The HTC Rhyme
The HTC Rhyme is something of a delicate matter, as it is HTC's firstphone that is said to have been designed with a female audience in mind. Yet it comes in dull colours and looks quite a lot like every other HTC handset we’ve seen so far.
PENTAX Q-REVIEW
Let’s get one thing straight from the start. The Pentax Q is quite an incredible camera to behold. It’s tiny. But not only is it tiny, it also looks great.
NIKON 1 V1
Nikon has announced two new compact system cameras: the Nikon 1 V1 and the Nikon 1 J1. We got our hands on both new cameras today, so until we can bring you our Nikon 1 V1 review
The ULTra Personal Rapid Transit System
"Think of it as a horizontal lift," says Fraser Brown, managing director of ULTra, the company that has built a new way to travel to Heathrow Terminal 5 from the business car park
THREE MIFI HSPA
Three has updated its MiFi range with the new Huawei E586 complete with HSPA+, and we have managed to get our hands on one to test out all its mobile internet goodness
Saturday, October 8, 2011
8 Inspiring Faces Of Breast Cancer
Last year, more than 200,000 new cases of invasive breast cancer were estimated to be diagnosed. 1 in 8 women is expected to receive a diagnosis during the course of her lifetime, according to BreastCancer.org.
It's nearly impossible to find someone today who hasn't been affected in some way by the disease -- with a mother, a sister, a grandmother or a friend diagnosed at some point.
But sometimes those women are more well-known. In honor of Breast Cancer Awareness month this October, we rounded up just a few of the inspiring faces of breast cancer over the past several years.
Wanda Sykes
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In an interview with Ellen DeGeneres aired last month, Wanda Sykes revealed that she had been diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a double mastectomy."I had breast cancer. Yeah, I know it's scary," Sykes said in the interview. "This was in February. I went for the reduction. I had real big boobs and I just got tired of knocking over stuff. Every time I eat ... Oh lord. I'd carry a Tide stick everywhere I go. My back was sore so it was time to have a reduction."
After the reduction, the pathology report found ductal carcinoma in situ in her left breast, which prompted Skykes, who has a family history of breast cancer, to opt for a double mastectomy.
And while the diagnosis is scary, she hasn't lost her signature humor.
"I was like, 'I don't know, should I talk about it or what?' How many things could I have? I'm black, then lesbian. I can't be the poster child for everything ... At least with the LGBT issues we get a parade, we get a float, it's a party. [But] I was real hesitant about doing this, because I hate walking. I got a lot of [cancer] walks coming up."
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Friday, October 7, 2011
Tempo: transformative, difficult look at advanced decision-making theory
Tempo: transformative, difficult look at advanced decision-making theory
By Cory Doctorow at 11:24 am Friday, Oct 7
As I've noted here before, Venkatesh Rao is a thought-provoking, profound thinker, and I always welcome his long, fascinating blog posts. When he sent me a copy of his slim book, Tempo, I was very excited to see it turn up in my mailbox.
Tempo is Rao's attempt to formalize many years of study into human decision-making. Rao spent two years as a Cornell post-doc doing USAF-funded research on "mixed-initiative command and control models," part of the research on decision-making that includes such classics as Chet Richards's Certain to Win. Rao taught a course on decision-making theory at Cornell that included many of his theories, metaphors and advancements on the subject, and he reports that students found the course entertaining, but disjointed -- a "grab bag" of ideas. Tempo is meant to turn that grab-bag into an orderly, systematic argument explaining Rao's overall view of how and why we decide stuff, how we can change the way others behave, and how to look at the history and future of humanity's individual and collective decisions. Heavy stuff, in other words.
Rao does not entirely succeed in making an orderly argument out of his grab bag. My relationship with Tempo was tumultuous. It's heavy going, abstract, and makes difficult (for me) to follow leaps from one subject to the next. I would normally read 150 pages of academic text in a day or two, but after two days with Tempo, I was still only 40 or so pages in. Usually, that's my signal to move on to the next book -- life's too short, and somewhere out there, someone's written something equally informative but easier to absorb.
