Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

September 20, 2012

The Human Face of Data Science
DataKind, a band of self-titled "generous geeks", share their skills with non-profits. Analyzing a range of data, from fertilizer use in Uganda to policing patterns in NYC, they're determined to use Big Data to make a better world.

Japan confirms cyberattacks over island dispute
At least 19 Japanese Web sites were hit by cyberattacks, reportedly from China and over the two countries' territorial dispute involving islands in East China Sea, says Japan's National Police Association

Big data rewrites the CMO’s role
With the mass of customer insight available to brands adding another weapon to a chief marketer’s arsenal, David Burrows asks whether their job titles should reflect this

Data Scientist: The Sexiest Job of the 21st Century
If capitalizing on big data depends on hiring scarce data scientists, then the challenge for managers is to learn how to identify that talent, attract it to an enterprise, and make it productive. None of those tasks is as straightforward as it is with other, established organizational roles

How good are we at lessons learned?
One of the PRINCE2 principles is to learn from previous lessons. Good in theory. How well is it done? Not very well in my view. Lessons learned is something that is left to the end of the project in my experience

When to Use Offline VDI

The common reaction from many end users and administrators alike is, "I would love to use VDI, but what if I'm not connected to the network?" To answer this common use case, the industry has developed several approaches to offline, or local, VDI.

Salesforce talks security: From passwords to animatronic ponies
It has a full-time internal red team of penetration testers trying to break in. It's proactively looking for insider threats, and fewer than 20 employees at the entire company have access to the database of customer passwords

APAC enterprises more susceptible to external threats
More organizations in the region experience external security issues and lose sensitive business data, due to rise in technology adopters who are not familiar with best practices.

Measuring Employee Morale Over Time
If your office includes employee-selected music playing, you can instantly gauge the morale by what's playing on the speakers. Generally, people are not going to be playing upbeat, happy music if they're depressed or upset.

South Africa carves its outsourcing niche amid flurry of acquisitions
Companies from India and the UK are snapping up South African business process outsourcing (BPO) firms, as the country asserts itself as an offshore outsourcing destination.

Quotes for the day:

"A leader needs enough understanding to fashion an intelligent strategy." -- John Kotter

"The function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers." -- Ralph Nader

September 19, 2012

Intel sets Windows 8 tablet event with HP, Samsung, others
Intel is going to kick off the season of the Windows 8 tablet by hosting an event next week attended by virtually all of the major PC players. The September 27 event will highlight products using Intel's "Clover Trail" Z2760 (PDF) power-efficient system-on-a-chip (SoC) processor.

1010data builds a big data bartering platform
1010data has launched a new service called the Analytical Dataspace, which is essentially a marketplace for buying and selling data and accessing analytics applications. 1010data has been providing a cloud-based analytics service for years, but this is a chance to add value by adding data.

IBM Beats Oracle, Microsoft With Big Data Leap
IBM introduced its InfoSphere BigInsights software in May. The software package includes a distribution of Apache Hadoop, the Pig programming language for MapReduce programming, connectors to IBM's DB2 database, and IBM BigSheets, a browser-based, spreadsheet-metaphor interface for exploring data within Hadoop.

Australian govt guides agencies on cloud adoption
... The guide states that agencies should also prepare exit strategies in case they then decide to move away from the selected cloud vendor. Agencies must consider what data needs to be archived, how it will be transferred or destroyed if required, and what liabilities exist.

The dog and the frisbee and data quality management
Andrew Haldane, the Bank of England Director of Financial Stability has questioned whether the Emporer (in the form of ever increasing, ever more complex regulations such as BASEL III and Dodd Frank) is naked.

AMD Tunes SeaMicro Servers for Big Data
Last week AMD’s Data Center Server Solutions Group unveiled the SM15000 server, which extends SeaMicro’s networking fabric beyond the chassis to connect directly to massive disk arrays, enabling a single 10 rack unit system to support more than 5 petabytes of storage.

