Microsoft staffing secretive Windows Phone project
Microsoft is working on a secretive new project in its Windows Phone division, according to a job description it posted over the weekend.
The description, for a software development engineer in test, gives few hints about the project.
"We are a team working on a top secret project inside the Windows Phone division. Our mission...GO BIG! DISRUPT THE MARKET!" the job description reads.
The advertisement says the project involves the first version of a new feature set and the group will complete planning for the features in a month. Read more...
VMware CTO looks back at ‘wild ride’
Few IT companies have fundamentally changed the data center like VMware. Yet 13 years into VMware's existence nearly all of its co-founders, including the wife-and-husband team of CEO Diane Greene and Chief Scientist Mendel Rosenblum, have moved on.
Still left to tell the story of VMware's early days is Stephen Herrod, the chief technology officer, who was working with Rosenblum as a Ph.D. student at Stanford University before VMware's founding in 1998.
At the time, there was little reason to think the idea of applying IBM's mainframe virtualization to commodity x86 servers would transform enterprise IT and be used by nearly every member of the Fortune 1000.
"I guess you have to be blindly optimistic to do any of this," Herrod said in an interview with Network World. "At the time, no one had ever virtualized the Intel processor and it became clear very quickly that it was not designed to do so. There were a lot of hard technical challenges that made it fun." Read more...
Update: Cisco to cut 6,500 jobs in cost-cutting blitz
Cisco Systems will cut about 6,500 jobs as part of an effort to focus its business and reduce operating expenses by $1 billion per year, the company announced Monday.
The layoffs will eliminate about 9 percent of Cisco's regular, full-time workforce. In the ranks of vice president and above, Cisco said it will cut 15 percent of employees.
The cuts will be made across all functions in the company. Of the 6,500 employees, 2,100 will take early retirement under a voluntary program Cisco announced in April. Read more...
Adobe snarfs up electronic signature automator
Adobe Systems has acquired the online electronic-signature and signature-automation provider EchoSign.
"We're extremely pleased to announce that EchoSign is now part of the Acrobat family," enthused EchoSign CEO Jason Lemkin and Adobe Acrobat headman Kevin Lynch in a post on the just-acquired company's blog – and, yes, that's their own ebullient emboldening.
In his own blog post, Lynch explained that EchoSign will be "integrated with Adobe's other document services including SendNow for managed file transfer, FormsCentral for form creation and CreatePDF for online PDF creation." Read more...
Mozilla outs un-Google site sign-in prototype
Mozilla has proposed a new method for signing into websites that avoids both site-specific passwords and existing cross-site sign-in services from corporate behemoths such as Google and Facebook.
Known as BrowserID, Mozilla's prototype is built atop a new "Verified Email Protocol", which uses public-key cryptography to prove that a particular user owns a particular email address. In essence, BrowserID lets you log into a website simply by clicking on a button and choosing an email address you wish to sign in with. Behind the scenes, the website, your browser, and a separate verification service use crypto keys to verify your identity. Read more...
Wireless networks are near capacity
Mobile networks in North America are filled to 80 percent of capacity, with 36 percent of base stations facing capacity constraints, according to a survey by investment bank Credit Suisse.
Networks in other regions also are more than 50 percent utilized, with the global average at 65 percent, Credit Suisse said after surveying carriers around the world. That level of use matches the average "threshold" rate that would trigger the service providers to start buying more network equipment, the report said. Looking ahead, on average the carriers expected their utilization rate to grow to 70 percent within 12 months.
Credit Suisse used the results to predict new sales by makers of cellular equipment, such as Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent, Nokia Siemens Networks, and Huawei Technologies. But at a certain level, heavy use of a base station can also affect the mobile experience of individual subscribers. The survey found that 23 percent of base stations worldwide had capacity constraints (defined as a utilization rate over 80 percent during busy hours), while 36 percent in North America were under that kind of pressure. Read more...
ITC won’t review Apple-Kodak patent decision
The U.S. International Trade Commission has terminated an investigation into a complaint by Apple that Eastman Kodak infringed on some of its patents in its cameras.
The ITC said on Monday that it decided not to review a May 12 ruling by an ITC administrative law judge that Kodak did not infringe Apple's patents. Read more...
User satisfaction study: Facebook vulnerable to Google+
User satisfaction with Facebook is low enough that the social networking site risks losing significant market share to Google+, according to a new study.
Although Facebook did marginally better this year than last, it still ranked last among all the sites included in the study, called the American Customers Satisfaction Index (ACSI)/ForeSee Results E-Business Report.
Describing the Facebook user experience as "poor," author Larry Freed wrote that Facebook has benefitted from "a monopoly of sorts" in the social networking market.
But Facebook shouldn't rest on its laurels. Despite its dominance, things could change quickly if it doesn't improve its customer satisfaction, according to Freed, president and CEO of Foresee Results. Read more...
Managing your cloud’s performance: Best practices
Once you move your core IT systems into private or public cloud networks, your work isn't over. Now you have a different set of technology issues to deal with: managing the cloud to ensure that your investments pay off for your enterprise and deliver the efficiencies and ROI that you're expecting.
Cloud management and monitoring have become even more important in the wake of April's Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) outage, when the IT world got to see just what happens when a cloud environment runs into problems, taking the operations of many companies down with it. There have been other recent serious cloud outages as well.
Getting the performance that your enterprise is paying for is "one of the big 'gotchas' for public clouds," says Mary Johnston Turner, an analyst at IDC. In a recent study of 250 user companies, service-level agreement (SLA) performance guarantees ranked second in importance after the specific needs of the applications themselves, she says.
"Enterprises are very concerned about performance," she says. "One of the reasons you're seeing so much interest in private clouds is because IT leaders are responsible for getting good performance to their users" and they aren't always ready to hand those huge responsibilities over to third-party cloud vendors. Read more...
Microsoft posts $250K reward for Rustock botnet herders
Microsoft upped the ante on Monday in its months-long battle against the Rustock botnet by posting a $250,000 reward for information that leads to the arrest and conviction of the hackers who controlled the malware.
It was the first time Microsoft used its malware bounty program since February 2009, when it offered the same amount for the people responsible for the fast-spreading Conficker worm.
Microsoft announced the reward early Monday in a blog written by Richard Boscovich, a senior attorney with the company's digital crimes unit. Microsoft also posted a reward document (PDF) that included an email address for tipsters. Read more...