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Archive for February, 2012

There has been a shakeup in LightSquared's executive ranks following the Federal Communications Commission's refusal to let the company launch its high-speed wireless network due to potential disruptions to devices that rely on the Global Positioning System. LightSquared's chief executive, Sanjiv Ahuja, has stepped down. Doug Smith, the company's chief network officer, and Marc Montagner, its chief financial officer, will serve as interim co-chief operating officers until a permanent CEO can be found. Ahuja will continue to serve as chairman of the board.

Twitter launched an expansion of its mobile advertising system Tuesday, putting promoted tweets into the timelines of users accessing the service from mobile applications. Users accessing Twitter from iPhone and Android apps have been able to search out promoted trends and tweets before, and promoted tweets have been appearing in timelines for users accessing the site from a mobile Web browser. But now those sponsored tweets will also show up in the timelines of users accessing Twitter via iPhone and Android apps.

Google on Tuesday rebuffed a request by a European Union privacy body to delay implementation of changes in the search giant's privacy policies set to take effect on March 1. "[W]e have notified over 350 million authenticated Google users and provided highly visible notifications on our homepage and in search results for our non-authenticated users," Google Global Privacy Counsel Peter Fleischer wrote in a letter to the Isabelle Falque-Pierrotin, president of France's Commission Nationale de l'Informatique et des Libertes.

Google on Tuesday rebuffed a request by a European Union privacy body to delay implementation of changes in the search giant's privacy policies set to take effect on March 1. "[W]e have notified over 350 million authenticated Google users and provided highly visible notifications on our homepage and in search results for our non-authenticated users," Google Global Privacy Counsel Peter Fleischer wrote in a letter to the Isabelle Falque-Pierrotin, president of France's Commission Nationale de l'Informatique et des Libertes.

You may remember the subscription economy from previous posts. It's one way to make sense of cloud computing and the many new and very different ways of doing business on the Internet. We're most familiar with Software as a Service and how different it is from conventional licenses; so familiar, in fact, that I don't need to describe it for you here. But subscriptions as a way of doing business are just about everywhere; they're not just in tech anymore. For instance, if you want, you can get your clothing as a subscription, and not only that but men have sites dedicated just to them.

Apple sent out invites Tuesday for an event on March 7, at which time the company is expected to unveil a new product -- possibly the hotly anticipated third-generation iPad. The event will be held at company favorite Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. The invite depicts what appears to be an iPad devoid of a home button, prompting speculation that the event will be used to announce a significantly redesigned iPad. Apple has used the wording of previous invites to provide clues as to what to expect at its announcement.

In the run-up to the launch of any of Intel's newest generation Xeon CPUs, most every server vendor and its extended family starts jockeying for position over who has the bragging rights for the fastest, biggest, baddest x86 systems on the planet. The resulting Power Points tend to be mind-numbing, parsing out highly granular design points and technical details that can inspire even the geekiest server analyst to reach for a bottle of Extra Strength Tylenol. So the Dell Enterprise Solution launch event this week qualified as a pleasant surprise for virtually everyone involved.

Proview, the company locked in a legal dispute with Apple over rights to the iPad name in China, has fired a new legal salvo. It's filed an amended complaint in California Superior Court in Santa Clara accusing Apple of fraud and unfair competition. Among other things, Proview's reportedly seeking about $1.6 billion in damages from Apple. "There's a lot of money to be made by Proview," Ramon Llamas, a senior research analyst at IDC, told MacNewsWorld. "But make no mistake -- Apple's got a very talented group of lawyers working for it around the clock."

Yahoo is pressuring Facebook to pay licensing fees on several patents covering a variety of website functions like advertising, website personalization, social networking and messaging. Yahoo has a responsibility to its shareholders, employees and other stakeholders to protect its intellectual property, Yahoo spokesperson Micheline Tang said. "Recognizing that, other major Web and technology companies have already licensed some of these technologies," Tang continued.

Dell has unveiled a portfolio of new blade, rack and tower PowerEdge 12th Generation servers. The product line is nothing short of amazing, the company would like you to know. However, please don't focus so much on the underlying technology; rather, consider what it can do for the business line end user. That was CEO Michael Dell's implicit message at the conference at which he unveiled the hardware. "You're going to hear today about a very different kind of Dell than you would have heard about five years ago," he told the audience at the San Francisco event.

