With the Microsoft earnings report this week, the big news was the first ever year-over-year decline in quarterly revenue for the software giant.
But to me the interesting news in the report was the fact that the company's servers and tools unit surpassed the client unit (which includes the Windows OS) to become the biggest profit area for Microsoft. Servers and tools was also the only unit to post a revenue gain over the same quarter last year.
One of the many side-effects of this bad economy is that there are now many people out there who are starting their own businesses as either their main source of income or to supplement their income. And whether you are now a computer help consultant to your local community or selling gear at flea markets, you are going to have customers who will want to pay you using a credit card.
For the small-time business this can be a significant hurdle, requiring lots of upfront and regular monthly fees. And if one wants to take credit card information for face to face transactions, it requires either bulky equipment that needs some kind of network connection or the risky use of credit card imprint gadgets.
However, online merchant account provider ProPay has another solution. Their recently released MicroSecure Card Reader is a very small handheld device that can capture and encrypt credit card information from the field and then securely transmit this information to the merchant's online account whenever they get back to their computer.
Click here to see screenshots The National Hockey League has performed a hat trick: scoring new video, content management and analytics capabilities at NHL.com.
Just about a year ago, video on NHL.com was, by the organization's own admission, not thoughtfully implemented, and user information was widely dispersed and not well-leveraged. In a very short time, using a homegrown content management system and a video player built by NeuLion, and with the assistance of design company AQKA, the NHL.com site is running as smooth as, well, ice.
According to many pundits, one of the keys to the future of the Web is video. However, based on much of the current use of video on the Web, this future seems to be a ways off.
True, many businesses today are using video on their sites, for everything from spreading news and company information to handling product demos and walk-throughs. But, typically, there is little or no integration with these videos. They basically live in their own siloed areas of a site, with no connection to other content or online commerce.
Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska was recently found guilty of corruption, and seeing him in the news brought back the memory of the senator describing the Internet as a "series of tubes."
For technology experts, this is one of the funniest misunderstandings of technology ever uttered publicly. I mean, could he have been more clueless? As Bugs Bunny would say, "What an ultramaroon."
So, sure, go ahead, laugh it up. But, remember, Stevens isn't alone in his ignorance. There are still lots of politicians, judges and even company CEOs who are just as clueless and unaware of how IT works.
If you don't believe me, spend some time reading the news. You'll regularly see stories about someone being charged for hacking who basically did the technical equivalent of walking by a building and noticing that the doors were open (for example, doing a Google search and seeing documents that shouldn't be public).
Green--nearly everyone wants to be green. Lots of people who would hardly consider themselves "tree huggers" have realized that investing in green products and technologies can pay dividends in both personal and global ways.
But there's one problem: To be green, you often have to have green (as in money). In almost all product areas, green products cost more (and sometimes much more) than their energy- and environment-wasting counterparts.
Sure, new PCs, servers and other technology products are slightly more energy-efficient than their older siblings. But I'm not sure that making small improvements in efficiency qualifies a product as green.
To my way of thinking, a product or technology has to change the terms of the game in some meaningful way to be green. And most products that fit this definition are relatively expensive.
In the eWEEK special report "Technology in 2009", I look at many of the new product and company announcements of recent months and use this information to predict some of the key emerging technology trends that we should expect to see for 2009.
To go along with this special report, I've also compiled this slideshow showing some of the recent and recently announced products that are good examples of the technologies expected to gain prominence in 2009. These products should help, or are already helping, to push these important technologies forward.
In the article "Technology in 2009", I look at some of the emerging technology trends that I think will be important and will get a lot of attention in 2009. But along with these technology trends, there are also going to be important technologies that should receive attention in 2009 that are likely to be ignored.
Anyone who casually watches the pharmaceutical industry can easily get confused about its priorities. It often seems as if there is a lot of effort going towards finding cures to sexual dysfunction, sleeping disorders and other similar problems, while much less effort is being put into curing the many deadly and widespread dis-eases.
But the technology sector isn't free from this same kind of out-of-whack priorities. Just look at everyone, from small startups to huge and established players, jumping on the social networking bandwagon, while important technology problems such as security get very little attention in comparison.
This can be a huge mistake. While sexy and heavily hyped technologies get a lot of attention, they often aren't addressing a serious problem, especially for enterprises. Given the current economic situation, vendors should really be looking at innovating in the areas that companies have to spend on instead of shiny new toy technologies that most businesses will decide they can easily live without.
This isn't to say that no one is working on innovating in these technology segments. As always, there are interesting startups trying to push the envelope. However, unlike Web 2.0, most of these technology markets aren't in an area where a small startup can make a big impact. What is needed to move these technologies forward is for the big players to innovate and not become comfort-able and stagnant.
Back in 2002 I wrote a column titled "It's time for next Internet." In that column I bemoaned the fact that we were still stuck with an aging Internet infrastructure and urged more progress in next-generation Internet initiatives such as IPv6 and Internet2.
At that time, while I was unhappy with the progress of these initiatives, I was pretty sure of one thing: By the end of 2008, we would definitely have made significant progress toward a new Internet infrastructure.
Boy, did that guess turn out to be wrong.
In the six-plus years since I wrote that column, advancement toward a new Internet has been glacial, at best. Come to think of it, given global warming, glaciers are probably moving faster than next-gen Internet initiatives.
At MIT's Emerging Technology conference, I had the opportunity to speak to Matt Glotzbach, Product Management Director for Google Enterprise.
Chief among the new enterprise capabilities we spoke about were the new video features for business that have been added to Google Apps. We also spoke about the potential effect of Android phones on Google enterprise offerings.
Click here to watch the video Among emerging technologies for the enterprise, few have received as much attention and hype as Unified Communications. Unified communications offers the promise of bringing all of a company's communications under control and making it possible to integrate these communications with enterprise applications.
But UC hasn't been growing as quickly as many have predicted. That's because, like most emerging technologies, it faces many hurdles that slow its adoption.
In this video, eWEEK Chief Technology Analyst, Jim Rapoza looks at some of the biggest problems facing Unified Communications. Click here to see the video on overcoming the hurdles for UC.
Green--nearly everyone wants to be green. Lots of people who would hardly consider themselves "tree huggers" have realized that investing in green products and technologies can pay dividends in both personal and global ways.
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