Returns the T-Mobile Sidekick as 4 G Android Smartphone-eWeek

T-Mobile United States teamed with Samsung mobile to bring back the T-Mobile Sidekick, Android Smartphone, sports 3.5-inch display and QWERTY keyboard on the hinge side of pop, Tilt signature for which friend mark is very known.

While the original friend without touchscreen, the introduction of dual modes of friend 4 G phone are designed to appease both the majority of users to have access to your device by touch and type.

However, instead of being on the basis of the danger that the operating system and data service, the property of Microsoft, the new friend will run Android 2.2 and is powered by CPU 1 GHz of T-Mobile 4 G network, capable of delivering potential peak download speeds of up to 21 Mbps.

Friend 4 G won't friend without serious communications capabilities, as is evident from the 5-row keyboard.

The new device includes the friend Group text and text on cloud messaging applications. Group text allows users to participate in the Group text conversations. Cloud text allows users to text friends or groups through computers and friend 4 G.

Friend 4 G includes VGA front-facing camera and the T-Mobile video chat powered by Qik. Friend 4 G also includes physical jump key, which allows customers to switch between live applications during a telephone conversation or assign keyboard shortcuts.

To the best Android Smartphone devices will also be integrated with Google services, including Gmail and Google maps and Android market access.

Friend 4 G comes with DriveSmart by T-Mobile, which calling, and senders the recipient is driving and will respond when it is safe. DriveSmart plus offers the same functionality, although it is activated automatically when handset is located in the vehicle in running order, as well as functions for parental controls for when small drivers are behind the wheel.

New friend 4 G is the rudder with Facebook and Twitter applications with users who can update their status from the notification and review of their channels from the start screen. Users can also sync your social network contacts in the address book of your phone.

Friend 4 G has also "media room" one-stop destination for music, videos, movies, YouTube, T-Mobile TV and Slacker radio. Customers can rent or purchase of their films and Television programs from the Samsung Media Hub.

Device pricing and availability have yet to be announced, although T-Mobile said, the United States can expect in Matt Black or Pearl magenta this spring.

Friend mark seeks to recover after taking some positive results in October 2009, when a hardware problem on servers managed by Microsoft subsidiary danger, containing the personal data of nearly 800 000 friend users phones.

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Homefront in the PS3, Xbox 360 $ 42 new sales-Punch jump (blog)

The retailer Amazon.com Inc. this week are discounted to THQ Inc. Homefront Playstation 3 Sony Corporation and Microsoft Corp. Xbox 360 in less than 42 $ new game sales.

This week in the possession of the Homefront PS3 SKU price reduction to $ 41.96, and the Xbox 360 SKUS in possession of $ 41.96 discount price.

Homefront is a warships based FPS title, which contains the single-player campaign and online multiplayer anti-personnel and vehicle warfare up to 32 users.

Sony sales began on Feb. Playstation 3 160 GB Killzone 3 bundle that includes the PS3 hardware SKU of 160 GB and $ 299 with a copy of Killzone 3.99.

PS3 160 GB SKU sold, for $ 299.99 and 320 GB SKU for $ 349.99.

Playstation move, PS3 console bundle includes the 320 GB SKU, the Playstation move Controller, the Playstation eye and sporting Champions at $ 399.99.

November sales of the Xbox 360, Microsoft began a 250 GB Kinect Special Edition bundle at $ 399.99.

With the Xbox 360 4 GB sells for $ 299 in a bundle Kinect. 99.

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What is the cost? Return on investment (ROI) of social media can be an intangible-The nonprofit times

What's It Cost?
ROI of social media can be an intangible

There's Facebook, Second Life, Myspace, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter and now Jumo. There are many smaller social networking platforms. When it comes to deploying assets, where to be in cyberspace is a tough decision.

Catholic Relief Services (CRS) in Baltimore is going through the evaluation process. CRS is one of Facebook's 500 million active users, and also tweets on Twitter and posts videos to YouTube. CRS has a Myspace profile with 3,288 "friends," although it is not seeing a lot of activity there and managers are trying to decide what to do with it. Deleting it is a serious option.

