With the popularity of smartphones and tablets among workers, IT departments are trying to accommodate the influx of consumer tech - and manufacturers are trying to help. Here are some consumer devices that have been tweaked for the enterprise - and the software that's being used.
Camera phones have come a long way since the first sub-megapixel models of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Aside from being more broadly available -- there's barely a phone sold today that doesn't have a camera -- they've also become much less of a novelty and much more useful as cameras.
Anyone who manages a high-traffic website knows the importance of the phrase "audience engagement." That's Webspeak for having an audience of readers who regularly post lively comments, keep the discussion going and give your site another reason to be visited.
I hate passwords. I hate coming up with them. I hate remembering them. I hate mistyping them four times in a row. And I hate getting locked out of whatever I'm trying to log into in the process.
Firefox is one of open source's biggest success stories. Not only is it a hit with mainstream users, it's also popular with developers, who've created a number of spinoffs, derivatives, and alternative builds from its code base.
As USB thumb drives and memory cards get larger and cheaper, it's getting easier to trust much more of your data to them. It's also much easier to mistakenly erase data or have them hiccup on you. And if you're in the habit of holding on to that data for too long -- for example, not transferring photos from your camera's memory card -- disaster is almost guaranteed to strike at some point. What happens then?
Once upon a time there was a browser named Firefox -- an open source project that many people happily picked up and spun off into their own versions with names like Iceweasel and Pale Moon. Now the same thing has happened with Google Chrome. Its open source incarnation, Chromium, has become the basis for a slew of spinoffs, remixes, and alternative versions.
The nice thing about standards is there are so many of them to choose from.
Every new technology brings with it the capacity to screw things up in an entirely new way. With social media, it's now become possible to turn what was once a verbal gaffe behind closed doors into a public peccadillo.
The single most common complaint you'll hear about any smartphone is how lousy the battery life is. Granted, battery life is like mileage on a car - it will vary widely depending on your usage. You can always buy more time by making fewer calls or downloading less data. But then, you probably carry your smartphone in order to use it.
Security: You either have it you don't. It's a matter of degrees or, as the experts prefer to think of it, layers. The more varieties of security you have, the better the odds your goods can be protected successfully from intrusion or theft.
When we were kids, my friends and I used to play a game where we fantasized about which technologies from Star Trek were most likely to be real-world inventions within our lifetimes. The transporter and warp drive -- not likely. But the communicator, the voice-commanded computer and the universal translator -- very likely.
To many companies and independent developers -- not just software publishers -- mobile apps represent something even more powerful and important than a brand-new platform to deploy apps on. It's a new and dynamic source of revenue, one with a lot of room to grow. And given how tough it can be to make money selling software at all, especially in this world of open-source and free Web apps, any proven way to make money in that field can become a magnet.
Most everyone who's had some experience with free open source software has learned about the OpenOffice.org suite of productivity programs: a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, database, and drawing tool that provide a good deal of the functionality of their commercial counterparts. For users who need powerful productivity tools but don't require a high degree of compatibility with Microsoft-formatted files, OpenOffice.org is almost a no-brainer.
When word began to circulate about <a href="http://blogs.computerworld.com/16974/diaspora_its_no_facebook_yet">Diaspora</a>, the hype about it being a potential <a href="http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9157638/Facebook_Complete_coverage">Facebook</a> killer took on a life of its own before a single line of code had been released. Now the <a href="http://www.joindiaspora.com/">first developer's alpha version of Diaspora</a> is out in the wild, and the hype is being replaced with scrutiny and well-deserved skepticism.