BI must become part of broad IT strategy
Companies that tie business intelligence capabilities to broad IT performance management practices and strategic goals can gain a significant strategic advantage, said analysts and IT managers said at the Gartner BI Summit being held here this week.
Most enterprise BI systems today are still inward-looking, using mostly past performance data such as revenue, profit and costs to support efforts to improve operational efficiencies and decrease costs. Read more...
Xmarks bookmark sync passwords safe, says LastPass
LastPass said Thursday that hackers did not obtain passwords linked to Xmarks, the browser synchronization service the company acquired last December.
Earlier in the day, LastPass forced customers to reset their master passwords after detecting a "traffic anomaly" that may have been a hacker intrusion.
But Xmarks passwords were not affected, and users of the browser plug-in -- available for Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and Safari -- were not required to come up with a new password.
"Xmarks users are not impacted that we can see," said LastPass CEO Joe Siegrist in an email reply to questions Thursday. "Different machines, networks, databases." Read more...
Try to remember: Evernote vs. Springpad
Sometimes it seems as though technology is making our lives more complicated, not less. There's a vast amount of information out there, much of which we seem determined to save. We collect it from the Web, from our scanners and via our smartphone cameras, and it can range from important data such as tax returns, family pictures and contracts to the photo you took of the wine that your friend served you last Thursday. Where do you put it all, and how do you find it again?
A number of applications promise to help you track that cacophony of information. Currently, the two kings of this particular castle are Evernote and Springpad. They are both Web-based tools designed to serve as bottomless storage repositories; they're built to enable people to deposit almost any type of digital information and then organize it, categorize it and/or retrieve it when needed. Read more...
Apple’s iMac, MacBook Pro lines are SSD friendly
Apple's new iMac line-up, unveiled earlier this week, includes technology that better marries the popular all-in-one desktops to the speedy NAND flash storage that Apple is using in more and more of its computers.
The updated all-in-ones, which sport Intel's latest Core-series processors, are based on Intel's Z68 chipset for Sandy Bridge. That chipset allows the iMac to use a speedy solid-state drive (SSD) as a boot and application drive in tandem with a traditional hard disk drive, which is used for mass storage of files and data.
Once available only on the highest-end 27-in. model, the built-to-order SSD option is now available for all but the cheapest iMacs, including a 21.5-in. version that starts at $1,499. Instead of getting a single hard disk drive, you can order a 256GB SSD and either a 1TB or 2TB hard disk, for an extra $600 or $750, respectively. Read more...
Suit says tech titans fixed worker pay
A former Lucasfilm software engineer is suing the movie studio along with Silicon Valley technology titans for what he portrayed as a conspiracy to curb pay for workers.
A suit filed on behalf of Siddarth Hariharan in a California state court on Wednesday contended that the accused firms and perhaps as many as 200 more illegally fixed workers pay by agreeing not to recruit talent from one another. Read more...
As Firefox Revs Its Engines, a New Browser Is Planned
Mozilla's Firefox 4 may be the browser's most popular release yet, but the project is already looking ahead with a new just-in-time (JIT) compiler for JavaScript that promises to outperform the software's current JägerMonkey technology.
Dubbed IonMonkey, the new compiler is designed to enable "many new JavaScript optimizations," according to the project's wiki page.
"In particular IonMonkey will feature much more organized and explicit data structures typical of advanced compilers," the project team explains. "This goal of being clean and flexible will be extremely important for future optimization work and experimentation." Read more...
Could Over-the-Air iOS Updates Brick Apple’s iPhone?
Apple and Verizon Wireless may be planning over-the-air downloads for iOS 5. News reports are heralding an end to the days when users have to plug an iPhone into a computer and connect to iTunes to get the latest version of the mobile operating system.
Over-the-air downloads are nothing new. Google's Android-powered phones do it. Microsoft Windows phones do it. Hewlett-Packard's Palm phones do it. So why shouldn't Apple?
Michael Disabato, managing vice president of network and telecom at Gartner, can think of several reasons why over-the-air downloads of iOS 5 would be a bad idea. Read more...
iPhone & Android: To OTA or not to OTA?
Going to the store to pick up software is an inconvenience that can be avoided. Want the new version of Photoshop? Download it. According to the team over at Mashable.com, Apple is planning to release their next iteration of Mac OS X (titled Lion) through the Mac App Store. As Mashable mentions, the Mac App Store became part of the OS X family in January 2011. The release of a full OS through the wires will bring an influx of traffic to the current perhaps-not-so frequented Mac App Store. Read more...
Hackers may have stolen Seattle ‘X-Factor’ contestants’ info
SEATTLE -- Thousands of people who tried out for the singing competition "The X-Factor" in Seattle last month may have had some of their personal information stolen. Online thieves hacked into a database containing the sensitive information.
The hackers stole names, birthdates, addresses and email addresses from about 250,000 "X-Factor" hopefuls, who have been auditioning across the country.
While no financial information was obtained, technology consultant Chris Pirillo says the concern is scammers could use the email addresses to get contestants to give out more personal information. Read more...
Convert to HTML5 and WebM with Zencoder
Zencoder is a cloud service for video encoding. Through a simple API, we provide high-performance, high-quality video encoding for web and mobile, at any scale, small or large, from broadcast media to online video publishers to UGC websites.
Zencoder encourags content publishers to support HTML5 video. Though HTML5 video is relatively new, it's now playable by more than 50% of Internet users, and that number is growing quickly.
They are committed to open technology and believe that WebM is the way forward for open video. An open-source HTML 5 video player, VideoJS, makes it easy to play WebM content in web browsers and mobile devices--but WebM encoding is needed too. Read more...