High-tech hardware spending returns, no help for IT jobs

IT decision makers will be investing in hardware in the coming six months, according to recent research, but high-tech executives say staffing will remain flat as companies not only slow the pace of jobs cuts but also hold off on new hires. The latest release of the CDW IT monitor reveals that more than two-thirds of some 1,043 IT decision makers in corporate and government sectors plan to make IT hardware purchases in the next six months. Podcast: Have IT budgets hit bottom yet?

More than 80% of large businesses and 84% of federal government high-tech executives polled expect to invest in hardware, with a majority pointing to operational efficiency gains as motivation. "Hardware refresh cycles have been pushed to limits we've rarely seen, and anticipated investment in this area is encouraging as companies prepare for a larger economic recovery," said Mark Gambill, CDW vice president, in a statement. Nearly 50% of both corporate and federal IT decision makers expect budgets to stay the same, with just more than 30% expecting slight budget increases. The survey, conducted over two weeks in September, also showed that more than 50% of federal government IT workers anticipate increased budgets in the next six months. Twenty-seven percent of those polled expect to also invest in software across a significant part of their organization, while 45% anticipate software purchases for a smaller portion of their companies. Eighty percent of IT decision makers do not anticipate adding staff and plan to keep their personnel counts at current levels. While spending is set to increase in various sectors in big and small ways, depending on the organization, questions regarding IT staff seemed to garner the same response across the board.

Twelve percent do plan to hire additional IT workers in the next six months, and 8% continue to consider cutting staff, the research found. "The confidence we began to see emerge in April with decreases in planned job cuts has now evolved into planned capital investments in IT infrastructure to increase efficiency and productivity," Gambill stated. "The down side is that the percentage of organizations planning investments in IT staffing has held steady and in some cases declined." Do you Tweet? Follow Denise Dubie on Twitter

Google Makes It Easier for News Sites to Opt-out

In what will be seen as a concession to media baron Rupert Murdoch, Google has made it easier for news sites-such as those Murdoch controls-to opt-out of Google News. Murdoch has previously threatened to take News Corp. content, including the Times of London, and the Australian, off Google when at some point in the future they become paid sites. Where they used to have to fill out an online form to opt-out of Google's news aggregation site, publishers will soon have a means to opt-out or set other options automatically, using a small file placed on their sites.

His Wall Street Journal and Barron's are already largely subscription-based. As for the aggregators, "these people are not investing in journalism," Murdoch said. "They're feeding off the hard-earned efforts and investments of others." "To be impolite, it's theft," he added. On Tuesday, Murdoch told a U.S. Federal Trade Commission hearing that "there is no such thing as free news" and reiterated his statement that News Corp. sites would move to a paid model. His remarks targeting Google prompted Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington to respond that "aggregation is part of the Web's DNA" and that old media needs to "get real." Murdoch has also reportedly been in talks with Microsoft that would result is News Corp. content being removed from Google and enhanced on Microsoft's Bing, which would pay News Corp. a fee in return for exclusivity. Google, which also attended the FTC meeting, made its announcement Tuesday in a blog post outlining extensions to the Robots Exclusion Protocol, already used to prevent Google and other search engines from indexing Web sites. Recent reports, however, say the talks have been overplayed in the media.

The extensions will give publishers control over how their sites are treated by Google News. "Now, with the news-specific crawler, if a publisher wants to opt out of Google News, they don't even have to contact us - they can put instructions just for user-agent Googlebot-News in the same robots.txt file they have today," wrote Google's Josh Cohen in the post. They'll also be able to apply the full range of REP directives just to Google News. Robots.txt is a small file that developers can place in the root directory of their Web sites that contain the Robots Exclusion Protocol commands. "In addition, once this change is fully in place, it will allow publishers to do more than just allow/disallow access to Google News. Want to block images from Google News, but not from Web Search? Want to include snippets in Google News, but not in Web Search?

Go ahead. Feel free. It's not likely most users will notice any difference as a result of the change, unless a large number of publishers decide to abandon Google News and the estimated 1 billion clicks-a-month it generates for participating publishers (including PC World) "Most people put their content on the web because they want it to be found, so very few choose to exclude their material from Google. All this will soon be possible with the same standard protocol that is REP," Cohen added. But we respect publishers' wishes.

