Recent Blog Posts

Spending a week in Sin City for the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) was surreal and exhausting. It never sleeps, and as a technology journalist in Las Vegas covering the biggest tech show of the ...

Most companies have plans to deploy cloud security technologies, which include products designed to secure cloud servers and data, in 2013

Beverages manufacturers, with 100-999 employees, typically spend nearly £90k per annum on application software packages. The next largest outlay of £50k is by pharmaceutical companies. At the other ...

UrtheCast (pronounced "Earth-Cast") is launching and installing two cameras on the Russian module of the International Space Station.

The Microsoft Open Technologies subsidiary has announced a public preview of its app store for Windows Azure known as VM Depot.

Would you risk hammering or drilling your smartphone?In this video from CES 2013 in Las Vegas, Kyle Zurkan from Amzer, demonstrates the company's ShatterProof screen protection for smartphones.

Recently the United Nations (UN) said that women and girls are at risk of being left behind if countries don't start putting measures in place to change attitudes towards women studying in ...

I have been doing blogs about IT predictions for 2013 but I haven't done any resolutions. Here are some New Year's resolutions from KPMG as well as some advice on achieving them.Leverage business ...

msn (Photo credit: Rufus Gefangenen)This week I have been pondering the end of an era and come close to wiping away a tear over the loss of a staple of my teenage dramas. The sword was already ...

CSC UK said last week it was cutting costs in the UK by moving jobs offshore, after posting a loss of nearly £1bn.It also revealed declining profits at its flagship, 10-year outsource with Royal ...

Red Hat has released an unashamedly labelled 'minor' release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

I have had some good feedback from the series of 2013 predictions I have been running.Experts from across the IT and outsourcing sector have given me their thoughts. As we are still in January I am ...

Malware and hacking tops the list of security concerns for organisations in 2013 in the wake of increasingly sophisticated attacks from criminal and state sponsored groups. Compliance is in third ...

Everybody knows that Germany is the land of Vorsprung durch teknik and that you have to get up pretty early if you want to get your towels around the pool before the Shmidts, the Müller and the ...

Huawei launched a few devices at CES in Las Vegas this week, while none of them were confirmed with regions, dates or prices, two smartphones, which are expected to ship to China and then ...

In the hopefully unlikely eventuality that your company executives still need convincing that the internet is going to transform your business, the past few days have provided further evidence of ...

I was talking to a contact of mine some weeks back and he was telling me about moves by Chinese IT giant Huawei to get into more mainstream IT services rather than its telecoms home ground.In fact ...

Windows XP upgrades and SAP upgrade testing are two areas that will stimulate the outsourcing sector this year.Nick Mayes, research director at PAC, said in a report that while there will continue ...

As we all traipse back into work with that certain glow of too many mince pies around our waistlines, what better time to launch the technological fork to curb our munching? That's right, this ...

At CES in Las Vegas this week, Panasonic unveiled a tablet to be added to CES's growing category of super-size screens. Sitting more in the "table PC" category, than "tablet", this technology ...

This week at CES in Las Vegas, Panasonic added to its line of rugged Toughpad tablets with the Windows 8 Pro 10.1-inch FZ-G1 and the Android 7-inch JT-BI. Since 1996 Panasonic has been producing ...

Life insurance companies with over 1000 employees spend dramatically more on IT & telecom than large UK organisations overall. Their outlay is expected to be over £29,000 per employee during ...

Silicon Valley has delivered an endless list of technology success stories to the world, boasting names such as Apple, eBay, Google, Western Digital and Yahoo, so it was perhaps not surprising that ...

I blogged earlier today about TUPE. This is the llegislation that protects workers' rights if they are in a company that is acquired or if their role is outsourced to a third party.Although TUPE ...

The Transfer of Undertakings, Protection of Employment (TUPE) legislation is designed to protect workers employment conditions when their company is acquired or their role is outsourced to a third ...

