The service gained a lot of popularity and became the single largest free hosting service. In 1999, the beat of internet, Yahoo bought the company and continued the service flawlessly. But the popularity was on gradual decline because of better and more featureful options by other free service providers. But still, alot of users sticked to GeoCities.

During the last one year, Yahoo! has been continous decline. It started with the Microsoft’s interest to acquire the company. Though Yahoo declined the offer in interest of it’s investors and users.
Why is GeoCities shutting Down?
The reason specified on Yahoo’s site is pretty much unfair for the consumers and reverse for the company:

We have decided to focus on helping our customers explore and build relationships online in other ways. Beginning on October 26, 2009, you will no longer be able to use GeoCities to maintain a free presence online — but we’re excited about the other services we have designed to help you connect with friends and family and share your activities and interests.
We recommend our award-winning Web Hosting service, which works a lot like GeoCities but includes a personalized domain name (such as widgetdesigns.com) and matching email, terrific new site building tools, unlimited disk space and bandwidth, premium customer support, and more. See more on moving to Web Hosting.

Clearly, they are no longer encouraging free services. Reason being, they are already having a drowning business and they are cutting costs wherever possible. Primary reasons had been loss of interest and dis-investment- (CEO Bartz brings Trouble to Yahoo! Investors: $2Million Shares Cashed-out)

Whatever is going on inside Yahoo, we have only glimpse of it but what we know for sure is- It’s Not right for the company, not right for the users.  Yahoo’s CEO Bartz said“We Have Never Been a Search Company”. Wow! I remember, I saw it growing from “a Search” to “Everything”.

Hey Yahoo, whatever you are doing, you are getting worse.Your market share is falling, economic state is worse, one of the main Inspiration: Carl Icahn, resigned; I no longer see a hope with left out business : stinky search (bing), outdated Email, IM. I hope you don’t shudown developers API, widgets, webservices, which most developers still use.
I wish… Yahoo had listened to Google.

Yahoo was the first love for several Internet users.

Motorola is into Do or Die situation. With most of the departments already declared bankrupt and business shutdowns, Motorola stands ont he edge trying it’s last Hope:

After the roundup of layoffs, Motorola has finally laid down a plan- A Plan that could save the Company and the Brand. It’s unveiling Android devices, designed to turn around the company.

Sanjay Jha, co-CEO of Motorola, has had to revamp the company’s mobile portfolio. The biggest bet by Jha: Become the biggest supporter of the Android operating system.

For Motorola, the future of the handset unit rides on the Google’s Android OS. For Google, a wave of Android devices are about to hit the market. Motorola-Google could be the duo that gives Apple’s iPhone a run. So far, no one has reached upto iPhone’s level.

Jha delivered the keynote at GigaOm’s Mobilize conference. It’s available here via a LiveBlog.

And what do we get? A new Mobile CLIQ (via Gearlog)

Originally codenamed Morrison, the Cliq will be exclusively available on T-Mobile, Motorola has deemed the Cliq the “first phone with social skills.” The Cliq is aimed at the T-Mobile texting-enthusiatic crowd who came to the network for handsets like the Sidekick.

The phone features 3G connectivity, a 5-MP camera with 24 FPS video, and the “best-in-class HTML browser.” The device will be available internationally on a number of carriers including Orange, America Movil, and Telefonica.

The device is powered by Motorola’s Android skin, MotoBlur. The OS promises to sync together information across a plethora of social networks and other online services. MotoBlur features a number of “live widgets,” such as Social Status, which lets users update statuses across sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Myspace.

More via Gizmodo
Software

Motoblur logs into all your different networks and accounts, from mail to Twitter to Facebook to anything in between, serving you the content in a single feed, on the phone’s front page. Widgets pop up on the main screen, allowing you to respond to messages and updates with one click. It will be included in future Motorola Android-based smartphones. Here’s a summary of features:

• Customizable home screen with Happenings, Status and Messaging widgets deliver status posts and more
• Customizable RSS news widgets keeps you up to date
• Messaging with Facebook, MySpace and Twitter Direct Messaging
• Address book synchs personal and work contacts, and connected social networks
• Caller ID shows caller’s name, number, status and profile pic
• Photosharing in MySpace, Photobucket, Picasa, Facebook

And if your cellphone gets stolen, you can automatically restore everything in a new phone—while remotely wiping all the information from the missing one.

Hardware

The 320×480-pixel 3.1-inch screen Motorola Cliq has a slide-out QWERTY keyboard with a D-pad. You know, for games. It also has a 5 megapixel camera, with autofocus and 24 and 30 frames per second video recording. They have included a 3.5mm headphone jack, as well as the usual 3G connectivity, and the obligatory integrated GPS with turn-by-turn directions.

Surprisingly, however, it doesn’t seem to have Wi-Fi connectivity. On the wireless department, apart from the 3G, it only has 2.0+EDR stereo Bluetooth. Bad, Motorola, bad! That’s not the only uh-oh point: It comes only with a 2GB MicroSD card as its only form of storage. Of course, you can always expand it to 32GB on your own. Maybe this will make it cheaper than the competition, but we don’t know yet, as pricing has not been disclosed yet.

It may not have Wi-Fi or internal storage, but it will come in two colors for the holiday season, winter white and titanium. Internationally, it will be called the Dext, or, as Motorola will surely put it, “MOTODEXT!!!!!”

Further Plans

Later, Jha is also likely to talk up Motorola’s Android devices at a Deutsche Bank conference Sept. 14.

As per Piper Jaffray analyst :

Our checks indicate two different Android smartphones will launch in the near future. We anticipate one model will launch for T-Mobile with a separate form factor launching for Verizon. Finally, we believe another unique product will launch for AT&T in Q110, and we anticipate this model could sell to several global carriers, including the Chinese market in time for Chinese New Year.

Device design to go along with Android will matter for Motorola, but another key theme is marketing.

Global Equities analyst Trip Chowdhry writes:

Contacts have seen the new Motorola Android Phone, and all feel the phone is extremely well designed, and probably may be a winner. Contacts tell us that it is slimmer than iPhone, capacitive touch screen seems more precise than iPhone and feels faster than iPhone. The native processing of code on Motorola is much faster than anything out there.

The Challenge

Motorola has to market the device correctly. Chowdhry guesses that Motorola will spend as much as $70 million on marketing. A year from now, Motorola will either be busy restoring its status as a mobile handset leader or just another company that files on chapter 11.

The deals like this, brings new hopes for the customers and areas where Mobile usage isn’t as dense as US, Japan, China.

Today, as per the latest press release, Orange and T-Mobile, will join hands in a new joint venture, this fall.

At the moment, they are 3rd and 4th largest Telecom providers in UK. The merger will create the largest mobile company in the United Kingdom, with a subscriber base of more than 28.4 million which builds up roughly 37% of the market.

Currently the largest UK operator with a 27% share is Telefonica’s O2, which is the exclusive iPhone carrier. At the  second place with 25% of the British market is Vodafone, the company which jointly owns a 48% stake of Verizon Wireless.

