Tech WorldInteresting developments in the world of tech.Intuit Founder: SMB Success Hinges On Easier To Use Products- September 15, 2008 Speaking at the California Accounting & Business Show & Conference in Los Angeles, Intuit founder Scott Cook told attendees that the keys to future success in the SMB market is to listen to customers about what the need and to deliver products that are easier to use. He contended that adhering to such advice has been at the root of his own company's success over the past 20 years. New technologies that are too complex to use and are not truly innovative are introduced into the small business...http://weblog.infoworld.com/smb/archives/001453.html?source=rss SMBs IT Investments Grow But Largely In Mainstream Technologies- September 15, 2008 SMBs continue to be conservative in their approach to technology purchases investing mainly in security point solutions, wireless LANs, and Web services, but are steering away from hotter markets such as security architectures, VoIP products, hosted applications, and Linux according to Gartner at its Small Business Vision conference in Boston on Thursday. "SMBs are just not looking to buy the next great thing. They remain very much conservative technology adopters, although we see for the first.http://weblog.infoworld.com/smb/archives/001475.html?source=rss The right Vista strategy: Do nothing- September 12, 2008 Most analyst firms were excited about Windows Vista in 2006, when it was on the verge of being released. But for several firms, that enthusiasm withered as it became clear that Vista is a flawed OS that few users actually want. Gartner has been among the most consistent doubters of Vista, warning businesses in November 2005 that the Vista migration would be long and slow, with most IT shops not able to fully deploy it until 2009 -- advice it still holds to. And today its view on Vista has...http://weblog.infoworld.com/techwatch/archives/016993.html That first step can be a doozy- September 11, 2008 Andy Baio has done a tour de force analysis of Girl Talk&8217;s Feed the Animals, a musical mashup made from hundreds of samples. From Wikipedia, he extracted data about the samples: the artist, title, and start time of each sample. Then, remarkably, he used Mechanical Turk to crowdsource the lookup of a missing fact: the ...http://blog.jonudell.net/2008/09/11/that-first-step-can-be-a-doozy/ A conversation with the founders of Princetons Center for Information Techology Policy- September 10, 2008 As information technologies weave their way into every aspect of our personal, professional, and civic lives, there&8217;s a growing need for informed public discussion of their public policy implications. Princeton&8217;s Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP) is one emerging forum for that discussion. My guests on this week&8217;s Innovators show are Ed Felten ...http://blog.jonudell.net/2008/09/10/a-conversation-with-the-founders-of-princetons-center-... Silicon-based flow control for smartercheaper air conditioning and refrigeration- September 9, 2008 One of the key themes in Amory Lovins&8217; series of talks on energy efficiency in buildings is the energy lost when pumping fluids. At DEMO today, a company called Microstaq showed a silicon-based valve that promises to dramatically reduce the power required to move fluids through air conditioning and refrigeration systems. Current refrigerant expansion valves, ...http://blog.jonudell.net/2008/09/09/silicon-based-flow-control-for-smartercheaper-air-cond... Annotating DNS with personal information- September 8, 2008 I&8217;ve always had a fondness for solutions that scribble in the margins of the Domain Name System. Today I saw a new one at the DEMO conference: Telnic, a service you can use to store basic personal or business information directly in the DNS. The service is associated with the .tel top-level domain. If you ...http://blog.jonudell.net/2008/09/08/annotating-dns-with-personal-information/ 21st century Yankee ingenuity- September 8, 2008 Serendipity brought me a copy of this article on Jock Gill&8217;s vision of small-scale grass farming operations. He thinks they&8217;ll be able to produce biomass fuel, in a sustainable and decentralized way, for local production of heat and power. We had a long talk about this, and related themes, which will appear in two upcoming ...http://blog.jonudell.net/2008/09/08/21st-century-yankee-ingenuity/ Text messages from Uncle Sam- September 7, 2008 The FCC this week approved a plan to create a nationwide emergency alert system that will deliver text messages to cell phone users should an emergency, disaster, or attack occur. The Warning Alert and Response Network Act (WARN Act) of 2006 gave the FCC the task ofcoming up with new ways to alert the public about emergencies. According to CNN, cell phone companies that voluntarily opt into the system will send text messages to subscribers in response to three types of events: Presidential...http://weblog.infoworld.com/techwatch/archives/016766.html Microsoft's XP intransigence is simply mystifying; can Dell save the day- September 6, 2008 You have to wonder what's going on a Microsoft when it comes to the issue of keeping XP available past the planned June 30 cutoff date. The company clearly knows that Vista was hardly its best moment, an ungainly OS forced out the door after years of delay so Microsoft would have something new to sell. A triumph of short-term thinking that is turning out to be a Pyrrhic victory. But Dell may offer the face-saving out for Microsoft that also saves XP. Decidedly mixed signals, so why the line...http://weblog.infoworld.com/techwatch/archives/016944.html |