We all know that the iPhone is tough to work on but is the iPad 2 a bit too hefty? Apple’s next generation iPhone and the rumored iPad mini will debut this fall, starting at a mystery event on September 12, according to blogger John Paczkowski.

Facebook’s new streamlined design seems to be tricking users into exposing personal data unintentionally.

First it was vision with Google Glass — could Google Hands be next? The search engine giant patented a smart glove design last week.

What’s the first thing successful CIOs do in the morning? If you think that you should check your email, you might be doing it wrong.

Is The Oatmeal’s Michael Inman the next technology wunderkind? He’s singlehandedly defeated the “world’s silliest tech lawsuit” and now Inman has raised a million dollars for a Nikola Tesla museum in New York. Let’s hope he continues to use his powers for good.

The world’s largest oil producer Saudi Aramco got nailed by a cyber-attack that is putting its 30,000 workstations at risk of being completely wiped. One would hope that such a large enterprise has a brilliant disaster plan in place.

Will law enforcement agencies use their new facial recognition technology to access newly available Facebook photos?

Most people would participate in the social media revolution except that it takes so freaking long. Here are 11 tips on how to use social media without losing your entire day.

Venture capitalists and tech entrepreneurs are telling the U.S. government to focus on more technological innovation and less IP policing.

Top talent is attracted to unique working environments and none is more storied than Google’s corporate culture. Here’s a peek into how Google takes care of its employees‘ families after they go to the great search engine in the sky.

Harassment at tech conferences does matter, says Valerie Aurora, and here’s what the industry needs to do to stop harassing women at large tech events.

Instead of worrying about who will mentor your millennials, perhaps you should consider finding a millennial to mentor your older workforce.

While Samsung has succeeded in defending itself from Apple’s copyright infringement case, the mobile giant is still a giant Apple fanboy, claims Mike Elgan.

With Facebook’s waning stock price, is the social media revolution the next dot com bubble to burst?

Public sector CIOs need to use Facebook and Twitter because they serve social media users, according to CIO Barry Condry.

The world’s first computer animation was programmed in Fortran almost 50 years ago.

Still clinging to that old 2G Motorola Razr phone? Time to upgrade. AT&T is planning to shut down the 2G network by 2017.

Curiosity, the NASA Mars science lab, has touched down on the red planet last night. Already there are fresh high res images of the Martian landscape. Fascinating!

As expected, post-IPO Facebook is experiencing massive braindrain with many of its movers and shakers cutting and running. More alarming is the news that insiders are ditching their Facebook stock.

Have you read any of the Malcolm Gladwell books on business success? If so, you may enjoy Zach Weinersmith’s tips on how to write Malcolm Gladwell books yourself.

Last month, Phil Simon wrote about the green facets of 3D printing. Now take a look at the human element — this 3D printer gave a disabled girl magic arms.

The CIO need to be the “cheerleader” of the community, according to the city of Seattle’s social CTO Bill Schrier.

Part of the social media users’ strategy is to become more visible, something this blogger feels CIOs struggle to accomplish within the organization.

CIOs are leaders in determining the direction of a business. When the London Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games (LOCOG) aimed to produce a zero-carbon, zero-waste event using energy-efficient technology, Gerry Pennell, CIO of the London summer games, used his IT expertise to help make the London summer games the greenest games ever.

Pennell deployed a combination of green IT technologies including piezoelectricity. Piezoelectricity occurs when pressure is applied to an object — a negative charge is produced on one side and a positive charge is produced on the other. Once pressure is relieved, electrical currents flow. Twelve 17.7″ X 23.6″ energy floor tiles lead visitors to Olympic Park. The kinetic energy harvested from over 12 million foot impressions will illuminate central LED floodlights 24 hours a day. This produces 2.1 watts of electricity per hour. The extra renewable energy is then stored in a lithium polymer battery for up to three days. It’s also sent via transmitter to power local street lights, displays and other off-grid applications.

