Virtualization has proven to be the weapon of choice when it comes to minimizing man-hours and increasing productivity  Just ask Doug Westhoff of  Brown Shoe.  He’ll tell you all about it. “Before, we had our traditional desktop setup, where you had an end user.” Westhoff said.  “The IT department would run a refresh every three years, and you know, after three years, that machine would be cluttered with malware.  This was one of the reasons we wanted to look into VDI.” After moving an office down from Wisconsin to St. Louis and test running a handful of virtual desktops, Westhoff was greeted with some very pleasing results. “The call center was really our test bed. We went through some growing pains with the sh

Tune in today (August 30)  as we kick off our wall-to-wall coverage of VMWorld 2010, live from SiliconAngle’s “The Cube” (see below) at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, California.

Sarah Austin was one of the first live streaming, life-casters popularized on Justin.TV and she is the founder of Pop17, “a collaborative blogging platform and web show that covers and tracks emerging web trends and tells the stories behind what’s going in social media.” Sarah and I have submitted a SXSWi 2011 Panel Proposal with Brandon Prebynski, Joel Cheesman, Christopher Kahle and Ryan Paugh. We’d really appreciate your votes and comments at http://bit.ly/howtogetajob by August 27th, 2010. Click here for the original article and to listen to the podcast Brands on Social Media ”When brands become a part of the community, it really feels like the brand is like your friend. You really love them, like you would a real per

As posted earlier,  The CUBE is part of SiliconANGLE’s continuous coverage of cloud computing and virtualization. The CUBE is powered by SiliconANGLE in conjunction with VMware, and introduces an innovative, four-day editorial live coverage of all the angles at VMworld 2010. Join Us. Watch Live! SiliconANGLE introduces VMworld Live – The CUBE. The CUBE is part of SiliconANGLE’s continuous coverage of cloud computing and virtualization. The CUBE is powered by SiliconANGLE in conjunction with VMware and introduces an innovative four-day editorial live coverage of all the angles at VMworld 2010. Join us everyday August 30–September 2, 2010, in San Francisco at the VMworld 2010 Blogger Lounge in Moscone South, as we cover all

Web analytics are cool. If you agree with that statement, there’s a good change you’ve spent some time reading Occam’s Razor, the fascinating blog about web analytics by Avinash Kaushik (author of Web Analytics 2.0 and Web Analytics: An Hour A Day). If you don’t know who Avinash is then just Google “Web Analytics” and you’ll surely find out who he is. I’ve personally  learnt much from his thought-provoking and action-oriented writings, and I’m sure you will too. Below is an interview about some of the hot topics in web analytics today. 1. Tools like Woopra have introduced us to real-time analytics. Is real-time the future of analytics? Why are we not there yet? There is more and more real-time data available. Goog

Robert Scoble just put out a thought-provoking video on his personal blog detailing the frightening bi-polar personality of US immigration policy. The three participants of note in the discussion Robert chronicles are Aye Moah, a brilliant Burmese UX designer who came to America based purely on her ability to do maths, Ronald Mannak, a European tech entrepreneur, and Chamillionaire, an American rapper-come-entrepreneur. [Aye] grew up in one of the poorest countries on earth. She shouldn’t have many opportunities. Yet here she was, talking with me at a Silicon Valley party after the Always On conference. The route she took? She went to MIT. How did she get in? Was one of the top-scoring students in Burma. One of the top 10, in fact.

Brand advertisers are increasingly asking Web sites and publishers to conduct "intent-to-purchase" studies that measure the success or failure of a Web video campaign. Break Media CEO Keith Richman tells Daisy Whitney in this week's New Media Minute how advertisers and publishers can use that data to improve their campaigns.

Is brand integration the wrong approach to Web video advertising? It may very well be, said Chris Williams, the general manager for Disney-owned digital studio Take180. I caught up with him at the NATPE LATVFest this week and he shared his contrarian point of view on why he believes pre-rolls are a smarter and more scalable solution for content providers in this week's New Media Minute. I also spoke to Jim Louderback, Revision3's CEO, about what it takes to survive for five years, as his company has done, in the new media business.

Brands and advertisers are spending a lot more money in online video. But how can they make sure their ads run in brand-safe environments and that they get the most out of their investment? Here are some best practices and tips to follow from Daisy Whitney and ScanScout in this week's New Media Minute.

Tomorrow I'll be at the GigaOm Structure 10 cloud event and I'll see Tom Roloff who will be speaking there.  Tom is a great guy but very much on top of one of the biggest trends - IT and Cloud convergence. I sat down and talked with Tom Roloff at EMC World.  We had a great chat about how IT is changing and vendor lock-in. Industry analyst Dave Vellante of Wikibon Project and I covered alot of areas, including: * Seventy percent of IT investment goes toward maintenance (running the business) * Assessing the value of application portfolios * Software pricing * The allure of the public cloud and where private cloud fits * Vendor lock-in * Transformation * Competiting with small consultancies * Predictions on cloud computing