As if they needed more stress, organizations are facing evolving and increasingly stringent compliance regulations from the Payment Card Industry, as well as Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA and others. Here are a few security compliance products that can make the audit process less excruciating.
Here are 10 of the distributor's hottest new offerings winning over solution providers.
New smartphones from Sony, Motorola and the first-ever Twitter-only mobile device -- the TwitterPeek -- headline a busy week for handset makers as the holiday shopping season heats up.
The first, Side-by-Side, is a search comparison tool that lets users test and rate results from two different search queries on the same body of data to see which gives the better results, according to a post on Google's official blog.
"Employees can then vote on their preferred results, by choosing the Policy A or B buttons, and the administrator can then use that information to choose and set up the right search solution for the business," wrote Google engineers Michael Parker and Salmaan Rashid in the blog post.
If IT administrators want to conduct a full relevance test for results of multiple search queries, they can feed in whatever queries they'd like to test, wrote Cyrus Mistry, product manager for Google Enterprise, in another blog post.
"All of the Side-by-Side administration can be done with a simple Web interface, and admins can anonymize each panel, so users don't know which search engine or setting powers which set of results," Mistry wrote. "Essentially, admins can now test any search products they want and provide their organization with the setting or solution that employees rate highest."
Also new are connectors for the Google Search Appliance. Now available are an update to major content management systems and a new Google Search Appliance connector for Salesforce.com data, allowing users to include sales data in their search results.
"In the enterprise, search engines crawl more than just the Internet -- they're also searching across all sorts of data stores and offline content," Parker and Rashid wrote. "Connectors integrate data from all different kinds of file and content systems (like SharePoint, FileNet, Documentum) so an employee searching their company intranet can see a single, unified search results page, even if the results are drawn from a wide variety of company data systems."
The Salesforce connector provides sales, marketing and customer support personnel instant access to information they need every day., wrote Jeff Ling, product manager for Google Enterprise, in another Google blog post.
"Additionally, given that the GSA already searches content in Google Apps, and now searches Salesforce, our customers know our unrivaled commitment to searching content wherever it resides -- on-premise, or in the cloud," Ling wrote.
Both tools are available in Google Enterprise Labs at Google.com
MIPS Technologies wants to develop consumer devices such as set-top boxes, digital TVs and home media players based on Android, Google's open-source platform.
This week, MIPS Technologies met a key milestone in that quest by making its source code publicly available.
The company also has started an Early Access program for a "small group of key customers" who will have access to specific hardware and code optimizations before they are publicly available, according to MIPS Technologies.
"We are seeing an enormous amount of customer interest in Android on the MIPS architecture," said Art Swift, vice president of marketing at MIPS Technologies, in a statement. "Android presents a compelling value proposition in bringing Internet connectivity and a broad range of applications to MIPS-based digital home devices."
MIPS Technologies said it has already demonstrated Android running on a home media player and a digital TV reference design and plans to demonstrate more solutions in the coming months.
"We are working closely with customers and partners to ensure that critical technologies are available for developers to take advantage of Android for consumer electronics," said Swift in the statement.
Last week, MIPS Technologies demonstrated its mCUE converged communications client for Android-based devices in Japan. The demonstration showed how embedded software products such as mCUE can enable VoIP, video chat and other IP communications in Android-based embedded equipment and consumer electronics devices.
Founded in 1998, MIPS Technologies designs industry-standard processor architectures and cores, including broadband devices from Linksys, DTVs and digital consumer devices from Sony, DVD recordable devices from Pioneer, digital set-top boxes from Motorola, network routers from Cisco, 32-bit microcontrollers from Microchip Technology and laser printers from Hewlett-Packard.
Swift told The New York Times that the Android platform is well-designed and versatile, which makes it easy to customize to other, non-hardware devices.
"It's really a beautifully architected system. Once people saw how straightforward it was to move from a handset to a netbook, then it began to be an 'aha' moment: 'What if I migrate this to a DTV or set-top box?'" he told the Times.
Blair-Goldensohn has begun to show signs of consciousness and is responding to verbal commands, according to The New York Times. He reportedly was walking alone near the park entrance at West 63rd Street Wednesday morning when the 4-inch-thick oak branch fell. He was taken to New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center.
Blair-Goldensohn is a natural language processing expert who identifies himself as a "High Sees Pirate" for Google on the company's Web site. He graduated with a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2007.
Blair-Goldensohn was struck by a dead branch, but the rest of the tree was in healthy condition, a parks department spokesman told the Times. "We inspected the trees in the surrounding area as well as a precaution, and they were also deemed to be healthy," the spokesman said.
"It's our attempt to rethink what operating systems should be," wrote Google's Sundar Pichai, vice president of product management, and Linus Upson, engineering director, on the company's official blog. Google will make the open-source code available later this year and it will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010, according to Google.
"Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We're designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the Web in a few seconds," wrote Pichai and Upson on the blog. "The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the Web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don't have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work."
Google launched the Chrome browser about nine months ago and more than 30 million people use it regularly, according to Google. "We designed Google Chrome for people who live on the Web — searching for information, checking e-mail, catching up on the news, shopping or just staying in touch with friends. However, the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no Web," wrote Pichai and Upson.
Google Chrome OS will run on both x86 and ARM chips, and Google said it is already talking to hardware partners to include the OS in netbooks. The OS will run on top of a Linux kernel and Web-based applications can be written "using your favorite Web technologies," wrote Pichai and Upson.
The applications should run on Google Chrome OS, but also on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux, according to Google.
Google Chrome OS is a separate project from its Android OS for mobile devices, according to Google.
"While there are areas where Google Chrome OS and Android overlap, we believe choice will drive innovation for the benefit of everyone, including Google," wrote the Google pair. "We hear a lot from our users and their message is clear — computers need to get better. People want to get to their e-mail instantly, without wasting time waiting for their computers to boot and browsers to start up. They want their computers to always run as fast as when they first bought them. They want their data to be accessible to them wherever they are and not have to worry about losing their computer or forgetting to back up files. Even more importantly, they don't want to spend hours configuring their computers to work with every new piece of hardware, or have to worry about constant software updates. And any time our users have a better computing experience, Google benefits as well by having happier users who are more likely to spend time on the Internet.
"We have a lot of work to do, and we're definitely going to need a lot of help from the open-source community to accomplish this vision. We're excited for what's to come and we hope you are too," the pair concluded.
Google expects to provide more Chrome OS updates in the fall.
"We're seeking partnerships with companies that can enable the implementation of our software," wrote Ed Lu, a member of Google's engineering team, on the company's blog.
This week, Google announced ts technology provider partner is Itron, a meter and data management company that serves over 8,000 utilities. Itron helped San Diego Gas & Electric implement Google PowerMeter, Lu wrote.
San Diego Gas & Electric is one of the first eight utility partners to offer Google PowerMeter now, wrote Lu. The other partners are: TXU Energy ( Texas), JEA (Florida), Reliance Energy (India), Wisconsin Public Service Cooperative, White River Valley Electric Cooperative (Missouri), Toronto Hydro-Electric System Limited (Canada) and Glasgow EPB (Kentucky).
"Our initial partners include utilities with millions of customers as well as smaller ones. They are rural and urban, privately held and municipally run. They all have one thing in common " a desire to serve their customers by providing access to detailed information that helps save energy and money," Google PowerMeter is expected to add additional utility partners throughout the year, Lu wrote.
Subscribe To This Feed