The merger of Orange and T-Mobile in the UK would be like Sprint and T-Mobile merging in the United States, breaking up the market into thirds.

The deal, which is due to be signed November, comes on the heels of poor financial results from T-Mobile and lackluster sales from Orange, and the reasons behind it are quite obvious: saving money. Despite the huge initial cost of the merger, the two companies expect to save, over time, up to 5.7 billion dollars. Part of these savings will probably reflect on the combined staff of the two companies: Orange’s 12,500 and T-Mobile’s 6,500 employees, although a spokeswoman said that it’s too early to talk about the impact on the workforce, but we can expect cuts.

As far as branding goes, both brands will remain separate in the first 18 months after the deal is completed. Orange chief executive Tom Alexander will lead the new company, while T-Mobile’s UK boss Richard Moat will become the COO.

Though both Vodafone and O2 were recently reported to have made bids on T-Mobile, a mutual interest was shared between executives at Orange and T-Mobile. Orange’s CEO Tom Alexander, for example, came to the company in 2007 from T-Mobile-owned MVNO Virgin Mobile. Alexander will become the CEO of the joint Venture, and T-Mobile’s CEO Richard Moat will take over as COO.

For the first 18 months of the joint venture, both brands will remain separate. T-Mobile this morning said that period will be used to “review branding alternatives” for the new company.

sources: betanews, Mashable ]]> http://geeknizer.com/orange-and-t-mobile-join-hands-to-become-uks-biggest-telecom-provider/feed/ 0 http://geeknizer.com/recession-and-necessity-are-the-mother-of-invention/ http://geeknizer.com/recession-and-necessity-are-the-mother-of-invention/#comments Thu, 23 Jul 2009 14:17:25 +0000 Tarandeep Singh http://geeknizer.com/blog/?p=1451 Read more »]]> Th famous Idiom of “Necessity is the mother of Invention” might see a change in future.
The Recession brings cost cutting, tighter time schedules, faster deliveries, efficient utilization of resources and the most important, Innovation.
As a result of recession, Innovation has to grow in every sector. It starts from smarter way of working, and is most seen at bringing new Innovative Ideas to industry where you can raise the margins and hence lower the operating cost.
History is proof of the quote. After all, many of the world’s enduring, multibillion-dollar corporations, from Disney to Microsoft, were founded during economic downturns decades back.

Generally speaking, operating costs tend to be cheaper in a recession. Talent is easier to find because of widespread layoffs and dissatisfaction. It’s easier to find a more talented resource relatively at a lower cost. The competition is usually less fierce because, frankly, many players are taken out of the game.

Recessions can also help executives figure out how to improve products, services, and processes internally and for customers. Ideally, the creative thinking that’s needed to weather the storm of an economic downturn can lead to new markets and revenue streams. “Innovation originates from challenges,” says Vineet Nayar, CEO of HCL Technologies, a Noida (India)-based global IT services company.

HCL recently partnered with Xerox (XRX) to provide tech support for corporate customers using Xerox systems meant to reduce the amount of wasted paper. The systems themselves were inspired by the dual challenges of helping to save the environment and the need to slash office expenses during the downturn.

Inventing cost-effective and time-saving processes becomes a priority in a downturn, and it’s an area of interest for companies and organizations in a variety of fields, from high tech to health care. “In a recession, you can innovate to be more efficient,” says John Kao, author of the book Innovation Nation and the head of Deloitte’s Institute for Large Scale Innovation.

Mergers/Acquisitions

Recession is the time when major of the Mergers and Acquisitions are triggered. Though multi-billionaire companies can go bankrupt in months, there are always new owners to overhaul the system. The Fall of Sun Microsystems, Nortel are the best examples. Though they fall for bad, Innovation-driven Big Fish eats them and keep them in a more safer zone.

Mergers are driven by effectiveness of cost at which they can be done. Recession is the best time, the market being down, a good bargain is available to the bidder, no matter what is the financial state of the company on radar.
Lessons to Be Learned

Some companies are always left Recession-resistant. Best example is for Apple. Apple reported quarterly profits jumped 15%. With sky high sales for Mac, iPhone, Apple once again proved the key to survive in recession is Innovation. Innovation at technology, flashy gadgets, quality, and rumors among it’s fans .

Smart companies will continue to apply the innovation lessons learned during today’s tough times even when things pick up. The innovative processes, products, and services that hatch now can help executives understand how to curb costs or take risks on fresh ideas when the economy rebounds.

Innovation is all about, how companies are finding creative ways to come up with new products and services faster and more efficiently—with fewer resources. Industry has to look at the current recession through a variety of lenses to rethink how to approach innovation tactics even as R&D budgets have been slashed. Smart companies are finding inventive ways of keeping employees motivated and creative even when morale is low. We need to look into the benefits of outsourcing innovation in areas ranging from industrial design to corporate strategy.

All these strategies help us to prove that there’s light at the end of the tunnel.

After almost a month of ongoing discussions, the proposed amount has been set to $475 million by Nortel. As per the agreement : It includes the planned sale of substantially all of the assets of the Enterprise Solutions business globally as well as the shares of Nortel Government Solutions and DiamondWare, a maker of softphones.

On this Eve, Nortel CEO Mike Zafirovski said:

“We continue to be fully focused on running our operations and continuing to serve our

customers while actively engaged in the sale of our businesses. We have determined that the sale of our businesses maximizes value while preserving innovation platforms, customer relationships and jobs to the greatest extent possible. The CDMA and LTE Access stalking horse asset sale agreement announced on June 19th, and today’s agreements around our Enterprise business are solid proof of that value. This represents the best path forward, and we are advancing in our discussions with interested parties for our other businesses.”

“The many customers I have spoken with have been highly supportive of our efforts and transparency throughout this process. They value our employees and technology platforms and are appreciative of our service levels which are at multi-year highs.

“Today’s agreements underscore the value of Enterprise Solutions and the investments we have made in enterprise telephony, unified communications and data networking core competencies. If successfully completed, this transaction will provide clarity on the path forward for our Enterprise customers, partners and employees, and enable the industry to continue to benefit from Nortel-created technology, know-how and leading-edge innovation.”

Avaya president and CEO Kevin Kennedy added to it, stating that the deal will benefit Avaya on several fronts.

“The addition of Nortel Enterprise Solutions will increase Avaya’s global scale, expand our channel partner network, and strengthen our world-class portfolio of products and services,” Kennedy said in a statement. “This is a strategic opportunity to acquire talent and complementary assets that position the combined company for growth and success. We are committed to protecting the communications investments of the customers of Avaya and Nortel, and to effectively executing the integration of Nortel Enterprise Solutions and Avaya.”
One industry analyst sees the deal benefiting all parties involved.
Want to compare LAN/WAN management products? Visit the IT Product Guides now.

“This puts Avaya ahead of Cisco for enterprise voice sales and enters them into the networking business,” says Henry Dewing, an analyst at Forrester Research. “There are advantages for Avaya and Nortel — achieving scope and scale to lead the worldwide communications market. There are opportunities for buyers to have a global vendor offering hardware, software, and services to advance their communications and collaboration capabilities. Both firms recognize the need to serve mixed vendor environments and leverage many channel options and partners for delivery.”

Avaya had 16.6% of the $16 billion enterprise telephony market in 2008 to runner up Cisco’s 14%, according to Dell’Oro Group. Nortel came in 4th, with 9.6%, trailing Siemens at 11.4%. Together, It gives more market share to Avaya.

Challenges for Avaya: Merits and De-Merits of Merger

Thouth Avaya will attain a larger customer base, and wider product ranges, challenges would remain with product overlap. As a matter of fact, Cisco, Alcatel-Lucent and Siemens, Huawei could benefit as Avaya works through the redundancies.

On the Positive side, Nortel’s LAN switching portfolio gives Avaya an entry into that market and could end its joint marketing relationship with Extreme, Kidron states.

But first, Avaya has to win the bidding.

“We see a strong possibility for an additional bidder(s) for Nortel’s enterprise assets emerging, especially given the low price,” Kidron states in his bulletin. “Siemens or private equity firms such as MatlinPatterson (a major bondholder) could participate in the bid. Both have either shown interest in the past or would make a good fit. Overall, this is another milestone in Nortel’s ultimate asset-unwinding process.”

MatlinPatterson is preparing a bid for Nortel’s CDMA and LTE wireless assets, which Nokia Siemens has already offered $650 million for in another stalking horse arrangement.

The International Nortel Networks Users Association (INNUA), which represents more than 4,000 Nortel enterprise customers worldwide, issued a statement saying that it “believes the acquisition will allow the company to refocus its energy and resources on its solutions, and quiet concerns about the corporate structure that has beleaguered the company.”
“This chapter in Nortel’s history is closed,” said INNUA Executive Director Victor Bohnert in the statement. “We understand that there is still much that can change during the auction process. However, we will begin working with Avaya as soon as it’s appropriate to determine how we can best represent the collective voice of their new customers.”

Under the stalking horse arrangement, Nortel will file the asset and share sale agreement with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware along with a motion seeking the establishment of bidding procedures for an auction that allows other qualified bidders to submit higher or otherwise better offers. Following completion of the bidding process, final approval of the U.S. and Canadian courts will be required.

As previously announced, Nortel does not expect that the company’s common shareholders or the preferred shareholders will receive any value from the creditor protection proceedings and expects that the proceedings will result in the cancellation of these equity interests. Nortel was delisted from the Toronto Stock Exchange on June 26.

So It’s all upto the Industry’s top telecom-equipment leaders. Who would bid the highest and swipe away the Avaya’s hopes.

Apple can prove the industry that they are among the Top-Recession resistant companies. Here are the top speculations:

Speculations Sources: CRN, Macrumors, Betanews

- Apple iPhone sales up: This is the most obvious one: iPhone has become an icon. The Apple iPhone 3G S sold more than 1 million units in its first weekend, not a bad way to close out a quarter. That, along with Apple slashing the price on the standard iPhone 3G, should mean a strong showing for the iPhone in the third quarter. In the first two quarters, Apple reportedly sold roughly 8.2 million iPhones, and analysts expect that Apple sold about 5.3 million in just the third quarter – a 40% increase over the second quarter – showing that Apple’s foray into smartphones is for real and not going anywhere.

- Record-Breaking Mac sales: Several analysts say Apple sold a record number of Macs in the third quarter. North American Mac sales were up 16 percent in June compared to one year ago and Mac sales altogether rose about 5 percent in the third quarter, according to The NPD Group. That means Apple sold about 2.6 million Macs in the third quarter. If NPD Group’s numbers are correct, Apple is teetering on a record-setting third quarter for Mac sales.

- Price cuts didn’t negate Apple 3Q Results: This is realted to the Earlier one. Apple had cut prices for some MacBook Pro notebooks in the third quarter, but the lower margin won’t hit earnings too hard. The demand is still there for MacBook Pro notebooks, and the price cut spurred additional sales. And record Mac sales and the release of the higher-priced the iPhone 3G S should offset some of the cash lost to MacBook price cuts.

- iPod sales might go down: If Mac sales and iPhone sales are up, something’s got to give. In the third quarter, it looks like the Apple iPod, the leader of portable digital music players, will take a hit. Apple sold 11 million iPods last year. This year, NPD expects Apple to report sales of 9.6 million. Part of the reason iPod sales are down is over-saturation of the market. It’s also possible that Apple is competing with itself, offering overlapping functionality with the iPod and the iPhone. “One of these days iPod sales will decline, and maybe it will be this quarter,” Andy Hargreaves, an analyst with Pacific Crest Securities, told BusinessWeek.

- The Apple App store will be more Lucrative: Apple has maintained that its mobile application marketplace, the iTunes-based Apple App Store, isn’t a money-making venture. But since the store launched last July, more than 1.5 billion free and paid mobile applications have been sold, roughly 500 million of those in the third quarter. Not too shabby. And with a good percentage of those applications paid for, App Store sales are sure to help Apple’s bottom line.

Remarkably, Everything is +ve for Apple. Let’s see how much of it comes out to be true.

While looking over SourceForge’s downloads recently, I noticed that applications exist in the openSource world just about for every need. OpenSource tools are Not only are they handy (obviously), they are also very recession-friendly. I decided to round up some of the best ones in one place. Most of these come courtesy of our fearless Linux leader Jack Wallen with only a couple of exceptions. (All of the links are downloads except for OpenDNS.)

Let’s start from most popular

The promise of open source software is best quality, flexibility and reliability. This is the best open source software in the world.

Firefox delivers helpful new features to make your online experience more productive. Chose from over a thousand useful add-ons to personalize and make it your own.

Miro – free, open source internet tv and video player. Miro gives you access to more free HD content than any other video player.

Pidgin – is a multi-protocol Instant Messaging client that allows you to use all of your IM accounts at once: AIM, Bonjour, Gadu-Gadu, Google Talk, Groupwise, ICQ, IRC, MSN, QQ, SILC, SIMPLE, Sametime, XMPP, Yahoo!, Zephyr

FeedReader - is a news aggregation solution that provides robust, state-of-the-art features in an intuitive, user-friendly environment. FeedBurner offers advanced, cutting-edge capabilities, including the most comprehensive podcasting support available today, as well as unique smart feed technology that puts the information you need right at your fingertips.

Azureus - implements the BitTorrent protocol using java and comes bundled with many features : Multiple torrent downloads, Upload and download speed limiting, both globally and per torrent, Advanced seeding rules, Adjustable disk cache, Only uses one port for all the torrents, UPnP sets the forward on your router and more…

FileZilla – is a fast and reliable FTP client and server with lots of useful features and an intuitive interface.

OpenOffice – is a multi platform and multi lingual office suite and an open-source project. Compatible with all other major office suites, the product is free to download, use, and distribute

Thunderbird help you better manage your unruly inbox, scales to the most sophisticated organizational needs while making it easy to find what you need.

.

Pant.Net – is free image editing and photo manipulation software for computers that run Windows. It features an intuitive and innovative user interface with support for layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools

.

Now let’s take a look at all the utilities and open source alternatives Category wise:

Image Editing and Graphics

GIMP – http://www.gimp.org
The GNU Image Manipulation Program is a Photoshop replacement that doesn’t have “quite” as much functionality but it’s excellent for free. It comes installed by default on many Linux distros and is also available in Windows. Worth a look.

Paint.net – http://www.getpaint.net/index2.html
A really good, lightweight alternative to Photoshop. It offers layers, unlimited undo, special effects and a wide variety of useful tools. The download is around 2mb too so absolutely worth a look – I use this when Photoshop is playing up.

ImageMagick – http://www.imagemagick.org/script/index.php
A lesser known application but it offers the ability to “create, edit, and compose bitmap images. It can read, convert and write images in a variety of formats (about 100)”. Use it to “translate, flip, mirror, rotate, scale, shear and transform images, adjust image colors, apply various special effects, or draw text, lines, polygons, ellipses and B?zier curves.”

Blender – http://www.blender.org/download/get-blender/
A 3D Studio Max alternative, very comprehensive and full-featured.

Office

OpenOffice – http://www.openoffice.org
It’s basically Microsoft Office so you need little else with this installed. It has MS Office support (in both reading and writing) so this fantastic suite is fully compatible.

Web development

Andrew Sellick covered this in his comprehensive list Top 15 free and open source web developer tools so this list is almost entirely his (he’s a friend so this content use was agreed).

Kuler – http://kuler.adobe.com/ A very powerful colour-picking tool, allowing for the easy creation of colour schemes.

Aptana – http://www.aptana.com/ The Aptana IDE is a free, open-source, cross-platform, JavaScript-focused development environment for building Ajax applications. It features code assist on JavaScript, HTML, and CSS languages, FTP/SFTP support and a JavaScript debugger to troubleshoot your code.

Color Cop – http://www.colorcop.net/A very handy tool for capturing colours anywhere on your screen. Color Cop makes it quick and easy in those situations where you need to know what colour is being used.

Firefox web developer toolbar – https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60The Web Developer extension adds a menu and a toolbar to the browser with various web developer tools. It is designed for Firefox, Flock, Mozilla and Seamonkey, and will run on any platform that these browsers support including Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

Internet Explorer Toolbar – [another long url]The Microsoft Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar provides a variety of tools for quickly creating, understanding, and troubleshooting Web pages. This version is a preview release and behavior may change in the final release.

Firebug – http://www.getfirebug.com/Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of web development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.

Watchfire WebXACT – http://webxact.watchfire.com/WebXACT is a free online service that lets you test single pages of web content for quality, accessibility, and privacy issues. It is very similar to Bobby and usefull to anyone wishing to check the accessibilty level of their templates/site.

JsUnit – http://www.jsunit.net/ JsUnit is a Unit Testing framework for client-side (in-browser) JavaScript. It is essentially a port of JUnit to JavaScript. Also included is a platform for automating the execution of tests on multiple browsers and mutiple machines running different OSs.

Xenu – http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.htmlXenu’s Link Sleuth (TM) checks Web sites for broken links. Link verification is done on “normal” links, images, frames, plug-ins, backgrounds, local image maps, style sheets, scripts and java applets. It displays a continously updated list of URLs which you can sort by different criteria. A report can be produced at any time.

Vischeck – http://www.vischeck.com/vischeck/vischeckURL.phpVischeck is a way of showing you what things look like to someone who is color blind. You can try Vischeck online- either run Vischeck on your own image files or run Vischeck on a web page. You can also download programs to let you run it on your own computer.

Feng GUI – http://www.feng-gui.com/Find out how people View your website or image and which areas are getting most of the attention. The ViewFinder Heatmap service, is an artificial intelligence service which simulates human visual attention and creates an attention heatmap.

Fiddler – http://www.fiddlertool.com/fiddler/Fiddler is a HTTP Debugging Proxy which logs all HTTP traffic between your computer and the Internet. Fiddler allows you to inspect all HTTP Traffic, set breakpoints, and “fiddle” with incoming or outgoing data. Fiddler includes a powerful event-based scripting subsystem, and can be extended using any .NET language.

browsershots.org – http://browsershots.org/Browsershots.org is a free open-source online service providing screenshots of your web site in a multitude of different browsers. It is not as advanced as BrowserCam but a fantastic tool none the less.

Expresso 2.1 – http://www.ultrapico.com/Expresso.htmExpresso is useful tool for learning how to use regular expressions and for developing and debugging regular expressions prior to incorporating them into your code. It provides a very cut down version of RegexBuddy but most importantly it is simple to use and free.

ColorJack – [very long url]ColorJack is an amazing online application providing users with the ability to match colours that work well together. Perfect for those developers who struggle to get a good colour scheme together.

Development Applications (IDE’s)

Eclipse – http://www.eclipse.org/
Eclipse is an open source community whose projects are focused on building an open development platform comprised of extensible frameworks, tools and runtimes for building, deploying and managing software across the lifecycle. It’s quite hardcore in my personal opinion so certainly not one for beginners.

NetBeans – http://www.netbeans.org/
All the tools software developers need to create cross-platform Java desktop, enterprise and web applications. Runs on Windows, Linux, MacOS, as well as Solaris. I never got on well with NetBeans but it is a good application, just not one I choose.

Code::Blocks – http://www.codeblocks.org/
A free c++ IDE built to meet the “most demanding needs of its users”.

SharpDevelop – http://www.sharpdevelop.net/OpenSource/SD/Default.aspx
A free IDE for C#, VB.net and Boo projects on Microsoft’s .NET platform.

Video Playback

Media Player Classic – [long url]
Amazingly lightweight and incredibly durable – MPC succeeds where most others fail. It really will play anything and doesn’t even need installing.

VLC Media Player – http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
A very popular application; a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats. It will play just about anything too.

Audio

Audacity – http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
Audacity is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. It is available for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems.

Winamp – http://www.winamp.com
While not open source, it is free and very good indeed. Far better than iTunes in my personal opinion.

Anti-Virus

AVG – http://free.grisoft.com/doc/1
A popular and comprehensive, free anti-virus application. I use it. Simple.

Avast! Home edition – http://www.avast.com/eng/avast_4_home.html
Also quite popular and available for free.

Games

Morgan Stanley says “Apple is outperforming the PC market in sales growth, and this was before Apple in June released its new MacBook Pros in June. Of course, releasing a new notebook would only spur sales for the months after its release.

Apple shipments were up 25 percent over April. In comparison, PC shipments for the same period were up only 1 percent, according to Fortune. As a result, forecast for the this quarter is 2.5 million Macs.

In its Q2 2009, Apple sold 2.2 million Macs, a 3 percent decline for the company over the year-ago quarter.

