For years, companies have looked to open source to salvage dying products, and each time these efforts have failed. Often dismally.

After all, if a product can’t make the grade as a proprietary product, it will almost certainly fare worse as an open-source product. Great open-source projects are founded on great code and robust community, two things largely lacking from failed proprietary products.

With respect to Symbian, its problems go far beyond its source code, but a lack of source code is the foundation for several of them. A year after announcing that its code would be available under an open-source license, the Symbian Foundation hadn’t actually released the code. Small wonder, then, that Symbian also couldn’t match the app store momentum of Apple, Google, or even its one-time sugar daddy, Nokia. No code, no developers.

No developers, no relevance, as its dying market share demonstrates:

Symbian: It used to be a contender

An open-source strategy generally favors challengers in a market, not incumbents. This is the genius of Google’s Android assault on Apple’s uber-closed iOS, and it is equally the reason that a swath of open-source upstarts — from Alfresco to BonitaSoft to Cloudera – has mounted successful challenges to the incumbents in their respective markets.

Open source, then, is a great way to spark or accelerate momentum. It’s a terrible way to reverse a product’s decline. If anything, it does the opposite by calling attention to the lack of interest in a project — freely visible through SourceForge or JIRA tickets or forum activity — and thereby compounding the indifference to the product.

Was open-source Symbian dead the moment it was announced? Perhaps. It certainly needed to demonstrate significant developer interest in the platform immediately upon announcing the code would be open-sourced, and then continuously thereafter. It did neither.  As a result, one by one Symbian’s key handset licensees like Samsung have dropped it for Android or other open-source alternatives. And it started way too late: by the time Symbian announced its code would be open-sourced, developer survey data already showed Android and OpenMoko interest running rampant. In the past two years, developer interest for Symbian has all but evaporated.

While interest remains relatively strong for Nokia’s Qt developer tools, it can’t compensate for fading interest in the overall Symbian platform.

Had Symbian gone open source when still strong with developers, and had the Foundation done a better job of engaging developers, it might have had a chance to survive as more than a dusty Wikipedia reference.

Open source isn’t a one-time announcement, coupled with a code drop. It’s exceptionally hard, ongoing work that requires equal parts evangelism, programming, and customer success stories to keep developers believing that their work matters. It’s especially difficult, as Drupal founder Dries Buytaert intimates, when a commercial entity gets involved, because it can frighten away community.

These principles aren’t exclusive to open source, of course. Consider Skype, for example. Skype appears to be pulling a Microsoft: turning inward, seeking to build out its own ecosystem rather than fostering a robust, third-party developer ecosystem. Microsoft is famous for its developer outreach on the enterprise side, but is equally famous for a failed go-it-alone approach in consumer technologies. Its dying brand, as CNN reports, reflects this failed strategy.

Both companies need to engage and encourage a third-party developer ecosystem. Open source is a critical way to accomplish this.

But neither they nor anyone else can hope to use open source as a purely palliative remedy for what ails them. Open source can be used to inspire and complement successful products. It can accelerate momentum. What it can’t do is resurrect dying technology products.

Disclosure: I work for Canonical, a Linux vendor. I am also a former Alfresco employee.

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Not so fast. Lost in the hype around cloud computing is the very real possibility that the company doing so much to enable it just might take a massive share: Amazon.

This thought hit home for me while I was reading Redmonk analyst Stephen O’Grady’s excellent post on Amazon’s quiet revolution:

If Amazon restricted itself to basic public cloud computing services, that would be one thing. Most of the large systems players have turned their attention to the burgeoning market for quote unquote private cloud services. Whether these same cloud players appreciate the fact that a large portion of their interest in the private cloud is a function of the public cloud economic realities established by Amazon is unclear, but unimportant. Amazon is singularly responsible for the framing that is the public cloud today, a framing which generally relegates those with traditional enterprise margins in mind to private cloud settings.

But Amazon has not, of course, restricted itself to basic public cloud computing services. Amazon’s steady but underacknowledged expansion into adjacent markets is no secret. Since those early days when it took a Master’s degree to apply DNS to a running EC2 instance, Amazon has steadily grown its footprint beyond basic compute and storage functions into core enterprise software markets like messaging (SQS, SNS), analytics (Elastic MapReduce), monitoring (CloudWatch), and databases (SimpleDB, RDS). And, as of last Tuesday, enterprise Linux.

Amazon, in short, is an enterprise software company. It just doesn’t look or act like Oracle, IBM, or VMware, so it gets treated as a side-show oddity when, in reality, it’s playing center stage. In many ways, it’s orchestrating the industry as a grand puppet-master, as O’Grady implies, and in the process, may end up disrupting established ways of doing business.

Amazon has started with infrastructure, virtualizing and delivering key components of enterprise data centers like databases, storage, and now Linux through its public cloud. In doing so, Amazon is not only shaking up outmoded delivery models like Microsoft’s Windows, but also new approaches like Red Hat’s Red Hat Enterprise Linux, as IBM’s Savio Rodrigues points out in his post over at InfoWorld.

