Enter Steve Jobs, with top hat and iPad

Apple's CEO flies to New York City to work his magic on the media elite

Photo: Apple Inc. Cheesy Photoshop job: Philip Elmer-DeWitt

The tech blogs were abuzz this week with sightings of Steve Jobs in Manhattan -- in the newsroom of the New York Times (NYT), on the third floor of the News Corp. (NWS) tower and in an Asian fusion restaurant wearing, according to New York magazine, "a very MORE

National security analytics is no child's game

Building technology to suss out bad guys is the easy part. Getting agencies to collaborate? Not so much.

By Stephen Brobst, chief technology officer, Teradata Corporation

Brobst: Don't blame volume of data for security lapses. Photo: Teradata.

When President Barack Obama or then-national security advisor Condoleezza Rice observed that intelligence agencies failed "to connect the dots" for either the botched Christmas bombing of Northwest flight 253 or the tragedy of 9/11, they MORE

Inside Obama's (MacBook) White House

The President may carry a BlackBerry, but his assistants are glued to their Macs

White House staff and others use Apple (AAPL) MacBook Pros to monitor President Obama's live YouTube interview Feb. 1, 2010. (Official White House Photo of the Day by Samantha Appleton)

[Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter @philiped]

The kids are alright

How millennials are altering the IT landscape, mostly for the better.

By Gary Curtis, chief technology strategist, Accenture

Curtis: Ignore Gen Y at your peril. Photo: Accenture.

For a new generation of employees, information technology is no longer a question ("is this okay with you, boss?") but rather an answer ("that's what it took to get the job done").

As the baby boomers begin to retire over the next decade, millennials – those MORE

John Chambers: Recovery continues, Cisco to hire in the U.S.

Cisco CEO John Chambers says he plans to hire as many as 3,000 workers soon – perhaps half in the U.S. Photo: Cisco.

John Chambers is often in a sunny mood, but on Wednesday he had some obvious reasons: Cisco posted financial results that blew past Wall Street's expectations, signaling that despite the rough economy businesses are spending on technology again.

I caught up with him after the earnings announcement to MORE

Facebook turns 6!

Mark Zuckerberg

The social networking site is all grown up.

Facebook celebrates its sixth birthday today. Just one year ago, Fortune put founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg on the magazine's cover in a story entitled "How Facebook is taking over our lives." The site had 150 million users. Today, that number has more than doubled to 350 million users.

There's no question Facebook has emerged as one of the most significant Internet MORE

Dick Brass: Why Microsoft is 'failing'

The former New York Daily News editor who ran Bill Gates' Tablet PC division tells all

In the week since Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad, there's been a lot of talk about where this leaves Amazon's (AMZN) Kindle.

"But the much more important question," writes Dick Brass in an essay prominently displayed on the OpEd page of Thursday's New York Times,

"is why Microsoft, America's most famous and prosperous technology company, no longer MORE

Cisco earnings: Great expectations

Here's the downside of being a rock star: People expect you to rock. So it is for Cisco (CSCO), the networking powerhouse that managed to cut $1 billion during the steepest part of the downturn and come out swinging.

It looks like the company will outpace analyst expectations for last quarter's revenue and profit when it reports earnings after the bell today. Trouble is, Wall Street already expects Cisco to do MORE

The myth of the free Apple iPad

Can Steve Jobs' tablet do for magazines what the sneaker phone did for Sports Illustrated?

Image: Time Inc.

Joe Zeff, who ran Time Magazine's graphics department for a few years while I was there, is getting some attention for an idea he floated on his new Design Blog: publishers, he suggests, should lure readers to their struggling magazines by giving away free Apple (AAPL) iPads in return for paid subscriptions.

It's MORE

Grab your tinfoil hats! Google teams up with the NSA

Though not confirmed by either organization, the mere mention of the two entities in the same sentence will have many privacy watchdogs on high alert.

The Washington Post is reporting that Google has enlisted the NSA to help secure their sensitive data.  In the wake of the Chinese hacker break-in, tensions are high at Google and other high tech firms that cyber attacks could compromise sensitive trade secrets.

Under an agreement that is still MORE