Facebook will launch a standalone news reader app on Feb. 3. Here is what you ought to know. 7 Facebook Wishes For 2014 (Click image for larger view and slideshow.) Facebook unveiled Thursday morning its highly anticipated news reader app called Paper, which mixes content shared by your folks with news from quite a lot of publications. The app would be available for download on iOS devices within the US on Feb. 3. Paper is the primary app launched by Facebook Creative Labs, an initiative to develop and design new apps for phones. Here is likely the primary of many “new and tasty forms of mobile experiences” that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg alluded to in its latest earnings call. Facebook reported Wednesday that it generates greater than 1/2 its advertising revenue from mobile. Facebook’s new concentrate on standalone apps and mobile is a natural and necessary next step for the social network, said Rebecca Lieb, industry analyst at Altimeter Group. They’re... Read More »

On the 25th anniversary of his proposal for the realm Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee wants Internet users to come back to the Web’s defense. On the Web’s 25th anniversary, the inventor of the sector Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, has called for the establishment of “a digital bill of rights to advance a free and open Web for everybody.” He’s established an internet site, webat25.org, to advance that cause. Berners-Lee’s post was published at the official blog of Google, a corporation that has long championed the internet as a free, open platform for innovation, and has fought meaningful battles against censorship, while it has weathered criticism for being below open with its Android mobile operating system and about customers’ advertising campaign data. It was Google in 2009 that proclaimed, “the internet has won,” an announcement arguably still valid from a platform standpoint. As Berners-Lee puts it, the net works with any information, on any device, with any software, in any language. Anyone can innovate on the net... Read More »

IT organizations are apt to react as badly to the 21st century’s PC as they did to the twentieth century’s PC. Help them recover from it. When I first examine Western Digital’s “personal cloud” for consumer storage, i did not think much of it. It was only a NAS with some clever apps that provided remote access features. But I’m now predicting that a more pervasive distribution of personally owned compute and storage assets will change the face of IT as we all know it. Here’s why: The Snowden effectThe revelations by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden in regards to the extent of NSA spying on, well, everyone have brought about public distrust of the govt, the main providers of public cloud services, or even the fundamental security protocols of the net. If privacy-minded folks have a very easy alternative to “protocols invented with the assistance of government agencies” or “software created by those we now distrust” — inside the type of private... Read More »

You’ve seen IT silver bullets come and go before? Make no mistake: IBM truly expects data centers to transport to the cloud. Last week, IBM announced that it was selling its low-end server business to Chinese hardware manufacturer Lenovo. The deal have been widely summarized inside the trade press because the logical results of the commoditization of x86-based servers, in much an analogous way PCs were commoditized a decade ago. And since IBM tends to not compete in low-profit product lines, this transaction was inevitable and makes simple, straightforward sense. If only things were that straightforward! While it’s true that IBM have been steadfastly moving out of commoditized hardware sales, the timing of these moves was significant. When it sold off its disk-drive business, disks were still good business, however the company saw a way forward for declining margins and shed its HDD unit. Then came the sale of its PC division to Lenovo in 2005. Eight years ago, PCs weren’t yet the low-profit,... Read More »

If a key to success is learning out of your mistakes, Microsoft must be well positioned for 2014. This was an up and down year for Microsoft. January opened with Microsoft still licking wounds suffered the former fall, when Windows 8 arrived with a thud and the much ballyhooed Surface RT somehow managed to fare even worse. After holiday sales did not lift sagging computer shipments, many critics rang within the new year by blaming Microsoft for the computer industry’s woes. In retrospect, this criticism was somewhat overblown. Windows 8 didn’t do any favors for Microsoft and its partners, but falling PC sales have had more to do with consumer preference for tablets than with desktop users’ disdain for Win 8’s Live Tiles. Nevertheless, Windows 8 and its struggles remained the dominant Microsoft narrative for many of the year. In fact, the OS overshadowed the truth that certain Microsoft ventures were having one hell of a year. Windows Azure not just grew right into a... Read More »