Tim Scannell

BOSTON — Microsoft finally put its head in the clouds this week by releasing details about a planned new operating systems and development platform that is tailor-made for Web-based services for businesses and consumers.But in doing so, it may be contributing to a dramatic expansion in the role of companies’ chief information officers. How so? […]

BOSTON — Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door. Does the same hold true for building a better smartphone? That’s what Google is trying to prove. But the leader in online search is already having to defend its strategy behind backing the open source Android mobile platform, which […]

BOSTON — In business, actions speak louder than data. You can also add more clout to that shout by slicing and dicing that data on the fly and quickly serving it up to the people when and where they need it the most. Throw in a little contextual seasoning and you basically have the recipe […]

Getting there may be half the fun, but it’s only a first step for companies looking to parlay the tracking and location capabilities of GPS into useful mobile applications. While GPS technology may provide an answer to “Where’s Waldo?” it is a bit trickier to pinpoint what Waldo or any other mobile worker is doing […]

What you see is not necessarily what you get. At least that’s the case with a lot of business intelligence software, which many companies tend to deploy with the use of spreadsheets over easier to digest graphics as a way of presenting data, and understanding how to use the data to form strategy. “Individuals do […]

BOSTON — Pssst! Want to know the secret to success in mobile broadband? First, stop thinking of a cell phone as, well, a cell phone. Today’s voice and data access-capable phones are “really Swiss Army knives,” said Sprint Nextel vice president of corporate strategy Jack Dziak. Dziak spoke at the Mobile Internet World conference last […]

BOSTON — He may not wear the stereotypical bling, but World Wide Web Consortium director and father of the Web Tim Berners-Lee wants to pimp your ride on the mobile Internet. If only it wasn’t filled with so many roadblocks. “Lot’s of people are still thinking in closed ways, and it is sometimes difficult to […]

“Excuse me, can I use your ‘risk mitigator’ to check my email?” Okay, maybe you won’t hear your average executive asking that question anytime soon. But it would be an apt description coming from someone in the financial services industry who uses a garden-variety Blackberry for much more than just accessing emails and juggling schedules. […]

As one of the developers of the original Java programming language and “Father of Java,” James Gosling is easily a cyber celebrity in the open systems community. Since creating Java and implementing its original compiler and virtual machine, the language has blossomed into an environment with a global install base of 5 million with more […]

A twenty-year-old technology could be set to become a worldwide standard for authentication. By one estimate, it already may be. That’s the thinking, at least, from network security researchers at MIT, who today launched a new effort to develop and expand Kerberos. The authentication protocol, developed in the 80s, already resides in one form or […]