Besides keeping tabs on their companies' online reputations, CEOs these days have their own to consider.

According to a report released on Wednesday, 66 percent of executives in America's biggest companies believe that CEOs' reputations are largely negative.

ETL stands for Extract – Transform – Load, and is the standard process by which most data integration takes place.  Data is extracted from one of more systems, consolidated and transformed, then loaded to the target system or systems.  This is usually done by a tool such as Informatica PowerCenter or DataStage.

Just three months ago, Apple celebrated as its App Store hit the 1 billion download mark. Lucky Connor Mulcahey of Weston, Conn. won a $10,000 iTunes gift card and a grab bag of Apple goodies for downloading Bump -- an application that lets users swap contact information by bumping their smartphones.

But the milestones are coming still faster. Today, about one year after Apple launched its iPhone application store, the company announced that 1.5 billion apps have been downloaded.

This week, I looked at the still emerging field of IT performance measurement known as business transaction management. BTM expresses any system problems, or outages, in terms related to the application itself. As part of this process, it maps all components across all platforms that an application touches. (The Gartner organization refers to the area as “application performance measurement.”)

One of BTM’s big advantages is said to be that it can make IT problems easier to talk about.

In the past week, I've seen a couple of blog posts dealing with the interview. At harvardbusiness.org, blogger David Silverman offers up seven tips to "Ace the Interview." Yesterday, TechRepublic's Toni Bowers gave us "10 ways to be liked in your job interview."

A new study out from DisplaySearch reports 20 percent growth worldwide of netbooks this year--with 33 million shipping--while laptop growth languishes.

While the US and North America market are not leading the charge, as much of the growth will occur in Latin America and Europe/Middle East and Africa, the study illustrates that the mini-computers have a solid niche.