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Apple has been criticised by free software campaigners over the way it controls music and other content on platforms including its newly launched iPad tablet device.

Launched on Wednesday at a event in San Francisco, the Apple iPad is expected to be released in the UK in March equipped with Wi-Fi access only with larger capacity 3G-enabled models available later in the year. As well as allowing users to browse music and video content in the same way as the iPhone and other Apple hardware, the iPad will also tap into an iBooks bookstore application launched alongside the device.

But free-software campaigners have criticised the iPad and iBooks launch as another example of the computer maker’s attempts to control digital content through technical measures known as digital rights management (DRM). Anti-DRM campaingers from the Free Software Foundation set up “Apple Restriction Zones” on approaches to the Yerba Buena Center For Arts, where the Apple launch was held.

For more go to: eWEEK Europe UK

The idea that Apple is going to disrupt publishing with iBooks (and iPad) in the same way it did the music industry with iTunes is to completely misunderstand how the market for books is going to develop.

I have tried the e-reader software on the iPhone and other devices and no matter how good it is supposed to be reading on a screen is just not comfortable. Not for reasons of eye-strain so much as of distraction. Knowing the device you hold in your hands is capable of letting you watch a movie of browse the web means that its hard to concentrate and lose yourself in reading in the same way as holding a novel.

But more importantly – e-books are fundamentally a red herring. Why go to the effort of reading a page of text at all – when the device you are holding is capable of rendering the author’s voice or even a cast of actors to you at the press of a button. And what is more, audiobooks are portable and can be listened to on the move. The future of publishing is not the replacement of books with e-books but the return to the oral tradition of story-telling which is word of mouth – something that Stephen Fry has argued predates the written word by thousands of years.

E-books are at best a transitional technology with a niche audience – novels will endure and in the meantime the popularity of audio-books will grow.

Getting the board to approve IT projects requires not only good presentation skills but also the ability to speak the same language as the rest of the business, says Andrew Donoghue.

While it’s debatable whether IT leaders are actually any less articulate than senior managers from other areas of the business, the idea that technical staff lack communication skills is certainly a persistent one.

One of the issues may be that IT concepts are fundamentally complex and as a result are more difficult to explain.

While this may be the case, some experts claim that effective technologists should be able to talk about what they do in direct and easily understood terms. “If an IT technologist can’t explain in plain English what it is he is trying to do or what are the issues, then the techie knows what he is doing but needs to go on a communication skills training course – or he is lying to you,” says David Chan, director of the Centre for Information Leadership at City University.

While basic communication skills can be learned, for some technologists it’s not that they can’t express themselves. Rather they struggle to communicate effectively because they are insulated from the wider imperatives of their business, say experts.

Adam Thilthorpe, director for professionalism at the British Computer Society (BCS), says there is a tendency for heads of department – including the CIO – to think only in terms of their part of the organisation.

“The first thing [for IT leaders] to do is to set all projects in the context of the business. That means the sector and market that the organisation operates in, not an internal departmental view. More and more the technology part of IT is commoditised and it is the information part, and the person who controls that, who holds the key to future success. The CIO should be uniquely positioned to best take advantage of this knowledge,” he explains.

Other key issues to address, given the depressed economy and emerging legislation prompted by the financial crisis and environmental concerns, are costs and compliance.

“The language of the boardroom is finance but to ensure that you are fluent, an understanding of Sarbanes-Oxley and similar corporate governance issues is a must.

CIOs must also take ownership of the exciting stuff, like innovation, and set it in the context of competitive advantage for the organisation. No CEO is ever going to be interested in IT for IT’s sake,” says Thilthorpe.

The best CIOs, it seems, are able to speak to the rest of the business in terms they understand and anticipate the questions and requirements they have for a new system.

“Our IT department is very good at not going down purely the technical aspects of an IT system. We will think about what are the right solutions from a business perspective,” says Ian Sibbald, financial controller of Cranfield Business School, who interacts with senior IT staff on a frequent basis.