"We, like many other nonprofits, struggle to accurately measure the financial ROI (return on investment) of our efforts," said Laura Durington, online community manager at the CRS. "We look at Facebook Insights, Google Analytics and we look at source code reports in our online fundraising program. But, it only gives us part of the picture. Still, I would argue, although it's more of a hunch, that we are getting something important out of these efforts."

According to an Idealware study, "The Nonprofit Social Media Decision Guide," CRS isn't the only organization considering cutting back on Myspace. The Portland, Maine nonprofit technology group surveyed 460 nonprofit employees, held six telephone focus groups, and a case study collection in which 273 staff members provided details of which social media channels they are using and who they are targeting.

As you might expect, since 2008 Facebook has seen a huge increase in popularity and there has been a substantial decline in Myspace nonprofit users. Many nonprofits aren't investing much time in it and are seeing decreasing benefits.

Myspace cut its staff in half in January, letting go 500 employees. The decision came after the social media website was revamped in October 2010 to run with fewer people. MySpace had 54.4 million unique U.S. visitors in November, down 15 percent from a year ago.

Julie Somogyi, director of integrated marketing and communications for the Girl Scouts of the Greater Chicago area, believes the organization needs to focus on the social media websites where their girls and volunteers are virtually congregating. "Even though we did have some initial interaction with Myspace a couple of years ago, we began investing our time more heavily in Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn in the past two years because those are the most active sites within our key demographics," she said.

According to Andrea Berry, Idealware's director of partnerships and learning and coauthor of the study, nonprofits are using social media websites for public interest, although the idea of fundraising is always in the back of their minds. "A lot of nonprofits are struggling to use it as a fundraising tool but use it as a way to reach out to new people, potential supporters, engage current supporters and reinforce their brand for key people in their area like the press," she said.
More than 30 percent of people surveyed who use Facebook and Twitter said they know that these social media sites are reaching new supporters for their organization and more than 75 percent responded saying they think Facebook and Twitter are reaching new supporters. The numbers jumped to 80 percent for sites such as Facebook, Twitter, video sharing sites and blogs for nonprofit managers who responded they think that these sites are enhancing their relationship with their audience.

"It's a good way to reach an untapped audience," Durington said. "When we started we weren't sure what to expect three years ago. Every article about it said this is going to be this huge boom for fundraising but very quickly most nonprofits found that not to be the case."

CRS uses Google Analytics, but it's still hard to see the absolute correlation for the Facebook donations because the tracking gets lost and it becomes a "grey area." They also spend more time promoting and encouraging people to go to their own website rather than the organization's Facebook page, although, the Facebook page is becoming a place where people can go to build and engage in an educated community, Durington said.

"Our commenter's seem to be very educated about global issues," she said. "We have witnessed a lot of some interesting dialogue, not just between us and them but also with each other."
It's an interesting experiment to see what people are talking about. CRS's goal is to boost traffic to their website and have Facebook be a referral point. Durington said that the people going from the Facebook page to their website is in the single-digit percentage but it is equal to the number of referrals they get from Google.

Facebook isn't as reliable as a website but it's starting to be a place were people look for information. "A website is always going to be number one. You shouldn't be using a Facebook instead of a website," Berry said.

ROI for nonprofits is hard to calculate, said Thomas A. McLaughlin, vice president of consulting services for the Nonprofit Finance Fund and contributing editor for The NonProfit Times. One way to see if there is anything happening is to look at the overall fundraising of operations. "In reality, even assuming that organizations have record keeping for this, its almost likely the best we could hope is to calculate a marginal interest on fundraising costs and attribute it to social media if that's the only thing that's changed," he said.

Another reason ROI is so hard to determine is it doesn't translate to mean the same thing for nonprofits. "ROI is popular for for-profit businesses and doesn't transfer easily to the nonprofit world," McLaughlin said. "There is no such thing as an investment in the nonprofit world like there is for for-profits. It would be more of a cost."