Sony has unveiled its new flagship smartphone handset at CES in Las Vegas, the Xperia Z. The smartphone comes with a full HD screen, Snapdragon S4 Pro quad-core processor and it comes ready for 4G ...

Samsung has introduced a full HD touch display monitor for Windows 8 PCs, which supports up to ten fingers of simultaneous touch.It's Samsung's first multi-touch display optimised for Windows 8. It ...

I got my hands on the beautiful premium Chronos laptop today at CES. The SuperBright 15.6-inch full HD touchscreen display almost glistened, it was so crystal clear. I'd taken a quick look at the ...

This is a good week for open source video games, the Cube 2: Sauerbraten multi-player shoot em up has reached its next major release and the game is available for download from the project website now.

The Computer Weekly Developer Network speaks to Craig Sullivan, VP and international general manager for NetSuite to set the record straight.

An article on the English language version of Chinese website The People's Daily has an article about the China government's plan to increase its outsourcing sector by 30% annually to the end of ...

English: Stephen Elop meets the bloggers in 2008 Suomi: Stephen Elop vuonna 2008 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)This week is witnessing the birth of a plethora of new technology at the Consumer ...

A father in China has hired virtual assassins to hunt down his 23-year-old son and kill his avatar to help cure his suspected addiction to online games. The father, named by the Kotako East blog as ...

Big data is all the buzz in IT. Businesses are trying to make use of the data they collect about customers, for example. And they are investing in BI software. But they are spending twice as much ...

New software libraries are being constructed for programmers to start employing so-called Vision Intelligence technologies into applications that can "see" what is going on in the environment ...

The connected home is one of the big themes at CES in Las Vegas this year. The idea of connecting all your devices to the internet and seamlessly to each other has popped up a few times at the ...

It's going to be a busy week for hardware, gadgets and gizmos, and HP isn't intending on missing out on the launches. The company has launched new notebook PCs, an IPS monitor with Beat Audio and a ...

A government commission looks set to give IT workers the opportunity to get revenge on bankers that have cost them their jobs and deteriorated their opportunities.IT professional in the banking ...

Infosys is reported to be getting rid of staff that are not reaching their targets. According to a report on Indian website The Economic Times, 5000 staff could be cut. The Economic Times India ...

If there is to be a metric it should be based on the quality of service delivered and received. The BBC iPlayer might well be a component in the test package, perhaps alongside access to a ...

Lenovo's new 27-inch touch screen table PC, the Horizon, features a "smart hinge" which lets the device stand upright like a traditional PC, but also allows the screen to lay horizontal. When the ...

The Computer Weekly Developer Network (CWDN) has bashfully shied away from covering too many of these marketing-enriched missives lest we be drawn too deeply into the dragon's lair to discuss ...

Lenovo have been busy, along with the launch of a 27-inch multiuser table PC, the Horizon, the company also had a few more tricks up its sleeve at the CES Unveiled event in Las Vegas.Lenovo ...

While some hardware companies are shrinking tablets from 10 to 7-inches, some on the other hand are blowing up computing hardware to become all-in-one devices at the 20-inch plus range. Larger than ...

I've had 24 hours in Las Vegas, managed to get over the jet lag, walked what seems like miles up and down the strip, had the fluorescent lights burning holes into my contact lenses and my stomach ...

One of the major concerns for many is... just exactly how compatibility demands will now be met between Windows 8 and the massively-complex beautiful-beast that is Adobe Creative Suite 6.

Who has (or should have) the responsibility for taking action (e.g. removing the registration under current terms and conditions) of those currently trading on-line in breach of the Distance ...

Financial services companies are probably the biggest consumers of IT outsourcing. Suppliers salivate when discussing their customers in the sector. The customers are less willing to talk about ...

I recently ran some blog posts giving the predictions for 2013 from of outsourcing industry experts.One commenter, Robert Morgan, talked about how some of the "suppliers are on life support." He ...