Bug #1 - Microsoft has a majority market share." - Ubuntu bug tracker. Much has changed since Canonical started on its quirky quest to "fix bug #1." Seven years ago Microsoft was seen as stagnant, ripe for plucking. Longhorn was still MIA, and Microsoft users were busy patching XP against the latest threats. Apple? Apple was still recovering from its near-death experience. The iPhone and the first netbook (the Asus Eee PC) were still three years in the future. The iPad wouldn't show up until 2010. If you had a computer, it was either a desktop or a laptop.

Google has hired veteran lobbyist and former member of Congress Susan Molinari to represent the company. Molinari served as a Republican member of the House of Representatives from New York between 1990 and 1997. Since then, she has represented major businesses as a lobbyist. Molinari, who will be based in Washington, D.C., "will become Vice President of Public Policy and Government Relations for the Americas, managing our policy advocacy and government outreach in North and South America, not just the D.C. office," said Google Chief Legal Officer David Drummond.

Groupon's push into mobile is firing on all cylinders, to hear the company describe its progress. The daily deal giant posted record mobile performance in North America in Dec. 2011, with one quarter of all Groupon vouchers purchased via a mobile device. Also, both consumer and merchant app usage were up significantly year over year, it said. Groupon mobile app users tripled from last December to more than 9 million. Also, more than 12,000 partners have used iOS devices or Android phones to redeem customer vouchers and track purchases via the company's merchant app.

Germany's Karlsruhe Higher Regional Court decided on Monday to temporarily suspend enforcement of a ban barring sales of Apple's iOS devices in that country. The case at hand is a patent suit brought by Motorola Mobility against Apple. The suit came after Cupertino changed the terms of its offer to license Motorola's technology. Motorola won't be able to enforce the ban, which was based on a lower court ruling, until both parties can present their arguments before a full-blown appellate proceeding before the Karlsruhe Higher Court, according to patents consultant Florian Mueller.

Attorneys General from 36 states have written to Google CEO Larry Page expressing deep concerns over the company's privacy terms. Google's new privacy policy, which permits greater information sharing among its products, should allow consumers to opt in, the attorneys general maintain. Besides lacking an opt-in mechanism, the policy also fails to provide a meaningful opt-out option, they say. The sharply worded letter calls the policy "troubling" and accuses Google of invading consumer privacy by automatically sharing personal information.

Salesforce.com hit it out of the park with quarterly earnings for its fiscal fourth quarter and full fiscal year, which ended Jan. 31, 2012. Total Q4 revenue was $632 million, an increase of 38 percent on a year-over-year basis, topping the $624 million expected by analysts. For the full fiscal year 2012, the company reported revenue of $2.27 billion, an increase of 37 percent from the prior year. Its Q1 2013 guidance was also robust, projected to be in the range of $673-$678 million, an increase of 33-34 percent, year-over-year.

Last month's Open Group Conference in San Francisco focused on how IT and enterprise architecture support enterprise transformation. Speakers in conference events also explored the latest in service oriented architecture, cloud computing and security. We're now joined by one of the main speakers, Jeanne Ross, director and principal research scientist at the MIT Center for Information Systems Research. Jeanne studies how firms develop competitive advantage through the implementation and reuse of digitized platforms.

Leave it to a comic strip, published 18 months ago, to allude to what has become a radical change in how technology is being adopted in the consumer world. Still, very few have recognized how this aspect would fundamentally transform enterprise software. When an ecosystem includes a marketplace or "app store," developers get direct access to customers, while customers get a more simplified method to find, try, buy, install and maintain software. The changes, which started in the mobile world, will transition to the enterprise and greatly change how we develop and acquire enterprise software.

T-Mobile plans to invest $4 billion in improving its wireless network to expand existing coverage and launch 4G LTE service. The "network modernization" strategy will also include improvements to voice and data coverage, an expansion of the company's sales force, retail store remodeling, an aggressive pursuit of business-to-business opportunities, and an increase in advertising spending. T-Mobile revealed its plans at the same time it reported its earnings for the final quarter of 2011.

