Luckily, we now have one. A whole week’s worth of celebrating remote work, in fact. It may not sell as many roses or chocolates as that better-known mid-month holiday, but Anywhere Working Week is now in full swing in the UK. Announced late last year with the support of MP Norman Baker, the seven-day event to highlight the personal, business and environmental benefits of flexible and remote working has a fistful of big-name founders, including Business in the Community, Microsoft, Nokia, Nuffield, Regus, Vodafone UK and Transport for London, and it is also supported by the UK Department for Transport, WWF and the Trades Union Congress.

“It’s no longer viable for businesses to stick to rigid, inefficient ways of working if they want to compete successfully in the market,” says Gordon Frazer, the managing director at Microsoft UK on the initiative’s home page, and the weeklong event is meant to promote these more flexible practices. To spur participation the sponsors are offering giveaways to those who sign up as supporters, as well as a handy calculator that British individuals can use to find out how much they would save by working remotely.

As the Digital Workplace Forum points out, the event is hardly making waves and compares it unfavorably to a similar but more cleverly promoted event in the Netherlands. The Forum blames the British government for its lackluster support, saying:

The lack of visible ‘oomph’ with Anywhere Working week is disappointing. . . . For all the positive benefits which flow from the Digital Workplace we believe the UK government should be championing remote working far more actively. It reduces pressure on transport, is good for the environment and produces a healthier, happier and more productive workforce.

To be fair to the British government though, the U.S. equivalent, Telework Week 2012, is next week and is hardly a pressing topic of discussion around American kitchen tables either. The truth is remote working doesn’t have tons of immediate sex appeal (that’s probably why the Dutch had to use pretty women in pink bathrobes to get their event some attention), despite the Digital Workplace Forum and the Anywhere Working Week sponsors’ being completely correct about its many benefits, which is both a shame and a marketing challenge.

How could the Anglophone countries take a leaf out of the Netherland’s book and find a way to make remote work a hot topic?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Martin Kliehm

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The results are now in, and while the fact that more and more knowledge workers are importing their smartphone and iPad addictions to the office probably won’t surprise you, the extent of the use of these devices and employees’ willingness to pay for them might. The survey found:

• Globally, one-third of devices being used for work are non-Microsoft.
• One-quarter of devices used for work are mobile (i.e., smartphones and tablets).
• In Europe and North America many workers choose which devices they use themselves: Seventy-three percent select their own smartphone, 53 their laptop and 22 percent even choose their PC.
• Forty-eight percent pay the entire cost of their tablets themselves; 41 percent shell out for their laptops.

That might be good news for mobile workers looking to get stuff done on the go and on devices of their choice, but it adds up to less cheerful reading for Microsoft. The report concludes that “mobile devices will become the majority of devices used for work, surpassing PCs” and “Windows’ device share will fall below 50 percent by 2016.” It goes on to suggest this will demand a shift in marketing on the part of Microsoft, obliging the company to target individual workers as much as IT decision makers. “Think about that for a minute,” says Frank Gillett, a Forrester analyst who co-authored the report, in a blog post coinciding with its release, continuing:

Microsoft’s share of OSes on shipping PCs is still far above 90 percent and declining only incrementally in the face of growing Apple Mac share. Microsoft’s share of PCs in companies is even higher. But seen through the eyes of the workers, not IT, Microsoft is down to about two-thirds of the devices they use to get work done. With the strong growth of mobile devices — personal or issued by IT — and Microsoft’s minuscule share of mobile devices, that means that Microsoft’s share of the OS on devices used for work will continue to erode.

Do these numbers surprise you at all?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Johan Larsson

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Cisco, which is famous for its acquisition strategy, may have made a rare flub with Skype. But since Cisco passed on the deal it’s still trying to exert some influence over Skype and its new owner Microsoft, via the European Union. Last week Cisco asked the EU to block the Microsoft-Skype merger. At the time Om wrote:

The company that once championed SIP and sold expensive PBX gear and expensive handsets for the offices has been losing influence in the new world of collaboration and communication. For a long time Cisco has dominated the unified communications business. Cisco, thanks to its nose-bleed inducing price tags, is aimed at companies with deep pocket books. Skype, on the other hand, is for real people and small businesses.

Cisco is extremely worried that Microsoft will now take Skype further into the corporate community, and that big companies will stop buying its gear. Cisco’s De Beer in his conversation earlier this morning wouldn’t go as far to admit it outright, but he did say that it was causing them problems with their corporate clients. The argument De Beer made was that just like any voice phone can talk to any other voice phone, video calls should have similar interoperability.

