Nicholas Kolakowski

Outsourcing as a practice remains strong, Larry Quinlan, CIO of professional-services provider Deloitte LLP, asserted during a keynote address at last week’s Global Sourcing Forum and Expo in New York City. Despite his pro-outsourcing bent, however, Quinlan also acknowledged the arguments of those who feel that off-shoring is ultimately detrimental to the U.S. economy. That […]

When Microsoft first released Windows Marketplace for Mobile, it only ran on the newest version of the company’s smartphone operating system, Windows Mobile 6.5. On Nov. 16, Microsoft announced that older versions, specifically Windows Mobile 6.0 and 6.1, will now be able to access its mobile-applications bazaar. Microsoft released both Windows Mobile 6.5 and Marketplace […]

Apple’s much-rumored tablet PC could include a stylus for writing in addition to a touchscreen interface, according to both blogosphere rumors and a patent application filed by Apple. As uncovered by blogs such as Apple Insider, Apple’s patent application (20090279783) describes an “ink manager [that] interfaces between a pen-based input device, one or more applications […]

After Microsoft’s release of Windows 7 on Oct. 22, any product rollout from Redmond will seem small by comparison. Realizing this, Microsoft introduced its Bing revamp and new Exchange Server 2010 in comparatively low-key fashion. Microsoft announced the worldwide launch of Exchange Server 2010 on the opening day of the TechEd Europe conference in Berlin […]

NetSuite and InsideView paired up to release InsideView for NetSuite, an application that ports social networking functionality to both Customer Relationship Management and Enterprise Resource Planning, on Nov. 10. By doing so, the companies join others that have recently been attempting to leverage social networking within a business-process context. NetSuite is a vendor of cloud-computing […]

Microsoft took responsibility for a developer lifting code from a CodePlex-hosted open-source project to build its free Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool, an incident that caused Microsoft to yank the program from its online Microsoft Store earlier in November. Microsoft had originally introduced the WUDT in October as a way of porting Windows 7 onto […]

Microsoft Bing Now Features Facebook, Twitter, Wolfram Alpha Access by Nicholas Kolakowski No Title Within a few weeks, according to a Microsoft spokesperson, Bing will begin integrating Wolfram Alpha into its search engine, allowing users to solve math problems and see other numerical information. No Title Bing’s Wolfram Alpha answers provide a variety of graphical […]

Microsoft’s Anti-Piracy Enforcement Team now has a Twitter feed. The feed, which began on Nov. 3 with a link to a Microsoft page describing how to tell whether a piece of software has been pirated, has only four tweets but is expected to expand. A Microsoft spokesperson described the Twitter handle as a way for […]

Apple plans to rapidly expand its retail footprint, with 40 to 50 stores set to open worldwide in 2010. The majority of those storefronts will be opened in various international locations such as London, Paris and Shanghai, according to a Nov. 12 report from Reuters. The new locations, including a planned store in the Louvre, […]

Mozilla released Firefox 3.6 Beta 2, the latest version of its open-source Web browser, on Nov. 11, a little under two weeks after the release of the first Firefox 3.6 beta. The second beta contains “over 190 fixes based on feedback Mozilla obtained from the previous beta,” said an organization spokesperson. The original Firefox 3.6 […]

Microsoft‘s interest in incorporating “computational engine” Wolfram Alpha into its own Bing search began earlier in 2009, according to a member of the Wolfram Alpha team. The search engine provides a definitive answer to query rather than a page of links, and it apparently threw Bill Gates for a bit of a loop. As described […]

NEW YORK–During a keynote address at the Global Sourcing Forum and Expo here on Nov. 11, Discovery Communications CIO David Kline suggested that any companies wanting to outsource their IT assets would do well to virtualize, streamline and otherwise render shipshape their organizations before the transfer. “If your mess is a mess, and you turn […]