Category: Comments & opinions

We round up the best and most popular Windows Phone apps to help you decide what’s hot and what’s not for 2014 While not quite matching Android or iPhone when it comes to dominating the mobile market, Windows Phone has a loyal following, and is certainly popular within the business community. Of late, Microsoft has made the OS much more business-focused than it used to be, helping it wrest market share from one-time rival BlackBerry, and it has also been designed to work with Windows-based IT infrastructures. 1. iTelMobileDialer URL: http://www.revesoft.com/…

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Are you ready for some football? Because Microsoft most certainly is. To go along with the introduction of a new NFL app for Xbox One and Windows 8, the software giant has also revealed how it plans to help professional coaches and players during games. As part of an ongoing partnership with the National Football League, which began last year and was reportedly worth $400 million over five years, Microsoft created what it calls a Sideline Viewing System. Naturally, the company’s own hardware is a key component to this; the new system is powered by Surface Pro…

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HP found 25 vulnerabilities per device including everything from TVs to thermostats to home alarms and scales About 70 percent of Internet of things devices—including sensors and connected infrastructure—have vulnerabilities that could be exploited, according to Hewlett-Packard. HP’s data is based on it Fortify division and a scan of 10 of the most popular Internet of things devices. HP found 25 vulnerabilities per device. These devices included TVs, Webcams, thermostats, remote power outlets, sprinklers, door  locks, home alarms, scales and garage openers. The findings, assessed based on the OWASP Internet…

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The logo is designed to make it clear to consumers when the goods they’re carrying contain an RFID smart chip, and to bring retailers and healthcare and banking companies out of a legal “gray zone” when it comes to data protection. The European Commission has revealed a new logo for items that include radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, to keep them compliant with EU data protection rules. The scheme is voluntary, but technology trade organizations like Germany’s BITKOM have signed up to promote its use. RFID tags, used in everything…

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Cost, data ownership, security, and other factors can complicate the SaaS decision. Software-as-a-service has moved well beyond the tidy world created by Salesforce.com. While there are now hundreds of successful SaaS vendors, customers have paid scant attention to the complexity this proliferation is having on their companies and end users. The first impact is cost. Subscription, per-user SaaS fees, payable monthly or quarterly, seemingly provide a low entry point. But this “cheap road in” overlooks the other infrastructure investments SaaS customers must make, including redundant connectivity from multiple ISPs to…

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In-memory computing (IMC) used to be an option only for larger companies with deep pockets. But, because the price of RAM has decreased significantly, companies of all sizes can now use this platform to process real-time data. The main advantage of IMC is the storage of data in the RAM on multiple computers, which decreases the impact of the data on performance. By storing data in RAM instead of on a disk, the speed increases exponentially. Without IMC, companies do not have access to the full capabilities of technologies such as big…

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The Missing Link talked to Zoran Kovacevic, from Internet Ogledalo Zoran Kovacevic launched a magazine about Internet when everyone else in Serbia was still hung on hardware news. He navigated the trying times of economic crisis with expertise, invested in understanding the behaviour of the Millenials and reduced the operational costs of his business by 80% by going digital. The Missing Link talked to Kovacevic about the challenges and delights of bridging the gap between offline and online newsrooms. Tell us more about your company and its beginnings? We launched the magazine Internet Ogledalo (Internet…

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For as long as I’ve been working with companies to get more out of their IT investments, we have used the term “IT Effectiveness.” The approaches for helping IT organizations get the most out of what they do have been studied and applied by many leaders and consultants for a long time.  Some refer to this discussion as “doing more with less” but I’ve argued that it’s more about doing the most important things with the available resources and being really focused on business-driven prioritization.  IT effectiveness is about making planning,…

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What if the world were one giant touchscreen? That’s the promise behind Metaio‘s “Thermal Touch” technology, which combines thermal imaging and augmented reality with spectacular results. Announced today, Thermal Touch uses standard and thermal cameras to track heat signatures people leave when they touch surfaces. The potential applications are enormous: Tap your door to enter a keycode without the keypad; tap your table to play a game of chess without the board; tap a print ad to hit ‘buy’ without a smartphone. “We can now essentially turn every surface into a touchscreen,” Metaio marketing director Trak Lord told VentureBeat. “Someone’s got to do…

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Cloud-based applications, also called Software as a Service (SaaS), have become the mainstay of many businesses these days. It makes sense to move many applications to the cloud because of the reduced costs of those applications and the increased speed with which they propagate through the organization, but the convenience of cloud doesn’t come without some risk. One risk that is often overlooked is the risk that is inherently involved with data. In the case of cloud-based apps, the concerns associated with data are usually focused on the security of…

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