Google, Facebook continue massive lobbying efforts in Q3

Google is on track to spend more money this year attempting to influence lawmakers than any other tech company

Google and Facebook continued to pour millions of dollars into political lobbying in the third quarter in attempts to influence U.S. lawmakers and have legislation written in their favor.

Google spent $3.94 million between July and September while Facebook spent $2.45 million, according to disclosure data published Tuesday.

The only tech-related company to outspend Google was Comcast, which is trying to persuade politicians to look favorably on a merger with Time Warner and spent $4.23 million during the quarter.

But Google stands as the largest spender in the entire tech industry to date this year. It has run up a $13 million bill lobbying Washington politicians and their offices on a range of issues as diverse as online regulation of advertising, cybersecurity, patent abuse, health IT, international tax reform, wind power and drones.

If industry spending continues at its current level, 2014 will mark the fourth year that Google has spent more money on federal lobbying than any other technology company.

Facebook began lobbying Washington in 2009 and has quickly risen to become the fourth-largest spender in the tech industry so far this year, behind Google, Comcast and AT&T.

The company's lobbying hits an equally diverse range of areas including cyber breaches, online privacy, free trade agreements, immigration reform, Department of Defense spending and intellectual property issues.

Another notable spender in the third quarter was Amazon, which plowed $1.18 million into its lobbying efforts. That represents a quarterly record for the Seattle company and is the second quarter in a row that it has spent more than $1 million on lobbying.

Amazon's lobbying was aimed at many of the same areas targeted by Google and Facebook, but covered additional subjects close to its business, including postal reform, online wine sales, mobile payments and Internet tax payments.

The money is funneled to D.C. lobbying firms that use it to push their clients' agendas to politicians and their staffers. The lobbying disclosure reports are published quarterly by the U.S. Senate and detail spending in general areas, but do not go into specifics.

Lobbying has long been an effective tool used by major companies, but it's only been in the last few years that Internet companies have started spending money in amounts to rival traditional tech giants.

During the third quarter, other major spenders included Verizon ($2.91 million), CTIA ($1.95 million), Microsoft ($1.66 million) and Oracle ($1.2 million).

Apple spent just over $1 million in the quarter lobbying on issues including consumer health legislation, transportation of lithium ion batteries, international taxes, e-books, medical devices and copyright.

---

Best Microsoft MCTS Certification, Microsoft MCITP Training at certkingdom.com

Best Places to Work in IT 2014: The three best organizations

What makes a company No. 1 in the eyes of its employees? We take a look at Quicken Loans, LinkedIn and Noah Consulting to find their secrets to success.

Work hard, have fun

What makes an organization a Best Place to work for IT professionals? If any one element can capture "bestness," it's the combination of rewarding work in an atmosphere that encourages camraderie.

This year, Quicken Loans, LinkedIn and Noah Consulting topped our large, midsize and small rankings, respectively, by keeping employees well compensated, challenged in their jobs and supported with extras like free lunch and foosball.

In the case of Quicken Loans, at left, the occasional three-wheeled transportation option is thrown into the mix as well.


A culture of excellence

Quicken Loans, the No. 1 large organization for 2014, is no stranger to the Best Places list. The online mortgage lender was No. 1 overall last year, and also topped the list between 2005 and 2007. (Large organizations have 5,000 or more U.S. employees.)

This year, the company additionally earned the top slot among all 100 Best Places organizations for employee retention, and was No. 4 for career development and No. 10 for benefits. (See Best Places by the Numbers for details.)

Quicken Loans proudly takes its place among firms driving the revitalization of downtown Detroit, as evidenced by this Motor City-inspired pool table.


Building skills, on the court and off

IT staffers at Quicken Loans are offered 200 hours of technical training each year, and in 2013 the company created a training program specifically for members of its IT team, with the goal helping them further their tech careers while also teaching them a wide range of soft skills, including communication, time management and leadership. A mentoring program helps identify which skills staffers need in order to reach the next level in their careers.

Employees are invited to blow off steam on the company's basketball court, which overlooks the Detroit skyline, or enter to win tickets to an NBA game; Quicken Loans founder Dan Gilbert owns the Cleveland Cavaliers.

