The New Nation - Internet Edition

How to stop laptop theft

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If you run a small business, your biggest IT worry is probably not when or whether to upgrade to Vista; it's how to keep your valuable equipment--and the even more precious data it contains--out of the hands of thieves. Laptops and mobile gadgets like cell phones, PDAs, and USB flash drives have become a necessity in many business settings. And such equipment now spends more time than ever outside the office, as employees work at home or in the nearest Starbucks.

That development presents a huge opportunity for loss and theft. Laptop thefts out of parked cars and conference rooms may grab headlines, but a far greater number of devices simply get left behind in places like cabs, subways, and airplanes.

YouGetItBack.com reports that La Guardia airport alone has accumulated more than 70,000 unclaimed laptops and PDAs in its lost and found. According to Accenture, 10 to 15 percent of all handheld computers, PDAs, mobile phones, and pagers are eventually lost by their owners.

Laptops have become increasingly attractive targets for identity thieves, too. A 2006 Ponemon Institute study reported an 81 percent increase in the number of companies reporting stolen laptops between 2005 and 2006. Even notebooks that never leave the office can be targets, as many thefts are inside jobs.

Most small businesses can weather the physical loss of a laptop or two, especially if their insurance policy covers the hardware. But the files on the machine may raise more-troubling issues: They can hold trade secrets or financial and customer data; they may not be backed up on a central server; and losing them may trigger embarrassing public reporting requirements under several recent federal and state laws.

According to a 2007 survey by McAfee and Datamonitor, a data breach involving personal customer information could cost a company, on average, $268,000 in reporting expenses--even if the data is never used. And one-third of the companies surveyed said that a major security breach had the potential to put them out of business entirely.

You can take several key steps to protect both your laptops and your data. By adopting these measures, you'll greatly reduce your risk of losing key hardware and data.

Track Your Laptop With an ID

The first step is to slap an ID tag on each laptop, BlackBerry, digital camera, and USB key your business owns, and record it with a recovery service. An astonishingly large number of businesses never record even the serial numbers of their equipment, police say, making it impossible for authorities to reunite found items with their rightful owners. Tracking tags give you an opportunity to enter serial number information as you tag each item, after which you can use the recovery service as a basic inventory system. (You should definitely maintain serial-number records, as well as purchase receipts, in case of insurance claims.)

Recovery services report recovery rates of 75 percent and higher on tagged items. Evidently, most people who find laptops are honest, and by offering prepaid returns and a reward on the tag (which lists an 800 number), the service makes it easy to do the right thing.

The services have you register each item on the Web, with identifying information; then they contact you to arrange return if an item is found. The price is nominal, usually around $5-$10 per label, with quantity discounts. Vendors that offer labeling and recovery services include ArmorTag, BoomerangIt, StuffBak, TrackItBack, YouGetItBack.com, and zReturn.

Some of these companies sell lifetime service for a fixed price, while others use a yearly subscription model. Some charge a recovery fee if an item is found. TrackItBack sells multipacks, which bring costs down to $5 per label, with lifetime service and no administrative or shipping fees on recovered items. TrackItBack will even send you a free replacement tag if the original comes off.

The recovery firms unanimously cite privacy considerations and their 24-hour phone service as reasons to use their labels instead of just a taped-on business card or an inventory tag from your own company. The labels themselves may deter theft, as they render an item harder to fence. Labels are available for portable projectors, keys, eyeglasses, Bluetooth headsets, GPS devices, luggage, and more--not just laptops and cell phones. Anything that moves can and probably should be protected.

China's software industry sees revenue rise more than 20 percent

AFP, Beijing

China's software industry saw an increase in revenue of more than 20 percent last year, boosted by particularly swift growth in income from services, state media

reported today.

The Chinese software industry generated revenues of 580 billion yuan (81 billion dollars) in 2007, up 20.8 percent from the year before, Xinhua news agency said, citing the Ministry of Information Industry.

Software and technology services saw the steepest growth, rising 24.8 percent to 97.8 billion dollars, according to ministry figures cited by the agency.

China, the world's fourth largest economy, has vowed to raise the contribution to growth from technology-intensive industries such as software.

'Critical' outages hit BlackBerry

Wojtek Dabrowski

Reuters: A major outage hit BlackBerry users in North America on Monday afternoon, cutting off wireless e-mail for everyone from busy executives to political campaign staff on the eve of three U.S. presidential primaries.