But I didn't stop reading Tempo -- instead, I talked about it over dinner that night with some friends I don't often see. I was captivated by Rao's explanation of tempo-driven narrative decision-making, the notion that we decide based on the stories we tell ourselves ("I will get a good job") and that the most important difference between one situation and the next is the rate at which the interactions and decisions proceed. Rao draws on examples as disparate as cooking and warfare, customer service and PowerPoint presentations, teaching and seduction.
A day or two later, I did put Tempo down. I kept it on my shelf, but moved it from the (teetering) "to be read" pile to the shelves of stuff I've finished with (for now at least). I was only halfway through, but I kept losing the thread, and I sometimes doubted whether there was a thread. Rao was blowing my mind every five or ten pages, but in between, he was driving me to distraction with jumps that I was either too dumb to follow or that he wasn't handling gracefully (or both).
But I've just picked it up again, and finished it. Why? Because I kept on referring to it in discussions -- all sorts of discussions. A critical analysis of a friend's manuscript for a new book on security; a talk with my agent about the plot of an upcoming novel; a discussion of economics and bubbles; a practical political planning session for an upcoming debate at a party conference. Tempo had stimulated a lot of thinking for me, and I thought it deserved finishing.
So I've finished it, and while I very rarely bother to post about books that I can't wholeheartedly recommend (see "life's too short," above), I find myself driven to post a rare mixed review. Tempo may be the most fascinating book whose thesis I couldn't entirely grasp and whose author I couldn't wholly follow that I've ever read. Theories of how and why people do things are key to everything from economics to law to security to ethics to literary criticism to childrearing to military adventurism to political campaigning. Rao's insights and examples are fascinating and sometimes transformative. All I can hope is that Tempo will be succeeded by better-developed versions of his argument, that expand and connect his ideas.
Tempo [tempobook.com]
Tags: Book, Business, decision making, economics, happy mutants, literary theory, productivity, review, Reviews, scholarship, web theory
Cory Doctorow
Upcoming appearances
* Oct 13-15, NYC: New York Comic-Con
* Oct 26, Torino: VIEW conference
* Nov 8, Berlin: evening reading (TBD)
* Nov 9, Munich: evening reading livestreamed in cooperation with www.lovelybooks.de (TBD)
Recent books:
* Context (essays)
* With a Little Help (short stories)
* For the Win (YA novel)
* Makers (adult novel)
Where not otherwise specified, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution. Boing Boing is a trademark of Happy Mutants LLC in the United States and other countries.
via boingboing.net
Innovation Starvation
Innovation Starvation
By Neal Stephenson
My lifespan encompasses the era when the United States of America was capable of launching human beings into space. Some of my earliest memories are of sitting on a braided rug before a hulking black-and-white television, watching the early Gemini missions. This summer, at the age of 51—not even old—I watched on a flatscreen as the last Space Shuttle lifted off the pad. I have followed the dwindling of the space program with sadness, even bitterness. Where’s my donut-shaped space station? Where’s my ticket to Mars? Until recently, though, I have kept my feelings to myself. Space exploration has always had its detractors. To complain about its demise is to expose oneself to attack from those who have no sympathy that an affluent, middle-aged white American has not lived to see his boyhood fantasies fulfilled.
Still, I worry that our inability to match the achievements of the 1960s space program might be symptomatic of a general failure of our society to get big things done. My parents and grandparents witnessed the creation of the airplane, the automobile, nuclear energy, and the computer to name only a few. Scientists and engineers who came of age during the first half of the 20th century could look forward to building things that would solve age-old problems, transform the landscape, build the economy, and provide jobs for the burgeoning middle class that was the basis for our stable democracy.
The Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010 crystallized my feeling that we have lost our ability to get important things done. The OPEC oil shock was in 1973—almost 40 years ago. It was obvious then that it was crazy for the United States to let itself be held economic hostage to the kinds of countries where oil was being produced. It led to Jimmy Carter’s proposal for the development of an enormous synthetic fuels industry on American soil. Whatever one might think of the merits of the Carter presidency or of this particular proposal, it was, at least, a serious effort to come to grips with the problem.
Little has been heard in that vein since. We’ve been talking about wind farms, tidal power, and solar power for decades. Some progress has been made in those areas, but energy is still all about oil. In my city, Seattle, a 35-year-old plan to run a light rail line across Lake Washington is now being blocked by a citizen initiative. Thwarted or endlessly delayed in its efforts to build things, the city plods ahead with a project to paint bicycle lanes on the pavement of thoroughfares.