Much of the activity at Apple's annual shareholder meeting was business as usual, according to reports. The company's directors and CEO Tim Cook were endorsed by a very wide margin. There was talk of the issues facing the company, such as what to do with that cash hoard, and why Apple hasn't handled the treatment of the factory workers issue better. Another event occurred at the meeting -- seemingly small but quite crucial to Apple, its investors and probably the tech industry as a whole: Apple agreed to change the way it elects directors.

The global marketplace for broadband services is dynamic and growing. At the end of 2011, approximately 660 million households subscribed to an Internet service, and about 580 million -- 32 percent of all global households -- received broadband service. The populous countries in Western Europe have high broadband penetration, but predictably, they are showing signs of slowing growth. Germany is Western Europe's largest broadband market with over 26 million homes subscribing to broadband services, equaling a penetration rate of over 66 percent of all households.

When Microsoft's next service update to Microsoft Dynamics CRM is released in Q2 2012, users who rely on its business intelligence functionality will be in for a pleasant surprise. Microsoft has ratcheted up the BI functionality significantly, providing more options on how to view, present and interact with the data, said Craig Dewar, director of Microsoft Dynamics CRM. "We think this will be an important competitive differentiator for us in the CRM space."

Apple won a round Thursday in its fight for ownership of the iPad name in China, but the bout is far from over. The world's most valuable publicly traded company gained its victory when a Shanghai court refused to block the sale of iPads in the city pending the outcome of a lawsuit over the iPad name. The company that claims to own the trademark on iPad, Proview International Holdings, of Taiwan, had won its first skirmish with Apple when a court in Shenzen, China, rejected the American company's claim on the trademark. That decision is being appealed.

Microsoft has filed a formal complaint with European Union antitrust authorities alleging that Motorola Mobility -- and hence, Google -- is improperly restricting the use of certain patented technologies. The complaint comes a week after the European Commission approved Google's $12.5 billion acquisition of the handset manufacturer -- with the warning that it would be watching to make sure Google did not use its new patent portfolio to take unfair advantage of competitors.

Top mobile app providers like Apple and Google have sided with California Attorney General Kamala D. Harris to increase privacy protections on mobile apps by providing consumers with more information about the personal data the apps collect. The effort was spearheaded by the California AG in an effort to crack down on apps that access and use personal consumer information such as the user's contacts list without notification or consent. As few as 5 percent of all mobile apps have a privacy policy, according to the AG, a statistic her office hopes to change.

I have a lot of fun writing about CRM -- the ideas, the tools and how they're brought together as a coherent strategy. CRM is a foundation on which to build relationships, layer on additional sales and support tools, and create a customer-centric business. But this foundation needs a foundation. After all, businesses thrived even before CRM technology was invented. While we in the CRM space like to say that you need a solid CRM foundation in place before you can grow to the next level, we tend to forget that CRM itself needs to rest on a solid foundation.

A few weeks ago I visited C Spire Wireless in Ridgeland, Miss. I didn't know what to expect. It's gone through quite a few changes recently; however, I have to say it was a delightful surprise. They were impressive and friendly. I met with the senior executives, they showed me around, we toured a retail store, they explained their strategy and answered my questions. Let me share with you some of what I learned on that visit. It is very interesting indeed. Then in my Pick of the Week, let's take another look at LightSquared. Is it curtains for them? Not yet.

Some developers are making more money by showcasing their wares in Amazon's Appstore instead of Google's Android Market, according to research from Distimo. The mobile analytics firm looked at the 110 apps available in both online stores that generated at least $200 per day in revenue during the last week of January. Of those, 42 earned more money sitting in the Amazon Appstore than they did in the larger Android Market. The Appstore also accounted for 28 percent of the total revenue from the top 110 sellers.

I spent the best part of last week cruising up and down Silicon Valley, checking in with customers and would-be clients. The consensus from this non-scientific survey is that business is better than OK, and most people are expecting this year to be the best in a while. Of course, there is a cloud -- literal and figuratively -- to go with that silver lining. After all, we're bouncing off a long fall to what's still a soft bottom. Business is good enough out there that many companies can't find enough qualified people.

Apple is hard at work building the "largest end-user-owned onsite solar array" in the U.S., according to a brief environmental report it released this week. The company announced that at its Maiden, N.C., data center, the central nervous system for services like iCloud and Siri, will be a LEED-certified data center running completely on renewable energy. The solar project will provide provide 42 million kWh of solar power to the center each year.

