Technology In Check

For medium sized companies with aspirations of becoming really big, this is one to play close attention to.

There’s a move by ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) to expand the name space used for what are called top-level domains. In short, there are a few top-level domain in the world, such as .com, .net, and .org. However in a news release today, ICANN announced that it is planning to expand the “real-estate” available at the top level.

What this means for business is that there will be a whole range of new names available. For example, if you’re willing to pony up the dough (and if you’re fast enough to get in on the application process) you might be able to acquire the top-level domain name of .acme. Or .yourname.

The possibilities here are staggering from a marketing perspective. Already, the news release cites certain cities that want to have access to their own names as a top level. So if you control the .van top level domain, you would then be able to market websites like canucks.van, dining.van, hotels.van …

The possibilities are staggering.

From a technical perspective, if you know what IPv6 means, then you’ll likely see that thjis new decision from ICANN will speed up adoption of the new protocol. Then again, if you don’t know what IPv6 means, then check back here again next week, and I’ll explain it.

I was visiting a client his week, and I came across a situation that I’ve seen a number of times. They were running a relatively new version of some software, but they were behind a service pack level (they were running service pack 1, and the current recommended level is SP2).

I was thinking about this a bit, and it occurred to me that this is a tendency I’ve seen a few times previously; a tech support provider feels that things are stable and working properly. So why bother to upgrade to the latest service pack? After all, it might break things, right?

Not always. Continue Reading »

Web 2.0 brought us social networking sites like MySpace or Facebook, as well as popularizing blogs like this one. It was a dramatic shift in thinking about the interweb, changing it from being a tool to being a place to play.

Web 2.1 expanded on that functionality by adding mashups, web-based applications like Google Docs, and expanding the collaborative sphere with tools like Microsoft’s Sharepoint. People started to look at how they could expand the boundaries of what they were working on, and how they could do things on the Internet instead of the local machine.

And today I read about some new items coming out now that I think of as Web 2.2 because it again changes how the world will see computing.

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While at a training session for some Microsoft products a couple weeks back, the speaker moved away from talking about pure technology for a few minutes. Instead, he spoke about a problem that faces many companies - retaining new, younger staff. The problem, he suggested, had nothing to do with wages, benefits or the people they work with. His theory was that it had everything to do with technology.

Let me explain.

Continue Reading »