Stories by: Ephraim Schwartz

The press has been all over President-Elect Barack Obama's addiction to his BlackBerry and the possibility that he might have to give it up for reasons of national security. But no one in the media seems to be asking the most logical follow-up question: Is the cybertechnology that can compromise the future chief executive's BlackBerry also a threat to mobile devices being used every day by thousands of senior executives in corporate America?

A congressionally sponsored study conducted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, made public on Monday, recommends everything from the creation of a the National Office for Cyberspace outside the authority of the Department of Homeland Security to maintaining "sufficient manufacturing capabilities" at home to supply components and software that is not dependent on a global supply chain.

Given all the pressures IT is under, another compliance initiative may seem to be one too many. There is such a mandate: to submit financial reports using XBRL (Extensible Business Reporting Language) tags. How much will the XBRL mandate add to IT's burden? At first, the burden will be small, but it will increase over time -- as will the opportunity to use XBRL for better internal operations, not just for reporting compliance.

Like any government mandate, the SEC's requirement to use XBRL (Extensible Business Reporting Language) in public companies' financial reports cannot be ignored. However, along with the government stick comes a number of beneficial carrots.

By the first half of 2009, Citrix will make its XenDesktop and XenApp client and server software for remote access to Windows applications available for the iPhone.

Wireless users in the US city of Baltimore are standing politely in line to sign up for just launched Sprint WiMax service, called XOHM, pronounced "zohm," at slightly better than the expected rate, according to Sprint executives.

In an atmosphere where government fines for breaches in privacy regulations are increasing, SAP and Cisco unveiled this week Data Privacy Composite Application by SAP and Cisco at the SAP TechEd conference in Berlin.

Mixing together a melange of services, software and marketing, IBM's announcement this week of its Cloud Services Initiative is about putting an organizing construct around all of its cloud offerings, according to one IBM executive.

Ross Mayfield, founder of Socialtext, unveiled this week version 3.0 of his company's enterprise wiki, which promises to make the corporate directory a social networking tool for the workplace.

While I applaud any company's attempt to be environmentally responsible and implement "green" projects, I remain skeptical of long-term commitments to green initiatives that don't decrease costs, fatten the bottom line, or polish the organization's image.

In the coming weeks the feds and the surviving financial services institutions will have the daunting task of unraveling all the securitized loans and other instruments that are hiding the toxic investments. But does the technology exist to do that? And if so, could it have been used to prevent the bad debt from hitting the fan in the first place?