Deal of Venus, Moon offer early bird skywatching

Early risers will be treated to a suggestive view celeste early next week as the two brightest objects in the night sky — Moon and Venus — will appear near to each other.

Venus and the moon appears low in the eastern sky-Southeast Monday and Tuesday. For U.S. skywatchers, they will rise over the horizon at about 4: 30 a.m. local time and should be in a good position to be displayed approximately 60-90 minutes later in Alba spinning.

This map of the sky of Venus and the Moon shows as they appear during appearances of morning next week.

See Venus and the Moon
Monday morning, Venus will be located about 7 degrees in the lower left of the Moon Waxing. On Tuesday, a slightly thinner moon appears a bit closer to Venus, sitting around 4 degrees to the left of the planet. [Photo: our moon change]

Keep in mind that the disputed measures clenched fist arm length about 10 degrees wide. So on Tuesday, the Moon and Venus will appear separated by less than half of a fist.

If you plan to arrive early to see this pair catchy, make sure you don't have any obstacles such as trees or buildings in your path, as they will be pretty low in the sky.

Venus is in the sky
Venus is now on the rise around the beginning of morning twilight. Although it is only about half as bright as it was during the greatest sagacity last December, is still an impressive sight as it comes up in the East-South-East.

Venus rises to about 2 hours before the Sun on Tuesday, but that will be reduced to only about 80 minutes 31 March. While unmistakably bright, is rather low in the sky at dawn.

Dawn in early March, Venus is less than 20 degrees high as seen from locations around 40 degrees north latitude, and every week it sinks a little lower.

Venus moves from Sagittarius to Capricorn on 2nd March. As it goes through the stars of Capricorn, we will have our last chance until December to observe the planet against a dark background and stars.

With binoculars, watch it go 4 degrees south of the star Beta Capricorni, 5 March and 0.7 degrees north of the Stella Theta on 13 March. Venus will enter weak constellation of Aquarius on March 25th.

Between one half and the end of this year, Venus will make a complete circuit of the zodiac. A telescope will reveal its shape Crescent.

The planet is now flee brilliant in front of Earth in his travel around the Sun. But its 22 miles to second motion is only slightly faster than 19 mps of the Earth. This year Venus takes about seven months to pass behind the Sun as seen from our platform motion in space.

Joe Rao serves as an instructor and lecturer at New York's Hayden Planetarium. He writes of astronomy for the New York Times and other publications, and he is also a meteorologist on camera to News 12 Westchester, New York.

© Space.com 2011. All rights reserved. More from Space.com.

Lexmark, AccuWeather offer Weather App-based printer

In a world drowning in information, weather could be among the most ubiquitous content out there. Radio and TV stations offer frequent updates--particularly during the time in the car--and sites like Weather.com are easy enough to check on your computer or iPhone. But Lexmark and AccuWeather are betting there's a place you should check the prospect of seven days--the humble office printer.

The two companies on Monday announced the debut of their new app Weather SmartSolution that allows users to check the weather forecast directly on touchscreens for Lexmark printers connected Web. Users can search for local reports, or enter the zip codes for travel destinations and--as we saw in the video below--print the information directly.

Besides, the service is being pitched to companies providing weather-dependent service, such as landscaping, ski shops and event planning.

The SmartSolution of AccuWeather Weather app is free and available to the genesis of Platinum, Pinnacle, Lexmark and Interact Mac compatible with inkjet printers.

For other Macintosh computing news, visit Macworld. Story copyright © 2010 Mac Publishing LLC. All rights reserved.

Some shareholders of Nokia offer a plan B, CEO of Nokia

The full letter covers a lot of criticism in regards to what the company is currently planning. The nine should be elected by a majority, want to change the current management seriously. One of the first things they want to do is see the expulsion of Nokia's CEO Stephen Elop.

Their argument is that Nokia will maintain ownership and control of the level of its software products because the software is where the value of innovation, differentiation and shareholder more easily can be created. Also want a renewal in hiring strategy, the Elimination of outdated and bureaucratic R&D practices and at all costs avoid becoming "a poorly differentiated OEM".

