Pens will have to be smart to survive

The pen might be mightier than the sword but it's unlikely to prove a match for the tablet and the smartphone, unless Livescribe realises its vision of a smart pen tightly integrated with smartphone and tablet.

In the online world you are what you surf

As more of our lives are spent online buying goods and services, downloading files, watching videos and interacting with others we leave great details of our existence that can be used or abused by others.

A new take on the digital divide

The Digital Divide has been hot political potato in Australia for years. Now the ITU has come up with  a new way of measuring it that might just reveal it to be bigger than it's generally regarded.

Think smart, think big - data that is

Two postings  appeared on Cisco's blog recently. The first announced the acquisition of Ireland based ThinkSmart Technologies and the second announced a webinar on big data. Neither referenced the other. Yet the links between them are significant. The ThinkSmart acquisition suggests that Cisco plans to use big data technologies to extract value from the vast amounts of data generated by wireless networks and their associated devices.

Apple's Passbook excuse for NFC-free iPhone 5 rates a 'fail'

For many years Apple has been ahead of the curve when it comes to new computing technologies. It was the first to adopt the mini floppy disk, and the first to abandon it. It led in the incorporation of WiFi and Firewire and, in the MacBook Air the use of flash storage instead of spinning drives for internal storage. Yet on near field communications (NFC) it is now well behind the curve.

Clouds gathering over the channel

The shift of IT into the cloud is also likely to have a profound effect on the supply chain: the market for IT hardware and software will shift from the end user organisation to the cloud service provider. An increasing percentage of the dollars will be spent by a few large service providers rather than many thousands of IT departments in end user organisations.