Collaboration has been around since the dawn of man, but recent developments have made it easier and more effective than ever People are born collaborators – in fact, we’ve evolved to collaborate. Our communication skills and ability to work together have taken us from the savannahs of Africa to the outer solar system. Collaboration has given us virtually everything, from our ability to avoid famine using agriculture to amazing works of art. Collaboration today, though, is going into overdrive thanks to the development of more and more tools that help…

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In his first interview as the video empire’s engineering chief, Matthew Mengerink discusses virtual reality, making money and stepping into the role during trying times for YouTube’s engineers. Soon after Matthew Mengerink became YouTube’s engineering chief a few weeks back, he got a taste of the virtual reality footage Google has been working on but hasn’t released to the public yet. “I saw stuff that just melted my brain,” Mengerink said Tuesday in his first interview since joining the Google-owned video site. Mengerink won’t go into detail about what he…

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For small businesses, effectively managing technology comes with a question: Is it better to outsource or stay in-house? Most small and midsize companies can’t afford to employ teams of full-time IT staffers. This creates a desire for outsourced solutions. However, opting for a third party means giving up a measure of control. What is best for your business? In this post, we offer a quick rundown of the top five tasks any small business should consider outsourcing: The Cloud According to MarketWatch, while 64 percent of business owners are aware…

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The promises of adding social media are appealing to many companies that desire an automated approach to monitoring their customers’ posts, blogs, and tweets about the businesses. Adding social listening to any customer relationship management (CRM) solution seems to be a natural progression of the direction CRM software was heading, but many decried the solution as intrusive and a potential violation of their customers’ privacy rights. Nevertheless, the technology has advanced and matured to the point where many companies are once again considering it to help them not only gain…

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Cisco, Intel, IBM and HP are bridging virtualisation and the software-defined data centre “Composable infrastructure” is a term you’re about to start hearing a lot more, and the good news is that while it is marketing jargon behind the shiny is pleasing advances in server design that will advance server virtualisation and private clouds. The new term has its roots in server virtualisation, which is of course an eminently sensible idea that anyone sensible uses whenever possible. Intel and AMD both gave server virtualisation a mighty shunt forward with their…

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EMC and VMware will funnel hybrid cloud services into their co-owned Virtustream brand EMC and VMware have announced plans to unify their cloud businesses under the single banner of the Virtustream brand. The move comes just a week after the announcement that Dell is to buy EMC for $67 billion, when it was also stated that VMware would remain a separate, publicly traded company. Virtustream – which EMC itself acquired for $1.2 billion in May – will incorporate Virtustream’s existing cloud offerings, EMC Information Infrastructure and VMWare services such as vCloud Air…

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