If you choose us a majority on the Board will pursue Nokia the following agenda:

* Return the company to a strategy that aims for high growth and high profit margins through innovation and overwhelming products with unrivaled user experience.

* Maintain ownership and control of software of Nokia products. The software is where innovation, differentiation and value to shareholders more easily can be created.

* Hiring strategy Revamp to target the young talent of the top software from around the world. Only if Nokia is able to attract and retain the best talent in the industry will be able to raise the level of innovation that is required to achieve sustained growth and consistently high profit margins.

* Dramatically increase efficiency by eliminating outdated and bureaucratic R&D practices such as geographically distributed software development and outsourcing.

* Avoid at all costs, becoming an OEM poorly differentiated with only low margin, commodity that is able to attract top talent and software cannot create shareholder value though innovation.

If you choose us a majority on the Board of Directors the following Nokia will take concrete actions:

* Immediate unloading of Stephen Elop from his duties as President and CEO of the company. Appointment of a new CEO with an international background of the mobile industry. The new CEO will be committed to pursue the rest of the actions listed below.

* Restructure Alliance with Microsoft as a tactical exercise focused mainly to the North American market. Release one or two Windows Phone devices under a sub-brand of Nokia. Only if the carrier acceptance, sales volumes and profit margins are satisfactory, consider releasing more WP devices and make them available in Europe. Windows phone will be the main development platform for Nokia. Nokia phones running Windows Phone will simply take advantage of existing tools for developers and application ecosystem already put in place by Microsoft.

* MeeGo will be Nokia's primary smartphone platform. This is where most innovation happens. If MeeGo does not bring great devices to the market on an accelerated pace, this strategy will not work. The Smartphone and tablet MeeGo will win top experiences and applications, iOS and competitor of Android-based products. To reduce time to market, will be done all R&D internally and MeeGo in one geographic location. If necessary, suspend the collaboration with Intel and concentrate resources on innovation and release new Nokia MeeGo devices to market faster.

* Increase the duration of Symbian for a minimum of 5 years. Collect the profits of the existing market Share and consumer preference that Symbian is already in Europe and Asia. Use increasingly Symbian to target mid-tier and feature phone segments. Up-selling existing users of Symbian for MeeGo. Concentrate efforts of Symbian in specific countries in Europe, Asia and Latin America where Nokia Symbian enjoy a high level of goodwill of consumers and may be sold to healthy margins.

* QT based strategy Developer with primary focus on MeeGo, but providing a credible story for Symbian Developer. Allow developers to make money with huge installed targeting Symbian based while offering their better user experience on MeeGo platform. All this with a common developer ecosystem that allows writing and releasing the software for Symbian and Meego is interoperability with minimal work.

* End distributed R&D. transition to an installation of R&D of which 90% of all Nokia R&D is done in only two geographical positions. One of them will be in Finland and the other will be defined later. There will be no more R&D projects with resources in more cities and zones. Will be allowed only small tactical software projects to take place outside the two main offices of R&D.

* End of outsourcing R&D. bring all major software and hardware development in-house. Immediate end to the outsourcing facilities where there are multiple levels of Nokia project managers and project leaders of the subcontractor between product managers and software developers (in some cases up to 90% of the team is management overhead). This action implies substantial staff layoffs in Finland and other R&D positions worldwide, as well as the recruitment of talented external key and tactical acquisitions of companies where appropriate.

* Leadership team shakeup. Immediate relief of Tero O.j. npera, Niklas Savander and Mary McDowell from all their responsibilities with the company. Other members of the Leadership Team Nokia can download individual reviews pending with the Board of Directors. Discharged the members of the Leadership team of Nokia to be replaced with the internal and external talent.