One cost expense would be if an organization hired an employee solely to work on social media campaigns or trying to break down the time of an employee who works on overall fundraising campaigns. "If organizations can somehow isolate the employees' times in various elements of fundraising, social media will be one of those elements," McLaughlin said. "If you get lucky enough, some organizations might track what that employee spends their time on. In those cases you might be able to strike some approximation on dollars and time spent on social media."

For the Girls Scouts of Greater Chicago and Northwest Indiana, instead of having one person designated exclusively to social media, they include the social media responsibilities in three marketing team members' job descriptions.

Maria Wynne, CEO of the Girl Scouts of the Greater Chicago area, thinks its important to have a place to go on the Internet for all ages, which is why the Girl Scouts just launched their new website, www.worldsstrongestgirl.org for girls 13 and younger. "It's a place for girls where they can express themselves that is safe, with anonymity and the latitude to be imaginary about a story or tell something that is very concrete," Wynne said.

The website is animated with cartoon-like characters that represent badges. Girls can click on a badge and write a story or create their own badge. "The younger girls are very much about something that interacts and engages them," she said.

For girls who are 13 and older, they want to network and talk with people online. One of the reasons why they created the website was to give the younger girls an entry point for interacting with the Girls Scouts online with an activity that isn't threatening.

"The financial value of those communications is secondary and although some decline in the program and marketing print budget has been realized, the intangibles are a bit more difficult to quantify," Somogyi said. "For example, when girls use social media to reach out to their friends and family members to ask them if they would like to order Girl Scout cookies, there is a financial advantage to the girl and her troop because they have reached more customers, and to the council as a whole because proceeds from the Girl Scout cookie program support how we can best support our membership locally."

On the Girl Scouts' Facebook page, girls and volunteers are connecting and even creating their own Facebook pages for their capstone projects and other programs that the Girl Scouts participate in. The Girl Scouts are also on Twitter and LinkedIn. "I think it's the way people expect entities to participate in the virtual world today," Wynne said. "Along with having a presence, it is for many the practical way of sharing information."

For example, Wynne has seen new leaders and volunteers ask for advice on their Facebook page and almost immediately there are 10 responses from other members of the Facebook group. "It's a mentoring and networking tool for best practices and a way for people to ask for help in the volunteer community," she said.

Justin Perkins, director of nonprofit strategy for Care2.com, has been working with nonprofits for five years with online marketing and donor improvements. He was inspired three years ago to make the ROI in social media calculating tool when Facebook Causes launched to help nonprofits decide if this would be worth their time and money.

"There was initial skepticism that there was a vital business model there (Facebook)," Perkins said. "Before investing time, it was ideal to come up with a tool to look before you leap."

The calculator was created using typical metrics that nonprofits use to measure online success like how many employees or volunteers are working on a social media campaign, how many hours a week they spend on it, how many "friends" they recruit, how many of those "friends" sign up for an e-mail list and ultimately how many become donors.

The calculator allows nonprofits to plug in their information or number goals in a four-step process to see their potential ROI. It can be found on www.frogloop.com/social-networks-calculator

Perkins believes nonprofits that started using social media had a sort of "gold rush mentality" but they need to figure out if it will actually be promising for them in the end. "What's the actual cost? What's the opportunity cost if we do this at the expense of something else? What is something else we could be doing to have a higher ROI," he said are some questions that nonprofits need be asking themselves when using social media. NPT

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Why the importance of computer partnership-InformationWeek

The underlying connection was closed: A connection that was expected to be kept alive was closed by the server. For years, the federal government has launched one policy initiative after another to protect critical IT infrastructure in coordination with the private sector. There's been progress, but the threats--computer breaches from foreign parties, fast-spreading worms, and hidden malware--have outpaced the advances, leaving computer systems and networks across industries more vulnerable than ever.

What can businesses and Uncle Sam to, together, it reverse this dangerous trend? There must be three areas of immediate focus. First, the public and private sectors need to share more information--more parties must be included and new platforms used. Second, they must pay more attention to defending against attacks that threaten critical IT infrastructure and even damage physical facilities. Third, their collaboration must be ratcheted up to the next level-the-real-time identification and response as threats occur and, more to the point, "moving security practices from a reactionary posture to one that's proactive and preemptive," says Rich Baich, leader of Deloitte's Cyber Threat Intelligence Group.

