IPHONES AND WIKIS

Apple announced Monday June 9^th at the World Wide Developer Conference that  the new iPhone would be released for sale on July11th, 2008. While the original iPhone release was slick and had a great touch interface, it missed the business niche market. The new device should fill those missing elements nicely. Here is why.

The new phone has GPS, which is a big plus for the business traveler. It also will provide metadata to an image captured with its built-in camera to provide your exact location where the image was taken.

Lets talk 3G. The iPhone with 2.0 software will cruise nicely on 3G networks which the rest of the world has been doing for a while. AT&T, the iPhone's exclusive carrier in the US has bumped up their networks to 3G levels in all major markets. The effect of this is downloading files, watching UTube videos, and email attachments will now be quicker.

The new phone has push email, contacts and calendars including Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync. It also gives users Cisco's IPSec VPN and wireless services with WPA2 Enterprise and also 8021X authentication.

Visual voice mail will allow you to select which messages to listen to first. You will be able to fast forward through a message to get to the pertinent facts.

There are lots more to this device, and the fact that they have leaned towards the business user will go a long way into mass acceptance. Twenty-two additional countries have been added in the sell list, so it looks as though they may be on their way to ten million units sold by Christmas.

Apple is advertising "Twice as fast. Half the price". Well, the phone is listing at $199.00 for the 8gig model and $299.00 for the 16gig, but lets look further.

SMS messages are no longer included free with your data plan so that will cost you more. An unlimited data plan will now cost $30.00 per month, up from $10.00 on the original iPhone plan with ATT. The bottom line is with the new 3G capable iPhone it will run you approximately $240.00 more over a two-year contract than the original unit.

So much for "Half the price". As a business traveler, I'll probably be getting one, but refuse to be fooled by the marketing.

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VMWare  Dives Into Specialized, Desktop App Virtualization

"_Vmware is bringing out its first release of a product based on its January acquisition of privately-held Thinstall. VMware ThinApp 4 will allow any Windows application to run on whatever version of Windows the end user has, as opposed to the operating system on which the application previously depended.

A user, for example, could take Internet Explorer 7 designed for Windows XP Service Pack 2 and run it on an earlier version of Windows. Internet Explorer 6 could be run alongside it, without generating conflicts. Each is running in its own virtual machine and tapping needed services from its host's version of Windows. But each contains all the registry settings, DLLs, and file system changes on which it depends.

This will allow the customer to run multiple versions of any application on Windows OS's. Interesting stuff, click the link above to read more.

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Cloud Vision

Would you trust your all your business's data to be put in a cloud (servers managed by third parties) and outside of your physical domain?

Some rather large businesses are helping to push this idea. Amazon and Google.

Think of the implications of this. Now a third party has access to all your social security numbers, addresses and may know where your children go to school. Many IT managers are uncomfortable with this concept, and I happen to be in agreement with them.

Besides privacy, there could be bandwidth issues and network latency issues for fast access to important data, not completely in your control anymore. It's a potentially dangerous slope to give others total access and control of your intellectual private data.

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CIA's Secret Intellipedia Has Universal Relevance

The CIA utilizes Web 2.0 tools to keep information up to date. Tools like wikis and blogs to add to the companies Intellipedia Information database.

"Dennehy, Intellipedia and Enterprise 2.0 evangelist, noted that Intellipedia is still in the ‘early adoption state' and while there are some similarities to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, there are still some important differences. ‘We're not dealing with facts,' he said of the general mission of intelligence and security agencies, ‘We're dealing with puzzles and mysteries'."

I find this paragraph somewhat amusing. There have been many instances when Wikipedia has played fast and loose with the facts.

Anyway it will make us all sleep better at night knowing the agency has their own modern wiki easily updated and accessible by multiple agencies for access?

Enjoy the warm weather and until next time, compute safely.

Marco