On the surface, it sounds like one of those inventions that seems so simple in a “why didn’t I think of that?” kind of way. If someone told me I could step on a piece of rubber and generate light for three days, I never would have believed them. Now just imagine if all sidewalks, paths, corridors and floor spaces were constructed of piezoelectric tiles. This trending technology could be the key to helping CIOs run an energy-efficient and sustainable business. For example, the energy created from swivel chairs constantly rolling across piezoelectric tiles could operate low-power applications in offices. On a grand scale, a CIO could run an entire energy-savings system from the foot traffic of company employees.

These special rubber piezoelectric tiles are the handiwork of young London brainiac Laurence Kemball-Cook’s Pavegen Systems. The tiles are a great low-carbon solution. They are waterproof, last up to five years and are made from recycled trunk tires and some marine grade steel.

Kemball-Cook has installed his tiles as a dance floor at the music festival Bestival in Isle of Wright, England. Currently, he has 30 permanent installations in schools, shopping malls, city squares and now the 2012 London summer games. However, the piezoelectric device’s hybrid formula is a secret. Even the price per tile is kept a mystery. Kemball-Cook eventually wants to make his tiles practical for the real world and affordable to smaller markets.

Piezoelectricity isn’t a new concept.  The East Japan Railway Company in Japan experimented with piezoelectric flooring since 2006 at its main station. In 2010, the city of Toulouse, France, installed piezoelectric tiles in sidewalks to generate its street lamps. Israeli company Innowattech tested piezoelectricity on railroad tracks and highways.

While many of these examples come from organizations with deep pockets, smaller companies are employing piezoelectric technology today. For instance, some dance clubs capture the energy on a dance floor and use it to power LED lights.

CIOs drive an organization’s performance and end results, so it’s mission-critical for CIOs to be as engaged as possible with all aspects of the company, including the human element. Piezoelectricity might just be the green way for CIOs to involve employees in IT.

For instance, in my own work life, I’m in my own mindset at my desk. I sometimes forget that I work alongside a durable IT team. With piezoelectric flooring, I might feel more included in my company and the behind-the-scenes operations. There would no longer be an invisible shield between employees and the IT team. Transmitters connected to piezoelectric floor tiles could charge our office printers and power ceiling lights. Knowing that just walking from my desk to the break room could generate electricity would bring all the departments together. And, with that, midmarket CIOs could be one step closer to not only a more tightly knit company, but a smaller carbon footprint.

Miki Onwudinjo is a TechTarget editorial assistant and a journalism student at Northeastern University in Boston.

CIOs looking to harness the power of talent retention should look no further than Apple’s low-paid workers. Wait, something doesn’t sound right about that plan.

Got a BlackBerry? You’re quickly becoming an endangered user.

Did you think Dell had slowed down with the buyouts? Silly reader. Dell is acquiring Quest Software this week.

CIOs got heart, too. Check out the CIO Scholarship Fund event to help future IT leaders with tuition.

The leap second caused outages on many sites over the weekend, like Reddit, BuzzFeed, Gawker, LinkedIn and Yelp, plus scores of Linux sites. Bad news for lovers of cloud computing services. You’ll be happy to know that the TechTarget network was just fine.

And if the leap second wasn’t bad enough, real storm clouds knocked out Amazon’s data center, wiping swaths of the Internet’s cloud computing services with it, including Netflix, Instagram and Pinterest.

At this month’s SearchCIO360 dinner, we met Seth Kutty, director of IT at Tesla Motors, one of the ten companies that are changing the world. Don’t miss our upcoming dinners in Chicago and Boston!

Windows has been enterprises’ de facto collaboration platform for the last 20 years. It’s had hooks into instant messaging (Windows Messenger), messaging and collaboration (Outlook and SharePoint), and even cloud services (Windows Live services) for a long time. But maybe a lot of that “old” software now is starting to hold Microsoft back.

If you listen to the rhetoric from Redmond following the Yammer acquisition, you’d think none of those legacy platforms mattered. Yammer makes a difference because, as CEO Steve Ballmer points out, it “underscores our commitment to deliver technology that businesses need and people love.”

The company shelled out $8.5 billion for Skype just about a year ago. Besides being the leader in Internet video and phone calls, Skype has a great chat feature. Now, with Yammer, that makes three chat platforms in the Microsoft arsenal.

