BillShrink launched a price comparison site dedicated to the new iPhone 3G , helping consumers decide whether the highly-anticipated device is the right purchase for their individual needs. BillShrink is a new, free online service that helps consumers save money by making continuously updated, personalized, usage-based money-saving recommendations, and its new comparison site allows consumers to navigate the complex iPhone 3G/AT&T combo pricing.
HP, which is trying to be stylish, is going up against Apple's MacBook Air with a Voodoo Envy notebook that's all of 0.70-inches deep and weighs 3.37 pounds wrapped in a carbon fiber skin. It's supposed to boot in seconds to access a browser or Skype, but has shorter battery life than Air. It should start at $2,099 this summer versus Air at $1,799.
Success in business increasingly relies on proactively harnessing the power of advanced technologies to manage processes, information, and relationships. Today's IT intensive enterprise must always be on the lookout for the latest in innovation that allow businesses to run with fewer resources while providing the infrastructure to meet today and future customer needs. Virtualization technologies are driving a top to bottom overhaul of the computing industry. The growing awareness of the advantages provided by agile virtualized environments is brought about by economic factors of scarce resources, government regulation, and more competition. Many leading corporations are embarking on virtualization initiatives on their path to predictive enterprise. This keynote explores the following aspects: Top CIO issues facing today?s IT environment, Understanding Key trends and challenges facing virtualization adoption across the enterprise, Examine Industry Requirements to enable and accelerate the virtualization journey, and Intel?s platform innovation/strategy and eco system partnerships addressing the challenges.
Grid Dynamics is a fast growing consulting company. Grid Dynamics advise and engineer systems and solutions of 'extreme' performance, scale and reliability. Our clients - leading financial, technology, Internet, communication and entertainment companies such as eBay or Bank of America - rely on Grid Dynamics to architect, design, prototype, build, or tune their business-critical grid systems. Grid Dynamics work with the latest technologies, platforms and tools, right on - or beyond - the bleeding edge of mainstream computing. Our staff consists of elite scientists and engineers, experts in performance computing.
While SOA can deliver dramatic cost reduction of an organization's business operations, it is a complex, multidisciplinary undertaking, and therefore introduces significant risk. This session presents a list of the most important risk factors and ways to mitigate them BEFORE it is too late. The session will be of interest to anyone planning an SOA initiative, primarily CIOs, Technical Managers, Project Directors and Technical Architects.
Up to this point, the iPhone has been a device for gadget fanatics and big spenders, while shortcomings like the price and lack of 3G have limited the addressable market considerably. By adding 3G, GPS and enterprise support and lowering the starting price, Apple has just dramatically expanded the addressable market for the iPhone, such that it now has at least some claim to be a mainstream device. The big increase in available countries will further add to the potential market size, and Apple should now have no problems reaching its near-term goals for iPhone sales. The bigger question now is whether it will be able to keep up with demand.
HP, which has previously given the space to Yahoo, is going to pre-install a Silverlight-based Live Search-enabled toolbar on all consumer PCs it ships in the US and Canada starting in January. That's when the HP-Yahoo deal expires.
Many organizations make the faulty assumption that SOA is a panacea that can, and should be, applied to every situation. The reality is that service orientation is not the right answer for every scenario. The expense of service orientation cannot always be recouped and, in some cases, service orientation can actually do more harm than good. In this talk, Kyle Gabhart will explore the subject of selective service orientation and how to go about effectively governing the service orientation of the enterprise.
Adobe has published their first plan of what should be included in Flex 4 that is scheduled to release next year. Since Flex is an open source product, you have a say in this too. Obviously, there's a hope that upcoming Thermo release will bring together developers and designers. I'm cautiously optimistic here. It's great that a designer's tool will automatically generate MXML. A developer will pick it up and re-factor. But will the tool be smart enough to reverse-engineer the re-factored code and present it back in a visual form to the designer for further work? That is a million dollars question.
This week you'll be able to order that disaster recovery pack that VMware has been promising since last September, Site Recovery Manager, but it'll take them another month to deliver it. It's supposed to let you set up, test and automate disaster recovery in a way that's not available with traditional methods, it says, painting a ghastly picture of how exposed companies are because it's otherwise so hard and downtime prolonged.
All new or emerging businesses are rightfully cautious of the big investment required to launch a successful web presence. A new cost-effective and time-saving service enables companies to fast track their strategic and tactical web initiatives while still actively growing their user base. Unlike past methods of web development, rapid prototyping is a back-to-front development process that allows the product user interface to be fully designed before writing any code.
Today Adobe announced the Open Screen Project which aims to bring the Flash player to as many different devices as possible.
Cutting through the jargon on the press release, the most significant points are that Adobe are removing restrictions on usage of the Flash and Flash video specifications (SWF, FLV, and F4V), publishing the device porting layer APIs, and removing the licensing fees for the next major version of the Flash Player and AIR for devices. Which means that developers will now be able to port Flash to any device, and distribute and deploy it for free. Additionally, the Flash Cast and AMF data transfer protocols will be published.
While Flash Player has long been an almost ubiquitous platform for desktop PCs, this new move aims to do the same for phones and portable devices. Ryan Stewart and Dave McAllister from Adobe have both written blog posts on the announcement.
Essentially, the Flash player is now about as open as it can possibly be without being open source. It’s an interesting move by Adobe, and I’m sure many will be watching to see what comes out of it.
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Today Adobe announced the Open Screen Project which aims to bring the Flash player to as many different devices as possible.
Cutting through the jargon on the press release, the most significant points are that Adobe are removing restrictions on usage of the Flash and Flash video specifications (SWF, FLV, and F4V), publishing the device porting layer APIs, and removing the licensing fees for the next major version of the Flash Player and AIR for devices. Which means that developers will now be able to port Flash to any device, and distribute and deploy it for free. Additionally, the Flash Cast and AMF data transfer protocols will be published.