Amazon is happy to effectively give away others’ businesses. As O’Grady illustrates, the entire reason we hear so much noise about private clouds from IBM, Oracle, VMware, Red Hat, and the like is that Amazon has effectively decimated their ability to make serious money in the public cloud.

So what happens when Amazon dismantles this wishful thinking and pushes all computing to its public cloud?

Such a move would naturally begin by Amazon getting enterprises comfortable running their applications on Amazon Web Services: companies like Pfizer. Sure, today they insist they’d never run everything in the public cloud and, in fact, Eli Lilly is an example of a company that has pulled back from AWS due to liability concerns. Clearly, it’s going to take time to get enterprises comfortable running their businesses on the public cloud.

But let’s get this straight: It’s just a matter of time. Salesforce.com proved enterprises will put their most sensitive data — their customer data — in the cloud. It’s unclear why a vast array of other applications and associated data would be any different.

Applications drive strategic value — and IT purchasing dollars — making it almost certain that Amazon’s support for infrastructure like Linux and MySQL is simply a way to enable the next round of its cloud strategy: application support. Over time, it’s hard to not see Amazon competing with the likes of Salesforce.com and Google in the cloud/SaaS-based delivery of enterprise applications.

So, today, Amazon is increasingly competing with the open-source vendors who sell support for a variety of open-source components of its Amazon Web Services offering. In the future, I expect we’ll see Amazon building out its AWS product portfolio in ways that make just about everyone in the traditional software market uncomfortable. Very uncomfortable.

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The report, “How Much Information? 2009 Report on American Consumers,” reveals that U.S. households consumed approximately 3.6 zettabytes of information in 2008. (The numbers also include television and radio transmissions.) That’s roughly the amount of information found in thick paperback novels stacked seven feet high over the entire U.S. — including Alaska — according to UCSD estimates. One zettabyte is one billion trillion bytes.

Among the other findings:

• The 3.6 zettabytes of total information used by Americans in their homes far exceeds storage or transmission capacity.
• The total is roughly 20 times more than what can be stored at one time on all the hard drives in the world.
• Less than 2 percent of the total information was transmitted over the Internet.
• Between 1980 and 2008, bytes consumed increased 350 percent, for an average annual growth rate of 5.4 percent.
• The average American’s information consumption tops 34 gigabytes a day.
• On average 41 percent of information time is watching TV (including DVDs, recorded TV and real-time watching).
• American consumers watched 36 million hours of television on mobile devices each month.
• Computer games are the biggest information source, totaling 18.5 gigabytes per day for the average American consumer, or about 67 percent of all bytes consumed.
• Americans spent 16 percent of their information hours using the Internet (second only to TV’s 41 percent).
• Americans consume about 1.8 hours of Internet video every month, or roughly 0.89 exabytes.
• Communications and web browsing result in 65.7 hours of usage per month, per user, and generate about 8.01 exabytes of data.

These data sets are based on an interesting interpretation of the meaning of data and information.

We distinguish between data and information. Information is a subset of data – but what is data? For our purposes, we define data as artificial signals intended to convey meaning. ‘Artificial,’ because data is created by machines, such as microphones, cameras, environmental sensors, barcode readers, or computer keyboards. Streams of data from sensors are extensively transformed by a series of machines, such as cable routers (location change), storage devices (time shift), and computers (symbol and meaning change). These transformations, in turn, create new data. Data is not information until it becomes available to potential consumers of that information.

So what is information?

Our measures of information include all data delivered directly to people at home, whether for personal consumption (such as entertainment), for communication (e.g., email) or for any other reason.

The caveats notwithstanding, one can easily argue for or against this study. I don’t care either way. One of the reasons I’m so intrigued by its findings is because I believe that the big growth in data (and information) consumption is not behind us, but ahead of us. Just imagine when there are billions of smart edge points: smartphones, e-readers or entirely new Internet content consumption devices. This is going to be the single biggest challenge — and opportunity — of the coming decades. It won’t be long before zettabyte becomes yet another word we learned on our way to a world that is drowning in data.

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Minutes after the U.S. stock markets started winding down for the weekend, a few technology giants made some announcements that amount to nothing more than tying up loose ends.

* Avaya got the go-ahead from Canada to buy Nortel’s PBX business for $900 million in cash.
* Microsoft & Yahoo finalized their search agreement that was first announced back in July. It’s a good way for the two companies to put yesterday’s Bing debacle behind them!

Photo courtesy of Microsoft.

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Earlier today, he was arrested for what is allegedly an insider trading scam involving quite a few people. The charges against him include four counts of conspiracy; he’s also being charged for eight counts of securities fraud. Talk about an ignominious fall for a man who is said to be worth a billion dollars and is ranked No. 559 on Forbes’ World’s Billionaires list.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

Others charged criminally in the case include Rajiv Goel, director in strategic investments at Intel Corp.’s investment arm; Anil Kumar, a director at global management-consulting firm McKinsey & Co.; Danielle Chiesi and Mark Kurland of New Castle Partners LLC, the one-time equity hedge fund group at Bear Stearns Asset Management Inc.; and Robert Moffat, a senior vice president at International Business Machines Corp.

The allegations put Mr. Rajaratnam at the center of several insider trades in which he allegedly caused Galleon funds to act on inside information or passed along tips to others.

