Enterprise

I normally loathe writing about the corporate world, but seeing as this is a column focused on the business of apps, I figured I would make an exception.

While it's great to talk about the latest mobile game or local search app, the real money may be made in the enterprise arena. That's particularly the case with Apple and iOS.

With Research In Motion and its BlackBerry line reeling, there's a wide opening for another smartphone operating system to take over as the de facto corporate standard. Several Android players have attempted to fill that gap, notably … Read more

New Enterprise Associates, one of the world's largest venture capital firms, has raised $2.6 billion for NEA 14, its 14th venture capital fund, TechCrunch reported this evening.

TechCrunch figures the new fund may be the largest in venture capital history, beating out a $2.56 billion fund that Oak Investment Partners raised in 2006.

The new fund will have a pretty broad deployment target, New Enterprise Associates partner Tony Florence told TechCrunch.

"From a sector perspective we will continue to be very enterprise-focused, but also very, very active in the consumer Internet space, where there are certainly … Read more

Several months after its high-profile fly-by of the New York City skyline, the Space Shuttle Enterprise has landed on display at a New York exhibit presented by the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum. The show finally opened to the public today.

The Enterprise has found its final home on the USS Intrepid. For now, it's housed in a temporary pavilion; the museum is planning a more permanent structure in the future.

The space shuttle was unveiled as part of Samsung's SpaceFest week at the museum, which also included the "launch" of the company's newest product, the 75-inch ES9000 television.… Read more

Task-management company Asana has unveiled a new way for its users to handle the e-mail overload in their in-box.

Dubbed Inbox, the feature is designed for the companies that are currently using Asana's task-management tool. With Inbox, team members can stay up-to-date on the latest events related to a particular task or project and avoid dealing with unnecessary e-mail threads, according to Asana.

At the center of that plan is a pane that provides "the entire history and up-to-date status of the work [a message is] about," in each message sent between team members. In addition, the … Read more

Would it really be such a bad thing if Houston declared war on New York?

Sometimes, the Eastern home of many things loud and haughty is so far up itself that one cannot readily distinguish top from bottom. A little Texan governance might, for a while, persuade New Yorkers to become more in touch with down-home realities.

I mention this dream because Houston, which managed the Space Shuttle program for 3 decades, is being given a wooden replica of a space shuttle, while that great home of spaced-out blarney in the East will enjoy the real thing, the space shuttle … Read more

Microsoft dropped some hints today that the commercial release of Windows 8 could come sooner rather than later, but critics are worried that it's not very business friendly.

Announcing the Windows 8 Release Preview, Microsoft's Steven Sinofsky wrote today in the Building Windows 8 blog that the final version is, at the very least, on track.

"If the feedback and telemetry on Windows 8 and Windows RT match our expectations, then we will enter the final phases of the RTM (release to manufacturing) process in about 2 months," Sinofsky wrote. (Windows RT refers to the version … Read more

Intel's upcoming Ivy Bridge processors are causing a ripple effect in the lineups of laptops everywhere, and HP's freshly unveiled series of ultrabooks, "sleekbooks," and professional slim laptops reveals that thin's spreading beyond ultrabooks.

Of particular interest is the fact that HP's consumer line of ultrabooks is falling entirely into the Envy brand, which was previously exclusive to higher-priced laptops optimized for Beats Audio.

Call them fauxtrabooks, call them sleekbooks, call them ultrathins: these new 14- and 15-inch ultrabooks along with AMD-powered ultrabooklike laptops are bound to create some consumer confusion. But, based on limited time with these systems, they're also likely to make a lot of people happy: these thin laptops are actually impressively affordable. Let's hope it's a trend. … Read more

It's the one space shuttle that never made the trip to space.

And now the shuttle Enterprise is making the journey to its final frontier, the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum in New York. It flew into JFK Airport from Washington Dulles this morning, not on its own power but latched atop NASA's 747 Shuttle Carrier Aircraft.

NASA has made an event out of the short flight. The twinned aircraft flew at a low altitude over the New York metropolitan area and passed within photo-op range of landmarks including the Statue of Liberty. It has now landed … Read more

Yammer is expanding its repertoire of file-sharing and collaboration services for businesses with the acquisition of OneDrum.

The U.K.-based startup brings even more social-minded work tools to the enterprise social network. OneDrum has developed a peer-to-peer desktop application that connects Google Docs with Microsoft Office (Word, Excel and PowerPoint), enabling users to be able to collaborate, co-edit and share these documents in real time.

Thus, Yammer will be able to boost its own real-time document editor feature, Pages, with desktop sync capabilities, enabling file folders to be shared across multiple users' desktops. Furthermore, new versions and changes to … Read more