UPDATE: Here's the full-blown Macworld account of the Apple iPhone 5 news.
If you're wondering about the current state of enterprise cloud computing and whether you're ahead or behind the game, check out the following two videos. Earlier this year at Interop 2013, John Gallant (chief content officer at IDG Enterprise) sat down with John Considine, CTO at Verizon Terremark, to discuss Considine's keynote at the show, which covered "The Cloud of Tomorrow". Read more
With over 50 million tablets sold this year alone, you would think that economies of scale and market forces would be driving tablet prices down. For the most part, that is not the case. A good 10.1-inch Android tablet is $400 to $500 dollars. That price hasn't changed since the iPad first came out. Read more
NASA again stepped up its plan to mitigate the asteroid threat to Earth by announcing two significant new programs that call on a multitude of scientists and organizations to help spot, track and possibly alter the direction of killer space rocks. Read more
In a user forum on Verizon's website, a couple users claim their Netflix instant streaming quality has been on the decline. Some claim to continue to experience problems even after contacting Verizon's customer service agents and working with them to resolve it. Read more
The consumer PC market has undergone a major transformation over the last few years, due in no small part to the rapid influx of relatively powerful and easy-to-use ultra-mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. Read more
As I wrote last week I have been on a quest for a new laptop. I quickly realized that convertibles were not yet ready for primetime in my price range (sub $1,000), so instead I decided that I would get a touchscreen model to fully utilize the Windows 8 interface. Read more
Mobile devices have swept over the enterprise like a Tsunami. According to a Cisco survey, up to 95% of organizations have BYOD in some sort or another on their networks. The reasons for the popularity of mobile devices are pretty obvious. But there is a dark side to the rise of mobile devices. The security implications of mobile devices accessing corporate networks and data keep network and security administrators up at night. Read more
Colorado State University researchers have been awarded a three-year, $850K National Science Foundation grant to help make the next generation of supercomputers more green.
I've been working in wireless and mobile for a very long time (Farpoint Group will shortly be 22 years old, and I worked on the first laptop computer, which was announced in 1982), and by no means am I going to advocate closing the patent office in the W&M space. Read more
It's a list one would never aspire to be on. The FBI today said it named the 500th criminal to its iconic "Ten Most Wanted Fugitives," program - a list that has been kept since 1950. Read more
Chinese hacking exploits became mainstream news over the past few months leading up to last week’s meeting between U.S. President Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping. While cybersecurity was a primary topic however, there was no breakthrough deal coming out of the tete-a-tete. The two countries did agree to work together on cybersecurity issues in the future.
On the heels of Samsung and following the successful lead of Apple, Microsoft has announced it will open a store-within-a-store at select Best Buy locations. The first stores will start to roll out this month and will cover 600 Best Buy storefronts in the U.S. and Canada by September.
Like the Apple and Samsung stores, the Microsoft stores within Best Buy will average 1,900 square feet in size, give or take a few hundred square feet, depending on the store. It will include a range of Microsoft consumer products, like PCs, Surface, Office, Windows Phones and Xbox. Read more
It’s late June and school is almost out. High school seniors are getting ready for college, younger kids are planning end-of-year parties, and families are getting ready to head to Disney and other fun spots. However, fun isn’t just limited to kids – network managers are getting ready for their own fun in Florida sun, as Cisco Live this year heads to the heart of Disney, Orlando, Florida. Read more
I'll be blunt - the icons in iOS 7 are ugly. If Apple wanted to ensure that Samsung would never copy it again, it succeeded.
While everyone is heaping praise upon Apple for implementing an entirely refreshed mobile OS design, the new icons that accompany said design are embarrassingly horrible. Read more
Just like pretty much everything else when it comes to successful technology solutions, the focus of governance planning for SharePoint needs to start with the business outcomes you are trying to enable. Understanding your business outcome goals are the first step to figuring out how to even think about governance for SharePoint. Once you understand the vision and outcome goals for your solution, you can define your governance plan to help you achieve them. Read more
Let me begin by saying again that, yes, IMHO, the majority of enterprise-class APs shipped in 2015 will indeed be based on 802.11ac, and that we'll see the wholesale replacement of 802.11n (the decommissioning of .11n APs) beginning around 2018. 802.11ac is indeed the future of the mainstream enterprise WLAN. For the time being, though, 802.11n is far from obsolete, and I continue to encourage the purchase of (especially three-stream) .11n APs for immediate needs rather than waiting for .11ac. Read more
Internet of Things (IOT) advocate Michael Koster fixated makers and hackers at the recent Maker Faire in San Mateo, California, a few weeks ago. Standing in front of samples of many versions of Arduino, Rasberry Pi, and sensors, he spoke of an open source horizontal platform that will unify the IOT. He changed people’s perspectives from looking up from a small control circuit of dedicated sensors and actuators to seeing the unique value that will be created by looking down at a unified world of horizontally interconnected sensors. Read more
While Cisco used the company's keynote slot at Interop last month to tout the Internet of Everything concept, deft video editors were careful not to include Everything in the video of the presentation that Cisco posted to YouTube on June 14. And no one is more thankful for that than Cisco SVP Rob "Blue Shoes" Soderbery. Read more