In a move to shake up the online gaming industry, OnLive has announced PC and Mac versions of its on-demand, instant-play games will roll out in June during the E3 2010 show. Here’s the rub: Gamers don’t have to buy a console, and they can get broadband speeds.
OnLive delivers games to HDTVs over an Internet connection via a small browser plug-in for PCs and OnLive’s MicroConsole TV Adapter, which will roll out later this year. The company is billing its game service as a way to find, purchase or rent video games from publishers like Electronic Arts, Ubisoft 2K Games, THQ and Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment.
“The idea here is that you buy or rent the games and stream them. That’s pretty challenging when it comes to gaming because you need very quick responses,” said Michael Gartenberg, a partner at the Altimeter Group. “OnLive is an interesting twist. The question is how it’s going to work in real time over the network.”
Read the rest of my story on CIOToday.
March 12th, 2010
Who says LinkedIn doesn’t lead to publicity? I would probably never have known about The Boardroom Executive Suites latest executive office suites project if Nathan Jansch, the president of the serviced office company, hadn’t reached out through LinkedIn to give me a heads up on the new facility.
So here’s the deal: The Boardroom Executive Suites signed an agreement to open a new executive suite business center at the intersection of Colorado Boulevard and I-25. This makes serviced office facility number two for Boardroom. (The company also has a location at 3773 Cherry Creek Drive in Denver.)
The new center will be located on the 7th floor of the Denver CenterPoint I office building at 3900 E. Mexico Avenue. With 10,300 square feet of office space, the executive suites project will feature 25 individual offices, four 500-square-foot office suites, two conference rooms, advanced VoIP telecommunications, on-demand administrative services, and six virtual office plans. The company also offers meeting rooms and virtual offices.
Read the rest of my story on aBetterOffice.com.
March 2nd, 2010
Iron Mountain on Monday acquired Mimosa in a $112 million deal. The deal makes a great deal of sense both tactically and strategically for Iron Mountain and the price seems reasonable, according to Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT. You can read his perspectives on the deal below:
From a broader industry perspective, Iron Mountain has seen its core business come under a lot of pressure from traditional storage vendors. The archiving space was considered to be pretty un-sexy by a lot of people. There were some tape vendors out there that were certainly making a good deal of money on selling tape arrays and cassettes to companies that wanted their own on-site premises. Before permanent archiving, they would turn to companies like Iron Mountain, which is considered by most to be the leader in permanent archiving services.
But over the past five or six years, we’ve started to see the archiving market become much more stratified, both with higher capacity tape, very aggressive pricing from the traditional tape players as they’ve been pressured by dramatically lower prices in disc archiving solutions like EMC Centera and then the emergence of virtual tape libraries which basically allow companies to seamlessly blend tape and disc archiving into a single environment.
So what is a specialist like Iron Mountain do in a case like that? Its traditional business is being sliced and diced. So it make sense for them to become greater than they were. We’ve seen that in some previous acquisitions in some of the cloud-based archive offerings the company has been offering as well.
The conventional wisdom is that in the storage business certainly is that business information by definition is valuable. So its’ worth the time and effort for companies to save that information in case they need it for a rainy day. That’s certainly the case for compliance-sensitive data. If a former employee brings a wrongful termination suit against a company, and as part of the discovery process their attorney employee or people close to management were referenced, which can be prohibitively expensive and complex. That’s where these e-discovery solutions come in.
Beyond the compliance and e-discovery, the there’s also the whole issue of being able to take information, much of it captured on e-mail or company documents, what we call unstructured information, and be able to search that and leverage it with business intelligent tools and that’s another part of what Mimosa brings. They do offer enterprise technologies that can incorporate e-mail and SharePoint files as well as document files. Their solutions are meant to be used on-site at the company so it basically gives Iron Mountain an enterprise content management solution within the company that could be deployed within the company’s firewall that compliments its external archive services and cloud services strategy.
This is the kind of opportunities that the big companies fully understand. IBM has poured billions of dollars into the development and acquisitions aimed at this same area. The entire EMC Documentum work group or product group is dedicated to this area and SharePoint content management is a really hot topic right now.
With that type of competition, if Iron Mountain wants to stay in the game and make sure it can take advantage of future opportunities they need to be in this space. Mimosa is not a big company. $112 million is not a big price. It gives them a company with known solutions and with an established customer base in the enterprise. It should give them the chance to get a foothold there and bee one of the companies considered as more and more of these deals move ahead.
February 23rd, 2010
Microsoft 
released its latest security intelligence report on Monday — and the picture looks grim for enterprises. Enterprise worm infections rose nearly 100 percent in the first half of 2009 from the previous six months. In the same period, consumers continued to struggle with rogue software.
According to the Microsoft Security Intelligence Report (SIRv7), rogue security software remained the single largest threat category for the first half of 2009. Despite progress combating rogues, this is still a major issue for computer users. Also known as “scareware,” rogue security software takes advantage of customers’ desire to protect their computer from threats.
But there is good news for enterprises and consumers. The report highlights a significant decrease in Zlob Trojan infections, from 21.1 million at its peak in 2007 to 2.3 million in the first half of 2009. Microsoft is offering some security best practices to help PC users ward off threats.
Read the rest of my story on Sci-Tech Today.
November 3rd, 2009
There’s been much ado about Microsoft ‘s Bing, and plenty of wonder around Google Wave. Although the Internet archrivals’ new offerings don’t compete directly, they do indirectly: Bing with Google Search and Wave with Microsoft’s ecosystem .Currently Google has the largest market share in search and Microsoft is dominant in desktop PC software. Observers wonder if each will cut into the other’s domain or if the status quo will be maintained.
“Bing will certainly take share from Google’s search business, but isn’t strong enough to challenge Google’s overall leadership, making it an approach mirrored by Microsoft’s efforts with Zune,” said Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group. “Wave represents an effort to displace Microsoft entirely, but has a higher probability of failing completely and is also consistent with Google’s strategy with apps.”
Click here to read the rest of my story on NewsFactor.
June 4th, 2009