LinkedIn: Fast-track career growth

The No. 1 midsize Best Place is LinkedIn, the Mountain View, Calif.-based company that runs the popular business-oriented social network. (Midsize organizations have between 1,000 and 4,999 U.S. employees.)

IT had a training budget of $350,000 last year for its 112 employees. Beyond that, each year employees are reimbursed up to $5,000 in tuition costs and/or the cost of technology certifications.

In addition, the firm ranked No. 7 of the 100 Best Places for employee retention, perhaps owing to the four weeks of paid time off that employees receive after one year of service, fully paid health insurance, a profit-sharing plan, stock options, overtime pay and individual employee bonuses.

Customer service is key for IT

LinkedIn is expanding globally, which creates opportunities for techies. IT hired 50 new employees and promoted 17% of its IT employees in the past year.

Unparalleled technical chops and a commitment to customer service is absolutely imperative for anyone working in IT at LinkedIn, according to Mike Jennings, senior director of LinkedIn's $31 million enterprise IT organization.

Per Jenning's directive, being a pleasure to do business with is a point of pride for IT at LinkedIn. IT support analysts like D'Artagnan Felarca, shown here, staff tech lounges where users are encouraged to make themselves comfortable in beanbag chairs and listen to music as they get their computing problems solved.


Having fun, pushing the limits

LinkedIn is now an 11-year-old company with nearly 3,500 employees, yet physically it still has the look and feel of an oh-so-cool Silicon Valley startup.

Workers cruise around the company's college-like campus on colorful beach bikes. There's free, made-to-order food in the cafe, an on-site health club, yoga and kickboxing classes, plus legendary parties hosted by IT, which has been known to transform the workplace into a full-on nightclub.

Then there is the great outdoors to conquer. Here, senior director Mike Jennings, right, goes in for extreme team-building with IT staffers Chris Arrington and Alex Lacayo.

Noah Consulting: Small footprint, nationwide reach

The No. 1 small Best Place is Noah Consulting, which specializes in the oil and gas, energy trading, and power and natural resources industries. Noah a virtual company, with consultants all over the country and just a small staff in its Houston headquarters. (Small organizations have fewer than 1,000 U.S. employees.)

The firm bridges the physical distance with highly sophisticated collaboration tools and annual all-company gatherings like the one shown here.

With just 60 IT employees, Noah prides itself on building a culture where consultants are willing to collaborate and pool their knowledge. Senior business analyst Jim Briggs says that team spirit pays off in the form of "a virtual network of people I trust" in California, Atlanta and Chicago.

All hands on deck

Tug-of-war is a highlight of Noah's annual summer gathering, where consultants and their families are flown in, put up in a hotel and treated to a weekend full of festivities, such as picnic suppers, themed entertainment and other family-friendly activities.

The summer gathering is just one way the small consultancy fosters work/life balance for employees who spend a lot of time on the road.

"Consulting is a particularly challenging environment to work in," says Shannon Tassin, who co-founded Noah in 2008 with two colleagues. "Our intention was to create a company where not only do employees feel valued and make connections, but we got to know their families as well."

Accessible bosses, engaged employees

Employees like Prasanna Balakrishnan, who has 13 years of consulting experience and has been a principal at Noah for two years, appreciate the firm's collaborative environment. "I don't see any kind of issue with seniority -- it's an environment where you can be comfortable asking questions. They are very open to sharing knowledge and teaching you," he explains.

"When you are at a large company, you don't have access to top-level management," Balakrishnan says. "Here, the partners are very approachable; you can book a meeting with them anytime."

At left, principal Bob Bush and senior recruiter Jory Teno bond during a community service event.

---

Best Microsoft MCTS Certification, Microsoft MCITP Training at certkingdom.com

8 cutting-edge technologies aimed at eliminating passwords

In the beginning was the password, and we lived with it as best we could. Now, the rise of cyber crime and the proliferation of systems and services requiring authentication have us coming up with yet another not-so-easy-to-remember phrase on a near daily basis. And is any of it making those systems and services truly secure?