Expertmaker founder Lars Hard says that AI-powered search is next on the horizon as are "smart and adaptive" user interfaces enabled by AI.

The big flaw in most of the IT predictions you will read at this time of year is that technology is no respecter of the calendar. Fast moving it may be, but it's not as if the issues faced by IT ...

Image via CrunchBaseNothing like a bit of spirit of fair play to kick off the New Year is there? Well, this latest competition spat is nothing like that at all... Microsoft has got on its high ...

The key message ... is that .uk should be developed as a trust mark with realistic quality control if it is to have value. Perpetuating a situation where .uk may refer to organisations based ...

We know what we don't want. But we don't know what we do.Thus have anti-outsourcers in Barnet and Cornwall begun the new year: with too little momentum to make something substantial of the ...

It seems that fans of the mid-sized but very rich football team Chelsea have leant from their Russian owner and taken to throwing their money away.One individual, who Downtime can only presume is a ...

Downtime was interested to hear that Google's Eric Schmidt is visiting North Korea this month on a "humanitarian" trip.It's hard to imagine what could possibly come of the meeting, as North Korea ...

Cloud computing is accelerating fast. There is hardly an industry not touched by the technology. With security fears reducing, costs coming down and technology maturing the march of cloud computing ...

The London and Isle of Man headquartered company that oversees commercially supported services for the Linux-based Ubuntu operating system has confirmed that a smartphone interface has been ...

We need to make csot-ecffective use of cross departmental data matching and of the private sector personal information sources which now cover most of the world except for sub-saharan Africa.

Cornwall Council CEO Kevin Lavery is leaving to take the top job in New Zealand's capital Wellington. In March he will become CEO of Wellington City Council.This comes days after Cornwall Council, ...

Big Data is considered by many to be an integral part of an organisation's IT strategy. But as the technology and strategy grow at a rapid pace, it widens a gap in necessary skills that are needed ...

It illustrates, however, just how vulnerable are those who seek to follow government advice and work from home or otherwise rely on on-line services - at least until such time as Ofcom focuses on ...

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has said that a stable specification of the HTML5 web markup language has been laid down for web application developers to now focus on.

Application development for the Android open source operating system and platform is of more interest to software programmers than building apps for either the iPhone or iPad.

Malcolm now chairs the planning and review meetings of the DPA Digital Single Market stream himself and I look forward to seeing serious progress over the year ahead as this mark of support and ...

The time has come for robust action (including by the British Computer Society) against those who bring the "profession" into disrepute by seeking to force those dealing with government on-line ...

But they will not be sorted and the consequent benefits will not be reaped unless those responsible have to report progress to those with the authority to resolve cross-boundary problems and not ...

Does your over-worked Mac deserve a Christmas present or perhaps a New Year's sprucing up?Well this is an environmentally friendly solar keyboard from Logitech works on Mac, iPhone or iPad. It uses ...

Of course the central premise behind the opportunity to "write once (and then) deploy anywhere" is an appealing proposition for both developers and users alike.

ipod shuffle loja online leilao (Photo credit: sucelloleiloes)Apple's iPod, the portable media player which launched way back in 2001, created a new generation of compact and colourful ways to ...

Every year Alan Stockey, a well known London banking security professional, sends me a Christmas poem with a security theme. It's a little late for Christmas Day, but then so is the snow. Day Zero, ...

Who really trusts the Internet for that which is critical as opposed to "nice to have but not essential".

The Guardian published an article about a letter that was written on 1912 on the 12th of December. The last time we had a 12/12/12 in fact.It is an interesting article. The man that wrote it talked ...

What will 2013 hold for information security professionals? Certainly a lot more serious incidents as we've been incubating a raft of potential crises for the past two decades. But what ...

So, we are on the brink of Christmas day. Ahead of us stretches 24 hours of gluttony, stuffing our faces with turkey, Christmas pudding and Toblerones the size of the gaudy tree in the corner. If ...

