It should be any entrepreneur's dream come true. But for some startups, a sudden, overnight explosion in growth can nearly bring the operation to its knees.

Such was the recent experience of Blank Label, a Web-based company that sells custom-made, user-designed dress shirts for men. After launching in October 2009, Blank Label enjoyed some modest initial success, selling a few hundred shirts in the first few months of business.

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The online buzz generated by the startup's unique service was enough to capture the attention of The New York Times and other prominent media outlets, whose positive coverage in mid-May quickly sent a flood of new customers to their site. Immediately following the press coverage, Blank Label's Web traffic increased by about 4,000% overnight, and conversion rates nearly tripled.

For a brick-and-mortar store, a sudden influx of customers can result in long lines. Online, it can cause servers to go down.

The team knew there was a problem when they started receiving emails from would-be customers asking when their website was going to go back up, according to Tommy Wong, co-founder and lead evangelist for Blank Label.

"There were massive problems with the site," says Wong. "First images wouldn't load, then pages stopped loading."

They tried rebooting their web server, but found that the problems only accelerated. A few hours later, they moved their website to bigger, more capable server space.

The technical issues were only the beginning of the headaches.

Before long, it became apparent that the supplier they had hired to produce the shirts was unable to keep up with the sudden demand, despite assurances to the contrary. Orders started shipping late, sometimes with defects. Within a week of the initial influx, Blank Label switched suppliers.

A new payment processor was in order as well, because the one they had been working with was alarmed at the sudden and dramatic increase of orders and decided to end their relationship.

In addition to website stability and production issues, the company's owners found that customer service was becoming too much to handle. To keep up with the requests, the company had no choice but to hire three customer support staff members, as well as outsource some technical work via oDesk.

Another co-creation startup that experienced growing pains is a company specializing in custom-made chocolate bars called Chocri. For them, the scalability issues have been seasonal, as demand for co-created chocolate has typically peaked during the winter holiday season, causing Chocri to sell out of inventory two Christmases in a row. The overwhelming demand has required CEO Carmen Magar to make a number of changes, including expansion of staff, moving into a larger space and reassessing the company's production practices.

When they first started out, Chocri would produce the milk chocolate, dark chocolate and white chocolate candy bars separately and then recombine orders. "That's crazy when you make 50,000 bars a month," says Magar. "So now we make all types at the same time."

Today, things are mostly back on track at Blank Label and Chocri, although there is still a two-week delay on new orders at Blank Label.

"I always feel like there's more work to be done," says Wong, adding that his company is working on further streamlining the ordering process and hoping to speed up shipping times.

If he could offer any advice to budding entrepreneurs and small businesses, Wong says it would be to ensure upfront that technical infrastructure and production resources are prepared for potentially rapid growth.

When all was said and done, Wong's company had hired four new people, and switched suppliers, servers and payment processors in order to cope with their sudden success.

These days, all it takes is a mention in a few high-traffic news outlets or some social media buzz to bring tens of thousands of people to your company's door. As some entrepreneurs have learned the hard way, it quite literally pays to be prepared.

Disclosure: Tommy Wong of Blank Label has written guest posts for ReadWriteWeb in the past.

Imagine you were a robot who only knew how to describe the world in four ways: self, other, time, and object. Now imagine you were struck by a bolt of lightning and found your robot brain aware of a whole new column in the spreadsheet...Place. You'd feel like a whole new robot and you'd probably sing a very happy robot song.

That's what the social web is going through right now, with the rise of location data and services as a viable pivot point for developers to work their magic with. Next week 2nd place check-in app Gowalla says it will launch at least the beginning of something a small but fascinating group of robot magicians has long waited for: a write-capable API.

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Imagine a mobile app that let you check-in at all the famous art museums of the world, post photos of yourself outside them and see which museums your friends have been to. Or the best places in the world to eat grilled cheese sandwiches, if that's your thing.

Niche topical apps like that could become easier than ever to create and tie-together with larger more established location based social network providers with the availability of multiple write APIs.

You could have your cheese sandwich check-ins show up in your Gowalla and Foursquare social networks, if you want, or you could view and use an app built on top of those APIs that only published and displayed check-ins at cheese sandwich related places. It's really all about cheese sandwiches.

