Author: Serkadis

This post is part of the IT Innovation series, sponsored by Sun & Intel. Read more at ITInnovation.com.
Of course, the content of this post consists entirely of the thoughts and opinions of the author.

Back when the iPhone first came out, there were all sorts of stories about how it was no good for the enterprise. While it’s certainly gotten better, it still does seem like the Blackberry is the enterprise smartphone of choice. Yet, many people really do like using the alternatives, and while the solution for many is to now carry around multiple devices, others are beginning to push for companies to support their own devices (iPhone or others). And this is becoming a bigger and bigger issue. These days, many technologies used in the office are coming from “the bottom up,” meaning that they’re personal technologies (hardware, software or services) that individuals are using/buying on their own first, and then realizing they’re so useful, that they start using them at work too.

And that, of course, raises the inevitable question of whether or not the IT department should support those technologies. The easy answer (which I’m sure we’ll hear many times over in the comments) is “of course not.” But it might not be that simple any more. Ignoring or holding back those technologies entirely may actually harm overall productivity in some cases, and limit what employees can and should be doing. Now, obviously, I recognize the argument that a large part of IT’s job is to keep things running and protect the overall setup from problems — and letting in any technology and supporting it can make that very, very difficult. But it ignores the flipside of IT’s role: enabling companies and their employees to be more productive through the use of technology. And, even if IT officially decides to not allow things like the iPhone, as the article above points out, it might not matter much:

Likely scenario: An employee is denied an iPhone (or possibly any company-provided smartphone) and decides to get his own personal iPhone for use at work. This surreptitious infiltration is actually a bigger concern than a handful of managers; at least with them you still get to control the configuration and deployment process. If you don’t know that workers are using iPhones in your company, you can’t secure them at all. You can’t even be certain what data might be stored on them.

And since the iPhone is fairly easy for even novice users to set up — they can sign onto wireless networks, access intranets, and even gain access to an e-mail server — it’s no stretch to imagine that a lone, unauthorized iPhone could seriously compromise confidential data, as well as access to your network and the services running in it.

So, a flat-out ban isn’t going to do the trick, but actively supporting any technology people bring into the workplace is too much to handle and causes too many problems. So where is the middle ground?

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Did you know that Ayla Brown, the daughter of Massachusetts State Senator-Elect Scott Brown, competed on the fifth season of American Idol? Though she was only 17 at the time, the brunette — who counted her Mom and Dad as her “American Idols” — managed to advance to the Top 16 when she appeared on the show in 2007. Here’s a clip:

While plastic surgery does have its risks – how accurate is notorious famewhore Heidi Montag-Pratt’s claim that she nearly died shortly after dropping $30,000 to turn her body into a Tupperware collection last November? Heidi’s surgeon, Dr. Frank Ryan, fires back at her statements. Dr. Ryan adds that although he will not perform any more surgeries on Heidi, he does not think that the reality star is addicted to plastic surgery. Really?

Via Wonkette and The Raw Story comes this shocking political headline from the Reuters newswire:

One can only imagine what Stephen Colbert will have to say about this.

We’ve been down this road before with Reuters: see Arnold Zwicky’s 2007 post “From the headline desk at Language Log Plaza” and my followup, “Reuters says guilty of elliptical headlines.” As we’ve documented, it’s long been the peculiar Reuters house style to create headlines of the form “X say(s) C,” where C is a complement clause missing a subject. This time around, the elision of the pronoun it results in crash blossom-y goodness, since the casual reader would assume that the subject of “Bears Part Of Blame For Senate Loss” is actually bears, construed as a plural noun, with the rest of the clause serving as predicate (and with the copula are deleted in typical headline style).

This goes to show just how engrained the “X say(s) C” formula is at the Reuters copy desk, if they can rattle off a headline like this without stopping to consider how it would read to anyone not steeped in Reuters-ese.

We’re getting our first look at rock n’ roll biopic The Runaways. The movie details the turbulent career of the all-girl group of the ’70s and features Twilight’s Kristen Stewart as Joan Jett — who later went on to have a successful solo career — and former child star Dakota Fanning as lead singer Cherie Currie.

The Runaways opens in theaters March 19.

