Larry Dignan and other IT industry experts, blogging at the intersection of business and technology, deliver daily news and analysis on vital enterprise trends.
Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and SmartPlanet as well as Editorial Director of ZDNet's sister site TechRepublic.
Andrew Nusca is a writer-editor for ZDNet, contributor to CNET and the editor of SmartPlanet, ZDNet's sister site about innovation. In 2013, his coverage will focus on enterprise startups. He is based in New York.
Rachel King is a staff writer for ZDNet based in San Francisco.
Recently I interviewed , Dianah Neff, the CIO of Philadelphia who is at the center of her city's push to bring Wi-Fi to the masses over the objections of the local phone and cable companies. States are passing laws to restrict government telecom projects just as fast as cities and towns gear up for municipal Wi-Fi.
The arms race for scientists with expertise in various areas of search, data mining and data analysis is in full flower, as in the tug of war between Google and Microsoft over the services of Kai Fu Lee. Meanwhile, Yahoo is making a major investment from its nearly $500 million annual engineering spend to build out its own world-class research group.
In Nick Gall's OSCON keynote this morning, he pointed out the common features of TCP/IP and shipping containers. He claims that software architectures have failed to sustain the open source ideal of "freedom to change.
David Berlind: Based on my conversation with VIA's Chipset Platform Group marketing Manager Keith Kowal, VIA is not a processor company that can so easily be chalked off the way Transmeta buckled earlier this year.
The latest craze among the search/shopping/mapping/community etc. portals is look-alike personalized pages.
Nat Torkington interviewed Sun President Jonathan Schwartz at OSCON this morning. Nat didn't pull many punches, but Jonathan held his own.
I absolutely agree with David Berlind regarding the importance of low-power servers. [How a chill-pill for your server room improves your bottom line] What I don't understand, however, (and haven't for quite a long time) is why the power consumption issue is getting attention now that Intel is talking about its next-gen low-power offerings.
A Churchill Club panel discussion on July 27 dealt with the complex issue of getting competitive advantage from IT investments. Nick Carr stirred up controversy with his article and book positing that in most cases IT doesn't offer competitive advantage, basically because everybody has access to the same technology.
In his keynote at the Tuesday night "extravaganza" at OSCON, Paul Graham made three points: People work harder on things they like The standard office is unproductive Bottom-up works better than top-down I hope this becomes an essay because there's lots in it that's worth spending more time thinking about. Some of it is in Hiring is Obsolete.
No real details on this yet. But a quick examination of the Board of Directors page over at OASIS' web site reveals that after barely five months at the helm, OASIS Chairman of the Board Jim Hughes (of HP)--who held that title as recently as yesterday--has been replaced by Sun's Eduardo Gutentag.