BlackBerry 10 Approved as Secure for Government Use

 BlackBerry 10 might not make it back into the consumer spotlight soon, but with Fed approval, RIM's devices may end up in the hands of government officials in need of secure communications. 

Is This Line Secure?

Due out in early 2013, RIM's BlackBerry 10 devices and OS need all the help they can get to reinvigorate the brand, raise consumer confidence and get something of a vibe going. Perhaps the image of clandestine agents toting their BB10s for secret messages, or seeing those in power wielding them to talk to "the man," or using them to solve the world's problems will help. 

That's because the US government has already given RIM approval for Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-2 certification. Meaning that BB10 devices and the back-end BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10, have one useful stamp on them.

The technology used in them offers data encryption on both server and device, and as messages are passed on. That's what the Feds demand, so no unauthorised listeners can drop in on what's being sent. 

Too Little, Too Late?

Of course, this accreditation is nothing if the government (and the standard also applies north of the border in RIM's home country) doesn't end up buying them. And there's little guarantee that anyone will be rushing to buy BlackBerry devices next year. 

However, with no phone maker really grabbing the third spot in the market behind Apple and Samsung, there is a fair chance that RIM could still stage a comeback, particularly with its powerful enterprise following with secure collaboration needs. 

BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10 is the key to keeping those IT managers happy and offers a great deal for those in admin. With consolidation of mobile device management, security, infrastructure, and app management from a unified web-based console, there's plenty to appeal to security concious businesses. 

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Top Rovio Execs Talk “Bad Piggies,” The Addictive Second Act From “Angry Birds” Creators

Following Fast Company’s exclusive hands-on with Rovio’s newest game at their Espoo, Finland headquarters, “Bad Piggies,” featuring the loathsome but lovable pigs, hits devices everywhere. The world stands at the ready.

This morning, Rovio, the Finnish startup behind the ubiquitous mobile game Angry Birds, plans to release Bad Piggies, a physics-based puzzle game that finally pushes the porcine villains out of their wooden and stone fortresses and onto the main stage. As I learned at the company’s offices during a hands-on demo of the game a few weeks ago, Bad Piggies is a far departure from the series that has catapulted Rovio into stardom, in that there is nary a bird or slingshot in the game.

“Angry Birds is more about having fun and breaking things,” says Petri Jarvilehto, executive vice president of games at Rovio, of the app. “With Bad Piggies, we’re going much more into creativity and building.” In the rollicking ride of a game, which today hits iOS, Android, Mac, and PC, players must piece together jury-rigged vehicles from miscellaneous items--boxes, wheels, balloons, propellers, umbrellas, bottles of soda--to help the pigs, who are stranded on a desert island, roll, rocket, and float their way through a hilly course, and ultimately to the eggs that they famously steal at the beginning of the sundry Angry Birds titles. Along the way, the pigs--goofy, squealing, and full of personality--collect power-ups and, potentially, three stars, based on the speed and care with which they get from point A to B.

Boasting a replayable quality similar to Angry Birds, the app is sure to evoke the same obsession among gamers, and the Rovio brand will almost certainly land Bad Piggies at the top of the charts. For Rovio, however, there’s more at stake here than simply creating another number one game--after all, they’ve easily pulled that off with the various iterations of Angry Birds, and even the puzzler Amazing Alex, though it lacked the staying power of its predecessors and has since descended from the upper rungs of the charts. Bad Piggies, rather, is the company’s shot at an entirely new business franchise, and an opportunity to finally debunk critics’ claims that its only goal is to milk the furious fowl for all they’re worth.

“It will take a lot of work, but we need to learn how to nurture our brand and keep it valid,” says Niklas Hed, cofounder of Rovio and first cousin of its CEO, Mikael Hed. “Now, we want to start telling the story from the pigs’ perspective. And they are even more interesting than the birds.”

The coming days will tell if the public finds the pigs as compelling as its creator does.

Source : fastcompany[dot]com

Rovio Launches “Bad Piggies,” The Addictive Second Act From “Angry Birds” Creators

Following Fast Company’s exclusive hands-on with Rovio’s newest game at their Espoo, Finland headquarters, “Bad Piggies,” featuring the loathsome but lovable pigs, hits devices everywhere. The world stands at the ready.

