IT Week Insider, Volume 9, Number 41

This week, the IT Week staff are embracing Friday the 13th with the same enthusiasm that turkeys do Christmas. We consider ourselves pretty unlucky anyway, what with the monkeys and all that, so visitors can expect to find us sheathed in cotton wool, our fingers poised over the speed dial for ‘mum’, and generally being very careful indeed.

In the build up to this momentous day we kept busy writing news and reviewing things with the vigour of a Victorian gentleman just back from an extended stay in Brighton.

Interview:
Smart fraudsters move in-house
Since David Porter of IT security chin-scratchers Detica came into the office we have been on lockdown. Why? Because he says we are at threat from our colleagues. “Even people who have worked at firms for a long time can be up to no good. They could be angry at their employer,” he warned. Given that we share an office with the most belligerent simians known since that hairy one dropped a piano on his mate’s foot in the tea adverts, we understand the anger argument. Will a lockdown help, though? Realistically, it’s better to be as far away from them as is monkeyly possible.

News:
Google launches office collaboration tools
Google continues its internet domination plans with the launch of an online collaborative document and spreadsheet creation tool. It also bought online video hosting leader YouTube for a figure approaching a googol, and is potentially building an army of winged flying robot monkeys. In the meantime, it seems to be a case of “all your docs (and videos) are belong to us”.

Comment:
Offshorers should not lose faith in India
Why? Well, James Murray says that despite shocking security lapses, data thefts, wildcat strikes, Bollywood-related riots, and the fact that they honestly don’t know what is happening in Hollyoaks at the moment, the Indian IT services industry is OK. Thanks for clearing that up, James.

Analysis:
Carr advises firms to pay less for IT
Nicholas Carr, the most controversial writer we’ve come across since that bloke wrote Bally Rotter and the Lord’s Chopper, about how the Holy Grail was actually a wooden bike that Jesus made and rode over England’s green and pleasant hills. Carr may have his own such theories, perhaps theories better than a Dan Brown book, but if so he keeps them rather close to his chest. What he doesn’t mind spurting, however, is his idea that IT doesn’t matter and that firms are mad to pay through the nose for software.

Review:
USB phone fails to shine
The miniaturisation of mobile phones is getting so out of control that soon you will need to have reductive surgery on your lugs just to be able to use the things. It’s bad enough leaving a phone behind in a cab, without losing them in your own ear canal. Happily, a handy alternative to brain-nuking mobile cancer wands is on the horizon: VoIP. And vendors are rushing to give us all smaller, better, faster, more preposterously named items that we can use to make calls from anywhere that you find a USB port. In the spirit of this, Dan Robinson looked at Vonage’s V-Phone, a device so small you could smuggle it through customs and still walk in a straight line.

IT Week Podcast
This week Daniel Robinson talks about how Microsoft is going to make Windows more annoying, and Dave Bailey tells us what magic numbers will make the broadband marketplace split open like coconuts on that Lost island.

Lem Bingley blog
This week El Bingley has been cutting through more flannel than a fat man’s tailor. He asks, does anything Gartner says make sense? Or, for you analysts reading this: Do Gartner’s linguistic and syntactic synergies contribute to the formation of any valuable thought/action alliances?

IT Week Labs blog
IT Week’s bread and water munchers reckon that British Telecom might be driving its staff peculiar. Quick, get those “you don’t have to be mad to work here but it helps” stickers on eBay. They’ll sell like flammable Danish flags.

Green Business News
Buy a computer, plant a tree. It’s not quite Hakuna Matata, is it?

IT Sneak blog
This week Sneak has been listening to people talk on the train and drawing pictures of dogs at their ablutions. There are places for people like you Sneak. Welcome to the family.

Phil Muncaster blog
This week Phil Muncaster been in Rome living the Vida Loca, or enjoying the Dolce Vita... Actually, it might have been a Cornetto. He’s too far away for us to see clearly.

David Neal blog
This week David Neal has been trying to work out what users of YouTube think about the Google purchase. To be fair though, it’s hard enough working out whether most of them are even alive, let alone trying to make sense of what they say.