Chambers confirmed this when he explained that Cisco’s customers asked it to make this move because they wanted their Cisco software and the Microsoft (plus Skype) software to work together. That’s right, Skype was a threat and now with Microsoft’s corporate cachet, it’s an even bigger threat, so now Cisco wants it to play nice — or just play with it.

Chambers also said that Cisco had been trying to work out a deal with Microsoft on this, but had gotten nowhere. The problem for Cisco is that it didn’t buy Skype a while back to avoid alienating its service provider customers. However, today when IP communications are the only communications, and the core of many lines of business for Cisco, thinking about that service provider subset of customers now means Cisco frustrates another set. For Cisco the growing importance and prevalence of a single network across all lines of business is both a curse and an opportunity.

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Box, formerly known as Box.net, is one of several companies — including fan-favorite Dropbox as well as Microsoft, and Google — competing to store your digital paraphernalia — Word documents, presentations, photographs, whatever — in the cloud and make it accessible from your devices of choice.

A big part of the update is the facelift Box gave virtually all Android clients. “We worked closely with Google to build a modern interface using Google’s Ice Cream Sandwich principles. That Android 4 UI will run cross all Android clients,” said Matthew Self, VP of platform engineering for Box. (Ice Cream Sandwich is Google’s name for the latest Android smartphone OS.)

Given the number of Android flavors in the field — every carrier has its own — and different versions of each, that single UI claim is no small feat. Self estimates there are easily hundreds of device-Android combinations out there.

Also new to Android: Users will be able to upload multiple files in batch mode and in background and can invite collaborators to work on  a document from their device. And, they can comment on these documents from their phones, Self said.

While Box supports a wide variety of non-Android devices–including Apple  iPhones and iPads, RIM’s Blackberry and Blackberry Playbook, even HP’s defunct TouchPad — Android appears to be the favorite.

“Android has eclipsed iPhone on the phone side and it’s growing fast in tablets.  There are a lot of Android phones coming into the enterprise,” Self said. He cited Gartner numbers showing Android with 50 percent of the smartphone market, Apple iOS with 25 percent and Microsoft with just 2 percent — a number he does not think will improve much.

That explains why Box offers no native Windows Phone support at all, although an HTML5 browser-based client runs on most devices. Self discounted the ability of Microsoft to gain significant market share in smartphones even though the new Windows Phone Mango OS has been well reviewed.

Update: A Box spokesman wrote in to clarify the company’s position on Windows Phone. He said:

At Box, we want to make it dead simple for our users to share and collaborate on business content from any device. We’ve invested aggressively in building amazing experiences on iOS and Android because those are the platforms our customers are using, but we’re always tracking adoption and demand, and will support Windows when we see it get traction in the organizations we serve.

With the updated Android clients comes support for four new languages — French, Italian, German, and Spanish– so Box is no longer an English-only experience.  The company will show off its new offerings next week at the Global World Congress in Barcelona.

It’s becoming clear that Box is banking on Android at the expense of Windows Phone and even Apple’s popular devices. The fact that Microsoft’s SkyDrive and  Apple’s iCloud cloud storage services could be considered Box competitors might be a motivating factor.

Still, given RIM’s Blackberry woes, the continued fragmentation of the Android market and the worry that Google’s acquisition of Motorola is causing rival handset makers –all of which could help Microsoft’s smartphone efforts– this looks like a risky move.

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What the company promises here is wide deployment choice for companies that want to build internal private clouds for security or other reasons or want to put all or part of their workloads into a public cloud.

As a systems integrator with a global presence, Dimension Data or DiData, can boast geographic coverage that gives it an advantage over other cloud providers. “We do about $5.8 billion a year and have 14,000 employees — we have the wherewithal to serve customers all over the world,” said Keao Caindec, CMO of Dimension Data’s Cloud Solutions Business Unit. (Dimension Data is a Johannesburg, South Africa-based subsidiary of NTT Holdings.)

Dimension Data Cloud Services layer OpSource’s software know-how atop EMC storage, VMware virtualization, Cisco networking and Dell servers, Caindec said.

The platform is managed by Dimension Data’s Cloud Control which provides the workflow orchestration, resource provisioning, and billing. A service administration layer does all the metering, sets the permissions and enforcement.

