Category: Analysis

SAP technology helps Brazilian job site contact workers where they are — on cellphones, but without apps. Jacob Rosenbloom approached Brazil’s labor market as an investor. He saw, he said last week in a media conference at SAP’s SapphireNow conference, a labor market of 102 million people, of whom only about 15 million have any education beyond high school. How could a company build a labor market to serve a laborer who doesn’t know what a resumé is and has never used a personal computer? According to Rosenbloom, CEO and co-founder…

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With the proliferation of smartphones and tablets, the business world has found itself scrambling for ways to tap into the benefits of such technology. This has been seen in efforts such as mobile app development. Perhaps even more significant, however, is the concept of “bring-your-own-device” or BYOD. What is byod?  This is the practice of allowing employees to use personal devices, specifically mobile devices, tablets, and laptops in the workplace. While a lot of companies are making the change, it is important to pause and consider whether or not it is…

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There’s an invasion of sorts of various form factors from oversized smartphones to wearables, all hungry for new applications and use cases. Here’s how to prepare.  Like the tagline for a bad horror movie, a form factor invasion is occurring on the mobile device front. Everything from huge table-size devices to watches and even “smart” light bulbs is vying for attention as the next smartphone, forcing businesses and application developers to consider massive variations across devices. Here are some suggestions on preparing for the growing form factor invasion. Identify usability…

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Consumer data collected through mobile devices should be considered a full ‘citizen’ of companies’ data infrastructure Most mobile applications will collect and analyze information about end users by 2015, a trend that raises both rewards and risks for enterprises, according to analyst firm Gartner. In fact, 25 percent of companies that take advantage of consumer data “will face damage to their reputations due to inadequate understanding of information trust issues,” Gartner analyst Roxane Edjlali wrote in the report, “Adapt Your Information Infrastructure in the Age of Consumer-Centric Mobile Apps.” “The…

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The futuristic concept of 3D printing is now available to everyone as the technology has blossomed into a full-scale revolution. Take Tech Pro Research’s survey and let us know if you’re using 3D printing. Hershey’s is one of the many companies using 3D printers. This is a design made out of chocolate.  Image: Technabob.com Personal technology is at a peak, with any given smartphone today featuring more memory, processing power and storage capacity than the Apollo Guidance Computer used by the team who sent mankind to the moon in 1969.…

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Talk to any information security professional over the past decade about a number of their greatest perceived challenges when it comes to doing their job. More often than not you’ll hear about how their organization’s business leadership didn’t provide them the support and space they need to secure their organizations properly. One way you’ll hear this is when it comes to the lack of budget. Another way you’ll often hear this expressed, is as security “doesn’t get a seat at the table.” There’s no doubt a large number of security…

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Corporate employees familiar with Dropbox should take extra precautions to avoid becoming a victim of a phishing attack that uses the popular file-sharing service. Cybercriminals have been sending out emails with malicious links pointing to a ZIP file on Dropbox that contains a screensaver that is actually ransomware similar to one known as CryptoLocker, security vendor PhishMe reported Friday. The attackers try to trick the recipients into clicking on the link through a variety of ploys, including disguising the email, so that the link appears to point to an invoice or…

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SAP’s biggest challenge in reshaping itself into a provider of online business applications is changing the corporate culture that made it one of the largest software makers on the planet. The technological shift is well on its way. SAP’s flagship Business Suite is available online through the HANA Enterprise Cloud. HANA is SAP’s in-memory database–a key piece of the company’s cloud platform. “They’ve made a lot of strides technically to get things to the cloud,” Henry Morris, analyst for IDC, said. But SAP must also navigate a changing purchasing landscape in which technology…

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Open Street Map Open Street Map is an open source map of the world, created and amended by people all over the planet. It emphasizes local knowledge, so if you’re in a city and know of a new route or location, you can feel free to add it. There are many types of contributors, from mapping enthusiasts, to professionals, to humanitarians that help add things during disasters. The map shown here was listed as a great example of a community-made map of Pompeii, Italy. Image: Open Street Map Citymaps Citymaps is a…

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People will be talking about the terrible 2014 Q1 for years. IDC has just revealed one of the worst storage quarters for a couple of years as buyers went on a high-end storage strike. There’s been a quite spectacular slump in the storage business in the first 2014 quarter, according to the beancounters’ Storage Tracker. Notwithstanding the digital-universe-drowning-us-in-Big-Data narrative, the actual storage market shrank this quarter. Here’s the bare bones IDC statement: “The total (internal plus external) disk storage systems market generated $7.3 billion in revenue, representing a decrease of -6.9…

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