NON-PROFITS ON CUTTING EDGE OF TECHNOLOGY

By M.S.Welles

The Nature Conservancy recently equipped a couple of scientists with solar-powered notebook PCs for a trip across Africa's Namib Desert on foot.

Spokesmen for The Nature Conservancy freely admit that they are using off-label technology and bending it in a way that makes it work in a place to suit their purposes.

Off-the-shelf software doesn't always fit the needs of non-profits. It can also be very expensive. As a result some large non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are busy developing their own, more affordable systems, often based on open source.

COMPUTER MODEL PREDICTS INTERNATIONAL CONFLICTS OUTCOMES

By D.E.Levine

Prof. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita teaches international politics at New York University and consults for the Pentagon. He's also a fellow at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University.

According to Prof. Bueno de Mesquita he has developed a computer model based on game theory, a mathematical structure for examining how people interact strategically while each takes into account the expected responses of others and also recognizes others are taking into account their responses.

Game theory involves people who are assumed to be pursuing their interests and who do what they believe will give them the best available outcome, although this is not always true.

With the Prof.'s computer model, the model starts by assuming everybody cares about two dimensions on any policy issue. The first dimension is getting an outcome as close to what they want as possible. The second dimension revolves around getting credit for either putting a deal together or preventing a deal from being made.

The computer model estimates the way in which individual decision-makers trade off between credit and policy outcomes. While some people try to figure out what position will win and then attach themselves to that position in the hope of getting credit for promoting the final agreement, other people are so intent to seek the outcome they want that, knowing they will lose, they are still prepared to go down in a blaze of glory.

Before the development of current computer power, analyzing information in a timely fashion was extremely costly and nearly impossible.

The Professor uses problems that involve dozens or even hundreds of players. Realistic data is used to reflect the status quo of the situations. The ultimate evolvement is then driven by the model's logic rather than being biased and reflecting an individual viewpoint.

UNITE PLATFORM UNVEILED BY OPERA

By M.S.Welles

An alpha version of Unite, a technology platform that adds a compact Web server to its browser and lets users share photos, files and music without third-party services, has been released by Opera Software ASA.

Opera 10, the company's still-in-beta browser has the collaborative technology embedded in it. The browser will be released alongside Unite.

HEARTLAND'S RESPONSE REEPS PRAISE

By K.C.Bishope

We previously reported a major security breach at Heartland Payment Systems Inc. (June 10. 2009 Heartland $12.6 Breach May Rise). Thus far CEO Robert Carr's actions in response to the breach is getting high praise.

The breach may have been the largest ever involving credit card data since it's estimated that the data from 100 million credit cards may have been exposed during the intrusion.

Carr's response has been to accelerate an end-to-end encryption project for protecting card data. The company, based in Princeton, N.J. is also pushing for development of an industry-wide standard for encrypting data while it's being transmitted over networks.

Heartland has also co-founded the Payments Processing Information Sharing Council enabling payment processing companies to share information about vulnerabilities, security threats and fraud.

So far, the company has been up front and open about discussing the security breach. It has reached out to customers and industry groups, as well as, reporters and security analysts.

In the past, when faced with security breaches, most companies and their top executives attempt to hide most information. Carr's approach is a total reversal to the norm.

As a result of his actions he has elevated the debate about card security and catalyzed card companies to speak out about end-to-end encryption. Carr claims that such a massive breach has been his greatest fear over the years.

GOOD FOR YOUR HEALTH AND THE PLANET

By D.E.Levine

What's lightweight, good for the planet and good for your health? The answer is an amazing, inexpensive portable product we found at the recent CEA Line Show in New York City.

Ergo-tilt is a compact plastic laptop holder that's designed to hold the laptop machine at a slight incline. In addition to traveling with laptops, many users are now using their laptops in place of desktop PCs, both in the office and at home.

Laptops get very hot and generally overheat and/or burn whatever they're sitting on unless some type of ventilation is provided to relieve the heat.

Ergo-tilt, is constructed from hard plastic and contains slots across the unit. Made from recycled materials, it packs flat, can withstand hard impacts without damage, and holds the laptop at a slight incline while allowing both ventilation an d relief from physical strain for the user.

The incline or tilt is achieved by a small slotted leg that pulls out from a flat position and allows the machine to lay in a tilted position while a lip at the bottom stops the laptop from sliding off.

Although the tilt is slight, the position relieves the strain on the wrist and arms of the user so that instead of developing painful carpal tunnel syndrome, the strain on the wrist and arms is relieved.

At 13 7/8 inches by 12 1/2 inches, the Ergo-tilt holds everything from netbooks to large laptops comfortably. With the leg folded flat, the device fits handily into a briefcase, backpack or even a large handbag.

