| Network World Daily News AM | | | CE Week, a New York City-based exhibition from the same folks who bring you the huge CES show in Las Vegas, attracts vendors who are showing new, innovative or just-plain-weird products. Here is a sampling of what we saw. | | | Issue highlights 1. iPhone 6 rumor rollup for the week ending June 27 2. Maître d' to Benioff: No lunch for you 3. MonkeyParking says SF shut-down demand is bananas 4. Mark Hurd lays out Oracle's cloud progress, plan to be number one 5. Smartwatches at work: Boon or bane for IT? 6. Groups pressure US lawmakers with NSA surveillance scorecard 7. FBI warns businesses "Man-in-the-E-Mail" scam escalating 8. The top 10 Windows 8 questions everyone asks 9. Reports: German government to drop Verizon because of U.S. spying | | WEBCAST: HP Today, the industry is at an inflection point - driven by a triple storm of Big Data, cloud, and mobility; and in this new environment, security is paramount. The New Style of IT is about how businesses and IT leverage this rapid change for enterprise growth. Learn More | | With the start of summer in June, we can now count the days until it ends in September with the expected unveiling of the iPhone 6. Pavlovian-like, the iOSphere seemed to salivate over a renewed spate of rumors, as if hearing them for the first time. This week, there was new unfounded certainty that the 5.5-inch iPhone 6 will have a 128GB storage option; and that the 4.7-inch model will go on sale Sept. 19. Pulses raced on learning that mass production of the Next iPhones, or one of them anyhow, was just about to start, and would feature a glass cover somewhere between 2D and 3D. Finally, the first iPhone 6 video appears online. And it's convincing. Honest. It really is. No kidding.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here READ MORE | | As his tweet above indicates, billionaire Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff was deemed unworthy of lunch today by the maître d' of a Paris restaurant.Benioff did not share the offered reason with his 107,000 Twitter followers, so a few of them felt free to speculate and offer advice: "There's a height limit?" (Benioff is tall; I've seen him described as 6-foot-5.) "Wearing sneakers?" "Gotta be dress code. Those Parisians make exceptions for nobody." "The @richardbranson model for such situations is to just buy the place :-)." The "real life Seinfeld" reference, in case you didn't know, is a nod to the notorious "Soup Nazi."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here READ MORE | | The public parking app company rejects the notion that it buys or sells spots READ MORE | | WHITE PAPER: Dell Next-generation firewalls (NGFWs) have emerged to revolutionize network security as we once knew it. Yet to safeguard an organization from today's ever-evolving threats, NGFWs must be able to deliver an even deeper level of network security. View Now | | Being second isn't good enough for Oracle when it comes to cloud revenue, co-president Mark Hurd told investment analysts this week following the company's fourth-quarter and year-end earnings report.As part of its earnings announcement, Oracle trumpeted that at an annual cloud subscription revenue run rate of nearly US$2 billion, it is now the industry's second-largest cloud vendor behind Salesforce.com.But meeting with analysts to lay out the company's cloud software strategy, progress in the market and expectations for its fiscal 2015, Hurd made it clear that Oracle isn't quite satisfied, telling them, "Make no mistake, we're laser-focused on being No. 1 in the cloud."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here READ MORE | | It's hard to assess how popular smartwatches will be for business users, much less for the IT staffers that need to protect the data running over them.Android Wear smartwatches will respond to the cue "OK, Google" in the same way Google's Voice Search does.One potential business use for a smartwatch centers on quick alerts for users, who would no longer need to fumble for a smartphone in a purse or pocket. A stockbroker, for example, could get an alert when a stock hits a certain price, or a doctor would know when a patient's condition turns critical.+ ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD 11 of today's (and tomorrow's) hottest smartwatches +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here READ MORE | | U.S. lawmakers got a report card on Friday: they've been graded by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other groups on whether they are effectively reining in the National Security Agency's surveillance programs.The new StandAgainstSpying.org scorecard, which gives letter grades to U.S. legislators based on their sponsorship or votes on a handful of bills, aims to pressure lawmakers into passing NSA reform measures, said Rainey Reitman, the EFF's activism director. Greenpeace, Reddit, Free Press, the Sunlight Foundation and other groups are also behind the effort.The scorecard rates U.S. representatives on their support for two of several NSA bills that lawmakers have introduced in the year since news organizations began publishing stories based on leaks from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The original USA Freedom Act, before it was amended and weakened, and the Surveillance State Repeal Act represent the two "broadest, strongest" bills on NSA reform, the groups said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here READ MORE | | WHITE PAPER: HP This white paper explores the reasons for implementing NG firewalls and lays out a path to success for overburdened IT organizations. Learn More | | The FBI and Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) are warning businesses to be on the lookout for growing scam that tricks them into paying invoices from established that look legitimate but in fact are fraudulent.The FBI says the scam is a tweak of the timeworn "man-in-the-middle" scam and usually involves chief technology officers, chief financial officers, or comptrollers, receiving an e-mail via their business accounts purportedly from a vendor requesting a wire transfer to a designated bank account, the FBI said. +More on Network World: The weirdest, wackiest and coolest sci/tech stories of 2013+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here READ MORE | | You've finally made the leap to Windows 8 (or, more probably, Windows 8.1), and a pretty big leap it was. Everything looks different. Everything acts differently. Even a simple task like shutting down your PC suddenly becomes a challenge.We know. We've lived through Windows 8, too, and we've received many, many questions about it. Here are the 10 most common ones we hear about Microsoft's latest operating system. With these answers under your belt, you can consider yourself well past the beginner stage.1. What's the differences between Windows 8, Windows 8.1, and the Windows 8.1 Update? To start the confusion, there are three versions of Windows 8:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here READ MORE | | The German government is reportedly dropping Verizon Communications as a service provider because of worries about U.S. spying.The government will shift all services provided by Verizon to Deutsche Telekom by the end of 2015. It had been reviewing its communications contracts already, but concerns about possible spying by the U.S. National Security Agency helped to tip the scales against Verizon, the Wall Street Journal and other news outlets reported.Germany's move is the latest evidence that revelations about NSA eavesdropping are damaging U.S. companies' overseas business.Verizon provides Internet access to some German federal agencies and helps to run a network that links them, the Journal said. The government's contracts with Verizon had been exposed recently in the media and caused an uproar because of reports of NSA eavesdropping on foreign leaders, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Those reports, based on information disclosed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, brought additional scrutiny to Verizon's government contracts.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here READ MORE | | WEBCAST: IBM Learn about IBM's new and expanded Information Management capabilities now delivered in the cloud. Learn More | | | | | | | | | |