In one instance, prosecutors allege that Mr. Rajaratnam, between January 2006 and July 2007, received nonpublic information about Polycom Inc., Hilton Hotels Corp. and Google Inc. and caused Galleon Technology Funds to make improper trades on that information. As a result, the Galleon fund earned more than $12.7 million, prosecutors said.

When I read this news this morning on Bloomberg, my whole life flashed in front of my eyes. Rajaratnam’s rise to the top was a familiar story to anyone who was in the technology business. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, he rose to fame because of his coverage of the semiconductor industry, which at the time was on a massive upswing.

Whether it was his relationships with chip companies or something else, he became a dominant analyst for Needham and eventually brought them so much business that he became president of the firm in 1991. Remember, this was the go-go 1990s, an era when everything was OK, and he rose with the boom.

He started his own hedge fund, the Galleon Group, in 1997 and left Needham in 2001. Over the next few years, he reported spectacular returns and was the envy of the industry. Many of the analysts (such as Goldman Sachs’ Microsoft analyst Rick Sherlund) I met over my long career went to work for him. The spectacular results brought in more money. From Galleon Group web site via MarketFolly:

…..”manages a series of funds that specialize in the technology and healthcare industries. Currently The Galleon Group manages five different long/short equity funds: Technology, Healthcare, New Media (Internet), Communications and Life Sciences. Galleon’s philosophy and approach differs from that of other hedge funds in the fundamental belief that it is possible to deliver superior returns to our investors without employing leverage. Combine strong fundamental investment analysis with superior trading capability Galleon places a strong emphasis on both fundamental investment analysis and trading. This enables us to identify companies with superior long-term growth prospects while maintaining the flexibility to profit from short-term market fluctuations.”

How do I say it politely? That is all poppycock. For all that analysis was apparently nothing but smoke and mirrors, and instead seems like a case of insider information-based trading. As Bloomberg reports:

Prosecutors said they’ve been investigating the case since at least November 2007, when a person they don’t name in the complaint began meeting with agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The person, who has pleaded guilty and is cooperating with authorities, had used inside information to trade securities and tipped Rajaratnam since 2006, prosecutors say in one of two complaints filed in Manhattan federal court.

The person, who had sought a job at Galleon in 2005, helped prosecutors by “making consensual recordings of four telephone conversations” with Rajaratnam, the complaint says.

Given how big this fund was, I’m sure the reverberations are going to be felt in Silicon Valley, where Rajaratnam had deep relationships. I’ve been on the phone trying to find out more from my sources and will update the report as I gather more information.

Meanwhile, it reminds me of the age-old maxim: When something is too good to be true…..

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As a responsible Mac user, I usually feel immune from most Internet threats…except for one. Using my Mac exactly as Apple intends it to be used sometimes renders my Internet connection virtually unusable for up to a month, and costs money to fix.

Could this happen to you? It depends on whether your Internet provider has a bandwidth “metering” policy (or “cap”). These caps are one of the most controversial topics for Internet users in 2009, and can put a significant crimp in your Internet use. Recently, Congressman Eric Massa (D-NY), who represents the Rochester area, introduced the “Broadband Internet Fairness Act” (H.R. 2902) (PDF). Massa got involved soon after Time Warner Cable unsuccessfully used Rochester as a test market for metering. Under this bill, the FTC would have veto power over such caps and thus allow them only under certain agreed-upon scenarios.

In my hometown of Lawrence, Kansas, the standard level of cable Internet service has a limit of 3GB of bandwidth per month. Overage is charged $2 per GB. Downloading a single movie from the iTunes store will blow through an entire monthly limit, and even the cable company’s most expensive “premium” service only allows 50GB of bandwidth. In 2009, that’s not really much bandwidth at all.

Once you’ve hit your limit, you have to severely restrict usage until the next month, or face a large bill. Your Apple TV remains stale without its new content, your iMac stops downloading podcasts, and your iPod weeps because it’s sick of the same old music you had last month.

Apple is the leader in multimedia content creation; new Mac users are always pleasantly surprised by how easy it is to buy from the iTunes store, or create their own content. A common question we get in our local user group is “I’m not sure what I did wrong, but all of a sudden I have a substantial overage bill from my cable company.” Of course, the user did nothing wrong, other than subscribe to a few podcasts, and perhaps download a new Apple software update and buy some shows with iTunes! The Mac is also blessed with great online backup services like MobileMe, yet when our user group did a presentation on backup strategy, I had to warn novice users to be careful lest their backups end up costing them an arm and a leg in bandwidth overage fees!

While on the surface this appears to be an isolated issue with a few providers, it is not. Bandwidth metering is a growing threat to cable Internet users in many cities. The American Cable Association (ACA) has come out in support of bandwidth caps, and the former chair of the ACA, Patrick Knorr, who implemented bandwidth caps in Lawrence, stated in multiple interviews that flat-rate Internet pricing is an “unsustainable” business model.