Maybe this is about making sure that the ready-to-be-released Windows 8 operating system and Surface tablets have the most recent collaboration software, without having to rejigger existing software or develop new applications.

But let’s understand one thing: Microsoft will have a place in enterprise collaboration for a long time to come, given its install base and the remnants of enterprise computing that will remain tethered to a desktop or laptop. However, it’s no longer the king of collaboration, with Apple, Google and Facebook, among others, having claimed huge numbers of users who have changed their ways of doing things forever.

Google reports an alarming rise in Web censorship by international governments in the last six months, according to its latest reports. The surprising thing is that most of those requests are coming from democracies.

Take one guess at the most important demographic in the tech industry. Now guess again, because your first guess was probably wrong.

Most of us have SoundHound or Shazam on our smartphones to help us play the “What’s that song?” game when out and about. But most users never realize that their smartphone apps are fueled by big data.

Got employees that work the 24/7 shift? Not the best strategy for success.

If you have stock in Nokia, you probably don’t want to read Andy Blumenthal’s latest.

Big bonus for the gadget-crazed among us: It’s rumored that Google’s first Android tablet will be called the Asus Nexus 7. Kind of rolls off your tongue, doesn’t it?

Speaking of tablets, Microsoft will not be announcing a partnership with Barnes & Noble this afternoon. Sorry, Charlie.

A proposed new Web censorship status code 451 would pay homage to recently deceased science-fiction writer Ray Bradbury.

And as we have been writing about here in the CIO/IT Strategy Media Group for some time now, the “new” CIO is many things to many different companies. But our SearchCIO.com news director did a little digging into just exactly what kinds of skills companies are asking for in their top IT executives, and the answers are very interesting.

Here’s a sampling:

• The vertical virtuoso
• The enforcer
• The protector
• The translator
• The negotiator

Not only do they sound like some real or potential Hollywood action flicks, these job skills show how intertwined the CIO and senior IT have become in the inner workings of the business as a whole. Non-IT executives should remember that when they are looking for ways to transform their businesses for today’s uncertain markets.

• Ultrabooks are blurring the lines between laptops and tablet devices, but the real question is whether your employees will use them to hit the network on the sly.
• Did you hear the one about how the United Nations is going to take over the Internet? Hands off our tablet devices, guys.
• We’ve all heard about Google’s and Facebook’s iterative changes — usually from users who are complaining about those same changes. Here’s the inside scoop on how they jockey that user feedback internally.
• Gadget lovers rejoice: Google is launching its own Android tablet devices this month, while Tim Cook announced a new MacBook Pro and MacBook Air with the Apple Retina display at this week’s WorldWide Developer’s Conference in San Francisco.
• The question of booth babes at IT conferences is discussed as a symptom of the male gaze.
• If you’re worrying about whether the United States can win a cyberwar, stop worrying — it can’t, and here’s why.
• Were people seriously concerned about a brave new world without the Apple Retina display?

The seriousness of Flame is real: Flame and the Duqu and Stuxnet malware are capable of attacking national critical infrastructure. The U.S. used Stuxnet against Iran’s nuclear program, which, given the many alternatives, seems like a pretty good idea. The same virus programs, however, could be used against any system that attackers wanted to target, including those in the U.S., and put millions of people at risk.

On the other hand, experts say there isn’t anything special about Flame and that it can be easily defended against with conventional security tools and policies. Microsoft this week revoked fraudulent certificates used by the Flame malware toolkit. Some experts say there is a bigger threat to businesses from application-level exploits by individual hackers than from the Flame-category cyberespionage attacks.

Two points are emerging in the wake of the discovery of Flame. One is (needless) panic; the second is a call for international treaties banning cyberwarfare. A big push for this is coming from Eugene Kaspersky, an influential security expert and founder of Russian antivirus company Kaspersky Labs, and the Russian government. Both entities are well populated with talented malware security experts, both legitimate and criminal.

As we have learned over the past decade, the best policy for security is openness. If we start making any kind of code or use of code illegal, we are going to have more problems than the threat of cyberattack. As the saying goes, if you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns.