applications in pictures

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  10 essential BlackBerry apps for travel

• No big-bang Apps news at I/O, but some announcements merit attention

  By Juan Carlos Perez | 17 May, 2013 23:57

  Apps, Google's flagship product for enterprise IT, had a minor presence at this week's I/O developer conference, but some announcements at the show and in prior weeks deserve attention from customers of the cloud email and collaboration suite.

• Wall Street Beat: Market stokes tech IPOs, as Tableau and Marketo debut

  By Marc Ferranti and Joab Jackson | 17 May, 2013 21:17

  A strong stock market could open the floodgates for more tech IPOs in the wake of Friday's solid debut of Marketo and Tableau, but not all segments of IT may be able to ride the wave.

• Mozilla postpones default blocking of third-party cookies in Firefox

  By John Ribeiro | 17 May, 2013 05:35

  Mozilla has postponed blocking third-party cookies by default in the Beta version of Firefox 22, "to collect and analyze data on the effect of blocking some third-party cookies."

• Tibco offers free R to the enterprise

  By Joab Jackson | 16 May, 2013 22:13

  Hoping to entice more enterprises to use the R statistical programming language directly within their predictive modeling and data visualization jobs, Tibco has released a free version of its R runtime engine.

• Jive Software adds integration tool for its enterprise social platform

  By Juan Carlos Perez | 16 May, 2013 20:37

  Jive Software has released an add-on to its enterprise social networking (ESN) software that automates and simplifies the process of integrating Jive's suite with third-party systems.

• SAP builds out HANA platform and ecosystem

  By Chris Kanaracus | 16 May, 2013 18:35

  Anyone remotely within the orbit of SAP lately knows that its number-one focus is the HANA in-memory database and development platform. At this week's Sapphire conference in Orlando, the vendor sought to show the progress it is making in both building out HANA's capabilities as well as attracting developers and partners to HANA.

• Amazon gives DynamoDB a performance boost

  By Mikael Ricknäs | 16 May, 2013 10:28

  Amazon Web Services is improving the performance of its DynamoDB database service with Parallel Scan, which gives users faster access to their tables.

• SAP updates line-of-business cloud apps

  By Chris Kanaracus | 15 May, 2013 17:26

  Selling SaaS (software as a service) applications aimed at specific lines of business is one way that SAP has tried to stake a claim in the world of cloud computing and during the Sapphire conference it unveiled a broad series of updates to the portfolio.

• Google weaves Larry Page's social strategy into Maps, Search

  By Sharon Gaudin | 16 May, 2013 17:12

  It became clear at Google I/O this week that Google is quietly but assuredly implementing CEO Larry Page's strategy to use Google+ to transform the entire Google experience.

• Google dives headfirst into streaming music pool

  By Sharon Gaudin | 16 May, 2013 10:06

  At Google I/O on Wednesday, Google unveiled a streaming music service that will compete directly with the likes of Pandora and Spotify -- in what is said to be a growing market, however.

• How Big Data can improve marketing and customer service

  By Allen Bernard | 13 May, 2013 13:28

  Big Data is poised to help marketers reach and engage customers and prospects in ways that businesses are only now starting to understand. Enterprises that don't embrace analytics may soon see embattled customers voting with their wallets.

• Sizing up open source: Not so simple

  By Stacy Collett | 06 May, 2013 10:09

  Choosing open-source software is more complicated than picking traditional software. Is your IT department prepared to contribute code fixes to the community?

• Free (with strings attached): Keeping track of open-source code

  By Mary K. Pratt | 06 May, 2013 10:08

  Just about anyone in the office can introduce open-source code into the company's IT infrastructure. Yet CIOs face real dangers if they're not properly managing their open-source assets.

• Five easy steps to going (almost) paperless

  By Christopher Null | 01 May, 2013 13:12

  It's over between me and my file cabinet. Six drawers full of dead trees. Total weight: a gargantuan 194.7 pounds of paper. I can't think of any less useful way to utilize home office space, especially when most of the contents, once filed, will never be touched again. I'm also gearing up to move, and the thought of packing, unpacking, and refiling all that stuff made me even more eager to end the relationship, pronto.

• What IBM's x86 exit may mean for rivals

  By Patrick Thibodeau | 19 April, 2013 18:32

  IBM's reported interest in selling parts of its x86 server business to Lenovo may bring major changes to the global market.

• SAP's first quarter: The key questions

  By Chris Kanaracus | 18 April, 2013 14:57

  SAP will announce its first-quarter 2013 earnings on Friday, a report that will get heavy scrutiny from company watchers. Here's a look at some of the more important topics that should come up during SAP executives' conference calls with press and analysts on Friday.