Consumer Tech Radar

About this Blog:

Bill Snyder analyzes the consumer technologies--gadgets, software, electronics, and everything else--that matter to everyday techies and businesspeople, and explains why these technologies and products should be on your radar – or not.

Bill Snyder

iPod Owners: Did You Know You're Suing Apple?

|   Apple has been hit with a class action suit by iPod owners saying that the company has made it unfairly difficult to play songs if they haven't been purchased on iTunes. Unless you opt out, you're part of the suit.

Sleekbooks and Ultrabooks and Notebooks, Oh My

|   It's getting harder and harder to cut through the marketing hype to find the PC you really want. It may be annoying, but if you don't look hard at the specs on different models you may wind up with the wrong computer.

Microsoft's Xbox 360 Ripoff

|   UPDATED: The bargain $99 deal for the Xbox 360 will cost you $130 more over two years if you fall for it.

Ease Off Email, You'll Live Longer

|   Higher heart rates, shorter attention spans and more stress are just some of the downsides of email addiction. A new study shows that unplugging now and then may save your life.

Macs, iPhones and iPads: When to Get the Best Deal

|   Sometimes it's better to wait before you shop. Aggregation site Dealnews.com has a database that predicts when prices on Apple products will drop and by how much.

Google's Street View Spying Was No Accident

|   An uncensored report by the FCC exposes the truth: Google employees knew that Street View cars were scooping up personal data from home Wi-Fi networks.

Buying a New PC? Wait Until Windows 8, New Intel Chips

|   Upcoming "Ivy Bridge" chips from Intel and touch-screen PCs running Windows 8 are reasons to hold off on your next PC purchase. And even if you can't afford the latest, you'll love the bargains that are sure to come.

Hackers' Next Target: Your TV

|   More and more of us are buying Internet-connected TVs. They’re lots of fun, but did you know that hackers can hijack them as easily as they can drop a virus on your PC?

Mad About Facebook/Instagram? Pixlr-o-matic Is for You

|   Have you lost respect for Instagram now that it has been acquired by the mighty Facebook? Not to worry: Pixlr-o-matic from Autodesk is a solid choice on iOS and Android for photo editing and sharing.

Step Off DOJ: Paying More for E-books Is a Good Thing

|   Apple broke Amazon's monopoly power over e-book pricing. Now the Department of Justice, in the name of fairness, wants to roll back the clock and let Amazon kill even more bookstores.

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Cloud computing has emerged as one of the most significant game changers to hit the technology landscape in the past 20 years. With this massive expansion of the cloud, the perception of the IT organization is shifting from a utility player to a change agent. This eBook breaks down five ways progressive organizations are using cloud-based IT Management solutions to help drive innovation and become more strategic, including: adding visibility and analytics, speeding up time-to-value, lowering costs, improving prioritization, and providing a blueprint for future cloud deployments.
Read the white paper to see how IBM helped Citigroup deliver new services and enhancements to their 200 million customers faster.
There are 3 ways to modernize legacy applications: rewrite completely, acquire packaged solutions or migrate existing code. This paper explains why it's best to migrate and how IBM® Rational® software can help.
Accommodating specific lines of business can result in a hybrid ecosystem of applications and servers. The resulting complexity of this architecture makes for an environment that is costly to maintain and difficult to change when addressing new challenges.
This whitepaper will help you to define a mobile device passcode policy. Security managers must attempt to reconcile two opposing goals. They must: 1) create a passcode policy that is strong enough to protect the device if it is lost or stolen, while: 2) not annoying users with needless length or complexity.
This whitepaper, authored by The Radicati Group, looks at the key reasons organizations should consider moving to a cloud-based archiving solution. Email archiving solutions enable organizations to store, monitor, and collect electronic data exchanged by their users to comply with internal policies and regulations.
ATERNITY will showcase a 30-minute demo on how Fortune 500 companies are leveraging its award-winning FPI Platform to deliver a user-centric approach to Proactive IT Management.
For businesses to move forward and tap into the ever-expanding universe of Internet users and network-enabled devices, it's critical to learn how to make the transition to IPv6. Learn the critical steps your organization must take to make a seamless transition-and keep your business world connected.
Learn how IT teams can protect against spear phishing tactics. Harry Sverdlove, chief technology officer of Bit9 offers a frank discussion about spear phishing - the most common technique used in today's advanced attacks.
Learn how to build a solid business case for your migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux so you can run leaner, innovate faster, be more flexible and own the New Now.
Social media isn't about you; it's about everything around you. As you consider how your customers want to communicate with you, social media is something that can't be ignored. But what should your strategy be? Is social media "just another channel?" What kind of a plan makes sense for your contact center and for your customers? Join our experts as they share their insight and research results.
Hardware tokens were a popular method of strong authentication in past years but the cumbersome provisioning and distribution tasks, high support requirements and replacement costs have limited their growth. The additional log-in steps that hardware tokens require and the resulting user frustrations have limited adoption and make them impractical for larger scale partner and customer applications.

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