In early 2011, I participated in a conference called Future Tense, where I lamented the decline of the manned space program, then pivoted to energy, indicating that the real issue isn’t about rockets. It’s our far broader inability as a society to execute on the big stuff. I had, through some kind of blind luck, struck a nerve. The audience at Future Tense was more confident than I that science fiction [SF] had relevance—even utility—in addressing the problem. I heard two theories as to why:
1. The Inspiration Theory. SF inspires people to choose science and engineering as careers. This much is undoubtedly true, and somewhat obvious.
2. The Hieroglyph Theory. Good SF supplies a plausible, fully thought-out picture of an alternate reality in which some sort of compelling innovation has taken place. A good SF universe has a coherence and internal logic that makes sense to scientists and engineers. Examples include Isaac Asimov’s robots, Robert Heinlein’s rocket ships, and William Gibson’s cyberspace. As Jim Karkanias of Microsoft Research puts it, such icons serve as hieroglyphs—simple, recognizable symbols on whose significance everyone agrees.
Researchers and engineers have found themselves concentrating on more and more narrowly focused topics as science and technology have become more complex. A large technology company or lab might employ hundreds or thousands of persons, each of whom can address only a thin slice of the overall problem. Communication among them can become a mare’s nest of email threads and Powerpoints. The fondness that many such people have for SF reflects, in part, the usefulness of an over-arching narrative that supplies them and their colleagues with a shared vision. Coordinating their efforts through a command-and-control management system is a little like trying to run a modern economy out of a Politburo. Letting them work toward an agreed-on goal is something more like a free and largely self-coordinated market of ideas.
SPANNING THE AGES
SF has changed over the span of time I am talking about—from the 1950s (the era of the development of nuclear power, jet airplanes, the space race, and the computer) to now. Speaking broadly, the techno-optimism of the Golden Age of SF has given way to fiction written in a generally darker, more skeptical and ambiguous tone. I myself have tended to write a lot about hackers—trickster archetypes who exploit the arcane capabilities of complex systems devised by faceless others.
Believing we have all the technology we’ll ever need, we seek to draw attention to its destructive side effects. This seems foolish now that we find ourselves saddled with technologies like Japan’s ramshackle 1960’s-vintage reactors at Fukushima when we have the possibility of clean nuclear fusion on the horizon. The imperative to develop new technologies and implement them on a heroic scale no longer seems like the childish preoccupation of a few nerds with slide rules. It’s the only way for the human race to escape from its current predicaments. Too bad we’ve forgotten how to do it.
“You’re the ones who’ve been slacking off!” proclaims Michael Crow, president of Arizona State University (and one of the other speakers at Future Tense). He refers, of course, to SF writers. The scientists and engineers, he seems to be saying, are ready and looking for things to do. Time for the SF writers to start pulling their weight and supplying big visions that make sense. Hence the Hieroglyph project, an effort to produce an anthology of new SF that will be in some ways a conscious throwback to the practical techno-optimism of the Golden Age.
SPACEBORNE CIVILIZATIONS
China is frequently cited as a country now executing on Big Stuff, and there’s no doubt they are constructing dams, high-speed rail systems, and rockets at an extraordinary clip. But those are not fundamentally innovative. Their space program, like all other countries’ (including our own), is just parroting work that was done 50 years ago by the Soviets and the Americans. A truly innovative program would involve taking risks (and accepting failures) to pioneer some of the alternative space launch technologies that have been advanced by researchers all over the world during the decades dominated by rockets.
Imagine a factory mass-producing small vehicles, about as big and complicated as refrigerators, which roll off the end of an assembly line, are loaded with space-bound cargo, and topped off with non-polluting liquid hydrogen fuel, then exposed to intense concentrated heat from an array of ground-based lasers or microwave antennas. Heated to temperatures beyond what can be achieved through a chemical reaction, the hydrogen erupts from a nozzle on the base of the device and sends it rocketing into the air. Tracked through its flight by the lasers or microwaves, the vehicle soars into orbit, carrying a larger payload for its size than a chemical rocket could ever manage, but the complexity, expense, and jobs remain grounded. For decades, this has been the vision of such researchers as physicists Jordin Kare and Kevin Parkin. A similar idea, using a pulsed ground-based laser to blast propellant from the backside of a space vehicle, was being talked about by Arthur Kantrowitz, Freeman Dyson, and other eminent physicists in the early 1960s.