Unfortunately, using the Internet normally with bandwidth metering is also unsustainable. When Mac owners are worried about downloading movies, doing backups or performing system updates, that hurts the Apple brand. Apple is continually innovating new ways to make the Mac OS the best Internet operating system, creating a whole ecosystem with iTunes, MobileMe and iLife. All of these great products rely on the ubiquity of the Internet. When Internet providers start making normal Internet use an expensive proposition, Mac users lose.

Apple should lead the way and come out against bandwidth caps. Given that many of the offerings on the iTunes store actually compete with cable TV, Apple should be vigilant that cable companies do not use bandwidth metering as a way to stifle alternative ways of viewing content. Additionally, Apple should add a bandwidth meter to the Airport routers; that way the bandwidth use of entire households can be tracked. If bandwidth caps are inevitable, Apple can arm the consumer with data to monitor their usage and dispute discrepancies with their ISP.

Apple could be an ally for consumers (even the “PC guy” in the commercials would be helped!), while at the same time standing up for its own brand and vision of consumer Internet use. If you disagree with the idea of bandwidth metering, make sure your voice is heard by giving customer feedback to your own Internet provider and writing your member of Congress. I had better end this article now…bytes and bits equal dollars and cents for me, unfortunately!

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“This is the way the market is going,” said Larry Fisher, research director for NextGen. “Increasingly when people are forced to make a choice on which building materials to use, they are going toward the more environmentally responsible approach.”

The study assessed the worldwide outlook for the use of greener building products, which the report defined as those having less of an environmental impact than standard building materials. Fisher said the drivers behind the trend were many: shifting attitudes among builders and consumers, government mandates, and the higher prices that green buildings often fetch on the market. The study didn’t look at the prices for green materials relative to their conventional competitors. But Fisher said he believes the cost savings — from recycling waste materials or using less energy-intensive manufacturing processes — in making greener products will often offset higher costs elsewhere in their production.

Cement is a good example. Chemical reactions during its creation emit large amounts of CO2, and energy is needed to heat and dry its constituent products.  Many cement manufacturers still rely on coal-fired kilns, and for every ton of cement made, about a ton of CO2 is released. Fisher said that’s led an increasing number of manufacturers to embrace the practices recommended by the Cement Sustainability Initiative, which, among other things, outlines ways for cement makers to reduce their carbon footprints. But Fisher said established cement makers currently aren’t focused on developing new products to replace conventional cement. Instead, they are searching for ways to reduce the energy intensity of their manufacturing processes and adopting cleaner sources of energy.

A handful of startups, however, are working on significantly different products and processes for replacing conventional cement. One is Los Gatos, Calif.-based Calera, which is developing a way to create some of the main ingredients of cement from CO2, effectively sequestering it into their products. The Khosla Ventures-backed company estimates its cement will retail for about $100 per ton versus about $110 per ton for conventional cement. Another is the relatively stealthy Newark, Calif.-based CalStar Cement, which is backed by Foundation Capital and is developing a process for using industrial by-products to make a cement replacement.

As governments increasingly place limits and prices on carbon emissions, the old guard may stop just tinkering with its manufacturing processes and start looking more seriously at innovative ways to produce cement. Cement manufacturers reportedly have already invested millions of dollars in green programs, like the Cement Sustainability Initiative.

The NextGen report found that commercial office buildings, new residential buildings and home improvements will likely present the biggest opportunities in green building products. Fisher expects green materials to take an especially strong hold in commercial and residential rebuilds and retrofits.

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Sounds easy, right? Wrong. CSR data is notoriously complex. Putting together a report can mean pulling data from environmental health and safety departments, community and education programs, philanthropic giving records, supply chain partners and operations records. Historically, companies have pulled that data into Excel spreadsheets to create new data sets for CSR reports. But as stakeholders — and shareholders — show more interest in sustainability concerns, companies are beginning to eye more sophisticated software to help them manage and report that data. 

Traditionally, CSR reports were released on an annual basis, sometime after the end of the company’s fiscal year. Combined with year-end financials, such reports informed socially responsible investment groups and shareholder organizations about companies’ activities. “A lot of these groups that…need that real, deep level of data tend to review their companies on an annual basis,” says Suzanne Fallender, Intel’s corporate responsibility communications manager.

In today’s market, however, companies are recognizing a need to go beyond sustainability reporting with strategic management plans that take social and environmental issues into account. That means they need deeper — and more dynamic — visibility into their performance against specific metrics, says Scott Bolick, VP of sustainability solutions for SAP. “We want to get the data at a level where it’s manageable,” he says. SAP, which just released its own sustainability report two weeks ago, is working on new solutions that could help clients automate sustainability reporting using data from its existing software products, Bolick says; the company’s recent acquisition of Clear Standards was a step in that direction.

Intel, which released its first CSR report in 2001 and its most recent report last week, currently uses a variety of internally developed, customized databases and information systems to help measure and manage its environmental impacts. But now the company says its needs are outgrowing customized solutions that sit on top of other software programs. “We are actually starting to explore alternative software solutions,” Gary Niekerk, senior manager of Corporate Responsibility, wrote in an email. “While our internal systems have worked well, the growing complexity of data needs and our push for ever more transparency is requiring us to look for even better solutions.”

