Compliantly

Even though Dell had a tough first quarter, it is sitting on nearly $10 billion in cash and equivalents and is "looking for opportunities" to expand its business through acquisitions, according to a Dell executive.

The executive quoted in the IDG News Service article is Steve Felice, president of the company's small and medium business unit. Felice refused to name the companies under consideration, but the article said unnamed observers believe that Palm or Acer are potential targets.

Michael Dell recently said that his company is interested in "smaller-screen devices", which could mean smartphones or some other sort of mobile device. Palm is getting ready to launch its new smartphone, the heavily hyped Palm Pre, and Acer has a strong netbook line as well as a huge footprint in the PC market.

Cisco Systems Inc. will be making aspects of its IP voice technology available virtually and sold as a service as part of a continuing set of improvements to its cloud computing strategy, the company's CTO said today.

Cisco will be "virtualizing voice products [to] sell voice as a service," said CTO Padmasree Warrior, in a Web conference with reporters and analysts. "Certain aspects of voice will be virtualized."

The move was somewhat expected as Cisco begins to offer more cloud computing technologies as it faces an array of competitors in both the cloud computing and unified computing areas.

Warrior and Doug Dennerline, senior vice president of Cisco's collaboration software group, talked about strategy and direction for collaboration and cloud technologies as part of the networking company's biggest annual user conference, Cisco Live! in San Franciso.

Warrior didn't give details about virtualizing voice, but analysts said they assume it will be offered mainly in private clouds used in major corporations that already have Cisco networks. Conceivably, that could include clouds run by voice carriers that serve both businesses and consumers.

Warrior and Dennerline also said that Cisco will differentiate itself from other cloud computing vendors by allowing customers to use their own networking gear together with the services in the cloud.

In one example, Dennerline said the company's ASR 1000 router now includes Cisco's Webex Web conferencing capabilities, which means 300 workers in a corporate headquarters can join a Webex session on the corporate LAN, instead of each of the 300 being required to reach out to a networking cloud to be part of a global Webex session.

Cisco's Webex group operates 220,000 Web conference meetings per day using nine network operations centers globally, Dennerline said. While Webex has had great success, it can be improved, he noted. In one small example, he said that today Webex allows six windows with six people of videoconferencing per desktop at 15 frames per second, "which is not very good." But the video could be high definition, and Cisco is working on doing that, he added.

Webex Connect, its Web conferencing tool, will be upgraded to a new version by the end of the summer, Dennerline said, giving it presence technology and IM capability from the cloud, combined with on-premise IP video capabilities.

Regarding service providers, such as AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc., and their role in offering their own version of cloud computing, Dennerline said that Cisco already offers many managed services through the service providers, but will begin to offer more that are software-oriented. "Service providers will play a large role and some will have part of the business ... They won't want to miss out on this market."

The total market for cloud computing has been estimated at $16 billion globally in 2009, but will jump to 42 billion in 2012, according to research firm IDC.

PostBooks, like most ERP applications, is organized by functional areas, or modules, described below. These modules are highly interconnected and integrated, but you can customize which modules - even which individual tasks - each of your staff is authorized to use.

The heart of any business system is Accounting, and the PostBooks Accounting module features a powerful General Ledger, which is tightly integrated in real time with the other modules of the system. You may define an unlimited number of Accounting Periods within each fiscal year. Financial Reports are completely user-definable, and the system's open architecture facilitates simple interfaces to third party applications such as spreadsheets, payroll, and fixed asset depreciation.

Order entry in the Sales module is where it all begins. Sales reps have complete visibility into real-time inventory availability and the production schedule. The system also allows for a rich array of pricing options, by Customer, Groups, Types, and Categories - as well as special promotions and sales, and the ability to throttle customer buying power by credit rating. Deep and rich historical sales data is available for detailed analysis across multiple time periods, using multiple variables.

The CRM (Customer Relationship Management) module adds more dimensions to the Customer picture - with a Universal Address Book that allows multiple Contacts and Addresses per Account, and allows Accounts to be Prospects, Customers, Vendors, Partners, even Competitors. Incident Management and To-Do List subsystems enable rich history and tracking of customer issues and communications. Opportunity Management tracks pre-sales prospecting and is tightly integrated with other CRM subsystems, as is Project Management, allowing you to associate Quotes, Sales Orders, Work Orders, and Purchase Orders with a particular Project - and track progress and individual Tasks within the Project.

Modules for managing Purchasing, Product Definition, Light Manufacturing, and Inventory are also included.

Exalead

The University of California Berkeley Library recommends a second opinion when searching the Internet, and Exalead is one of its top recommendations.

