Gadgetwise Blog: Q&A: New Speeds for Old Machines

May 14

The look of Microsoft’s Windows 8 Start screen can be rearranged to match personal preferences.

May 14

Absolute Technology recently introduced Linkase, a $50 cellphone case for the iPhone 5 that uses electromagnetic waveguide technology to enhance the Wi-Fi signal.

May 14

Amazon.com displays on its home page products you browsed on recent visits to the site, but you can delete some or all of your shopping history.

May 13

The Ooma Telo is advertised as a “free home phone service,” and while it is nowhere near free, it may be a better deal than you currently get from your phone provider, plus the sound quality is excellent.

May 13

The new 802.11ac wireless-networking standard promises much faster data speeds, as long as you have the right equipment.

Gadgetwise Blog: Q&A: Installing Microsoft Office on Multiple Machines

I just bought a new computer, but plan to keep my old one. I still have the original discs for Microsoft Office 2010 — can I also install the program on the new PC?

Microsoft released a few versions of Office 2010, so the number of computers on which you can install the software varies. According to the company’s Web site, if you have the Office Home and Business 2010 edition or the Office Professional 2010 suite, you are allowed to install a copy on one PC and a second copy on a portable device “such as a laptop.”

If you have the more consumer-oriented Microsoft Office Home and Student 2010 edition of the suite (the version that includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote — but not the Outlook mail program), you have more flexibility. This version of the software can be installed on up to three computers designated for noncommercial use in a single household.

To install the program on the new machine, you will need the Office 2010 product key — that lengthy 25-character string of letters and numbers usually affixed to the DVD case — to activate the software. If you have problems with product activation, Microsoft offers some support.

Bits Blog: Big Data: Rise of the Machines

For a column that laid out some second thoughts on Big Data, one of the people I talked to was Thomas H. Davenport, who has worked in the fields of knowledge management and analytics for 15 years. Data analytics is the predecessor to Big Data. He knows the context — what’s new and what’s not with Big Data — as well as anyone.

Mr. Davenport, a visiting professor at the Harvard Business School (on leave from Babson College), has authored and co-authored several books on analytics, including “Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning” (with Jeanne G. Harris, Harvard Business School Press, 2007). Shortly after the Big Data phenomenon took off, Mr. Davenport said, only half-joking, that he considered simply substituting the term “Big Data” for “analytics” for updated versions of his books.

But as he looked more deeply, there really was something different in Big Data. Data volumes have been steadily increasing for decades, Mr. Davenport noted, though the pace has accelerated sharply in the Internet age. “More than the amount of data itself, the unstructured data from the Web and sensors is a much more salient feature of what is being called Big Data,” he said.

I also asked David B. Yoffie, a technology and competitive strategy expert at Harvard, who is not part of the Big Data crowd, what he thought. The Internet, he observed, has been a mainstream technology for 15 years, and so has the ability to monitor and mine Web browsing behavior and online communications, even if those skills are much improved now.

Still, Mr. Yoffie is most impressed by the rapid spread of low-cost sensors that make it possible to monitor all kinds of physical objects, from fruit shipments (sniffing for signs of spoilage) to jet engines (tracking wear to predict when maintenance is needed).

“The ubiquity of sensors is new,” Mr. Yoffie said. “The sensors make it possible to get data we never had before.”

Machine-generated sensor data will be become a far larger portion of the Big Data world, according to a recent report by IDC. The research report, “The Digital Universe in 2020,” published in December, traces data trends from 2005-20. One of its forecasts is that machine-generated data will increase to 42 percent of all data by 2020, up from 11 percent in 2005.

“It’s all those sensors, the Internet of Things data,” said Jeremy Burton, an executive vice president at EMC, which sponsored the IDC report.

The implication is that Big Data technology will steadily move beyond the consumer Internet. Industrial companies like General Electric are already making big bets on the payoff. The IDC forecast also suggests that there is a lot of substance to the vision of machine-to-machine communication and intelligence that W. Brian Arthur terms “the second economy.”