For full article go to: Silicon.com

More and more CFOs are becoming responsible for businesses’ IT function. Andrew Donoghue explains what they must know to manage CIOs.

Financial chiefs are only going to become more involved in IT decision-making in the future, recent research from analyst Gartner shows.

Around 23 per cent of CIOs surveyed last year said they currently report to the head of finance, compared to 38 per cent who reported to the CEO. According to Gartner, if this trend continues, by 2013 more CIOs will be reporting to the head of finance than the chief executive.

The CIO may be more familiar with the intricacies of the technology but the CFO will make the final call on whether the project goes ahead. So how much does the chief financial officer really need to know about technology to feel confident in their decisions?

silicon.com spoke with industry insiders, senior financial staff and academics to find out what insights about technology CFOs need to equip themselves with to effectively oversee the IT operation.

1. You don’t need to be a techie to understand IT
As anyone who has ever dealt with a so-called ‘helpline’ can attest, some IT staff have a hard time empathising with people who don’t share their technical knowledge.

But according to Ian Sibbald, financial controller of Cranfield University, it is possible to work closely with, and even make decisions on IT projects without having an intricate knowledge of the systems concerned. “Our IT department is very good at not going down purely the technical aspects of an IT system,” he says. “We will think about what are the right solutions from a business perspective.”

Ian Singer, IT partner at accountancy firm Littlejohn, agrees CFOs should focus on the business benefits and not get too wrapped up in the technical details. “CFOs shouldn’t get bogged down by the detail of technology features. CFOs faced with new technology should ask their CIOs, ‘what are the benefits to the business of implementing this change/buying this new system?'”

More important than technical knowledge is the ability to ask the right questions and illicit responses in clear language from the head of IT, says David Chan, director of the Centre for Information Leadership at City University. “You don’t need to be a techie, you just need to be able to probe and get them to explain things in plain English. If you don’t have technical staff that can answer those questions, then recruit them or train them.”

2. Think themes not technologies
Rather than focusing laser-like on specific technologies or products, it is more realistic given the rapid pace of development in the IT sector for CFOs to think in terms of general topics and let the tech experts fill in the details, experts argue. “I would say it is more themes in technology. Some of those that we have been looking at recently would be voice over IP, ERP solutions, and carbon management,” says Cranfield’s Sibbald.

Amir Sharif, professor of operations management at Brunel Business School, agrees that a broad understanding of technical strategy is more useful to CFOs than wrestling with specific products. “CFOs definitely need to know what’s going on with IT – they don’t need to know the specific nuts and bolts obviously but a good, broad understanding of the strategic use and risks of IT are essential,” he says.

That said, Sharif also argues against complacency and expecting the IT department to spoon-feed all the requisite information. “One fundamental danger that CFOs face is that of ‘Leave it to IT’,” he warns.

For more go to: Silicon.com

Ingres claims the central European country should be an example to other states but Hungarian open source experts disagree

Open source database company Ingres has held Hungary up as an example to the UK and other European countries of how government should be championing the use of non-proprietary software in the public sector.

But some Hungarian experts have pointed out that while the central European country has made progress when it comes to allowing open source players to compete on the same terms as proprietary companies, there is still a long way to go before the Magyars could be held up as leaders on open source.

In a statement released this week, Ingres announced that it will be teaming up with Hungarian IT specialist FreeSoft which presents itself as the head of a consortium that won the “Hungarian government’s open source software tender that has a four-year, $22.3 million budget”. Commenting on what it sees as Hungary’s progressive attitude to open source, Roger Burkhardt, chief executive of Ingres said that Hungary should be seen as an example to other European governments.

“This is one of the largest open source procurements I have seen and we applaud the Hungarian Government for leading the way in introducing competition and cutting back on proprietary software purchases,” said Roger Burkhardt, chief executive of Ingres. “In my opinion, the Hungarian Government is showing the European Union that there is plenty of open source competition in the market today. I anticipate that more government bodies than before will be following Hungary’s lead and will benefit from the cost savings that come with an open source deployment.”

