Personal branding isn’t a new topic. In fact, it’s been around since roughly 1997 when Tom Peters coined the phrase, but as we slowly recover from the economic downturn and with the rise of new technology, personal branding is becoming more prevalent and more important.

Developing and maintaining your personal brand should be a part of your long-term career strategy.

A personal brand is more than just maintaining your LinkedIn profile, according to the experts. “Good people put their head down and get caught up in their job and forget they have a whole career to manage,” says Pamela Rucker, chairwoman of the CIO executive Council’s Executive Women in IT.

So where should you start? CIO.com spoke with career strategists, authors, and industry experts to lay out a nine-step plan to help you build your personal brand from the ground up.

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Atlassian has revamped the Jira bug tracking tool with a new user interface, which the company said will offer faster navigation and a simplified workflow.

"We really tried hard to create a whole new, more efficient Jira," said Dan Chuparkoff, Atlassian group manager for Jira marketing. "It should be easier to use and easier to learn."

Jira 6, released Tuesday, also comes with performance improvements and the first interface designed specifically for mobile clients.

First released in 2002, Jira was originally created to provide a way to track bugs during the software development process, allowing a development team to identify issues in the code base they were working on, and then track how these problems are being remedied.

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Google will retire its Checkout payment processing tool on November. 20, and warned retailers they will need to move to a different payment processing platform.

Checkout, which launched in 2006, was merged with Wallet, which is a mobile payments tool, last November. The product was aimed at taking on eBay’s PayPal service, which dominates Web-based payments.

Google said it has partnered with Braintree, Shopify and Freshbooks to offer discounted options for retailers that have not yet selected an alternative payment processor.

Wallet will now be the company’s focus. Developers for its Play store will be moved to the Google Wallet Merchant Center, Justin Lawyer, senior product manager for Google Wallet, wrote. There will be no changes for consumers using Wallet on sites such as Priceline and Uber, according to Lawyer.

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Windows 8, released to the wild last October, seems stuck in a no-win situation.

On the one hand, it is not catching on with Android- and iOS-loving consumers turned off by the Windows 8 tile-based interface and the Windows App Store, which by Android and Apple standards, is anemic and disorganized. And these days, consumer technology is frequently a precursor to enterprise technology as shown by the BYOD (bring your own device) phenomenon.

On the other hand, the situation for Windows 8 isn't any better in the enterprise. IT decision-makers interviewed for a new Forrester report don't see the Windows 8 experience as an improvement over the stable and well-liked Windows 7, mostly due to confusing behavior between applications running in the "Metro" touch interface and those running in the traditional desktop mode.

In the report, entitled "IT Will Skip Windows 8 as the Enterprise Standard," IT professionals reveal that a top concern about Windows 8 is the "potential for significant user training and support and the need for application redesign to take advantage of the new Windows 8 interface."

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Forget Glass, self-driving cars or a smartwatch. Developers, not physical consumer products, were Google's darlings at the company's annual I/O conference this week.

Google brands I/O as a conference for developers, and this year, with a range of new tools unveiled to attract more outside developers -- and boost the revenue from their services -- the company sought to deliver the goods to I/O's intended audience.

"Giving back to the developer community was a big theme," said Andrew Levy, CEO at Crittercism, an app performance management company, who attended the conference.

It was a stark contrast to last year's show, which saw a group of skydivers wearing Glass, the company's closely watched augmented reality system, land on top of San Francisco's Moscone convention center during a lively keynote address delivered by Google co-founder Sergey Brin.

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Google did its best to court developers at this year's I/O conference with a much-needed integrated developer environment, API for better games, and the capability to more easily translate apps. Their allegiance will become increasingly important as smartphone and tablet hardware sees fewer dramatic improvements.

"You guys, Android developers, are really the heart of this ecosystem and I think you know that. We have been on this journey together for over five years now," said Hugo Barra, vice president of Android product management, during the opening keynote.

The past 12 months have been lucrative for Android developers, according to Barra.

