Stories about: Audible

YouTube stars gather in Boston, a laptop is gone in 90 seconds, a look at new robots, a tearful farewell to Bill Gates and a look inside a cable laying ship.

While it's true more and more organizations are turning to agile software development for their IT projects, adoption is now hitting the wall. At a recent conference, IBM project management expert Scott Ambler cited statistics from a survey earlier this year in which 69 per cent of respondents said their IT departments were utilizing agile development practices.

When is it OK to talk in public? To have an audible ring tone? To reply to a text message? Rational people disagree -- strongly. As the war between these two tribes grinds on, new battlefields are opened.

It doesn't take a genius to catch on to the fact that in IT, innovation is a mandate. Push the envelope of what's possible, or find yourself relegated to wayside. But, to borrow a favored David St. Hubbins Spinal Tap aphorism, there's a fine line between clever and crackpot when it comes to making good on technological breakthroughs in the enterprise.

Datacentre staffers are challenged when processing capacity is increased within existing facilities. While the reliability of hardware, software and networks has been improving, electrical and mechanical infrastructure improvements lag behind. Forensic evaluations of datacentre failures demonstrate that operator errors, electrical and mechanical single points of failure, design problems, and construction defects are the leading causes for datacentre disruptions.

Meetings are hard enough to run when the participants are all in the same room, fighting over the last chocolate doughnut. But any meeting you call, nowadays, probably has at least one person attending who works in a remote location. In some cases, everyone in the teleconference is dialing in. You may be great at orchestrating an in-person meeting, but running an effective teleconference requires new skills.

Amazon.com has begun a new chapter in its battle for customers' ears: it has agreed to pay US$300 million for Audible, a seller of audio books that has a close relationship with Apple.

In a world in which gadgets are getting ever-smaller, SanDisk's new Sansa View is, strangely, significantly larger than both its competitors and its own predecessor, the company's Sansa e200 line of media players.

In all the marketing blather about Amazon.com Inc.'s awesome new Kindle e-book reader, you won't hear "e-mail," "RSS feeds" or "online calendars" mentioned at all.

The Cool Stuff Holiday Gift Guide is back, with tips for the very best gifts to buy for the tech lovers in your life. This year, be the one whose gifts are the biggest hits.

Last April, I wrote a column titled, "Why e-books are bound to fail." My reasons: cost, the availability of better alternatives and, most importantly, book lovers love paper books.