Jay Livens
Latest from Jay Livens
Four Questions to Consider When Choosing a Home Generator
A business colleague recent tweeted a question about choosing a home generator. He was concerned about recent power outages in New England and worried that they would continue in the upcoming months and years. He was looking at options to protect his home in the case of a significant outage. I had recently considered adding ...
Google+: The Elephant in the Room or the Ugly Stepchild?
The Twittersphere was abuzz when Google announced their new Google + social networking functionality. For me it was déjà vu as I remembered similar enthusiasm over Google’s ill-fated Wave service. Thanks to Greg Knierieman I have been playing with G+, and at this point, I am undecided about its usefulness and here’s why. There are ...
Living with a Motorola Atrix – The Good and Bad
Frequent readers of this blog will know that I am an avid smartphone user. For years, my primary platform was RIM’s Blackberry and I appreciated the phone’s highly functional physical keyboard. When I changed jobs, my new company did not support Blackberry and so I was issued a Palm Pre Plus which I blogged about ...
How the Amazon/Overdrive Partnership Changes the Economics of the Kindle
I have blogged in the past (here and here) about my frustration with digital books and the Kindle. It is a great device, but I have always struggled with the economics of the platform. This is especially telling when compared to the option of borrowing books from the library which the Kindle has never supported…until ...
NetApp and Engenio – Part 2 – A Hypothesis
In my previous post, I discussed why I thought that NetApp’s acquisition of Engenio was a difficult one and why I question the value of the combined entity. Simply put, there seems to be redundancy in the product line and it makes you wonder how a merged company creates substantial new value. However, there is ...
3 Things I Like and Dislike About the Palm Pre Plus
I have blogged on numerous occasions about cellphones and historically, I have been an unabashed Blackberry user. So it was with a sense of shock when I realized that my new employer would not support Blackberry phones. I had two options: Windows Mobile – Not not the new and cool WMP7, the old crappy one ...
AT&T Data Woes
I started a new job back in November and it has been a whirlwind. As part of the transition, I have changed cell phones and added an aircard. In a future piece, I will discuss my new Palm Pre. My employer offered the option of three mobile data providers: AT&T, Verizon and Sprint. Sprint coverage ...
Perspectives on Quest Acquiring BakBone
About four months ago, I published a blog post discussing the future of dedicated VMware backup solutions. The post ignited a bigger discussion and included additional blog entries from W. Curtis Preston, me, Jon Toigo, Virtual Tacit, Veeam and Quest software. I strongly encourage readers to review the differing perspectives in each post. I mention ...
Logitech Launches the Revue – The First GoogleTV Device
Logitech launched the Revue which is their set-top box powered by GoogleTV. This is the first of many future devices that will use GoogleTV and will initially be sold for $299.99. I have not had any hands-on experience with the unit yet, but wanted to provide some introductory perspectives. The first thing that caught my ...
The criticality of RTO and RPO
Frequent readers of this blog know that I am obsessed with data protection in general and data restoration specifically. Obviously these two elements are critical for today’s data-intensive businesses and there are a multitude of vendors providing solutions to address these challenges. It can be difficult to assess the benefits of a given approach and ...