ReadWriteWeb

We haven't written much about TIBCO's enterprise social media tool tibbr since a year ago. But they have interesting news, including updates to the service, that they are announcing today with v3.5, scheduled to be available next month.

Networking giant Cisco is attempting to quantify the enterprise market for tablets. So, the company spent the last several months of 2011 surveying 1,500 executives, middle management, salespeople and clerical staffs of medium to large business around the world. What they found was that, on average, enterprise IT shops handle one tablet request for every three smartphone requests across the world.

No industry vertical has been more disrupted by the evolution of the smartphone than the enterprise. Since Apple released the iPhone in 2007 and the subsequent rise of Android, IT departments have struggled to reconcile device and application management, security and software deployment. What to do when every employee wants to bring their own device to work?

An infographic from xcube puts the changing enterprise mobile landscape into perspective. For instance, 63% of enterprises look to mobility for cost savings and near 50% are responding to employee demand. Since the end of the third quarter in 2011, the iPhone is the most preferred smartphone in the enterprise at 45%. BlackBerry comes in second at 34.5%. Check out the studious infographic below.

As beloved as Firefox is by its users, the open source browser has had a harder time finding hardcore fans among IT managers at large companies and other organizations. That's because its rapid release cycle has always been notoriously tricky for them to keep up with. On top of that, Mozilla would sometimes end support on a particular older version of its browser before enterprise clients were ready.

Mozilla has heard the pained cries of IT managers everywhere and today announced that they're going to put out an Extended Support Release version of Firefox to help organizations better manage and support the software.

How long have you held your current position? If you answered less than two years, you are not alone. It seems that turnover could be IT's biggest challenge in the new year: keeping talented developers. Network World's Carolyn Marsan writes this week about the topic and it is well worth reading her story.

This isn't a completely new problem. In 1980, I took my second job, about two years after I started work at a consulting firm in Washington, DC. My father was not happy about the switch. He was working as an accountant for the same place (and ended up putting in 30 years by the time he eventually retired, yes complete with gold watch that I have somewhere). He thought it was too quick a transition. What would other employers think? Little did I know I was starting a trend in the tech field lo these many years ago

The notion of app stores is expanding into the world of printers and HP has made some important strides in the past year after it announced its ePrint line of printers. The apps, combined with an Internet-accessible printer, are both actually pretty neat and I will show you what is involved in getting it all to work.

IBM is poised to unleash its revamped mobile strategy with a full suite of tools aimed at providing enterprise developers with an end-to-end system for collaboration, development and management for mobile applications. IBM is putting the full weight of its history, tools and computing clout behind its mobile strategy. The company's comprehensive framework has the potential to be one of the most powerful end-to-end development environments available.

We have been studying what IBM is doing in the mobile realm for the last week as the company readies the push of its IBM Mobile Technology Preview. IBM is not going to push its tools and frameworks onto developers in one large product vertical but rather is taking an iterative, pragmatic approach to solving many of the mobile dilemmas that face enterprise developers today. We also interviewed Leigh Williamson, a Distinguished Engineer at IBM and a member of the CTO Team for mobile software strategy development. Check out the transcript of our conversation below.

Today GitHub rolled out GitHub Enterprise, a self-hosted GitHub instance that companies can deploy internally. If you've heard this song before, another company that specialized in catering to developers went "enterprise" and never quite managed to get any traction. Is GitHub headed down the same rabbit hole, or is the company likely to succeed where SourceForge failed?

In one of the brilliant short stories that Isaac Asimov contributed to the science-fiction collection The Androids are Coming, the director of research for the U.S. Robot and Mechanical Men Corp. suggests that more human-like, positronic-brain robots - more like androids - could be made popular and desirable among the living population if living, sentient folks could see them doing bigger things that aren't tremendously important or dangerous. Maybe if one were elected mayor, for instance, folks would appreciate androids more and buy them to be their butlers.

Luckily - up to now, at least - technology hasn't had to be sold to the consumer or to the enterprise using this kind of "trickle down" logic. But today, a new subsidiary of Motorola Mobility, the company Google seeks to acquire, is invoking an Asimov aura around the launch of enterprise-class communications security services designed for, of all things, Android devices.

It is interesting to look through all the material that Amazon has released for its announcement of the new Kindle Fire tablet. From the announcement of the new family of Kindles, to the product page on Amazon.com to the press release for the new cloud-based browser Silk, the word Android is not mentioned once.

The Kindle Fire is a tablet, built off Android. Amazon developers forked Android somewhere along the way, probably from either the Frozen Yogurt 2.2 or Gingerbread 2.3.4 so really, this is actually a tablet built off a smartphone OS and not the official Android tablet OS, Honeycomb. Yet, Amazon is about to blow the rest of the Android tablet ecosystem out of the water.