If you're doing serious Web content engineering you might well choose an all-singing, all-dancing product such as Adobe's Dreamweaver. The latest version of Dreamweaver in Adobe's Creative Suite 6 (released just over a year ago) was really impressive with new features such as an improved user interface, support for jQuery UI widgets, better cascading style sheet Version 3 support and support for PhoneGap. All in all, a very cool and comprehensive Web development platform.

Have you had a IT project go astray? Maybe you were lucky and it was a brief hiccup with minimal financial consequences. Or maybe you had a disaster of biblical proportions, such as the one that befell Levi Strauss in 2008.

How would you like to build a global enterprise-scale data access infrastructure? A daunting prospect, yes? Imagine creating a system that could make any subset of any significant data resource in your organization available where it's needed without incurring insane implementation and maintenance costs ... sounds too good to be true?

Last week here in Backspin I discussed how real-world "things" that aren't easily augmented with digital instrumentation, such as bicycles, cars and even dogs, can be indirectly connected to the Internet of Things (IoT) using physical ID tags and online proxies. This is, as I pointed out, a powerful concept.

Considering the enormous webcam market and the number of products available it's hard to believe that anyone could come up with anything new, novel and useful but, impressively, that's just what Logitech has managed to do with its Broadcaster Wi-Fi Webcam, a really well-designed webcam for OS X and iOS only.

Some time ago I had a call with a company that ran data centers they claimed were "green." Their argument for their greenness was they purchased power with green credits, which meant they paid a premium for electricity to fund alternative energy programs. Along with that they had a car park full of solar cells.

First up, serious networking stuff concerning Apple and how iOS supports VPNs and how it won't in future.

Facebook's big announcement was a big "so what?" and minimal innovation at its finest

Every now and then a company appears that makes a slew of cool products. The latest of these is Satechi, which I think should use the tag line "purveyors of fine gadgets." Satechi just sent me a few very cool items and in a couple of weeks I shall review their remarkable Wireless Mini Router/Repeater. Today, I have two of their presentation controllers, both of which include laser pointers.

Everywhere you go these days -- every store, every urban street, every car park, every ATM -- there are video cameras watching where you go and what you do. Just what are "they" (whoever "they" are) doing with all of that video surveillance?

Microsoft has just been hit, again, with a massive fine by the EU for making the same mistake all over again

When you're talking to a n00b -- say, your CEO or VP of sales and marketing (or maybe even your CIO) -- it can be hard to get them to understand just how big and complex the Internet is. Sure, they hear about the billions of people on the 'Net and all of the companies making money through e-commerce of one kind or another (which hopefully includes yours), but what they will often have a problem grasping is the sheer scale of the Internet and how it's grown. What they need is a visual aid.

Gibbs analyzes the results of his "How do you manage your social networks?" survey

OK, lots of interesting stuff for you this week. First up, LinkedIn has open sourced a system called Databus, a real-time database change capture system that provides a "timeline-consistent stream of change capture events ... grouped in transactions, in source commit order."

In his 1990 book "The New Realities," Peter Drucker noted: "Knowledge is information that changes something or somebody - either by becoming grounds for action, or by making an individual (or an institution) capable of different and more effective action." And that is what Big Data is delivering ... new knowledge, new insights and new actions, all of which will give us new problems to deal with.