Stories about: McDonald's

Social network MySpace lobbed a shot across the bow of Apple iTunes last night with the launch of MySpace Music, a new site that offers free on-demand music streaming along with MP3 downloads for sale to US users.

Late last week, the Bush administration unveiled a staggering plan to bail out the financial industry by having the federal government purchase US$700 billion in unwanted mortgages and mortgage-backed securities. For those of you keeping score at home, this means the US government could soon spend nearly US$1 trillion on what amounts to a large pile of trash. To give you some perspective on just how large this sum of money is, we've broken down what sort of assets your company could purchase with US$700 billion, including wireless communications devices, data centers and even new CEOs.

There's been an explosion in growth of Wi-Fi hotspots during the last several years. Best-guess estimates range from 33,000 WLAN hotspots worldwide to more than 250,000 at present.

As organizations deal with increasing challenges and uncertainty, raising communication efficiency has become more crucial than ever. While the concept of unified communications (UC) has been around for some time, it continues to present enterprises with new opportunities for productivity improvement.

I'm often cautious of devices that claim to have Wi-Fi functionality and support, mainly because connecting to Wi-Fi (especially secure Wi-Fi) can be tricky for devices that don't utilize a browser or some other good input method. In the past, several devices I've tried (digital photo frames, cameras, printers) have failed to connect to my network because of the configuration issues required that weren't completely hammered out by the vendor.

There you are, sipping your latte while banging out code in Django, Drupal, and Ruby, and feeling pretty cutting-edge. Sure, those are the hot skills of the moment, and they'll probably help you land your next job. But take a minute to think about the guys who came before you and the tools, particularly COBOL, they used. And give 'em some respect. They deserve it.

IBM is trying to do for data centers what McDonald's helped to do for hamburgers and fries: turn the building of them into an efficient, quasi-manufacturing process.

When you're on the road, you can feel more like a juggler than a traveler: You've got your notebook, your smart phone, your camera, your GPS device, your MP3 player -- and all the power cords, USB drives and other gadgets that go with them.

Public Wi-Fi hot spots have been popular for about eight years. During that time, companies providing the service have been groping about, trying to figure out how to monetize it. The dominant model to date has been to simply charge for it. Pay us US$20 a month, and you can log in at any of our many locations.

As made abundantly clear with Friday's announcement, Microsoft's US$44.6 billion bid for search engine Yahoo was driven by the software giant's desire to stay viable in the online advertising market.

The founders of open source collaboration software start-up Mindquarry have shut down the company and moved on to a new venture, building up the social media product lines of Day Software.