Harvard Business School and other major Universities are beginning to add open source into the curriculum. This is a sign that open source is starting to get the attention of many in the business world and curriculum's are adjusting to address this shift. In the April 2008 edition of Harvard Business Review we see a fictional case study involving the decision process required to decide whether or not a company should embrace open source business model or keep their software closed.

A new study shows that men are more prone to Internet fraud than women. IC3 received 206,884 complaints of online crimes during 2007. Their findings show that men lost $1.67 to every $1 lost by women in online fraud. This is a $40 million increase in reported losses to law enforcement when compared to 2006.

Some high profile employees seem to be itching to get out of Google. The image of Google being "a utopian place to work" as Craig Silverstein, director of technology, (and Employee #1 at the company) said in an interview with CNBC, seems to be waning.

Some recent announcements make it clear that the utopian atmosphere may be fading. Just within the last few months we've seen their vice president of engineering, Douglas Merrill, VP for global sales and operations, Sheryl Sandberg, and their CFO George Reyes step down. (see a more comprehensive list in Appendix A)

Verisign will be increasing the wholesale price of .com domains from $6.42 to $6.86 and .net from $3.85 to $4.23. They are using the maximum 7% increase allowed under Verisign's contract with ICANN which runs through 2012.

You can bet registrars will be passing on the cost to consumers. The new prices are scheduled to take effect in October.

Hugh MacLeod posted a question on his site: If open source is such a phenomenon, where are all the open source billionaires? That is the premise of a recent Wired IT article.

Some would say that not all rewards are financial ones. Open source is motivated by community, social interactions, and peer recognition.

Being able to monitor web traffic to your sites is very important. You want to be able to gather metrics like where are users are being referred from, how long users stay on your site, what ads are working or not. Being able to gather statistics helps you find out what types of things are working and helps you adapt and build content users enjoy.

There are several very expensive web statistics packages that do a great job, but there are also plenty of free tools out there that do very well.

Here we've compiled a list of some of favorites:

Need a good list of open source tools that you can run on your mac?
I came across this site that outlines a pretty comprehensive list of some of the most popular tools used on the Mac. See open source tools for MacOS .

The list is well organized and easy to follow.
Happy downloading :)

Skooliki
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http://www.outervillage.com

I came across this tool called virtual box that may be a great alternative to VMware workstation.

Ever wish you could take that long nasty looking URL and make it into something small and compact that can be easily forwarded to email or phone devices.

For those using Microblogging these tools are a necessity. Other useful purposes for small URLs include embedding links with ugly uid's, certificates, or other commonly seen tags when user hover over hyperlinks.

Unison announced at CeBit that it has launched what it claims is the best Linux based communications suite available. It combines IP telephony, e-mail, instant messaging, address book, capable of running on a single Linux server. It is available free as a public beta.

An interesting article in the Wall Street journal tries to outline some reasons as to why most business executives fail to see the value of IT within an organization.

IT has been proven to provide numerous competitive advantages within the business world. Companies like UPS, FedEx, Netflix, Amazon, Google to name a few have differentiated themselves through innovative uses of information technology.

Click Forensics has published a heat map showing countries where the most click fraud is originating. (Red is bad, green is good). The biggest sources of click fraud are India (4.3 percent), Germany (3.9 percent), and South Korea (3.7 percent). Mexico is also in the red.

Playing video games builds the skills needed to succeed in life and work according to the book authored by John Beck and Mitchell Wade "The Kids are Alright: How the Gamer Generation Is Changing the Workplace". They go on to say that playing games can help people be more sociable, develop strategic thinking, and become better leaders.

Wade and Beck survey asked questions to find out whether the experience of gaming, and growing up surrounded by games, changes attitudes, expectations, and abilities related to business, "the answer is a resounding yes," they say.

Virtualization seems to be the buzz word all in IT are using these days. It can mean a bunch of different things depending on who you talk to. Refer to Wikipedia for many of the latest definitions. For our discussion let's define it as a technique for hiding the physical characteristics of computing resources in a way in which other systems, applications, or end users interact with those resources.