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.
A Dave Matthews Band bus driver was recently convicted of emptying a septic tank onto the open deck of a Chicago River tour boat containing 100 passengers. He didn't mean to dump it on the tour boat, by the way--he just meant to dump it in the river.
Coming up on a year as CEO of the 'troubled' Siebel Systems, former IBM'er Mike Lawrie was rolled out to the press to talk about whatever milestones were achieved during his first 11 months on the job. Less than two weeks later he was unceremoniously sacked, replaced by George Shaheen, who had been a Siebel board member for a decade.
IT Facts has details of the Cinema Index survey, comparing the cost of a movie ticket to average earnings around the world. Workers in India have the best deal, earning the price of a movie ticket in about 16 minutes.
In an interview with News.com, Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers describes Cisco's ideal takeover target as a company with "about 100 people, primarily in an engineering product area, with good engineers that are just about to bring a new product out (or has just come out.
If you're not a Comcast customer, you're probably blissfully unaware of the problems that Comcast customers have been experiencing the last few weeks. If you are a Comcast customer, then like me, you've likely experienced serious downtime and you're probably wondering what's going on.
Based on a recent e-mail I received, word is starting to get out that ZDNet is running an auction on eBay that awards the winning bidder some audio advertising space in the IT Matters series of podcasts that I host. Normally, it goes against every rule in the editorial book here at ZDNet for someone like me to be discussing one of the company's advertising initiatives, but in this case, I'm crossing the line because I think its for a very worthy cause.
Steve Gillmor's latest blog posting following on my posting about salesforce.com further lays out how a new species of software infrastructure is evolving that is a real alternative to the Microsoft platform.
If there ever was an industry battle that exemplifies the legendary epic of David vs. Goliath, one that has lasted for years with the scrappy and resourceful David continually unsheathing new and effective weapons, that battle has been between browser maker Opera Software and Microsoft.
Yesterday I talked with executives from a company making the transition from selling a proprietary enterprise application to embracing the open source way. The newly minted Greenplum is actually a new iteration of Metapa, a company with an application for data distribution and query execution across a large cluster of commodity Linux machines to boost database performance on large tables.
Avalon, the new graphics sub-system that Microsoft plans to include in its upcoming Longhorn operating system, lets developers mix 3-D features into designs by simply including them in the markup along with the rest of the user interface. To some, like Microsoft tech evangelist Karsten Januszewski, Avalon holds a lot of promise, but there are also skeptics.