One day, passwords will be a thing of the past, and a slew of technologies are being posited as possibilities for a post-password world. Some are upon us, some are on the threshold of usefulness, and some are likely little more than a wild idea, but within each of them is some hint of how we’ve barely scratched the surface of what’s possible with security and identity technology.

The smartphone
The idea: Use your smartphone to log into websites and supply credentials via NFC or SMS.

Examples: Google’s NFC-based tap-to-unlock concept employs this. Instead of typing passwords, PCs authenticate against the users phones via NFC.

The good: It should be as easy as it sounds. No interaction from the user is needed, except any PIN they might use to secure the phone itself.

The bad: Getting websites to play along is the hard part, since password-based logins have to be scrapped entirely for the system to be as secure as it can be. Existing credentialing systems (e.g., Facebook or Google login) could be used as a bridge: Log in with one of those services on your phone, then use the service itself to log into the site.

The smartphone, continued
The idea: Use your smartphone, in conjunction with third-party software, to log into websites or even your PC.

Examples: Ping Identity. When a user wants to log in somewhere, a one-time token is sent to their smartphone; all they need to do is tap or swipe the token to authenticate.

The good: Insanely simple in practice, and it can be combined with other smartphone-centric methods (a PIN, for instance) for added security.

The bad: Having enterprises adopt such schemes may be tough if they’re offered only as third-party products. Apple could offer such a service on iPhones if it cared enough about enterprise use; Microsoft might if its smartphone offerings had any traction. Any other takers?

Biometrics
The idea: Use a fingerprint or an iris scan -- or even a scan of the vein patterns in your hand -- to authenticate.

Examples: They’re all but legion. Fingerprint readers are ubiquitous on business-class notebooks, and while iris scanners are less common, they’re enjoying broader deployment than they used to.

The good: Fingerprint recognition technology is widely available, cheap, well-understood, and easy for nontechnical users.

The bad: Despite all its advantages, fingerprint reading hasn’t done much to displace the use of passwords in places apart from where it’s mandated. Iris scanners aren’t foolproof, either. And privacy worries abound, something not likely to be abated once fingerprint readers become ubiquitous on phones.

The biometric smartphone
The idea: Use your smartphone, in conjunction with built-in biometric sensors, to perform authentication.

Examples: The Samsung Galaxy S5 and HTC One Max (pictured) both sport fingerprint sensors, as do models of the iPhone from the 5S onwards.

The good: Multiple boons in one: smartphones and fingerprint readers are both ubiquitous and easy to leverage, and they require no end user training to be useful, save for registering one’s fingerprint.

The bad: It’s not as hard as it might seem to hack a fingerprint scanner (although it isn’t trivial). Worst of all, once a fingerprint is stolen, it’s, um, pretty hard to change it.

The digital tattoo
The idea: A flexible electronic device worn directly on the skin, like a fake tattoo, and used to perform authentication via NFC.

Examples: Motorola has released such a thing for the Moto X (pictured), at a cost of $10 for a pack of 10 tattoo stickers, with each sticker lasting around five days.

The good: In theory, it sounds great. Nothing to type, nothing to touch, (almost) nothing to carry around. The person is the password.

The bad: So far it’s a relatively costly technology ($1 a week), and it’s a toss-up as to whether people will trade typing passwords for slapping a wafer of plastic somewhere on their bodies. I don’t know about you, but even a Band-Aid starts bothering me after a few hours.

---

Best Microsoft MCTS Certification, Microsoft MCITP Training at certkingdom.com

Gartner: Top 10 Technology Trends for 2015 IT can’t ignore

Rise of smart machines, ubiquitous access and software-defined architectures will reshape IT, Gartner says

ORLANDO—Gartner defines its Strategic Technology Trends as those technologies that have the most potential to drive great change in the enterprise IT arena in the next three years.

Indeed this year’s crop has that potential as trends like software-defined networks and 3D printing take center stage in Gartner’s list.

“You need to be looing at linking to customers in new and unique ways; what technologies set the foundation to enable these moves,” said Gartner vice president David Cearly. IT will be dealing with everything from virtual technologies to intelligent machines and analytics data everywhere, he said. “And in the end all things run through a completely secure environment.”

