I’ve attended every Office 2.0 conference so far and found it to be a fascinating cutting edge experience, and a source of both great contacts and fascinating and useful information. Office 2.0 is a collective experiment organized every year in San Francisco, CA and aimed at discovering the future of online productivity & collaboration. It is a unique gathering of visionaries, thought leaders, and customers using innovative online services for getting things done at the office, at home, and on the go. Last year I spoke on an enterprise collaboration panel and also organized PlayStation 3’s running Firefox on Sony Plasma TV screens. Plug a keyboard and mouse into a PS3 and you have a pretty good cloud computing home…

At the recent Fortune Brainstorm conference I spoke with Michael Capellas, CEO of First Data, which processes about one-half of all US credit card transactions. He said that the company collects massive amounts of financial data and that this part of the business is just ten percent of revenues–he wants it to be one half of total revenues within the next two years. First Data revenues were $8 billion in 2007. He said:”I probably know more about what you are likely to do next than you do.” One of the financial data services First Data is considering offering is to allow consumers to control their own financial reports–these are used to determine credit ratings–which determine interest rates. Those interest rates…

If blocking P2P traffic is bad, isn’t banning it worse? It’s now been reported not just once, but twice, that AT&T is banning P2P traffic by its wireless customers. That will not make iPhone 3G customers happy. So if the first item on the agenda tomorrow for Kevin Martin’s Commission is to penalize Comcast for “secretly degrading” Internet traffic by throttling back BitTorrent packets last year, shouldn’t the second item be AT&T’s open and complete degradation of all P2P traffic, on its airwaves? And wouldn’t you want to look at how AT&T might be managing P2P traffic on the ground as well? Or, is there only selective outrage — inside or outside the FCC — when it comes to stated…

Last week, TechCrunch’s Jason Kincaid wrote about an obvious Twitter vulnerability that allowed a user called “johng77536″ to game the popular micro-blogging service to add thousands of followers (subscribers) in a short period of time. The “johng77536″ account has since been disabled but a security researcher tracking Twitter security flaws and weaknesses has discovered a new vulnerability that lets users easily game the “follow” system. Aviv Raff has launched a new Web site called TwitPwn.com with basic details of his discovery: Twitter suffers from a vulnerability which allows an attacker to force his victim to follow him automatically. Twitter security team was notified on 31-July-2008. Technical details will be added as soon as this vulnerability [is] fixed. Raff showed me…

If you want a central location to store your bookmarks, you may want to give del.icio.us a try. Instead of saving bookmarks locally in your browser, you can save them on the web, and access them any time. Today, del.icio.us got a redesign. Besides the look and feel, they have improved their folksonomy. Tags are much easier to manage and organize. Search is improved too. Del.icio.us is the second place to go for web searches if I can’t find anything useful in Google because their search results are ordered by user popularity instead of “PageRank”. If you are a del.icio.us user, what do you think of the new interface? Here are my bookmarks if you want to add me a…

Updated throughout: EDS said Thursday that shareholders have approved the HP acquisition of the IT services company. Internally, rumors about impending layoffs at EDS are surfacing, but a company spokesman called the rumors “completely factually incorrect.” According to a statement, 98.8 percent of EDS common stock was voted for the HP deal–that equates to 72.4 percent of the outstanding shares. The HP purchase of EDS has been cleared by the European Commission and U.S. regulators. Pending clearance from other jurisdictions HP’s purchase of EDS should close in the third quarter. Meanwhile, EDS and HP have settled five shareholder lawsuits following the merger announcement. Also see: HP’s Hurd: U.S. demand ’spotty’; Data center, app consolidation continues While all of this news…

A new whitepaper that Microsoft researchers are set to present at a conference next month sheds more light on Microsoft’s back-end cloud infrastructure.

I hate passwords - especially in a corporate setting. We’ve all been there - your password must be between 6-8 characters and must include at least one letter, one number, one symbol, yadda yadda yadda. Oh, and you’ll be asked to change it every 60 days. Sigh. OK,  I recognize that IT departments do that sort of stuff to keep the network safe. But I also can sympathize with employees who, because of password overload, write their passwords on sticky notes and keep them at their workstations. Yeah, like that’s keeping the network secure. Now, here comes RoboForm, a longtme password-management and form-filling product for consumers, with a new Enterprise version. The company released it a few months back but…

Sun released a preview SDK for JavaFX which gives developers a first look at the RIA play for Sun. Coté has a couple of videos up wth Nandini Ramani, the Director of Engineering for JavaFX and we did a Podcast with Joshua Marinacci as part of RIA Weekly that should be out this week. There are a number of cool things with the tooling (and how they plug into CS3) that give the impression Sun is really focused on creating some great experiences with JavaFX. One of the most compelling features of JavaFX is the ability to seamlessly move between the browser and the desktop. Being able to drag JavaFX content from the browser and turn it into a desktop…

Why build a new PC when, with a few easy upgrades, you can transform your old PC into one that feels like new (or at least newer!)? PC upgrades aren’t about boosting the power of your PC, but in allowing you to get more done in less time, or get your work (or play) done quicker or easier. Some upgrades do increase the overall performance of your PC (”Yeah! More power!!!”), but others are designed to make your existing PC easier to use.