ReadWriteEnterprise

What do you drink when you're out at the bar? What do you brag about afterwards? If you're like a lot of Untappd users in the United States, they're not the same thing. At least that's what the data from Untappd suggests, according to lead developer and co-founder Greg Avola.

Avola spoke on February 1st in London at the Monki Gras. As part of a larger talk about Untappd and its growth, Avola talked about the aggregated data that the company has gleaned from user shares via the Untappd app.

Red Hat’s customers using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5 and 6 are getting a little more breathing room when it comes to updates. The company announced today that it is extending the support life cycle from seven to 10 years for RHEL 5 and 6. Customers using RHEL 6 will have support through 2020.

According to a FAQ from Red Hat, the move is in response to customer requests. Many of the customers adopting RHEL 5 were doing so mid-cycle, and were looking at dealing with upgrades sooner than what’s desirable. With the extension, RHEL 5 support will be carried through 2017.

While the basic risks of social media are well known to most enterprise security managers, there are many dark corners of social media that can be just as dangerous or even more so. Here are three ways that social media can sneak malware and exploits across your corporate firewalls, and ways that you can pay attention and hopefully prevent their misuse. The biggest issue is that many corporate executives don't really know what is going on across their networks, and don't have any visibility into the traffic patterns and potential exploits.

SaaS backup provider Backupify has recently examined its own customer sample to do some demographic profiling of Google Apps users. The results are somewhat intriguing, as you can see in the infographic below. If you remove .edu domains, Google Apps still has nearly 40% of all of its seats used by businesses with more than 10,000 employees. The company surveyed their customers who have at least 30 users.

Whether Windows 8's radically re-imagined usage model catches on with tablet and PC users will depend in large part upon the role Microsoft Office apps will play. If it looks too much like Office 2010, then having Windows 8 relegate Office to the "Desktop" side while mobile-style apps take over the "Metro" side, won't make much sense.

This morning, Microsoft gave out the first signal of how the shift will happen. The first technical preview of The Software Probably Known as "Office 2013" has made its way to select testers, in advance of a public beta now scheduled for this summer.

Pentaho Corporation today announced that it has made freely available under open source all the big data capabilities in its Kettle v4.3 release, and has moved the entire Pentaho Kettle project to the Apache License Version 2.0. This is the same open source license that Hadoop and others use. We have covered Pentaho before here.

A new longitudinal study at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth focusing on the online activities of the Inc. 500 has found a huge drop in the number of companies maintaining corporate blogs over the past year. The UMass researchers, under the direction of Nora Barnes, has been following this group for several years. Only 37% of those interviewed had a corporate blog last year, down from half of those interviewed in 2010.

So, we've shot down SOPA and PIPA. Congratulations Internets for a job well done. Mission accomplished, right? Not so much. While that's two bad pieces of legislation pushed back, there's much more where that came from. Leaving aside existing nastiness like the DMCA, we also have the even nastier Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) (PDF). How bad is it? Bad enough that the European Parliament's rapporteur for ACTA (Kader Arif) resigned over it today (January 27, 2012). Unfortunately for those of us in the United States, President Obama has already ratified ACTA on behalf of the United States.

Over six years ago, I rounded up a group of analysts to elicit their opinions on what was then a startling trend: People who purchased iPods were then purchasing Macs. Was it a fluke, I asked? Some said maybe not: Buyers were learning to trust the Apple brand again. But there were too many mitigating factors at that time which could eventually derail the Mac's comeback, for which the only route to its eventual culmination appeared to be by way of the home entertainment center.

What literally no one foresaw in 2005 was the possibility that an Apple-branded device could become a future year's most successful and desirable business tool. The iPad bounced the Apple brand right back into the office; and now, results of a survey of 10,000 IT professionals worldwide by Forrester reveal that as CxOs find themselves embracing iPads, their companies end up opening their front doors to Macs.

Mobile UX designers and marketing and analytics firm Nellymoser today released a comprehensive study of print magazine action codes. They took the time to review every 2011 issue of the top 100 national magazine titles: all 164,000 pages' worth. They found a total of 4,400 QR Codes, MicrosoftTags, Spyderlynk SnapTags, BEE Tags, JagTags, Digimarc watermarks and other codes with an iPhone or Android device. For each tag, they scanned and ran the resulting Web page or video. At least give them props for being thorough.

The results show to no surprise that despite their problems, tags are becoming more popular, from an average of two per issue at the beginning of the year to more than six nearing the end.