Homebrew coder A128 is back to release a new version of his Seno DS Music Sequencer, an easy to use homebrew music live sequencer for the DS that uses WAV samples or sounds recorded via the DS

Year on year, Chinese GDP in Q4 jumped 10.7%, according to statistics that have just been released.

For all of 2009, GDP growth was 8.9%.

Pretty staggering numbers, but was it a miss? According to a Dow Jones survey, analysts had been looking for a 10.8% gain.

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Prepare For A Slew Of Fresh Chinese Data Tonight, Including The All-Important Inflation Data
• Now A Top Goldman Banker In China Now Warning Of A China Real Estate Bubble
• Bank Of China Lending Freeze Ignites U.S. Dollar Rally, Slamming Shanghai

A special United Airlines flight is en route to Chicago this afternoon from Haiti with about 75 evacuees, an airline spokeswoman said. Earlier in the day, the airline dropped off several dozen relief workers and supplies.

The flight is scheduled to land at O’Hare International Airport shortly after 9 p.m., having made a brief refueling stop in Puerto Rico.

The airline planned to transport 15,000 pounds of water donated by Walgreens, nearly 400 tents from Feed the Children and communications equipment from Airline Ambassadors.

The Illinois Department of Children and Family Services said it is preparing to care for children who might be arriving. The children will not officially be placed in state custody, spokesman Kendall Marlowe said.

Marlowe said medical officials would screen Haitians while they are processed for entry into the U.S.

Marlowe would not comment about where the children would be housed upon their arrival in Chicago to protect their privacy. He said some of the children might already be in the pipeline for adoption.

United plans up to 30 more relief flights to Haiti.

Several charter flights have arrived in the U.S. in the last 24 hours to bring in children along with adults who need medical care.

–Oscar Avila

Read the original article from Tribune News Services.

A small fire on the roof of a West Englewood apartment building this afternoon left three people displaced from their homes, fire officials said.

No injuries were reported at the fire, which broke out about 4:45 p.m. at a three-story building in the 6500 block of South Ashland Avenue and was extinguished a few minutes later, said Chicago Fire Department spokesman Quention Curtis.

Curtis said the city Department of Human Services was on the scene to help the displaced people, all of whom are adults, find temporary shelter.

– Staff report

Read the original article from Tribune News Services.

The International Home + Housewares Show, a Chicago mainstay since 1939, plans to assess whether it should move from McCormick Place to Las Vegas or Orlando for 2012, the Rosemont-based show sponsor disclosed Tuesday.

McCormick Place, which lost two big shows last fall, is at risk of losing several more in coming months, sources said.

One of them, sources said, is the National Restaurant Association, which has not yet made a commitment for its 2012 show. The restaurant show is among the city’s most well-known.

The International Housewares Association’s board applauded the city and state’s push to cut trade show costs, but said the alternative site review is being done in case Chicago fails to make adequate progress in time for a 2012 decision. The March show is booked here for the next two years.

“Our board members represent our exhibitors, who are critically concerned about the costs relating to labor, food and the operational aspects involved in exhibiting or attending our show at McCormick Place,” said Phil Brandl, association president.

The show draws 60,000 attendees and generates an estimated $75 million in local spending.

The association shopped around several years ago as well but stayed put after cost adjustments were made. Since then, costs have risen and “the economy certainly has put pressure on the whole picture,” Brandl said.

[email protected]

Read the original article from Tribune News Services.

The Day in WTF…..

-Break out the earplugs. Rihanna performed “Redemption Song” to raise money for Haitian Earthquake Relief on Wednesday’s Oprah…Couldn’t she have just donated a couple of her millions and spared us the horror of being subjected to this shit? Bob would not be pleased!

-Lindsay Lohan is rumored to be dating French actor Aurelien Wiik after they were spotted kissing at a party in Los Angeles…..

–Linda Blair’s dog was shot dead by a neighbor this week after the pooch escaped from her compound a mauled a potbellied pig!

-Sarah Palin can sell 1 million copies of her autobiography, but can’t move 1,000 copies of In Touch Weekly!

-Kendra Wilkinson Tweeted this adorable image of her new son, Hank IV. Someone get this little guy a Nike endorsement……

-ABC has picked up another drama created by Grey Anatomy’s Shonda Rhimes….