Weighing only a few ounces, ergo-tilt doesn't add any weight to the bag but is easily available to use with any laptop.

Recommended price is $19.98 and the unit is available in a number of colors. It can also be imprinted with a company name and logo, making it a unique and functional advertising item.

DE-DUPLICATION SPREADS SLOWLY

By D.E.Levine

De-duplication is single-instance storage. It involves the elimination of redundant data. By marking data blocks with unique numbers provided by hash algorithms, duplicate pieces of data can be removed from storage.

Although the market is starting to expand, today primary corporate use of the technology is for e-mail archiving.

Most current tools are point products that sit on an appliance between a primary disk storage system and the background software process.

The market is beginning to expand as Sun Microsystems Inc. and Net App began shipping tools that provide de-duplication on primary storage systems.

However, due to high start up costs, IT managers remain reluctant to adopt the technology. Also adding to the uncertainty on the part of IT managers is a reluctance to step into a space that not many people have tried.

HEARTLAND $12.6 MILLION BREACH MAY RISE

By K.C.Bishope

Heartland Payment Systems Inc., a Princeton, NJ based credit card payment processor, disclosed a major data breach in January. To date it has set aside $12.6 million to cover related costs.

MasterCard Inc. has imposed a fine of about $7 million, claiming that the processor failed to respond appropriately after it was notified of a potential breach.

Heartland denies that charge and is appealing the fine. It has about 250,000 customers and is one of the largest payment-processing companies in the country.

In January it announce that intruders broke into its systems starting in May 2008 and potentially compromised the data of 100 million credit and debit cards.

Heartland had previously been warned by credit card companies about suspicious activities related to transactions it had processed.

What the actual cost will be to Heartland in the end is unknown. It could go up, depending upon findings of damage done.

INTEL APPEALING ANTITRUST FINE

By M.S.Welles

Intel Corp. will appeal the European Commission's $1.44 billion levied for violating antitrust laws.

The EC found Intel guilty of paying rebates to computer manufacturers and to Media Markt, Europe's largest IT retailer. Ostensibly the motivation was to keep systems based on rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) off store shelves.

Contending that despite lower PC prices, consumers were left without a choice of technologies, the EC said the antitrust action will protect consumers because Intel had harmed consumers.

The fine is the largest antitrust penalty that the EC has ever levied against one company.

IRON MOUNTAIN STILL GOING STRONG

By D.E.Levine

Iron Mountain, a long-time repository that started out storing paper files is going strong and keeping up with the times.

Initially offering physical storage with armed guards (which it still offers), Iron Mountain first started offering backup services, with encryption, over the Internet 14 years ago.

Iron Mountain Digital recently launched a storage service called Virtual File Store service. This service is targeted at inactive data which must be kept but isn't needed on a daily basis.

For active data, Iron Mountain offers Live Vault to provide critical backup services and data protection.

However, once a project is completed and the data needs to be put in "cold storage" Virtual File Service is the solution. While keeping the data safe, it's a cost cutting solution.

The service is even being referred to as cloud services because it's a service over the Internet that can scale up or down, and customers pay per usage.

WEB HOSTING THRIVES

By M.S.Welles

The economy is currently in the worst recession in 50 years, but Web hosting is thriving within the IT industry.

The demand for services has been growing. These services range from shared hosting and collocation to virtualization, managed hosting and cloud computing.

Web hosting companies are doing well and reporting increased revenues during 2009. Gartner predicts continued growth for all aspects of Web hosting during the next five years.

Because of the recessions and restricted access to enterprise capital, companies who were looking at building a data center are now taking a lease from a web-hosting company or going collocation.

As a result, the Web-hosting market is growing at double-digit rates despite the recession. The Web-hosting firms are building new data centers but at a slower pace than a few years ago. And the new data center space is selling out really quickly.

Experts say that the Web-hosting industry didn't go into the recession with overcapacity. This saved them from overextending and not being able to sell the space and services available.

Turnkey facilities provide low operating costs making it advantageous to outsource applications to Web-hosting firms.

By outsourcing, firms reduce capital spending on data center floor space, servers and network equipment. Instead, they replace the capital spending with a monthly operational cost.

The Web-hosting firms think this is a permanent trend. However, whether Web-hosting services demand is a stop-gap measure until the econmy recovers or a permanent trend, remains to be seen.

HP RECALLS LAPTOP BATTERIES

By D.E.Levine

HP recalled 70,000 Lithium-Ion batteries used in some of its laptops because they pose a fire hazard.

The batteries were used in the company's HP and Compaq-brand laptops. The laptops were sold in electronics and computer stores in the United States between August 2007 and March 2008.