These cloud services hit a market that is rapidly filling up with cloud computing options. Just last week, EMC — which already backs the VCE company that bundles EMC storage, VMware and Cisco UCS servers — said it would team up with a VMware and Atos, a French IT giant with global presence, on Canopy, another wide-ranging cloud services initiative. And, another tech triumvirate – Cisco, VMware and NetApp — offer a FlexPod hardware-software bundle that competes with the VCE’s Vblock offerings.

The biggest webscale clouds — the prototypes of which are run by Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Facebook or Zynga — tend to deploy commodity “scale-out” hardware. That trend leaves premium vendors — EMC, Cisco, NetApp — looking for ways to embed their pricier hardware in cloud deployments. Hence all the joint efforts. Last week it was Canopy, this week DiData, stay tuned for more.

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Kamala Harris worked with Amazon, Apple, Google, HP, Microsoft, and Research in Motion on what appears to be a formal agreement to help app developers comply with an already existing California law that requires them to have privacy policies. The main change is that the six companies responsible for the vast majority of app downloads in the U.S. must now provide app developers with a way to link to an app’s privacy policy on their own Web sites or insert the text of the policy within the app. But the statement released by Harris’ office was “not intended to impose legally binding obligations on the (mobile companies).”

It’s hard to imagine the new agreement having too much of an effect on mobile privacy. Even if “the majority” of mobile apps lack privacy policies (per Harris’ office), the majority of those downloading apps blow right past those privacy policies in order to install their new toy. Those who do read the policies are in store for some of the finest legalese yet created as to hide as much as possible the notion that free apps depend on the collection of personal data. Having a policy is much better than not having a policy, but greater emphasis on making those policies easier to understand would be appreciated.

Harris’ agreement stops short of pinpointing specific uses of personal information that might harm consumers, but it does make it easier for app developers to post policies and for consumers to report violations of those policies, so it’s probably better than nothing. The AG’s press release said the parties will reconvene in six months, at which point there will likely have been yet another incident along the lines of Path’s address-book snafu that drew widespread attention.

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FISMA was meant to define a framework for protecting government information and operations against natural or man-made threats. Three levels of threat — low, moderate and high — were defined, based on the potential impact of a security breach. The latest action in the cloud comes as cloud providers lay claim to the “FISMA moderate” designation, meaning that the threat of a breach could result in “moderate” damage in terms of loss of “confidentiality, integrity or availability.”

Gaining a “FISMA moderate” designation is an important checklist item that would make cloud services more palatable to government agencies that want to move to the least expensive deployment option but also protect their data. Virtustream is the latest cloud vendor to hoist the FISMA moderate flag, saying Monday that its Vienna, Va., data center earned the moderate level FISMA authorization and accreditation certificate. It already held the FISMA “Low” accreditation. To attain moderate ranking, it had to show sufficient “physical controls and procedures to ensure that the site is secure via biometrics and other controls and is highly available through redundancy,” according to a Virtustream statement.

Amazon Web Services claimed the FISMA moderate mantle in September. As AWS evangelist Jeff Barr wrote at the time:

After receiving our FISMA Low level certification and accreditation, we took the next step and started to pursue the far more stringent FISMA Moderate level. This work has been completed, and the door is now open for a much wider range of US Government agencies to use AWS as their cloud provider. Based on detailed security baselines established by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), FISMA Moderate certification and accreditation required us to address an extensive set of security configuration and controls.

There’s nothing wrong with these FISMA claims; it’s just that they’re not really official — yet. FedRAMP will take another three or four months to review and generate a list of compliant companies, said a spokesman for the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA).

One thing is clear: the race is on to win government cloud business, said John Pescatore, Internet security analyst and VP at Gartner. “There’s definitely going to be money in direct sales to the government but also sales to companies like defense contractors that do business with the government.” Being on that FISMA-approved list will be non-negotiable to most high-tech companies.

Already there have been some nasty, revenue-driven vendor spats over FISMA claims, such as when Microsoft publicly questioned Google’s claim of FISMA compliance for Google Apps.

Sorry states: FedRAMP for feds only

One problem is that while FedRAMP pertains to federal cloud deployments only, many worry that budget-constrained states and cities will read any FISMA certification as some sort of safety guarantee. (The TechAmerica Foundation last week released its own set of best practices and guidelines for cloud deployment.)

Jeff Gould, president of Peerstone Inc., warned of this issue. “FISMA is a federal standard, but you also have a lot of state and local governments wanting to save money. Many will point to the FISMA badge as justification, although it is irrelevant to them,” he said. “We’ve got a race to the bottom where CIOs in smaller government entities are looking for any excuse to get the cheapest thing. The danger is that the vendors will take this FISMA certification as a blanket label to say ‘I’m the safe and secure cloud.’”

