March 10, 2015

These companies think the future of wearables is wellness, not watches
Whisper it, but if the trend at London's Wearable Technology Show is any indication then the future of wearables may not be in fitness. Yesterday, Apple announced a medical research platform in the form of Research kit and less than 24 hours afterward, the dominant theme is not about pleasing marathon runners. "There's a kudos in sport," says Smartlife's Martin Ashby -- one of the exhibitors at the show. "But the future of wearables is in health and wellbeing." It's a bold statement from the CEO of a smart sportswear company, but is it true that companies are looking to ditch fitness fans in favor of hospitals? If you're curious to read what others believe, keep reading.


Enterprise Architecture’s New Clothes
Digital as a trend is continuing its inexorable march into the enterprise, a fact that has not escaped the attention of many CIOs. According to the latest CSC CIO survey, a large proportion of CIOs is investing in new technologies to drive business innovation forward in their organizations. However, in working with our clients, we are finding that the issue of using new technologies is only part of the story. To become truly digital organizations and fully exploit new technologies and outside-in forces, they also have to change how their IT organization is organized, including IT’s (increasingly blurring) relationship with the rest of the organization.


Six entry-level cybersecurity job seeker failings
According to a poll last summer of 1,000 18–26 year olds conducted by Zogby Analytics and underwritten by Raytheon, about 40 percent of Millennials reported they would like to enter a career that makes the Internet safer, but roughly two-thirds of them said they aren’t sure exactly what the cybersecurity profession is, and 64 percent said that they did not have access to the classes necessary to build the skills required for a career in information security. That means, at least when it comes to the entry-level information security market, that there will be many job applicants continuing to enter the field with backgrounds that lack formal information security training. This echoes what we hear when we speak with CISOs and others who often hire security talent.


Automatic’s cool app for cars is coming to Apple Watch
Automatic is bringing some of these features to the Apple Watch, Automatic co-founder, Ljuba Miljkovic told me: “Because Automatic on the Apple Watch is an extension of the iPhone app, it’s technically able to present any alert the Automatic adapter can read from the car’s onboard computer. For now, we’ve focused on more frequent uses-cases like quickly seeing where you parked your car and easily tagging trips for business reimbursement.” One of the most useful features of Automatic is its ability to read data gathered by the processors inside modern vehicles, information you once needed expensive systems to access is now available to you through your phone.


‘Leap’ Second Poses Systems Challenge
A leap second is a one-second adjustment that is applied to in order to keep its time of day close to mean solar time. Without such a correction, time reckoned by Earth’s rotation drifts away from atomic time because of irregularities in the Earth’s rate of rotation. ... The problem is that most time synchronization systems in place today were implemented at a time when financial markets were still largely voice-based. Today, with transaction speeds being measured in nanoseconds, such systems are inexact. In order to mitigate the risks of inaccurate time stamps when disseminating and trading on sensitive market information, firms are implementing precision time stamps based on the atomic clock operated by the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colo.


One month to launch: A closer look at Apple's Watch
Despite the differences in materials, all three versions of the Apple Watch feel very similar once you've got 'em strapped on. The 42mm versions are just a touch more substantial thanks to the slightly bigger chassis and battery (I'm told the difference in battery life is super small), but you're not going to notice the difference. My go-to watch is a stainless steel Mondaine and the Watch felt dramatically heftier, only natural considering all the stuff that's been crammed into it -- it's also got more weight to it than an ASUS ZenWatch, the Android Wear watch that Apple's work most closely resembles. Don't worry: You might not love the shape, but the Watch feels suitably expensive.


Socially Exceptional Recruiting
With buzz around the value of social media in recruiting gaining steam — led by the growing popularity of professional networking website LinkedIn and social networking sites Facebook and Twitter — Molloy wanted to see if using these channels in talent acquisition was worthy of further attention. “We wanted to either prove that what people were saying and writing about social media recruiting was true,” said Molloy, now the Palo Alto, California-based firm’s senior manager of candidate development, “or that perhaps it was appropriate for marketing and other teams but not HR.” So Molloy and his staffing team at the cloud and virtualization software firm’s Cork, Ireland, office created a Facebook page and started to post jobs. He also had staff members post the openings to their own personal Facebook profiles.


Protecting the enterprise with cybersecure IT architecture
The trouble is, they’re in a race against time. A joint study by McKinsey and the World Economic Forum in 2014 revealed that 71 percent of global banking IT executives believe that attackers will continue to move faster than banks in modifying their skill sets and spotting potential vulnerabilities. Additionally, 80 percent of respondents believe that the risk of cyberattacks and compromised data will have major strategic implications for their businesses over the next five years. To stay ahead of attackers, companies need to design processes, platforms, and IT infrastructures with security in mind and incorporate secure architecture principles into their security programs.


Measure data science team efficiency with a feature-based approach
The trickiest part of measuring efficiency is figuring out your unit of measurement. I suggest you use a feature-based approach and develop an explicit definition of a feature. This concept was inspired by my work with Feature-Driven Development (FDD), an agile software development methodology that breaks a solution into many small features. I like feature-based measurement systems because they inherently reflect the end users' interests. A feature is something an end user will use, so it's a good basis for gauging how quickly something should be produced. Compare this with lines of code, which means nothing to an end user.


The power of doubt: Finding comfort in discomfort
CEOs insist that, despite the changing nature of their role, they remain “the ultimate decision makers,” providing clarity and direction. This clarity is ever more elusive in a world of intersecting trends, competing demands, and unpredictable ripples. Worse, what appears to be clear may in fact be a dangerous illusion, because “if you’re that clear, you’ve probably missed something.” Keen to protect themselves against this false sense of security and the risk of being blindsided, “a [certain] level of professional doubt should be the quality of any good leader,” says one CEO.



Quote for the day:

"Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest." -- Mark Twain

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