"Throw more money at it." That's an old suggestion for trying to solve problems big and small, but it's a solution that rarely works, because it doesn't address the root cause of the problem in question. Despite knowing that it's bad advice, the FCC has recently come up with a corollary to it: Throw more spectrum at it.

Recently, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski outlined a plan to promote growth in the mobile communications sector, including a proposal to give mobile operators more spectrum. That's bad.

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[The author of this article is Bob Flores, the former Chief Technology Officer for the US Central Intelligence Agency. Currently he's a private government technology consultant with Applicology Inc., and a member of the board of directors of St. Louis-based cloud computing software maker Appistry.]

Hope was a slogan and a sentiment that played a major role in the US presidential election of 2008, and hope continues to be the mindset of technology advocates pushing for cloud computing in the public sector. As a former government employee with a long history in the intelligence field, I can easily see how cloud computing can contribute to the country's security and prosperity.

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The year 2009 is expected to be the first when mobile phones start gaining real traction in holiday shopping. Nearly one in five consumers will use a mobile device to assist in their holiday shopping this year, according to Deloitte's most recent Annual Holiday Survey of retail spending and trends. Shoppers will use their mobile devices to find store locations, research prices, find product information, get coupons, read reviews and more. An estimated one in four consumers will even make a holiday purchase with their phone, representing a sizable chunk of potential sales.

It's little wonder then that retailers are showing more interest than ever before in the mobile Web. Recent Nielsen data shows that the mobile Web audience in the US grew a whopping 34 percent between July 2008 and July 2009, in spite of the economic climate and otherwise bleak consumer spending. Ironically, the down economy may be a key factor luring consumers to the mobile Web this holiday season, as they use their mobile phones to compare prices and find the best bargains, even in real-time as they peruse malls and stores.

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Download Google Chrome Dev version 245.1 for Linux from Fileforum now.

Google finally released a beta version of its Chrome Web browser for Linux on December 8, slightly more than one year after releasing its Chrome browser for Windows. The wait was worth it, especially given the more than 300 extensions already available to customize the new browser.

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The proposed USD$30 billion Comcast-NBC Universal deal has entered the labyrinthine process of winning Congressional approval from the antitrust gurus and the Federal Communications Commission. Small cable operators, which apparently still exist, fear that they will be driven out of business by the sprawling new company that would combine NBC's programming with Comcast's vast network of 24 million subscribers.

Those of us who remember the Frankenstein that was AOL Time Warner may shudder as we hear these words again: "It's great to own content and distribution!"

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Linux and open source middleware JBoss has made its mark in the enterprise, and it is just a matter of time before open source becomes mainstream in other functional parts of the IT infrastructure as well. Where exactly that will happen, however, is the interesting question.

With most companies spending 10 to 20 percent of their revenue on enterprise software, many IT managers would love to see more enterprise-class open source options. However, IT architects and project managers of IT tend to be cautious -- the back office has a low tolerance for risk, which makes it difficult for projects to gain entry into that exclusive back office.

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For years, IT departments have had full control over their own infrastructure -- for better and worse -- and are naturally uncomfortable with anything that prevents them from being the sole resource for their own infrastructure. They have been trained to maintain tight control because of the complexity of their own environment -- a positive trait that has helped to assure timely and accurate delivery, but limits their ability to accept change.

It should come as no surprise, then, that IT often views data leaving its network as a negative rather than a positive. However, Software as a Service cost-savings and the ability to help companies foster innovation within their own infrastructure is too strong a value proposition for most enterprises to ignore. Although management may be pushing cloud initiatives on reticent IT staff, many chief information security officers (CISOs) and chief technology officers (CTOs) are wary of the hype and have nagging fears about the loss of infrastructure control, loss of ownership of data, vendor lock-in and data security.

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Up to now, if you wanted a smartphone with power and without complexity, the only orchard you could go to was Apple's. With the arrival of the Motorola Droid, though, that's changed.

The Droid uses Google's Android operating system. It's not as slick as the OS in Apple's iPhone, but it's still a breeze to use, and it has some tricks of its own, like voice search. Yes, you can talk to this phone, and it will fill in your search terms. It's accurate, too. As a goof, I asked it to find "chronosynclastic infundibulum," and performed the search without a sneeze.

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The story of "Edgy" sounds like an iPhone developer's worst nightmare. You create a game that includes a lot of intricate puzzles and levels. Lots of time goes into it, so you think it's appropriate to charge a moderate amount, as iPhone games go. There seems to be no reason for the App Store to reject it -- no shaken babies, no naked ladies, no Internet tethering, just clean old puzzle-solving fun. Approval is granted, public reaction is generally positive, and it seems you've caught your little piece of the iPhone dream.

Then it all starts to unravel over a single word: the name of the app.

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This just in: Females outnumber males on social networking sites. The site Pingdom did a survey, and concluded that 16 out of 19 (84%) of the most popular social sites have more women populating them than men. The super geek sites Digg, Reddit, and Slashdot have more men on them, but the more popular sites including Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, all have more women visiting them.

The average ratio of all sites surveyed, according to Pingdom, was 47% male, 53% female.

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Digital advertising is evolving beyond the desktop computer, leaving companies relying solely on Web sites and display advertising woefully behind the eight ball. More and more, brands are relying on software development to create engaging consumer experiences that span multiple open platforms. Branded mobile applications are fast becoming an important element of this new digital ecosystem, as evidenced by Apple's announcement that its App Store had surpassed 100,000 apps in early November.

This shift away from more familiar mediums for brand communication has important implications for the composition of, and interaction between, established groups within agencies. The pervasive dynamic between technology and creative groups is not always conducive to more technically demanding campaigns because of a fundamental disconnect between these two groups' proficiencies.

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E-readers seem to be smoking hot this year. The Amazon Kindle, of course, has been leading the pack, but Sony seems to have sold more than a handful as well, and its new Sony Daily Edition e-reader may be in short supply. Meanwhile, newcomer Barnes & Noble already sold out of its new Nook e-reader, which the company just announced a month ago -- and that's only pre-orders that aren't shipping until the end of this month. Order a new Nook now, and you'll have to wait until January to get it.

Sounds a bit like Amazon's first sold-out holiday sales effort with the Kindle.

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Let's put this simply: If you want to stream free, professional videos online,

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If you search for "browser" in the App Store, you'll get dozens of applications, each purporting to be an alternative to the iPhone and iPod touch's built-in Safari browser. In a sense, they are alternatives, since they look different and might have a few unique features. But they're really all Safari underneath -- Apple will only approve browsers that are basically built with Safari guts using a reworked user interface.

On the down side, this means we won't be seeing alternative browsers from the likes of Mozilla or Opera any time soon, and there's no official challenger to Safari in terms of speed or compatibility with various Web standards.

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Microsoft announced at its Professional Developer Conference on Tuesday the release of version 4.0 under the Apache 2.0 license. The license transfer makes good on a longstanding promise from Redmond that it would make the popular .NET code base available as open source.

The gift to the open source community, however, does come with some strings attached -- or, rather, removed from the gift wrapping. Microsoft reduced some of the framework's functionality in making the Software Developer's Kit open source, according to Peter Galli, the Open Source Community Manager for Microsoft's Platform Strategy Group. In his blog post last Tuesday, Galli revealed details about the code release.

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