This morning, Rovio, the Finnish start-up behind the ubiquitous mobile game Angry Birds, plans to release Bad Piggies, a physics-based puzzle game that finally pushes the porcine villains out of their wooden and stone fortresses and onto the main stage. As I learned at the company’s offices during a hands-on demo of the game a few weeks ago, Bad Piggies is a far departure from the series that has catapulted Rovio into stardom, in that there is nary a bird or slingshot in the game.

“Angry Birds is more about having fun and breaking things,” says Petri Jarvilehto, executive vice president of games at Rovio, of the app. “With Bad Piggies, we’re going much more into creativity and building.” In the rollicking ride of a game, which today hits iOS, Android, Mac and PC, players must piece together jury-rigged vehicles from miscellaneous items--boxes, wheels, balloons, propellers, umbrellas, bottles of soda--to help the pigs, who are stranded on a desert island, roll, rocket, and float their way through a hilly course, and ultimately to the eggs that they famously steal at the beginning of the sundry Angry Birds titles. Along the way, the pigs--goofy, squealing, and full of personality--collect power-ups and, potentially, three stars, based on the speed and care with which they get from point A to B.

Boasting a replayable quality similar to Angry Birds, the app is sure to evoke the same obsession among gamers, and the Rovio brand will almost certainly land Bad Piggies at the top of the charts. For Rovio, however, there’s more at stake here than simply creating another number one game--after all, they’ve easily pulled that off with the various iterations of Angry Birds, and even the puzzler Amazing Alex, though it lacked the staying power of its predecessors and has since descended from the upper rungs of the charts. Bad Piggies, rather, is the company’s shot at an entirely new business franchise, and an opportunity to finally debunk critics’ claims that its only goal is to milk the furious fowl for all they’re worth.

“It will take a lot of work, but we need to learn how to nurture our brand and keep it valid,” says Niklas Hed, co-founder of Rovio and first cousin of its CEO, Mikael Hed. “Now, we want to start telling the story from the pigs’ perspective. And they are even more interesting than the birds.”

The coming days will tell if the public finds the pigs as compelling as its creator does.

Source : fastcompany[dot]com

Axceler, Webtrends Partner For Better SharePoint Governance, Visibility

There’s just nothing like seeing a couple of old hands get together for a common cause. That’s what’s happened today with the announcement that Webtrends and Axceler are joining forces to help another old pardner — SharePoint.

SharePoint Governance Is Suddenly a Hot Topic

One of the many interesting things about this partnership is that it comes on the heel of a spate of announcements about new solutions and software for SharePoint governance.

This week alone we had a new records management release from FileTrail that has a strong element of content governance in it, while AvePoint announced the availability of its DocAve 6 Service Pack 1 (SP) that provides governance for SharePoint.

You can go for months without anyone ever talking about data governance in SharePoint and then all of a sudden, we get a run of three different solutions from three different vendors in a matter of days. With two days left to go, could we be looking at a record-breaking week for SharePoint governance?

Joking aside, there is a serious issue here. It may be that the sudden interest in SharePoint governance indicates that the penny has finally dropped — and enterprises are beginning to realize that SharePoint deployment without strict governance can end up being extremely costly.

Of course it's important to remember that it is already the end of September — and by all accounts, there are only about three months left before SharePoint 2013 goes into general release.

Axceler, Webtrends Combine Their Strengths

Enough of that, and back to Axceler and Webtrends. This combined solution looks to manage user access to SharePoint and SharePoint content and to measure user access and engagement in SharePoint environments.

From the Axceler side of the equation, ControlPoint provides the user management element. Webtrends for SharePoint provides in-depth analytics of what users are doing in SharePoint and even who those users are.

Combined, the two companies (both Microsoft Gold Partners) are providing a solution that offers powerful intranet analytics along with enterprise collaboration governance. The companies say that this will ensure enterprise security and compliance.

