Maureen O'Gara

Apple sent the Fair Labor Association (FLA) in Monday to start inspecting the conditions under which its widgets are made including Foxconn's factories in China, the recent subject of an Upton Sinclair-like exposé by the New York Times. Apple said the FLA and its labor rights experts are supposed to interview thousands of workers about their living and working conditions including health and safety, wages, hours and communication with management, checking the plant floor, dorms and other facilities and reviewing documents relating to all stages of employment. Apple CEO Tim Cook said in a statement that "The inspections now underway are unprecedented in the electronics industry, both in scale and scope, and we appreciate the FLA agreeing to take the unusual step of identifying the factories in their reports." The inspectors are supposed to get complete cooperation.... (more)

Microsoft Slashes Price of Its Cloud Database

As a result, it said, of "customer feedback and evolving usage patterns," Microsoft cut the price of its cloud-ified SQL Azure database 48%-75% for databases larger than 1GB and introduced a new entry-level 100MB model. It blogged that it's noticed that many projects start small but need to grow quickly so now as the user's database grows the price per GB will decline significantly. It also said that many cloud adopters and customers with smaller workloads want an inexpensive option so that's where the 100MB option comes from. Amazon may have made them do it. GB Previous Pricing... (more)

US Start-Up Born to Make War on Junk Mail

Just when the US Postal Service looks down for the count, a self-funded Seattle start-up called PaperKarma figures its destiny is to suppress junk mail on which the post office depends. The company was started by Sean Mortazavi, who hasn't given up his day job at Microsoft yet, and PaperKarma's sole employee Brendan Ribera. The pair has developed a free multi-platform mobile app that lets junk mail-inundated protesters take a picture of the junk mail flooding their mailbox, hit an "Unsubscribe" button and send it to PaperKarma. The start-up will automatically pass it on to the ma... (more)

Apple Starts Unleashing Mountain Lion

Sooner than expected, Apple Thursday started previewing a developer-directed beta of Mountain Lion, its next-generation Mac OS X 10.8, due out late this summer. It's borrowed some more features from iOS like the popular and unlimited iChat-replacing iMessages IM as well as Notes, Games Center and Reminders and changed the names of Mac's Address Book to Contacts and iCalc to Calendar, making the two operating systems more alike - you can see where this is going, right? Mountain Lion also integrates with Twitter and Apple's own iCloud. Documents created on Macs will be available ... (more)

Mobile Devices Get Active Directory Protection

Centrify is going into the mobile business in support of iOS and Android phones and tablets. The move involves putting its multi-platform support for Microsoft's Active Directory on its own cloud so companies can protect the increasing ubiquitous BYOD they need to control and secure whether they're on the corporate network or not. It promises an organization can re-use its Active Directory investment without deploying a complex new infrastructure or dealing with yet another "pane of glass" in the form of another standalone management console. Its new enterprise-scale subscripti... (more)