"Here is a pretty insane number for you: Google Play has just crossed 48 billion app installs ... but even better than that; over the last four months this year we have already paid out more money to Android developers on Google Play than in all of last year," Barra said.

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Jive Software has released an add-on to its enterprise social networking (ESN) software that automates and simplifies the process of integrating Jive’s suite with third-party systems.

The add-on is based on technology Jive acquired when it bought a company called StreamOnce. At launch, the StreamOnce add-on links Jive’s ESN suite with the Gmail and Microsoft Exchange email servers and with the DropBox cloud storage app.

Later on, it will integrate Jive’s product with ERP (enterprise resource planning) and CRM (customer relationship management) software from vendors including Oracle, NetSuite, Salesforce.com, SAP and SugarCRM. The StreamOnce add-on is available now. Jive officials declined to say how much it costs.

Prior to acquiring StreamOnce, Jive had made custom integrations between its software and several third-party products, including Microsoft’s SharePoint collaboration server, Microsoft’s Outlook email client, the Box cloud storage and file sharing app and Salesforce.com’s Chatter ESN product. Jive also provides a set of APIs (application programming interfaces) that external developers can use to create bridges between their applications and Jive’s software.

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Windows 8, the most significant upgrade to Microsoft’s operating system since Windows 95 and one of the most important products in the company’s history, will not achieve enough adoption in enterprises to be considered a standard, according to Forrester Research.

By the time the next major Windows upgrade is released, Windows 8 will be in less than 50 percent of workplace PCs, unable to overtake its predecessor Windows 7.

“I have to believe Microsoft expected better enterprise adoption for Windows 8,” said Forrester analyst David Johnson, the lead author of the report “IT Will Skip Windows 8 As The Enterprise Standard,” released Thursday.

As it is, most enterprises have either recently migrated from Windows XP to Windows 7, or are in the process of doing so. In a Forrester survey of European and North American enterprises and SMBs conducted in last year’s third quarter, Windows 7 was on almost half of respondents’ PCs and Windows XP had a 38 percent share. Respondents further said that they forecast having Windows 7 on 60 percent of their PCs a year later, and Windows 8 on 26 percent.

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A German online copyright law that will give publishers the exclusive right to the commercial use of their publications on the Internet will come into effect on Aug. 1.

The law was published in Germany’s Federal Law Gazette (Bundesgesetzblatt) on Tuesday. After a law is published in the gazette, it will come into effect, a spokeswoman said.

The new rule is a toned down version of a controversial online copyright bill that aimed to give publishers the right to charge search engines like Google for republishing short text snippets of the kind used in Google News.

The law as published does not extend to news snippets though. It states that publishers have the exclusive right to commercialize their products or parts thereof, except in the case of single words or very small text snippets. 

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Google CEO Larry Page made a surprise appearance Wednesday at the Google I/O conference, where he overcame problems with his throat to take questions from developers in the audience for almost an hour.

Page hadn’t been expected to speak at I/O, in part because he’s suffering from a vocal-cord problem that he finally opened up about this week. On Wednesday, he spoke softly but clearly into a handheld microphone.

See TechHive’s transcript of Larry Page’s remarks at Google I/O

Google’s forays into areas beyond search, such as Google Glass and smarter navigation tools, are projects that have emboldened Page to try to improve lives globally, he said Wednesday.

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Just by saying "Okay Google," people will soon be able to search using voice commands on their Chrome-powered desktop and laptop computers, Google said Wednesday.

"Okay Google, show me things to do in Santa Cruz," a person can say. They get back a list of attractions in the town as well nearby places Google thinks should be included.

The feature, which Google calls Conversational Search, taps into the company's knowledge graph, which tries to make connections between different bits of information and understand the context of people's searches.

Conversational Search also builds on Google's voice recognition and natural language processing technology, already used on mobile devices running Chrome and Android.

