Jason Snyder
Executive Editor
Jason Snyder is executive editor at CIO.
Crackpot tech: Wireless power
Ever since Nikola Tesla lit bulbs on his grounds without wires, the promise of wireless power has stirred hope and interest, but little success. Today, with the wide array of electronic devices that require power, the promise of...
Crackpot tech: Pervasive computing
How many times have you missed an important phone call because you were in a meeting? Or wasted 15 minutes searching the building for one of your co-workers? Or sent an important job to the printer, only find that it’s out of toner?...
Crackpot tech: Optical computing
For years, chipmakers have bumped against the ceiling of Moore’s Law. Current fabrication techniques can’t keep CPU speeds climbing at the meteoric rates of decades past. Because of this, today’s advances focus on multiple cores and...
Crackpot tech: Nanotechnology
No technology has the potential to revolutionized enterprise computing like nanotechology -- at least that's the impression given by the breadth and intensity of experiments in going small these days. Practical or not, nearly every...
Google gears up for offline Apps
Beat to the offline punch enabled by its own Google Gears technology, Google appears on the verge of leveraging Gears to enable users of its Google Apps online productivity suite to work on documents and spreadsheets while not...
Job hunt 2.0: Get paid to be interviewed
IT workers with one eye on the want ads now have a means for making their passive job search lucrative -- by getting paid to interview with potential poaching organizations.Seeking to provide employers with improved hiring options,...
Web 2.0 to earn enterprise cred in 2008
The majority of IT departments that currently view Web 2.0 technologies as trivial, consumer-grade frivolities will eat their words by year's end and instead lead the charge to implement RSS, mashup, and social networking...
XML to the e-voting rescue
Fearful that Election 2008 will devolve into an e-voting miasma of epic proportions? Well, wax conspiratorial no longer.At least that's the tenor of today's OASIS announcement of EML (Election Markup Language) 5.0, which has garnered...
Yahoo's one-armed OpenID embrace
As much as Yahoo's OpenID support is worthy of applause, perhaps that applause should remain one-handed for the time being. After all, the company's upcoming beta campaign to allow members to tap the fledgling digital identity...
Analysts: OOXML to TKO ODF in late rounds
Position is everything when defending market share, and it just might be that Microsoft, both market-wise and technology-wise, has what it takes to ultimately defend its productivity app dominance from those backing the ODF document...
Microsoft 'spyware' to jack into your brain waves
A recently published Microsoft patent application should send shivers down the spines of those already paranoid about companies' employee-monitorning capabilities -- and once the technology in question is developed, companies will...
First Google Android phone suite completed
While the world awaits an ear-candy update from Steve Jobs at this week's Macworld, the iPhone's most likely long-term mobile buzz disrupter, Google's Android platform, received a boost from a small California-based development firm...
Sun sounds death knell for datacenter
An intriguing blog post by Brian Cinque at Sun announces -- and hazily outlines -- the company's vision to consolidate its datacenters out of existence by 2015.The great migration to nothing will be evolutionary, Cinque writes,...
Rails stack inks $3.5 million deal
Engine Yard, a startup that allows businesses to outsource their Ruby on Rails app deployment needs, today received $3.5 million in Series A funding from Benchmark Capital, providing further evidence that Rails is a Java alternative...
App dev skills hot, youth not
Application developers and project managers top the list of sought-out IT pros, according to an Atlantic Associates' survey, which also noted that, when it comes to managing techies, folks are not fully psyched to wrangle work out of...
Google Fellows discuss parallel processing model
Google Fellows Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat have published a paper in this month's Communications of the ACM, a publication of the Association for Computing Machinery, detailing the programming model Google leverages to process more...
Google employees trade on optimism
A recently released study of trades undertaken in an internal predictive market in place at Google surfaced a quantifiable can-do spirit among the company's employees.Analyzing the predictive market trading behavior of 1,463...
Google PageRank to stem staph infections?
Just as Silicon Valley insiders are calling for a qualified scuttling of Google's PageRank algorithm in sussing out Web page relevance, U.K. researchers are turning to Google's golden formula to combat the spread of...
Muni Wi-Fi back on SF map
High perhaps on its recently announced $20 million in Series B funding, wireless networking startup Meraki Networks has announced it will lift up the tar-smeared municipal Wi-Fi baton dropped by EarthLink in September 2007, stating...