BlackBerry Customers Offered Free Apps As Apology

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

Last week, Research in Motion apologized for the service outages that swept around the world last week, leaving millions of its BlackBerry users unable to send or receive messages.

Today, it said it's offering customers about $100 worth of free apps and a month's worth of free technical support in "appreciation for their patience during the recent service disruptions."

Enlarge Damien Meyer /AFP/Getty Images Damien Meyer /AFP/Getty Images

Among the apps subscribers can select:

— SIMS 3.

— Texas Hold'em Poker 2.

— iSpeech Translator Pro.

— Drive Safe.ly Enterprise.

— Vlingo Plus: Virtual Assistant.

The free app offer begins on Wednesday and lasts four weeks, the company said.

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TECHNOLOGY, Senator Calls for Investigation into OnStar Policy Changes That Affect Customers' Privacy

Popular navigation-system OnStar, which offers in-car tracking and navigation information, has been blasted for its new privacy policy by U.S. Senator Charles E. Schumer.
U.S. Senator Charles E. SchumerSchumer, D-NY, is calling for an investigation by the Federal Trade Commission into last week’s policy changes by OnStar. The company recently reserved the right to compile and sell information about drivers’ habits, and also announced it would track users even after users discontinue the service--unless a user explicitly opts out.
“By tracking drivers even after they’ve cancelled their service, OnStar is attempting one of the most brazen invasions of privacy in recent memory,” Schumer said in a written release.
[READ: OnStar Developing Mobile Apps for Chevy Volt]
OnStar claims that customer’s rights have not been violated and that customers have been fully informed of the changes. Customers who tell OnStar they don’t want their data collected can still have the tracking disconnected. OnStar also says that, while it has reserved the right to sell customer data, it has no plans in the works to do so.
In a letter to OnStar, Schumer said the policy changes violated an implicit trust between consumers and the company that the personal data that OnStar collected would be protected. Schumer wrote: “More troubling, it is a violation of which many may not be aware; a reasonable consumer would assume that when they terminate a service, they will no longer be monitored by the service provider. “
Schumer called on the FTC to investigate if the policy changes are an unfair or deceptive trade practice. Schumer also wrote an open letter to OnStar executive Linda Marshall to urge her to reconsider the changes.
Schumer has made tech security a focus of many of his recent announcements. For now, however the OnStar changes seem here to stay. OnStar is owned by General Motors and has more than six million U.S. customers who could be affected by the changes.

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TECHNOLOGY, Mozy Ships Hard Drives to Cloud Backup Customers

In an attempt to spur adoption of its MozyProcloud backup service, Mozy today shipped external hard drives to many of its small- to medium-sized business customers to speed initial system backups.
The new service, called Mozy Data Shuttle , is not dissimilar to what many enterprises do when creating offsite backups: the initial full backup is made to local hard drives, and then those drives are shipped to a disaster recovery site where the data is ingested by a storage array or tape library.
Mozy's Data Shuttle consists of a bright green 2TB Iomega hard drive with both USB 2.0 and eSATA connectivity.
After a customer orders the service, Mozy ships the customer a hard drive. As soon as the hard drive is connected to a system, it prompts the MozyPro customer to perform an encrypted full backup of the system. The customer can then use a pre-printed shipping label to ship the drive back to Mozy where the data is downloaded onto its servers.
As soon as the Data Shuttle drive is unplugged from a customer's system, incremental backups of the system data are automatically sent to Mozy's data center . When the backup drive's data is downloaded, it is automatically joined with the incremental backups to create a full data copy.
"In the last 12 months, more and more people are opening up to backing up data to the cloud. At the same time, the amount of data in organizations has grown. Those two things converging is what prompted us to bring out this service," said Gytis Barzdukas, director of product management at Mozy.
Barzdukas said about two-thirds of Mozy's business comes from SMB customers. When a growing number of those customers reported having at least 100GB of data to store, it became a barrier to backing up online because it was taking weeks in some cases to complete.
"While their data was growing, their network bandwidth wasn't necessarily staying on par," he said.
Mozy is targeting organizations with 100GB to 8TB of data or five to 30 desktop users.
Jamie McKenzie, Mozy's Data Shuttle product manager, said the service can handle up to four 2TB drives for ingestion at a time.
Each drive has two layers of encryption. The first encryption key can be chosen by the customer either through a default key or by creating a unique personal key. Then the Data Shuttle drive generates a second encryption key used for additional security while the drive is in transit. The one-time key is used to unlock the encrypted data so that Mozy can then store a customer's encrypted data at rest.
Mozy never has both keys, so it is unable to see a customer's data.
The retail price for the first Data Shuttle drive is $275, and $100 for each additional drive, according to Barzdukas.
Lucas Mearian covers storage, disaster recovery and business continuity, financial services infrastructure and health care IT for Computerworld. Follow Lucas on Twitter at @lucasmearian or subscribe to Lucas's RSS feed .

