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New device aimed at those who can't get a BlackBerry.

Sectoral Asset Management, a Montreal-based investment advisory firm, recently began using the application service provider version of LineData's LongView Trading order management system. Why lease versus buy the software? "We’re a small boutique firm, we have limited IT resources, and we don’t have the resources internally to host or manage trading applications," says Laurent Sicard, IT manager at Sectoral Asset Management.

Data center energy management company TrendPoint Systems is offering a four-point plan for “green data centers”. Although the plan leads into a pitch for TrendPoint's product, it includes some helpful hints for those who find their data centers to be energy hogs.

The current economic downturn and skittish investors have left administrators and managers concerned about maintaining a stable capital base and avoiding mass redemptions, says Ron Kashden, president of TKS Solutions in this contributed blog entry.

As Wall Street firms continue to open new offices in foreign countries and to outsource around the globe, one challenge for IT departments is to make sure that work, data and documents flow quickly and smoothly among widespread offices and data centers. Adobe and GemStone are announcing today a joint solution designed to meet this challenge: they’ve embedded GemStone’s GemFire data virtualization software, which harnesses the memory resources of many computers to speed up data retrieval and improve scalability and fault tolerance, into a version of Adobe’s LiveCycle workflow and document management software.

iPhone kinks are starting to bother even people who don't have them.

To boost their chances of preventing costly data breaches , financial firms must improve their detective controls, according to an analyst at SMART Business Advisory and Consulting.

Firms seem to understand the importance of preventative controls, such as having firewalls and access control lists. "But they lack a good grasp of detective controls," says Tony Hernandez, managing director at SMART.

Watching the Olympic diving competition last night and seeing how after every dive the Chinese athletes humbly bow, making a simple, graceful gesture foreign to most Americans, reminded me of how much we could learn and benefit from other countries' customs and practices. Such an attitude is critical to doing business in Asian countries, according to Roger White, managing director of IT consulting firm Citisoft. White recently completed a six-year stint in Tokyo, where he helped U.S. firms expand their asset management businesses in Japan (while working for PriceWaterhouseCoopers). When he first arrived, “I found everything was different – I had to check everything I knew at the door and learn to do things differently.” He observed that the U.S. firms that took a softer approach to implementing new practices, first trying to develop a deep understanding of existing processes and customs before introducing changes, fared far better than those that slammed their American ways on Japanese employees. Also, White found that demonstrating a new process in front of local employees and proving before their eyes that it worked before making them do it, helped them accept it.

In the UK version of The Office, David Brent (Ricky Gervais) gives a performance review of accountant Keith, which soon turns into every boss's nightmare.

Watch out Google and Yahoo!Finance A 21-year old programmer contacted me about Streetread.com, a new financial Web site he developed that automatically aggregates the latest headlines from over 20 of the leading financial news sites. Users can also enter the ticker symbols of stocks they follow.

The U.S. Conversion from GAAP to International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) should take place in 2013. But if financial firms want to be ready, they must start preparing now, says Ernst & Young.

To help you mentally prepare for vacation, here's an in-flight safety video from Mad TV:

For “task” or “knowledge” users who do ordinary things with their desktop computers such as word processing, spreadsheets, email and web browsing, ClearCube is announcing this morning a virtual desktop solution that feeds multiple desktops – as many as eighty -- from one PC blade. In theory, this could save money and IT support time in the running of Wall Street's office PCs.

In a recent conversation with Jacob Hall, chief architect for the investment bank at Wachovia, he brought up an interesting idea he’s been thinking about: deploying desktop computers like workgroup printers. “Rather than virtualizing desktop computers and moving them to the data centers, where we already have expansion problems as most companies do, we deploy desktops where they are today, but we just deploy fewer of them,” he says. “We think a new type of workgroup computer needs to be created that can take advantage of this.” Each workgroup computer would serve twenty to forty people, he estimates.

A tough-talking Rainn Wilson, aka Dwight Shrute from The Office, leads a meeting on budget cuts and gets ideas from a diverse group of employees in this SNL Digital Short.

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