As companies make greater investments into social enterprise applications with the promise of enhanced internal communications and collaboration, the question hanging over every organization is, 'Is this working? … Organizations using SharePoint effectively need a combination of measurement and governance to drive effective collaboration and provide a 360-degree view of the social enterprise, which is precisely what Webtrends and Axceler have teamed to deliver," said Jeff Seacrist, VP of Partner Solutions, Webtrends.

It remains to be seen whether they have or not — but if the partnership can provide effective SharePoint governance and user analysis, then they are onto a winner. Combined, they say, the new integration provides:

• Simplified adoption: Offers ways for enterprises to measure the level of content collaboration — by user, geography, team, project or site. Also offers insights into trends across the deployment.
• Restricted uncontrolled sprawl: Gives administrators the ability to uncover usage patterns and block unnecessary growth by identifying lesser used sites as well as popular access points.
• Corporate governance: Allows administrators to easily establish rules and protocols to control usage of SharePoint according to corporate guidelines. Also provides insight into how users interact with corporate material.
• Compliance: Offers better visibility across the entire SharePoint platform by automating SharePoint governance with the ability to establish rules and protocol policies; also boosts security to deter information theft.

With this deal, both companies expand an already impressive list of partnerships built around Microsoft and SharePoint.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Interview: Brian Clifton on Cutting Through Data Noise and the Future of Analytics

In the seven years since Google Analytics launched, the realm of analytics has changed hands from the purview of the IT department to the marketing department and beyond. But just because we can readily access the tools does not mean that we are necessarily putting them to good use. To gain some insight into this we interviewed Brian Clifton, author, consultant and trainer, who specializes in performance optimization using Google Analytics.

Brian acted as head of Web Analytics for Google Europe from 2005-2008 and recently released the third edition of his "Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics," used by students and professionals worldwide. 

CMSWire: Do people collect data that is useless or unnecessary?

Brian Clifton: No, and let me say that I don't think collecting *any* kind of data is useless. However, it can be distracting and generate a higher level of "noise." The mistake I see most often is people not focusing i.e., they simply look at all of the data all of the time. Beyond the high level reporting of metrics such as total visitor counts, total revenue etc., looking at all of the data all of the time has very little analytical value. Therefore, what you need to do, is chop up the data into meaningful groups of similar data points i.e., segment.

Example segments to enhance the signals from the noise:

• Customers
  • A segment that includes only visits from existing customers — even if they do not purchase from your site when they visit. This is why this segment is so valuable — these visitor have bought from you before!
• Engagers
  • After customers, Engagers are your next most valuable group of visitors. They have shown engagement, i.e., made an effort, perhaps even given you their contact details. Examples include registrations, contact requests (form submissions), file downloads, ranking products and content, comments and feedback, video views, clicks on social love buttons etc.
• Mobilers
  • A segment that includes only visits from mobile devices. Mobile is a very different experience to browsing on a bigger screen. Lots of implication for your web site structure/design if this segment is significant to you.
• Non-Bouncers
  • A segment that excludes all bounced visits i.e., removes single page visits that have no engagement. The theory is that these visitors are clearly not interested in your website, so remove them from your analysis.

Of course these segments are not mutually exclusive and you can be very creative by combining them.

My point is that data "noise" is not something to be discarded. It's only noise relative to a specific question you are trying to answer at a particular time. When you look at answering a different question, and that noise can be a rich data stream indeed (people have won nobel prizes for analyzing noise!). Therefore, always collect the full spectrum of web data and user segmentation as your tool for focus and analysis.

Editor's Note: To get more insights from Brian, follow him on Twitter @BrianClifton

CMSWire: How can a company decide which data to collect? Are there common metrics/strategies that work across the board or does it change on a case by case basis?

BC: My approach when I first engage with a client is not to show or look at any analytic reports. I usually get an odd response to that when I have been hired as the web analytics expert! However, the first meeting is a workshop where I sit down with the marketing team to understand their needs and abilities. By needs, I mean understanding what tasks they perform as a group and therefore how they can measure the success (or not) of that. A metric that measures success is known as a Key Performance Indicator (KPI).

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

iPhone 5 Smashes Pre-Order Records, New Kindle Fire Out Now

       How busy are the credit card exchanges today? Early reports suggest the iPhone 5 sold out some 20 times faster than the iPhone 4S managed, while anyone can now get their hands on a new Kindle Fire HD tablet from Amazon.