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Google is adding 41 new features to its Google+ social network on Wednesday, including a richer interface that works better on mobile devices and some major enhancements to photo sharing.

There’s little Google can do to improve one essential feature, however—the number of active users on the service.

Speaking at the company’s I/O event in San Francisco Wednesday, senior vice president Vic Gundotra said “hundreds of millions” of people have joined the service, but he didn’t specify how many were active users. Facebook has just over a billion monthly active users.

Top of the list of new features on Google+ is a redesigned social stream that, on devices with wider screens, can show up to three columns of posts from friends and colleagues. Posts including photos and videos can span multiple columns to give the interface a richer appearance, said Gundotra. And the number of columns can be narrowed to a single column for viewing on mobile devices.

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Google is rolling out a subscription music service that will bring users unlimited access to millions of songs in return for a monthly fee.

Google Play Music All Access will be available in the U.S. from Wednesday and cost $9.99 per month, the company announced at its Google I/O conference in San Francisco Wednesday.

Users get a 30-day free trial and, if they sign up before June 30, will get a $2 discount on the monthly fee. Google didn't announce launch plans for other countries.

"We set out to build a music service that didn't just give you access to a world of music but helped you explore it," said Chris Yerga, Android engineering director at Google, during a presentation at I/O.

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Google has introduced new APIs to help developers build better games for its Android OS.

The announcements were made at the start of Google I/O, which kicked off in San Francisco Wednesday.

The APIs (application programming interfaces) include Cloud Save, which will save information about how far a player has advanced through a game, said Sundar Pichai, Google's vice president for Android and Chrome.

That means if players finish Level 1 on their smartphones and then pick up their Android tablets, they'll be able to resume Level 2 without needing to do anything.

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Google was once a humble startup with a big dream—to be the David that takes down Microsoft’s Goliath. Google has become a tech force to be reckoned with, challenging Microsoft in almost every area including Web search, browsers, email, operating systems, productivity software and mobile platforms. Over time, it has chipped away at Microsoft’s market share.

Microsoft is great at many things, but over the years marketing has not been one of its strengths. Microsoft has also been a victim of hubris, ignoring threats to its products because it believes its dominance is untouchable. Lately, though, Microsoft has been campaigning more aggressively against Google to protect its market share.

Microsoft's marketing playbook

At times, saying nothing or saying too little, too late has done more damage for Microsoft than a poor marketing campaign. Windows Vista had its issues out of the gate, but overall it was a solid operating system with unique benefits. However, Microsoft let its rivals—primarily Apple—control the messaging. The narrative that brainwashed the general population is that Vista was a failure, and Windows PCs aren’t cool.

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Regular PCWorld readers may recall Cinnarch, a Linux distribution I covered last fall that combined Arch Linux with the relatively new and alternative Cinnamon desktop environment.

Cinnarch was just in beta at the time, but recently the project team behind it announced that they planned to abandon Cinnamon  as a default desktop, calling it “too much a burden to maintain/update going forward.”

Making good on their promise, the team this week announced the birth of Antergos, a brand-new Arch-based Linux distribution that's based on GNOME 3 instead.

'Modern, elegant, and powerful'

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Facing fierce competition in the market for cloud services, hosting provider Rackspace has pledged to help its users debug the programs they’ll run on Rackspace’s OpenStack platform.

“Traditionally, Rackspace has been in the infrastructure support business, and now customers are [interacting] at the application level,” said Scott Sanchez, director of strategy at Rackspace. “We wanted to make sure when customers called, we weren’t telling them the basics, but supporting them as developers.”

The additional expertise will be incorporated into the standard support package for the company’s OpenStack-based Rackspace Cloud service.

Specifically, Rackspace wants to make it easier for developers to understand how their applications can interact, in their native languages, with OpenStack and the Rackspace Cloud service, through the use of Rackspace’s APIs (application programming interface) and SDKs (software development kits).

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Google’s proposals to address the European Commission’s antitrust concerns will make matters worse, competitor Foundem said Tuesday in a complaint it filed in the case.