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HP Customers Seek Stability With Whitman

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

Hewlett-Packard customers disconcerted by management shakeups and product strategy shifts are hoping for a stable future with Meg Whitman, who Thursday was appointed the company's new CEO.

Some customers who felt disrupted by recent changes at HP said they want Whitman to stabilize a chaotic situation by quickly and decisively communicating a product road map.

Whitman was appointed HP's CEO to replace Leo Apotheker, who was on the job for only about a year. During his reign, Apotheker set the stage for HP to move away from PCs to focus on the more profitable enterprise hardware, software and services. In August the company said it would acquire software maker Autonomy for US$10.2 billion, and also proposed selling or spinning off the Personal Systems Group (PSG), which deals in PCs and mobile devices. HP at the time said it would kill its line of WebOS smartphones and tablets, while retaining the software platform.

HP's board felt the need to bring in new leadership after spotting weaknesses in Apotheker's performance and operational execution, said Ray Lane, executive chairman at HP on a conference call to discuss Whitman's appointment. Board members were also "embarrassed" by the way Apotheker's team handled the August announcements.

The way HP communicated its plans to spin off or sell the PC business left many questions hanging, said Gerry McCartney, the CIO at Purdue University, which buys a range of HP products, including servers, desktops, laptops and office supplies. said. Purdue also has four of the Top 500 supercomputers in the world, two of which have been built by HP.

"I think the decision was poorly signaled. You could be watching the market and what's being said. We do that fairly well and we did not see this coming. When this was announced it was unsettling. You wonder 'what's coming next,'" McCartney said.

McCartney would ideally like the PC unit to remain a part of HP so every product comes from a single organization.

McCartney isn't rattled by the management shakeups, but leaders shape a company's direction, which helps shape product and purchase choices, McCartney said. He would like Whitman to bring stability and decisively communicate product plans for the next years so he can stabilize Purdue's internal IT road map.

"We buy the product set, we don't buy the CEO. To the extent HP is delivering services and products we are buying it's great. When they don't, that's not great," McCartney said.

Customers are still trying to digest the change in leadership, but hope for a stable product line, said Nina Buik, the chief marketing officer for Connect, an independent user community of HP's enterprise product customers. Connect has more than 50,000 members worldwide.

"I think people are looking at things that affect their business strategy. It's the product and product road map," Buik said. Some events over the last year, such as Oracle's decision to stop application development for Intel's Itanium chip architecture, have also made HP enterprise users fix internal road maps.

Buik has chatted with a few Connect members about the leadership change and found that most are "extremely optimistic" about Whitman, who is seen as a good communicator and who knows HP as a director on the board, Buik said.

"She has capital in Silicon Valley, which is important," Buik said.

There is a difference in running a smaller company like eBay, where Whitman was formerly CEO, and HP, Buik said. Whitman has the qualifications to run the company, but will also surround herself with capable people to execute business strategy, Buik said.

Some customers are not concerned about changes in HP as long as the company continues delivering products and services.

Alex de Joode, security officer at Leaseweb, one of Europe's largest Internet hosting providers, said the company was not worried about the turmoil at HP. The company uses thousands of ProLiant servers in its data centers, and in June added 5,700 more servers.

"We did not notice much about the internal struggles on an operational level." de Joode said, adding that Whitman can now focus on the strengths of HP's business, which includes introducing innovative products.

HP's board leadership seems vulnerable, but recent events could be the start of a new chapter, said Howard Owen, the owner of Stafford Printing, which uses HP printers for high volume digital and offset printing.

"They seem to have confidence in Meg Whitman," Owen said.

Owen deals directly with HP's small graphics arts division, which remains unaffected by the management change, Owen said. However, he was a little concerned when the company announced the potential sale or spinoff of the PC division.

"It made me wonder about the future, about the role of graphics services in the big picture for HP," Owen said.

Nevertheless, a new leader brings Owen a renewed hope in HP.

"I hope [Whitman] can get out and interact with the graphics services people," Stafford said. "It'd be great to see her."

(Loek Essers in Boston contributed to the story)

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