As companies choose these new solutions, they need to consider how that data gets used, Bolick says. While health and safety metrics may need to be monitored constantly, other data (such as employee turnover) might be more meaningful on an annual basis. As companies set annual sustainability goals, they may want accountability for meeting those targets tracked on a monthly or quarterly schedule. Bolick points to the example of air travel. SAP has made a public commitment to reducing its carbon emissions to 2000 levels by 2020. To see progress, Bolick says he needs monthly visibility into the flights taken and the carbon that represents.

That doesn’t mean companies are necessarily moving their reporting in a more granular direction, however. Neither SAP, Intel nor Microsoft say they’ve seen a demand for more frequent data. Fallender notes that a number of years ago, Intel tried reporting quarterly environmental health and safety information on its web site, but stakeholders didn’t end up using the information. Collecting, verifying and publishing the data was labor intensive, so the company went back to annual reporting. However, Fallender says Intel could revisit the issue going forward.

If companies move increasingly toward dynamic information about their environmental performance, they’ll need systems that can verify the numbers’ accuracy. “The concern is that part of what we do before we publicize anything is auditing,” says Microsoft Chief Environmental Strategist Rob Bernard. SAP’s Bolick agrees: “The market is going to hold you accountable,” he says. “That’s why people are now saying, Excel spreadsheets aren’t going to cut it for me anymore.”

This article also appeared on BusinessWeek.com.

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The draft rule was announced the day before a show of support from the Obama administration for both corn and cellulosic ethanol. The administration held a call this morning with reporters to discuss not just the EPA rule but also $786.5 million in stimulus funds that will be allocated for biofuel research and commercialization and a task group called the Biofuels Interagency Working Group that will work on development programs and policies.

The EPA rule is the most controversial of the three. While many biofuel advocates favor an emissions standard, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson on Tuesday morning cited an estimate that biofuels only reduce emissions by about 16 percent compared with fossil fuels. Other studies put the number closer to 60 percent, said General Wesley Clark — an enthusiastic ethanol proponent and chairman of ethanol trade group Growth Energy — and Growth Energy CEO Tom Buis, during a conference call today. Growth Energy’s board of directors includes corn-ethanol companies POET, Western Plains Energy, Amaizing Energy, Hawkeye Renewables, and Green Plains Renewable Energy.

Clark called the modeling “science gone wild” and “way out of line with what other studies show,” and pointed out that attributing things like rainforest clearing to ethanol alone is unfair, as governments choose to cut trees for many different reasons. The good news, Clark and Buis said, is that the current model isn’t set in stone. The EPA plans to conduct peer reviews on its emissions analysis and has formed an interagency biofuels group to help come up with policies to make biofuels greener.

Jeff Broin, CEO of corn ethanol maker POET, said in a statement that he is:

[C]oncerned about the preliminary rule issued by the U.S. EPA that included an indirect land use change penalty for corn ethanol. While many scientists have found significant flaws in the models used to calculate indirect land use change, I think the very concept is flawed and stems from a lack of understanding of ethanol and agriculture.

The vastly conflicting studies out there on emissions from ethanol does make the subject confusing. Last month, when the California Air Resources Board delivered a similar call to include indirect land-use numbers in a state standard, more than 175 scientists signed a letter suggesting that those ethanol emissions numbers were flawed.

Speedy improvements in the technology could also render an easily dated emission-calculation model obsolete. An Argonne National Laboratory study last year concluded that ethanol’s water consumption fell 26.6 percent, and energy use fell 21.8 percent, over a five-year period ending in 2006.

But for some of the newer cellulosic ethanol firms, which will be able to create ethanol from waste, and non-food plants that don’t take up farm land, the ruling seems less threatening. Bruce Jamerson, CEO of cellulosic-ethanol company Mascoma, believes this process will help establish a common scientific basis for a much-needed lifecycle analysis, which will help to value biofuels’ carbon-dioxide advantages. A lack of scientific consensus has resulted in widely varying conclusions from different lifecycle studies today (see examples here and here). Jamerson said he’s confident that cellulosic fuels will come out ahead under any scientifically driven lifecycle analysis. “If we’re going to encourage low-carbon fuels, let’s come up with a common independent agreed-upon scientific standard for what constitutes low carbon,” he said.

Bob Walsh, CEO of algae-biofuel startup Aurora Biofuels, said that while the industry and science community doesn’t yet understand the whole equation of how energy plays into biofuels, it all boils down to the same thing for biofuels companies: Reducing your energy use is good for both your emissions numbers and for your economics. “If you’re energy-efficient, you probably have a good greenhouse-gas model and you’re efficient economically, too,” he said.

Even among companies involved in cellulosic ethanol, though, support isn’t universal. Mark Emalfarb, CEO of biofuel-enzyme company Dyadic International, said the rule kicks the ethanol industry when it’s down. “The economy’s unstable enough,” he said. “Either we have to get off oil or not get off oil. This seems to me to be ‘let’s throw more burdens in [biofuels'] way.’” Emalfarb recommends reducing emissions by supporting cellulosic advancements and technologies that turn carbon-dioxide into fuel or electricity, instead of by penalizing corn-based ethanol.

