The Glider

WorkSimple, a social goal performance tool that competes with SuccessFactors and Rypple, is now available from the Google Apps Marketplace. - WorkSimple, a startup in a performance management space that is heating up, has seeded its Free Forever goal performance application in the Google Apps Marketplace, the search engine's online store for apps that hook into Google Apps. WorkSimple competes with SuccessFactors and Rypple, both ...

Microsoft will host a Windows 8 Consumer Preview event in Barcelona Feb. 29. Thats likely the launch date of Windows 8 beta. - Microsoft will almost certainly use this years Mobile World Congress in Barcelona as the venue for whipping back the curtain from its Windows 8 Consumer Preview. The company has sent eWEEK and other media an invitation to a “Windows 8 Consumer Preview”-themed event at 3:00pm Feb. 29 at the Hotel...

Microsoft is prepping Windows 8's beta also known as the "Consumer Preview" for release later in February. Although the Developer Preview gave people the chance to play around with a rough draft of the upcoming operating system, that beta will provide a much better idea of what users can expect when the release version arrives sometime in the second half of 2012. Many of Windows 8's features will be instantly familiar to anyone who's used previous versions of Windows. The traditional desktop is still there, accessible via a "Start" screen of big, colorful tiles linked to applications (the better to port Windows 8 onto tablets). The new operating system has even borrowed a few design cues from other Microsoft products like Office: There is, for instance, a "ribbon" user interface for Windows Explorer (albeit a minimized one, which could come as a relief to those who dislike that way of navigating through options). But the biggest system changes tie into Microsoft's expectations that Windows 8 will find its way onto tablets and other ultra-mobile devices: The ability to mark a wireless network as metered or unmetered is just one example of this. In a time where users are abandoning traditional PCs as their main computing device in favor of smartphones and tablets, the need is greater than ever for Microsoft to adapt with the times, lest it be left behind. The following are some new Windows 8 features designed to make the platform more portable and easier to operate once users find a space to sit down and work. - ...

Everyone in the enterprise is now talking about how to leverage big data, and a good chunk of that discussion includes the evolution of NoSQL database technologies. Experts are saying that 2012 is the year when IT departments start adopting NoSQL in earnest, but is the enterprise ready yet? What needs to happen in NoSQL's evolution to make it prepare it for highly complex data requirements? To find out, eWEEK asked Robert Greene, vice president of technology at Versant and a 20-year veteran of the database industry, to break down what needs to happen for NoSQL to become enterprise-ready. Versant is an object-oriented database provider, and the company is taking its own approach to the NoSQL movement. For instance, Greene said that NoSQL solutions need to leverage more of the classic database techniques for concurrency control and design their internals to take full advantage of modern multi-core hardware architecture. In addition, Greene said NoSQL is learning what the object database industry learned several years ago as it sought to deal with soft schema over a relational storage engine. However, enterprises will not change all their internal processes and replace existing systems for the sake of NoSQL. To evolve, NoSQL must address interoperability with existing systems, to couple through ETL, to facilitate data manipulation through enterprise tools, and it needs to present itself as a well-defined resource to existing monitoring and management processes. - ...

Nokia will cut thousands of jobs related to phone manufacturing, as it shifts production from Europe to Asia by the end of 2012. - Nokia will shift phone production from Europe to Asia by the end of 2012, a move that will result in 4,000 job cuts. The cuts will occur at three factories in Finland, Mexico and Hungary. On its Website, Nokia suggested it would provide financial support and assistance with local re-employment...

LG Electronics has a 5-inch LG Optimus VU "phablet" planned, possibly for a Feb. 21 release. Like Samsung, LG is betting the time is right for the 5-inch tablet-phone. - LG Electronics has released a teaser video showing off the sharp, clean lines of what it's calling the LG Optimus VU, a quot;phablet quot; with a 4:3 aspect ratio and a 5-inch display, on the diagonal. A photo of the device of the Japanese site Datacider shows a date stamp on the device of F...

NGINX delivers commercial support for the popular open-source NGINX Web server. - NGINX, pronounced “Engine-X,” has announced commercial support options for companies using its open-source Web server in production. This is the first commercial offering of Nginx Inc., which was founded in July 2011 and launched in October. The company is offering three technical-support packa...

Xamarins new MonoTouch 5.2 speeds up and simplifies iPhone and iPad application development. - Xamarin, a maker of development software for building cross-platform mobile apps for phones and tablets, has announced MonoTouch 5.2, a new version of its software for developing iPhone and iPad apps. MonoTouch 5.2 delivers new capabilities to improve application performance, streamline the dev...

Amazon's popular Kindle Fire is missing in action outside the U.S., angering consumers in Canada and the U.K. and costing the company some money. - As Android tablets go, Amazon's (NASDAQ:AMZN) Kindle Fire is absolutely flourishing in the U.S., where industry analysts estimate the e-commerce company sold 4 million to 6 million of the 7-inch slates at $199 a pop for the holiday quarter. Yet each report of the Kindle Fire's success adds so...

Sprint reported a fourth-quarter loss, but also the end to a four-year period of recovery. The next few years will instead be about growth and of course the iPhone and LTE. - Sprint, during its first full quarter with the Apple iPhone, reported a net loss of $1.3 billion and a diluted loss of 43 cents per share during the fourth quarter of 2011. This was the bad news. The good news was that Sprint, which announced its fourth-quarter earnings Feb. 8, sold 1.8 millio...