Shane Schick

When Larry Ellison once said, "I used to think. Now I read The Economist,"he gave that magazine the kind of status and prestige that transformed the way everyone thought about it. Now imagine what he could have done with the BlackBerry, or the PlayBook.

Among the more scintillating revelations to come out of recent trial proceedings in Oracle vs. Google has been the admission that Oracle had considered buying Research In Motion,as well as Palm, as a way to break into the smart phone market. Ellison said Oracle, which alleges Google ripped off its intellectual property to build the Android OS, decided against RIM because it would have cost too much, and Palm lacked the competitive prowess to succeed. Both were probably good calls at the time. But I remember being in a room with Larry Ellison when he said BEA was too expensive. That didn't stop the company from buying BEA less than three years later.

Revenge, it turns out, is a dish best served on a smart phone.

After the hugely successful launch of Angry Birds Space recently, every IT department should stop playing it (for a minute) and ask themselves what makes the game so addictive and how they could begin to tailor their own mobile enterprise applications to adopt a similar approach.

When you're surrounded by more than 4,000 other companies at the world's biggest IT trade show, it's not easy forthe innovative startups to stand out. One solution? Let prospective customers walk through the walls.

Sitting in a large square in Hall 16 of CEBIT 2012 this year is an odd-looking collection of booths, or half-booths.

Malicious hackers who may be based in China managed to fool Canadian federal IT staff into providing access to government computers, leading to severe Internet restrictions at Treasury Board and the Finance Department, CBC News reported last week.

Artwork: Diego AguirreAlthough the government has so far offered little information on the breach, CBC said the attack first surfaced in January and cut off Internet access for thousands of public servants, although service has slowly been returning to normal. There has been no confirmation so far that Canadians' personal information has been compromised or lost.

CIOs who were once considered technology gurus by their coworkers can expect much different treatment from Generation Y workers who feel they are very proficient with IT tools, according to a national study conducted by IT World Canada and Harris/Decima.

Approximately 69 per cent of the more than 1,000 people surveyed in Freedom to Compute: The Empowerment of Generation Y said they regard themselves as highly proficient computer users. This was particularly true among those between 18 and 29 with a postgraduate degrees, 80 per cent of whom said they were highly proficient. Men also tended to rate their IT expertise highly at 77 per cent. Those who earn more than $100,000 annually thought they had a good grasp of computing hardware and software compared to those who earned less than $50,000.