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Anti-virus vendor AVG Technologies is hoping that by releasing its LinkScanner technology as a free, standalone product it’ll be able to help protect us from an expanding online threat.

I had the chance to speak with AVG CTO Karel Obluk, who shared some really interesting (and disturbing) information about the shift in the way cyber-criminals are distributing malicious code.

Since most email is protected by ISPs and users are getting smarter about using anti-virus software and firewalls, most malicious code is now distributed by web site visits. A computer can be infected by a so-called “drive-by download” just by visiting an infected site.

Some vital stats via Obluk:

• On any given day, some two million web pages are poisoned by hidden threats.
• 60 percent of malicious web sites appear for less than one day.
• Real-time scanning is critical as relying on a database of known URLs isn’t sufficient protection.

AVG Link Scanner isn’t new, but previously you could only get it as part of the AVG Anti-Virus or Internet Security products. You can now add this functionality to your security toolbox, even if you use other security products.

At the heart of the LinkScanner is technology that analyzes web links in real time and determines if they pose a threat. If so, it prevents you from downloading those pages. It also works in conjunction with major search engines to give you a visual indicator on the safety of the links returned in the search results. Green check marks indicate you are safe to click through.

You may remember when AVG 8.0 was released that there were some slow browsing issues reported, related to LinkScanner. Since then, optimizations have been put in place to minimize that side effect, including a fix to resolve an issue with Windows Vista. I’ve had it installed since they released it, and in two days of normal working I haven’t noticed any perceptible slowdown.

LinkScanner runs on both Windows XP and Vista (32 & 64) and is a free download for non-commercial use.

What do you use to protect your machine from malware?

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Improvements in hardware helped the team keep costs low. Luke Peterson, data architect for Obama for America, told me his $700 laptop easily handled voter registration data, in fact better than did the $5,000 workstation he used in 2004.  But improved processor performance was aided to some degree by improved software, too. Peterson said the campaign used inexpensive software options — PostgreSQL, MySQL, etc. — where possible, saving budget resources for expensive items like SPSS licenses and an ArcGIS server for the Chicago office.

Increased bandwidth also was a big boon. In 2000, Peterson explained, the Al Gore campaign was using an ISDN that was split 60 ways (I hope he was exaggerating). “If we needed to move a big data set, we’d set it up at 6:00 p.m. and go home … or go work at another computer,” he told me. “Maybe the next morning, if you’re lucky, it went through.” Compare that to the Obama campaign, which had “huge” pipes going into the Chicago office and invested heavily in Internet connections for field offices.

Advances in mobile technology made life easier, as well. By the end of the campaign, Peterson said, the team was running most of its voice communication on cell phones and even VoIP. – the only copper going into the Chicago office was the DSL line. The Chicago office maintained a traditional digital phone service, but many, if not most, of the field offices dumped traditional phone lines for VoIP. The team even built an iPhone app designed to help canvassers do their jobs.

The campaign also used cloud computing tools and a whole lotta SaaS. On the cloud front, Peterson recalled a team of DBAs using EC2 to run a huge PostgreSQL spatial analysis with political shapefiles. SaaS-wise, Peterson cited extensive use of Google Docs and EditGrid. In fact, he told me, the campaign shared more EditGrid spreadsheets than it did Excel spreadsheets, and there was a rumor that Google contacted the Obama campaign’s legal team in South Carolina to say the team had the biggest spreadsheet of any Google Docs user.

And, of course, there was Team Obama’s use of new media. On top of the 5-million-plus friends Obama for America had across the social networking landscape, the campaign also targeted applications and advertising to each particular site. Ads on Gothic.net were different than communications on LinkedIn, for example, and the distinct differences in how people use MySpace vs. Facebook meant different strategies for those two sites.

Facebook was a big part of the campaign for reasons beyond its online reach: Co-founder Chris Hughes was part of the campaign team. In fact, Peterson told me, Hughes’ presence underscored the campaign’s open culture, a characteristic that made possible the testing (and ultimate success) of all these new strategies. In other campaigns, Peterson said, the then-25-year-old Hughes, despite his web mogul status, would have been told to sit down and shut up. In the Obama campaign, though, he “kicked some of the gray-hairs in the ass a little bit,” Peterson said.

Even with all the new techniques employed by Obama’s campaign, I expect those who cut their political teeth with the Obama campaign will hone their methods in the years to come, making 2007-2008 seem like last century just a few election cycles down the road. With the growing legitimacy of cloud computing, the growing prevalence of broadband and the growing reach of social networks, the possibilities for what computing can bring to a campaign seem almost endless.

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Data drove many decisions for the campaign. The team amassed more than 13 million email addresses and more than 5 million friends across the social networking landscape. Of the roughly $750 million Obama raised, two-thirds of it was donated online. There were field offices across the nation. Data was coming from everywhere — every time someone signed up on Facebook, donated $5 or requested info from my.barackobama.com, the campaign got at least a phone number or an email address.

Corralling the various data was critical, Peterson said during the presentation, as it allowed the campaign to “break down the walls between departments.” In early 2007, when Iowa was the focus, Team Obama built a tool that meshed voter registration data with data collected online to determine the geographic location of voters. This allowed precinct organizers to more fully personalize the experience for voters in their precincts. Instead of generic phone calls asking people to vote for Obama, callers were able offer rides to caucus locations or talk about issues that voters might have raised via a forum post. While all this was going on in Iowa, another web tool was feeding information to volunteers in states with later primaries and caucuses, who built and grew coalitions until the official campaign focused its attention on those states.

The main objective of this data integration strategy was to make the most of resource expenditures. The Obama campaign didn’t want to waste time going through the phonebook cold calling, so it used data mining and integration to figure out “who the cream was on our barrel,” on whom it should unleash its hordes of volunteers. This was the campaign’s single biggest technology-derived success, Peterson told me. It gave the campaign a leg up on the Republican effort, which Peterson thinks lost its analytical edge thanks to “data nerd” Karl Rove’s absence.

The end-result of data integration is creating what Peterson calls “one picture of the truth” across the board, where organizations see all the relevant data for a particular need in one place instead of having the data isolated in their respective departments. Siloing data points decreases efficiency and usefulness. Peterson said corporate America’s bureaucratic structure and cultural resistance to departmental integration slow down data integration projects, even though corporations all strive to make the best use of their data.

As opposed to established corporations with legacy systems and practices, campaigns are like startups: They’re pretty much built from the ground up each election cycle, meaning there are no deeply rooted architectural or cultural obstacles standing in the way of integration. When the Obama 2012 campaign begins to take shape — strategies developed, infrastructure put in place and resources allocated — Peterson hopes 2008 veterans bring the institutional memory to build in data integration from the start.

Tomorrow, I’ll tell the rest of the story — how technological advances ranging from Facebook to mobile processors to cloud computing helped revolutionize the way campaigns are run.

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Long story short: you can always try this method and revert back if you find it too limiting while mobile. Simply log in to Gmail on the web and click the Settings link. From there, click the Labels link and remove the “Show in IMAP” check-boxes for any labels that you don’t hit up all that often on the go. Be sure not to uncheck the standard or default labels for key items like Inbox, Sent Mail, and Trash.

In my example above, you can see that I’m no longer synchronizing the CES 2009 or CTIA labels: those shows are in the past and although I want to keep the mail that’s in them, I don’t need to access it while out and about any longer. Again, this is common sense, but probably not something folks think about: why “clog the sync” with data you really don’t need when mobile?

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While there’s no shortage of accounting programs available, with varying levels of complexity and pricing, it can be difficult for a small shop to find the right solution. Focusing on ease of use and integration with other web apps, Outright is a great choice for web workers.

In reality, the accounting needs of the average solo web worker are usually pretty modest. Record the money in (income) versus your money out (expenses) and be prepared to pay your taxes when they’re due.

At its core, Outright is a basic web service designed to allow you to easily track your expenses and income. Using a familiar check register interface, you enter in transaction details and get quick and simple access to the general health of your business.

As a member of the Small Business Web initiative I wrote about recently, Outright integrates well with FreshBooks, the invoicing app, and Shoeboxed, the receipt organizer (both also SBW members).

In fact, it is when used in conjunction with these other apps that Outright really stands out. While it has all the right things to make data entry easy, like auto-complete and keyboard shortcuts, nothing could be easier than having your existing invoice and expense data imported automatically. When connected to your Freshbooks or Shoeboxed accounts, all transactions are updated nightly and even maintain a link connection so you can get to the original source quickly.

There are some challenges with this integration, though. For example, Outright exclusively uses the categories from  Schedule C but since Shoeboxed doesn’t have that limitation, there are instances when it is necessary to manually re-assign a category to synced records.

I think the folks at Outright don’t stress enough the tax preparation angle when describing the usefulness of their service. With email reminders when quarterly payments are due, estimated payment amounts and a really handy Schedule C printout, using Outright just for the tax preparation functionality alone might make great sense.

If you’re already using Freshbooks or Shoeboxed, then getting an Outright account is almost a no-brainer. But even if you’re not using these apps, then Outright is still a very good choice for basic expense and income tracking.

oDesk integration was also recently added, and I imagine support for other apps is coming soon, so it might be a good idea to check in occasionally and see if they are supporting your app of choice.

Outright is free during the beta period and works wherever you have a browser and Internet connection.

How do you manage your books?

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As Stacey has pointed out over at GigaOM, there’s a lot of potential for synergy between IBM and Sun’s cloud computing offerings, and the combined company would likely offer a robust enough array to help enterprise customers migrate to the cloud. That could be good news for Sun’s Eco Responsibility initiative, launched in December 2005. At the outset, the campaign was part of an effort to bolster sales of Sun’s new energy-efficient chips and server products with a “green” message, but Sun also made an effort to tie the campaign into its overall approach to computing. Because cloud computing and green IT have become so closely linked in many minds, an acquisition of Sun by IBM likely wouldn’t put a damper on Sun’s Eco Responsibility initiatives (though I’d be surprised to see IBM keep the “Eco Responsibility” branding).