Research In Motion has released its first update for the PlayBook's operating system. The debut of BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0 adds -- finally -- some essential features to the tablet, such as a native email client, calendar and contact functionality. RIM wanted to ensure that it would not just provide email via the tablet -- but secure email, said David Heit, director of product management, enterprise, at RIM. "This is not just about an email client -- it is about achieving a secure and well-managed connectivity," he said.

Barnes & Noble released a new Nook Tablet Tuesday, shaving US$50 off the price and reducing the storage by half. The new price, $199, matches Amazon's Kindle Fire. The new Nook emulates the Fire on a number of fronts -- price and 8 GB storage. The new Nook comes with a 1 GHz dual-core processor and a slot for a microSD card that will hold up to 32 GB. B&N also dropped the price of its Nook Color e-reader $30 to $169. Amazon heated up the tablet market last fall when it introduce the Kindle Fire at a price that many consider a loss-leader.

The Obama administration's program to modernize federal information technology operations is now in its second year, and the momentum for reform is continuing at a high level. "We are seizing on the power of 21st century technology to consolidate data centers and moving to lightweight, shareable technologies, such as cloud computing, while also directing agencies to consolidate commodity IT services, and shift to shared services," Federal Chief Information Officer Steven VanRoekel said last week.

For some, any move to the cloud -- at least the public cloud -- means a higher risk for security. For others, relying more on a public cloud provider means better security. There's more of a concentrated and comprehensive focus on security best practices that are perhaps better implemented and monitored centrally in the major public clouds. And so which is it? Is cloud a positive or negative when it comes to cybersecurity? And what of hybrid models that combine public and private cloud activities -- how is security impacted in those cases?

Yelp, the online local review service, expects to sell 7.15 million shares in its IPO, at US$12 to $14 each. The total potential take is $100 million. The company will list its stock on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol "YELP." Yelp's price target values the company at roughly $778 million, about nine times last year's sales. That compares to Google's IPO at five times sales and Yahoo's IPO at four times sales. Yelp listed both Google and Yahoo as competitors in its IPO filing. Yelp claims about 66 million unique visitors per month and has about 25 million local reviews.

These days, cybercriminals are successfully circumventing advanced security controls with the precision of a sniper. In the crosshairs are banks, financial institutions, governments and enterprises. In a recent Gartner survey, 76 U.S. banks indicated that malware-based attacks were a growing problem and that fraudsters were able to defeat defenses such as advanced profiling systems, risk-based authentication and even most strong authentication methods. Unlike the old shotgun approach, attackers now carefully study their prey using cyberreconnaissance techniques.

Amazon's Kindle Fire was second in tablet marketshare only to Apple's iPad in the fourth quarter of 2011, according to a report from IHS iSuppli. Amazon didn't release official sales figures when it reported its quarterly earnings for the end of 2011 recently, but the iSuppli report states the company shipped 3.9 million Kindle Fires during the last three months of 2011. That gave the Android device a 14.3 percent marketshare of the worldwide tablet market. The Kindle Fire came in ahead of devices from Samsung and Barnes & Noble.

Three years ago, the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia was at a crossroads with its constituent relationship management system. The system it was using at the time, based on Unidata, was decades old, said Necie Steward, director of advancement services for USciences. The provider was planning to upgrade the system to a newer version, which would have required no small upheaval within the various departments that used it. As it happened, most of the users hated the system and welcomed the opportunity for a complete change.

Amazon's Chinese website is no longer offering Apple iPads for sale. This follows a request from Apple to drop the product because Amazon isn't authorized to sell the device, in that country, according to a recent report. Meanwhile, officials in various Chinese cities are confiscating iPads from retailers, apparently in connection with a legal dispute between Cupertino and Taiwanese firm Proview, which asserts it has rights to the iPad name in China. However, that issue is not related to the stoppage of Amazon's iPad sales in China, according to Yankee Group's Carl Howe.

A Morgan Stanley analyst has cut his rating on Amazon to equal weight from overweight. The reason? Mounting near-term challenges that mean 2012 will be a year of transition for the stock. Generally, the company is a long-term supporter of Amazon, Scott Devitt wrote, and it remains a long-term supporter. However, there are near-term trends the company must address, and soon, he said. Chief among them is Apple's wild success in changing the digital distribution of music, books and other content.