There were also battery packs which were sold separately, according to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission.

NSF PLANS INCREASED CYBERSECURITY RESEARCH

By K.C.Bishope

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has a proposed $7.045 billion for fiscal year 2010. This is an 8.5% increase over the 2009 budget.

Of these monies, $1.1 billion is earmarked for Networking and Information Technology R&D (NITRD) which coordinates network and IT investments across agencies.

A commitment of $46.7 million is planned to accelerate innovation in silicon technology. Funding would go toward the establishment of partnerships with national labs an commercial entities.

An investment of $126.7 million would be made in cybersecurity research, emphasizing usability and privacy.

Transformative research will be funded by $92 million across research divisions.

The President's Plan for Science and Innovation envisioned a doubling of the NSF budget from 2006 to 2016. The current increases and plans puts the agency right on track with that original plan.

MCAFEE EXPANDS

By D.E.Levine

McAfee, long known for its antivirus security software is expanding by acquiring Solidcore Systems for about $33 million in cash and $14 million additionally if certain performance targets are met.

Solidcore's products are currently used on more than 200,000 endpoints such as point-of-sale (POS) systems, ATMs, servers, workstations and mobile devices.

McAfee's interest in Solidcore centers around its whitelisting technology which is able to control the applications allowed to run on a computer.

Upon completion of the acquisition, McAfee plans to incorporate Solidcore's whitelisting and compliance-enforcement tools into the McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator management console.

GOOGLE GETS AGGRESSIVE

By M.S.Welles

Google is getting more aggressive in the enterprise market as it signs more and bigger Google Apps customers.
Lotus
Google Apps consists of all things Google including Gmail, calendar, Docs, video and Google sites.

Google recently convinced kitchen appliance maker Hamilton Beach to abandon Lotus Notes for Apps and it also signed auto parts supplier Valeo, its largest customer to date.

Not only is Google aggressively getting enterprises to switch to Apps, but Google is getting new customers to talk about the switch.

Google Apps is a fine set of applications, but Microsoft has long held the enterprise market. We're all now watching Google progress and monitoring the comments about why enterprise users are switching and why they're happy.

Is this the beginning of Google making significant inroads into the enterprise?

CISCO PLANS HOME VIRTUALIZATION

By K.C.Bishope

Cisco CEO John Chambers has announced Cisco's intention to bring virtualization into the home.

This has a lot of people asking exactly "What is a virtualized home?" The second question is generally "Why would I want a virtualized home?"

Cisco describes home virtualization as having access to something like a movie or book while it isn't actually physically in your possession in your home.

Cisco, formerly an enterprise-oriented company sees big business in the consumer and home digital networking and entertainment market. It recently launched the Linksys Home Media Hub, a wireless server for home use. This is seen as the first step in Cisco's move into the home market.

CHECKING CLOUD PROVIDERS' SECURITY

By D.E.Levine

According to Forrester Research analyst Chenxi Wang in a recent report entitled "How Secure Is Your Cloud?", when you submit data to a cloud provider that information is stored and manipulated in an environment that is shared with other customers.

This sharing doesn't automatically mean that security and privacy are jeopardized but it does require that customers use diligence.

It's more difficult to find out where your data is exactly and how it is replicated. Failure to address security adequately can result in potential legal and business liabilities.

A good move is to encrypt all of the data while it is sitting idle in databases as well as while it is moving around in the cloud.

Regardless of whether the cloud provider addresses security, the end security decision and actions are always up to the customer, who bears the final responsibility for securing the data.

MICROSOFT'S FULL PIPELINE

By M.S.Welles

Microsoft has an aggressive agenda for shipping new software in 2009 and 2010. Four of it's major platforms, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 and Exchange 2010 are all scheduled to ship by the end of 2009. Office 2010 (which includes Sharepoint Server) will ship in early 2010.

Each of these software platforms is capable of providing corporate IT with an upgrade cycle extending past 12 months. Behind this lineup is a new version of SQL Server and an appliance version of the database for parallel processing.

Added to this are a handful of at least 10 code-named projects, also available by late 2009 and early 2010.

All of these planned releases are having a top down effect, forcing IT to stategize and plan much more carefully than in the past. Errors made now will be costly and difficult to overcome.

The result has been a rise in technical consulting jobs, even in a bad economy filled with layoffs.

Microsoft too has gotten on the bandwagon and pulled together very clear planning advice which it is offering to customers. The company has even told customers testing Vista to stop and move on to testing Windows 7.

In the past Microsoft has had a reputation for rarely advising users to abandon one upgrade plan and move on to an impending release of a new version of the product. This appears to be changing as Microsoft takes an honest approach and advises customers to move onto what will be best and in the long run , most economical.