Leading check-in app Foursquare has an API, or Application Programming Interface, that developers can already build software on top of that reads Foursquare data and can publish check-ins to Foursquare as well. But competitor Gowalla has had a read-only API, meaning 3rd party apps could display user location data but couldn't publish back to Gowalla.

Gowalla developer Adam Keys told the company's developer email list today that unlike previous promises a write-API was coming "next week," this time he means it. "The good news is that I think I've got the foundation in place," he wrote. "I'm hoping to write up the docs and get *something* out next week, even if it's not complete API access."

The Gowalla apps include one thing that Foursquare does not - the ability to upload photos of places along with your check-in. Might that be a part of the new Gowalla API? We certainly hope so.

It means there's more than one game in town. There's a very big difference between one hot check-in app you can publish to and two. As ReadWriteWeb's resident hacker and geofreak Tyler Gillies told me this afternoon, "I think this will really change the game as far as people's ability to create applicatons that allow you to check into a venue on multiple services."

The value of a multi-platform check-in app is that you don't have to choose, you can participate in and see your friends' activity across services you yourself don't spend a lot of time on.

At the same time, it means you get to choose. If everyone in the world was on AT&T and they couldn't call out to Verizon, you'd never leave one service because it would mean you'd lose contact with your friends.

Enter interoperability and you've got customer choice, vendor competition and a new wave of innovation.

At least that could be how it turns out with regard to the addition of interoperable Place streams across multiple vendors.

Foursquare today lets a user opt-in to have news and reviews from favorite organizations like the Huffington Post, the Wall St. Journal and the Independent Film Channel pushed automatically to their phones when they check-in near a place that those organizations have annotated. That's hot and it's just the beginning of the kind of features these kinds of location apps will be able to offer in the future. Like a robot that's been struck by lightning.

A service provider or developer can offer software users a lot if they know what the user likes, who the user is friends with and how recent all that data is. Add knowing where people, places and things are and you've got a big jump in potential recombination of factors. Not just for location apps themselves either, but in all kinds of apps that use the location data such apps make it easy and compelling to publish.

Maybe even with pictures.

This spring at Twitter's first developer conference Chirp the big splash was a forthcoming feature called Annotations. The feature will allow publishing software to annotate Tweets with a wide open variety of metadata, which could then be read and analyzed by other software. Annotations are going to be big, if and when they launch.

At Chirp it was said that the Annotations feature would launch in the second or third quarter of this year. Now the company's developer advocate, Taylor Singletary, said today on the Twitter developers list that it's not going to work out that way. "We haven't yet announced a release date," he said in response to an inquiry, "and it's still a ways in the future while we tackle some other projects."

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We've got an inquiry in with Twitter asking what that means, but it seems clear that the company is slammed with technical challenges, has other priorities and wrongly estimated the roadmap for this very important part of the platform. (Update: see below.)

Here's how Annotations will work. It will allow publishing software to mark-up tweets with any kind of characteristic or namespace (local weather when and where a twit did tweet, for example) and any kind of value - cloudy with a chance of meatballs, for example. Twitter messages are fairly rich with metadata already and incredibly easy to analyze and build on top of, but Annotations would open that up so far the sky's the limit.

It's worth mentioning that Twitter's unveiling of Annotations at Chirp happened around the same time as, and was widely compared with, Facebook's launching of personalized content widgets and tentacles expanding all over the web, among other things. Facebook shipped its announced project, for better or for worse.

In another email on the same list today, Singletary said that the processing of white-listing applications to ping Twitter's servers with a production-level frequency was clogged with backlog, growing more critical in its evaluations and being re-evaluated.

It's one of those laws like a room full of monkeys and typewriters. And it's the core value proposition of Annotations, too.Meanwhile, Twitter launched an official recommendation feature today that's frankly, not nearly as exciting as the kinds of recommendation capabilities that independent developers have built (see Mr.Tweet or Twellow, for example). Hopefully the API for this feature will be turned into more fabulous things. A whole world of independent developers, empowered with the ability to read and write data, will inevitably build cooler things than even the smartest company in the world. It's one of those laws like a room full of monkeys and typewriters. And it's the core value proposition of Annotations, too.

