Stories by Mark Gibbs

The rush to make everything mobile has generated new ways to do business, new ways to organize ourselves and new ways to communicate, but mobile apps aren't your father's mainframe, desktop or laptop applications.

Mobile apps are all the rage these days, but to get one built for your organization can be a daunting financial prospect. Should you decide to go to a bespoke shop to have your dream iOS or Android app coded you would be looking at a seriously large price tag.

A year ago Gibbs wrote about a cold fusion power system that could change the world ... but so far, we've seen nothing useful ...

There's a problem a lot of business units run into when it comes to automating a business process: They know a custom application could make them more profitable and or more efficient, and they know Web deployment is the way to go, but there frequently isn't an off-the-shelf application that can do what they want.

Alas, it might not be possible to say the same about the rest of your organization, and if there's one thing that will sink your company in these harsh economic times, it is an inability to communicate. For any organization trying to get ahead in a competitive market, having staff with spelling, writing, and for that matter, speaking problems, is a huge problem.

I've just fired up VMware Fusion 5 Professional Edition on my iMac under OS X Mountain Lion and I'm really impressed.

In the quest to keep you, dear reader, entertained and informed I undertake extensive research to find what's hot, interesting and useful. This means that I spend a lot of time looking at "stuff" of which only a small fraction of the "really good stuff" gets published.

Amanda Palmer, known to her fans by the soubriquet "Amanda ****** Palmer" and wife of noted author Neil Gaiman, raised almost $1.2 million on Kickstarter back in May.

The ship early, patch often philosophy has put real programming and programmers on the endangered list

These projects are at opposite ends of the computing spectrum and they are both hot!

Gibbs follows up on his column from two weeks ago wherein he claimed " I think I know just what might be the smart [social media] tubes of the future.

I've checked out many iPad stands over the last few months and I just found what I think is one of the very best: The Uprise 360 produced by Hub Innovations. This is a dead simple design which your iPad (version 2 or 3) snaps into and you can rotate it to portrait or landscape as required. It's easy to remove the iPad when you need to and that's it ... as I said, it's dead simple and does the job. For $39.95 the Uprise 360 produced by Hub Innovations Uprise 360 gets a Gearhead rating of 5 out of 5.

Is there any organization or company that can resist surreptitiously tracking its customers?

First up: The U.S. Patent Office just granted Microsoft a patent for, and I am not making this up, controlling an audio signal of a mobile device by giving it a whack. My friend Jerry spotted this gem sliced and diced on the Patent Bolt Blog with the headline, "Microsoft Patent: How to Silence your Device by whacking it off."

Security firm Sophos today apologized for wreaking havoc in its customers' networks after a faulty update to its anti-virus software yesterday caused false positives for certain malware to occur on Windows-based computers.