Going, Gone

The first shipments of Apple's iPhone 5 smartphones have sold out some 20 times faster than for the previous model. While that is a pretty meaningless statistic, the practical fact is that shipping times are now up to two weeks past the launch date (21 September) for new orders. If you've missed out on the first batch, be prepared to wait. 

After the keenly-watched launch, and despite the negative press, it is the consumer who is the ultimate arbiter, and it looks like they're voting in huge numbers with the pre-order stock selling out in around an hour, as opposed to just under a day for the iPhone 4 and 4S launches. Remember, if you're left twiddling your thumbs, iOS 6.0 will be available on 19 September to give you a taster. 

Go, Go, Quick

If you want some new hardware today, then Amazon is shipping its new Kindle Fire tablets, unveiled earlier this month. The high-selling rival to Apple's iPad, the new model ups the power stakes with a HD model and gives the company a handy head-start on Apple's mini-tablet, which should be unveiled next month. 

While Amazon doesn't make much money on its tablets, it rakes in the cash via content sales and Amazon's massive loyal user base. Apple's loyal fans on the other hand seems happy to upgrade tablets at will and the new model should easily boost the 86 million plus iPads that are already out there. And at a new price, there could well be many new buyers. 

Certainly, both are likely to find their way into Amazon and Apple "families" with multiple devices in the home. As this trend evolves, both will have to come up with new ways for multiple users to share the same content, which will be a neat trick to pull off, as users look for better features and not just new hardware. 

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Integrating Back-End Systems to Enhance Enterprise Mobility

It goes without saying that improved enterprise mobility is a good thing for business. Right? Putting enterprise applications into the hands of employees makes companies more productive, more efficient and they get the most out of their staff.

But there’s the rub for some pundits in this space. By enabling access to back-end systems on smart mobile devices, employees are not just able to work anywhere — they’re able to work anytime too. With businesses trying to compete in a challenging economic climate, there’s concern that employers could view enterprise mobility as a way of pressuring staff to work out of hours and on weekends, as they no longer have the excuse of not being connected to essential applications.

To Worry or Not To Worry

Is this a legitimate concern? Perhaps, but for me, this is looking at enterprise mobility and the workforce the wrong way. I firmly believe that connecting people back to their office, wherever they are, can actually improve job satisfaction and help to both retain and attract talent.

Why? One of the biggest frustrations for employees who do the majority of their work on the road is the need to replicate a lot of this work once they’re back at their desktop connection, simply because they haven’t been able to access and communicate in real-time with enterprise systems while they’ve been in the field.

Instead of getting confirmation on a sales order at a customer’s premises, they’ve had to log the details and then re-log them again once they’re back in the office or at home. Only then can they sign the deal off.

The "double-entry blues" is still rife among the mobile workforce. Without mobile apps that integrate with back-end systems in real time, the problems of lag times and poor synchronization between work processes and systems of record continue.

It’s not only an inefficient way of working, but it’s also incredibly frustrating for employees, as often the time they’re spending catching up with orders and jobs is their own, which doesn’t make for a great work/life balance.

Companies simply can’t allow this type of culture to continue. Employees shouldn’t have to waste their time on double-entry and employers need to recognize what a tremendous drain on resources and morale this can be. Sure, they can be pressured to be always on, but managers and work teams can arrive at equilibrium on this issue without shutting themselves off from the benefits of being connected and mobile.

What a Good Enterprise Should Be

The modern enterprise should be about empowering its workforce to do the best job possible — and increasingly this is something that employees will expect and look for when moving to new roles. As a consequence, those companies that aren’t able to offer comprehensive enterprise mobility may find that they’re struggling to retain and attract the best talent, severely impacting their brand as a prospective employer.

Companies that don’t properly mobilize their workforce are endangering both their competitiveness and their reputation, because the simple truth is that satisfied and fulfilled employees make for a better business.

Image courtesy of Diego Cervo (Shutterstock)

About the Author

Christopher P. Willis is chief marketing officer for Verivo Software, Waltham, MA.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com