We're excited about this change and will start rolling it out today," Cohen said in concluding his post announcing the change. If publishers don't want their websites to appear in web search results or in Google News, we want to give them easy ways to remove it. David Coursey has been writing about technology products and companies for more than 25 years. He tweets as @techinciter and may be contacted via his Web site.

Microsoft pushes Bing in China with mobile portal

Microsoft stepped up promotion of Bing in China with the launch of a Web services platform for mobile phones this week, a possible step toward challenging the dominance of Google and Baidu.com in the country. Bing has not caught on in China and Microsoft has done little to promote it in the country. The Microsoft portal, an effort to spur use of its services in a market crowded by local competitors, offers downloads of mobile clients for Bing and Windows Live Messenger, along with instructions on how to use Microsoft services, including Hotmail, from a mobile phone.

However, Bing, launched in June, has grown quickly in the U.S. and attracted about 9 percent of online searches there last month, according to Internet monitoring companies. Baidu and Google together account for as much as 95 percent of online searches done in China, leaving Yahoo, a range of local search engines, and any new players like Bing to compete for the remaining slice of the market. China's online search market is dominated by local player Baidu, with Google in a distant second place. The Bing mobile client lets users search for local information such as maps, restaurant locations and weather forecasts. Bing has strong potential but will face difficulty competing with Baidu and Google in the near term, said Ben Cavender, senior analyst at China Market Research Group in Shanghai. Microsoft "will continue to strengthen and expand the service scope of its mobile Internet products," the company said in a statement.

While Baidu and Google have well-established search services for free music downloads that keep Chinese users coming back, Microsoft so far has done little to localize Bing, Cavender said. Bing did not make a list of China's top 10 most-visited search engines in August, as posted on the Web site of local online traffic analyzer CR-Nielsen.

Undercover 1.5 ousts iPhone thieves with push notifications

It's 2 AM. Do you know where your iPhone is? What if you want an app devoted to recovering a stolen iPhone or iPod Touch-one that has a few more tricks up its sleeve? Well, maybe you do, thanks to MobileMe's "Find my iPhone," but what if you're not a MobileMe subscriber? That's exactly what Orbicule's Undercover for iPhone is.

Our iPhones are now smarter, faster, stronger, better, and able to let third-party apps do more than ever. We've already covered this app and its Mac OS X cousin, back when push notifications were little more than a bullet point on a wish list, but times have changed. Back in the 1.0 days, when Undercover was just a wee lad, you had to fool your iPhone's captor into launching the app before it was able to transmit its location. You can make the messages as enticing as you want-say, by having them pretend to be a notification from your bank account. Not an easy task: Thanks to App Store policy, apps cannot change their names or icons, and I'm guessing that all but the thickest criminals knew better than to launch an application called "Undercover." Now you have the ability to send push notifications with any message of your choosing directly to the iPhone-yes, just like MobileMe. But the comparisons end there.

If the crook chooses to view the push notification, Undercover will launch, disguised either as a game that's taking its sweet time to load or loading any Website of your choosing, such as the aforementioned bank's. While the thief is distracted, Undercover will be happy to save the device's GPS coordinates and IP address to Orbicule's Website. They'll also be sent directly to any police officer you've contacted to work on the case and registered in Orbicule's Undercover Center. Each time that Undercover launches, it will save a new set of coordinates that you can view in Google Maps. Orbicule has made a video to demonstrate this killer feature. You could use Find My iPhone to collect live GPS information from MobileMe and log a record of GPS coordinates via Orbicule, submitting it all to the police.

It looks as though this app could be used not only as an alternative to Find My iPhone, but a nice companion app as well. It's still far from perfect, at least until (or unless) Apple can be made to change their iPhone app policies to let third-party apps like Undercover do a little more. It requires iPhone OS 3.0 or later. Undercover for the iPhone costs $5 and works on all iPhones and iPod touches.

