IT embraces bring your own device in corporate deployment, despite risks
While the bring-your-own-device phenomenon in IT presents a fair amount of risk to enterprise security, most companies are warming up to the idea anyway. A Cisco-sponsored survey of 600 IT and business leaders found that 95 percent of their companies allow employee-owned devices on the corporate network.
Of all companies surveyed, 36 percent support all BYOD devices, while 48 percent support a select list of devices. An additional 11 percent tolerate employee-owned devices on enterprise networks, but will offer no IT support.
iPhone meets its match
Finally, initial sales of another smartphone smoke iPhone -- that is if leaked numbers prove true. Samsung Galaxy S III goes on sale in 11 days, but preorders reportedly already top 9 million. By comparison, the much-lauded iPhone 4S sold 4 million units, including preorders, during its first three days of availability. At this pace, Galaxy S III is poised to be the biggest smartphone launch to date.
Samsung announced the smartphone on May 3, when I asked: "Is iPhone 4S obsolete?" Surely someone thinks so, and their answer should chill the hearts of Apple apologists and investors. Samsung, not Apple, is the rising star in the cloud-connected device firmament. Perhaps iPhone 5 will change matters. But for now, Samsung, propelled by the Galaxy S brand, broad channel distribution and smart software innovation, is brightest star.
Facebook's IPO is a jackpot for some, despite dark shadow of mobile
Today is Facebook Day, the day when the most-successful-social-network-so-far opened up to public investment and outshone all other American IPOs up to this point.
With shares initially priced at $38, Facebook (FB) opened at $42.99 on the Nasdaq at 11:30am EST on Friday. After a brief delay in trading on Friday, a reported 82 million shares (of 421.2 million) were traded in the first 30 seconds of availability, totaling $116 billion.
Now in beta, ESET Smart Security 6 and NOD32 Antivirus 6
ESET has released NOD32 Antivirus 6 and Smart Security 6 to public beta, and is attempting to lure early adopters by offering a chance to win one of 500 one-year licences for Smart Security.
Top of the new feature list must be Anti-Theft, a web service which aims to help you locate missing devices. If you’ve enabled anything similar on your phone or tablet then you’ll know what to expect – you can log on with a browser, perhaps see the position of your device on a map, view grabs of the laptop’s screen, and so on but it’s still a welcome addition to the packages. (Although it’s in NOD32 solely for the beta: normally Anti-Theft will be in Smart Security only.)
LastPass Wallet secures your iPad and iPhone information
LastPass.com, developer of the LastPass family of password-storage products, has released a new free app for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. LastPass Wallet is designed to give iOS users a taster of the LastPass feature set by providing a tool for viewing, creating and managing secure notes, one of the service’s lesser known features.
The app provides templates for users to quickly create notes for sensitive personal information often found in the user’s wallet or purse, such as credit card details, passport number and wireless passwords.
Turns text files into 3D-animated ebooks
Plain, ordinary text files aren’t normally the most interesting ways to convey information, but if you’d like to change that then Toolwiz FlipBook may be able to help.
Just point the program at a particular TXT file, and in a click it’ll be converted into an executable file. And launching this on any Windows PC will display your file’s contents in a 3D book. Readers can navigate the book via keyboard or mouse, and will see an animated flipping effect as the pages turn.
Will you make Mark Zuckerberg rich?
Stated differently: Will you invest in Facebook? The third-largest IPO in history begins today. Facebook set a price of $38 share, which values the social network at about $104 billion. Twenty-eight year-old cofounder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg will be super wealthy, if Facebook gets its price (and likely much more) as I post ahead of the market's open.
Facebook makes available 421.2 million shares. Zuckerberg maintains voting majority, 503.6 million, which at $38 is $19.1 billion, making him the 29th richest person -- wealthier than Google's cofounders.
Comcast ditches data caps, but charges heavy users overage fees
Comcast said Thursday it plans to make changes to its pricing structure to start billing for the amount of data customers use, versus the capped method in place today. The cable company will test two different pricing structures in some markets, while hard enforcement of the 250GB cap put into place in 2008 would end.
Both piloted pricing structures give users 300GB of data at a flat rate. Where they differ is in how this allotment is treated: one solution places this cap across all of Comcast's tiers, while the other carries the 300GB allotment for the Internet Essentials, Economy, and Performance tier and higher allotments for faster tiers above that.
Windows Phone reaches for the bottom
Sometimes, BetaNews readers really amaze me. Three days ago I posted "The measure of Windows Phone failure is..." based on comScore US smartphone OS market share data. To me, it was a trivial story, because I was days late writing about the numbers and posted it more as filler, being short writers (because of holidays and emergencies). More than 220 comments later, Windows Phone is hot-topic of debate among you.