* Aggressively recruit young talented software from the best universities. Nokia actively recruiting for visiting top universities worldwide to screen and invite the best students for interviews in Nokia's R&D locations. Establish a path of progression of credible and rewarding technical career in Nokia (to avoid the best talent, leaving the company or to become management overhead). They offer competitive salaries for new talent (if necessary, considerably above the market local wages). Establish Nokia as a company where the best and brightest want to work.

* Specific further actions related to the S40 platform Ovi services will be determined and the company's marketing activities at a later stage.

Startups offer Cool Tools is ease pain

Error in deserializing body of reply message for operation 'Translate'. The maximum string content length quota (8192) has been exceeded while reading XML data. This quota may be increased by changing the MaxStringContentLength property on the XmlDictionaryReaderQuotas object used when creating the XML reader. Line 1, position 8994.
Error in deserializing body of reply message for operation 'Translate'. The maximum string content length quota (8192) has been exceeded while reading XML data. This quota may be increased by changing the MaxStringContentLength property on the XmlDictionaryReaderQuotas object used when creating the XML reader. Line 1, position 9165.

If you want to know what IT tools and technologies you'll be using in a few years, it pays to keep an eye on enterprise technology start-ups.

Seasoned VCs and entrepreneurs agree that IT start-ups looking for funding should have an offering that makes the CIO's life easier -- and it had better not involve lots of capital investments on software installations and supporting infrastructure. Instead, backers are looking for software-as-a-service, cloud-based and mobile innovations that improve the IT cost proposition.

"There are too many inefficiencies that exist in large enterprise software, such as platforms that have to be upgraded, and that translates into a lot of money for IT," says Will Indest, vice president of venture development at Tech Columbus in Ohio. Indest says that many companies just don't have the budget for large software and hardware buildouts -- especially when there are options like SaaS and cloud storage.

That's a sentiment echoed by Maria Cirino, co-founder of venture capital firm .406 Ventures in Boston, who calls the move to cloud computing the biggest shift since client/server computing took hold in the '90s. "We see small to midsize companies embracing cloud right away, and large enterprises will soon," she says, adding that companies stand to gain too much economic leverage to ignore the trend.

Cirino says she's been culling her stack of prospects to find companies that focus on securing the cloud, because she feels that's the biggest obstacle for larger enterprises. For instance, she's working with a pre-beta start-up called CloudCop that will provide monitoring and analytics for companies that want to move their data to the public cloud. She says that CloudCop aims to provide an audit trail for businesses facing compliance regulations.

Start-ups and more established vendors are offering cloud-based tools that can help IT departments with everything from chargeback to backing up data that users enter on social media sites. Industry experts say the timing for these services is good as IT shops warm to the idea of having their infrastructure and data off-site.

Deborah Magid, director of software strategy for IBM Venture Capital Group in San Mateo, Calif., is closely watching the cloud-based storage arena. She predicts that many large enterprises will adopt a hybrid approach to storing data, where some is on-site and some is in the cloud. However, she notes that vendors still need to work out the speed of search and retrieval, as well as international regulatory issues -- areas ripe for innovation.

Mobile is another key market for successful IT start-ups, says Tech Columbus' Indest. If a start-up looking for funding approaches him without a mobile component that addresses the proliferation of smartphones, tablets and other devices, he says, "it's just not a good prospect."

What are the good prospects? Computerworld has gathered snapshots of five start-ups that are bringing hassle-saving IT products and services to the enterprise. They run the gamut from mobile device management to database virtualization, but all are aimed at alleviating the myriad pain points, including purchasing and managing in-house infrastructure, that IT faces today. And even if you don't end up using these specific products, chances are you'll check out something similar within the next year or so.

Cloud-based IT resource tracking: Apptio

For the past few years, IT departments have been under pressure to move from being a cost center to being a service provider for the enterprise. This means tracking business units' usage of IT resources, including labor, hardware, software, power and cooling.

CIOs and other IT managers often develop bills of services using a combination of spreadsheets, business intelligence software, asset management systems and, in some cases, blind estimates, according to Apptio co-founder, president and CEO Sunny Gupta.