E-readers could push growth in e-textbook market, analysts say

With more e-readers hitting the U.S. market, analysts predict a big uptick in device sales in late 2010 with a strong surge in the popularity of electronic textbooks used in high schools and colleges in time for school in the fall of 2011. The market for e-textbooks is considered a rich one, but is also governed by many factors, including the cost of e-readers. How fast and large the e-textbook market grows depend on a diverse array of more than 20 textbook publishers in the U.S., many of whom are weighing the use of proprietary or standard e-publishing technology and evaluating whether students will rely on e-readers to purchase expensive textbooks and other books, analysts said. "It's a two-year window for e-textbooks before there's significant market traction," said Gartner Inc. analyst Allen Weiner in an interview. "But it's a fertile market." Weiner predicted that a number of major vendors, including Google Inc. and Apple Inc., could enter the market with devices and marketing plans that involve textbook publishers and, possibly, college bookstores. They can run about $400 - the price of the new Irex DR800SG announced yesterday - putting them out of the reach of many students.

Apple has long been rumored to be working on a tablet computer , perhaps with a 9-inch screen, for debut in February. It will use the Verizon Wireless network for downloading books and newspapers. That hardware could be targeted at college students accustomed to dropping $100 or more for traditional hardback texts, Weiner said. "An Apple tablet could be the sweetest college textbook reader you've ever seen," Weiner said. "Apple is letting the e-reader market simmer and will come into it when the market's ready to boil." The market in the U.S. now includes the Irex device, which has an 8.1-inch screen and goes on sale at Best Buy stores in October. Sony Reader devices are being sold at Best Buy to work with AT&T's wireless network. Plastic Logic is planning to introduce an e-reader in the U.S., while Asian manufacturers are expected to launch products - though not necessarily in the U.S., she said. "There's also a lot of speculation about whether Barnes & Noble will launch their own e-reader or use existing ones," she said.

And Amazon.com has produced several Kindle e-readers with wireless connections via Sprint Nextel Inc. "While we've just seen three vendors in the U.S., there will be a lot of activity in the next year," said Vinita Jakhanwal, an analyst at iSuppli. While the cost of components inside e-readers is dropping, lowering the overall cost of an e-reader, Jakhanwal predicted it could be three years before e-readers hit the magic $99 price point coveted by many consumer electronics manufacturers to attract a large audience. A publisher might not want to sell books only to a one platform, he noted. Globally, iSuppli estimates about 5 million e-readers will be sold in 2009, a number expected to climb to between 13 million and 14 million in 2010. Weiner said that textbook publishers differ over the use of the open ePub standard or a proprietary approach like that used by the Kindle. Publishers are also weighing whether e-textbooks should be rented, and if they are sold, whether buyers can re-sell them afterwards. "There's a lot to be worked out," Weiner said. For example, a user might click on a button in text to see a video of a lecture by the author of the text, or to click for an updated interactive quiz on the material, delivered via a fast wireless network. "It's important for textbook publishers to give more value and charge more, with an ability to update material so a user would want it for being current," Weiner said.

A potentially lucrative area for publishers is "value-added" technology that can be included with e-books, Weiner said. Some colleges are also testing e-readers to be used as mobile clients that connect to a college's server for access to course work, professors' notes and other materials. "The possibilities are endless," Weiner said, noting that some textbook publishers are experimenting with hybrid models that combine e-book technology with print-on-demand books, so that a publisher only prints the portions of text or the number of textbooks that it needs. While there is clearly a market opportunity with e-readers and e-books, including e-textbooks, there seems to be a general consensus that e-readers will encourage reading and promote education , analysts, some educators and even librarians have said. Weiner said it is too early to determine how much an e-textbook might save over the cost of tradition textbooks, adding that college-owned bookstores will have a say in the price of e-books. "You have to figure you can't [leave out] the bookstore, since that's a large revenue stream for a school," he added. "It's basically a question of whether you empower them to to become online bookstores, as is happening in some cases." Some publishers might use the ability to attract life-long e-book readers by first luring them with lower-priced e-textbooks. "One motivation for publishers, as they've told me, is if you get students in the habit of using e-books and get e-readers devices in their hands, then it might be easier to get them to buy other e-books," Weiner said. Having e-textbooks and e-readers "could stimulate reading, and that improves education," Weiner said. "Anything to get people to read more, particularly young people, is big."

A fresh start at a company that gets security

This economic recession has cost all of us. I was laid off first in 2007 after six years as the top security manager at a company where I had built the security program from scratch. In my case, it cost me my job - twice.

