Choosing a protection product for a virtual infrastructure is a lot like buying an anti-virus product for the Mac OS: most people would say why bother when few attacks have been observed to date. (Although that situation is changing see our coverage here on Mac Defender. )Nonetheless, as more IT shops make use of the cloud, it is only a matter of…
How To Clean Up The Apps Connected To Your Social Media Accounts
How many apps have you allowed access to your Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts? The answer is probably more than you think – and more than you really want. Here’s how to stay secure by auditing and cleaning up which apps can access your social media accounts.
CAPTCHAs With A Conscience: Can You Prove You’re Human?
Can websites get visitors to prove they’re human by forcing them to make a moral choice? This is not a hypothetical question.
How the Air Force Is Flying Toward IPv6
The United States Air Force is one very high-tech organization, and we’re not just talking about jet fighters. The Air Force’s latest mission is a high-stakes, high-speed migration to Internet Protocol v6 (IPv6). Chances are most corporate networks aren’t as extensive or complex as the Air Force’s, but the service’s planning operations…
How Chattanooga Transformed Itself into America’s First Gig City
What can you do with a ubiquitous metropolitan gigabit Ethernet connection? Google has recently gotten lots of attention with the metro fiber network that it is beginning to build in Kansas City. Welcome to Chattanooga, Tenn. The city has laid its fiber network just about everywhere, and is beginning to reap the rewards of ultra-fast…
Charting the Underground Twitterverse [Infographic]
How bad is the underground Twitter economy? According to security vendor Barracuda Labs, pretty bad.
What Would Make AOL Relevant Again (Not Refreshed Email)
As attention fades for Yahoo’s latest CEO switch, we turn to another Internet pioneer — AOL. That company has a new version of its Web-based email software, is basking in good quarterly earnings and this week saw its stock price briefly hit a yearly high. Talk about mixed emotions, the rally followed one of its lowest rates of decline in…
From Contest to Company: 6 Tips for Taking a Startup to the Next Level
From hackathons to programming contests to business plan competitions, competitive events are a great way to test the potential appeal and viability of a startup idea. But what happens after the contest? Win or lose, how can a new company make the most of the experience and the exposure?
Microsoft’s Imagine Cup Student Software Contest Holds Lessons for Startups
The 10th annual student software contest, Microsoft’s Imagine Cup, is wrapping up in Sydney, Australia, and there are some important lessons that all entrepreneurs, young and old, can glean from the process. The contest challenges hundreds of thousands of people – mostly college students – from around the world to come up with a new idea, code it…
Indiana’s Sewers: An Outpost on the Internet of Things
An unlikely place to look for the latest trend for the Internet of Things is inside the sewers of the City of South Bend, Indiana. For the past six years, South Bend’s city managers have been working with a group of consultants from IBM, nearby Notre Dame University and others to instrument the city’s sewers as a means of delivering better…
P2P and Streaming Video Gobble Up Increasing Corporate Bandwidth
Since we wrote about Palo Alto Networks’ applications study in January, the company has continued to track corporate networking trends with their customers and today is releasing a new data visualization tool, as well. Somewhat surprisingly, they are seeing very large jumps in use of peer-to-peer file sharing and video streaming services at the…
Noteworthy Upcoming Big Data Conferences
Big Data has had its marquee conferences with Strata and Structure, but there are several newer venues that you might want to consider, including two conferences coming up in St. Louis. If you are just getting started, or even if you are an old hand, these are great places to learn more about this fast-growing technology.
Study: B-Schools Need a Better Handle on Using, Tracking Social Media
A study on the usage of social media by the top MBA programs in the United States shows that while all are using Facebook for recruiting and marketing their programs, most of them don’t do any ROI assessment of the social media tools they employ to bring in prospective students. Nor do most tap the potentially best resource: Just a few schools…
Google’s BigQuery Gets Big Dashboards and Expanded Multiple Queries
Google has been busy adding features to its BigQuery service in the six weeks since it became available. There are new visualization dashboards, the ability to process more concurrent queries and additional commands. Clearly, Google is trying to make this a go-to service for ad hoc data processing.
Tell Your Children to Learn Hadoop
It is time for your kids to start learning about Hadoop, the formless data repository that is the current favorite of many dot-coms and the darling of the data nerds. Indeed, the younger the better. The Hadoop ecosystem is a big tent and getting bigger.
5 Questions to Ask Before Choosing Your Company’s Social Media Tools
If your enterprise is shopping around for an internal social media provider, chances are that you have thought about putting together your own request for proposals (RFP). A number of organizations have put together templates and suggestions over the years, and the latest one comes in the form of a Slideshare document from Sprinklr that…
New Prize for Bio-Sensors Announced by X Prize Foundation
Today the X Prize Foundation announced a $2.25 million Nokia Sensing X Challenge to produce a new generation of health care and biometric sensors. This adds a new health-related prize to their roster of other scientific challenges, including a $10 million prize to produce a wireless health monitor like the Star Trek Tricorder, another $10 million…
Cartoon: Why Social Media Matters for Your Customers
It is time for another look at enterprise IT from our friends Chief and Chuck. If your management still thinks Facebook and Twitter are fads, then perhaps this cartoon will hit home. After all, if we could only just not be bothered all the time from our customers when they have problems, right? One way is to just ignore them, and the message from…
Keeping Your Cloud Presence Straight: Spiceworks Launches Free Detection Feature
If your boss asked you to identify all of the various SaaS-based providers that are being used across your corporate network, how long would it take you to put together a report? This isn’t academic: As more of your end-users sign up for these cloud-based services, it becomes increasingly harder to maintain the appropriate enterprise security…
Tracking the Performance of Past Tech IPOs
With the lackluster first day issue of Facebook on Friday, we thought we would take a moment to look at the memorable tech IPOs of the past and see how they have fared over the years. While the first day “pop” of some companies can generate news, what is more important is the longer-term performance of the stock – say, after three years of trading…