The search engine features a number of advanced options including phonetic search for those who are sometimes spelling challenged. Spell a word like it sounds and results will include words that sound like what was typed into the search field.There is also a proximity search feature with a "Near" operator that finds documents where the query terms are within 16 words of each other, and a "Next" operator where search terms are next to each other. Other options include searching in a specific language only, after or before a certain date, and a prefix search that looks for the beginning letters of a word.In the results, users see thumbnail pictures of Web pages, which can be pulled up and previewed without leaving the site.In addition, Exalead has enterprise search products available (desktop, network). Its Cloudview platform support 300 formats, including structured data (RDBMS, ERP, Lotus Notes, directories) and unstructured content (e-mail messages, PDFs, Office documents, Web pages).

Scour

Social networking meets social searching. Users can offer feedback on results of their search queries, which are tabulated from across the three top search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing). The feedback moves individual results either up or down in the rankings, which is designed to make the results more relevant as time goes on. Users also can create custom algorithm, which lets them determine how results will be ranked.

Users can gain as many as three points per search (one each for searching, voting, commenting), and earn a $25 Visa gift card for each 6,500 points they collect. Users also earn 25% of the points earned by users they refer to the Scour.Scour is developing search widgets for Windows and Mac desktops, and a Yahoo search widget.

Hunch

Hunch is all about a decision engine, asking the user 10 questions or less to arrive at a solution to a problem or concern. At the core of the search site is a question selection algorithm built by Hunch's small collection of Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer scientists with backgrounds in machine learning.

The design is such that questions are asked just like a human would structure a line of questioning. The questions asked vary based on what has already been asked and how it was answered.

And Hunch is another search engine with a social aspect. The smarts are a collection of common knowledge derived from users who can submit new topics, questions to ask and decision outcomes.

Hunch says its algorithm is a mathematical framework married with a group of users who provide "personality by contributing to it and making it clever, funny, and nuanced."

Scirus

Scirus is a playground for all things scientific. The site searches more than 485 million science-specific Web pages and is built on technology developed by Fast Search and Transfer, now owned by Microsoft. The Scirus engine focuses only on Web pages containing scientific content. If users search for REM they won't see any results for the popular band.

The search engine picks up peer-reveiwed articles such as PDF and PostScript files and dives into digital archives and patent and journal databases.

Scirus has a range of subject areas including health, life, physical and social sciences. Users can rank results by relevance or by date.

The simple search site also has a link to the latest stories New Scientist News.

The advanced search lets users narrow results based on subject, information (articles, books and so on), file formats and specific sources.

Indeed

Sometimes a search engine can be a uniquely personal experience and so is the case with Indeed, which is a site that aggregates job postings. But you won't submit your resume here or chat on discussion boards; Indeed offers an aggregation of posted jobs on some 1,500 sites from industry sites to corporate job boards.

Indeed's simple interface lets users type in job keywords and what city they want to work in. The result is a list of jobs in your area.

But that is just where the search begins. Users can narrow the search by salary range, title, company, and distinguish between recruiters looking for applicants and company's searching for employees.

Indeed has a feature that lets users request to look only at the jobs that have been added to the site since they last visited. The site also provides a trending graph for salaries in particular fields and cities, and a month-by-month graph that tracks the number of jobs posted for the category you are searching.

The "Where are the Jobs" feature shows you how many jobs there are per 1,000 people in the top 50 most populated metropolitan areas.

Users that create an account get more features. They can save searches and create Job Alerts.

Comprehensive legislation to protect consumers' privacy is closer to becoming a reality in the U.S. Congress than it's been in several years, officials with the Center for Democracy and Technology said Tuesday.

Interest in passing a comprehensive privacy bill seems to be higher in Congress than it has been in at least six years, said Leslie Harris, CDT's president and CEO. Although a bill has yet to be introduced, several lawmakers have expressed interest in legislation that would be the first major privacy update since 1974.

Representative Rick Boucher, a Virginia Democrat and chairman of the communications subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, has talked about drafting privacy legislation, and Congress enacted health privacy provisions in a huge economic stimulus bill passed earlier this year, Harris noted. At the same time, members of Congress have been drawn into a debate about the privacy implications of behavioral advertising, with ads delivered based on tracking of consumers' Web surfing habits.

"We have an opening here for the first time to get a bill on privacy," Harris said at a media briefing. "I think that [the stimulus bill] bodes well for the possibility that the privacy logjam is being broken."

CDT has pushed for comprehensive privacy legislation for about a decade, and in recent years, several technology companies, including Microsoft, Google, Intel and eBay, have joined the cause. But while privacy bills have been introduced in Congress in recent years, they've failed to move forward.

Some online companies have called on Congress to let private industry come up with self-regulatory principles to govern online privacy.

In mid-June, Anne Toth, Yahoo's vice president of policy and head of privacy, told a House committee that self-regulation is working in the online advertising industry.