However, if predictions are true and Apple does sell 2.5 million Macs in the third-quarter, the company will see a nominal increase from the 2.496 million sold during last year’s 3Q.

Consumer interest in its products led Apple to the top of Nielsen’s report released yesterday, documenting the most trafficked hardware Web sites. Apple more than doubled the traffic of its nearest competitor Hewlett-Packard.

The question will be resolved on 21st July. How well Apple has done, will be declared on 21st July when Apple’s 3Q financial results are out to public.

Now where does Microsoft stand in comparison? Some might say Microsoft has faced a few serious bumps over the last 10 years but came out fine. Going back to Windows Me (possibly the worst of the Windows releases), it was able to rebound with Windows XP. But the Vista debacle that began in 2006 has brought along an avalanche of critique. Although I’ve never personally agreed with the technical complaints, the fact that there are six or more variations of the software, combined with price tags that have just gone overboard, makes the anger directed at Vista understandable. When you look at the many upgrades and varieties of Vista and now Windows 7, the slew of new System Center products, and the Xbox division (which may continue to do well with the new body controller idea), you have to ask if Microsoft is overbloating its product line. Is it stretching out in too many directions, instead of improving the core products and lowering the cost to consumers?

Some may say, “Well, Microsoft has a ton of money, so there is nothing to worry about.” But Microsoft has already begun trimming the fat. Microsoft said in January that it would cut up to 5,000 positions over the next 18 months, starting with an initial 1,400-person wave. And many analysts expect that number to grow.

What about competition? So far, nothing substantial. Microsoft is actually competing with itself in many ways. Folks love Windows XP so much that they won’t switch to Windows Vista, partly because they’ve heard it wasn’t good, not because they’ve seen it or it’s caused them any problems. Upgrades to Vista and Office 2007 have not been as plentiful as Microsoft had hoped. Windows 7 may turn it around a bit, and certainly a bouncing economy may loosen the money belt with some companies.

Apple may make a better commercial than Microsoft (even I laugh at Apple’s Mac-versus-PC ads, while I grit my teeth in anger for Microsoft’s Seinfeld/Gates commercials), but Mac doesn’t have much traction in the enterprise space. The Mac is still a niche market, not a threat. Linux supporters have yet to unite and battle the Redmond giant. Essentially, Microsoft has one advantage over GM: The competition won’t cause its downfall.

Knowing the work Microsoft developers put into their products, I believe they are the saving grace of the company — as long as they are allowed to hear the voice of the people. This is an area where I’ve seen a problem. For example, when Windows Server 2008 was released, it was odd that you could not perform an Exchange 2007 backup through Windows Server 2008. You needed a separate product (Microsoft marketing encouraged the new System Center Data Protection Manager). People complained — loudly — on the Exchange team’s Web site. They were told that Microsoft would develop a fix. That was over a year ago.

Finally, Microsoft announced at TechEd 2009 that SP2 for Exchange 2007 would contain a backup fix. The actual fix, however, is the bare minimum Microsoft could provide to satisfy the crowd but not steal any thunder away from the separately sold Data Protection Manager — a tremendous disappointment. Now whose fault is that? If it were up to the Exchange team, I’m confident it would develop a fully functional tool, as opposed to this volume backup tool that doesn’t even provide what we have in Windows Server 2003 and Exchange 2007.

Microsoft will continue to have a long and healthy life ahead if it does three things: First, adopt a new marketing strategy. Second, let its developers go crazy and really nurture their product, trimming out solutions and honing the primary pillars of Microsoft (Windows, Office, and Windows Server). Third, provide a more reasonable price tag, starting with Windows 7.

What do you think? Do you see Microsoft following the wake of GM into dangerous waters or do you think it still has a long, clear path ahead? Any suggestions on how Microsoft can pull it around or stay the course?

source: infoworld

The news, reported first by the Mac Observer from what I can tell, isn’t that surprising. Psystar was under financial strain from trying to battle Apple in court while maintaining a business. As Mac Observer noted, the Psystar bankruptcy may indicate that its legal backers may have dropped out. However, Psystar blames the economy and suppliers’ increasingly difficult credit terms for its problems. In any case, 9 to 5 Mac reckons that the Northern California courtroom battle between Psystar and Apple is mired in limbo.

Psystar workers confirmed the bankruptcy and the filing appears to be made last Thursday.

In a petition (download petition PDF and declaration), Psystar claimed 1-49 creditors with assets of $0 to $50,000. Liabilities were $100,001 to $500,000.

Meanwhile, Psystar owes Carr & Farrell, the lawyers for Apple vs. Psystar suit, more than $88,000, DHL almost $13,000 and the IRS nearly $12,000. The fact that Psystar couldn’t pay its credit card processors or its shippers casts some doubts on plans to launch new Mac clones and even a netbook. The bankruptcy news comes following a small but significant victory over Apple in the courtroom.

In one of a bevy of filings (see PDF), Psystar blamed the economy for its financial woes:

Due to the weakened economy, Debtor has had no alternative but to commence these Chapter 11 proceedings. Debtor sales have been greatly affected by the decrease in consumer spending. The financial crisis has also caused creditors to tighten up their terms and become more demanding for immediate payment. Debtor’s vendors due to their own financial problems are not being able to supply all necessary items to allow Debtor to produce their product, thus, forcing Debtor to pay higher prices for parts in order to fulfill customer orders in a timely manner and to assure satisfaction with the product. These factors seriously contribute to the Debtor not being able to turn a significant profit in each sale. Debtor has continued doing business in this manner with diminutive profit in hopes of a turn around in our present economy but find that the long term roots of this crisis can only be overcome by directly implementing the restructuring of Debtor s business plan and can only do so with the requested Chapter 11 protection. Debtor plans on emerging from this Chapter 11 with a strong and effective plan to make an increasingly higher profit and still provide the consumer with the product that they have grown to enjoy and trust. Debtor possesses valuable intellectual property which will be implemented in a well thought out and more profitable business plan.

Here’s the list of the top 20 creditors:

Meanwhile, there’s a hearing that was scheduled for today to keep Psystar’s bank accounts. Psystar doesn’t want to close its bank accounts and open new ones due to the administrative burden. Typically, bank accounts are closed when a company files for bankruptcy and new ones are opened. That move closes the books on the past company and the reorganizing one. Psystar maintains that if it can’t continue with its existing accounts it won’t be able to continue operations.

Calls are out to Psystar’s lawyer and I’ll update as I find out more.

Source: Zdnet

Aruba Networks announced its wired and wireless “branch-in-a-box” Virtual Branch Network (VBN) products shortly before the Interop trade show in Las Vegas, where Motorola rolled out its Wireless Enterprise Branch Office Solution and Cisco announced OfficeExtend as part of its Collaboration in Motion portfolio.

These and other Wi-Fi-centric “plug-and-play” products promise to automatically replicate corporate LAN services, such as policies and security credentials, to branches with no need for IT intervention, while allowing the remote user’s Wi-Fi or wired LAN experience to mimic that of users connected at headquarters.

