Aug 24th, 2009 - Since its inception in 2004, Ubuntu has been the beneficiary in what seems like a bottomless money pit for South African entrepreneur, Mark Shuttleworth via his commercial support and development venture, Canonical. Since Canonical, Ltd. isn't an American publicly-owned company (and I don't know... (Read More)

Nov 21st, 2008 - Has your IT budget just taken a big hit for 2009? Many have. These desperate times call for desperate measures but don't worry these measures aren't nearly so desperate and they just might help you fix that ailing IT budget. All you need is a little creative thinking and some good people behind... (Read More)

May 20th, 2009 - Where would we be without the Global Positioning System? Well, without GPS I probably would not be at this hotel nice and early, waiting for a meeting to start. Forget the idiots who end up driving on train tracks or toppling over cliffs, for some of us SatNav has become not a car gadget but an... (Read More)

Feb 15th, 2009 - Look, I am a British father of four. Two of my kids have been through the teenage years, so I know all too well just what a love affair the UK has with text messaging. As does my bank manager. So it really should not come as any surprise to discover that here in the UK we send an average of 200... (Read More)

Dec 19th, 2008 - If you ever wondered just what it takes to look for aliens, then prepare to get informed. Sure, you might imagine it doesn't take much more than hooking up a load of computers to form a gigantic zombie network which, for a change, does not use spare CPU cycles to send spam. Indeed, the SETI@home... (Read More)

Sep 30th, 2008 - Ever looked at something, done a double-take, looked again and yes, that is what you saw but your brain told you it could not be? That is exactly what just happened to me when I read the NASA press release which informed me, in no uncertain terms, that it was snowing on Mars. As if that wasn't... (Read More)

Oct 29th, 2006 - I guess when you are a billionaire, finding somewhere new and exciting to go on vacation gets difficult after a while. No such problem for Charles Simonyi, who as part of the original Xerox PARC team helped developed the mouse, the GUI and even laser printing, and went on to Microsoft for 11 years... (Read More)

Aug 15th, 2006 - OK, so that would just be silly, would it not? Nobody in their right minds would accept a job working in IT on Mars. Yet so far 70 people have applied to the Mars-500 project in Russia, for the unusual position (literally) of an IT Manager willing to be sealed inside a metal container simulating a... (Read More)

May 12th, 2009 - Jonathan Ive (there, I bet you thought the headline was a typo) is not as famous as perhaps he ought to be. Next to Steve Jobs he has been responsible for turning the Apple brand around, making it desirable again, chiefly by designing the iPod, the first eMacs and substantial amounts of iMacs so... (Read More)

Jan 29th, 2009 - Just back from a briefing with the registration company behind the new .tel domain. Interesting stuff in that it's not really about websites as people who've gone in on the first wave of registrations, for commercial companies with trademarked names, will know. Given the spate of fake... (Read More)

Sep 18th, 2008 - That was quick, but I suppose it would be. Readers might have heard that while America has had the Lehmann Brothers crisis, we've had our own little meltdown in the UK and two of our banks, HBOS and Lloyds, have decided to merge. And they've been Cybersquatted. Now, this can be a mightily... (Read More)

Aug 8th, 2008 - The concern over domain names and whether they can be hijacked by malicious code is accelerating. The BBC's website carries this story, in which Dan Kaminsky is credited with discovering the flaw and he warns that it could be more serious than we'd thought at first. Verisign is in the story... (Read More)

Jul 15th, 2008 - So I get this call. Would I like an exclusive briefing on a new technology that's going to turn text into speech - the first one to do this 'native'. Forgive me, but no I don't. This typifies, in my view, the all-too-common view that a technical advance ought to be done for the sake of it. Let's... (Read More)

Jul 1st, 2008 - I've left this one a few days as I've been waiting to see whether there's a consensus. Last week ICANN overhauled the rules on Internet domain name, permanently - there's a BBC report on it here. Without seeing any of the new domain names just yet it's difficult to tell just what the impact is... (Read More)

Jun 26th, 2008 - So the ICANN people are discussing a major overhaul of the Internet in Paris today. I can't say I'm all that delighted. The thing about the Internet is that it basically works. If you can read this it's because I'm able, from London, to type in www.daniweb.com and follow the links in to submit... (Read More)

