The Glider

Amazon's Kindle Fire is an unabashed success, though how much of a success remains unknown thanks to the e-commerce company's refusal to disclose unit shipment sales for its Kindle line of e-readers and tablets. Amazon has only said it sold millions of Kindles and Kindle Fires during the holiday quarter. Furthermore the company's Q4 earnings were less than stellar, throwing more shadow than light on hardware sales. Still, most industry analysts have crunched their own numbers. But first, here's a level set: When word leaked that Amazon would launch an Android tablet, every high-tech pundit saw it as an affront to Apple and its world-dominating iPad. Speculation is about as iterative as software out of Google, so when further info leaked that the tablet would be priced between $200 and $300, people stopped calling it an iPad challenger and started predicting it would be the first hugely successful tablet to compete with existing offerings from Samsung, Motorola and HTC. Analysts now believe that's about right. Check out why in this eWEEK slide show. - ...

Faced with the prospect of having to do more with less, IT departments are eyeing the benefits of moving to a virtualization and private clouds. And while virtualization and cloud technology offer many similar benefits, the true differentiator with cloud is automation. Automation is so important, it should be the number one reason any company moves to a cloud infrastructure. The reason: A smart cloud infrastructure would automate many tasks that IT has needed to perform before new services could be available in the past. Such tasks would include building new virtual machine images and deploying these images.
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In March, IBM plans to reveal the names of the newest members of the Smarter Cities Challenge. The three-year initiative, under which IBM will award $50 million-worth of technology and services to 100 municipalities, is designed to help cities address some of the critical issues they face. Many of these projects focus on a common theme surrounding the collection, sharing, analysis, and acting upon data by urban interactions and transactions; IBM provides the technical and business skills to help cities create innovative and cost-effective strategies to address these challenges.
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The Galaxy S II's successor won't be making its debut at the massive show in Spain, says Samsung. In the first half of 2012, the phone will be thrown its own party. - The Samsung Galaxy S III will not, as hoped, make its grand debut at Barcelona's Mobile World Congress 2012 event in February, according to Samsung. Instead, the smartphone will receive its own party. quot;The successor to the Galaxy S2 smartphone will be unveiled at a separate Samsung-hosted ev...

Cisco is upgrading key switches to enable them to better handle the demand for faster networks brought on by such trends as cloud, BYOD and video. - Cisco Systems is bringing 40 and 100 Gigabit Ethernet capabilities to two key switch lines, offering data center administrators a path to faster network speeds as traffic ramps up and more workloads get moved into the cloud. At the Cisco Live event in London Feb. 1, Cisco officials announced th...

With HTML5 and CSS all the rage with developers, particularly Web developers, a new site has emerged to advise them on the use of features in the programming languages. The HTML5 Please site offers expert advice on which features to use and not to use when developing apps. The site breaks its advice down into three categories: use, use with caution, and avoid. Additionally, it tells developers which features they should use with fallbacks or polyfills. The bottom line is that the new site gives developers recommendations on which HTML5 and CSS3 elements they can safely use to create apps and sites that are effectively supported across a range of browsers. Because HTML5 is a moving target and many of its elements are too new to safely use for cross-browser support, HTML Please is a welcome aid to developers who want to color inside the lines. The HTML5 Please site is a community project created by Divya Manian, Web opener for Opera Software; Paul Irish, developer programs engineer on the Google Chrome team; Tim Branyen, a software engineer at Bocoup; Connor Montgomery, a Web developer and computer science student at St. Louis University; and a host of others. This slide show takes a look at the HTML5 and CSS3 elements that HTML5 Please says are completely safe for developers to use. - ...

While the U.S. Constitution generally prevents the government from snooping through personal laptops without just cause, those protections don't apply at the U.S. border, where agents can take any electronic device, search through all the data and keep it for further scrutiny, even without cause. Business travelers, lawyers, doctors and other professionals may have confidential or privileged information on their devices that need to be protected. Even personal devices can contain a wealth of sensitive information, including medical records and financial documents. "Our lives are on our laptops–family photos, medical documents, banking information, details about what Websites we visit, and so much more," the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Seth Schoen, Marcia Hofmann and Rowan Reynolds wrote in a guide for travelers carrying digital devices. While agents are authorized to keep the devices up to 30 days for their search, anecdotal evidence suggests they can take longer, according to the EFF. For organizations with compliance requirements, having confidential data out of their control for an extended period of time can have serious repercussions. These searches can also impact employee productivity while waiting for the search to complete. Below are some tips from the EFF on how to protect data privacy on electronic devices in case of a border search. - ...

RIM's first BlackBerry 10 smartphone will be ultra-slim and black, at least according to a leaked slide posted on the BlackBerry enthusiast blog CrackBerry. - Research In Motions upcoming BlackBerry 10 device will be ultra-slim and somewhat narrow, with a wide touch screen and rounded edges. At least, thats according to a leaked presentation slide posted on the BlackBerry-enthusiast blog CrackBerry, which didnt name its source for the information. “Were...

2011 is being commonly referred to as "The Year of Disasters." The United States set a record with 12 separate billion-dollar weather/climate disasters in 2011, with an aggregate damage total of approximately $52 billion, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. These incidents have prompted many organizations to reconsider the human element during a crisis or major news event and evaluate how they communicate with employees, suppliers, investors and customers. Emergency and mass notification systems are designed to help organizations communicate to stakeholders during an incident or disruption. However, in response to the high occurrence of prominent disasters in recent years, the marketplace has been flooded with products to address emergency and mass notification needs. The need to diligently evaluate vendors is critical to ensure that services will meet an organization's specific requirements. Our key information source in the following slide show is Tracey Forbes, vice president of software business development at SunGard Availability Services. - ...

Sprint has agreed to give LTE wannabe LightSquared until mid-March to get FCC approval of its untraditional spectrum, which continues to interfere with GPS signals. - Sprint reportedly is giving LightSquared some slack, agreeing to extend the deadline by which the hopeful LTE 4G company must gain the approval of the Federal Communications Commission. LightSquared, owned by billionaire Philip Falcone's Harbinger Capital Partners hedge fund, first promised to h...