August 23, 2013

Using social media to secure a new generation of customers
We firmly believe that by using gamification and personas like MoBo and Gyaano, we can engage customers and provide a financial learning experience that is both fun and friendly. We’re introducing young people to financial concepts while avoiding jargon and helping them understand complex scenarios. Evidence to date shows that our strategy is working.


Researchers create wallpaper that listens and measures
They are capable of taking in environmental data and wireless communication. “We originally built this for energy management in a smart building,” electrical engineering assistant professor Naveen Verma said in a release. “Temperature sensors and occupancy sensors communicate with a central management system using distributed radio arrays that are patterned on wallpaper.”


Connectivity issue caused trading problems, Nasdaq says
When Nasdaq ran into the connectivity problem Thursday afternoon it immediately issued a regulatory halt on all trading in Nasdaq-listed securities in order to protect the integrity of the markets, the statement noted. It went on to add that the technical issues with SIP were identified and resolved within 30 minutes. "For the remaining period of time, NASDAQ OMX, other exchanges, regulators and market participants coordinated with each other to ensure an orderly re-opening of trading in NASDAQ-listed securities,".


EBook: Continuous Improvement with Cycle Time
Great teams are constantly striving to improve the way they work in order to innovate and deliver faster. Meaningful, actionable data helps teams make informed decisions about what and how they can improve. Cycle time is one of the most important and helpful metrics for teams who are striving to continuously improve. In this ebook, we will discuss what cycle time is and how it can help your team improve their process and deliver faster.


Big Data Generates Some Interesting Jobs, All It Takes is a Little Creativity
In the process of exploring the avenues by which big data will deliver value to businesses, some interesting new job titles and descriptions are emerging across the industry. The new generation of jobs being spurred by Big Data are often a blend of stats-savvy and business-savvy skillsets and activities. Here is a sampling of a few of these blended positions that have recently appeared at online recruiting sites:


A Cleaner Cloud?
Google built a data center in Finland out of an old paper mill that uses a high-tech cooling system to filter cold sea water from the Bay of Finland to properly cool their servers – read more about this in Chilly Climates Ideal for Data Center Locations. Our Michigan data centers also benefit from our chilly winters and moderate temperatures, cutting down our cooling bill. Another way may be the use of renewable energy sources such as wind power.


Chinese microbloggers arrested over online rumors
Yang Xiuyu and Qin Zhihui, who each oversees a Web marketing company, were hauled in by the police which said the duo had deliberately spread rumors and defamed celebrities in a bid to generate profits, according to a Sina report Thursday. The authories added that both were paid by other companies to fabricate rumors on their Weibo accounts to damage the reputation of other competitors.


The Case for Software Lifecycle Integration
As we’ve previously noted, the tools used within the software delivery lifecycle are isolated from each other and there are an abundance of manual processes where automation should prevail. The resulting manual process for creating status and traceability reports takes time and requires the involvement of people. On large projects or projects that are spread out geographically, the amount of time required ultimately reduces the value of the information.


How Master Data Management Improves Your Understanding of the Customer
Until recently, master data management (MDM) had been regarded as one of those techie functions, deeply internal to enterprise infrastructure. As it turns out, MDM is very much a business asset that has a growing role in many areas that should matter to enterprises: strong brand presence, multichannel customer interactions, right-fit content and information, and highly variable buying journeys.

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Quote for the day:

"Vision is the art of seeing the invisible." -- Jonathan Swift

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February 03, 2013

Introduction to WebSockets
Chris Beams - a senior technical staff member at VMware and a core Spring Framework committer, Gunnar Hillert - a member of technical staff (MTS) at SpringSource and Rossen Stoyanchev - a Spring Framework developer make a thorough introduction to WebSockets and provide practical advice on using it in applications.

Creating a Simple Bloom Filter

You may have never heard of a bloom filter before but you've probably interacted with one at some point. For instance if you use Chrome, Chrome has a bloom filter of malicious URLs. When you visit a website it checks if that domain is in the filter. This prevents you from having to ping Google's servers every time you visit a website to check if it's malicious or not. Large databases such as Cassandra and Hadoop use bloom filters to see if it should do a large query or not.


Cloud computing law puts Canadian users at risk of snooping by American spies
In a report commissioned by the European Parliament, former Microsoft chief privacy adviser Caspar Bowden reveals, “it is lawful in the U.S. to conduct purely political surveillance on foreigners’ data accessible in U.S. clouds,” operated by U.S. firms such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, IBM and others. One sweeping provision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) authorizes the targeting of, “foreign-based political organization(s)... or foreign territory that relates to... conduct of the foreign affairs of the United States.”


How Oracle Uses Big Data to Improve the Customer Experience
Customer experience management (CEM) programs are no stranger to the use of data. CEM professionals use data to gain insight about their customers to help improve the customer experience and optimize customer loyalty. Not surprisingly, CEM programs typically rely on customer feedback as their main data source (e.g., social media, customer emails, tech support notes, formal customer surveys). Customer feedback data, however, are only one type of business data that are used to improve business decisions.


Executive Insight: Breaking down the walls of the data centre
Martyn Warwick talks with John Dunne, the CTO of pioneering Irish start-up Intune, about how Software Defined Networks (SDN) will provide the means to simplify and control complex switches in the age of Big Data and will bring together the IT and telecoms worlds in ways never seen before.


5 ways to find your team's hidden talents
Even if you're leading an overqualfied crew, you're best served by trying to match people with work that requires as much of their brainpower as possible. Unchallenged workers are often unhappy workers, and unhappy workers leave when they get a better offer. Here are some ideas for finding and using your team's hidden talents.

The Big Data Challenge: 10 Tips for Telcos
The overall theory is that by extracting useful information from the information that is currently hidden and untapped in many systems and networks, CSPs can provide a better customer experience, develop more targeted and intelligent marketing programs and develop new business models that will ultimately enable them to maximize their top and bottom lines.


ASP.NET: Truly Understanding ViewState
Yet, here is a very good, in-depth article on ViewState that doesn't even mention it! Then there's this W3Schools article on ViewState that seems to indicate that posted form values are maintained via ViewState, but that's not true. (Don't believe me? Disable ViewState on that textbox in their example and run it again). And it's the #1 Google Search Result for "ASP.NET ViewState". Here is ASP.NET Documentation on MSDN that describes how Controls maintain state across postbacks. The documentation isn't wrong per say, but it makes a statement that isn't entirely correct


Breaking Down the Kinds of CIOs
According to the infographic below, there are five types of CIOs namely The Enforcer, The Mediator, The Evangelist, The Dinosaur and The Strategic Consultant. Take a look at the infographic which comes courtesy of Brogade to get a glimpse of the characteristics of each type as well the survival rating.


Four essentials of a good single sign-on strategy
Organizations implementing SSO, particularly to systems that hold sensitive data, should implement risk-appropriate authentication methods with the SSO system. Solutions aren't 'one size fits all' and solutions which provide SSO to all target systems may be deemed too expensive. Therefore, a best practice is to identify the tactical and strategic approaches that reduce enough of the problem space over time and within budget.


Sharing Code in WCF without Code Generation
The basic design pattern is so simple it is a wonder why the proxy generator even exists. (Well not entirely; proxy generation is still needed when consuming a non-WCF service.) As you can see, all you need to do is subclass ClientBase with the service interface you wish to implement and expose the Channel property. The constructors are recommended, but optional.

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Quote for the day:

"Concentration comes out of a combination of confidence and hunger." -- Arnold Palmer

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