The Commission on April 25 opened a month-long period to allow rivals to assess a package of proposals aimed at alleviating concerns that they were unfairly penalized by Google’s search algorithm and were placed lower down in search results, while Google’s services were promoted.

British company Foundem was one of the first to complain to the Commission about Google’s practices. A fundamental flaw undermines every clause in the proposals and “would do nothing to curtail the unassailable advantage that Universal Search affords Google’s own services,” Foundem CEO Shivaun Raff, said in a statement Tuesday. She called on the Commission to reject the proposals, saying that “in many important respects, the proposed changes would make things considerably worse.”

Google is keen to portray the Commission’s acceptance of its proposals as a fait accompli, she said. Indeed, Google has been in talks with the Commission over these proposals for many months and the decision to put them to a market test will not have been taken lightly.

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It's been about six weeks since the release of Firefox 20, so assuming Mozilla stays on its usual schedule, Firefox 21 will make its debut on Tuesday.

This next version of the popular open source browser has already attracted attention for the changes brought in early versions to Firefox's “Do Not Track” capabilities, but those are by no means the only interesting additions we'll see.

Several changes and new features are slated to arrive in the final version of Firefox 21, in fact. Here's a quick rundown of some of the highlights you can expect to find.

1. Three 'Do Not Track' options

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It looks like Groupon is adding yet another mobile payments solution to the already crowded space that includes its own Groupon Merchants app for iPhone and Android. as well as competitors such as Square and PayPal Here.

An iPad app called Groupon POS earlier today briefly landed in the iTunes store before it disappeared. Now if you click on a link pointing to it from various media outlets you’ll only receive a message that says “The item you’ve requested is not currently available in the U.S. store.”

What’s behind its removal is anyone’s guess (a horrible name, perhaps?) and Groupon hasn’t officially announced it. Before it went missing, the Groupon POS app description said it “works for a wide variety of merchants from cafes and delis, to salons, spas and florists,” reported TechCrunch, which said it looked like a more simple and generalized version of Breadcrumb, a restaurant-centered iPad payments solution Groupon acquired last year.

You can expect a Groupon app for tablets to reappear because of the kind of traction Groupon is getting in mobile. In a recent earnings report the company said that 45 percent of North American transactions occurred on mobile devices, compared with only 30 percent a year earlier.

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A new mobile application from Harmon.ie promises to improve the way people use Microsoft Office 365 from iOS, BlackBerry and Android tablets and phones.

Users will be able create, edit, share and store documents using Harmon.ie 4.0 to tie together Office 365 components like SharePoint Online, Yammer, Office Web Apps, Outlook and SkyDrive Pro.

"We want to let people work on Office 365 from mobile devices in ways they haven't been able to," said David Lavenda, Harmon.ie's vice president of product strategy.

Microsoft has been criticized for what is viewed as limited mobile access to SharePoint in particular. The company has a SharePoint Newsfeed app for Windows Phone and iOS, and plans to release it for Windows 8 before mid-year, and for Android later on. In addition, a SkyDrive Pro mobile app for Windows 8 and iOS is also due by mid-year; it's available now for Windows Phone 8.

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Bing is adding some new social features to its search engine, by letting users comment and Like their Facebook friends' posts directly on the site.

The new tools constitute yet another expansion to the Microsoft search site to make it more interactive and useful as the company seeks to distinguish itself from Google search.

In March Bing expanded its center column to incorporate more social information from Facebook, Twitter, and Klout into how it displays search results involving people. In January its right-hand Social Sidebar was scaled out to include more content from users' Facebook friends such as status updates, shared links and comments.

Previously, users could see that content, but could not interact with it without leaving the Bing site. But with the latest expansion, they can.

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There's no doubt that desktop Linux has become increasingly user-friendly over the years, but it's equally true that some distributions focus more on ease of use than others do.

Ubuntu and Linux Mint are two examples at the forefront of this usability trend, but recently I came across another that has put friendliness at the forefront of its goals.