Mike Tennefoss , Aruba’s head of strategic marketing, has gone so far as to say that Aruba VBN products are taking on Cisco’s popular branch-office Integrated Services Router (ISR), which bundles multiple Layer 2 and Layer 3 wired and wireless network functions in a single box.

Yet Aruba’s $99 and $395 wired and wireless Remote Access Point (RAP) products, now shipping, don’t support routing. Still, Tennefoss says, “Most of our VBN customers to date have dropped ISRs in favor of RAPs because they didn’t need the routing function in their branch offices.”

The ability to adopt router-less networking isn’t a given. It matters whether a single link to the public Internet serves as a site’s WAN connection or whether you are using a business-class WAN service, such as an MPLS VPN service, with a choice of WAN destinations and paths. Also, some WAN carriers simply mandate that routers be used to terminate circuits.

“[Aruba is] calling a sophisticated AP with minimal WAN intelligence a ‘branch office in a box.’ That’s a travesty,” says Joel Conover, senior manager, network systems at Cisco.

Cisco’s new OfficeExtend works similarly to the RAP, albeit behind a Cisco 800 Series ISR for WAN routing.

My earlier posts had been around different applications of twitter like controlling your home appliances, etc. Now expect the next step. Jobs!

Job boards that charge for job postings might be becoming a thing of the past if Twitter has anything to say about it. Read how one company is using Twitter as a way to recruit people for jobs.

According to Nielsen NetView, in February 2009, Twitter had nearly 7.1 million users, with a growth rate of 1,382 percent from the year before. Some companies are finding this growth rate a great opportunity to recruit people for jobs.

In a recent issue of Workforce Management, two representatives from digital advertising agency Organic said they have made Twitter the anchor of their job posting strategy. Here are some of the benefits, according to Organic:

“Once we have an opening that might be a fit for a Twitter friend, rather than making a cold call to a stranger, we can make a “warm tweet.” We can talk to someone with whom we’ve already interacted, who already understands a bit about Organic based on tweets that cover Organic’s culture, work and news items. It’s less like a blind date and more like a first date with someone you’ve already met.

Another benefit: There are no time or space constraints to tweeting with a candidate. We don’t have to interrupt potential candidates during their busy workdays; they can engage with us when it’s convenient for them. And candidates who aren’t ready to make a move can easily retweet, or forward, our opening to peers who may also be a fit.”

Also, it’s free, unlike many traditional job boards.

If you decide to take the plunge and make Twitter part of your staff recruitment plan, here are six tips the Workforce article offers for using it to top advantage:

1. Create a branded company Twitter profile. Assign a key person–or automate tweets–to post jobs as they become available. This person should also be responsible for following professionals that could be potential candidates.
2. Don’t be a Twitter wallflower. Engage in conversation with the people you are following–and your followers–whether you have job openings for them or not. Then, when you need to speak with someone about an opportunity, you’ve already established rapport.
3. Create a protocol for your job Tweets. Consider searchability by using hash marks (#) around key words. Include a trackable URL to your job posting so you can monitor the number of click-throughs a job posting receives.
4. Help your search by using a third-party tool such as TweetBeep, which alerts you to tweets relevant to your search.
5. Encourage your staff to retweet job openings by providing an incentive such as a referral bonus for candidates sourced through tweeting.
6. Don’t be a one-track tweeter. Be varied and creative in your approach. To keep it real and not boring or spamlike, tweet on a variety of topics including industry-related items of interest, some personal tweets and, of course, your job postings

I dont want this answer “nothing”.

I sought to ask what the new Administration’s policy may be toward open source. What resulted was a lively discussion of the President’s politics and positions.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. The economy, the reputation of the nation, and the strength of its tech sector all impact open source. Any President has power in all those areas.

But what I sought to elicit was a discussion of the specific policies he may have toward open source. It’s possible many commenters did not think it matters much. It does.

There is much this President can do for, and to, the open source movement.

1. Will he buy it? Any enterprise which fully implements open source winds up hiring programmers who contribute, in turn, to open source projects. Some contribute code, others their expertise, and the code base they develop becomes available to the community, and to businesses around the world. So how much open source the Administration uses matters.
2. What license will he support? The Veteran Administration’s VistA system predates the open source movement and was built as public record. Some projects evolved from that, like WorldVistA, use the GPL. A commercial implementation, Medsphere, uses the AGPL. If the government used Eclipse or other BSD-type licenses, companies could extend it for their own commercial benefit. Given the potential size of a government code base, that’s meaningful.
3. What about copyright? FOSS advocates, especially those at the Free Software Foundation, feel the government’s attitude toward copyright is important. Turning the Constitution’s copyright into a property right, they argue, could have a substantial chilling effect on open source. And the over-zealous enforcement of copyright, through DRM schemes, can also have a chilling effect.
4. Internet Policy. All open source business models ride on the Internet. Will America’s Internet highways remain wide and affordable? How will this Administration seek to enforce American laws in cyberspace? Will it support changes to the Internet architecture meant to enforce local laws — all national laws are local laws.

It’s likely I missed some important issue in the list above. Please feel free to bring it up in the comments.

What I attempted to point out last week is that the President’s policy in these areas remains unformed. But there have been recent hints in both directions. Many cheered the appointment of Julius Genachowski as FCC chair. The same people booed the appointment of Mignon Clyburn to another FCC seat.

Similarly FOSS advocates charge that the Administration’s close ties with the RIAA and MPAA threaten open source by extending copyrights forever, by seeking to make copyright payments universal for everything, and by creating a coercive enforcement regime.

We don’t yet know where the broadband money in the stimulus will go. Will it go into the pocket of incumbents and be wasted, as happened to the old Gore tax? Or will we get new wireless superhighways in rural towns, and new unlicensed frequencies for WiFi and WiMAX?

Regardless of how the President and his appointees choose to come down on these questions, they will all have a powerful impact on the development of open source, or lack of it, over the next years.

What should the Administration be doing to enhance or degrade open source? What will he do? Can we expect something more practical this time?

In light of this, there are opportunities for IT leaders and our fellow IT workers who are still looking for work. You know all those little projects that have been on the periphery for the last couple of years, but larger projects keep pushing to the back burner? Well, bring them out and dust them off.

There is a lot of IT talent out there willing to do short-term project work at reasonable rates. The price is right when you do not have to go through an agency or consulting company and go directly to independent contractors; the rates can be nearly half of what you would normally pay. The difference is, the IT contractor gets all of it. Also, getting independent contractors is a lot easier today. The challenges of going with independent contractors are the liability issues and guarantees regarding the quality of work. However, with the current employment market, getting independent contractors with referrals from people you know and trust occurs a lot more frequently.

What kind of projects are we talking about?

We recently had contractors work on a couple of small projects that took far less money and time than we originally thought and are making our internal customers very happy. We managed to get a mini contact management database (sort of a bridge to a larger CRM system) with 16 hours of developer time and six hours of systems administration time all deployed on existing infrastructure. The quality of the resource did not require us to provide a lot of oversight or additional management time to make sure the project was successful.

