I'm a big fan of widgets. Now that the concept of "cloud computing" has gained traction in the technology industry, lots of people are also wild for widgets. Of course, when you dynamically assemble content from multiple sources, bad things might happen to good people:

SiteMeter's widget for tracking visits to Web sites went haywire on Friday and rendered many pages unviewable via Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser.

The technology industry will take steps to eliminate these problems. Standards will help a little, if only to get the people writing widgets to think about all the implications and edge cases of what they're building. Abstracting the run-time layer of widgets through mechanisms like Netvibes' universal widget API can help, too.

On Thursday, Forrester announced that it bought JupiterResearch for $23 million in cash. Bringing the two companies together has been a dream of mine since the 1990s -- Jupiter always had incisive analysts, influential clients, and always seemed to be ahead of the next trend -- and it always seemed like a cultural match for Forrester (OK, I'll admit it -- they were probably much cooler than us...)

It's pretty simple why we bought Jupiter. Marketing and strategy executives are probably the most challenged by technology changes. I was with the head of marketing for a major national newspaper recently who said to me: "...given Facebook, blogs, YouTube, Craig's List, we don't know what will be in the future -- we have no idea." Forrester serves these executives -- and adding JupiterResearch's analysts, salespeople, and service people to this effort will help us help our clients even more -- and it will mean that we can grow that business faster.

Monster today announced their acquisition of Mountain View, Calif. based Trovix for $73 million in an all cash deal. Trovix was known as an applicant tracking system (ATS) vendor and have amassed over 40 customers during their short tenure, but that was not their passion. Instead, they were fully focused on perfecting and innovating search technologies. Their goal was to bridge the gap between jobs and candidates and find the perfect match for both. So what does Monster get and what are they going to do with Trovix?

by Josh Bernoff and Cliff Condon

If there is one other research company that we've continued to encounter, respect, and see as real competition in the interactive media space, it is JupiterResearch. While the company ownership has changed hands several times over the years, the analysts have continued to do great work.

That's why we're very pleased that Forrester Research today announced it is acquiring JupiterResearch.

By Ted Schadler

What's a zettabyte? It's the same amount of information found on 500 billion DVDs or 75 full-length movies for every human on the planet. And a half a zettabyte, a mere 250 billion DVDs' worth, is the number of bits that Cisco expects to fly around the Internet every year in 2012.

The networking giant has created aVisual Networking Index, a detailed measurement of annual business and consumers Internet traffic. In a recent conversation with Cisco senior analyst Arielle Sumits, we learned that Cisco has used this index and a lot of detailed data to calculate that the public and private Internet will carry 6 times the amount of traffic in 2012 as it does today.

The big driver of that torrent is, of course, video. By 2012, Internet video alone will be almost 400 times the size of the entire US backbone in 2000. Add downloadable HD video, Telepresence, and Internet traffic to the television, and the volume of bits is staggering, even higher than the P2P traffic.

Wow, that's a lot of bits. But what does it really mean? I think it means three things for Information & Knowledge Management professionals: