Новости за 08.12.2015

Thomas Friedman famously announced that the world is flat in his 2005 book of that name; he was writing about globalization. In Friedman's view, VoIP, file sharing, and wireless were the "steroids" that have accelerated the flattening of global commerce. Today I'd add video over Internet, which has become more and more prevalent as bandwidth has improved.

Microsoft last week announced it will switch the licensing for next year's Windows Server 2016 to a per-processor-core basis, a move analysts said is at least partly a grab for more revenue.

Consumers will see an increase in successful cyberattacks against their online health records next year; supercomputers like IBM's Watson will reduce patient deaths and treatment costs by 10% in 2018; and virtual healthcare will soon become routine.

If you've ever seen the scary red pages in Google Chrome that prevent you from visiting a dangerous website, and wished you had them on your phone, then you're in luck: Google has extended Safe Browsing, the technology behind those security alerts, to Android.

Google Fiber could be coming to Chicago and Los Angeles, where more than 6 million people live, Google announced Tuesday.

Remember back when we had clearly defined device categories with bold lines between them? Smartphones were for voice calls and on-the-go communication, tablets were for more extended touchscreen use and laptops were for serious mobile productivity. Ah, simpler times.

Cisco Systems is rethinking its collaboration tools from the bottom up, turning the lowly Spark text-messaging app into a cloud-based platform that includes videoconferencing and the core features of an enterprise phone system.

Mozilla has released a new content blocker for the iPhone and iPad, continuing its push to provide users with privacy options for their Web browsing.

While the power of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks has decreased in recent months, their number has spiked, a trend that could signal trouble for smaller companies and websites.

Apple today started selling a battery case for the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6S, a tacit admission that the smartphone doesn't have enough juice to power the increasing demands of some owners, as well as that there's more money to be made in the accessories market.

AT&T announces more gigabit fiber. It has plans for 38 more cities with U-Verse GigaPower, but exactly who will or won’t get it isn’t clear.

The digital transformation of business via cloud, mobile and big data technology is fueling IT mergers and acquisitions, which are set to rocket past the record level set back in 2000 as the dot-com era crested.

Mophie’s brand of external battery packs and cases for iPhones have become synonymous with the product category, but this morning Apple took a chunk from the business by introducing its first ever iPhone case with a built-in battery pack.

For nearly 150 years, Schindler Group has been moving people. The Lucerne, Switzerland-based company makes, supplies and services elevators, escalators and moving walkways. As it moves toward the future, Schindler is deploying smart equipment capable of sharing information with back-end systems and, among other things, sending alerts about maintenance needs to service personnel.

I've known Zendesk pretty much since its inception. In fact, I was the first person to write about the company, soon after they launched eight years ago or so. (Disclosure: For a very short period some years ago I consulted to Zendesk around their communications strategy). Back then it was just the three co-founders and lovable sidekick Michael Folmer Hansen (not to mention his alter ego, Jennifer Hansen, a fictitious character that now, as then, greets new customers via email).

Legislation requiring tech companies to report on terrorist activity on their platforms is likely to be revived in the U.S., following concerns about the widespread use of Internet communications by terrorists.

Sure, it's just another iPhone battery case, but what makes this one stand out from the many others is the manufacturer: Apple.

You get what you pay for.

With M3D's Micro 3D Printer, you get a well-made machine that's constrained in what it can make by its smaller-than-a-breadbox size but delivers average to above-average print quality. It sells for $349.

The Micro 3D Printer started in 2014 as a Kickstarter crowd sourcing project by Bethesda, Md.-based M3D LLC. The effort was wildly popular, raising more than $3.4 million through 11,855 backers.

M3D was founded by Michael Armani, a researcher with a PhD in materials engineering... Читать дальше...

A thorny performance issue gets reported during this IT shop's morning briefing on problems encountered in the past 24 hours, according to a pilot fish sitting in on the meeting.

Google's parent company, Alphabet, has renamed its life sciences division Verily and given it the goal to "understand disease at the individual level."

A former Secret Service agent was sentenced Monday to 71 months in prison for stealing bitcoins from vendors on the Silk Road, the now-shuttered underground marketplace he was investigating. 

More and more CEOs are peppering their corporate strategy talks with two words: digital transformation. In fact, market-research firm IDC says “it is becoming increasingly difficult to keep track of all the CEO proclamations related to digital transformation.”

If you indulged in online shopping over the Thanksgiving weekend this year, you were far from alone. Thanksgiving Day through Cyber Monday drove a total of $11 billion in online sales, a 15 percent increase year-over-year (YoY) and 30 percent of all online sales in November ($39.5 billion), according to Adobe's Digital Index, which analyzed aggregated and anonymous data of more than 125 million visits to 4,500 retail websites to feed its predictive model.

Semiconductor maker Micron Technology is closing a manufacturing facility in Puerto Rico and moving the work to China.

The PC business can't climb out of the four-year hole it's dug for itself, researcher IDC said today.