By Xavier Oliver, IESE professor
Time Reader 2.0 combines the best of the New York Times with the flexibility of its on-line version and the power of a new application. The question is whether its attractiveness and bonding capacity will really help make the newspaper’s on-line version profitable.

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The makers of optical discs continue their quest to expand the capacity and lower the cost of digital storage. General Electric (GE) has announced the development of a new format that can hold 500 GB. These new high-capacity discs utilize microholographic technology and are the same size as standard optical discs, which means that players capable of reading and writing on them will also work with CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray discs. They were developed at GE labs over the course of six years and some sources say they could hit the market by 2012.
 
Equivalent to 100 DVDs, they are ideal for professional, scientific and audiovisual applications that require large storage capacity. And if the manufacturers can make them affordable enough, they could also be released for the consumer market, for such uses as saving high-definition audiovisual content. "This could be the next generation of low-cost storage," said analyst Richard Doherty in The New York Times.
The progression from CD to DVD, with its 5 GB, and from there to Blu-ray, with its 25 or 50 GB, has been notable. Nevertheless, hard disks seem to be winning the race as digital storage media thanks to their spectacular growth in capacity, their speed and their plummeting prices. A 1-terabyte (1,000 GB) internal hard drive can be had for as little as 100-150 euros.

So, while Blu-ray still struggles to find its place, this breakthrough could give new momentum to the optical disc. And much more so if the efforts of GE's developers pay off and they end up reaching the milestone of 1 TB per-disc.

Articles in New York Times, La Repubblica (italian), and Le Nouvel Observateur (french)

Concerns about software quality have long been a recurring theme. There are specialized forums (such as the renowned site maintained by Peter Neumann, a noted expert in computer-related risks) as well as periodic, heated debates on the topic. In principle, professionals agree about the need for carrying out exhaustive quality-control procedures, especially in critical environments, but when it comes to finding solutions, their points of view start to vary. Manufacturers insist that quality costs money and that the customers seem to forget this, whereas the latter become annoyed when problems in the code cause a disruption for their business. Amidst the crossfire, professional ICT organizations seek a middle ground in hopes of reconciling the two sides. But progress is being halted by the current economic crisis and resulting IT budget cuts, which add to the risk of failures.

According to a study by the Chartered Management Institute and the UK government citing the Financial Times (FT), 40% of British companies in 2008 reported some type of disruptive incident with their IT systems, whereas in 2002 that percentage was just 19%. According to FT, this progression can be extrapolated to the rest of the developed countries. In Spain, the magazine CIO España last year cited a study by the IT tech association ATI that revealed the "minimal interest shown by Spanish IT companies in this aspect, which is fundamental for business." One of its authors, Luis Fernández Sanz, a university professor and organizer of the conference "Jornadas sobre Innovación y Calidad del Software," taking place this year at the University of Alcalá de Henares, "believes that the repercussions of the downturn on technology have made it necessary to establish a set of priorities, focusing on regulations and standards on quality and security in order to meet objectives and protect company assets." Similarly, the EU wants software makers to offer guarantees to the consumer on any physical product, a proposal that does not sit well with the BSA, according to a report by ZDNet.

Articles in Financial Times, ZDNet, and CIO España (spanish)

 When asked to predict major technology trends in 2009, most analysts agree that Cloud Computing is closely followed by the rise of social networking and Web 2.0 tools in the enterprise sphere as the most dominant themes.This feedback strongly supports IESE's belief that online collaboration is starting to play a key role in driving business model innovation and, with it, an organization's competitive advantage. To gain a better understanding of this trend, Prof. Sandra Sieber and Prof. Evgeny Káganer are spearheading a global research study that will explore how firms use social media tools to foster collaboration across organizational boundaries. To learn more about the study and to sign up for participation please visit the project’s website.

Social Media Project Website