If that sounds too complicated, then consider the 2003 proposal of Geoff Landis and Vincent Denis to construct a 20-kilometer-high tower using simple steel trusses. Conventional rockets launched from its top would be able to carry twice as much payload as comparable ones launched from ground level. There is even abundant research, dating all the way back to Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the father of astronautics beginning in the late 19th century, to show that a simple tether—a long rope, tumbling end-over-end while orbiting the earth—could be used to scoop payloads out of the upper atmosphere and haul them up into orbit without the need for engines of any kind. Energy would be pumped into the system using an electrodynamic process with no moving parts.
All are promising ideas—just the sort that used to get an earlier generation of scientists and engineers fired up about actually building something.
But to grasp just how far our current mindset is from being able to attempt innovation on such a scale, consider the fate of the space shuttle’s external tanks [ETs]. Dwarfing the vehicle itself, the ET was the largest and most prominent feature of the space shuttle as it stood on the pad. It remained attached to the shuttle—or perhaps it makes as much sense to say that the shuttle remained attached to it—long after the two strap-on boosters had fallen away. The ET and the shuttle remained connected all the way out of the atmosphere and into space. Only after the system had attained orbital velocity was the tank jettisoned and allowed to fall into the atmosphere, where it was destroyed on re-entry.
At a modest marginal cost, the ETs could have been kept in orbit indefinitely. The mass of the ET at separation, including residual propellants, was about twice that of the largest possible Shuttle payload. Not destroying them would have roughly tripled the total mass launched into orbit by the Shuttle. ETs could have been connected to build units that would have humbled today’s International Space Station. The residual oxygen and hydrogen sloshing around in them could have been combined to generate electricity and produce tons of water, a commodity that is vastly expensive and desirable in space. But in spite of hard work and passionate advocacy by space experts who wished to see the tanks put to use, NASA—for reasons both technical and political—sent each of them to fiery destruction in the atmosphere. Viewed as a parable, it has much to tell us about the difficulties of innovating in other spheres.
EXECUTING THE BIG STUFF
Innovation can’t happen without accepting the risk that it might fail. The vast and radical innovations of the mid-20th century took place in a world that, in retrospect, looks insanely dangerous and unstable. Possible outcomes that the modern mind identifies as serious risks might not have been taken seriously—supposing they were noticed at all—by people habituated to the Depression, the World Wars, and the Cold War, in times when seat belts, antibiotics, and many vaccines did not exist. Competition between the Western democracies and the communist powers obliged the former to push their scientists and engineers to the limits of what they could imagine and supplied a sort of safety net in the event that their initial efforts did not pay off. A grizzled NASA veteran once told me that the Apollo moon landings were communism’s greatest achievement.
In his recent book Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure, Tim Harford outlines Charles Darwin’s discovery of a vast array of distinct species in the Galapagos Islands—a state of affairs that contrasts with the picture seen on large continents, where evolutionary experiments tend to get pulled back toward a sort of ecological consensus by interbreeding. “Galapagan isolation” vs. the “nervous corporate hierarchy” is the contrast staked out by Harford in assessing the ability of an organization to innovate.
Most people who work in corporations or academia have witnessed something like the following: A number of engineers are sitting together in a room, bouncing ideas off each other. Out of the discussion emerges a new concept that seems promising. Then some laptop-wielding person in the corner, having performed a quick Google search, announces that this “new” idea is, in fact, an old one—or at least vaguely similar—and has already been tried. Either it failed, or it succeeded. If it failed, then no manager who wants to keep his or her job will approve spending money trying to revive it. If it succeeded, then it’s patented and entry to the market is presumed to be unattainable, since the first people who thought of it will have “first-mover advantage” and will have created “barriers to entry.” The number of seemingly promising ideas that have been crushed in this way must number in the millions.