Numerous advertising technologies have been rolled out since Chirp as well. Annotations is a hugely ambitious strategy, and the squabbling over namespaces and standards was one that Twitter said it was going to let the market work out on its own. That made some people quite unhappy.

We've asked Twitter for clarification on the revised Annotations roadmap and will update this post with the company's response.

Update: A Twitter spokesperson responded to our inquiry and said that yes, Annotations will launch. "We'll still launch Annotations. The team that was working on Annotations is currently focused on our number one priority, which is site stability." No doubt Annotations could themselves pose scalability challenges. They could at least blow our minds, if not a series of related servers.

Below is an image of what each Tweet looks like under the hood right now, before annotations. (Click for full size view.) Each of those fields is powerful, but inflexible and defined by the company. Imagine a new one that's open to being defined however a publishing tool sees fit. That's the vision behind Annotations.

London-based communications SaaS provider Mimecast has announced the results of its second annual Cloud Adoption Survey. The survey, conducted by independent research firm Loudhouse, assessed the attitudes of IT decision-makers in the U.S. and UK about cloud computing.

And the results are unsurprising, echoing the findings from elsewhere: the majority of organizations are now using some sort of cloud service, or considering moving to the cloud. Concerns about security and cost are cited as the major obstacles to adoption.

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Some of the research highlights include:

• The majority of organizations now use some cloud-based services. The report found 51% are now using at least one cloud-based application. Adoption rates for U.S. businesses are slightly ahead of the UK with 56% of respondents using at least one cloud-based application, compared to 50% in the UK. This is a substantial increase from Mimecast's 2009 survey, when only 36% of U.S. businesses said they were using cloud services.
• Two thirds of businesses are considering adopting cloud computing. 66% of businesses say they are considering adopting cloud-based services in the future, with once again, U.S. businesses leaning more towards adoption than their UK peers (70% of U.S. businesses, and 50% of UK ones).
• Email, security, and storage are the most popular cloud services. 62% of the organizations that use cloud computing are using a cloud-based email application. Email services are most popular with mid-size businesses (250-1000 employees) with 70% of organizations this size using the cloud for email. Smaller businesses (under 250 employees) are most likely to use the cloud for security services, and larger enterprises (over 1000 employees) most likely to opt for cloud storage services.

Overall both users and non-users responded positively to the idea of the cloud, believing that the cloud creates better performance (61%), sustainability (62%), and smooth integration into existing systems (56%). But the report also points to some different attitudes between those who have adopted cloud technologies and those who haven't:

• Existing cloud users are satisfied. Security is not considered to be an issue by existing cloud users: 57% say that moving data to the cloud has resulted in better security, with 58% saying it has given them better control of their data. 73% say it has reduced the cost of their IT infrastructure and 74% believe the cloud has alleviated the internal resource pressures.
• Security fears are still a barrier. 62% of respondents believe that storing data on servers outside of the business is a significant security risk. Interestingly, this number was higher for users of cloud applications than it was for non-users (only 59% of non-users thought it was risky, while 67% of users did.)
• Some think the benefits of the cloud may be overstated.54% of respondents said the potential benefits of the cloud are overstated by the IT industry, and 58% indicated they believed that replacing legacy IT solutions will almost always cost more than the benefits of new IT.

"The research shows that there is a clear divide within the IT industry on the issue of cloud computing," says Mimecast CEO and co-founder Peter Bauer. "While those organisations that have embraced cloud services are clearly reaping the rewards, there are still a number who are put off by the 'cloud myths' around data security and the cost of replacing legacy IT. It is now up to cloud vendors to educate businesses and end users to ensure that these concerns do not overshadow the huge potential cost, security and performance benefits that cloud computing can bring."

The design and user experience of a site is often a make or break experience. Users, company hires and investors are heavily swayed not only by how neat a site looks, but how well thought out it is. Simply put, if your site is bad on the experience or design front, it makes it look like your team can't execute, which is about the worst thing you can say about a startup.

Finding the right people to do this is incredibly hard. Agencies generally are way out of the startup budget and can have stifling timelines, freelancers are not full time or necessarily committed to your product and hiring full time is a very lengthy process. One of the most core competencies to a startup is an industry-wide bottle neck.

