News

• Cisco takes its lumps, keeps developing video meeting tools

  Cisco Systems owned up to some miscalculations in its video collaboration strategy but showed off some promising future capabilities in a briefing with media this week.

• Quickbooks Online outage leaves some customers in sour mood

  Intuit's Quickbooks Online service suffered an outage this week that left "a small subset" of customers unable to access their data, but the company says the problems with the on-demand accounting software have now been fixed.

• Coding contest shows how big data can improve health care

  A recent coding competition in the Boston area brought together IT professionals, medical workers and others with an interest in health IT to show how data analytics can improve health care.

• Sony brings streaming music service to the iPhone

  Sony on Friday released an iPhone app to access its streaming Music Unlimited service, part of its efforts to expand its online platforms to devices from rival manufacturers.

• China's Sina Weibo targeting Japanese advertisers

  One of China's top Twitter-like sites, Sina Weibo, is working to attract Japanese companies to advertise on its platform by helping the firms open and use accounts on the microblogging service.

• Customisable Cloud SLAs on the way, researchers predict

  Service-level agreements and legal standards for Cloud offerings will become more customised to individual customers and vertical industries as the cloud market continues to mature and providers look for ways to differentiate their offerings, researchers at the University of London predict.

• Yahoo Axis may be game changer for search and the troubled company

  With Axis, Yahoo is trying to change the search game, while also trying to change its image as a troubled company.

• Facebook beefs up mobile photo sharing with Camera

  Facebook introduced its own mobile photo app, Camera, on Thursday, bringing richer photo-sharing features to the platform even before the company closes its deal to acquire the popular photo-sharing app Instagram.

• About 4.5 million Catholic school students to get Office 365

  About 4.5 million Catholic school students will get access to Microsoft's Office 365 cloud e-mail and collaboration suite as part of a 3-year deal the software vendor struck with the Catholic International Education Office (OIEC).

• European privacy regulators want more detail on Google's policy changes

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• Yahoo leaks private key, allows anyone to build Yahoo-signed Chrome extensions

  Yahoo was forced to release a new version of its Axis extension for Google Chrome after the original one contained a private key that allowed anyone to digitally sign extensions in Yahoo's name.

• Are CEOs getting the social media thing?

  IBM says a study it did of some 1700 Chief Executive Officers worldwide found that many indeed - or should be - grasping social media as a key enabler of collaboration and innovation.

• Box to beef up IT administration features of cloud content management software

  Box will start letting customers test a new set of IT administration controls for its cloud-hosted enterprise collaboration and content management software on Thursday.

• Google to offer mapping and other software in Syria

  Google is now allowed under U.S. export control rules to offer downloads in Syria of its mapping software Google Earth, photo sharing software Picasa, and its Chrome browser, it said Wednesday.

• Apple claims US government sides with monopoly in e-book case

  The U.S. government has sided with monopoly rather than competition in bringing a case of e-book price-fixing against Apple, the company said in a filing on Tuesday before a federal court.