The problem, which BlackBerry owner Research In Motion described as a "critical severity outage" affecting users in the Americas, once again raised concerns about the stability of the e-mail service 10 months after a widespread crash last April.

Carmi Levy, senior vice-president of strategic consulting at AR Communications, said reliability is a serious concern for companies like RIM because if problems become routine, they can drive customers away.

"It's a big issue and it's a growing issue," Levy said, adding that huge outages could prove to be "a major Achilles' heel" for RIM.

RIM's U.S. shares fell as much as 1.3 percent on the news, after closing up 5.3 percent in regular Nasdaq trade. On the Toronto Stock Exchange, the shares finished the day C$4.73 higher at C$94.62.

RIM notified its clients of the outage in an e-mail, but officials at the Waterloo, Ontario-based company were not immediately available for comment.

"This is an emergency notification regarding the current BlackBerry Infrastructure outage," RIM support account manager Bryan Simpson said in an e-mail sent to large clients.

The notice gave no details on the cause, when service might be restored or how many people could be affected. The last big outage in April 2007 provoked an angry backlash from more compulsive users, who have dubbed the device "CrackBerry" due to its drug-like addictiveness. At the time, co-Chief Executive Jim Balsillie said such incidents were "very rare" and RIM was taking steps to prevent it from happening again.

RIM's worldwide subscriber base reached about 12 million people by late last year, mainly executives, politicians, lawyers and other professionals who rely on the BlackBerry to send secure e-mails. Sleeker new models are also catching on with students and others outside professional circles.

Jen Psaki, a spokeswoman for Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama, said, "While the outage did confirm our widespread addiction to BlackBerry service, fortunately it did not cause more than a temporary inconvenience."

Voters go the polls on Tuesday in Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia, the latest battleground in a tight race between Obama and Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination in November's election. By about 7:00 p.m. Eastern time -- about three hours after RIM notified customers of the problem -- some users said a few e-mails were trickling through. Others, however, continued to be without service.

U.S. mobile phone service provider Verizon Wireless said the outage was affecting all carriers' BlackBerry email service in North America. It said Verizon Wireless customers can still make calls on their BlackBerry.

Some appeared to enjoy a respite from a device.

"It made my life a little bit easier, since I didn't have to reply," Liberal Party spokesman Jean-Francois Del Torchio said from Parliament Hill in Ottawa. "But when I arrived at my desktop and I saw all the e-mails I received, I was like, 'Oh, I still need to work'," Del Torchio told Reuters.

Sony Ericsson offers Windows mobile phone

Sony Ericsson is launching its first Windows Mobile phone, a business-oriented, touchscreen "arc slider" device called the Xperia X1.

Dee Dutta, Sony Ericsson head of marketing, said Xperia is "the first brand that is truly borne from within Sony Ericsson," and it delivers a "seamless blend of mobile Web communication and multimedia entertainment with a distinctive design."

Big Win for Microsoft

The new device features a wide-pitch QWERTY keyboard and is the first in a new line bearing the Xperia name. It has a 3-inch VGA screen, a 3.2-megapixel camera with video recording, an FM radio and a slight arc when the keyboard slides out. The company said typing is fast and easy because of the "ample distance" between keys. The phone offers quad-band GSM/EDGE and UMTS/HSDPA/HSUPA 850/1700/1900/2100MHz, as well as Wi-Fi connectivity.

The phone has four kinds of interactive navigation -- touch, the keyboard, a 4-way keypad and an optical joystick -- and adjustable interface panels for different applications. The X1 will be available in the second half of this year. "This is a big, big win for Microsoft," said Avi Greengart of Current Analysis. He noted that the software giant now has "four of the top five handset manufacturers" -- Motorola, Samsung and LG in addition to Sony Ericsson. "Everybody," he said, "but Nokia." Windows Mobile opens up the U.S. smartphone market to them, he added.

IDC's Chris Hazelton said the new X1 will be particularly appealing to IT departments because it can immediately support Microsoft Exchange and other common business software such as Office Mobile. It also has well-tested remote control management. Hazelton noted that Sony Ericsson had a number of "prosumer" devices with the UIQ interface on top of a Symbian operating system. He and Greengart said the U.S. enterprise market was not receptive to UIQ-based devices.

