With Yang out, big changes coming to Yahoo?
Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang's departure this week from the company should put in in a better position to take drastic action to fix its long-running woes.
Yang has seen the company become one of the first Internet high flyers and then descend into B-level status since founding it 18 years ago next month. He resigned Tuesday from multiple positions at the firm, including his lofty position on the company's board of directors.
Yang's departure is but the latest upheaval at the embattled company that in September ousted former CEO Carol Bartz, and then dealt with speculation that both Microsoft and Google may be gunning to buy Yahoo.
Just two weeks ago, Yahoo appointed former PayPal president Scott Thompson to replace Bartz as CEO. Read more...
Obama wants less offshoring, as vendors see U.S. shift
President Barack Obama is trying to encourage U.S. companies not to send work overseas. This might not be as hard a job as it seems for some types of IT work.
A number of vendors believe offshore outsourcing is becoming less attractive and are working to make the most of this shift. Among them is a former CEO of the large IT services firm Keane, Brian Keane, who is setting up a new firm, Ameritas Technologies, to address the domestic IT services market. The Keane firm was recently sold to Japanese-based NTT Data Company.
Keane said his company will be "focusing on jobs that have gone offshore, but should have never gone offshore." Some software applications are strategic to a company and require extensive interaction with users, Keane said. Offshore developers "just don't understand how the application is being used," he said.
Stephanie Moore, an analyst at Forrester, agrees with this view. Read more...
Smarter hypervisor use can lead to a ‘big, big change’ in security
To gain insight on the months ahead as they relate to IT attacks, malware, cloud security, and the impact of virtualization on security, we recently chatted with Simon Crosby, former CTO of Citrix Systems' data center and cloud business. Crosby recently founded a cloud security startup, Bromium, with Guarav Banga, former CTO and senior vice president at Phoenix Technologies, and Ian Pratt, chairman of Xen.org and co-founder of XenSource.
CSO Online: What do you think 2012 may bring in terms of malware?
Crosby: I think you will see, obviously, a growth. By the way, the growth path in malware is currently exponential per year. That will continue. That's obvious. I think you'll see, in the U.S. large enterprise and maybe even in the federal infrastructure, another major compromise next year. It will be incredibly bad and incredibly embarrassing. That is, to say, very succinctly, we are now in a state of ongoing national cyber espionage. It's not cyber war, but it's cyber espionage on a grand scale. That's absolutely going to carry on. However, I do think the year ahead heralds a fantastic opportunity. It will be the first time when virtualization hardware and its uses within computer systems, generally, dramatically change the odds in favor of security. Read more...
U.S. losing high-tech jobs, R&D dominance to Asia
U.S. companies are locating more of their research and development operations overseas, and Asian countries are rapidly increasing investments in their own science and technology economies, the National Science Board (NSB) reported this week.
While the U.S. remains the global leader in science and technology R&D, that lead is narrowing, asserts NSB, the policymaking body for the National Science Foundation. In particular, 10 countries in Asia -- China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand -- are closing ranks on U.S. leadership in science and technology.
The U.S. share of global R&D expenditures dropped from 38% to 31% between 1999 and 2009, according to NSB's new report, Science and Engineering Indicators 2012. Meanwhile, global R&D share in the Asia region grew from 24% to 35% during the same time frame. Asia's rapid ascent has been driven largely by China, where R&D growth spiked 28% in 2008-2009, landing it in second place behind the U.S. Read more...
Microsoft opposes SOPA, declines to join blackout strike
Microsoft today said it opposes a controversial anti-piracy bill in the U.S., but declined to join the widespread "Internet strike" that sites like Google and Wikipedia were conducting.
"We oppose the passage of the SOPA bill as currently drafted," said a Microsoft spokesman in an emailed statement. "This is an important issue and we think the recent White House statement points in a constructive way to problems with the current legislation, the need to fix them, and the opportunity for people on all sides to talk together about a better path forward."
