Worth noting: Last entry for Encyclopaedia Britannica book.
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Worth noting: Last entry for Encyclopaedia Britannica book.

You got to take note about a small piece of yesterday’s news: After 244 years, the Encyclopaedia Britannica is going out of print, instead focusing on its online encyclopedia,yesterdays Publishing print editions of its flagship encyclopedia. Not unexpected, but the fact that it was finally announced it is amazing… 244 years!   Sources: Encyclopedia Britannica…

World Internet Usage Statistics
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World Internet Usage Statistics

Very interesting statistics on Internet usage  from a global perspective. Couple of things to call out: North America is #3 by number of Internet users North America is #1 by Internet penetration   World Internet Usage Statistics News and World Population Stats. Source: http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm Data is as of December 31, 2011.

Move from Physical Image to Virtual
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Move from Physical Image to Virtual

There are many reasons you would like to convert a Desktop/ Laptop image into a virtual image.  They may include: Backup / easy recovery Want to access your image while on the road Tired of traveling with multiple devices Today is fairly easy to convert a physical desktop/laptop into a virtual one. Although I focus…

Internet Parental Controls Enforced
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Internet Parental Controls Enforced

Like many of you parents out there, we have a real issue with  our kids Internet access habits…   They are online at all times, talking to their friends, surfing YouTube or playing multi-player online  games.     The Internet has  become a large part of our everyday activities, so we are not necessarily oppose to these activities, but the…

To Netflix: Must Try Something else now
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To Netflix: Must Try Something else now

After several months  of back and forth, this past weekend (long weekend)  we finally came to realization that the current Netflix offering is just not working for us anymore…    When the rate increase changed, earlier this year,  we switched to streaming only, but, simply put,  the current  streaming selection sucks! Recent news events that…

Boring Statistics – No More!
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Boring Statistics – No More!

Who said statistics need to be dull…. Excellent video : titled Social Media Revolution 3 (4:15 version via Erik Qualman) based on the book Socialnomics by +Erik Qualman — [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0EnhXn5boM]   Back in 2009 I was exposed to the same style video called “Did You Know? 3.0 ” which conveyed a number of statistic, in a very refreshing matter…

Is email going the way of regular mail?
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Is email going the way of regular mail?

First some astonishing statistics: (Source: PingDom: Internet 2010  in numbers) 107 trillion – The number of emails sent on the Internet in 2010. 294 billion – Average number of email messages per day. 1.88 billion – The number of email users worldwide. 89.1% – The share of emails that were spam. (that is 269 billion emails) 2.9 billion – The number of email…

US Broadband Infrastructure falling behind
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US Broadband Infrastructure falling behind

A few  days ago (5/13/2011), I saw a segment in the PBS.org series Need To Know that talked to how strategic Europe sees the upgrade of their broadband infrastructure.  More interesting is that it is being financed privately. As the program shows, the result have transformational. Fast forward to at time stamp: 24:50 time stamp. Watch the full episode. ( Broadband Infrastructure:…

Microsoft Online – $4B startup and counting
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Microsoft Online – $4B startup and counting

It is simply amazing to see how much is Microsot investing into its online division. Based on the the latest Microsoft quarterly result published last week, the operating loss for the online services division was  $726M  in the 3rd quarter alone, and a loss  $1.8B for the current year. If we look back to when the…

Tip my hat to Amazon.com – Showed Real Class
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Tip my hat to Amazon.com – Showed Real Class

After a heck of an outage last week,  Amazon published they root-cause and postmortem yesterday – less than 5 days after the actual outage, and *after* they have completely stabilize the after-math of the outage. I have to tip my hat to how Amazon for the content transparentness, analysis and the expressly stated  apology to their customer. We go…

Shout-out to ThisWeekIn.com Podcast Network
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Shout-out to ThisWeekIn.com Podcast Network

Jason Calacanis, an established, proven entrepreneur and angel investor  who has started, sold and funded startups, and his crew produce a phenomenal set of podcast shows, out of their web property: ThisWeekIn.com Two of my favorites, which I listen to whenever I get the chance are: This Week in Startups (TWIST), offers aspiring entrepreneurs invaluable…

Traditional TV/Cable is finally caving!
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Traditional TV/Cable is finally caving!