In other words, the growing number of cybersecurity "partnerships" being established between the federal government and the business community are more than a one-way street. The feds may be driving the effort through initiatives such as Homeland Security's 2009 National Infrastructure Protection Plan, developed in response to a presidential directive, but companies stand that benefit from the more resilient cyber defenses that result from such collaboration.

The feds have defined 18 infrastructure areas considered essential national interests. They include the agriculture, banking, chemical and defense industries, as well as government facilities. The goal is to protect the computer systems and networks that serve those vital sectors from increasingly winning threats, including those running the hostile actors such as terrorist organizations and rogue nations.

Even the Department of Defense is looking to work with the private sector. When Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynn recently outlined the DOD's plans for bolstering its cyber defenses, he called for increased cooperation with industry. "With the threats we face, working together is not only a national imperative to, it's one of the great technical challenges of our time," he said in February at the RSA Conference in San Francisco.

Over the past two years, the DOD has developed "active defenses" that use sensors, software, and signatures to protect its military networks. Next, Lynn said, the agency will make its cyber capabilities available to the private sector "to help protect the networks that support government operations and critical infrastructure," such as the power grids, telecommunications networks, and defense will systems.

Several organizations have laid the groundwork for increased collaboration on cybersecurity. Since 2003, the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) has been providing updates on threats that industrial control systems and other computing infrastructure. The 42,000 members of InfraGard, and partnership between the FBI and the private sector that dates back to 1996, are devoted to it, creating the "actionable intelligence" for infrastructure protection.

Much of the activity revolves around information sharing in key industries. For example, the National Council of Information Sharing and Analysis Centers supports threat response for companies in financial services, healthcare, public transportation, and a handful of other industries.

Information sharing is important, but it's not enough. Scott Charney calls, VP of trustworthy computing with Microsoft, calls the information "and the tool, not an objective."

Industry-specific initiatives are evolving into something more substantial. The Financial Services Sector Coordinating Council, whose members include Bank of America, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, and Visa, coordinates the protection of the IT and other infrastructure operated banks, insurance companies, and other financial institutions. The council does that work in collaboration with the departments of Homeland Security and Treasury, and in December it took things a step further via a memorandum of understanding with the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Commerce Department, and Homeland Security that paves the way for financial firms and government agencies to work together on the development of cybersecurity technologies and test beds.

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Security against identity theft-the Times Herald-Record