What if that person in the corner hadn’t been able to do a Google search? It might have required weeks of library research to uncover evidence that the idea wasn’t entirely new—and after a long and toilsome slog through many books, tracking down many references, some relevant, some not. When the precedent was finally unearthed, it might not have seemed like such a direct precedent after all. There might be reasons why it would be worth taking a second crack at the idea, perhaps hybridizing it with innovations from other fields. Hence the virtues of Galapagan isolation.
The counterpart to Galapagan isolation is the struggle for survival on a large continent, where firmly established ecosystems tend to blur and swamp new adaptations. Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist, composer, visual artist, and author of the recent book You are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, has some insights about the unintended consequences of the Internet—the informational equivalent of a large continent—on our ability to take risks. In the pre-net era, managers were forced to make decisions based on what they knew to be limited information. Today, by contrast, data flows to managers in real time from countless sources that could not even be imagined a couple of generations ago, and powerful computers process, organize, and display the data in ways that are as far beyond the hand-drawn graph-paper plots of my youth as modern video games are to tic-tac-toe. In a world where decision-makers are so close to being omniscient, it’s easy to see risk as a quaint artifact of a primitive and dangerous past.
The illusion of eliminating uncertainty from corporate decision-making is not merely a question of management style or personal preference. In the legal environment that has developed around publicly traded corporations, managers are strongly discouraged from shouldering any risks that they know about—or, in the opinion of some future jury, should have known about—even if they have a hunch that the gamble might pay off in the long run. There is no such thing as “long run” in industries driven by the next quarterly report. The possibility of some innovation making money is just that—a mere possibility that will not have time to materialize before the subpoenas from minority shareholder lawsuits begin to roll in.
Today’s belief in ineluctable certainty is the true innovation-killer of our age. In this environment, the best an audacious manager can do is to develop small improvements to existing systems—climbing the hill, as it were, toward a local maximum, trimming fat, eking out the occasional tiny innovation—like city planners painting bicycle lanes on the streets as a gesture toward solving our energy problems. Any strategy that involves crossing a valley—accepting short-term losses to reach a higher hill in the distance—will soon be brought to a halt by the demands of a system that celebrates short-term gains and tolerates stagnation, but condemns anything else as failure. In short, a world where big stuff can never get done.
*****
*****Neal Stephenson is the author of REAMDE, a techno-thriller published in September, as well as the three-volume historical epic “The Baroque Cycle” (Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World) and the novels Anathem, Cryptonomicon, The Diamond Age, Snow Crash, and Zodiac. He is also founder of Hieroglyph, a project of science fiction writers to depict future worlds in which BSGD (Big Stuff Gets Done).
[Image: Marshall Hopkins]
via worldpolicy.org
AMIT GUPTA LIKES YOU!
Two weeks ago I got a call from my doctor, who I’d gone to see the day before because I’d been feeling worn out and was losing weight, and wasn’t sure why.
He was brief: “Amit, you’ve got Acute Leukemia. You need to enter treatment right away.”
I was terrified. I packed a backpack full of clothes, went to the hospital as he’d instructed, and had transfusions through the night to allow me to take a flight home at 7am the next day. I Googled acute leukemia as I lay in my hospital bed, learning that if it hadn’t been caught, I’d have died within weeks.
—
I have a couple more months of chemo to go, then the next step is a bone marrow transplant. As Jay and Tony describe below, minorities are severely underrepresented in the bone marrow pool, and I need help.
A few ways to help:
- If you’re South Asian, get a free test by mail. You rub your cheeks with a cotton swab and mail it back. It’s easy.
- If you’re in NYC, you can go to this event my friends are putting on.
- If you know any South Asians (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Maldives, or Sri Lanka), please point ‘em to the links above.
*NEW* Organize a donor drive near you (the most helpful thing you could possibly do!) email 100kcheeks@gmail.com. They’ll send you kits, flyers, tell you what to say, and make the whole process easy cheesy.
My friend Amit Gupta founded my favorite photography site Photojojo. A few weeks ago, he was diagnosed with leukemia. Amit is one of the nicest, most genuine, most creative people you could ever meet. Prior to founding the awesome Photojojo, he also co-founded Jelly in 2006 in NYC, a coworking community, that’s now spread to 60 cities across the world and helped spark the coworking revolution. It looks like Amit will need a bone marrow transplant quite soon. We can help him with that.
