Edward Cone

Gartner’s Hype Cycle report lists technologies and trends that are moving through Bunyanesque stages, such as the “Trough of Disillusionment” and the “Slope of Enlightenment.” The idea is that we get excited about new things, talk them up, find out that nothing works as easily as expected, and eventually the good stuff shakes out and […]

Talking with security expert Bruce Schneier does not always leave a person feeling more secure. That’s because Schneier doesn’t sell easy solutions. Instead, he challenges businesses, governments and individuals to examine their assumptions about risk, to eschew simplistic answers and to accept the fact that no system is–or can be–perfectly secure. Now the chief security […]

Robert Scoble is the guy who took corporate blogging mainstream and wrote a book about business blogging. In 2003, he moved his popular Scobleizer blog to Microsoft, giving the software giant a much-needed human face. Since then, blogs and other Web 2.0 tools have become commonplace in the enterprise, but a lot of companies still […]

Bill Hoban is the CIO of Extra Space Storage, the second-largest operator of self-storage facilities in the United States. His company has embraced cloud computing in a big way–and that has led to big changes in the CIO’s job. Extra Space has 685 facilities and almost 400,000 customers across the country, so applications that run […]

Though the IT industry we know today did not exist during the Great Depression, certain elements were already in place–at least in the larval stage. As our economy heads south, I was interested in finding out how the proto-industry fared in those earlier days. One of the most dramatic stories from that grim era concerns […]

If the presidential election is decided by a narrow margin, folks like Michael Adamson could make all the difference, with a little high-tech help. A stock trader who lives on a farm outside the small town of Madison, N.C., Adamson is a volunteer for the Barack Obama campaign. He leads a team of about 15 […]

We talk a lot in this magazine about alignment–putting the power of IT to work to increase shareholder value. But there are other values, too, ones that matter deeply to us. How we deal with our moral, social and political views in a business context is a tough question. The passions of the larger world […]

Turning data into useful commodities is the subject of Data Driven: Profiting From Your Most Important Business Asset, a new book by consultant Thomas C. Redman. Too many companies fail to make that basic process happen. Part of the problem, as Redman argues in this excerpt, is that the flow of data is misaligned with […]

When we interviewed Jonathan Zittrain earlier this year, his warnings about the iPhone seemed a bit academic. Sure, his preference for open systems like the Internet made sense, but Apple was allowing developers to create applications for its App Store, and the supercool iPhone seemed invincible. That was then; this is now. Suddenly, the iPhone […]

Wall Street has invested heavily in information technology, including systems that calculate risk in order to safeguard the big investment firms against pretty much exactly what’s been happening to them this year. But don’t blame the computers for the meltdown of the financial system. The best technology can only do what people tell it to […]

Success is said to have a thousand fathers, and many people share credit for bringing the Internet into existence. Even so, the title “Father of the Internet” fits Vinton G. “Vint” Cerf better than most; he and Robert Kahn designed the TCP/IP protocols that govern data transfer across the Net, along with the Internet’s basic […]