With the release of its first Windows Mobile device, Hazelton added, Sony Ericsson is splitting its consumer and enterprise devices into UIQ and Windows Mobile devices. UIQ is a good interface for consumer devices, he said, with a friendly front end geared to multimedia. Sony Ericsson, formed in 2001, is the fourth-largest cell-phone maker in the world by market share. Its new Windows Mobile phone is part of an effort to increase its U.S. presence, but, according to a report today in the Wall Street Journal, those plans do not include buying Motorola's mobile-phone division. Sony Ericsson has been steadily increasing its sales compared to Motorola's.

Sony Ericsson's new chief executive, Hideki Komiyama, told the Journal that the idea of buying out his competitor is not attractive, and he intends to implement the U.S. strategy through "organic growth."

More options with tomorrow's cell phones

Internet

If you don't like the way the e-mail program on your PC works, you can replace it with one you like better. And when you need to add a new capability to Firefox, you can simply install an extension. But such flexibility doesn't apply to most cell phones, since cellular providers restrict how you use a device that's in your face--or pressed to your face--for sometimes hours a day.

That's about to change. In the coming year cell phones will start opening up, allowing users to customize their handsets' interfaces, run any program, and, most important, gain access to underlying hardware for finding directions, making calls over Wi-Fi, and taking pictures.

Eventually, experts say, you'll also see devices such as cameras, camcorders, and other gadgets gain access to cellular data networks, even though they'll never be used to make a phone call.

Sparking the move toward cell phone openness is Google, flexing its billion-dollar muscles. Google's primary motivation, not surprisingly, appears to be putting more advertisements in front of more eyeballs. In a closed cellular world, wireless carriers can control what their subscribers see. Open up the system, and Google and other parties can dive in and begin to compete for your attention.

By mid-2007 Google and other Internet giants had convinced the Federal Communications Commission to require that any company that won a January auction for a set of national cellular wireless licenses must allow consumers to use any device and any legal application on that company's network. Furthermore, late in the year Google, along with three dozen partners, unveiled plans to construct an open-source cellular phone platform known as Android. At least initially, Android is probably what you'll hear most about when the topic of cell-phone openness arises. Because Android is open source, and because the Open Handset Alliance that is behind the platform has agreed to permit remarkably deep access to the OS, any two Android-based devices could be quite dissimilar.

Simple Android applications and the standard interface will be common among such devices. But Android developers can produce unique approaches to navigating through menus and options, or they can allow you to choose from, or later install, dramatically different graphical user interfaces.

The approach is deeper than the "skins" often used to put a thin interface overlay over a piece of software. Instead, the experience will be as if you could boot up Windows Vista and replace Aero with an iPhone interface while still accessing the same programs and data.

Android will also allow application developers easy access to all of the hardware that may be installed on a phone, including GPS chips, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and cell radios, cameras, and other less common options.

Open to the Outside World

Another advantage of an open phone platform: It enables easier interaction with remote services that store or provide information. Consider a phone with a GPS chip, a camera, and a persistent cell or Wi-Fi network connection. Flickr, for example, could release a simple program that would stamp your photos with geographic coordinates stored in the picture's metadata, and automatically upload photos as they're taken. Certain cameras and hacks have similar functionality today, but no cell phone supports such a mashup out of the box.

But that sort of application won't come first. The initial wave of new software will likely tie together basic components--features like contacts, calendars, notes, to-do lists, alarms, ring tones, and other media. The Android software development kit (SDK), for instance, includes standard, accessible formats for basic contacts, calendar functions, and media. Contrast that to many current phones, in which the data sits in separate and often incompatible databases or proprietary formats.

Hate the programs that ship with your Android model? You can probably install new ones while making no other data changes.

The iPhone SDK may allow such access, given that the iPhone runs a version of Apple's Unix-based OS X operating system that's much like the desktop release, which lets program developers work with similar types of underlying user information, databases, and file storage.

As Charles Golvin, a wireless analyst with Forrester Research, observes, integrating tasks with today's phones is practically impossible. "You're listening to your voice mail, [and] you'd like to use the note-taking application on your phone to write notes to yourself, all in one standard workflow [as] if you were sitting at your desk," he says. "But nobody, bar none, has done an implementation of that workflow that an average person could figure out and use."