Unlike blood transfusions, finding a genetic match for bone marrow that his body will accept is no easy task. The national bone marrow registry has 9.5 million records on file, yet the chances of someone from South Asian descent of finding a match are only 1 in 20,000.
This is where we come in. We’re going to destroy those odds.
How? By finding and registering as many people of South Asian descent as we possibly can.
Tests are easy– a simple swab of the cheek. If you’re a match, the donation involves an outpatient procedure. It’s not fun, but it’s not dangerous either. And doing it could save a life.
We are encouraging anyone of South Asian descent to take a test to see if you’re a match.
You can get a free test by mail, or, if you’re in New York, you can join us Friday, October 14th for a special party to rally support.
We’ll have test kits on hand at the party, as well as music, booze, and maybe even a photo booth. It will, for the first time, combine a House 2.0-style party with a New Work City-style party, and if you’ve ever been to either, you know they are always something special.
Please spread the word and please do everything you can to help Amit beat leukemia. He’s a superstar.
Much thanks to Tony and pals for organizing this event, and EVERYONE who’s been tweeting and reblogging.
Please help get the word out any way you can. My life quite literally depends on it.
Ice Cream Sandwich’s Google Plus App Renames Messenger ‘Chords’
When Google unleashes Ice Cream Sandwich, a slew of updated core applications will come along with it. The folks at Android Police have managed to get their paws on the goods, extracted directly from the Nexus Prime Of note is an overhauled version of Google Plus for Android, listed as version 2.0. The version number shows a significant update can be expected. One of the immediately noticeable changes is the decision to change the name of the service’s group messaging functionality. Once huddles, group chat will be known simply as “Chords” moving forward.
We expect to see significantly revamped version of many of the apps included in Google’s Mobile Suite when Ice Cream Sandwich launches, but unfortunately the postponement of next week’s CTIA event leaves the timing of the reveal up in the air.
[via AndroidPolice]
via phandroid.com
Google Apps Vs Office 365? It All Depends
Google Apps Vs Office 365? It All Depends
Interop panel says the choice of a cloud-based productivity platform comes down to a lot more than just the per-user price.While Google and Microsoft have been duking it out in the press over Google Apps and Office 365, boasting about how this or that feature is superior to what its rival offers, the choice of platform for real-world organizations may come down to more fundamental considerations like size, budget, and even whether a social media strategy is in the business plan.
Office 365 Vs. Google Apps: Top 10 Enterprise Concerns(click image for larger view and forslideshow)Office 365 and Google Apps offer similar upfront pricing, starting at about $5 or $6 per user, per month. But there's much more to consider, according to panelists who spoke Wednesday at a session at the Interop technology conference and expo, a UBM TechWeb event in New York City.
-->
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New York Met VP Paul Depodesta talks about the journey of examining data differently. Depodesta discusses all of the ramifications and the outcomes of bucking the traditional ways of looking at baseball statistics & evaluating talent.For large organizations that have built up a trove of documents in Microsoft Word over the years, the choice is a no-brainer, according to Kevin Kieller, principal at consulting firm EnableUC. "Most organizations already have a large investment in Office documents," said Kieller.
That fact alone, he said, will steer most large companies to Office 365, which boasts better (though not perfect) fidelity when rendering documents created in the desktop version of Word than what Google Apps offers. "Your documents are going to change" when uploaded to Google, Kieller warned.
[Microsoft didn't forget business users with its updated mobile operating system. Learn more about Windows Phone Mango's Top 5 Enterprise Features.]
For smaller or less formal organizations, however, the fidelity issue might not be seen as a major problem. "I know of a lot of organizations that are trying to eliminate the desktop altogether," said Dave Michels, president of Verge1 Consulting, who also spoke at the session.
Another issue that could influence the decision to choose Microsoft or Google's online productivity platform is the extent to which an organization plans to use all of the included features. With an online version of SharePoint, Microsoft's collaboration platform, Office 365 is decidedly richer than Google Apps. But it can also be expensive to use and integrate with onsite data. "SharePoint is a beast; it's complicated," said Michels.
