While Google officials, from CEO Larry Page on down, are all aflutter over Google+, Mark Zuckerberg views Google's new social networking site as "their own little version of Facebook."

At least that's what he told Charlie Rose in an interview that aired Monday evening on the veteran broadcast journalist's PBS show.

When Rose asked him if Facebook planned to engage in a "flat out" platform war with Google, Apple and Amazon over the next 10 years, Zuckerberg said Facebook views Apple and Amazon more as partners, while acknowledging Google is more of a rival.

"People like to talk about war. There are a lot of ways in which the companies work together. There are real competitions in there, but I don't think this is going to be the type of situation where there's one company that wins all the stuff," he said.

"Google in some ways is more competitive and is certainly trying to build their own little version of Facebook," he added. "When I look at Amazon and Apple, I see co... Read more »

Cisco is acquiring a minority stake in a subsidiary of KT, a South Korean telecommunications services company, which will offer managed services for smart buildings and smart city projects from January.

The investment in KC Smart Service (KCSS) is part of a global strategic collaboration between the two companies to bridge the IT and communications markets, Cisco said on Monday.

The new venture will be funded with starting capital of US$30 million from KT and Cisco. KT will be in charge of the overall management of the operations of the new company which will be headquartered in Korea.

KCSS will initially target 14 countries in the Asia-Pacific region, including Japan and China, Cisco said. The company will have 30 staff to start with, including experts in the areas of smart space, which may be increased to 70 by next year.

The venture will deploy technologies from both KT and Cisco, including Cisco's Unified Service Delivery Platform, Cisco said. The companies have ... Read more »

By 2014, almost one in three midsize businesses will be using a recovery-as-a-service (RaaS) with the ability to backup and restore virtual machines (VMs), according to Gartner.

Gartner predicted that 30% of companies will use RaaS over the next few years, with the market being driven, for now, by midsize companies. The research firm defines those as having annual revenues between $150 million and $1 billion.

Today, just over 1% of midsize businesses use RaaS as part it their operations. The service, which allows the managed replication of VMs to a service-provider's cloud, can eliminate the need to pay as much as $100,000 a year as part of an in-house disaster recovery budget, Gartner said.

According to John Morency, research vice president at Gartner, among the midsize companies now using RaaS two camps are forming. The first is using server virtualization recovery features and SAN-based replication to deploy in-house disaster recovery for some applications. The second is implementing earl... Read more »

While the masses were initially disappointed, the iPhone 4S features a glut of top-end tech that is designed to put it on a par with the likes of the Samsung Galaxy S2 - but does it manage to do that?

The changes to the iPhone 4S are easy to document - the camera has been upgraded to 8MP (with an improved aperture ratio), the CPU is now the same dual-core A5 processor as seen in the iPad 2, and a seven time increase in graphical processing power.

Check out our video of the iPhone 4S in action - is it the phone for you?

So now we know. It is to be full-scale war in the cloud.

After the best part of a decade in which the business applications establishment came under assault from the enfants terrible in the cloud, the big guys are hitting back. First Microsoft, then SAP and now Oracle - the competitive landscape is rapidly changing for relative newcomers like Salesforce.com, SuccessFactors and NetSuite.

Calling them newcomers of course is something of a fallacy. Salesforce.com is 13 years old and a $2bn revenue company. Its claims to the IT mainstream are legitimate and far from those of the aspiring upstart that many of the traditional on-premise applications firms had hoped to characterise it and other cloud apps firms.

That state of denial - there are no other words for it - are now at an end, and not before time. There are real-world examples of enterprise-scale cloud application deployments that prove the validity of the challenge posed by the "upstarts". Take Siemens' decision to oust SAP and replace i... Read more »

A fall in the share price of battered BlackBerry maker RIM puts the firm's market value below the value of all its stuff today.

With a share price of $18.59 at 12.21 EDT, Research in Motion's total stock added up to less than what its property, patents and other assets are worth, according to the book value of $18.92 a share calculated by Bloomberg at the end of last quarter.

RIM has taken a number of hits in the last couple of months, with dramatic cuts in its fondleslab offering, a massive network outage in EMEA that was a public relations disaster and the recent news that an update for the aforementioned tablet, the PlayBook, was being postponed.

The Canadian company's tablet product has become increasingly difficult to shift from the shelves, with retailers first slashing prices and then touting them in a buy-one-get-one-free offer.

One of the issues with the device is its lack of a native email client, a situation the company was supposed to be remedying with an... Read more »

Oracle and Google held another settlement conference on Wednesday in their ongoing lawsuit over alleged Java intellectual-property violations in the Android mobile OS, but failed to reach an agreement, according to a filing in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

In a change from past settlement meetings, only attorneys for each side participated, and both via telephone. Previous sessions have seen Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and Google CEO Larry Page participate in face-to-face talks.

Additional settlement discussions will be "scheduled in consultation with parties," the filing states.

The case had been set to go to trial Oct. 31, but Judge William Alsup recently postponed it to sometime next year.

Also Wednesday, Google received another setback in its bid to minimize the potential impact on a jury of an email sent by Google engineer Tim Lindholm in August 2010, shortly before Oracle filed suit.

"What we've actually been... Read more »

The U.S. can expect more aggressive efforts from countries such as Russia and China to collect information through cyberespionage in areas such as pharmaceuticals, defense and manufacturing, according to a new government report released Thursday.

The two countries were singled out in the report from the Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive, which also issued recommendations for how organizations can strengthen their defenses.

"Chinese actors are the world's most active and persistent perpetrators of economic espionage," the report said. "Russia's intelligence services are conducting a range of activities to collect economic information and technology from U.S. targets."

The growing complexity of IT systems will work to the advantage of cyberspies, as more sensitive information is held on devices such as smartphones and laptops.

Cyberspying is efficient since it can be conducted with relatively limited resources from far away. Once an intrusion is dete... Read more »

All politics aside, no candidate or campaign in our nation's history has ever matched Barack Obama's 2008 presidential run for pure tech savvy. 

As Facebook apps go, Are You In is about as brain-dead simple as they come. All it does is announce to your friends that you're "in” for the 2012 campaign, then gives you a central page where you can harangue people in your contact list to also declare themselves "in.”

That is, when it works. But Are You In never really worked the way Facebook apps are supposed to.

First problem: When I signed on, Are You In failed to display a permissions screen – you know, the one where the app tells you what information it's going to suck out of your profile and what it's going to do with it, and giving you the option of saying Thanks But No Thanks?  Instead, I got dropped straight into the app.

I had to check my Privacy settings to make sure it had actually installed. Yep, it had. Even weirder, though, when I checked my app's a... Read more »

Romanian eBay hacker Vlad Duiculescu, known online as "Vladuz," lost the appeal to get his three-year suspended prison sentence reduced on Tuesday. The court also dismissed the appeal lodged by prosecutors regarding the hacker's acquittal on organized crime charges.

Vladuz led a hacking campaign against eBay from 2005 until 2007 that resulted in the compromise of multiple employee email accounts and sensitive information. According to the company, the hacker's actions resulted in losses of over US$7 million.

Duiculescu was arrested in April 2008 in Bucharest after a joint investigation by law enforcement authorities in Romania and the U.S. He was charged with several counts of unauthorized access to a computer system, accessing and modifying information without authorization, distributing tools that facilitate computer hacking and establishing an organized criminal group.

The hacker, who was 20 years old at the time, spent two years in jail awaiting before the Bucharest Tribunal ruled in Jan... Read more »