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Andrew Hyde is a startup enthusiast out of Boulder, Colorado. He has founded five companies, including a freelancer marketplace and Startup Weekend.

"Finding quality user experience and design is a problem almost every startup I've ever talked to has had," says Natty Zola, founder of travel journal site EverLater.com. "The position is part artist, psychologist, team therapist and designer. Someone that is both creative and analytical. It is a very rare."

The golden case study for excelling design and user experience in a startup is Mint.com. The lead designer of the project was Jason Putorti (who is now at Bessemer) has had quite a bit to say about the importance and process of making these hires. In reaction to this problem, he launched elegant.ly, which aims to match startups and designers.

The site is very light right now but features a beautiful integration of LinkedIn's API. Designers are currently matched to leads on startups by the staff of elegant.ly on a one-by-one basis, although a more robust site is being built out to automate the process. You can look for work in visual design, UX design/wireframes, icon design, identity design/illustration, motion design, Web development, experience/product Strategy or user research.

Many news outlets, including ReadWriteWeb reported yesterday that the first piece of Android malware may have been discovered in the wild. It now appears that we were mistaken. In an interview with Android Tapp Jackeey Wu, the developer of the wallpaper app in question, denied malicious intent. He said he was gathering device information to take advantage of favoriting features in Android.

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I also collected device id,phone number and subscriber id, it has no relationship with user data. There are few apps in Android market has the favorites feature. Many users suggest that I should provide the feature so I use the these to identify the device, so they can favorite the wallpapers more conveniently, and resume his favorites after system resetting or changing the phone.

In a follow-up on its blog, Lookout, the security company that originally reported that the wallpaper apps were transmitting data, notes that the app did disclose that it was accessing phone data. However, not every app that accesses data actually transmits it off the device, and Wu's apps did not disclose that phone information would be collected (enterprises most certainly are not going to want employees voice mail passwords transmitted to third parties, regardless of that third party's intentions). Whether Wu himself knew he'd be collecting passwords along with users' phone numbers, we do not know. We have not been able to find a way to contact Wu.

We will update with additional information as it becomes available.

The architectural style of a data center is not what you would think as being unique.

But data centers can have a certain style as illustrated in a recent post on Data Center Knowledge, which put together a collection that shows a level of creativity in how data centers are being designed.

Rob Snevely is the author of Enterprise Data Center Design and Methodology. He says the primary function of building a data center is in the detailed mechanical process of laying out the building for maximum density and equipment loads.

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But he also says design philosophies are being applied to data centers that fit with the modern times of the 21st century.

Here are a few that stand out:

"The Spy Who Loved Me" Bunker
The Bahnhof "James Bond Villain" Data Bunker in Stockholm, Sweden

On the city streets, people go about their day, unsuspecting that deep below the asphalt lies a bunker where Dr. Evil would feel right at home. It's the data center for Banhof, one of Sweden's largest ISPs. The features of this subterranean data center are a bit quirky. It includes greenhouses, waterfalls and German submarine engines. Your data is safe here. It is designed to withstand the force of a hydrogen bomb. Unusual? Yes. The architect started with the view that rock has its own symbolic representation of life. Space-themed conference room? Sweet.

Super-Sized Data Center
Microsoft Container Data Center in Chicago

In the city of broad shoulders is the big gulp of data centers. And who else but Microsoft would build a data center with such scale. The Microsoft data center is 700,000 square-feet and cost a whopping $500 million. It has its own "container canyon." This is like a garage where 40-foot trucks don't move but the data does. Truly massive.

Which Came First: Chickens or Computers?
Yahoo Computing Coop in Lockport, NY

Now this is our kind of data center. Chickens need good ventilation and so do servers! So why not build a data center that looks like a chicken coop and is meant to breathe, too?

And here we thought data centers were just big boring buildings.

Most of the talk surrounding immigration reform in the U.S. these days is coming from my home state of Arizona where controversial laws like Senate Bill 1070 have the nation divided. For entrepreneurs, there are other laws - mainly those surrounding work visas and green card acquisition - that are in dire need of reform if the nation is going to rebound on the back of innovation. Thursday night, the tech community was again reminded of this need when Robert Scoble posted a blog and video interview with a pair of foreign-born entrepreneurs who shared their varying but equally troubling stories of immigration.