-In an interview on an Irish TV this week, In Treatment star Gabriel Byrne, 59, confessed that he was molested by a priest when he was 11 years old……

-Conan rips NBC in espanol…..

-Couple charged for partying with underage kids, encouraging them to have sex….

-Mawell performs “Fistful of Tears” on Oprah’s Haiti Relief Special. Flawless…

-SJP must think she really is Carrie Bradshaw! The actress has confirmed she will be injecting her style sense into the next collection for designer brand Halston – the actress has been named as the label’s new president…..

–Complex’s 25 Most Anticipated Albums of 2010….

–Spider-Man 4 director named……

-A “Whites Only” Basketball League will launch in 12 cities across the Southeastern United States this summer. What year is it again? The “Whites Only” league is tired of the “street ball” played in the NBA, and wants to return to fundamental basketball that does not include fighting with the crowd, or players grabbing their crotch. Here’s the kicker, the league was started because Whites are now a “minority in America.”

-Caught on Tape: Goat destroys strip club!

-Marisa Miller out at Vicky’s Secret?

-Actors J. August Richards and Sarah Paulson have been tapped to play younger versions of Richard and Ellis on an upcoming eppy of Grey’s Anatomy. The flashback episode, “Time Warp,” is set in 1982 and will air Feb. 18…

-Roger Stephens, the 61-year-old jackass who made headlines after repeatedly slapping a 2-year-old at a Wal-Mart in Stone Mountain, Georgia last summer, was sentenced to one year in jail on Tuesday. The incident took place last August when Stephens approached the girl’s mother and snarled: “If you don’t shut that baby up, I will shut her up for you.” He then smacked the girl at least five times across the face in what he calls a “knee-jerk rejection…..”

Lauren Hutton is bringing her years of style and experience as a fashion maven to Lifetime’s reality design competition Project Runway.

Lauren steps into the high heels of a guest judge for Week 2 of the show, airing tomorrow night! The actress/model will join Heidi Klum, Michael Kors, and Nina Garcia on this week’s installment of Runway. Last week’s Season 7 premiere saw Nicole Richie guest judging the contestants’ first designs.

“We were so lucky to have Lauren Hutton as a guest judge,” Executive Producer Jane Cha said in a statement. “She was knowledgeable, feisty and is obviously an icon of the modeling and fashion industry in general,” Cha continued. “She was also very generous in speaking to our ‘Models of the Runway’ cast, who all were extremely appreciative of Lauren’s advice!”

Project Runway airs Thursdays on Lifetime.

Liberal economist Robert Reich offers up some very useful analysis of the Massachusetts election, and what it means in the bigger picture:

Here’s what’s really going on. In Massachusetts, in New Jersey, all over the nation, voters are petrified of losing their jobs, their homes, and what’s left of their savings. Nothing counts more than the economy. Rightly or wrongly, presidents and the party in power are blamed when the economy is lousy. Voters fired Jimmy Carter in 1980 because the economy went south. They fired George Bush the first in 1992 because the economy was awful. They fired congressional Democrats in 1994 because the economy was still awful. And they’re in the process of firing Obama and the Democrats — unless or until the economy turns around.

Is any of this Obama’s fault? Not really.

We’ve never heard any credible plan that would have produced an immediate v-shaped recovery (not tax cuts, not more targeted infrastructure spending etc.), and we suspect anyone else who claims such a plan exists is being disingenuous.

That being said, Obama has promised better times, and they’re just not here yet. The whole “jobs saved” line is just a punchline.

But regardless, for the next 10 months, you can expect Democrats to go all-out with every throw-spaghetti-against-the-wall jobs programs they can think of. With healthcare out of the way, jobs will be everything, so watch for more moves like the Fannie and Freddie blank checks (quantitative easing in disguise), plus everything else.

Of course, there’s no easy answer, as Reich goes on to point out, the only real way to produce more immediate stimulus is more deficit spending, and now that will be harder than ever to pull off thanks to Massachusetts, and the fear that’s instilled in the conservative Blue Dogs.