"Market forces drive companies like Yahoo to bring privacy innovations to our customers quickly," Toth said in a written statement. "As one company leads, many others follow or leapfrog by innovating in other ways. Self regulation then raises the bar to bring the rest of industry along with commitments in the areas of notice, choice, security, and enforcement."

The Network Advertising Initiative, a cooperative of online marketing and analytics companies, has had online principles in place since 2000 and updated its privacy principles in December, Charles Curran, NAI's executive director, told lawmakers in mid-June.

In February, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission released a report calling for stronger self-regulatory efforts for online advertisers. "Industry needs to do a better job of meaningful, rigorous self-regulation or it will certainly invite legislation by Congress and a more regulatory approach by our commission," FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz said then.

While some online advertising groups are just recently revising their own codes of conduct, self-regulatory approaches have generally been weak, said Ari Schwartz, CDT's vice president and chief operating officer. Advocates of self-regulation have suggested it would move faster than legislation, but self-regulation has been slow to develop, he said.

"There has not been the kind of action that we've expected as the technology has changed, as the industry has changed," Schwartz said.

CDT would like to see a privacy bill that makes collection of consumer data transparent, that allows consumers to have strong controls over the use of their private information, that allows consumers to see what data is being collected and that includes penalties for the breach of personal data. CDT, a digital rights and privacy advocacy group, also wants Congress to give the FTC and state attorneys general the power to bring enforcement actions against companies that violate privacy laws, and it wants to give private citizens the power to file lawsuits against companies that have abused their private data.

Several groups have opposed CDT's call for privacy lawsuits to be allowed.

Cisco Systems won't try to compete with pay-as-you-go cloud computing providers such as Amazon, and instead will sell its infrastructure to those companies and provide its own software as a service.

The company sees virtualization as the next major computing model and its own Unified Computing System as the first step toward a fully virtualized data center, Chief Technology Officer Padmasree Warrior said in a briefing Monday during the Cisco Live user conference in San Francisco. The company's presence in both enterprise and service provider networks makes it the ideal partner for companies adopting cloud computing, because they want to gain cloud benefits such as scalability and disaster recovery without pushing out control of all their infrastructure, she said.

Cisco is positioning itself in the cloud world as all major vendors find their places there. Warrior said her company's approach differs from those of rivals Hewlett-Packard and IBM because those vendors are moving into the sale of cloud computing resources. Cisco doesn't see a big enough opportunity in that business, she said.

There are four layers in cloud computing, Warrior said: software as a service (SaaS), development platforms as a service, capacity as a service, and the underlying infrastructure for providing those services. Cisco already provides software as a service, in the form of its WebEx collaboration and IronPort security products. Its WebEx Connect offering for third-party application development is a platform as a service. Cisco will leave the business of selling raw capacity to others, while supplying the infrastructure for those kinds of companies, Warrior said.

With Cisco-based cloud infrastructures available for hire, enterprises will be able to hold on to some of their own resources while tapping into public clouds and smoothly moving data, applications and computing workloads between the two, according to Warrior. Cisco's Unified Computing System, which combines the company's new blade server platforms with networking and storage elements, is a step toward that capability, she said. It's a pre-integrated architecture that removes the burden of manual integration from the enterprise IT department, according to Cisco. The company has already sold UCS to some customers, Warrior said.

Cisco doesn't intend to have a completely closed system between enterprise and cloud-provider networks, she added. Where the infrastructure on one end isn't Cisco's, the company's goal is to work with other vendors' systems, she said.

The company also gave an update on its WebEx SaaS collaboration product. Cisco is updating the WebEx interface to appeal to "Main Street" users in addition to the "early adopters" who have made up much of its user base, said Doug Dennerline, senior vice president of Cisco's Collaboration Software Group.

The software will be oriented less toward virtual meeting spaces and more toward individuals whom a user collaborates with, he said. For example, users will be able to click on a contact's name in an instant-messaging buddy list and see a history of interaction between the user and that person, such as what meetings they have both attended. If any of those meetings were recorded, links to those recordings would also pop up.

Cisco is also using its acquisition of PostPath last year to create a cloud-based e-mail system integrated with the presence technology it acquired from Jabber, Dennerline said. And its move to bring smartphone users into WebEx is continuing, with more than 150,000 downloads so far of the WebEx application for the iPhone, he said. Cisco is also talking with Research In Motion, Nokia and Samsung about smartphone clients, he added.

Cloud computing is critical for collaboration because the next wave of productivity gains will come from inter-company collaboration, Warrior said.

There is a trend toward richer collaboration between companies, where so far most tools for interaction have been within organizations, said IDC analyst Abner Germanow, who attended the briefing. This is where Cisco has an edge over its competitors, namely Microsoft and IBM, which have dominated intra-company collaboration, he said. The faster that enterprises move in this direction, the better for Cisco, Germanow said, because its rivals are trying to catch up. However, the trend is likely to take two to five years to play out, he said.

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