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The first is Aye Moah, a native of Burma - one of the poorest nations in the world - who found herself accepted to MIT within nine months of just learning that the institute existed. Though she is one of the smartest students from her country and despite nailing a perfect score on the SAT, her chances at employment in the U.S. are slim due to the current state of our immigration laws.

"Even if she were to get a work visa, it probably would be from a bigger company that would treat her poorly (I keep hearing stories of how immigrants are treated like crap and can't leave, otherwise their work visa will be yanked). These laws are unjust and not American," writes Scoble in a passionate post from Thursday night. "Worse yet they are anti innovation because it's these smart, highly educated, people who will start the next companies."

The other interviewee is Ronald Mannak, a living example of just why so many foreign entrepreneurs want to come to America. According to Mannak, Dutch laws have left him responsible for repaying $200,000 he received in venture funding for a startup that went under. Though there is some argument in the comments below Scoble's blog regarding these laws, Mannak's financial law example is one of the prime reasons entrepreneurs want to set up shop here.

As we have mentioned before on ReadWriteStart, the Startup Visa movement has been lobbying law makers in Washington to open the nation's doors to entrepreneurs. We first wrote about the potential benefits of the bill in December of last year, and this year updated you when the bill was officially introduced by Senators John Kerry and Richard Lugar.

The stories highlighted by Scoble Thursday night are just a few of the numerous examples of both the need and demand for this type of immigration reform. More entrepreneurs means more companies which means more jobs for Americans. While Moah and Mannak may be a pair of fringe examples that coincidentally wound up infront of Robert Scoble's camera, their stories still shed light on how America is shooting itself in the foot on growing entrepreneurship.

This week's roundtable was organized in collaboration with my partner MAD Incubator, a technology incubator in Malaysia that is dedicated to giving technopreneurs a chance to succeed and make a difference.

First up was Max Teoh presenting GetToDo, a real-time, vicinity-based sales and promotions solution for the Malaysian lifestyle market. It enables retailers and brands to promote their products to consumers interested in lifestyle products through Internet and mobile channels. In terms of target audience, the company targets trend-conscious Internet savvy consumers in the teenagers to working adult segments.

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Max came with a few specific questions around pricing and content strategy. On pricing, his assumption is that retailers and brands will be paying for promotions, and he has checked with about 100 retailers and brands to validate this assumption. However, the pricing model he suggested - $.01 per minute of promotion highlight - doesn't sit well with me. Elsewhere in the world, promotions pricing models generally revolve around CPM, CPC, CPA, and similar metrics. I have not seen a time-based promotion metric ever.

Even though Max wants to undercut the price-points of Google and Facebook, which may be a fine strategy, I just don't feel comfortable about this cost-per-minute metric that I have not seen before. Readers, if any of you have seen it, please let me know. If not, then I would advise Max to stay within industry-standard pricing models like CPM, CPC, and CPA. Max also had questions about his user-generated content strategy, and how to ensure that UGC quality is maintained at a high level. Well, to that my advice is to introduce a layer of human moderation.

Next Tham Keng Yew discussed SocialWalk, a Web-based solution for managing conference and meeting registrations. Keng Yew has introduced a level of differentiation in this solution by helping the registrants connect with people with related interests from a business networking point of view, which I thought was quite clever. The company already has a number of good customers, and is a validated business.

His questions for me were around how to increase his sales momentum. Currently, most of their leads are coming in from referrals from event organizers. My response is to do a focused direct mail and email campaign, or even telemarketing campaign, targeting the conference and event organizers. We also discussed how to engage the attendee community further, and to that, my response was to build an event recommendation engine that promotes related events to their community.

Ooi Boon Sheng then presented Xilnex, a retail business software catering to the Malaysian SMB space. The company already has 200-plus customers, and a validated subscription-based business model. The product, however, needs some high-touch, hands-on support to drive adoption, which is why Ooi is selling the product through a couple of national distributors.

His problem is that distributors are lukewarm because of the low initial payment due to the subscription business model. Ooi needs to, therefore, make it as attractive as possible for distributors to sell the product, and the way to do so is to invest in some marketing and lead generation himself. And as the leads come in, pass them onto the distributors, so that they can service and convert those leads efficiently.