Although 2011 reports had said that Microsoft was quietly working behind the scenes to modify SOPA, or the Stop Online Piracy Act, this was the first time the company publicly stated its position. Read more...
Google launches project for S.African businesses
Getting more small companies wired will help their businesses grow, and help their country fight unemployment, officials said Thursday as Google launched a project that makes it easy to showcase South African entrepreneurship on the Internet.
With a few clicks Thursday, the first entrepreneurs used Google Inc.'s Woza Online to create their own websites. Woza Online, which Google launched with help from South African government researchers and cash from mobile phone company Vodacom, offers free domain names with South Africa's co.za tag for the first 10,000 applicants.
It took Rajis Reddy less than 15 minutes to set up a website for her company, which employs 10 craftsmen and other workers in rural eastern South Africa to create traditional, brightly colored wooden toys.
"We've developed a website!" Reddy said. "I can't believe it." Read more...
Apple offers software for interactive textbooks
Apple is launching a new version of its iBooks software, tailored to present vivid, interactive textbooks for elementary and high school students on the iPads.
IBooks 2 will be able to display books with videos and other interactive features.
Apple Inc. is also setting up a textbook section its iTunes store. Among the launch titles will be two high school textbooks — Biology and Environmental Science — from Pearson PLC and five from McGraw-Hill.
They will cost $15 or less, said Phil Schiller, Apple's head of marketing. Schools will be able to buy the books for its students and issue redemption codes to them, he said. Read more...
5 insanely thin and light laptops that are coming soon
There's a whole new wave of gadgets right around the corner that you might not have even known you needed — until now, of course. Meet the ultrabook, a class of super-slim, considerably powerful notebook computers that are cut from the same cloth as Apple's MacBook Air. "Ultrabook" might not be a word you've heard before, but the idea is meant to inspire a category of laptop that is nearly as mobile as a tablet, but that doesn't sacrifice power for portability — the ultimate pitfall of the netbook.
Ultrabooks are on the way, but choosing between them won't be easy. Assuming you don't take the Mac route and opt for Apple's own offering, the members of this tidal wave of featherweight computers running Windows will share most of their features in common by definition. In fact, the term "ultrabook" is a trademarked term, owned by Intel. To qualify as an ultrabook, a notebook computer should hover around the $1,000 mark, be no more than .8" thick, weigh less than 3.1 lb., and boast a respectable battery life and an efficient solid-state drive (SSD) rather than a traditional mechanical harddrive.
As you'll see, these rules were meant to be broken, but even some of the notebooks that stray a little from the mold are interesting enough to keep an eye out for. Here are five favorite ultrabooks, some available now and some on the way soon, and what sets them each apart from the pack. Read more...
China’s challenge to the iPad raises a red flag
China Communist Party members can now carry a tablet PC to verify identification cards, read the blogs of cadres and manage state-owned firms without fretting that using a bourgeois Apple Inc iPad will ruin their street cred.
Enter RedPad Number One, an Android-based tablet computer filled with software applications (apps) catered to a party official's every need for control. Delivered in a decadent leather case for 9,999 yuan ($1,600), it is twice the price of Apple's most expensive iPad 2.
The eye-popping price has China's microblogs alight with chatter over just why this device is so expensive and who is footing the bill.
"Is it the god of toys? Why don't they throw in a free iPad with it," said Looperrr on Weibo, Sina Corp's, microblogging platform. Read more...
FireFall creator Red 5 drops from E3 to protest SOPA
Red 5, the PC game developer behind the upcoming free-to-play shooter/MMO mashup FireFall, has dropped out of E3 2012 in protest of SOPA.
CEO Mark Kern, also a Boston University Law School graduate, is redirecting the company’s E3 funds to launch The League For Gamers, an advocacy group representing end users, gamers and First Amendment advocates. The Entertainment Software Association (ESA), a trade body for the games industry, owns the E3 show and supports SOPA.
Kern gave an extensive interview to Ars Technica in which he explained that the ESA has taken only the side of large publishers on the SOPA issue, leaving out developers, indies, and users. Read more...