Category: Comments & opinions

Anti-virus systems are now a de facto part of modern computing. In a world where every webpage, email and downloaded file has the potential to contain malicious code or trojan horses there is a need to be more vigilant than ever about the security of your computer and your data. Traditionally anti-virus programs have been installed directly on a computer’s hard drive – running in the background to alert users to phishing attacks, dangerous files and other online threats. However, as the cloud computing continues to expand we are now seeing the…

Read More

Printing at home is dead simple, and most of us don’t think twice about it. But it sure is a heck of a lot easier when you can send a print job from any device, anywhere in the world to your printer at home. A slew of cloud-connected printers let you do this, but even if you’re stuck with a printer that doesn’t talk to the web you can get in on the print-anywhere fun with the help ofGoogle Cloud Print. This free service from Google has been around since 2011, when it…

Read More

Working with a virtual team will have its ups and downs. There will always be challenges down the road but you can weather through anything when you have a great team.  Unfortunately, even the greatest teams are not immune to low productivity levels which greatly affects output. While you can routinely give pep talks to give your team a boost, you can also employ a variety of productivity tools to address the problem at hand. Productivity touches upon different aspects in a day in the life of a virtual team.…

Read More

Inventor Nikola Tesla may have died alone and broke, but he has powerful friends who want to preserve his legacy. Cartoonist Matthew Inman, the brain behind “The Oatmeal,” is one. Using his popular web comic, Inman launched an effort to turn Tesla’s former laboratory in Shoreham, New York, into a museum. Tesla, who lived from 1856 to 1943, developed the basis for AC power, among other ideas and innovations that have shaped our lives. He obtained more than 100 patents, according to the Tesla Memorial Society of New York. Inman…

Read More

The week in cloud: Shared-link vulnerability overshadows Dropbox for Business push; Eucalyptus updates private cloud and Oracle v. Google reverberates. Last week, Dropbox wanted its news to be about its growing sales presence abroad — it’s expanding the partner channel for Dropbox for Business to the European Union, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand. But that plan went sideways when news surfaced (thanks to rival Intralinks) of a vulnerability in the way Dropbox handled live URLs. In an email to reporters, an Intralinks spokeswoman said the issue surfaced in a “routine Google Adwords campaign” when referral searches led…

Read More

Back in the day Back in the 1990s when I began doing business online I could put up a website and if I could get the website found I could bank on making money from it. I had some of the first health insurance websites there were up back then. Websites were a novelty. They were new. Search engines were coming into being. As we moved into the early 2000s then having a website and in particular a website that could do business online if ranked well on the search…

Read More

Applications are changing dramatically due to mobile and cloud pressures. This not only drives the need to change application development practices, but it changes the nature of what is delivered to users. Applications are changing dramatically due to mobile and cloud pressures. This not only drives the need to change application development practices, but it changes the nature of what is delivered to users. Ahead of the Gartner Application Architecture, Development & Integration Summit 2014, May 19-20 in London, David Mitchell Smith, vice president and Gartner Fellow, answered questions that are…

Read More

Just visualize your product in this environment. That’s the basic pitch behind an augmented reality app for sales, which helped Paris-based startup Augment raise $1.5 million. “There is not really any other augmented reality platform targeted to sales people,” CEO and founder Jean-Francois Chianetta told VentureBeat. He added that other augmented reality platforms, like Blippar, Aurasma or Wikitude, are “focused on the marketing opportunity” instead of sales. The first target for the company: sales reps selling merchandising displays to retailers, such as the ones from the European division of L’Oréal Professional Products that are using the app. “This…

Read More

IT outsourcing customers say they want more from their service providers. Yet they often use the same old negotiating tactics to set up their outsourcing deals. If you want a more collaborative relationship with IT service providers, it has to start at the negotiating table, says Kate Vitasek, author of “Getting to We: Negotiating Agreements for Highly Collaborative Relationships,” based on research conducted at the University of Tennessee Knoxville. CIO.com talked to Vitasek about what’s driving the need for more collaborative outsourcing relationships, how traditional negotiating tactics destroy value, and…

Read More