2014 Hype Cycle Special Report Evaluates the Maturity of More Than 2,000 Technologies. 2014 Marks 20th Anniversary of the Gartner Hype Cycle The journey to digital business is the key theme of Gartner, Inc.’s “Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2014.” As the Gartner Hype Cycle celebrates its 20th year, Gartner said that as enterprises set out on the journey to becoming digital businesses, identifying and employing the right technologies at the right time will be critical. Gartner’s 2014 Hype Cycle Special Report provides strategists and planners with an assessment of the…

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Top young entrepreneurs say their smartphone is as important to running a business as a car or laptop The country’s top young entrepreneurs think their smartphone is one of the most important tools for running a business. So claims research by Xero, which showed 52 per cent of the 500 young people questioned thought their smartphone was as important as a laptop or car to help their business grow. Some 51 per cent said a laptop was the most important tool in their toolkit. A desktop PC was only favoured by…

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In a survey of nearly 4,000 IT managers across 27 countries, Kaspersky Lab has not only found that targeted attacks on the rise year-over-year, but also identified the business sectors most likely to be targeted. Globally, 18% of organizations in the Government & Defense sector reported at least one targeted attack within the past 12 months. The rate of targeted attacks reported within the Government & Defense sector was the highest rate reported in this year’s survey, a notable increase from the global average of 12% reported across all business…

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Software is hard to develop for many reasons: We must figure out what to do, do it, and ensure that we have done it correctly. Last week, I said that I was going to discuss invariants. I’ve decided to put this topic off for a while because when I started thinking about it, I realized that it was just a small part of a much bigger subject. Invariants are an intellectual tool that we can use to increase our confidence that a program is working as we expect. However, it…

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Brand journalism? Yes, it’s true; at first glance, this does seem an oxymoron. It would be easy to assume brand journalism is just a fancy euphemism for content marketing, a new ‘buzzword’ designed to remodel old marketing techniques in a seemingly more credible package. But brand journalism is much more. All cynicism aside, brand journalism is not the same as content marketing. Spotting the crucial differences between the two is the first step to understanding what it is and how you can receive work as a brand journalist and how…

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It’s a fact. Email is making us slower, less productive and even dumber. The average employee now checks email 36 times an hour, spending a full 13 hours a week reading, deleting, sending and sorting emails. Each time we’re distracted with an email, it takes an average of 16 minutes (yes, 16 minutes) to refocus on the task at hand. But the news gets worse: Workers who check email frequently suffer a 10-point drop in IQ, the equivalent of missing an entire night’s sleep. Our email inboxes, once-upon-a-time the private…

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