IDC sees BPO spending, challenges increase

Grok Headline matches for IDC sees BPO spending, challenges increase

Dell CEO: IT spending to increase in
2004

Dell CEO: IT spending to increase in
2004 12/29/2003 02:58 PM

Survey: IT managers say they'll increase
spending

Survey: IT managers say they'll increase
spending 05/10/2004 01:16 PM
Information technology managers expect to increase their spending by 2.4 percent in 2004, according to a survey by Forrester Research. That's up from the 1.7 percent rise projected six months ago.

Government, retail IT spending to
increase

Government, retail IT spending to
increase 01/09/2004 09:54 PM
Government IT spend is likely to lead a resurgence in 2004.

Research and Markets: SMBs Set to
Increase IT and E-Business Spending by
6% to 8% in 2005

Research and Markets: SMBs Set to
Increase IT and E-Business Spending by
6% to 8% in 2005 04/11/2005 03:36 AM
Research and Markets (researchandmarkets.com/reports/c15412) has announced the addition of SMB IT and E-Business Spending to their offering. [PRWEB Apr 11, 2005]

Bush Announces Large Increase in
Homeland-Security Spending

Bush Announces Large Increase in
Homeland-Security Spending 01/22/2004 07:24 PM
The president also promoted his temporary-worker initiative to aid illegal immigrants during a campaign appearance in New Mexico.

LG Caltex Oil sees 120% increase in net
profits

LG Caltex Oil sees 120% increase in net
profits 05/18/2004 07:17 AM
Maekyung Internet May 18 2004 11:53AM GMT

MMO2 sees customer increase

MMO2 sees customer increase 07/21/2004 04:24 AM
The mobile operator raises its UK revenue forecasts after user numbers grow faster than expected.

Nanotech funding sees big increase

Nanotech funding sees big increase 08/16/2004 11:49 AM
globetechnology.com Aug 16 2004 3:45PM GMT

Web Design Guru Sees Flash Challenges

Web Design Guru Sees Flash Challenges 12/10/2002 05:50 AM

Another survey sees IT spending on
rebound

Another survey sees IT spending on
rebound 11/17/2003 07:47 PM
Data published Monday indicates that spending on information technology products and services continues to regain momentum in the United States.

Dell CEO Sees Capital Spending Up in '04

Dell CEO Sees Capital Spending Up in '04 12/29/2003 11:09 AM
AP via ABCNEWS.com Dec 29 2003 10:43AM ET

Dell sees corporate IT spending up in
'04

Dell sees corporate IT spending up in
'04 12/30/2003 08:37 AM
Manorama Online Dec 30 2003 7:44AM ET

Dell sees IT spending revival

Dell sees IT spending revival 12/29/2003 08:09 PM
CNN Dec 29 2003 6:52PM ET

Brief: IBM’s Palmisano sees tech
spending rebound

Brief: IBM’s Palmisano sees tech
spending rebound 05/19/2004 04:32 PM
IBM CEO Samuel Palmisano said traditional IT areas such as PCs, computer servers and data storage will return to historical growth levels of twice the rate of gross domestic product.

Nortel CEO sees no surge in telecom
spending

Nortel CEO sees no surge in telecom
spending 11/18/2003 02:28 AM
CNET Nov 18 2003 1:54AM ET

Cisco sees 'improving' trend on spending

Cisco sees 'improving' trend on spending 12/11/2003 01:13 PM
San Jose Mercury News Dec 11 2003 12:08PM ET

Microsoft Sees Rise in Corporate
Spending

Microsoft Sees Rise in Corporate
Spending 04/23/2004 06:59 PM
AP via Daily Press Apr 23 2004 11:21PM GMT

Palmisano sees moderate growth in IT
spending

Palmisano sees moderate growth in IT
spending 11/13/2003 10:06 AM
ZDNet Nov 13 2003 9:23AM ET

EC sees tiny increase in women in
science jobs

EC sees tiny increase in women in
science jobs 03/29/2005 11:18 AM
But not in its own projects

Snow Sees Spending Slashed in '06 Budget
(Reuters)

Snow Sees Spending Slashed in '06 Budget
(Reuters) 12/19/2004 03:35 PM
Reuters - The Bush administration will seek to slash government spending next year, U.S. Treasury Secretary John Snow said on Sunday, but he was less specific than the president in predicting how quickly the deficit would fall.

Microsoft sees boost in corporate tech
spending

Microsoft sees boost in corporate tech
spending 04/25/2004 12:41 PM

Microsoft Sees Continued Rise in
Corporate Spending

Microsoft Sees Continued Rise in
Corporate Spending 04/24/2004 01:10 PM
Red Nova Apr 24 2004 4:32PM GMT

Dell Sees Rise in Corporate Spending
(NewsFactor)

Dell Sees Rise in Corporate Spending
(NewsFactor) 04/09/2004 03:57 PM
NewsFactor - Dell (Nasdaq: DELL) says corporate spending on I.T. products is beginning to strengthen. The company announced that it is shipping more personal computers and other devices in the quarter than it previously forecasted.