There’s little doubt that, over time, more of the government’s data and workloads will move to the cloud. But there’s no substitute for due diligence — which is what the FedRAMP effort proposes. The last thing any of these constituencies — cloud vendors, agencies, integrators, the government itself — needs is a public snafu.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user g_kovacs.

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In case you missed it, Microsoft’s Dean Hachamovitch, corporate vice president for Internet Explorer, posted at what first glance Monday appeared to be another alarming expose of Google’s disregard for user privacy: “Google Bypassing User Privacy Settings.” Hachamovitch charged that Google was trying to pull the same trick on IE users that it shamefully employed to install third-party cookies on the computers of Safari users, but the reality wasn’t quite as damning as the headline.

IE uses a privacy protocol called P3P, a well-meaning but ill-fated attempt by the World Wide Web Consortium to introduce common privacy standards into Web browsers. The idea was to give users more control over how they were tracked by Web sites by asking those sites to declare their data-collection intentions in machine language (known as CPs) that could be understood by the browser and dealt with according to the user’s preferences.

But IE is the only browser that has implemented P3P, and the Web page for the standard itself hasn’t been updated since 2007. Also, P3P was designed before the time of the “Like” or “+1″ buttons, meaning it doesn’t know how to deal with the concept of one Web page needing to understand that you’re logged into another Web site in order to provide you with the ability to share content through Facebook and Google, among others.

As a result, Google and Facebook simply don’t participate, substituting the code strings outlined in the P3P specifications for real text and a link to their P3P policies. As noted in Microsoft’s blog post, Google sends this message:

P3P: CP=”This is not a P3P policy! See http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=151657 for more info.”

This confuses IE, since it is looking for a set of three and four-letter code strings in order to enforce the P3P privacy policy, not actual words and links. That means Google’s third-party cookies will be installed on the machines of IE users.

But Microsoft protests way too much in flagging Google for this behavior.

For one thing, Google had already disclosed that it didn’t honor the aging standard. Facebook, a close partner of Microsoft’s and the recipient of $240 million in investment from Microsoft, has also confirmed to ZDNet (and previously disclosed) that it doesn’t follow the P3P guidelines for many of the same reasons as Google. Microsoft refused to comment to ZDNet regarding Facebook’s similar treatment of the P3P standard.

And even Microsoft once recommended that Web sites feed invalid P3P code to browsers, as shown in a 2010 study on P3P by Carnegie Mellon that was distributed by Google after Microsoft published its “findings.”

“Even if the CPs were valid, Microsoft’s recommendation undermines the purpose of P3P since it encourages web administrators to use CPs that do not represent their actual data practices,” the authors wrote in Section 5 of their long report.

In a statement distributed Monday, Google said “Today the Microsoft policy is widely non-operational. … The reality is that consumers don’t, by and large, use the P3P framework to make decisions about personal information disclosure.” Instead, they use clearer options in browsers like Firefox, Chrome, and Safari regarding how Web sites set cookies on their machine.

This situation is far different from Google’s approach to Safari privacy standards, in which it bypassed cookie restrictions without disclosure by tricking the browser into thinking an ad was a form submission and was deservedly chastised. We can all agree that a common privacy standard for Web browsers is a nice idea, but modern Web services operating in 2012 can’t be expected to adhere to privacy policies abandoned by their creators in 2007.

You have to wonder what Microsoft was thinking: it’s quite similar to the 2011 blog post in which Google whined about Microsoft’s patent-licensing policies, which are completely legal even if some of the patents themselves might be questionable.

Microsoft would probably be better served by just sitting back and letting Google continue to make mistakes rather than lobbing a petty attack while giving another company following the exact same policy (a company that stands to return a nice chunk of change to Microsoft’s coffers in a few months) a free pass.

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While SkyDrive has been around for awhile, and claims 17 million users (and stores 10 petabytes of data), the bulk of the mind share around cloud storage has accrued to Dropbox, which at last count claimed 45 million users.

The blog, written by SkyDrive Program Managers Mike Torres and Omar Shahine, describes how Microsoft insiders have been using the Windows 8-SkyDrive tandem internally:

We clean install Windows 8 on a new PC and sign in, and all of our settings, browser history, and customizations just show up. In addition, one of the most important steps we take to make a new PC “ours” is to copy over our personal files – like documents and photos. With Windows 8, we wanted to make sure that your files would be instantly available and up-to-date as you move between PCs – without configuring add-ons or using a USB drive.