While Flash Player has long been an almost ubiquitous platform for desktop PCs, this new move aims to do the same for phones and portable devices. Ryan Stewart and Dave McAllister from Adobe have both written blog posts on the announcement.
Essentially, the Flash player is now about as open as it can possibly be without being open source. It’s an interesting move by Adobe, and I’m sure many will be watching to see what comes out of it.
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Apple has finally bought PA Semi, the fab-less low-power PowerPC start-up that supposedly swooned when Apple switched from the PowerPC Intel. What Apple's going to do with it now become fodder for the speculators. The iPhone uses an 32-bit ARM-derived chip that Intel would love to displace with its newfangled Atom processor.
We’ve extended the deadline for this competition by two weeks.
You asked for more competitions, so here’s another one!
We’re giving away two copies of Adobe CS3 Web Premium (kindly donated by Adobe) to the authors of the best articles about Adobe Flex and AIR submitted over the next four weeks.
That’s right — you could WIN a copy of the ultimate graphics package for web developers, Adobe Creative Suite 3 Web Premium, just by submitting an article about Flex or AIR. Worth USD $1,599, the package includes the latest versions of Photoshop, Illustrator, Fireworks, Flash, Dreamweaver and a host of other tools that form the industry benchmark for creating web graphics.
How To Win
Submit your article to submit (at) sitepoint.com.
Some tips on writing for SitePoint:
For more tips, please read our Write For Us page and our author submission guidelines (PDF).
Oh, and another thing…
Even though there will be only one winner for each of the topics, we may choose more than one article for publication. In fact, if they’re all good, we may publish the lot! So even if you don’t win, your article may still make the front page of SitePoint!
That is all. Get writing and good luck!
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Rumor has it that in the next few weeks Adobe is going to 'reorganize' its Mobile and Device business unit where its Jobs-criticized Flash Lite lives and send the engineers to go work with the larger platform effort and Flash proper, which Jobs has also criticized. Presumably, Adobe is going to do what it takes to appease Jobs. It does want to be on the iPhone and needs Apple's help.
If you're like me, you've probably been spending every waking moment you have eating, living, and breathing the iPhone SDK. Since March 6th, that's pretty much all I can think about once I get home. So, what do you do if you want to learn how to write iPhone apps, but you want to become a pro at iPhone SDK programming? Its one thing to read the SDK, page-by-page until your eyes bleed (what I do for fun), but most people like to hang out with other developers, get hands on, do labs, see demos, and generally get their hands dirty.
'The iPhone has shifted power in the US smartphone market away from carriers and mobile software companies, and toward hardware companies like Apple,' said Michael Mace, a principal at Rubicon Consulting, as Rubicon today released a new survey showing that the iPhone is providing big benefits to both its users and the companies that sell it. 'The challenge for Apple is moving iPhone demand beyond early adopters and current Apple customers,' Mace added.
I want to thank everyone who showed up to share my enthusiasm for the iPhone as it is, what I believe, the mobile development platform to target. I also want to thank those people who tolerated my evasiveness and lack of detail during the SDK session. As I've said before, just because everybody else on the internet has no problem violating NDAs, when I click 'Agree', I know what I am agreeing to and I intend to stick to that agreement.
During the Q&A period after one of my sessions at the iPhone Developer Summit last Thursday, there was someone there from Microsoft Competetive Intelligence. She asked myself and some other folks who were lingering nearby to describe, in our unbiased opinions, what we thought was wrong with Windows Mobile.
Sybase iAnywhere announced availability of support for Apple iPhone during the first international iPhone Developer Summit, colocated with AJAXWorld Conference & Expo 2008 East. Information Anywhere now enables IT organizations to provide secure delivery of Lotus Domino and Microsoft Exchange enterprise email to iPhone users, in addition to a broad range of other mobile devices. Sybase iAnywhere?s unique approach to providing enterprise email support for the iPhone reduces potential security concerns while still providing a rich user experience utilizing native iPhone applications.
Sybase iAnywhere announced the availability of support for Apple iPhone within its Information Anywhere Suite. Information Anywhere now enables IT organizations to provide secure delivery of Lotus Domino and Microsoft Exchange enterprise email to iPhone users, in addition to a broad range of other mobile devices. Sybase iAnywhere's approach to providing enterprise email support for the iPhone reduces potential security concerns while still providing a rich user experience utilizing native iPhone applications.
This session will provide attendees with an overview of the iPhone SDK, including discussion of the App Store, Apple's planned distribution channel for SDK applications. Keep in mind that the contents of the SDK and experiences while using it are covered under NDA, so be prepared for me to talk in generics and leave out specific details that might be covered by the NDA. I am planning on providing a quick introduction to Objective-C for those attendees who may have never seen it and might be worried that it will be difficult to code in (it isn't!).
With millions of iPhones sold in recent months, enterprises are challenged with how to manage the influx of these personal devices coming 'in the back door' without compromising security policies. One IDC analyst states, 'Bringing secure enterprise wireless email to the Apple iPhone brings it one step closer to being able to be used as a trusted enterprise device.' This session will advocate a proactive approach to adding iPhone as a supported device, and illustrate how doing so provides enterprise support for iPhones and reduces security concerns, while still providing a rich user experience utilizing the native iPhone mail application.
The iPhone is transforming the Web as we know it and compelling every Web designer to consider handheld portable devices. This session covers various aspects of iPhone and iPod Touch development. It will include tips and tricks as well as best practices to follow. Williams also covers how to use an integrated development environment (IDE) for building iPhone and iPod Touch applications and how to use the iUI library to easily build iPhone applications - the free, open source, cross-platform, JavaScript-focused Aptana IDE.