Earnings alert: Novell sees weakness in
IT spending

Earnings alert: Novell sees weakness in
IT spending 08/20/2004 08:29 AM
Plus: Salesforce reports rise in profit...Nortel to lay off 3,500...Intuit posts loss while revenue rises...BEA earnings rise amid internal turmoil.

T-Mobile sees 200% increase in GPRS
traffic following tariff restructuring

T-Mobile sees 200% increase in GPRS
traffic following tariff restructuring 01/04/2004 08:28 AM
Telecoms.com Jan 4 2004 7:10AM ET

Young Company Sees Website Sales
Increase By Over 2000%

Young Company Sees Website Sales
Increase By Over 2000% 09/13/2004 03:34 AM
LoudPacket, Inc., a top worldwide networking hardware provider and supplier announces a record smashing sales increase on it’s newly launched website, www.loudpacket.com. [PRWEB Sep 13, 2004]

Microsoft sees pick-up in corporate tech
spending; may last for months

Microsoft sees pick-up in corporate tech
spending; may last for months 04/24/2004 01:10 PM
Canadian Press Apr 24 2004 4:15PM GMT

Goldman Sees Tech Spending Growth
Staying Low (Reuters)

Goldman Sees Tech Spending Growth
Staying Low (Reuters) 03/19/2005 03:05 AM
Reuters - Companies remain cautious about spending on technology, and only marginal increases are expected for the rest of 2005, a survey of technology decision makers said on Friday.

ITtoolbox Spending Survey Shows IT
Spending On The Rise

ITtoolbox Spending Survey Shows IT
Spending On The Rise 06/27/2004 04:51 AM
The results of the second annual ITtoolbox IT Spending Survey demonstrate that IT budgets have increased over 2003. The survey, which was sponsored by Hewlett-Packard, was conducted by ITtoolbox, the leading provider of information for professionals in the IT workplace. The purpose of the survey was to provide insight into current and future purchasing trends of corporate IT departments worldwide. [PRWEB Jun 27, 2004]

OpenEvents challenges

OpenEvents challenges 02/05/2005 09:12 PM

Peter Caputa puts it succinctly in

Why OpenEvents Is an Uphill Battle!

I am writing a series of posts on why OpenEvents is an Uphill Battle. I am hoping that this rallies some people to think creatively, and also to realize that if we work together to make this happen, then we will all will benefit much quicker.

So, The first reason that OpenEvents is an uphill battle is because the established players have no incentive to share data. Actually, they have disincentives because there are so many businesses that depend on the data for their revenue stream.

[pc4media]

Whether it's XML or rdf, centralized or distributed - sharing and building on Events as an open, shared kind of micro-content - is leaving the station.

Addicted to challenges

Addicted to challenges 12/31/2004 06:35 AM
Express Computer India Dec 31 2004 10:55AM GMT

The Challenges -and Potential- of 3G

The Challenges -and Potential- of 3G 12/29/2003 08:00 PM
Wireless Watch Japan Dec 29 2003 7:37PM ET

Teleconnection Challenges 3G

Teleconnection Challenges 3G 09/20/2004 03:06 AM
3G Sep 20 2004 7:19AM GMT

FOAF challenges

FOAF challenges 01/09/2004 09:52 PM

FOAF challenges.

FOAF challenges

Some interesting discussion has been triggered by Jon Udell's comments on FOAF. I agree with Edd and Dan that FOAF is about more than social networking and have said as much here on several occasions. Personally I see two problems with FOAF neither of them big.

Firstly the name causes people to adopt certain expectations about it's intended usage particularly with general surge of interest (fad?) in social software. I certainly wouldn't advocate a name change but, as the exchange with Udell has demonstrated, we need to take care to present FOAF correctly.

The second problem is just about data. Because there is no central repository of FOAF data, it's harder to create FOAF applications: you either need to run a scutter yourself to collect up what's available, or generate FOAF out of the back-end of another site. Of course you can also hang out on #foaf and badger someone (e.g. Jim Ley or Matt Biddulph) to give you a data export; that's what I did.

I firmly believe that playing with the FOAF data that's out in the wild will generate the most interesting applications, and provide essential implementation feedback on the vocabulary itself.

So I'm going to try encouraging folk to regularly and visibly publish the results of their scutter runs. An "offical" data set hung of the FOAF homepage would also be useful. This should hopefully encourage the development of more FOAF applications.

Incidentally I mentally classify those applications as follows:

• FOAF-generating -- e.g. FOAF-a-Matic, ecademy, TypePad, etc. Applications that generate FOAF but don't typically process it to perform any useful function. These are an important step in producing a critical mass of data
  
• FOAF-gathering -- e.g. a Scutter, FOAFbot, FOAFnaut. Applications that harvest the web of FOAF data to build a data repository. Functionality is then built around this repository
  
• FOAF-consuming -- e.g. FOAF explorer/viewer, Dashboard, Planet RDF. Applications that read specific FOAF data, to fulfill some function. FOAF-gathering applications also typically consume data in this way -- to manually refresh their repository -- but I'm thinking of slightly different application scenarios, e.g. automating web site registration and preference maintenance, generating a project or community blog, etc.
  