Yesterday, Gartner released first-quarter global phone sales data that puts to end any real debate about Windows Phone's present: Combined smartphone OS share with Windows Mobile was 1.9 percent, down from 2.6 a year earlier but flat sequentially. The quarter-on-quarter data suggests, in context of Nokia Lumia launches, that Microsoft's mobile operating systems have finally hit bottom -- that perhaps the things won't get much worse and could finally improve.
Trackerbird launches, lets you collect user analytics in your .NET apps
Cloud-based desktop software analytics platform Trackerbird completed its beta phase and launched to general availability on Thursday. The platform lets .NET software developers and vendors embed tracking mechanisms in their software to watch installations, trends in feature usage, user behaviour, demographics, and license conversions.
It's similar in concept to Concerity Analytics, which we launched here on BetaNews two years ago. By integrating Trackerbird's SDK into a desktop application, developers can collect anonymized reports and detailed conversion funnel analysis in real time. All software usage metrics collected by Trackerbird are totally anonymous and no IP addresses are stored. Developers can make Trackerbird analytics collection an option that the end user can choose to run.
4G LTE: 1 billion served by 2017
Unsurprisingly, 4G LTE is the fastest growing cellular network technology, in part for what it delivers and deployment's timing. Strategy Analytics forecasts that 4G LTE will reach 1 billion connections, or 15 percent of all, by 2017. That compares to 12 years for GSM and about 11 years for WCDMA to reach as many.
But LTE isn't gain without pain. In the United States, Verizon by far and large has the most expansive 4G network, reaching 250 metro areas and 200 million Americans compared to 38 metros and 75 million people for AT&T. Adoption still is fairly low, perhaps because phone subscribers don't understand the value. Meanwhile, Verizon will axe grandfathered unlimited plans when subscribers upgrade to LTE. There's pain for the gain.
Earthlink debuts hosted desktop services, adds cloud expert to executive team
Earthlink this week strengthened its cloud services offerings, debuting a hosted desktop solution that allows customers access regardless of device and via both the Internet and secure MPLS connections. Over 250 applications are supported, and customers may also install their own custom applications.
Since the middle of last year, EarthLink has been transforming its business from an ISP to cloud services provider. In July, the company promoted Brian Fink to executive vice president of managed and cloud services. Fink brought with him two decades of experience in managed services. Since then, the company has continued to make some high profile cloud hires, including the appointment Thursday of former Concentric Cloud president Michael Toplisek to vice president of IT services.
FeedDemon 4.1 drops Google Reader sharing features
It’s a strange day when some of the biggest news about the latest release of an application is a feature's removal, but this is the case with the latest version of FeedDemon. Some months ago, Google announced plans to make changes to its Reader service and this has ultimately led to FeedDemon removing the sharing features that relied on this particular service, but Google+ mostly been picks up the slack. The most recent version of FeedDemon also has a number of other changes and additions that are worth mentioning.
The program has long featured a recommendation engine that can point you in the direction of stories, articles and feed that you might well find interesting, and this has been improved to ensure greater relevance. When you use the built in browser to view web pages, a new Ctrl+0 keyboard shortcut is available that can be used to revert to a 100 percent zoom level. If you have the Pro version of the program – as opposed to the free Lite version – you also have a new newspaper style Photo Strip view to make use of.
Blackbaud CRM for nonprofits gets major feature upgrade, Web interface
Catering to the special marketing needs of nonprofit organizations, Blackbaud Inc. on Thursday released a new version of its Blackbaud CRM software which expands the software's functionality with a new browser-based dashboard, new fundraising and membership management functionality, and improved overall data management.
The major addition to Blackbaud CRM 2.93 is its Web dashboard. Previously, the software was only available as a Windows application, but now it can be accessed through Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera, Safari for iOS, and Android. The dashboard features a new, streamlined user interface and new batch commit functionality.
Flipboard 1.9 for iOS lets you listen while you look
iOS app Flipboard has already earned itself something of a name as a great way to aggregate multiple social networks and news media into a single, more easily managed stream. The latest version of the iPhone and iPad app sees the introduction of support for audio as well as the more usual text and image based content. Audio content can be scanned through just as you would the rest of your feeds, but it can also be played in the background while you continue with your browsing.
There is support for SoundCloud, NPR (National Public Radio) and PRI (Public Radio International), which gives you the opportunity to listen to a wide variety of podcasts, radio broadcasts and more. By connecting Flipboard with SoundCloud you can listen to sounds that have been created or shared by your friends. There is a whole new audio category for you to explore and this interesting change in direction for the social networking tool.
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