Intelligent fridge can tell you when you’re out of milk If you thought grocery shopping could hardly get much easier, think again. Microsoft is collaborating with Liebherr’s appliances division to develop ‘SmartDeviceBox’, a communication module that connects Liebherr’s refrigerators and freezers to the internet. Thanks to internal cameras and deep learning algorithms similar to those of Cortana (Microsoft’s Artificial Intelligence), Microsoft’s new fridge technology recognises food packaging, and effectively monitors what products you have at home. “This information flows automatically into an inventory list, which lets the customer see quickly…

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You hear it all the time: Mobile is over. The app boom is finished. The average American downloads zero apps per month (okay, maybe 1.5 apps per month) — so it’s time to start thinking about the “next big thing.” Of course, nobody really means that mobile is “over,” just that all the big opportunities have already been grabbed. The thinking is that, with Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Whatsapp, WeChat, and Twitter out there, and no one downloading many apps any more, there’s just no room for something new. It’s too late. Don’t bother trying to…

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Selecting an ERP vendor involves questions – lots of questions. It’s important to get as much information as possible in the selection process since choosing the right product from the right vendor is one of the most critical decisions in the implementation process. It can literally make or break the entire project. There are a great many questions you need to ask. Here are some of the most important ones. Does this product support your style of operations? ERP systems are specialized by type of business and often by industry.…

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Last month, law enforcement officers showed up at the lab of Anil Jain, a professor at Michigan State University. Jain wasn’t in trouble; the officers wanted his help. Jain is a computer science professor who works on biometric identifiers such as facial recognition programs, fingerprint scanners and tattoo matching; he wants to make them as difficult to hack as possible. But the police were interested in the opposite of this: they wanted his help to unlock a dead man’s phone. Jain and his PhD student Sunpreet Arora couldn’t share details…

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Research has shown that 70 percent of organizational change efforts fail. Lack of support from across the organization is a major cause for this daunting statistic. Without support, big ideas don’t take hold — or have the desired impact. You need buy-in to make organizational change happen, especially when building support for a new technology initiative. This is a timely challenge as the internet, big data and other tools have made markets increasingly competitive, pushing many organizations to adopt new technology to remain relevant. These initiatives can seem like obvious solutions…

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I have the privilege of occasionally meeting with folks from our sales and marketing teams along with solutions engineers to discuss the sales cycle, past deals, or deals that are in the offing. As is often the case, there are many opinions on how deals should be examined, deconstructed and the opportunity positioned. You could think of it as a calculated gamble that you will do business but it can be a little less scientific and a little less of a matter of luck and more of a carefully constructed…

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Technically Incorrect: A new study suggests that holiday gatherings mean that millennials will use their phones strategically to avoid Uncle Bilbo. Technically Incorrect offers a slightly twisted take on the tech that’s taken over our lives. This is the time we declare our independence. We proclaim our individualism. We rail against those who would subjugate us. And we certainly aren’t going to talk to Uncle Bilbo and that peculiarly coiffed lover of his at a 4th of July party. In order to help us, we have our phones. I know…

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There is much friction on whether phones are easy to use (which they are) and being easy to configure (which they are not). The gap between perception and reality within voice services is driven by the amazing advances in digital technology. End-users, particularly those within enterprise environments, are witness to an astonishing array of configurability when it comes to interfaces. And almost any interface—or reporting system for that matter—that reaches back to touch a database can be adapted to the roles and responsibilities of those users. But most enterprise users…

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