    A recent piece of news captures (finally) the truth about the feeling everyone has about their cable serif. It is overpriced and there is never anything on when one finally has the time to sit down in front of the TV. Cable Lost 500,000 subscribers in a single quarter http://www.techspot.com/news/41013-cable-lost-500000-subscribers-in-q3-thanks-to-the-web.html In a related…

iPad thoughts – the first 2 weeks
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iPad thoughts – the first 2 weeks

  Very interesting device.   For me, it is definitely a consumption device.  Netflix, web-surfing,  news and blog reader, drawing and playing games with my kids, and some YouTube.      The video quality is amazing, the magazine reader is excellent, the battery second to none… Very good for easy blog postings and lite-email writing during my daily…

Project Management Online Tools
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Project Management Online Tools

One of the most common questions I get asked is what tool to I use to manage projects while working with virtual teams.   The answer I give, is typically, “it depends a lot on the size of the project, and what you want to manage”     Collaboration, Project Management, Project Portfolio Management (PPM), Online Project Management,…

slideshare World’s Best Presentations 2009
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slideshare World’s Best Presentations 2009

Back at the September 2009 slideshare.net ran an online contest to find the world’s best presentations.   I have completely forgotten to check the finalists until I ran across an old email reminding me about it.   I went in to the slideshare.net 2009 winner’s page and was surprise to find the winner to be a presentation…

AWS: Free inbound Data transfers until June’10
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AWS: Free inbound Data transfers until June’10

From Amazon Web Services Email today: Free Inbound Data Transfer (until June 30, 2010) Data Transfer into AWS will be free of charge from now through June 30, 2010, making it even easier for customers to get their data into AWS. This applies to data transfer into Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon Relational…

AWS: Free inbound Data transfers until June2010
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AWS: Free inbound Data transfers until June2010

From Amazon Web Services Email today: Free Inbound Data Transfer (until June 30, 2010) Data Transfer into AWS will be free of charge from now through June 30, 2010, making it even easier for customers to get their data into AWS. This applies to data transfer into Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon Relational…

Cloud-Services vs Virtualization
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Cloud-Services vs Virtualization

As many of you already know, we have been  strong proponent of cloud-based services for a very long time…   The idea of  maintaining an expensive and complex in-house infrastructure to support basic IT services  is steadily shifting away from mainstream business. Adoption of cloud-based services continues to climb steadily. However, a recent  article on the…

Toner
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Toner

Went out today to find  toner for my LaserJet printer, and I almost flipped! Checked three places and the toner (at all three places) was over  $124.00 –  Crazy! – What happened to toner pricing?   I used to buy it for $80.00 tops. I went online and decided to buy it from  newegg.com which had…

Online Project Management Tool Requirements
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Online Project Management Tool Requirements

I have been checking online tools to help  me manage projects collaboratively amongst a diverse virtual team.   A few simple requirements I consider baseline are: Overall dashboard for Program Weekly Program Status Reports (entry / editing ) Ability to enter project status reports Ability to have multiple projects  under one category Issue tracking – Ability…

DaaS and SaaS – ” …dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria!”
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DaaS and SaaS – ” …dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria!”

Desktone (http://www.desktone.com/) and more pointedly the generic term DaaS or desktop as a service is being bandied about and will help (I say “help” in jest) to muddy the terminology waters and give us a new buzz word. Really, I think DaaS has legs and will see favorable acceptance with the “greening” of IT with…

Green IT & Infrastructure Optimization: Are they compatable?
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Green IT & Infrastructure Optimization: Are they compatable?

Infrastructure Optimization opens the door for Green Computing with the ability to reduce overall costs via reducing power consumption through virtualization and by making better use of IT resources by more efficiently distributing workload amongst idle system resources rather than introducing additional systems.

Virtually Speaking: Presenting — Presentation Virtualization – redux
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Virtually Speaking: Presenting — Presentation Virtualization – redux

Amy Newman over at ServerWatch.com in her VirtualzationWatch column helps to clear the virtual haze that is virtual presentation. Glad someone is speaking to this – in the 30 plus years of virtualization each market segment hasn’t been able to define itself all that clearly. Thanks Amy. The cool thing about application virtualization with Microsoft’s…

Citrix + Softricity + Microsoft – Softricity = ?
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Citrix + Softricity + Microsoft – Softricity = ?

In the old days, Softricity was a partner of Citrix. Citrix is a partner of Microsoft. And Softricity was a partner of Microsoft, but is now part of Microsoft. See where this is going? When Softricity was acquired, there was some industry speculation as to what would happen to the great interoperability between SoftGrid and…

Free Webinar: Desktop Management – The Business Value of Application Virtualization

Free Webinar: Desktop Management – The Business Value of Application Virtualization

I thought some of you might be interested in a free event that our team is putting on, centered around the business value of virtualizing applications. For Infrastructure Optimization wonks like myself, this technology is poised to become the centerpiece of many future IO engagements for me and our team. Registration is free, and the webinar is an hour long.

Newsworthy…
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Newsworthy…

Amazon.com does it again ! A quick follow-up  to my December 29, 2007 posting , Sony/BMG has joined the bandwagon to offer their music catalog through the Amazon DRM-free  service.     This makes all of the major record label’s catalogs available there.  – Now that is cool (and something that iTunes can not claim)

DRM-free Music – is now mainstream?
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DRM-free Music – is now mainstream?

Very Interesting to see the latest announcement from Amazon.com on Dec 27 in which they told the world that “Warner joins EMI, Universal Music Group nd a pack of independent labels that sell so-called digital rights management-free music in Amazon MP3, at the company’s music store.“ It will be interesting to see how DRM-based services…