Enter Korora, a distro that “was born out of a desire to make Linux easier for new users, while still being useful for experts,” in the project's own words. Originally based on Gentoo Linux when it launched in 2005, Korora was re-born in 2010 as a Fedora remix with tweaks and extras for additional usability.

Korora recently got a key update to version 18, and it looks intriguing. Here's a summary of what's inside.

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You know you're not in iTunes anymore when the app you're eyeing has a $1,050 price tag, but SAP is nonetheless expanding its online shopping experience in a bid to entice its customers to purchase enterprise software the way they shop on their smartphones.

SAP has made some changes and additions to its enterprise application store, including a new deal with Bazaarvoice aimed at improving the volume and quality of product reviews on the site.

The store now contains more than 2,000 applications from SAP and some 1,000 partners, the ERP vendor said Friday. The offerings include mobile, cloud-based and on-premises software.

Other recent improvements include the ability to buy some partner applications using PayPal, new tools partners can use to build out storefronts and expanded geographic availability of the store to 26 countries. New additions include Belgium, Denmark, Hong Kong, Norway, the Philippines, Spain and Sweden, SAP said.

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Twitter has acquired Ubalo, a company that provides various services aimed at speeding up the coding process, the social network announced Thursday.

"We've got some exciting news: The Ubalo team is joining Twitter," the site announced in a tweet. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Ubalo describes its business as a way "to make large-scale computing easier and more accessible to a technical audience." It refers to its chief technology as "pods," which may contain code, data and any other files needed to support a developer's application.

The services of the privately-held company are geared toward more efficiently scaling code across multiple computers. When a user runs a pod, Ubalo, which its founders say means "counting," takes care of the details behind the scenes, according to the company's website. "We hide the details of the computers, environments, and messaging, so our users can worry much less about integration and scaling and instead write just the code they need for their analysis or processing," the company said.

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Box has acquired Crocodoc in a move to significantly improve the way documents are rendered for viewing on its enterprise storage and file sharing service.

Box will integrate Crocodoc’s HTML5 technology into its product and use it to eventually replace its existing document preview feature, Box said on Thursday.

Crocodoc was founded in 2007, and its document rendering and viewing technology is used by services including Microsoft’s Yammer, Facebook, LinkedIn and BlackBoard.

Box, which has more than 150,000 business customers and 15 million end users, also plans to make the Crocodoc API (application programming interface) a core piece of its application development platform so that the technology can be tapped by third-party application vendors.

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Fans of free and open source software (FOSS) may recall a report from Coverity last year that found open source code typically has fewer defects per thousand lines of code than proprietary software code does.

Fast forward to this year, and the news is even more striking.

Following the analysis of more than 450 million lines of software code through the Coverity Scan service, Coverity's 2012 Coverity Scan Open Source Report, which was released Tuesday, concludes that “Linux remains the benchmark for quality.”

'Differing dynamics'

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X1 has released the biggest upgrade of its desktop search tool in four years, adding the ability to query SharePoint sites and tap webmail accounts.

The upgrade, called X1 Search 8, also runs in virtualized thin clients, a first for the product, according to the company. X1 also redesigned the product’s user interface and sharpened its indexing engine to make it faster.

X1 Search 8 lets users search through their desktop files, preview more than 500 file types in their native formats and take actions right from its interface, such as opening a file, editing a document or sending an email.

The tool costs $49.95 per license, with an annual support fee of $19.95. The company offers volume discounts to organizations that buy 500 or more units.

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Google is rolling out a new IT administration console for its Apps email and collaboration cloud suite and for other enterprise products such as Maps Coordinate and Chrome OS devices.

The console’s interface now has what Google describes as “a cleaner look” as well as improved navigation meant to be simpler and more intuitive.

Also new is the ability for IT administrators to customize certain elements of the console, such as rearranging control settings icons in the tool’s dashboard, Google said on Wednesday.

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