But other players in the open source tendering process in Hungary have pointed out that two other consortia also “won” in the process and that it only allows open source players to be included in a centralised IT tendering framework, rather than being an actual commitment on the part of the Hungarian government to spend $22.3 million (£13.7m) on open source.

“This 4 billion forints (£13.7m) framework was awarded to seven vendors (three consortiums, one of them led by ULX and one by Freesoft) back in August to share the right to supply under the framework agreement. We have to remember though that it is only a framework that can be spent on open source within the public sector, the government is not paying for it, those organisations will have to make that decision individually and work out the budget for any open source migration,” said Gábor Szentiványi, chief executive of Hungarian open source integrator and Red Hat partner ULX.

For more go to eWEEK Europe UK

RSA, aside from being the security arm of data and storage specialist EMC, has been hosting an annual security conference in the US for years which routinely attracts the best and brightest from the IT and security worlds including Bill Gates and Al Gore. Competing with the likes of Infosec in the UK, the European version of the event doesn’t attract quite the same level of speakers as its US sibling but can still boast luminaries such as BT security iconoclast Bruce Schneier and last year’s guest speaker, former fraudster-turned-security expert Frank Abagnale.

The organisers of the RSA Conference like to have a theme to pull all the disparate elements of the show together. Last year, the show was themed around the achievements of UK computing pioneer and codebreaker Alan Turing. This year’s show continued the cryptographic theme but from the more esoteric perspective of novelist Edgar Allan Poe.

While Poe’s The Gold Bug famously includes a cypher-based search for treasure, his tale of The Black Cat probably has more in common with the themes explored at this year’s show. In the story, a man murders his wife while in the throes of trying to kill the family cat. The cat’s plaintive meowing eventually gives away both crimes and Poe uses the story to illustrate the idea of the unintended consequences that wait in store for even the most effective strategist.

Jumping from the 19th-century to the present-day zeitgeist of social networking, the show included a warning about the consequences of interactive web sites on corporate security. While some CIOs might look to block access to Facebook through fears of lost productivity, the real concern should really be the exposure of so-called ‘gateway data’, Herbert ‘Hugh’ Thompson, chief security strategist for People Security and professor in the Computer Science department at Columbia University in New York, told RSA delegates. Thompson defines gateway data as innocuous information that, when disclosed, can be used to access secure systems. “You might never heard of a the term ‘gateway data’ before but that’s because I totally made it up,” he said. “Basically it’s data that seems harmless but when used properly can facilitate access to highly sensitive information.”

For more go to CIO.co.uk

Adoption rates of virtualisation have yet to match the hype surrounding it, here Andrew Donoghue hears from businesses who’ve already taken the plunge.

Despite vendors touting the numerous benefits that virtualisation can bestow on businesses that adopt the technology, there is a flaw in the rhetoric that is hard to get around: not many companies are actually adopting virtualisation.

Figures from analyst Gartner released earlier this year reveal only 16 per cent of current IT workloads are running on virtual machines. Although that estimate is set to grow to some 50 per cent of workloads by 2012, it still paints a picture of the reality of virtualisation being well behind the ‘must-have’ technology image portrayed by vendors such as IBM, Microsoft and VMware.

Zahl Limbuwala, chair of the British Computer Society datacentre specialist group says some of the coolness towards virtualisation is down to the economic downturn making any new IT projects harder to execute. But also, virtualisation technology itself has matured and companies are taking a more strategic approach to it.

“It is generally accepted that there is a positive benefit from virtualisation irrespective of which technology you decide to virtualise with,” he says. “But I think there has been a dampening of enthusiasm around virtualisation and consolidation projects over the last 18 months probably due to a combination of the economic climate and increasing complexity around the technology.”