"IT executives are trying to manage IT without any real way to measure costs, quality of service and the actual value of IT products. They have management tools to measure individual aspects of IT -- such as the network, bandwidth and mobile devices -- but not as a holistic view," he says.

Apptio's SaaS Technology Business Management (TBM) Solution Suite promises to give IT teams and corporate executives a consolidated look at all IT investments and their associated costs, showing the financial impact of client, infrastructure and application services, says Gupta. Authorized users can input data, run reports, view data via customized dashboards, or dispatch alerts based on predefined thresholds, such as a business unit's storage usage.

IT also can create a "bill of IT" for each business unit to show its exact service consumption. Gupta says this is critical for forecasting, aligning budgets and developing an accurate chargeback program.

For instance, using the TBM, a company might realize that employees are using 10 applications that perform similar functions. By standardizing on one, it could gain significant cost efficiencies in terms of volume pricing and streamlined support. Also, the TBM offers what-if scenarios so organizations can weigh the pros and cons of granular business decisions, such as moving storage from the data center to the cloud or increasing the use of telepresence.

At a glance

Company: Apptio

Enterprise product: TBM Solution Suite

Pricing: Starts at $100,000 per year, depending on the number of users and modules deployed.

Funded by: Andreesen Horowitz, Cisco Systems, Greylock Partners, Madrona Venture Group and Shasta Ventures.

Gupta says that the Starbucks coffee chain started using the TBM and discovered that the laptops it had deployed to cut desktop expenses were actually costing more because of battery replacements and support issues. Armed with this information, the company was able to change its warranties and help desk strategies to extract the savings it had initially anticipated.

Mark Gibbs, CEO of Gibbs Universal Industries (GUI), a consultancy in Ventura, Calif., and a Network World columnist, says that as the data center becomes more complex, "IT resource tracking is as important as ever." Using SaaS offers benefits such as easily deployed add-ons and instant feature updates based on requests and what-ifs that other companies use, he says.

However, he warns that IT teams must test how data gets into and out of these hosted systems to ensure that they interoperate smoothly with the tools that will feed data into them, and that the information used is accurate in real time.

Cloud storage and backup for Web apps: Backupify

Under strict scrutiny to make data recoverable and secure, IT is faced with an ever-growing challenge: controlling all the data that users generate in Web applications such as e-mail, social media sites, and document-sharing and collaboration tools.

Enterprise Strategy Group senior analyst Lauren Whitehouse calls this issue the "Achilles' heel" for most organizations in this era of third-party hosted applications and cloud storage. "When IT owns and operates applications, they are responsible to make sure that the application and data are available, which includes employing backup/recovery processes and other high-availability technology. Now that more organizations are outsourcing applications, the issue of downtime and data loss is getting exposed," she says.

At a glance

Company: Backupify

Enterprise product: Backupify Pro 500

Pricing: Starts at $19.99 per month for 10 users; additional users are $3 per month each. Includes both a social media account backup module and Google Apps domain backup.

Funded by: Avalon Ventures, First Round Capital, General Catalyst, Lowercase Capital, Betaworks and several individual investors.

This is particularly a concern, she says, because many online service providers don't have well-defined service-level agreements. Whitehouse calls services like Backupify "an insurance policy."

Backupify is SaaS that backs up data from Basecamp, Facebook, Gmail, Google Docs, Twitter and other online applications to Amazon's S3 storage cloud network. "IT struggles because users are creating data in all these silos around the Web, and that data is exposed to hacking and viruses. It's also prone to loss from human error," says Backupify CEO Rob May. By centralizing user data on Amazon's environment, IT managers can apply security and deduplication policies for compliance without building out their own storage infrastructure, he says.

With Google Apps backup, IT registers the accounts to store in Backupify and receives e-mails confirming each completed backup, as well as access to archives and downloads. The social media backup module works similarly; IT can register each service and user it wants backed up.

Backupify is appealing to companies beholden to data-retention standards, such as those in financial services and healthcare, because it enables them to have the benefits of social media and Web-based applications without increased risk, May says.