They also talk a little about how they’ve built the Windows 8 onramp to SkyDrive, the current iteration of which Microsoft describes as more a web site than a true cloud service.

 We built the entire app using modern web technologies like JavaScript, CSS, and HTML5, and because of our recent updates to SkyDrive.com, we were able to use the same JSON APIs and JavaScript object model that the website uses. The only difference on Windows 8 is that we bind the results to modern controls that were built for touch. This is part of the reason it’s so fast, and the touch behavior works so well (and works on Windows on ARM too). Over time, we fully expect the Metro style app and SkyDrive.com to “converge” on functionality so there won’t be a question of which experience someone should use. When using Windows 8, the SkyDrive Metro style app will be the best way to browse and manage your SkyDrive.

“Metro” is Microsoft’s term for its tablet or phone interface.

Microsoft is expected to launch a consumer preview of Windows 8 at the Mobile World Conference next week in Barcelona.

Given the noise around cloud storage — from startups like Dropbox and Box, along with legacy behemoths including Microsoft and Google with its long-rumored Google Drive — look for the battle to rage on.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user redjar

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While the area is more famous for the tech luminaries and startups it lost to other regions — Harvard alums Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Microsoft’s Bill Gates being the most famous examples  – it still can claim a roster of impressive tech startups.

As a Silicon Valley-based partner for Boston-based North Bridge Venture Partners‘  Paul Santinelli has studied the differences between the two technology hotbeds up close and come up with a few conclusions. ”Boston is strong in infrastructure, comms [communications], and enterprise software — the kinds of technologies needed to build businesses,” he said in a recent interview.

Silicon Valley — which led the league in VC money with more than $3 billion invested in Q4 2011, according to the PricewaterhouseCoopers/NVCA MoneyTree Report, is much more focused on the consumer markets, Santinelli said.

But in the post-minicomputer, post-PC world, why build a business in Boston? “That’s a question we had to answer in a very real way when we got started,” said David McFarlane, Co-Founder and CEO of Akiban Technologies, a Boston-based NewSQL database startup. Some of the company’s backers wanted it to relocate to Silicon Valley, he said, but Akiban resisted.

“There’s a tremendous amount of talent in the Boston area where there are quite a few database and data integration companies. There are a number of founding architects that came from Object Design, from Archivas, Blue Agave, and Oberon and InterSystems,” he said. Object Design was a pioneer in object-oriented databases; Blue Agave, a demand management specialist, was acquired by I2 Technologies (which was then acquired by JDA Software); Archivas was a storage startup acquired by HDS; InterSystems is the company behind the Cache database (an outgrowth of the  MUMPS database) used by many hospitals and healthcare organizations.

Ori Herrnstadt, McFarlane’s co-founder and Akiban CTO agreed. “The caliber of architects you found here in the database world was unmatched. The Vertica, the Netezza, the Object Design guys were all here,” he said.  (Vertica, Netezza and Object Design ended up at  Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Progress Software respectively.)

Other hot database or storage oriented startups in the Boston area include Kinvey, ParElastic, Ginger.io, Sonian, Hadapt, Cloudant and VoltDB, the latest brainchild of serial database entrepreneur Michael Stonebraker, who backed Informix, INGRES, Streambase and, Vertica.

It doesn’t hurt that MIT, Harvard, Tufts, Boston University, Boston College, Brandeis, Bentley, Babson, UMass/Boston and other colleges are shoehorned into a compact area around the city. Those schools provide a steady stream of young talent to power startups. Another key part of Boston’s deep bench comes from its background as the home of the minicomputer — the mid-range machines that bridged the mainframe and PC eras. Those minicomputer companies — Digital Equipment Corp., Prime Computer, Data General, Wang Labs, ComputerVision — have gone the way of the dodo bird, but left behind an impressive array of technology experience that remains relevant.

Boston’s proximity to east coast financial companies is another plus. Those companies are not only a possible source of investment but a potential customer base, Santinelli said.

Still, as evidenced by the number of local companies snapped up by outside tech giants, the Boston-Cambridge nexus can feel more like a farm team to distant big leaguers. IBM alone has bought 20 local area companies since it purchased Lotus Development Corp. in 1995. IBM’s most recent purchase was Burlington, Mass.-based Emptoris last December.  Oracle (bought Cambridge-based Endeca in October) and others have cherry picked promising startups in the area. There simply aren’t many tech giants based here any more. On the plus side, the well of expertise still runs deep in the area that witnessed the rise (and fall) of the minicomputer era.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user John Stracke

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