December 20, 2015

Mobile App Developers are Suffering

First, a user must discover the potential new app. This is by far the most challenging problem that developers face. There are two portals for discovery today: 1. paid promotion, which is dominated by Facebook, and 2. the app stores themselves. The biggest issue is that these two forms of promotion only work for the apps that have already been discovered. Paid promotion is completely unsustainable for most apps given that the cost for an active install increased to $4.14 in the last few months. I can count on my hands the number of business models in the app ecosystem which can support that cost of customer acquisition. This means that app ads are only usable by the very small percentage of the ecosystem that is monetizing well. For the majority, it is a prohibitive channel.


Driving Digital Transformation Using Enterprise Architecture

The speciality here is, change in pattern for “Transformation” when the prefix “Digital” gets associated. It is no longer IT for Business. It is technology-enabled business, literally! The basics of market place of how one get their 4Ps together to generate values is changing and thus newer Business Model. That is where the critical differentiation comes in. This drives in a couple of thoughts: A) Business Gurus need to understand information and technology B) Technical Gurus need to understand business. It is no longer a question of business and IT alignment, it is a question of merger and how the mix looks like! Everyone understands this and understands that change is unavoidable. However, they are also apprehensive of repeating “past failures to transform”.


Google reveals the most popular searches in 2015

Google has released its list of the most searched terms of 2015. Over 3.5 billion searches are made on Google everyday - around 1.2 trillion per year - and the company combs through these to compile a list of the most popular. The list is a good way to measure what happened during the year and includes a mix of news events, films, celebrities, and apps. Here are the top 10 most popular searches on Google in the past year.


In Who Do We Trust? How Privilege Plays Out in Security and Privacy Online

To make matters worse, there are often conflicting reports on how consumers should protect themselves from identity theft, surveillance and other online threats. Without trusted beacons out there, it is often up to individuals to figure out how to protect themselves — or recover — from invasions when they do occur. Threatening the situation even further is the acceleration of cybersecurity misinformation and government manipulation in the wake of the November 13th Paris attacks. As information about the Daesh (aka ISIS)-affiliated perpetrators began to emerge, so did reports on how they planned their attacks.


The First Person to Hack the iPhone Built a Self-Driving Car. In His Garage

There are two breakthroughs that make Hotz’s system possible. The first comes from the rise in computing power since the days of the Grand Challenge. He uses graphics chips that normally power video game consoles to process images pulled in by the car’s camera and speedy Intel chips to run his AI calculations. Where the Grand Challenge teams spent millions on their hardware and sensors, Hotz, using his winnings from hacking contests, spent a total of $50,000—the bulk of which ($30,000) was for the car itself. The second advance is deep learning, an AI technology that has taken off over the past few years. It allows researchers to assign a task to computers and then sit back as the machines in essence teach themselves how to accomplish and finally master the job. In the past


Tech support call scams becoming more aggressive

Another variation of the tech support scam is luring people to the bogus, malicious fake site. The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) recently fined ($1.3 million) and shut down some scammers who had stolen over $17 million from their duped victims by luring them to their sites with pop-up alerts telling the victim that malware was on their PC. The ads provided a contact number and people would be told to call to get rid of the problem. From there they’d be directed to a malicious site and the unsuspecting victim would follow instructions, and then nasty malware, ransomware would be downloaded, and they would be charged thousands of dollars to have it removed. Every business, of every size, and every individual is a potential target. Make sure that everyone in the organization can recognize some of the key red flags of a tech support scammer.


Using MySQL with Entity Framework

Starting with version 6.7, Connector/Net will no longer include the MySQL for Visual Studio integration. That functionality is now available in a separate product called MySQL for Visual Studio available using the MySQL Installer for Windows ... They have created an *open system for others to plug-in ‘providers’ – postgres and sqlite have it – mysql is just laggin… but, good news for those interested, i too was looking for this and found that the MySql Connector/Net 6.0 will have it… You would need a mapping provider for MySQL. That is an extra thing the Entity Framework needs to make the magic happen. This blog talks about other mapping providers besides the one Microsoft is supplying. I haven’t found any mentionings of MySQL.


Peer Feedback Loops: How to Contribute to a Culture of Continuous Improvement

Feedback is an essential part of any lean or agile development. This holds for the technical level as well as for your work management system. This article advocates for complementing the well-known strategies of metrics and meetings with peer feedback. Why peer feedback? Simply speaking, because this kind of feedback encourages continuous improvement on a personal level too. ... the value-add of peer feedback depends heavily on how it is facilitated. That is why, the three articles of the series present a total of nine methods I've tried and tested in various environments. To make these methods as comprehensive as possible they are presented in the context of real-life case studies and complemented by some figures to illustrate what they can look like.


Web Socket Server in C#

A lot of the Web Socket examples out there are for old Web Socket versions and included complicated code (and external libraries) for fall back communication. All modern browsers that anyone cares about (including safari on an iphone) support at least version 13 of the Web Socket protocol so I'd rather not complicate things. This is a bare bones implementation of the web socket protocol in C# with no external libraries involved. You can connect using standard HTML5 JavaScript. This application serves up basic html pages as well as handling WebSocket connections. This may seem confusing but it allows you to send the client the html they need to make a web socket connection and also allows you to share the same port.


When And Why OpenStack Needs A Cloud Management Platform

Different companies stop at different stages of this maturity model, depending on the business needs and the maturity of their IT organization. As the environments in stage 1 and stage 2 grow in size and complexity, companies can reach an operational scale that requires more sophisticated management tools than the ones provided out of the box by server virtualization and IaaS cloud engines. ... OpenStack does a great job in providing the instrumentation for the aforementioned capabilities – think the metering APIs that OpenStack Telemetry (Ceilometer) offers or the orchestration templates that you can define with OpenStack Orchestration



Quote for the day:


"Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others." -- Jack Welch


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