According to Limbuwala, companies are increasingly realising that successful virtualisation is about more than just tackling a few servers and hoping to save hardware and electricity costs.

“I think there is a little more complexity and detail to it now than people just saying, ‘Let’s just go and call in our favourite virtualisation vendor, buy a set of new blades, install them and we’ll make a 16 to 1 saving on energy costs’,” he says. “I think there is a little bit more thought going into it now and so it takes a little bit more time.”

John Tuccillo, chairman of the board for The Green Grid, a confederation of end-user and vendor organisations focusing on energy efficiency, believes companies have begun to realise that virtualisation isn’t the panacea it was made out to be and are taking a more considered approach.

“I think a lot of people looked on virtualisation as a silver bullet,” he says. “Don’t get me wrong, it is a fantastic tool but it’s just one of the tools available. And it’s not an inexpensive exercise to get value from virtualisation.”

For more go to Silicon.com

Just returned from a last trip to the UK before we hunker down in Budapest for Christmas and the birth of our daughter  in February. It was good to see everyone and catch-up on work but slightly soured by the experience of flying Wizz Air.

Not only was my flight out delayed by two hours and diverted to Venice! – yes Venice – so that the airline could deliver a spare part but I was clobbered with a £100 charge for excess baggage despite paying for an extra bag online.

The Venice diversion wasn’t anything to do with our plane being faulty – it was fine – it just turned out that delivering a part to the Venice using our plane and our time – was the easiest option for Wizz Air. Which might have been just about tolerably despite adding two hours to our flight time if they had the sense of fair play to offer a sandwich or a cup of tea but we were told by the air-hostesses that although they would like to – the company would not allow it.

The second mishap on the way back was due to fact that Wizz Air has a stupidly complex – some might even say purposefully so – website when it comes to excess baggage that requires you to not only pay £15 for an extra bag but then pay more depending on how much that bag will weigh!! Thinking that I had paid for my bag I missed the extra step only to find out that I had paid for an extra bag which wasn’t actually allowed to weigh anything! The cost of paying for the bag which weighed 8Kgs was £104 at £13 a Kg. Nice – especially at 6.30 am.

Anyway – suffice to say I that I won’t be flying Wizz Air again.

Here’s my complaint letter:

Dear Sir/Madam

I am a UK journalist currently based in Budapest. I specialise in writing about technology and the web and have a question to ask about your website regarding the excess luggage section.

I am wondering specifically why it is possible to select the option of paying for an extra bag – and then being given the option to choose one that weighs 0 kg?

I am asking this question as I fell foul of this fault this morning when traveling back on Wizz Air Flight W6 0202 to Budapest from a press trip to London. As I was bringing back some products for my pregnant girlfriend – I was happy to pay for an extra bag – which I did online and was charged an extra 5500 HUF.

However it was not until I arrived at the airport to catch my flight this morning that I was told that although I had paid for an extra bag – I had not paid for any kg!!!!. I would like someone to explain to me why the site is designed to let this happen as at worst it is very poor site design and at worst could be seen as willfully misleading and simply an opportunity to confuse travelers and make them pay more for excess luggage.

I did try to tell the check-in attendant that I had tried to pay for the extra bag but was told that there was nothing that could be done and I would have to pay an extra £104 for a bag that I had thought I paid for. The attendant – evidently guilty about enforcing the rules which must catch plenty of people out – actually admitted to me to my face that: “Well they are a low-cost airline and will do what they can do get money out of people.“

I would like this money this money compensated back to me as I feel that the web site is misleading and poorly designed – in a way that could be construed to try and extort money from unsuspecting customers – and will be exploring as much in frequent blog postings, news articles and features on the poor customer service at Wizz Air.

I was happy to pay extra for the bags but feel I have been unjustly penalised thanks to the poor design and wording of the site.