So Gartner’s Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2015 list looks like this:
1. Computing everywhere: Cleary says the ithe trend is not just about applications but rather wearable systems, intelligent screens on walls and the like. Microsoft, Google and Apple will fight over multiple aspects of this technology. You will see more and more sensors that will generate even more data and IT will have to know how to exploit this—think new ways to track users and their interactions with your company—in an effective, positive way.

2. The Internet of things: Yes this one is getting old it seems, but there’s more to it than the hype. Here IT will have to manage all of these devices and develop effective business models to take advantage of them. Cearly said IT needs to get new projects going and to embrace the “maker culture” so people in their organizations can come up with new solutions to problems.

3. 3D Printing: Another item that has been on the Gartner list for a couple years. But things are changing rapidly in this environment. Cearly says 3D printing has hit a tipping point in terms of the materials that can be used and price points of machines. It enables cost reduction in many cases. IT needs to look at 3D printing and think about how it can make your company more agile. C an it 3D printing drive innovation?

4. Advanced, Pervasive and Invisible Analytics: Security analytics are the heart of next generation security models. Cearly said IT needs to look at building data reservoirs that can tie together multiple repositories which can let IT see all manner of new information – such as data usage patterns and what he called “meaningful anomalies” it can act on quickly.

5. Context-Rich Systems: This one has been a Gartner favorite for a long time – and with good reason. The use of systems that utilize “situational and environmental information about people, places and things” in order to provide a service, is definitely on the rise. IT needs to look at creating ever more intelligent user interfaces linking lots of different apps and data.

6. Smart Machines: This one is happening rapidly. Cearly pointed to IBM’s Watson, which is “learning” to fight cancer, and a mining company – Rio Tinto—which is using automated trucks in its mines. Virtual sages, digital assistants and other special service software agents will about in this world, he said.

7. Cloud/Client Computing: This trend was on last year’s list as well but Gartner says the need to develop native apps in the cloud versus migrating existing apps is the current issue.

8. Software-Defined Applications and Infrastructure: In order to get to the agility new environments demand we cannot have hard codes and predefined networks, Cearly said. IT needs to be able construct dynamic relationships. Software Defined technologies help on that scale.

9. Web-Scale IT: This trend remains pretty much the same as last year. Gartner says Web-scale IT is a pattern of global-class computing technologies that that deliver the capabilities of large cloud service providers. The likes of Amazon, Google and others are re-inventing the way IT services can be delivered. Still requires a cultural IT shift to be successful.

10. Risk-Based Security and Self-protection: Cearly said all roads to the digital future success lead through security. Trends here include building applications that are self-protecting.

---

Best Microsoft MCTS Certification, Microsoft MCITP Training at certkingdom.com

Windows 10 revealed: Microsoft's next OS fuses Windows 7 and 8

 At a press event on Tuesday, Microsoft launched the next version of Windows: Not Windows One, not Windows 9, but Windows 10, which combines the reborn Start menu with Windows 8’s colorful live tiles and adjusts its behavior depending on how you’re using your device.

Windows 10 will officially launch in the middle of next year, but you’ll have a chance to try it out before that via a new Windows Insider program, launching Wednesday. The platform’s most vocal fans will have a chance to download the technical preview before it launches next year.

Microsoft’s Joe Belfiore showing off Windows 10’s reborn, revamped Start Menu.

Microsoft executives unveiled the new OS at a small press event in San Francisco, where the company tried to position the Windows 10 OS as a “natural step forward” for both Windows and Windows Phone, which will also be renamed Windows 10.

Windows 10 will be designed for the enterprise, Terry Myerson executive vice president of Microsoft’s OS group, said. It will have a “familiar” interface, whether it be for Windows 7 or Windows 8. “They will find all the tools they’re used to finding, with all the apps and tools they’re used to today,” he said.

Windows 10 will be compatible with all the familiar management systems, including mobile device management. MDM tools will manage not just mobile devices, but PCs, phones, tablets, and even embedded devices inpart of the Internet of Things, Myerson said. Enterprise customers will be able to manage their own app stores, so that ther employees get the right apps for them. As Windows 8 did, data security will be a priority, he said.