Once we started down this path, we found a bunch of small projects that would cost $1,000 to $5,000 each that the IT department didn’t (and still doesn’t) have enough time to focus on. What’s more, we found a lot of resources available to do the work. Within weeks, you can get a bunch of small wins that make your users very happy and provide an independent contractor with some much-needed income. In this economy, there really aren’t that many win-win situations — take advantage of the ones you can.

Here are examples of projects that are perfect for contract labor:

• Backup error messages: Come on, admit it… your backup error messages could use some cleaning up. Once we put in a backup system and set up all of these alerts for failures and successes, it becomes noise that tends to get ignored as time goes by. Do a three-day contract with a good systems administrator to clean up the alerts and make them relevant. Maybe even tie them into your help desk.
• Small data applications: We all have a ton of these. HR may have a recruiting database that needs to be automated or an Excel spreadsheet in finance that needs to be automatically generated instead of having to manually enter data. Marketing probably has a ton of small data-based projects as well.
• Microsoft SharePoint: For those of us with a SharePoint deployment, an independent developer can light up different applications or enhance existing ones to aid with company collaboration and communication.

I am not advocating busy work but rather several small projects that make your life easier, your customers happier, and your company more efficient. Note: Many projects that appear to be busy work are only busy work when you have to pay $175 per hour to have it done. With independent rates from $50 to $90 per hour, you actually may have a compelling business case for some of these projects. Not only that, but you have a resource pool wiling to do one day or one week projects. Most consulting companies would rather have longer-term engagements to support their overhead.

A side benefit to all of this is that you get the opportunity to try before you buy. When the labor market starts to turn around, you already have a relationship with a high-quality resource that has demonstrated value within your company. It’s a perfect try before you buy scenario.

So look around in your IT lockers and dust off those small projects.

There were articles over the net which said “will Obama TAX the internet?” LOL. it looked funny but its true. “If he could, he would”. If he was CEO of GOOGLE, he might have down that easily. Taking his steps onwards, President Obama unveiled tax code changes Monday he said could curb offshoring, but analysts and tax experts believe the plan will have little to no impact on the megatrend that threatens as many as one-in-four IT jobs at large companies.

The criticism boils down to this: It isn’t the tax code that created the offshore outsourcing industry over the last decade; it’s the low cost of highly skilled labor.

President Obama didn’t address the wage gap today, but he is arguing that the tax code has played a contributing role in the growth of offshoring, and that includes high-skilled outsourcing.

In his remarks, he cited a major Indian IT outsourcing center, Bangalore, as one of the places that has benefited from tax loopholes. The U.S. has developed “a tax code that says you should pay lower taxes if you create a job in Bangalore, India, than if you create one in Buffalo, New York,” Obama said.

These tax loopholes give companies that create jobs overseas the ability to take deductions on expenses “when they do not pay any American taxes on their profits,” he said.

The proposed tax changes, which must be approved by Congress, may affect IT vendors that run subsidiaries overseas by denying deductions for offshore payments on things like payroll expenses, said Alan Appel, a tax attorney at Bryan Cave LLP in New York.

“By denying the deduction, the hope is that it will be more expensive to operate offshore and it will give incentives to create jobs in the U.S,” Cave said.

The proposed tax code changes is about as close as the White House has come to addressing the issue of IT offshoring. Whether the administration ties the use of the H-1B visa, which is heavily used by Indian offshore firms, is still a question mark.

Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, said last week that the U.S. should increase the supply of foreign workers and said the H-1B cap is keeping wages high, protecting workers from global competition and creating a “privileged elite” in the U.S.

The major motivation for moving work overseas is the difference between salaries in the U. S. and overseas. A job that pays US$100,000 here may only cost one-sixth that in India, said Peter Bendor-Samuel, CEO of the Everest Group, a outsourcing consultancy in Dallas.

“If there is a tax consequence here it’s de minimis to the overall impact” of outsourcing, Bendor-Samuel said. In any case, he said, “this idea that people are doing outsourcing to avoid taxes is simply wrong.”

Sang Kim, a partner in the international tax practice at DLA Piper, also said he doubts that the legislation will impact outsourcing. “The argument is that it should stem the flow of jobs leaving the U.S. but the reality is I don’t think the jobs are moving outside the U.S because of tax policy,” Kim said.

If anything, the tax code changes could accelerate the flow of jobs overseas to offset the larger tax bite, he said.

Kim said there could be unforeseen consequences to the tax changes. A foreign country could, for instance, could offer subsidies to U.S. firms to create jobs as a way of mitigating any tax impact, he said.

The Hackett Group, whose clients include many multinational firms, reviewed data collected from 200 companies to find that at companies with revenues of at least $5 billion, as many as one quarter of IT jobs will be moved offshore by 2010.

Global e-mail spam volumes have dropped 20% for the first quarter this year compared with the same period last year, according to McAfee’s latest research on the topic.

McAfee attributes the dramatic reduction in e-mail spam to the November shutdown of the notorious McColo spam-generating site. In the McAfee Threat Report for the First Quarter 2009, published Tuesday, the security firm said spam levels are still 30% below their peak seen in the third quarter of last year right before the shutdown of the rogue ISP McColo.May be Spammers know, no one will click spamming links coz people have no money

Spam as a total percentage of e-mail volume is now at 86% — hardly great news, but 90% had been the more common figure and current levels haven’t been this low since 2006, according to McAfee. All e-mail, both good and bad combined, is believed to have averaged about 100 billion messages per day worldwide in March, a trend continuing into April, notes Dave Marcus, McAfee director of communications.

However, McAfee is not optimistic that e-mail spam volumes will continue to drop as they have done in the first quarter. “The question is not whether spam will return to previous levels but rather when it will return,” McAfee says in its report.

The United States remains the top country whose computers — many of them compromised — generate the most spam worldwide. “The U.S. continues to lead the world with 35% of the glove’s spam output,” McAfee states in its report.

But in other nations there’s also trouble, McAfee points out, asserting that criminals have been attacking Russian banking and government networks in order to use computer resources within them to generate malware-laden e-mail and spam.
McAfee cites Rusfinance Bank, OGO Bank, Tusarbank, Link Capital Investment Bank, Maritime Bank, Vladivostok Alfa Bank, Bank Voronezh and Inter-Svayz Bank as being among the Russian financial institutions inadvertently generating spam.
“This data suggests online criminals are largely indiscriminate about their targets and will attack any organization of financial or other interest to them,” McAfee states in its report.

The McAfee report also adds, “Our data suggests that computer systems in the following Russian government offices are controlled by cybergangs.”These institutions would include the Ministry of Taxation, Nazran Region; the Russian State Internet Network; Regional Finance and Economy Institute; Joint Institute for Nuclear Research; and Pension Fund of the Russian Federation, among several others.

Marcus says McAfee has notified these institutions of its findings, which were recently made as the security firm combed through information it was collecting about spam and IP addresses.