This problem was bad enough – but on my outward trip to Luton from Budapest W6 209 on 27 November – the flight was delayed by over two hours because your airline thought it was easier to deliver a part to Venice by diverting our flight to London and inconveniencing everyone on board – than send it by another route.

The flight was due to take off at 17.45 and but did not actually take off till nearly 18.30. The detour to Venice then meant us waiting on the ground for another 45 minutes before the part could be dropped off – before we finally took off again for London. We arrived in London at 21.40 – over 2 hours late.

Despite inconveniencing passengers for your own ends – we were told by the cabin crew that they could not compensate us in any way at all – not even a drink or sandwich was offered – despite the fact that we had been inconvenienced to save your airline time and money rather than as part of any kind of safety emergency or technical problem with our plane.

In short – my whole experience of your airline has been terrible and as someone who regularly meets with senior business executives in the UK and Hungary I will be only too happy to spread the message to everyone I meet during the busy Christmas period ahead.

Yours sincerely

Andrew Donoghue

The Green Grid’s John Tuccillo and Zhal Limbuwala from the British Computer Society argue that consuming less IT and upgrading less frequently isn’t necessarily the most sustainable approach

IT vendors are very keen on discussing environmental and low-carbon approaches to IT in terms of energy efficiency. The idea that new technology will be more efficient and “greener” than older kit fits nicely with the perpetual upgrade mantra that has been the mainstay of the computing industry since its inception. Out with the old and inefficient and in with the new and shiny.

But alongside the focus on energy efficiency, some experts, including representatives from UK government, have begun to look to the IT industry to expand its sustainable horizons to include the entire life-cycle of technology. For example one study from the University of Tokyo estimates that of the total carbon debt of a PC through its life-cycle, 75 percent is incurred during the manufacturing phase. Most of the carbon damage is done when devices are built – not from the energy they consume during their lifetime, experts argue.

Not surprisingly the idea of embedded carbon is not one the IT industry is as eager to embrace as energy efficiency, just as the concept of selling less kit that lasts longer doesn’t fit well with the “new shiny thing” fundamentals of the technology industry.

eWeek Europe UK recently caught up with two experts in IT energy efficiency to discuss the issue. John Tuccillo is chairman of the board for international data centre energy specialist The Green Grid, and Zhal Limbuwala is chair of the British Computer Society data centre specialist group.

The Green Grid is a consortium of IT vendors – including Intel, Microsoft and AMD – and end-users of IT, which aims to develop tools and approaches to help its members improve the energy efficiency of their data centres. The BCS data centre specialist group is one of the 40 or so sub-organisations of the British Computer Society – also known as The Chartered Institute For IT – focused on similar issues to the Green Grid.

The two groups have announced a partnership which will see them collaborate on initiatives designed to improve the sustainability of data centres, including the development of simulator tools which should enable IT professionals to make more accurate judgements how sustainable their infrastructure could be.

For more go to: eWEEK Europe UK

One of the world’s poorest countries is following offer African nations in looking to IT offshore services and crowd-sourcing

The effects of a twelve year civil war may still be very much in evidence in the African Republic of Burundi but aid-workers and educators believe the Internet could offer a brighter future for the country.

Neighbouring Rwanda has invested heavily in broadband and IT infrastructure in the years since the country was rocked by genocide in the mid-90s and Burundi appears to be following a similar strategy. UK charity World Emergency Relief issued a statement this week explaining its decision to fund a computer lab in a school in Burundi’s capital city Bujumbara.

The charity said over 500 pupils from some of the poorest areas of city attend the Himbaza School – and the new IT suite goes some way to offering them a future. The charity believes that by giving more African children access to computers and the internet, the continent could potentially challenge India and Asia in the market for outsourced IT services and virtual admin tasks also known as crowd sourcing.

“At the moment this is principally benefiting areas which already have a reputation for competitive software development such as India and South East Asia but there is absolutely no reason why Africa should not become an extremely competitive option,” the charity states

For more go to eWeek Europe UK