One of today's buzzwords is big data. Volumes of information generated are increasing rapidly, driven in part by increased take up of mobile technologies and the growing number and range of ...

Assuming that your Internet connection does not go down over Christmas, remember that everything you do on-line on Boxing Day (expectedto be a peak period for content download) will be recorded and ...

Here is another round of predictions about the European IT outsourcing market next year. Today is the turn of Robert Morgan, director at sourcing consultancy Burnt-Oak Partners. Yesterday I ...

Cloud-based desktop environments are on the rise.

Open source programmers are being offered a Selenium-based free cloud testing service from application testing company Sauce Labs.

It's the time of year when pundits express opinions on the year ahead. And naturally I have my own views. Before that, let's take a quick look at my forecasts for 2012. How well did I do? Last ...

Here is another round of predictions about the European IT outsourcing market next year. Yesterday I featured Sam Kingston from T-Systems, on Tuesday I revealed the views of outsourcing lawyer Mark ...

With the BlackBerry 10 launch almost a month away now on the 30 January 2013, the "excitement" is growing for what may (or may not be) RIM's magnum opus.

While the Fujitsu ScanSnap S1300i scanner is not portable enough to pop in your laptop bag, it is indeed a rather compact (although heavy for its size) device which can neatly sit on your desk, ...

Steven Hipwell, principal project manager at Birmingham City University guest blogs for Inspect-a-GadgetEvery year Vision 2020 hosts World Sight Day, bringing awareness to the plight of the 285 ...

Maybe I am just full of Christmas cheer, but I wanted to write another positive blog post this week and congratulate Mansfield's Business Improvement District (BID) organisation on a job well done. ...

Adobe Acrobat Portfolio SDK exists to help programmers develop software that interacts with Acrobat technology as the SDK contains header files, type libraries, simple utilities, sample code and ...

This gives context to the proposals for an Intellectual Property Crime Unit and a Digital Copyright Exchange . Time is running out to rewrite the relevant sections of the Digital Economy Act before ...

Here is another round of predictions about the European IT outsourcing market next year. Yesterday I featured outsourcing lawyer Mark Lewis of Berwin Leighton Paisner and the previous day it was ...

KPMG's report on the performances of IT services suppliers across Europe has put Cognizant at the top of the list.I wrote about the UK report earlier in the year. Computacenter was seen as the best ...

The global economic slowdown has of course meant mostly bad news for most people, business verticals and individual companies.

I was sent this blog post by William Dvorak and Michael Raybman who are foundersof Deterministic Labs, which helps companies big and small outsource software development effectively.It relates ...

The Livescribe Sky Smartpen vs Murdoch and BSkyB Recent news has caused me to debate whether I should include a review of the Livescribe Sky Smartpen on Inspect-a-Gadget anymore, because sadly, the ...

Here is another round of predictions about the European IT outsourcing market next year. Yesterday I featured the predictions of KPMG's Lee Ayling . Today it is the turn of outsourcing lawyer mark ...

Today I interviewed Jonathan Charley, who is a partner in financial services at IT and business consultancy Bearingpoint. He was a CIO at Lloyds Bank previously.I asked him what trends he was ...

With a childhood spent mostly being a plumber, rescuing a princess from a castle, Downtime has learned a few things. Mostly it has learned that being a plumber and rescuing a princess from a castle ...

Ministry of Defence (Photo credit: pixelhut)Today, the mobile industry got another boost with the promise from government of even more spectrum to bid on. The Ministry of Defence confirmed it would ...

BPO used to be about cutting costs. But today, through the use of technology, much more can be gained by outsourcing a process. The ability to collect and analyses the massive volumes of data ...

Much of what we read relating to the future impact of open source, or cloud computing, or any significant 'still-nascent' technology paradigm tends to be focused on the user/consumer end.

I have been asking people for their thoughts and predictions for the IT services sector next year.Sam Kingston, a former CIO and now UK head at service provider T-Systems, made an interesting point ...