E-Business & Web 2.0

Paying your restaurant tab gets a little easier. And you might even get to prowl online while eating.

If the rumors are true, and Microsoft is indeed considering buying Facebook, Google can start the celebration now. Buying Facebook would hurt, not help Microsoft's battle with its online rival, and end up being billions of dollars badly spent.

I am, shall we say, more than a little cynical, even by my standards, when it comes to wireless networking. For example, I really, really have doubts about the wisdom of moving up to 802.11n. That said, I think the monster Mobile WiMax deal, which was announced today, may actually go places.

As my friend Ryan Naraine, soon to be security evangelist for anti-malware company Kaspersky Labs, recently observed, "This list of 0days is always a source of content for me." The list in question is the Zero Day Initiative's list of vulnerabilities.

Another PCI compliance deadline looms. Is your Web app ready for it?

It's IT Blogwatch: in which Sun finally releases OpenSolaris, but with a surprising, cloud-computing twist, courtesy of Amazon EC2. Not to mention a joke for Photoshop users...

Heather Harreld Havenstein has, err, this: [Good grief -Ed.]

At first I thought it was just me. I'd open up my e-mail inbox in the morning to find over a hundred messages telling me that people at OhMyGoshAndGoodness.com or NowWhatWasThatAllAbout.com didn't need my spam. Spam? Me? I don't think so!

Today, CIO means being more than a competent manager of IT. It should mean Lord of Process, and we should grasp that title and run with it.

In the business textbooks of 2025, Microsoft's slow collapse will be attributed to many things. The failure of Windows Vista to hold the desktop market; Microsoft's inability to successfully move from a PC product based company to an Internet service based enterprise; and Ballmer's inability to pull off the Yahoo buyout.

Here's the text of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's letter to Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang, sent to me by Microsoft's PR about 5 pm Pacific Time on Saturday. Microsoft raised its original $31/share bid to $33/share, but Yahoo insisted on $37/share, ...

We've heard repeatedly about Facebook's pitiful privacy protections, but thanks to the BBC we have a blow-by-blow example of just how easy it is for even an ordinary programmer to hop on the social-networking service and start skimming info...

One SaaS vendor says data integration is not a problem for cloud computing.

Sun Microsystems could do much more for cloud computing.

201 created IT Blogwatch: in which we help Sir Tim Berners-Lee celebrate the 15th birthday of the Web; and discover that -- like the Queen -- it has more than one per year. Not to mention explaining Hollywood...

I see that a group calling itself the Association of Corporate Travel Executives is warning its members to limit the amount of proprietary business information they carry on laptops and the like because they're afraid that government agents can seize that data at border crossings.