By acquiring Sun, IBM would also gain control of Java, Sun’s biggest brand success, if not its largest commercial one. (Sun may have swapped its SUNW stock ticker for JAVA in 2007, but in 2008, the company earned just $200 million from Java on total revenues of $13.8 billion.) AMR Research suggests that Java, not Sun’s server and storage products, could be the biggest boon for IBM — including for IBM’s recently launched “Smarter Planet” campaign, which aims to use information technology for improving the efficiency and sustainability of diverse industries, from food and oil to water and electricity. Because Java, a pervasive and powerful development platform, is already an important part of many of IBM’s software and services offerings, bringing it in-house could give IBM a serious advantage over other enterprise software vendors — including those (like SAP) seeking to make their own sustainability management software plays.

Earlier this year, I spoke at length with Drew Clark, director of strategy for the IBM Venture Capital Group, about IBM’s Smarter Planet initiative. He stressed the growing importance of the mobile handset; according to Clark, mobile access to the data generated from smart systems will play a key role in improving the effectiveness of such initiatives, particularly in the consumer space. In order to bring smarter tools to consumers — whether they be smart home energy management systems, smarter irrigation systems, or smart parking and traffic tools — Clark said making information accessible and actionable on a mobile device will be necessary. “The new IT platform has evolved from the desktop to the mobile handset,” he said.

For Clark, the mobile platform that can run such systems has to be three things: easy to use, easy to develop for (preferably with a developer community behind it), and “as open as you can be,” he said. “That’s the magic formula.”  By acquiring Java, Sun would add just such a platform to its portfolio of tools. (Sun’s Java ME is supported on Symbian, Windows Mobile and BlackBerry handsets — as well as unofficially on Android.)

However, that’s just my take. Unsurprisingly, neither Sun nor IBM would comment on the potential impact of such a deal on their green initiatives.

This article also appeared on BusinessWeek.com.

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I’ve looked at some of the common services that VAs provide, and found some free or cheap alternatives that you might want to look into.

Internet research

One of the most common services that VAs provide is Internet research. If there’s something you need on the web, but you can’t seem to find it within a few minutes of searching for yourself, it might be time to ask others to assist you.

When I need to get feedback and answers from businesspeople, I’ve always turned to LinkedIn Answers. The community there is generally friendly and helpful. When I’m researching a post I’m writing, I usually go there to ask for other people’s take on a subject. Alternatively, you can also use Yahoo! Answers and AskMetafilter.

Twitter can also come in handy for this purpose, whether you’re looking for a quick answer or if you want to meet a resource person who can walk you through a complex topic. The number of replies you get usually depends on the number of people who are online when you tweet your question, as well as how many followers you have. Still, I’ve had some questions answered by people who weren’t following me, so it’s not a strict rule.

Online forums are also a useful resource, especially if you’re researching a topic with which you’re unfamiliar. Just go to a forum specializing on the subject you need to know about and ask your questions. Usually, most members are willing to help you out.

Regardless of which research shortcut you use, you need to verify the validity of the information you’re getting. You can do this by asking the people helping you to include any online articles, books and other resources that will allow you to know more about the subject. While this means you might need to put in some extra work, at least these helpful people have pointed you in the right direction.

Most importantly, you need to be very polite and grateful. Give thanks and respect to the people who spend a few minutes of their day to help you out. Don’t forget to return the favor and give back to the community, too.

Appointment setting

Scheduling a meeting or a conference call can be a little tricky because of all the back-and-forth communication with the participants. This is why many people hire VAs to schedule these events for them.

But there are also some apps that make scheduling easier as well.  These include TimeBridge (reviewed here) and TimeDriver (discussed in a previous post). Aliza Sherman also listed several scheduling solutions in her post about must-have apps for web workers.

Restaurant reservations

While I was looking through the web sites of several VA companies, I found that restaurant reservations are among their most-requested services. The tech tool alternative to hiring a VA for this purpose is to use a service like OpenTable or DinnerBroker, where you can reserve and schedule your table online.

Of course, these sites don’t have all the available restaurants in the U.S. in their databases. OpenTable claims to have over 10,000, while DinnerBroker covers just over 1,000 restaurants. And for famous restaurants that are fully-booked for a month, you’ll have to get on a waiting list. To do that, you usually have to call the restaurant yourself.

Rule-of-thumb

Generally speaking, if you don’t have the money to hire a VA to complete a task, you can find a way to automate it.

Some of the more popular services that VAs offer include reminders and wake-up calls. I’ll skip discussing obvious alternatives (alarm clocks), but if you can get an app to automate your reminders, there’s rarely any reason to hire someone else to do it. If you use Google Calendar to track such reminders and appointments, why not get Google Calendar on your phone and let that handle your reminders?

Every time you wish a VA handled a repetitive task for you, find a tool that will help you out with it instead. I had a friend who hired someone to backup his Google Docs files one by one, but there’s actually a free and simple way to do that with the right Firefox extensions.

I’m not saying that all these apps and sites can easily replace a human virtual assistant: Having a VA can be very good for your business if you know how to delegate well.  But if you don’t have the budget for one, you don’t have to do all the grunt work the hard way, either.

Have you ever considered hiring virtual assistants? What kinds of tasks are you thinking of delegating to them?

Image by Lorenzo Gonzales from sxc.hu

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