Links for January 7th

A little something extra…

This was a busy day, one of those where I’ll probably get weird, work-related dreams at night.

One of the items in my inbox was about a new line of laptop bags from Sumo, the Sumo Messenger Bag. While I don’t get the laser-eyed robo-crab PR emails that Stephen does, I do get a lot of tangentially-IT related press releases. Thankfully, I find a second here and there on weird press releases to be a fun distraction in my day.

Anyhow, my new policy (more “practice,” really) is that when I get a press release for something physical, I ask for a review/test unit. It doesn’t work too often, but, thankfully, it looks like I’ll be getting one of these bags. This is actually fantastic, as I’m always looking for a better bag.

You may recall a couple bag reviews on RedMonkTV from a few years ago (Matthias Zeller‘s Waterfield Cargo and Dan McWeeney’s Crumpler). I should have a write-up of using my Crumpler Horseman as a laptop bag and occasional “one bag solution” soon too (see it in action above at this year’s SpringOne in New Orleans) – it’s pretty good, actually.

The Links

• AT&T Upgrades 3G Technology at Cell Sites Across Nation
  (a.) is it faster for you? (b.) we'll see if it survives SXSW and ACL this year.
• Happy birthday to me! I’m joining Google
  Chris Messina joins Google to become their "Open Web Advocate," which he says means: "I’ll still be an active community board member of the OpenID and Open Web Foundations; I hope to help push the Activity Streams project forward with a 1.0 release of the spec soon. And I’m still hopeful about the future of my semi-neglected and half dormant Diso Project! I’ll also soon be publishing the results of my collaboration with Mozilla Labs, which will provide some insight into what social networking in the browser might look like, and how OpenID Connect might play a role in it."
• AT&T Hedges Bets, Adds Android and WebOS
  "AT&T announced that it will be launching five Android-based handsets in the first half of 2010, completing Android's invasion of all four major wireless providers in the United States. Actual details and specifications are scarce, but AT&T did reveal that it will carry a device from Motorola with the MotoBlur interface, a device from HTC, and it will be the first carrier in the United States to offer the Android-based Dell smartphone."
• Driven to Distraction – Despite Risks, Carmakers Integrate the Web With the Dash
  As I recall, they have something like this in South Korea. How's it working out there?
• Microsoft joins SVG working group
  "We're investing in what the Web will look like in the future and we are committed to providing a browser that accurately supports Web standards. Making the Web easier for developers continues to be important and we will continue to contribute to development of HTML 5 along with other popular Web standards."
• Palm opens WebOS developer program to the public and adds plug-in support
• Verizon gets enhanced version of Palm Pre
• BMC gulps down Java management minnow • The Register
  Timothy Prickett Morgan
• Filtrbox Acquisition – Jive Software
• VMware,”Hey what ya’ building over there?”
  Nice piece from Mark Hinkle speculating what VMWare buying Zimbra (as is rumored) might mean for the longer-term road-map.
• The Nimsoft award for the most replaced vendor in 2009 goes to….. [Microsoft]
  "But….the real story is that over half our new customers in 2009 were upgrading from low end solutions. Open Source, Nagios, Solarwinds etc. These customers that 'hit the wall' with these limited solutions and yet are looking to grow their business…..Nimsoft is a perfect home."
• The Rise of Continuous Application Performance Management
  It's like you keep running your unit tests and performance tests in production, kinda-sorta…
• Nursing Facility Turns To SaaS For Network Management
• AccelOps v1.5 – Integrated Monitoring That Cuts through Datacenter Complexity
• OpsCamp Austin – Jan 30th, 2010 – Eventbrite
  If you like operations stuff, you should check this out in Austin later this month.
• Phurnace Acquired by BMC – Great News
• BMC Scoops up Phurnace Software
• BMC picks up Phurnace Software, adds Java enterprise automation to lineup | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com
  "Phurnace’s technology will make it easy to model and deploy Java Enterprise Edition applications from the likes of Oracle’s BEA, Red Hat’s JBoss and IBM’s Websphere." At first glance, seems like a technology gap fill for Blade Logic automation.

Disclosure: see the RedMonk client list for clients mentioned.