Best Places to work in IT?

ComputerWorld had an excellent article on the best places to work for in the IT arena. The key thing to look for would be the same company that shows up in different categories and here is the link for the overall rankings of the companies.  Check to see whether your company’s name is in the list and if not, what can you do in order to get there in the following years - after all, it is the people, the work culture and management that are the key assets of an IT company.

More acquisitions by Google

Google has acquired feedburner - the chicago based company that provides media distribution services for blogs and RSS feeds. Our RSS feeds also go through feedburner. Here is the announcement post on their site.

They also acquired another company called Zenter - this company provides software for creating online presentations. If you recall,Google had previously bought Tonic Systems which also works in the same area but more on the backend technology. Google should now have a complete set of online applications suite - documents, spreadsheets, presentations, mail and calender/events. In order to be a real threat to MS-Office though, Google will need to figure out a way to do seamless integration between these different applications. The usability and the interface of these applications is another cause of concern for them - it still has a long way to go. Google is not the only one looking at the online office application market - other players in this line are: Zoho, Zimbra, MS Office Live and thinkfree. Read/Write Web had an interesting post with a comparison between these different application suites.

Oracle 11g launch in July 2007

Oracle is all set to release their next version of the RDBMS on July 11. You can read more on this in Infoworld’s article as well as here on Oracle. In Feb., we had posted on the upcoming features of this release and will now be posting specific articles pertaining to the features of this release.

Safari for Windows

Apple recently introduced Safari 3, their web browser for Windows and Mac. It is supposed to be faster than IE 7 on Windows as per the press release by Apple So, what do other people think of this release? Here is the blog post from John Lilly (COO of Mozilla) - link. And regarding the reasons on why Apple might have thought about releasing Safari for Windows, here is an interesting post by Om Malik on his blog.

AT&T’s new CEO’s interview

GigaOM had this interesting interview of Randall Stephenson on their site today morning. And here is the press release from AT&T about Randall assuming the office.

SQL Server 2008 (Katmai) June CTP is available

The June CTP for Katmai (the next version of SQL Server) has been made available by MSFT at their site:

https://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer

You can get more information on the CTP here.

Bill Gates and Steve Jobs Interview

All Things Digital has posted the transcript of the interview that they conducted at the D5 conference this year. Pretty interesting read - you can read more on that here.

Google is buying Panoramio

Google is all set to buy Panoramio. The company is a 18 month old start-up company based out of Spain and it’s web-site links millions of photos with the exact location where those photos were taken. They have been a significant contributor to Google Earth so the acquisition makes perfect sense.

This news of the acquisition was posted on the blog sites of both the companies:

http://www.panoramio.com/blog/google-agrees-to-acquire-panoramio/

and

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/05/pictures-worth-thousand-clicks.html

Microsoft’s Surface Computing

I wonder how many of you have looked at surface computing from MSFT…this is something that is in the works and is a pretty neat concept. It reminds me more of the movie - Minority Report where Tom Cruise is shifting through images in order to find the potential killers…well, nothing that elaborate over here but this does signify a change in how we would interact with digital media in the future. Instead of a mouse or a keyboard, one can use their hands and move information between objects. It is essentially a 30 inch tabletop display which is totally interactive for the end users.

I would recommend visiting the site and browsing through the Fact Sheet, the demos and the FAQs: http://www.microsoft.com/surface/

More on surface computing - D conference.

Google’s StreetSide

Yesterday, Google launched it’s street-view mapping feature in an attempt to further create a richer experience for it’s geoweb services. They have partnered with Immersive Media and Greg Sadetsky has blogged about the technology behind this work. Google is not the only company that is striving for this space - Microsoft has a bird’s eye view as well in it’s maps with a large coverage thanks to their relationship with Pictometry. Another company that is in the fray is the EveryScape as they attempt to provide a 3-D Web available to the users.  They have a demo on their site that you can drive through to get a feel for it.  Interesting concept.