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Scott Brown’s Victory Means Obama Is About To Rain Hellfire Down On Wall Street
• In Just The Last Week, Job Creation And Business Confidence Tumbled Again
• Get Ready For 11% Unemployment In January

Crytek’s highly anticipated tech-shooter, Crysis 2, is not only going multiplatform this time, it will also invade a new type of jungle. Yes folks, you can forget about the tropical island as the latest Crysis incarnation is

Filed under: Etc., Technology

There are a lot of reasons for invention that goes beyond necessity, and pure want is right up there at the top. A clever gent named Dave tired of making the 15-minute walk to his freezing cold car, so he built a long-distance remote starter from a prepaid cellphone.

To make it work, Dave removed the vibrating mechanism that would signal a call after receiving pulses from the phone’s circuit board. Then he wired the phone to send those pulses to the remote starter’s switch, and voila: two rings and the car starts up. He is no longer limited by proximity when using the remote start; as long as the phone gets a signal, he’ll have a warm car whenever he gets there. Clever, no?

Total cost of the hack was $71.03, but that doesn’t include the remote starter unit you’ll need to buy and install in your car. And speaking of installing, should you try this out you might want to conceal your handiwork. These probably aren’t the safest days to have someone coincidentally poking under your hood and finding a cell phone wired to your engine…

[Source: Dave Hacks via Engadget]

Build your own remote starter with a pre-paid mobile phone originally appeared on Autoblog on Wed, 20 Jan 2010 19:59:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’ve discussed peer-to-peer lending sites in the past, though mostly with respect to regulatory questions revolving around their attempts to securitize the loans. However, every time we mention those sites, we get comments or emails from people insisting that such sites are terrible and much riskier than they make out. Right after the economy crashed back in 2008 the various P2P lenders all stepped up their PR campaigns, claiming that such P2P lending could step in and provide credit where the banks were pulling back. Of course, now reports are starting to come out suggesting that, indeed, peer to peer lending is incredibly risky with extremely high default rates:

To look at the results of Prosper’s loan marketplace, though, is to see not a solution to the credit crisis, but a microcosm of it. Loans to unqualified borrowers; reliance on mathematical models that turn out to be a lot less useful than they seemed; failed hopes that high interest rates could make subprime loans profitable; sky high default rates–Prosper has it all. Prosper’s Web site advertises returns of 6 percent to 14 percent for lenders. But the reality is that the lenders who loaned $188 million through Prosper have not earned anything like these returns. On the contrary, the majority of them have lost money, as they’ve watched their loans go bad at shockingly high rates.

Much like the loans made by banks during the mortgage boom, Prosper’s loans have gone into default at rates much worse than predicted by historical credit data. In November, 2007, Larsen told the Associated Press that Prosper’s default rate “hovered at around 2.7%.” That, however, included many new loans that simply hadn’t had time to go bad. Larsen refers to this obliquely in the AP story, noting that as more loans matured the rate would rise, but there’s no hint of just how steep that rise would be. Prosper’s data now shows that now shows that close to 36% of the loans made before Nov. 27, 2007–the date of the AP story–have ended in default, roughly thirteen times what a casual reader would have thought from Larsen’s comments. That is close, coincidentally, to the total 39% (or roughly two in five) default for the Prosper loans that have reached the end of their three year term.

The article goes on to highlight more and more ugly looking data concerning these sorts of loans — noting that for those who try to counter the high default rate with higher interest rates, the default rate goes up sharply. This is not a surprise — it’s basically how it should be based on your typical risk/reward tradeoff — but when the default rate on certain types of loans is over 50%, that’s not exactly a reliable investment strategy.

And from there, the article highlights how Prosper appears to mislead potential lenders with some sleight of hand:

In other words, only by cutting out more than two-thirds of its loans, does Prosper manage to eke out the positive results for AA to E rated loans that prospective lenders see on Prosper.com. Or you can look at it another way and ask how many investors have actually gotten returns in the 6 percent or 14 percent range that would-be lender see blazed across the Prosper.com front page? Thanks again to Eric’s Credit Community, we have a pretty good idea: Of investors with a portfolio of loans that are an average of at least two years old, folks who have lost money outnumber those who’ve earned 6 percent annual return by more than six to one.

The article goes on and on in that vein, and it’s really damning to the claims from some of these sites. Given how many articles have praised such services as potentially “revolutionizing” how people raise money for things, it’s definitely worth highlighting these questionable results.

Update: A few folks are suggesting that Prosper is different than others in the space…

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