where that hot restaurant you read about is. Once you're done exploring the map, just click on the My Location button, and the map centers itself back to your location. Click the button again, and the blue dot disappears.

For My Location to work, you need to have a Web browser that supports the W3C Geolocation API such as Google Chrome or Firefox 3.5. If you use Internet Explorer or an earlier version of Firefox you can also download Google Gears to get My Location to work. Google finds your location by getting your Web browser to deliver location information based on the WiFi access points around you. If there aren't enough WiFi points to get a fix on your location, Google can also make an estimate based on you IP address-although these estimations can often be wildly inaccurate.

It's also possible that My Location may not work at all, in which case you can set your default location on Google Maps and then activate the little blue dot. In my tests My Location worked well, I was sitting in a public cafe with several WiFi access points around me. The only problem was my dot kept moving down the block from my location every few minutes and then came back to the correct spot again (I'll have to ask Google if they sell leashes for My Location dots).

In addition to My Location, Google earlier this year introduced Latitude: a social networking version of My Location that lets friends share their locations with each other that works on both Mobile devices and personal computers. If My Location and Latitude aren't enough location fun for you, Google will also let you attach your location to your Gmail signature.

My Location wasn't the only service Google introduced yesterday; the search giant also introduced the ability to search for Creative Commons photos in Google Images.

Exploits of unpatched Windows bug will jump, says Symantec

2009-06-22T13:03:00.001-07:00

An exploit of a still-unpatched vulnerability in Microsoft Windows XP and Server 2003 has been added to a multi-strike attack toolkit, Symantec said late last week, a move that may mean attacks will increase soon.

According to Symantec, an in-the-wild exploit of the DirectShow bug, which Microsoft acknowledged a month ago, has been added to at least one Web-based attack kit. "This will likely lead to wide-spread use in a short time," said Liam Murchu, a researcher with Symantec's security response group, in an entry posted to the company's blog on Friday.

Microsoft has not yet issued a fix for the DirectShow bug, which affects Windows 2000, XP and Server 2003, but not the newer Windows Vista or Server 2008. The flaw also doesn't affect the not-yet-released Windows 7.

However, attacks leveraging the bug have been tracked since May, when Microsoft issued a security advisory and confirmed it had evidence of "limited, active attacks."

Unlike other recent exploits of Microsoft zero-days - vulnerabilities that haven't been patched by the time attack code surfaces - the DirectShow attacks are not targeting specific individuals or organizations. "This is not a targeted attack, but is one of limited distribution," Ben Greenbaum, a senior research manager with Symantec, said in a telephone interview.

What caught researchers' attention, added Greenbaum, was that the DirectShow exploit piggybacked on a run-of-the-mill phishing attack. It's becoming more common, said Greenbaum, that a phishing site - in this case a bogus log-in page for Microsoft's Windows Live software - also hosts malware that tries to hijack PCs.

"They're thinking: 'Why not try to get them with everything we can?'" said Greenbaum, referring to the attackers.

The phishing site silently redirects visitors to another URL that hosts the DirectShow attack code, which is in the form of a malicious .avi file. Multiple malformed .dll files are also loaded onto the victimized system; those .dlls, in turn, load an encoded .exe payload that then downloads and installs a Trojan horse that adds the compromised PC to a growing botnet.

Although a patch is not yet available, Microsoft has suggested that users disable QuickTime parsing on Windows 2000, XP and Server 2003 machines. QuickTime, which is Apple's media player, is not flawed, but the QuickTime parser in DirectShow, a component of DirectX, is. Microsoft has posted a tool that automates the process of disabling QuickTime parsing in Windows; normally that requires editing the Windows registry, a chore many users avoid.

Microsoft's next regularly-scheduled security updates will be released July 14. Most researches expect the company to patch the DirectShow bug then.

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