For a new product, the ISV needs to do some demand generation on behalf of the distributors, and thus make it worthwhile for the distributors to engage with them. And once again, direct marketing against very tightly segmented lists is one of the cheaper ways of demand creation.

Up last was Roslee Ali for Abbassy Sdn Bhd who has a comprehensive parking management solution. Roslee's customers are municipal parking owners and also building owners with parking lots. There are about three existing competitors in the market who have deep relationships with the target customer base, even though their products are relatively simple, non-comprehensive, and commodity-based. Nonetheless, it is proving hard for Roslee to penetrate the market because the buyers tend to rely on these older vendors, and are reluctant to change into a new vendor or a new system.

My assessment on this scenario is that Roslee needs to partner with the existing vendors and extend their solutions, and sell to the customers with these vendors. Competing with them and trying to replace their solutions won't work. We discussed a variety of issues about this business including financing and cash-flow challenges.

I started doing my free Online Strategy Roundtables for entrepreneurs in the fall of 2008. These roundtables are the cornerstone programming of a global initiative that I have started called One Million by One Million (1M/1M). Its mission is to help a million entrepreneurs globally to reach $1 million in revenue and beyond, build $1 trillion in sustainable global GDP, and create 10 million jobs. In 1M/1M, I teach the EJ Methodology which is based on my Entrepreneur Journeys research, and emphasize bootstrapping, idea validation, and crisp positioning as some of the core principles of building strong fundamentals in early stage ventures. In addition, we are offering entrepreneurs access to investors and customers through our recently launched our 1M/1M Incubation Radar series. You can pitch to be featured on my blog following these instructions.

The recording of this roundtable can be found here. Recordings of previous roundtables are all available here. You can register for the next roundtable here.

Sramana Mitra is a technology entrepreneur and strategy consultant in Silicon Valley. She has founded three companies, writes a business blog, Sramana Mitra on Strategy, and runs the 1M/1M initiative. She has a master's degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her Entrepreneur Journeys book series, Entrepreneur Journeys, Bootstrapping: Weapon Of Mass Reconstruction, Positioning: How To Test, Validate, and Bring Your Idea To Market and her latest volume Innovation: Need Of The Hour, as well as Vision India 2020, are all available from Amazon.

Photo by Ramasamy Chidambaram

Over the past year, Facebook and privacy are two topics that have become practically joined at the hip. The site has changed its privacy settings again and again and last winter CEO Mark Zuckerberg declared the death of privacy. One of the leading arguments behind all of this has been that we live in a new era, beyond the "age of privacy", and the new social norm for the next generation is to share, freely and without regard for such antiquated concerns as privacy.

New research released today from Eszter Hargittai and danah boyd shows that instead of disregarding privacy, youth have increasingly modified their privacy settings on Facebook over the last year. The age of privacy over, indeed.

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The paper, titled "Facebook Privacy Settings: Who Cares?", examines "the attitudes and practices of a cohort of 18- and 19-year-olds surveyed in 2009 and again in 2010 about Facebook's privacy settings". From the abstract:

The research finds that "most" Facebook users modified their privacy settings at least once in 2009, with this practice only becoming more common as time went on, increasing for both frequent and less frequent users. "This suggests that either Facebook's changes to the site or the public discussion about them that took place between 2009 and 2010 -- or a combination of the two -- may have influenced people's practices," reads the report.

One table in the report helps illustrate how privacy has increasingly become a concern of users, even the 18- and 19-year-olds the research focuses on. The table shows how, over the past year, the number of users modifying their privacy settings has increased dramatically. The most interesting changes come in the first and last columns, with the number of users who had never changed their settings dropping to almost none and the number of users who changed their settings four or more times nearly doubling for all current Facebook users.

In addition to looking at how often respondents altered their Facebook privacy settings, the report also examines their confidence in doing so. The researchers asked respondents to rate, on a scale from one to five, their confidence level performing a number of online tasks, from changing their privacy settings, to posting a comment on a blog, to uploading a video to a site such as YouTube. Surprisingly, the changing of Facebook privacy settings beat out every other of nine online activities.