“Windows 10 will be our greatest enterprise platform ever,” Myerson said.
Windows 10 revealed

Joe Belfiore, who runs part of the OS team focused on the PC experience, showed off the new OS, which he called a “very early build.” Yes, the new build has the Stat menu, combining the icon-driven menu from Windows 7, plus the added Live Tiles to the right.

Belfiore used the analogy of a Tesla to describe how Windows 7 users would feel when they upgraded—something that Microsoft desperately wants them to do: a supercharged OS, but one that will feel familiar.

One of the things that Microsoft wants to ensure is that Windows 10 is personalized results, including search results, Belfiore said.

Windows 8 had a universal app platform, with a common Windows Store that handle updates independently. Belfiore said that Microsoft wanted all those Windows 7 uses to get all the benefits of Windows 8 apps. Apps will be shown in the Live Tiles, with no real indication whether they are “classic” apps or modern, Windows 8 apps. Apps can be “snapped,” like Windows 8. Users will also not have to leave the Windows desktop to use modern apps, as expected.

Multitasking will also be a priority, with a stated goal being able to “empower” novice users, Belfiore said. On the taskbar there will be a “task view” where users can switch back and forth between different environments—whether it be 32-bit Windows 7 apps or modern apps. And yes, they will include virtual desktops, with the ability to switch back and forth between virtual environments. A “snap assist” feature will allow users to select similar windows to snap alongside other apps. And up to four apps or windows can be snapped to the four corners of the desktop, Belfiore said.

Even more advanced uses will be able to take advantage of new keyboard shortcuts, with the ability to ALT-TAB between desktops. “It’s a nice forward enhancement to make those people more productive,” Belfiore said.

Microsoft even improved the command line interface, with an improved keyboard interface. (You can use Crtl+V to paste now!)
Touch when you need it

Belfiore wrapped up by talking about touch: “We’re not giving up on touch,” he said. But he did say that that massive numbers of users were familiar with the touchless Windows 7 interface, while supporting those who have jumped to Windows 8.

So that means that the Charms experience will be revamped. When you swipe right on Windows 10, the Charms bar is still there. But Belfiore said that the Charms experience would change. When people swipe in from the left, Windows 10, you’ll get a task view. “I’m using touch in a way that accelerates my use of a PC,” Belfiore said.
windows10 continuum start screen

Microsoft is also working on a revamped UI that isn’t is in Windows 10, yet. For two-in-on devices, a “Continuum” mode will adjust the UI depending on whether or not the mouse and keyboard is present. When a keyboard is disconnected, the Windows 8-style Start menu appears and a back button is available so that users can easily back out to a prior command. Menus grow larger. Bu when a mouse and keyboard is connected, the desktop mode reappears, Windows apps return to desktop windows, and the Start page disappears.

Now, Microsoft needs to take the next step: pitching enterprise customers, Myerson said. And that’s critical for Windows’ future, analysts said. Expect more details on the consumer flavors of Windows 10 early next year, more application details at BUILD, and then a launch of Windows 10 near the middle of next year.

“For businesses, I think there are some businesses who have picked it up and they are really early adopters, but in general, the sense—when we engage with customers, we’re not hearing a lot of reception out there,” Wes Miller, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft, said in advance of the briefing. “We’re hearing a lot of businesses even before whatever that thing comes out tomorrow, before that came out, businesses were saying, we’re going to hang out on Windows 7, it’s stable, it does what we need to do.”

Starting Wednesday, Microsoft will launch a Windows Insider program, distributing the technical preview of Windows 10, Myerson said. Through Window Insiders we’re inviting our more vocal Windows fans” to help refine the Windows experience, executives said. Users wil be able to sign up at preview.windows.com, he said, where they will be able to hold private discussions with Windows engineers and give feedback.

“Windows 10 will be our most open, collaborative OS project ever,” Myerson said.

---

Best Microsoft MCTS Certification, Microsoft MCITP Training at certkingdom.com