Oracle launches solution for Indian analytics market
The company has introduced Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine, the industry's first high-speed engineered system featuring in-memory business intelligence (BI) software and hardware to deliver extreme performance for analytical and performance management applications.

Story from a company that built "the best software testing tool"
The best software testing tool is always the human brain. It can operate in "non thinking" mode too and unfortunately seems to be the popular mode among most testers since they are paid for it.

Undercover cops secretly use smartphones, face recognition to spy on crowds
An undercover cop can often be spotted in a crowd due to wearing an earpiece or talking into a microphone hidden under his or her sleeve. But by using smartphones and tablets loaded with specialized apps, these same undercover officers mingled with demonstrators, took photos and transmitted “real-time video of protesters as they moved about the streets.”

UniFlash for Android Flashes, Manages, and Installs ROMs From Your Desktop
UniFlash is a Windows utility that lets you download, flash, back up, restore, and install new ROMs on your Android device, all from the comfort of your desktop.

Quote for the day:

In motivating people, you've got to engage their minds and their hearts. ---Rupert Murdoch

September 18, 2012

Twitter hires security expert Charlie Miller
Twitter is creating a security dream team. Charlie Miller, famous for his hacks on the iPhone and MacBook Air, finding holes in iOS and devising ways to hijack Android phones with NFC, will be starting his new job at the microblogging company next week.

Is Quality Job One? 3 COBIT quality processes make it so!
COBIT 5 says the quality management process is about defining and communicating quality requirements including controls, ongoing monitoring, and the use of practices and standards in continuous improvement of efficiency efforts. Please notice that quality is not just about testing. Pause and think about this.

Germany proposes ban on surveillance software exports to totalitarian regimes
Germany's foreign minister Guido Westerwelle has told a conference that the country hopes to ban the export of tools that could allow repressive regimes to monitor their own citizens.

Google pictures a better photo-tweaking tool with Snapseed
San Diego-based Nik Software, a 17-year-old developer of digital image editing tools, is now part of Google. The search giant did not reveal details of the acquisition, but the move is likely part of Google’s endeavors to make its Google+ social network more competitive with Facebook

Motorola announces RAZR i in the Europe
The RAZR i will be running on one of Intel's latest mobile chips (2GHz processor), differentiating it from what we saw from the Google-owned phone-maker a few weeks earlier.

5 ideas to help everyone make the most of big data
Although their use cases don’t always align with what more-traditional businesses are doing, they know enough about the science and technology to save big-data newcomers a lot of frustration.

Case study: ING Direct taps big data to understand customers
The bank has already invested heavily in data analys, and the next step is to implement a big-data strategy to speed up the process of understanding a torrent of customer data.

Identity is the new perimeter
While we cannot control the whole security stack for every SaaS application, we can leverage new identity standards to fill the gaps left by the disappearance of the traditional perimeter as we know it.

9 key career issues software developers face
Whether you're an independent contractor or a cubicle loyalist with a wandering eye, programming want ads abound, each stirring its own set of questions about how best to steer your career.

Microsoft confirms hackers exploiting critical IE bug, promises patch
Microsoft on Monday issued a security advisory that confirmed in-the-wild attacks are exploiting an unpatched bug in Internet Explorer. The software maker is working on a fix.

Quote for the day:

"It's fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure." --Bill Gates

September 17, 2012

New Big Data Project Drill Joins Apache Incubator To Make Hadoop Faster
Drill is a distributed system for interactive analysis of large-scale datasets. With a design goal to scale to 10,000 servers or more and process petabytes of data in seconds its being designed to efficiently process nested data.

How Disney built a big data platform on a start-up budget
The big data world is full of small, scrappy startups using their ingenuity to build complex systems out of open source software, but the Walt Disney Company is not one of them. Here’s what goes into building a big data platform in a Fortune 100 company.