In the end, boyd and Hargittai paint a picture of a generation of users that not only care about their privacy, but take steps to ensure it.

If actions speak louder than words, it certainly doesn't look like the age of privacy has ended. Only that small percentage that didn't modify their privacy settings seem to be agreeing with the idea of broadcasting their information to the world. The rest, it would seem, still like to keep some things private.

There goes that argument, huh?

Taylor Swift has nothing on Boulder software startup Occipital. The pop star has been seen recently in an ad for the Sony TX7 Cyber-shot whose selling-point is the ability to create a panoramic image by sweeping the camera once from side-to-side. Occipital, makers of the popular RedLaser app (which eBay recently purchased from the startup), has brought this very same functionality one of the best selling cameras on the market today - the iPhone. Launching today in the AppStore, 360 Panorama (or just "360" for short) will allow iPhone users to do their best Taylor Swift impersonations by creating panoramic images with one sweep of their phones.

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Available for $2.99 in the AppStore as of right now, 360 Panorama should make an obvious addition to any avid iPhone photographer's collection of camera apps. Photography is a small hobby of mine, and I'm always on the hunt for hot new camera apps for the iPhone. When Occipital co-founder Vikas Reddy told me about the company's new app, I was very excited to get my hands on it and test it out in the field.

Previously, my favorite option for creating panoramas on my iPhone has been an app called AutoStitch. To make panoramas in AutoStitch, I have to first snap a series of pictures, making sure to leave enough overlap for each image to fit together with the next. Then I would fire up the app, select the right pictures, and wait about 30-60 seconds for the app to complete the stitching process.

With 360 Panorama, the time it takes to create a panoramic image is significantly reduced. Once the app loads, simply hold the phone up in the position you wish to begin the panorama, tap the screen, rotate the view either left of right and tap the "Save" button to store the panorama. Panoramas are created right before your eyes in real-time as you pan side-to-side, eliminating the uploading and waiting time in other apps.

"Literally every single frame is used. Behind the scenes, our computer vision-based system is processing every frame and calculating precisely how much you moved," says Reddy. "The vision system is extremely fast and precise, and there's nothing like it on the iPhone period -- panorama or otherwise."

So how well does the app actually work?

As for capturing and saving panoramas, the app works as advertised - at least on the iPhone 4 where gyroscopic readings help the app better determine movement. The speed and ease at which it can create panoramas is the selling-point of this app, and is the only area in which it beats apps like AutoStitch. The overall quality and resolution of the images, however, doesn't come close that seen from AutoStitch.

The example below is a 360-degree panorama captured in front of my house. Upon closer inspection, we can see vertical lines representing the various images captured by the app. Additionally, the app realigned the start and end points of the panorama (just right of the tree) to the middle of the image, causing a jarring overlap. On other attempts, the app misjudged where the images should begin and end, causing a large black void to fill the middle of the image.

The resolution of the images created with 360 Panorama is also much smaller than those that can be created using an app like AutoStitch. The above 360-degree shot is 2048 pixels wide at full resolution while this AutoStitch panorama of less than 90 degrees I made a few weeks ago is 3222 pixels wide.

AutoStitch also includes several handy features which 360 Panorama lacks - namely the ability to crop images. Users will need a third-party app to crop their images from 360, and will also be missing features like export settings and AutoStitch's advanced exposure blending.

The verdict for 360 Panorama is a bit of a toss-up. If you want the speed and ease of creating panoramas with the steady wave of a hand, then this is definitely an app you need to try out. But if you want higher quality and resolution from your panoramas, then you might be better off sticking with an app like AutoStitch.

International management, I.T. consulting and technology firm PA Consulting Group claims that the so-called "iPhone death grip" (the method of holding the iPhone 4 to degrade antenna performance) is a problem unique to the new iPhone. After performing tests, the firm confirms that the phone's wireless performance was generally in the same range as other smartphones except when held in the "death grip" - then, it performed significantly worse than its competitors.

According to Simon Tonks, the consultant who led the testing, "Our tests indicate that the 'death grip' issue is real, and is worse for the Apple iPhone 4 than for other smartphones."

