Archive

The IT industry appears to be in the thick of a number of interesting trends happening not only in technology, but in society at large. Cultural assumptions are changing about the nature of media and production, and consumers are being empowered as producers. The Web at large has embraced this shift...

Microsoft on Wednesday announced that its cross-browser plug-in, Silverlight, will eventually appear on Linux. Silverlight, a challenge to Adobe's Flash, means Microsoft will have to convince Web users they can really "light up the Web," with Silverlight, as the ad copy states, and view high-quality...

Yahoo, Google and MSN hold a huge lead in search engine technology over open source alternatives. These search giants are competing in a battle among themselves to be a computer user's default search site for search. Where can a computer user go to find an adequate open source alternative to mainstr...

Microsoft's Office Open XML on Tuesday failed to win enough votes among members of the International Organization for Standardization to become an international standard. The vote, however, may not be the final chapter in the fight over standardized document file formats. The Foundation for a Free I...

Mobile devices are increasingly working their way into our everyday lives, and market research suggests that the operating systems driving these devices are often Linux-based. Technology research firm ABI Research forecasts that Linux will be the fastest growing smartphone operating system over the ...

In his new book, "The Cult of the Amateur," Andrew Keen publicly and pugnaciously says many of the things people were quietly thinking about Web 2.0. He refers to bloggers as a "pajama army" wreaking cultural havoc from their parents' basements. By penning his polemical book, Keen has brought to the...

Linux platform provider Xandros has taken one step further in a collaboration agreement with Microsoft that it signed in June over how the two firms will handle intellectual property on Linux interoperability projects. The two firms expanded the collaboration agreement on Aug. 15 to include Scalix e...

Targeting small and medium-sized businesses, Zmanda on Wednesday introduced an advanced enterprise-class release of its open source backup software called "Amanda." Proprietary backup and recovery software vendors haven't had to worry much about open source competition up to now. After all, they cou...

Mozilla's Firefox now has a campus edition, according to a Tuesday announcement by the company. The Firefox Campus Edition gives students access to music, lyrics, cover art, videos, photos and more, with add-ons FoxyTunes, StumbleUpon and Zotero. The push is yet another chapter in the business of dr...

Collaborative wiki technology is making its way into the small and medium-sized business, offering SMBs a way to foster collaboration among employees and interaction with the public. One company, Des-Moines, Iowa-based CustomerVision, recently released RapidWiki, which is designed to get small and m...

The open source model of developing software is making a significant impact, not only in the software development and broader high-tech community, but more generally within corporations, other types of businesses and organizations around the world, as Part 1 of this series describes. Whether it's on...

The world of technology contact centers is going to get a little more engaging. IBM, forever scrambling to stay ahead of the game in customer interaction models, announced Thursday that a virtual IBM Business Center is open for business in Asia. What makes this different from any other contact cente...

Ingres on Wednesday announced its launch of Icebreaker BI Appliance, a solution for business intelligence customers. The Icebreaker BI Appliance is actually a tightly woven combo of the Ingres database integrated with Linux business intelligence software from open source-based JasperSoft, and Linux-...

Open source software -- think Linux, Firefox, Wikipedia, Apache, Ajax and a host of other projects -- has introduced a radically different development model -- and mindset -- to the stream of high-tech innovation. It is one that is having repercussions in the corporate world that go beyond how softw...

Cepstral, a speech technology company, has decided to open its Media Resource Control Protocol library to the developer community. The move is designed to free telephony application developers from the protocol grindstone and lead to greater inroads in software innovation, Cepstral's CEO said. The m...