For me this classification separates out some of the implementation issues: a FOAF-consuming application doesn't typically have to worry about attribution, trust, etc. The data is coming from a limited number of sources. FOAF-gathering applications have to deal with a much more difficult set of problems. [Lost Boy]

New Year, Same Challenges

New Year, Same Challenges 01/08/2004 08:27 PM

Calypso Wi-Fi Challenges 3G

Calypso Wi-Fi Challenges 3G 12/03/2003 06:24 AM
3G Dec 3 2003 4:46AM ET

The challenges of synching

The challenges of synching 01/04/2004 08:26 PM
I predicted the other day that synching would appear in lots of newsreaders in 2004. (Some have it already, yes, but they don’t have it as I’ve defined it below.)

A good question would be: why isn’t synching already a feature of every newsreader already? It can’t be that hard, right—just read and write from a file somewhere that two copies of your newsreader can access.

I mean, what’s the hold-up? You just need something like a .newsrc. No big deal, it’s an old problem that’s been solved many times before.

Okay, so the rest of this post will be about the challenges in implementing synching.

What is synching?

First we need to define what synching is. It’s really a collection of features and requirements.

1. It’s merging, not cloning, of subscription lists.

2. It also synchs read/unread states of individual items.

3. Your newsreader uploads and downloads your synch data so you don’t have to do it manually with a browser or FTP client or whatever.

4. Your newsreader knows (or at least guesses) when it needs to download and upload synch data.

5. It works between different newsreader software on different operating systems.

I’ll take these one at a time.

Merging

Cloning is easy, merging is hard—but synching has to be merging.

For instance, imagine you have a newsreader at home and one at work. You subscribe to the same feeds—except that at work you also subscribe to some at-work-only feeds that you can’t get at home.

So when you get into work in the morning, you want to synch your data from last night at home. If it’s just cloning your subscription list, then the additional at-work-only feeds would get deleted, since you aren’t subscribed to them at home. Since we’re merging, not cloning, your at-work-only feeds do not get deleted.

But this leads to an interesting problem: what happens if you unsubscribe from a feed at home? The synching mechanism won’t delete it from your work subscription list, because for all it knows that feed could be a work-only feed.

And there’s another entire set of problems that come up because for most newsreaders the subscription list is an outline rather than a flat list. Merging hierarchies is far more difficult than merging flat lists.

Synching read/unread states of news items

This is possibly the toughest of the challenges.

In an ideal world, you can identify every item in an RSS feed with a unique id of some sort. So the synch data would be able to pair a unique ID with its read/unread status.

But not all versions of RSS have the concept of a unique ID. And, even in the versions that do have unique IDs, they’re not mandatory, and lots of feeds don’t use them. (And sometimes feeds have a terrible bug: they have unique IDs that aren’t actually unique.)

So, in the absence of a unique ID, how do you identify an item in a way that will work every single time? Answer: you can’t. There is no solution that will work every single time. (And this is why sometimes you notice in your newsreader items that are unread that you know you’ve read. They’ve been edited.)

Even if you include an entire item, all its text and links and various elements, it’s possible that the item was edited between leaving home and arriving at work.

So instead the synching has to do the best it can. Any format will probably use links and titles and whatever else so newsreaders can do a best guess. (I suspect that most developers hate situations like this, by the way, and it may be the single biggest reason why synching isn’t yet universal among newsreaders.)

Uploading and downloading

You’ll want to tell your newsreader where to save your synch data so you can get it at home and at work.

You might say, why not use .Mac? Because not everyone has an account. Because your newsreader at work might be on Windows. (And there are some other technical reasons which I’ll skip.)

Why not use FTP? Or HTTP-upload? Or...?

The answer is probably that a couple different methods may need to be made available. (FTP and HTTP-upload seem like obvious candidates, but I’m just guessing.)

But here’s the deal: I doubt that every newsreader already includes code for uploading files by the various methods people will want to use. Sure, there are libraries available, but newsreader developers will still have to write code and do a bunch of testing. Even a seemingly small thing like this still takes time and effort.

Knowing when to upload and download

This may be the easiest part.

When you launch your newsreader, it can ask if you want it to synch. It would then download your synch data from wherever and do the synch.

Similarly, when you quit, it could ask if you want to upload your synch data.

There may be more sophisticated algorithms that would make sense too, but the above is I think a good minimum.

Different newsreaders, different operating systems

This means getting a bunch of developers to agree on a format for synch data. That’s probably the easy part—the hard part will be testing to make sure X can synch with Y and Y can synch with Z and Z can synch with X.

That, by the way, is where you come in.

SCO challenges IBM witnesses

SCO challenges IBM witnesses 09/13/2004 04:13 PM
The Linux adversary again demands evidence from Big Blue and cites allegedly contradictory testimony.

Get ready for the challenges - and
potential - of 3G

Get ready for the challenges - and
potential - of 3G 12/28/2003 05:28 PM
Singapore Business Times Dec 28 2003 4:38PM ET
Grok Description matches for IDC sees BPO spending, challenges increase
GrokA matches for IDC sees BPO spending, challenges increase

IDC sees BPO spending, challenges increase

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