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The death grip issue is aggravated by the fact that the radio performance on the iPhone 4 was already fairly poor, the firm reports. "The iPhone 4's radio performance was also found to be generally at the lower end [of the range]," said Tonks. "This means it will tend to drop calls earlier than other phones and may suffer more in areas of weak signal. Though, overall it's still within the normal performance range for similar products."

In addition to testing iPhone 4 signal strength itself, the firm also compared the iPhone 4 to other leading devices, including the Blackberry 9700 and the HTC HD2. The results of the tests were recorded in a snazzy YouTube video which features an upbeat rock n' roll track, padded test rooms and humorous clips of people attempting to use the iPhone 4 by taping it to their head or augmenting the signal strength with a wire coat hanger.

The silliness of the video (at least until the halfway point) may detract from what are actually legitimate tests from the firm, an award-winning group known recently for its work with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to reduce methane emissions, work with the Butan government in using biometrics in border control, its design and development of the first disposable medical injectors for automated injections and its work in saving companies millions through supply chain optimization, among other things.

The group's experts confirm that ultimately, the iPhone 4 represents a trade-off between product design and innovative features versus ensuring a product works effectively. They also noted that a rubber band placed around the antenna provides a significant performance improvement.

While reporting on the iPhone 4 "death grip" seems a bit like beating a dead horse at this point, considering that Apple has already acknowledged the issue and announced it would offer free bumpers to iPhone 4 owners, it's notable at least for the fact that these iPhone complaints have now gone worldwide (PA Consulting Group is UK-based). This news confirms that the issues with the antenna aren't just a problem primarily affecting U.S. users dealing with AT&T's poor network performance, but also affect iPhone 4 owners in other countries as well.

In Cisco's Mid-Year Security Report, the company cites research finding that 50% of end users admitted to accessing social media tools at work, in spite of company rules, at least once a week. Another 27% have changed the settings on a company device to access prohibited sites or applications. The report notes the security risks, and potential for lost productivity, Facebook and other social media sites present, but doesn't recommend enterprises block social media sites entirely.

Citing both worker morale and the potential to use the tools for work-related activities, Cisco recommends better security education and social media policies in the work place instead of technical restrictions that employees would likely route-around anyway.

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"If enterprises respond to this threat by banning all access to social networking sites, they may damage workers' ability to collaborate and communicate in a changing business environment," the report states. Interestingly, Cisco notes that the cybercriminals security managers may be trying to protect their companies from are early adopters of social media technology. For example, a social networking based market for buying and selling stolen credit card information was discovered in Russia.

Cisco suggests companies establish explicit security policies and create and distribute a security handbook. "Too often, C-level executives are allowed to label security as 'IT's problem.' But in the enterprise, security is everyone's problem," the report says.

Only 1/7 of the companies participating in one study Cisco conducted have established formal processes for the use of social networking tools in the enterprise, and only 1/10 said their IT departments had direct involvement in social media initiatives.

The report suggests that, at minimum, enterprises implement a process for employees to address social media related questions to the right decision makers so that errors that impact security might be avoided. (See also Error and Accuracy in the Read/Write Enterprise)

The stakes are high: Last year, in the total losses linked to online fraud jumped to $559.7 million from $265 the year before.

Cisco ends the report with five suggestions for improving enterprise security:

2. Focus First on Solving "Old" Issues--and Doing It Well "Software updating and patching is a good place for many organizations to begin making improvements."

3. Educate Your Workforce on Security--and Include Them in the Process "Target C-level executives and other VIPs for extensive education, as they are prime targets for phishing and social engineering schemes."

4. Understand That One Security Border Is No Longer Enough "Business is becoming 'borderless,' and so, too, is the network, which means there are multiple borders to protect... and they are constantly changing."

5. View Security as a Differentiator for Your Business "How an enterprise approaches security and responds to trends such as social networking and mobility can have a direct impact on its ability to hire and retain talent."

Cisco's research on social media use in the enterprise is consistent with research conducted by other companies, such as firewall vendor Palo Alto Networks, whose own report we covered last year. Palo Alto offers some intriguing alternatives to outright blocking Facebook - the company allows administrators to block only applications, or make the site read-only.

What do you think? Does it make more sense to block Facebook than try to deal with the security issues it poses or should enterprises embrace it?

Image Credit: Massimo Barbieri

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