I was laid off again just recently, after two years during which I first tried to build a new security program, but then had to cut my already very small staff. Needless to say, I think that was a poor decision, and I don't say that because I lost my job. Finally the security program was shut down entirely. Just before the ax fell, I had been working on cost-cutting initiatives. I figured that there had to be a better way to save money than ejecting large pieces of our corporate knowledge base. I had hated cutting my staff, and I was determined to ensure that no more layoffs would be required.

After digging around, I found two very expensive services that the company was paying for while getting very little value in return. But just as I was feeling good about the prospects of this proposal, I was called in to the CIO's office, where I found myself facing our HR director and a bunch of layoff forms. It looked to me as if we could eliminate those expensive and underperforming services, and then use our in-house staff and infrastructure to perform the same work at a lower cost and higher level of quality. Clearly, the company had chosen to go down the well-worn path of cutting staff rather than reducing costs in other areas. But now I have a new position that I'm feeling pretty good about.

It was a devastating blow. My job-loss trauma was thankfully brief, and I can look back and realize that I'm probably better off not working for a company that made such terrible decisions. This time, I don't have to start from scratch exactly; this company has many good security practices ingrained into its processes, mainly because the technical staff is young, smart and savvy - they get security, and its importance. I'm a security manager again, but in a different industry, and in a company with a different culture and work environment. It looks like I won't have a very large staff once again, maybe two or three people, but the rest of the IT staff here is very aware of what constitutes good security practices, and that could make a huge difference.

I'll be facing some new challenges here that I hadn't encountered in the previous eight years, but I've also learned some things from my experiences, so when familiar challenges present themselves, I'll react more effectively. With everybody pulling in the same direction, I might not need a lot of full-time employees dedicated to security. For instance, I had to kick off my last security manager position with a focus on patching, as I tried to turn the steering wheel of a big company toward an effective program of consistently applying security updates to operating systems in a timely fashion. Instead, a collaborative approach with the IT administrators and a focus on getting management to provide the right resources and priorities can be more effective. I had mixed results, but I learned in the process that it doesn't pay to push too hard in the wrong places. That is a lesson that should be applicable in many situations, even though in my new company, patching is recognized as being important.

I will need to raise the visibility and priority of the efforts so we can make improvements, but I don't have to try to get everyone to understand why it's needed. It's being done, though not consistently and not comprehensively. What a relief. Account management is being done fairly diligently, although it could use some improvements, especially in the area of terminations and deprovisioning. It's also good that our IT administrators have a pretty good hardening standard for their Windows and Unix systems, and they seem to be applying it uniformly. Administrative access could use some fine-tuning as well; currently, everyone's an administrator, and there are many shared passwords in use.

Overall, I would rate this environment 7 out of 10 in terms of general security practices. I'll definitely want to address that. My first priority will be to start making small, incremental improvements in the current practices to make things better and introduce more maturity and consistency into the environment. This week's journal is written by a real security manager, "J.F. Rice," whose name and employer have been disguised for obvious reasons. This is a new challenge for me, one that I hope will be fun and exciting as well as successful. Contact him at jf.rice@engineer.com.

IBM offers Symphony on Keepod USB devices

IBM announced Tuesday that its free Lotus Symphony office productivity suite is now available on Keepods - thin USB devices made by the Italian company NSEC. Big Blue's Symphony suite is based on OpenOffice.org and includes word processing, spreadsheets and presentation creation. Keepods are roughly the size of a credit card and hold up to 16GB of data. The new Keepod version, available through the Keepod store, employs VMware's ThinApp virtualization software, which wraps applications into an executable file that is isolated from a computer's operating system, mitigating compatibility and security concerns.

Prices start at €19.90 (US$29.78) for a 2GB "Base" version. Eighty percent of respondents polled for a Forrester Research report earlier this year said their companies were using some form of Office, and 78.4 percent had no plans to deploy any alternatives. A 2GB Secure edition, which includes 256-bit AES hardware encryption, is priced at €69. Although a USB deployment option could make Symphony attractive to more users, Microsoft retains an iron grip on the office productivity market. IBM does not formally track Symphony installs but estimates about 10 million people are using the software, said product manager Jeanette Barlow. The Keepod announcement comes in response to "a huge push from enterprise customers for supporting mobile workers," she said. Many companies are still in the tire-kicking stage, running pilot programs or deploying the software on a departmental level, she said.

IBM expects interest in Symphony to jump significantly next year, when a new version based on the OpenOffice 3 codebase is released, according to Barlow.