ReadWriteEnterprise

Who among us hasn't received an email recently telling us to click a link to update our email account info, provide corrected banking login details, update our credit card information on file, and what-have-you? Most of you are savvy enough to know that these are phishing scams and don't usually fall victim to clicking on these links or disclosing confidential information, but still stuff happens. According to SecureList.com, phishing messages accounted for 0.03% of all email messages this past April. And The Internet Crime Complaint Center reports nearly $556 million in losses to cybercrime in 2009, of which about half comes from phishing.

The iPad isn't just a hot new consumer device, it's also an increasingly popular tool for business. Each week we take a look at the new or updated business apps for the iPad, and highlight trends in how tablets are being used in the enterprise.

This week we take a look at a new document viewer, and an updated app for giving giving presentations on mobile devices.

Your startup's early infrastructure decisions are probably the most painstaking and time-consuming ones you'll have to make, for both the technologists and the businesspeople on your team.

It is hard to know what your company and product will need (and be) 6, 9 or even 12 months down the line - especially today, in the era of the pivot, and the lean startup. Get it wrong, and you're going to spend a lot of money later fixing the problem - just ask Twitter or Facebook.

Dell has published an infographic collecting various statistics about the progress of the consumerization of IT. We've covered some of this data before, such the studies sponsored by Unisys, but this does a nice job of pulling several piece of information together.

I don't care for the conflation of IT consumerization with the labor movement, but it's otherwise a nice visual summary of the changes occurring in the enterprise.

We've written extensively about QR codes, including a story that ran earlier this week about using them as a virtual tourism activity. But an announcement from Hipscan.com caught our attention about how you can actually use these curious codes to generate hard cash money.

I am waxing a bit nostalgic this week with various assignments for ReadWriteWeb: the story on PC BIOS, another one on embargo that you will see next week on the site, and seeing Rackspace's history of programming chart takes me back.

Can it be that DOS and I have been involved with each other for 30 years? That sounds about right. DOS has been a hard one to romance, to be sure.

Social media provides companies with new opportunities for customer service, research and marketing (within reason of course), but most respondents to a survey of C-level executive conducted by Harris Interactive for Capgemini aren't yet sure how to harness social media.

One of the issues brought to mind by VMware's new pricing scheme is how important price actually is in enterprise software pricing. For SMBs, pricing can make a break a deal. But for large enterprise, it's not as clear-cut. In some cases, as Sameer Patel of the Sovos Group has pointed out, buyers may actually prefer a higher price because they need to justify their budgets (that's oversimplifying things, but there you have it). Also, too low a price may suggest to enterprise buyers that a product isn't enterprise-class.

What do you think?

Assistly, a social CRM and help desk software-as-a-service, announced version 2.0 of its product this week, including a new freemium pricing model. Your first Assistly user is now free, with no limitations. It costs $1 an hour for additional part-time agents or $49 a month for each full-time agent with unlimited usage.

Besides the pricing change, Assistly's admin panel and reporting features got a facelift.

Inmagic is launching an idea management system called IdeaNet this week, claiming to deliver the "right mix of culture, process, and tools to support open and fluid lines of communication across organizational communities and silos." That's quite a mouthful, not to mention a lot of Big Ideas right there.