One of the big concerns that companies have when setting up IT departments is how much freedom to give to the workforce when it comes to the Internet. There are two major philosophical ideas on the subject. The first is that employees are paid to work, not paid to surf the web, and that as [...]

In the Wall Street Journal, Scott Austin, writing for the Venture Capital Dispatch blog talked about how quickly tech companies grow – specifically, what makes a tech company a “rocket ship,” “hot company” or “slow burner.” The difference being the answer to one simple question: “How long did it take the company to reach $50M [...]

Boy, did we have fun with this one…   One other thing: That news ticker on the bottom? Well, I wrote some of them, but I asked the entire company for some ideas – some of them were used pretty much verbatim, others were edited, and still others inspired other news ticker lines. I’d like [...]

The Gartner Group is on our short list of organizations not to tick off, a list also populated by our customers, our business partners, and the Mafia. They are very influential in the IT management industry, and as such, it would be stupid if we did. (Er, the Gartner group, not the Mafia.) So, we’re [...]

Back during Cisco Live, we did a co-presentation with NBC Universal, which talked about how they built and managed the network that delivered live coverage of the Beijing Olympics to not only millions of television viewers, but also to online and mobile viewers as well. We now present to you this video of the engineering [...]

A Texas judge has ruled that Microsoft is not only in patent violation against a company called i4i, which, apparently, owns the ability to create custom XML documents, but must also halt sales of Microsoft Word 2003 and 2007 within 60 days. ZDNet said that i4i’s patent “sounds a bit generic,” but the court ruled [...]

Network World has an article by Eric Lai up today on “Five recession-era strategies for software vendors (and their customers.)” The first suggestion, however is to “Crack down on piracy.”  It’s not that customers (or pseudo-customers) are malicious, it’s just that oftentimes the licensing is often complex – like, for example, forgetting to renew a [...]