Added Kieller: "There are some big ticket dollars associated with moving to SharePoint" in the cloud.
So for organizations that just need rudimentary online collaboration tools, Google Docs and Google Groups may be the way to go. But again, it's not that simple. Another factor is the extent to which an organization needs to safeguard user data and user privacy.
Both Google Apps and Office 365 offer a number of solid security features, but philosophically Google may be more disposed to seek access to its users' data. "Google wants your information," said Michels, who noted that the search giant's business is built mostly around monetizing customer data through advertising and third-party marketing programs.
Social media is also a consideration. To the extent that a company wants its employees to interact with each other through the cloud, Google may have the advantage. The company recently launched its Google+ social networking service, and is integrating the platform with its Apps environment. Office 365 also offers a form of social networking through Lync, but it's a less intuitive environment.
Google+ also extends to the whole Internet, although that might not sit well with security-conscious IT departments. "They may not see that as a plus," said Kieller.
The bottom line, according to the panelists, is that the choice of Google Apps or Office 365 does not lend itself to simple "right" or "wrong" answers.
Learn the secrets to getting your employees to share and collaborate with one another in this Enterprise 2.0 webcast. Here's a hint--it's not about the technology, it's about your people! It happens Oct. 12. Sign up now. (Free with registration.)
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Google Apps Vs Office 365? It All Depends
Google Apps Vs Office 365? It All Depends
Interop panel says the choice of a cloud-based productivity platform comes down to a lot more than just the per-user price.While Google and Microsoft have been duking it out in the press over Google Apps and Office 365, boasting about how this or that feature is superior to what its rival offers, the choice of platform for real-world organizations may come down to more fundamental considerations like size, budget, and even whether a social media strategy is in the business plan.
Office 365 Vs. Google Apps: Top 10 Enterprise Concerns(click image for larger view and forslideshow)Office 365 and Google Apps offer similar upfront pricing, starting at about $5 or $6 per user, per month. But there's much more to consider, according to panelists who spoke Wednesday at a session at the Interop technology conference and expo, a UBM TechWeb event in New York City.
-->
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New York Met VP Paul Depodesta talks about the journey of examining data differently. Depodesta discusses all of the ramifications and the outcomes of bucking the traditional ways of looking at baseball statistics & evaluating talent.For large organizations that have built up a trove of documents in Microsoft Word over the years, the choice is a no-brainer, according to Kevin Kieller, principal at consulting firm EnableUC. "Most organizations already have a large investment in Office documents," said Kieller.
That fact alone, he said, will steer most large companies to Office 365, which boasts better (though not perfect) fidelity when rendering documents created in the desktop version of Word than what Google Apps offers. "Your documents are going to change" when uploaded to Google, Kieller warned.
[Microsoft didn't forget business users with its updated mobile operating system. Learn more about Windows Phone Mango's Top 5 Enterprise Features.]
For smaller or less formal organizations, however, the fidelity issue might not be seen as a major problem. "I know of a lot of organizations that are trying to eliminate the desktop altogether," said Dave Michels, president of Verge1 Consulting, who also spoke at the session.
Another issue that could influence the decision to choose Microsoft or Google's online productivity platform is the extent to which an organization plans to use all of the included features. With an online version of SharePoint, Microsoft's collaboration platform, Office 365 is decidedly richer than Google Apps. But it can also be expensive to use and integrate with onsite data. "SharePoint is a beast; it's complicated," said Michels.
Added Kieller: "There are some big ticket dollars associated with moving to SharePoint" in the cloud.
So for organizations that just need rudimentary online collaboration tools, Google Docs and Google Groups may be the way to go. But again, it's not that simple. Another factor is the extent to which an organization needs to safeguard user data and user privacy.
Both Google Apps and Office 365 offer a number of solid security features, but philosophically Google may be more disposed to seek access to its users' data. "Google wants your information," said Michels, who noted that the search giant's business is built mostly around monetizing customer data through advertising and third-party marketing programs.
Social media is also a consideration. To the extent that a company wants its employees to interact with each other through the cloud, Google may have the advantage. The company recently launched its Google+ social networking service, and is integrating the platform with its Apps environment. Office 365 also offers a form of social networking through Lync, but it's a less intuitive environment.
