The traditional reason for considering virtual desktops in place of conventional PCs has been TCO, with much of the saving coming from the ongoing management and administration benefits. But those savings largely accrued because of the difficulty of managing large numbers of PCs, so small businesses couldn’t really benefit unless they went down the DaaS (desktop as a service) route.

It should have been a revival of sorts for Web 2.0 public floats. Instead, the social networking giant Facebook’s IPO is turning out to be a dampener, raising questions about its knock-on effects on the fortunes of other social media hopefuls.

It’s the biggest thing in mobile networks at the moment, but 4G is proving to be a confusing mess of mixed messages, unfulfilled promises and a marketing disaster.

So Apple has finally decided to return some of its massive pile of cash to stockholders. The company announced this week that it would start paying a regular quarterly dividend of $US2.65 per share, beginning in its fourth fiscal quarter of 2012 (July-September).

I am frequently given pause to stare (somewhat open mouthed) at those around me as I watch them itching to get out their smart phone, iDevice or other tablet to update their Twitter friends; to add still more of life’s minutiae to their Facebook page; to send someone a TXT message; to tend to their ‘farm’ (or whatever the latest Zynga game theme is).

There’s an old Cat Stevens song (yes, I’m old enough to remember!) called Where Do the Children Play? The song speaks to a rapidly changing and evolving environment and uses the metaphor of the loss of children’s play space to the needs of the wealthy to explain inner urban life.

Telstra and Google have seemingly raised the bar for Australian experiential retailing

'Yet again, incompetence is saved by technology and shrill media reportage'