"Nothing in our garbage, if it is shredded," says Robert Unger, CPA and Certified Fraud Examiner Judelson, Giordano on ampersand Siegel in Ashtabula. DOMINICK FIORILLE/Times Herald-Record, the FBI says that identity theft is the fastest growing crime in the United States over time, tax – if it is, And the personal information floating around the Internet and in the mailboxes of citizens – is ruthless to prime attempted theft your personal data.Good news: E-submission by the State, the IRS, or New York is safe – in fact, many experts on the security of your computer is recommended. There are also some bad news: you should be very careful, with everything else, including leaving personal information in your mailbox. E-file. Experts argue that electronically is safe, and probably your refund sooner. If not (e) the file, the envelope directly to the post office, not the location in the mailbox. Keep your tax returns on safe safe. Shred documents that you will not have to keep. Do not use e-mail for sensitive information. Be aware of phishing. The IRS's e-mail. If you receive a call that from the IRS, the IRS to verify by calling 800-829-1040. Source: myID. comGreg Miller, owner of CMIT solutions of Goshen, which provides computer support and security for small and medium-sized enterprises, is warning people about a "phishing scams", or in the practice of sending e-mailin order to filch the personal data. These e-mails look very professional and masquerade as legitimate communications from existing companies, or even the IRS. But following the links in the e-takes you to the website of the lousy thugs trying to trick you to give up its information.So, all verified and never give out your password information or social security number, Miller said. Miller also warns that any personal work on an unsecured Wi-Fi network. In other words, don't try to file to your local coffee shop with free Wi-Fi. But even a home network may be vulnerable, how to use WEP encryption — which is 10 years old technology – instead of the more credible the WPA encryption.If nothing, Miller suggests, consultation with an expert on computer. Many people to wireless routers with the encryption in a credible, he said, but I don't know how to turn it on. "It is not hard to turn on (encryption), but it's not intuitive," said Miller. Rob Unger, CPA and Certified Fraud Examiner Judelson, Giordano on ampersand Siegel in Middletown, said keeping information safe has become a major concern for the people who prepare taxes. "Nothing gets in our garbage when it is shredded, '' he said.Unger encourages people never use email for things such as social security numbers, "shred" confidential documents, and let sit in your mailbox.Patrick Turner, a small pond advice in Wallkill, which also provides computer support and security for small and medium business, agrees with Unger. He said that the main rule should be never include any personal information in e-mail. "Email was simply not designed with regard to safety," he said. Turner also suggest updating all viruses and anti-spyware software.But (e) the application is another matter. Most experts advise people electronically. "(E) programs are solid in terms of encryption practices," said Brad Maione, a spokesman for the New York State Department of Taxation, The practice is also lit up. From 11. March of the 3.9 million New Yorkers their state tax returns filed electronically, in comparison with 690,000 New Yorkers, who on paper, said Maione.ssacco@th-record.com
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Nokia and Microsoft; partnership to Trump other smartphones? More Telecommunications News

Separate these two technology companies are hopeless in the market of business smartphone, but you can future partnership between the couple themselves ready to crack the business market of mobile – and inevitably defeated rim and Android device?

This is a funny thought.

Finish phone giant Nokia, has announced the latest plans for the kit, all their smartphones with Microsoft Windows phone 7 software that could lead to revolutionary business phone in making.

Offers an alternative to the popular BlackBerry phone can be difficult to market, but the popularity of Windows personal computers and Laptops may, it has unbeatable advantage of the mobile scene.

Microsoft know business, so that plans to crack the market corporate phone comes as no shock, but with Nokia, exclaiming that the 2011 and 2012 will be its "transition years" This means it can be a fair while, until we see all the signs of which joint device press shelves.

However, with Microsoft, the design of its operating system to comply with the marketing instead of it, is he shot himself in the foot before the war even started?

We think that Microsoft should stick to what he knows best and challenge business minds are identical, the partnership with Nokia can mean a "one size satisfies all the" used by enterprises worldwide, or embarrassing plummet in cellular unknown.

What are your thoughts on loyalty? Who do you think will continue to run High as the best business smartphone?

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Site gives students Web access to Open Source calculation Tools-Campus Technology

A small British company has launched a set of free open source calculation utilities for students. The bamboo Toolbox includes access to software that is developed by open source communities that runs in a Web browser hosted by Hughes Bennett education. If a student wants to save calculations, he or she can register at a "personal laptop" for a small monthly fee.

A dozen utilities create the current offerings, including:

R Project for statistical analysis and graphical modelingGNU Octave for numerical computationsMaxima for manipulating symbolic and algebraic expressionsObjective-C for the object-oriented features add to c routines.

"A major obstacle to the adoption of open source software in higher education is the cost of installing, configuring, and maintaining software. The result is that there are many excellent open source software packages for students, but they are not accessible, because students and higher education institutions do not have the money and staff in the difficult economic climate of today, "said Chi Nguyen, editor of the site. "Bamboo Tools removes that barrier by eliminating the cost of installation and maintenance. Now, students and institutions of higher education can be directly used the bamboo Tools software collection with their studies. "

A subscription of £ 2 per month grants the user access to a single laptop for a tool in the Toolbox. The laptop works like a wiki, allowing the Subscriber work done through the software, including previous iterations. Further information can be found here.

About the author

Dian Schaffhauser is a writer who covers technology and business. Send your higher education technology news to her dian@dischaffhauser.com.

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