Google+ also extends to the whole Internet, although that might not sit well with security-conscious IT departments. "They may not see that as a plus," said Kieller.
The bottom line, according to the panelists, is that the choice of Google Apps or Office 365 does not lend itself to simple "right" or "wrong" answers.
Learn the secrets to getting your employees to share and collaborate with one another in this Enterprise 2.0 webcast. Here's a hint--it's not about the technology, it's about your people! It happens Oct. 12. Sign up now. (Free with registration.)
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Thursday, October 6, 2011
Remembering Steve Jobs: Your Pictures
Steven P. Jobs, the visionary co-founder of Apple, died Wednesday in Palo Alto, Calif., at age 56. The New York Times is asking readers to share a picture that illustrates the impact of his life and legacy. How did Mr. Jobs’s life affect you? View selected submissions in this slideshow.
Reader Submission Courtesy of F. Moody
1. Select One Photo Images cannot exceed 5MB.
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Chip Shot: Cisco Cius: A Tablet That's Serious about Enterprise Productivity
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Verizon, Duke University Collaborate On Health IT
Verizon, Duke University Collaborate On Health IT
Duke and Verizon will focus on scaling up promising health IT innovations and using the network to reach a mass market.
Duke University and Verizon announced on Wednesday that they are collaborating on healthcare IT initiatives aimed at improving patient outcomes, reducing costs, and bolstering medical research capabilities.
(click image for larger view)
Slideshow: 12 Innovative Mobile Healthcare AppsUnder the multi-year agreement, Verizon Connected Healthcare Solutions, the company's health care practice group, and Duke is combining technical resources and personnel to focus on health projects that leverage advanced communications technologies, including wireless.
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BYTE editorial director Larry Seltzer was on hand for Amazon's Kindle tablet announcements. Highlights include impressively cheap pricing, a few feature drawbacks, and many bundled Amazon services.The pact "will touch a variety of subinitiatives," said Sam Bastia, Verizon general manager of strategy, in an interview with InformationWeek Healthcare.
The Duke and Verizon alliance will include technical collaboration, including indentifying and assessing healthcare technology products and services for commercial viability; business collaboration, including an internship program for Duke students to be assigned within Verizon teams for the development and implementation of business initiatives; and a scientific advisory board that includes senior representatives from both Duke and Verizon.
[ Adoption of innovation technology in healthcare can be slow. Learn What's Holding Back Health IT Innovation? ]
Among other things, the pact will help Duke researchers investigate ways of scaling up promising new health IT innovations for mass use through tapping the computing and communications infrastructure offered by Verizon, said Dr. Kevin Schulman, a Duke University professor of medicine and business administration and director of the health management sector program at Duke.
"We've been in discussions for two years," said Schulman in an interview with InformationWeek Healthcare. "Verizon has been an infrastructure player for a long time, and health IT is a solution for getting data from point A to point B, but the network is key," he said.
"A lot of solutions and concepts need networks and mass," said Schulman. By utilizing Verizon's technology expertise and infrastructure, Duke and Verizon can work on scaling up those innovations, he said.
For instance, collaborative work will focus on emerging mobile patient engagement and telehealth applications that could allow patients and clinicians to use smartphone technology "to understand whether a patient needs to be seen," said Schulman.
Other work could involve "ubiquitous and smart medical devices and sensors" used in the home, as well as "other assets like medical pumps" that could allow patients to transmit data and communicate with remote healthcare providers.
In that work, Duke and Verizon teams will look at "how to hang things over the network to deploy tools to patients and providers and not worry about how to scale up," said Schulman.
For instance, emerging applications using smartphone technology being tested in small pilot groups by Duke can be scaled up using Verizon's technology resources for use by many more people.
Verizon's computing infrastructure can also be leveraged by Duke and other medical researchers as a powerful tool for complex medical analysis and research, Schulman said.
Not every application is ready for the cloud, but two case studies featured in the new, all-digital issue of InformationWeek Healthcare offer some insights into what does work. Also in this issue: Keeping patient data secure isn't all that hard. But proposed new regulations could make it a lot harder. Download it now. (Free with registration.)
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