When it comes to malicious Web activity from sites with “bad reputations”for hosting malware, the top three countries remain the United States, China and Russia. But this last quarter saw growth in malicious Web activity from sites in the Netherlands, United Kingdom, Republic of Korea, Japan, France, Canada and Czech Republic, the McAfee report concludes.

CIOs at top-performing companies are dealing with this issue in part by making quick and deep discretionary cuts across the board rather than through better IT cost-control initiatives, according to a new survey by The Hackett Group.

The survey shows IT budget growth at 1.3 percent for 2009 to 2011, compared to a historic average of 5.3 percent. At the same time, IT demand will grow at a rate of 8.6 percent. Reconciling greater demand with a smaller budget means IT must deliver higher levels of efficiency and productivity improvement, says Erik Dorr, senior research advisor for The Hackett Group.

CIOs traditionally do this through cost control (such as negotiating better vendor contacts) and discretionary cuts (such as staff reductions). Although discretionary cuts are the most effective way to quickly achieve savings in the face of rapid demand, this tactic comes at a cost, Dorr warns. “Without addressing fundamental productivity issues, these types of cuts inevitably lead to a degradation of service levels and a reduction in the level of demand that can be met,” he says. The survey also found a lack of focus by CIOs on the demand-side of IT services, which creates an opportunity to trim costs there, says Dorr.

Typically, IT met rising user demand by simply handling it, rather than creating processes to prioritize work by its value. However, as CIOs do more with less, developing demand management capabilities becomes critical. The survey found companies focusing demand management efforts around project portfolios (58 percent) and cost allocation of IT services (37 percent).

It’s tough enough to be an effective manager when the economy is strong. But making the right decisions, keeping staff focused, and maintaining IT service levels may seem next to impossible when you’re managing through an economic crisis. Here are some ideas for keeping yourself and your team afloat.

It’s clear that the current recession is not going to be a fleeting phenomenon. Managers need to learn how to lead under extraordinary marketplace pressures and decreased morale, amid pay cuts, spending cuts on strategic projects, and staff reductions. As a leader, you can get through this mess in a positive manner if you take the time to think carefully about the needed cuts, how are you are going to deliver the news, and how you can keep people motivated and productive on the job after the axe has fallen.

Note: This article is also available as a PDF download.

1: Be objective and fair and gather facts

Before you make any critical decisions — such as whether to shutter a project or cut 10 percent of your IT staff — evaluate all the options as if you were analyzing a software package, so that you can make a cogent case for your plan. If you’re choosing between IT projects, “Think of it like a debate class,” advises Kathy Gallo, managing principal of New York City-based executive coaching firm Marshall Goldsmith Partners. Assess choices with a thorough fact-gathering, prioritization, and analysis process, not a gut reaction.

2: Allow your staff to help make the tough decisions

Making painful cuts might be a little easier if employees have a hand in shaping them. Maybe some flextime or telecommuting would help employees cope with salary or benefits reductions. Helen Cooke, managing director with executive coaching firm Cooke Consulting Group in Haddon Heights, NJ, tells of a story she heard recently in which an executive brought his staff into a room and asked them if they would rather the company do some layoffs or require a 10 percent cut in pay and benefits. (They jumped at the latter.) “It’s all about being creative and open to the possibilities without spending a lot of money.” She recommends brainstorming sessions with employees and/or soliciting ideas through an internal web site.

3: Talk often — and do it in person

Yes, you’ve heard it before, but it’s true: Get out there and talk to your people often about what’s going on with the company, impending consequences, and what’s positive in the company’s future. Experts concur that this is something leaders don’t do enough of, or handle the wrong way. Be as transparent as possible. Don’t tell white lies. Don’t surprise everyone with bad news if you’ve known about it for weeks. Don’t send out an e-mail when you could organize a Web conference or a group meeting. All of these things erode trust and make managers seem like impersonal clods, which makes for an unhappy workforce.

4: Walk the walk

Are you going to Hawaii with your spouse a month after announcing layoffs? Maybe you shouldn’t. Did you cut yourself out of the salary reduction plan? Maybe you should reconsider. You get the picture.

5: Get creative about cuts

If there’s any possible way you can save money without affecting your staff, look at those options first. Evaluate vendors: Are you getting the best deal? Maybe it’s worth hiring an operational consultant to ensure you can get better contracts. Are you operating in a “green” fashion in terms of power management on your computer and networking equipment, minimizing use of lights and heat, reducing paper usage through double-sided printing, and so on? Again, ask your staff for ideas. These days, they might care less about free soda and coffee.

6: Be yourself

When life gets choppy, some people have a tendency to take on a different persona to make things all better. Think happy! Be energetic! If the cheerleader style is your normal modus operandus, says Cooke, feel free to crank it up a notch for the benefit of your grousing employees. Take them out for a beer on Friday afternoon. Hire a comedian for an hour’s worth of fun. Give a pumped-up talk over a brown bag lunch. Because the power of positive thinking is huge. But if you’re not the first to laugh at jokes, and you’re cranky before having three cups of coffee, don’t act out of character. Your people will see through it pronto. (However, do take your team out for a beer on Friday afternoon, regardless.)

7: Do layoffs right

If you have to do layoffs, you owe it to your staff to spend the maximum effort possible in doing them accurately (this means you’ve done a thorough analysis of options), sensitively, and with full disclosure about how and why the cuts were made. “If executives aren’t good at communicating that downline, it can have a really negative impact and foster distrust,” says Cooke. She also advises that companies not cut corners on severance packages, and if possible, offer some sort of benefits continuation or outplacement services. “If people staying at the company have a sense that, wow this is unfair, they may not stay loyal to you.”

8: Don’t give up on professional development

This falls under the category of “Don’t ignore the employees who have been saved.” Those left behind after layoffs are mind-boggled about their own future, not to mention the extra workload they will undoubtedly have to handle. Give them the benefit of your time through 1-on-1 meetings to discuss their issues, concerns, and career goals. Provide talented employees the opportunity to job shadow, cross-train, or even simply sit in on meetings with other groups to expose them to different career paths, Cooke advises. Sometimes, the best education is free.

9: Keep up the fight for business alignment and ROI

In this economic climate, there’s no better time to stay true to the core IT goals of delivering business value and maximizing efficiencies. The more you can show you are being responsible and strategic to your staff and higher-ups, the better for everyone. “We are keeping our heads down and making sure what we have continues to demonstrate the value technology brings to the business,” says Bruce Whitely, CIO of beer distributor J.J. Taylor Inc., based in Jupiter, FL. “To this end we are implementing a task-tracking tool to better document what technology does on a day to day basis.”

10: Look to the future

Everyone is stuck in the present right now: survival. For a change, spend a few hours each week thinking about, and talking about, your company and department’s future. What can you do that will deliver unique value to customers (internal and external) when the economy begins to recover? What can you do now that will help the business survive until then? This can be a positive and healthy way to deal with the stress of the moment. “Reminding ourselves and each other and staff about what is in our control can be very helpful,” Cooke says.