David Strom

Lost in the overall deluge of social media and other online tools is the lowly blog. But blogs are still one of the best ways for corporations to get their message delivered. And before you call me old school, consider that blogs are undergoing a bit of a renaissance as the linchpin of a communications […]

I have had the opportunity to mentor quite a few startup companies in the St. Louis region over the past several years. I was asked yesterday why I do it, and it because I want to give something back to my community, help others avoid some of the same mistakes that I did when I […]

Like some of you, I was in the market to buy a new phone late last year, and went online to the AT&T store to make my purchase the day or so after the new iPhone 4S was available. Smart, I thought to myself: avoid the lines (not that there are many lines here in […]

It was three years ago this week when I began an experiment inproducing a new form of IT product reviews, using video screencastingtechnology, combined with my years of testing thousands of products.Since then, I have done more than 65 reviews, which works out to abouttwo a month. After putting a product through its paces, I […]

I have been on the road a lot this summer, which is always the worst time of year to travel. But one thing I have noticed is that increasingly, many laptop-toting travelers are inadvertently sharing their files when they are on the hotel or airport or airplane or coffee shop WiFi. So here is a […]

Yes, it is time for the twelfth annual SysAdminDay coming up in twoweeks. I must have missed the first eleven of them somehow, but I planon celebrating in style this time around. Stay tuned for the contest details at the end of this post. Yes, those underappreciated folks that build your servers, debug yourSQL code […]

In the past week I have done several stories for ReadWriteWeb where Ihad to really dig to get the price from the vendor. This seems thebeginning of a trendlet, especially when it comes to Web-basedservices. Even IBM’s press announcement had nothing on its pricingplan, something that would have been unheard of a few years ago […]

So maybe the iPad is the must-have cool portable device at the moment. But Apple still has a few things to learn about building the best tablet. And since trying out the Blackberry Playbook over the weekend, I have a few suggestions (not that Apple is going to listen to me): First there is multitasking. […]

In my last update on virtualization, I looked at developments toward the end of 2010 concerning virtual desktops and improvements to virtual infrastructure. The past six months have seen increasing sophistication in both areas, with new products from the major virtualization vendors and some interesting twists, which I’ve noted below. First, let’s look at the […]

Behold: this August will be the 30th anniversary of the first IBM PC. That humble box changed our world. No, IBM wasn’t the first PC maker, but back then the company revolutionized our industry. It created an entire ecosystem of partners and suppliers, and prompted development of desktop applications such as Lotus 1-2-3. Looking back […]