September 17, 2013

The Human Body is the New Password
A few weeks ago Motorola demonstrated a so called password pill. A vitamin pill that contains a computer chip which transmits an encrypted signal to identify the individual. Google recently filed a patent to recognize faces in a unique way. Normal facial recognition software can easily be fooled by keeping a picture in front of the camera. Google has therefore found a way that the static portraits can be broken, simply by winking, “at least one of a blink gesture, a wink gesture, an ocular movement, a smile gesture, a frown gesture, a tongue protrusion gesture, an open mouth gesture, an eyebrow movement, a forehead wrinkle gesture, and a nose wrinkle gesture.”


The future bank will be the one with biggest (inter)network
Banks are very poor at collaboration – apart from creating their cooperative SWIFT – and many areas of banking today will not exist in the future without collaboration. We need to make collaboration work to survive. If you look at how the world works today, everything has ‘crowd’ in it somewhere with crowdsourcing and crowdfunding being two that really apply to the banking world. This is why we will need far more collaboration in the future as you cannot work or stand alone in a globally connected world.


With No Camera Required Armband Converts Gestures Into Controls
The Tom Cruise action-thriller Minority Report, made in 2002 and set in 2054, envisioned a world where people spoke to computers and controlled them with a swipe of the wrist. We only had to wait ten years for the science fiction imaginings to become a reality, with gesture recognition, and more recently wearable tech, blurring the lines between digital interfaces and human commands to making communicating with machines easier than ever before.


Disrupting the Consultants: Clayton Christensen and Friends Sound the Alarm
Now, more than ever before, companies want to connect to the originator, the source of an idea - instead of going with organizational middlemen. Thought-leadership translates to market leadership. Some of the big firms are hiring these gurus to harness their I.P. but the list of independent, disruptive gurus is growing fast.


Get an Inside Look at Microsoft Datacenters and Hardware
Have you ever wondered what a datacenter looks like? Maybe you saw a datacenter 5 years ago. I can tell you first hand a lot has changed in datacenter construction and implementation in the last 5 years. There are a couple of great videos on YouTube that show off a few of the things that Microsoft is doing with cloud computing hardware and datacenters.


Cybersecurity business booming in Silicon Valley
"It's a multibillion-dollar business in and of itself," said John Grady, a security specialist with the International Data Corporation, of the criminal enterprises. "So the industry, to keep up on the defensive side, has just skyrocketed." Although HP doesn't reveal how much money it gets from its cybersecurity products, which are designed to discourage attacks and minimize losses when breaches occur, the amount is a tiny portion of its revenue.


Hybrid Databases Gaining Favor for Enterprise Big Data Analytics
“Traditional databases do not go away,” said Sastry Malldi, the chief architect for StubHub. ... The more unstructured data coming into the company, the more structured you have to become in dealing with all those sources. StubHub uses a four-layer data approach overseen by a data management umbrella. The data and data management reside in eBay’s private infrastructure cloud. ... The hybrid database will be the goal of the enterprise data architect for years to come.


Postgres Gets Even More Reliability, High Availability, Several Developer-Friendly Features
PostgreSQL 9.3 comes with Fast Fail-over and streaming-only Remastering as well as many developer-focussed features such as materialized views, auto-updateable views, many features for JSON data-type and more. ... Features include: Optional ability to Checksum data pages and report corruption; Fast Failover option for Standby servers: enables sub-second switch from master to replica; and Streaming-Only Remastering: easier, faster reconfiguration of cascading replicas after failover


Valve CEO: Why Linux is the future of gaming
"Linux is the future of gaming for gamers on the client as well, because, besides Microsoft moving to a more locked-in style of computing, "Open systems were advancing much faster. The old console guys are not competitive, and there's huge tension in proprietary systems." For example, Newell said, "It took us six months to get one update through the Apple store. Closed systems are at odds with the evolution of gaming." So, Valve has been bringing its Steam games to Linux. There are now 198 Steam games running on Linux. The issues of bringing the games to Linux have been solved.


Innovation under the covers
There are a number of reasons for what I call "innovation under the covers". First, every firm wants to be viewed as an innovator, so it pays to talk about innovation externally, regardless of what you are actually doing internally. Second, innovation is risky, so rather than make a big, public bet that may fail, executives are often willing to allow innovation to happen, but in a quiet, discrete way in case it doesn't pan out.



Quote for the day:

"The leadership instinct you are born with is the backbone. You develop the funny bone and the wishbone that go with it." -- Elaine Agather

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