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.
Websense -- a company that sells solutions that help managers crackdown on unauthorized usage of the Internet -- issued the following statement today: "Websense, Inc., the world’s leading provider of employee internet management solutions, today announced that internet misuse in the workplace costs American corporations more than $178 billion annually in lost productivity.
Should we have quotes of the day here on Between the Lines? As I research my stories, I come across all sorts of interesting quotes (on the phone, in the blogosphere, etc.
News.com's Matt Hines cites a new study by the Hackett Group showing that companies building too much complexity into HR and financial software systems will incur higher costs than companies that have simple strategies.
I know I said it the other day in another blog -- "Nicholas Carr, eat your heart out" -- but now comes a company that's pretty much saying it on TV. Although the TV commercial apparently isn't that new, I noticed that Bank of America is running ads on OLNTV's Tour De France coverage (not much can stop Lance Armstrong from winning his seventh Tour at this point) that, in no uncertain terms, attempts to point out that IT is one of the financial giant's key differentiators.
From Ed Gottsman: The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, with funding from the US Department of Homeland Security, has developed a "smart" cell phone that sits on a security officer's hip and continuously transmits radiation readings to a central server. These readings are used to develop a map of existing radiation sources, which in turn is used to detect new, illicit sources of radiation, should they appear.
During the conference call announcing the layoffs and restructuring HP CEO Mark Hurd explained his reasons for dissolving the company's Customer Solutions Group (CSG), which was tasked with sales to corporations, small and medium-size businesses and public-sector customers. The bulk of the sales organization will be integrated into the Technology Solutions Group, which will now both develop product solutions and sell to large corporations.
In his last response to my response to his response to my attack on the credibility of his report on Technorati (did you follow that?), Microsoft evangelist Robert Scoble asks and implies some questions that deserved to be answered.
IBM's senior program manager of Web services Standards Tom Glover (also president, and Chairman of the Board for the Web Services-Interoperability (WS-I) Organization) has responded to my feedback on defining open. Why define open?
I couldn't help but spot the irony in the fact that in the same week that HP announced it would be laying off approximately 15,000 employees, it also announced it would be taking on one new employee who will be getting a compensation package with an estimated worth of $15.3 million per year.
The Promethean Dave Winer (who I wrote about here) chimed in to the percolating Berlind/Scoble (chief Microsoft geek blogger) conversation about their respective views on Technorati and blogging styles:Meanwhile Scoble is getting some grief from ZDNet's David Berlind. I've gotten this kind of grief myself, and it's based on a big misunderstanding.