A band of frequencies clustered around 2.4 GHz has been designated, along with a handful of others, as the Industrial, Scientific, and Medical radio bands. “A lot of the unlicensed stuff — for example, Wi-Fi — is on the 2.4-GHz or the 900-Mhz frequencies, the ISM bands. You don’t need a license to operate on them.” That’s Ira Kelpz, Deputy Chief, Office of Engineering and Technology at the Federal Communications Commission, explaining precisely why these ISM bands are attractive to gadget makers.

Dr. Drew Stevens wrote: "Jeb Blount likes to say that “Sales Professionals are the Elite Athletes of the Business World.” I agree with him but here is the question: What are the core characteristics of elite sales athletes and how does one join this elite group?

Based on my 20 years of sales, sales management and sales training, I can narrow it down to seven, yes only seven common traits. "

Mahan writes: Everything the client asks of you, and everything you offer a client, is an intended solution. When you walk in the door and they ask you for something, anything, it's likely to be a request for a solution (We need a…, We want…, We're looking for…, Do you…, Can you help us with…). When you offer them something, it's likely to be a solution. Solutions have no inherent value. Solutions only derive value from the problems they solve and/or the results they produce. Understanding this guides everything else we do with clients.

This one paradigm shift has large implications. If it makes sense to you, you will be unable to talk about any of your solutions unless you've first talked about the problems the solution is supposed to solve and/or the results it's supposed to achieve. Otherwise, it's not a solution, it's an event. It might be an entertaining event, a well-received event, but it's only an event, not a solution. Solutions must actually solve something.

Maarten Balliauw wrote: The main idea of this project was to be able to type in a URL ending in ".docx", which would then render a preview of the underlying Word document. Luckily, ASP.NET provides a system of creating HttpHandlers. A HttpHandler is the class instance which is called by the .NET runtime to process an incoming request for a specific extension. So let's trick ASP.NET into believing ".docx" is an extension which should be handled by a custom class…

Bob Brauer writes: Acquisitions of companies such as Sun, BEA, Peoplesoft, Cognos, Siebel, Business Objects, and countless others the past few years have created a competition vacuum in the enterprise software space.

Interestingly, some of the Fortune 500 have annual I.T. budgets north of a billion dollars per year. And those that don't have budgets that are indeed quite large. This, combined with the fact that many of their primary systems were built and deployed in the 1990's (yes that's ten to twenty years ago) and are getting a bit "long in the tooth" as they say of aging horses, creates an interesting set of dynamics.

All of these trends point to a "perfect storm" of opportunity. Their alignment ought to be attractive to a new wave of entrepreneurs that can take advantage of the emerging Cloud Computing trend in new and exciting ways. This will enable a great deal of new innovation in the enterprise/corporate information technology space.

Bob Bauer wrote: If an organization is utilizing external data sources to improve business processes, there are a couple of different approaches that can be taken. The first option is to acquire, update, and maintain these external data sources yourself. The other option is to "plug in" to these data sources over the Internet that exist out in the Cloud, typically via a Web services API using a protocol such as XML-based SOAP or REST….

Loraine Lawson wrote: “The wonderful thing about standards is there are so many to choose from.” Fridsma knows the struggle of standards first-hand: He is overseeing the effort to sift through standards for electronic medical records as acting director of the Office of Interoperability and Standards in the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology. (It's important to note that this is not a standards body, but rather an open effort to sift through the existing standards to see what works and what doesn't.

To bulk up against Big Blue and its 4,000 consultants, SAS has teamed up with Accenture, who is also feeling the heat from IBM, but in consulting services. Together, SAS and Accenture will spend $50 million initially to develop new analytics products for six industries. For its part, Accenture sees analytics as a big growth area and partnering with the top analytics software vendor makes sense. And to beef up its corporate image, SAS is building a new 280,000 foot executive briefing center with 690 offices, two auditoriums, and a full café to impress analytics prospects.

Brad Feld wrote: As long time readers of this blog know, I’m strongly against software patents. Succinctly, I think they are (a) invalid constructs, (b) totally unnecessary, and (c) a massive tax on and retardant of innovation.

The film is based on a series of interviews conducted during the Supreme Court’s review of in re Bilski (which I attended in person) — a case that could have profound implications for the patenting of software. It’s really good and worth 29 minutes of your life.

Michael Krupa wrote: The HR SaaS application vendors are starting to incorporate messaging or ESBs into their offering. The most prominent example of this is Workday purchasing ESB vendor Cape Clear back in February of 2008. Since then Workday has embedded Cape Clear into their application to allow end users to create their own real-time inbound and outbound interfaces.

For those other SaaS vendors who are still stuck in the flat file interface, you better get it together soon. We are wising up and will be requiring state of the art real-time interfaces in our vendor selection criteria.

Cory Doctorow wrote: A world of exhaustive, reliable metadata would be a utopia. It's also a pipe-dream, founded on self-delusion, nerd hubris and hysterically inflated market opportunities.