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News

• The future of mobility: Are we asking the right questions?

  The shape of the future is discernible if we can find the relevant patterns.

• Where is technology leading us?

  It is time to address technology driven narcissism and isolation.

• In Pictures: Drones behaving badly

  Technical advances -- and questionable use -- are fast accelerating the need for policies regarding the unmanned future of our skies

• ASB’s high tech office breaks workplace traditions

  ASB’s new head office environment means employees can work anywhere, with the device of their choice, and printers are often on respite. CIO New Zealand takes a tour of North Wharf in Auckland’s Wynyard Quarter.

• Test and test again: The lesson from Windows 8.1's bumpy rollout

  That's good advice for Microsoft, developers, hardware partners and customers.

• Smartglasses should be part of BYOD policies: Gartner

  CIOs are taking a fresh look at impact of wearable electronics on the enterprise.

• Forrester: Move towards Sharepoint and Yammer integration to solve social problems

  'With market penetration of well over 100 million seats, SharePoint is a strategic investment for many organisations looking to foster more effective collaboration among employees,' Forrester says in a report.
  

• Security information event management use up in mid-sized orgs

  IT security practitioners typically greet vendor-based studies with scepticism because they come off as a sales pitch for whatever products that vendor sells. People become especially leery when a study leads to the predicted death of a particular security tool. But when looked at cumulatively, such studies offer small snapshots of why companies are making certain security decisions.
  Two newly released studies aiming to do just that looked at how security information event management (SIEM) and other log management tools are being used in mid-sized companies.

• Lumley refreshes IT infrastructure

  Lumley General Insurance in New Zealand has renewed its contract with Unisys to implement a technology refresh of the IT infrastructure, supporting the company’s current core insurance applications. The three-year contract renewal builds on a 20-year relationship in which Unisys has provided mainframe and datacentre services, says Unisys.

• Budget laptop, big impact

  The low-end Eee PC laptop from Asus might be small, but it’s had a powerful impact on the Australian and New Zealand computer market since the Taiwanese manufacturer launched the device late last year.
  The Eee PCs appeal to families and users who want a second laptop.

• A nasty kettle of fish

  News that the keyless entry system for many of the world's automobiles has been "pwned" by university researchers, hot on the heels of the news that the world's most popular PC operating systems both suffered a "pwning" from hackers at a security conference, raises some troubling questions for the global technology community.
  The most pressing questions, which citizens of the world need to have answered in the next several days if the global automotive and computer industries are going to avoid a major catastrophe, are these: How do you pronounce the word "pwn"? Is pwning a way of gathering a tasty seafood dish, or is it something far more sinister? Can Orthodox Jews engage in pwning, or would that be against the Halakhah?

• Who killed the canary?

  On April 25, 2006, 9.30pm, Todd Russell, Brant Webb, Larry Knight and 14 other miners were almost a kilometre underground at the Beaconsfield goldmine in Tasmania when the earth began to move. A minor seismic event, measuring just 2.2 on the Richter scale, triggered a rock fall, killing Knight and leaving Russell and Webb trapped.
  The Beaconsfield incident was a tragedy. Fortunately, Russell, Webb and 14 other miners survived, and advances in mining technology and supporting information technology systems played an important part in their escape.

• Gartner's top 10 strategic technologies for 2008

  Which technologies must any good IT executive examine in 2008? The list includes green power, unified communications, virtualization, mashups and social software.
  Gartner has identified the “Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2008”, and is urging IT executives to think about the risk of not implementing each one. If your competitor masters one of these technologies and you don't, will you be at a strategic disadvantage?

• Web technology provides consultant with global reach

  E-consulting company Theandb is an example of globalisation at work and how the use of technology can compete with much larger companies - and even compete overseas.
  The business is based in Sydney, NSW, although its two principals, Agnes Ponthus and Bjoern Schliebitz, are respectively French and German.

• Prepare for the ‘perfect storm’

  CIOs and IT leaders approaching their next PC technology refresh had better do some serious preparation. Technology refreshes—when enterprises replace one-third to one-quarter of their PC fleets each year on a rolling basis—have become pretty routine in recent years. But several factors are coming together right now to make refresh decisions more complicated and more fraught with risk, says Bruce Michelson, Hewlett-Packard’s national lifecycle manager. “This refresh is kind of a perfect storm,” says Michelson, who travels to HP’s Fortune 500 customers to study and share best practices regarding PC lifecycles.
  Think of the factors affecting your next refresh as simultaneous storm fronts bearing names like Consumer IT and Virtualisation. (It almost goes without saying that Microsoft Vista upgrade plans, if you have them, will factor into this refresh cycle.)