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VMware made a number of announcements at VMworld 2011 in Las Vegas on Monday. Among its new projects is a global cloud offering. This is, so to speak, a network of clouds from multiple services in various countries. Customers will work with their local vCloud Datacenter service provider to get into the global cloud....

IBM is working on a 120-petabyte storage array that will consist of 200,000 disk drives, according to the MIT Technology Review The array is expected to store about 1 trillion files....

Salesforce.com has been front and center the past couple of weeks, revving up for its Dreamforce '11 cloud computing industry event, running Aug. 30 to Sept. 2 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Dreamforce is expected to draw more than 40,000 registered attendees and showcase 1,000 solutions from 300 Salesforce.com cloud computing partners.

It is amazing to me the number of people I know who are basically saying Steve Jobs (some wonderful quotes from him here) leaving Apple will not change Apple. Most saw what Apple was like with Jobs, have seen that no similar company has been able to repeat what Apple has done over the last decade, and have seen both Microsoft after Gates and Disney after Walt. They even saw what happened to Dell during the short time Michael stepped down. But Jobs, who is even more hands on than the most-micro manager any of us know, will pass without a ripple. Wow -- now that is a reality distortion field.

Business users are drawn to the cloud. Of course, that's not surprising, considering they tend to see only the benefits: self-service freedom, scalability, availability, flexibility, and the pleasure of avoiding various nasty hardware and software headaches IT leaders, on the other hand, aren't always as enthusiastic. They worry about cloud securit...

The definition of "cybercrime" is ever changing, as is the severity of attacks. 2011 has already been labeled the "year of the data breach," and yet many of the breaches are not the typical SQL injection attacks or database hacks. Instead, criminals are using legitimate website functions to steal data and sometimes money, from targeted organizations. Compounding the problem, as U.S. banks and other financial institutions are enabling customers and employees to make mobile transactions, security implications around both Web and mobile functionality have become a large concern for IT...

After two months of basking in the accolades Google+ has received, Google's social media strategy is again the cause of some head-scratching The search engine has decided to shut down Slide, a social media app and game maker that it bought about a year ago. Even more eyebrow-raising: Its founder and chief executive Max Levchin is leaving....

Internet radio service Pandora announced its first results as a publicly traded company on Thursday Quarterly revenues totaled US$67 million, 117 percent up year over year (YoY), and listener hours hit a new high of 1.8 billion, up 125 percent YoY, Pandora said....

Attendees at Microsoft's TechEd New Zealand show were reportedly treated to a preview of what may have been a new quad-core Windows slate device running on the not-yet debuted Windows 8 The slate could be a giveaway at Microsoft's Build conference in September, according to a Smarter Geek blog post by attendee and IT consultant Alan Burchill. The i...

Online privacy was in the news again this week -- and Facebook, not surprisingly, figured prominently in many of the stories What was surprising, however, was that Facebook wasn't being castigated for implementing some new policy that made it appear the social networking giant was trampling users' privacy rights in its rush to tap new revenue strea...

The cocooned gTLD has started to spread its wings, and soon it will show its colors and become a butterfly. Its well-guarded fuzzy and slow progress has finally propelled it to a much-anticipated metamorphosis, but the world still waits for some flying maneuvers. Mother ICANN has worked very hard to coax it along to this stage. It seems that mains...

SAS is beefing up its SAS Social Media Analytics application with new features that give users a better handle on their social media effectiveness: improved tracking of past versus present performance, and benchmarks to assess competitors' performance. "A lot of this functionality seems as though it would be routine, but few companies on the marke...

There may be life yet for the seemingly defunct HP TouchPad. The company has discontinued its development of all webOS devices, leading retailers to drastically mark down prices on the TouchPads they have in stock. Some buyers have been able to score one for as little as $100 -- that's $400 off the initial asking price when the device entered the market a couple of months ago...

HP's TouchPad tablet never sold so well as when HP announced last week that it was ceasing production of the device Consumers have cleaned out the market's US$99-per-unit inventory of TouchPads....

Solid proof regarding the origins of high-profile international cyberattacks is typically elusive. However, when Western interests are targeted, suspicion often turns to China -- whether rightfully or otherwise Those suspicions were again aroused recently, courtesy of government-controlled China Central Television.

Research In Motion on Thursday announced its new BBM Music service, a cloud music offering for BlackBerry Messenger. BBM Music enables social and viral music discovery by allowing users to build a community-based library with friends' selections. A closed beta of BBM Music has launched in Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom. The service is expected to be available later this year in multiple countries for a monthly charge of US$4.99...

Managers of federal agency websites will be focusing on customer relations to meet the requirements of an ambitious program designed to improve the value of the government's online public resources. Over the next two months or so, agencies will be drilling down into their website mechanisms to determine whether their electronic presence truly meets the needs of the public -- in much the same way as a private sector firm measures audience satisfaction...

I don't get why companies today take so long to make deals. Just do it already. The latest rumor is about Sprint Nextel, Comcast and Time Warner Cable acquiring Clearwire. Of course, we have heard of other Sprint rumors over the last few years that didn't pan out -- like acquiring T-Mobile. Dan Hesse, the CEO of Sprint, waited too long to pull the trigger on that one, leaving Sprint out in the cold. So will Sprint swing this deal or not? ...

As is so sadly the case with many environment-oriented subjects, Green IT was consigned to the back burner at a lot of businesses when the economy began grinding its gears several years ago. The same thing happened to a lesser extent to some potentially game-changing CRM strategies, most notably mobile CRM. We have a natural tendency to pull in wh...

Travel apps open a whole new world for vacationers and business travelers alike. However, there are now so many travel apps that it's hard to determine which will render the best and most frequently updated information. Muddying the issue further, app stores tend to list flight and hotel apps first and leave the fun and wonky and offbeat apps buri...