WordPress continues to go from strength to strength as both a blogging platform and a CMS. The latest version – 2.9 “Carmen” – includes some useful enhancements that content creators will appreciate. For those that don’t like to go with a .0 release, WordPress 2.9.1 is now out. It fixes a few small niggles with the initial WordPress 2.9 that affected people with older versions of PHP and that used the scheduled posts feature of WordPress. [more...]

According to Dell’Oro Group figures released this month, the VoIP marketing is still a two horse race between Cisco and Avaya. The market for IP Phones grew by 10 Percent, which is a promising sign. They have also reported that the Unified Communications market grew in the third quarter of the year. The top two Unified Communications vendors, Avaya and Cisco, both posted double digit revenue gains, compared to last quarter.

“The second half of the year is typically stronger for the Enterprise Voice market, and the third quarter of this year was no exception for the Unified Communications segment,” commented Alan Weckel, Director at Dell’Oro Group. “Although we expect vendors to experience strong fiscal year-end results in the fourth quarter of 2009 and 2010, we do not expect vendors’ fiscal year-ends to be as strong as they were prior to 2008 for quite some time,”

Things are growing, but we’re still a way off the boom years of VoIP. The gradual migration continues, and the leading players remain much the same.

It is a bad week for data loss. First, Sidekick, or more specifically Danger (owned and run by Microsoft and operating the service for T-Mobile) lost a large amount of user data. People have warned about the Sidekick service for a while. Essentially, data is stored in the cloud, and not on the device. A storage network migration went (very) wrong, and Microsoft / Danger lost millions of Sidekick users’ data.

A bug has also emoerged in the latest version of Apple’s OS X, So the problem isn’t just with cloud services. This from the Guardian:

Apple has admitted that its latest operating system harbours a bug that can accidentally delete data belonging to the computer’s owner. The glitch occurs when some users who upgraded to the Snow Leopard – which was released at the end of August – log into a “guest” account on their machines. When they log back in under their own name, all of the files in their home directory – such as documents, music and videos – have been deleted.

Leading to some annoyance on the Apple discussion forums. OS X does include back up software (aka “Time Machine”) which enables users with back ups to restore their data. The moral? If your data is stored in the cloud, make sure someone is responsible for back ups – either by keeping a copy on local storage, by backing up to another provider, or by ensuring that your provider is responsible for back ups – although a recent informal survey of providers Ts and Cs left me distinctly unimpressed. Most of them boiled down to “we’ll try and backup your data, but we might not, and even if we do, we are committing that we’ll get your data back” – and that was for paid back up services!

Data is still data, wherever it is. Hard drives fail and operational errors happen. An independent (and separate) back up is the best insurance you have against these failures.

There’s a gadget that has had our interest for a little while now. The first encounter was in St James’ Park, where this wallet sized device was enabling the real-time uploading of photos in the middle of a picnic. Vodafone has now launched the Novatel Wireless Intelligent Mobile Hotspot 2352 – or MiFi to its friends – available on a data package from now.

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One of the great things about social media and web 2.0 tools is just how easy it is to take content from one place and put it in to another – it is also why it so terrifies many it traditionalists.

This screencast shows how to take a image gallery from photo sharing site Flickr and place it into a Wordpress blog post. The screen cast itself is embedded from Jing/Screencast.com to this site (which is a Wordpress blog – did you see what I did there?). [more...]