) 
My Blackberry has been Bing’ed!
If you are a Verizon Blackberry user, you may have noticed that suddenly, and without warning, your default search options were changed to Bing earlier this week. When you search via your BlackBerry ‘Start’ or ‘Go to’ page is now Bing.
First of all, don’t panic. You have not been the target of malware, or a prank, or any other bit of random reprogramming. All is as Verizon intends it to be.
Clearly, Microsoft and Verizon made a deal of some sort, and clearly not everyone loved the idea. I’ve certainly heard some feedback in the last week about the change, most of it simply related to having the choice taken away. Take note, you can still enter ‘Google’ or any other search engine you want to, but it is an additional step. In the grand scheme of things, while having choices reduced generally does not make anyone happy, this is most likely not the worst thing that will ever happen in the world of technology.
This type of behind the scenes marketing deal makes sense from a dollars and cents standpoint, I am sure. It just feels a bit intrusive. That being said, it is hard to believe that this will reduce the functionality of anyone’s Blackberry in any way, after all, although we all love having more choices, either Google, Bing, or one of several other search engines will serve perfectly well to deliver up the information we are looking for.
I think it is safe to say, that in a world where consumers are subject to marketing in everything from the internet, television, and even their movies, it is not a surprise to see marketing enter into the ubiquitous world of smart phones. As these types of partnerships and marketing programs mature, it seems likely that we will see a lot more sponsored links, preferred vendors, and pre-loaded applications on our smart phones.
In: Tech Education, Technology
From the ‘Technologies to Think About’ File…
With the proliferation of data from multiple sources, hard drives are filling up faster than ever. Frankly, even with reduced costs of storage, content is being created at unprecedented rates, and the cost to store and back up this mountain of data is becoming a real concern to business managers. Stack on this the increasing need to find green IT initiatives, and you have real issues – but at least these issues have real solutions available!
The answer, which is rarely spoken of in small business, but commonly utilized in larger companies, is data deduplication. Data deduplication is, at the simplest level, a process undertaken by software or a hardware device to find duplicate data and replace that data with a marker pointing to the original data. Think about a file or segment of a file that is saved in 30 employees personal file folders. The deduplication process finds the original, then puts a pointer in each of the other locations, cutting the space to 1/30th approximately of what it was on the storage device with no change to how the user experiences their data.
The benefits are significant:
- Has been shown to reduce size of back ups by up to 90% in some environments
- Reduces required disk space thus reducing disk expansion costs
- Reduces energy costs as less hard drives are utilized, less heat produced, etc
- Restore times reduced due to less actual data in data or disaster recovery
If you are interested in data deduplication as part of a cost reduction, a ‘green’ initiative, or just as a sensible way to manage growing data stores, talk to your IT staff or IT consultant about it. There are numerous choices on the market with different costs/benefits to fit your business needs.
Personally, I think that the combination of reduced hard drive requirements coupled with the positive impact on total data being backed up alone would be a motivator to take a hard look at these solutions!
If you would like to learn a bit more, take a look at HP’s data deduplication page for some additional information -
Happy computing!
Richard Brunke
In: Tech Education, Technology