Mar 3rd, 2009 - Skype is an excellent VoIP phone service for telecommuters or company employees who travel a lot. You can make and receive calls from your computer for free, and get a personalized phone number, voicemail, and other upgrades for a small fee. Skype announced a new fee-based feature this week,... (Read More)

Jan 26th, 2009 - Even if your marketing team says you don't need a company blog (though you probably do), consider setting up a Web site status blog for your visitors or customers. A status blog is a basic, no-frills site that contains updates and posts concerning a Web site's uptime (and downtime). It's a great... (Read More)

Oct 14th, 2008 - If the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) gets its way, businesses may soon get a whole new crop of top-level domain names to choose from. Though they'll probably cost around $100,000 to purchase, the chance to own a user- and search-friendly domain will be a no-brainer for... (Read More)

Sep 22nd, 2008 - NASA is looking for organizations to become members of its CIO Executive Board, which serves under the Corporate Executive Board. Now that's a job I can get behind. According to the official solicitation, "The membership includes unlimited accesses to proprietary council research for staff... (Read More)

Sep 18th, 2008 - What can your IT department learn from Microsoft's latest advertising bungles? Plenty. When the company released its "Mojave Experiment" ads (which I'd link to but the site forces you to install Silverlight to view them), the premise was rather sad. It seemed to suggest that at least one of the... (Read More)

Feb 16th, 2009 - A couple of weeks ago Alfresco CTO John Newton posted the following tweet on Twitter: "Does Cloud = SaaS ? I don't think so. Cloud is computing, more like electricity." My gut reaction was that they were equal, and up until that moment I had used the terms interchangeably, but Newton's post... (Read More)

Nov 4th, 2008 - Salesforce.com, best known for its cloud-based CRM package, announced on Monday that it would be providing web hosting services for web sites, intranets and web-based applications. The announcement comes on the heels of Microsoft's coming out party for its cloud computing services platform called... (Read More)

Oct 29th, 2008 - Richard Garriot; a famous Game developer has just returned from his tour in space on the Soyuz TMA-12 a tourist cruise line in space called “space adventures”. Garriots father Owen Garriot is a former NASA Astronaut; which may have been why Richard Garriot Paid $35 million dollars for his 12 day... (Read More)

Apr 7th, 2008 - How much would you pay for a pizza? Chances are not as much as the anonymous bidder who won the auction to relieve entrepreneur Chris Clark of the pizza.com domain. Clark invested in pizza.com in 1994 for just $20, and even allowing for his annual $20 domain registration fees he has turned a pretty... (Read More)

Jun 20th, 2007 - According to a press release I have received from Wind River, a Device Software Optimisation (DSO) company, a Linux platform has been selected by Honeywell Aerospace for a space mission for the first time. Wind River Platform for Network Equipment, Linux Edition, will be the underlying OS... (Read More)

Mar 6th, 2008 - I caught a technology sector analyst from Invesco on Yahoo's Tech Ticker this morning who had some interesting things to say about the dysfunctional relationship between the technology stock sector and the subcrime . . . err . . . subprime credit debacle. It seems that the credit & lending... (Read More)

Feb 26th, 2008 - How stupid is the state of Maryland? No, not it's fine people, but it's short-sighted governor Marty O'Malley and its state legislature, which recently upped taxes state-wide in an effort to fund new programs and pay for additional government services. The tax hike has residents steaming and... (Read More)

Sep 20th, 2007 - Last week I went and did something I swore I’d never do – save 15% or more on my car insurance with Geico.com. Yep, I know all about the annoying lizard and the perpetually ticked off cavemen. I went ahead and did it anyway. The trigger point was a letter from Progressive, my old insurer,... (Read More)

Mar 28th, 2007 - Starting May 2007, Yahoo is going to offer unlimited inbox storage. That's right, to celebrate their 10th anniversary, there will be absolutely no limit on the number of messages you can hold in your mailbox. This is obviously to compete with Google's Gmail and other similar providers, which are... (Read More)

May 6th, 2006 - Two of the largest webhosting companies around, www.ev1servers.com (formerly RackShack) and The Planet (www.theplanet.com) have announced a merger today. The merger is a result of both being bought out by investment company GI Partners. As of right now, things are still in flux, and the only... (Read More)