Microsoft wants to turn your lounge into a Holodeck
A patent filed by Microsoft describes technology that will convert your space into a full 3D gaming environment.

Ultrathin teardown! Asus ultrabook vs MacBook Air
Are Windows-based Ultrabooks built to the same engineering and manufacturing standards as Apple's now-legendary MacBook Air? We removed the shells from both an ultrathin Asus Zenbook Ultrabook and an Air to find out.

Google tool bridges back-ends for iOS and Android apps
The J2ObjC tool converts Android-friendly Java source code to Objective C, which is used to build iPhone and iPad apps. It can't be used as a shortcut to building iOS app user interfaces, though.

Who’s the Character in My Character-Based Leadership Style?
We usually talk about “character” as personal qualities, like self-awareness, collaboration, wisdom, empathy. All these things do make up “character” but not a living breathing character, which is what each of us is!

Google and Mozilla's web cryptography API gets first working draft
The programming interface, being developed within the W3C, could lead to more secure web apps. Possible use cases include cloud storage and secure messaging.

You could be charging your laptop via USB cables soon, thanks to new USB PD technology
The new USB Power Delivery (PD) standard was shown off last week at IDF 2012. It can provide the 60 watts of power needed to recharge a laptop battery, and may be available starting later this year.

Intel unveils Rosepoint—CPU and WiFi on same chip
Roseoint, a System on a Chip (SoC) that has a dual core Atom processor along with a WiFi radio transceiver. It's the culmination of ten years of research.

Q&A: Author Susan Cain on “the power of introverts” in business and beyond
With their quiet, reflective natures and preference for alone time, introverts are often overshadowed by the more outspoken, extroverted half of Americans.

Quote for the day:

"Management is the art of making problems so interesting that everyone wants to get to work and deal with them." -- Paul Hawken

September 16, 2012

When Mergers Meet MDM and Data Governance
The challenges of instituting data governance for master data management in a single enterprise are manifold, as anyone assigned to manage the task can relate. And, when policies and enterprise standards are expressed as goals, they inevitably run into existing ways of working at the departmental and line of business levels.

IDC expects maturing cloud services to generate $100 billion in revenue in 2016
A recently released IDC report is enthusiastic about the growth of public cloud services, predicting $40 billion in spending in 2012 that will grow to $100 billion annually by 2016. Their expectation over this five year time period is that annual compound growth rate of the public IT cloud business will be five times greater than the growth of the IT industry

Creativity and IQ, Part I: What Is Divergent Thinking?
... positive moods tend to enhance divergent thinking and creative problem solving, particularly when the solutions looked for are not ‘optimizing’ (ideal) ones but ‘satisficing’ (‘do the job’) ones....

Data Is Useless Without the Skills to Analyze It
the advent of the big data era means that analyzing large, messy, unstructured data is going to increasingly form part of everyone's work. Managers and business analysts will often be called upon to conduct data-driven experiments, to interpret data, and to create innovative data-based products and services. To thrive in this world, many will require additional skills.

Importance of Schedule and Cost Control
Without the schedule and budget baselines plans, one does not know where the project stands relative to planned schedule progress or planned budget performance.

Why the lessons of the Past Are Not Enough!
The new competitive edge is neither a product nor a service; it is the people who make them. While innovations can be replicated …innovators cannot.

Without radical change in patent law, Android's ecosystem will die
Only the invalidation of Apple's utility and design patents will save Android from possible extinction as a widely-used mobile device platform.

Microsoft Applies For the Patent on Beating Your Phone Into Silent Submission
There are plenty of high-tech phone features to yearn for, but Microsoft is applying for the patent on one so simple, primitive, and awesome you'll be amazed you didn't think of it yourself: the ability to smack your phone and have it shut up.

It’s Official: The Era of the Personal Computer Is Over
The moment came during the second quarter of 2012. For the first time in a generation, according to the firm’s reckoning, PCs did not consume the the majority of commodity memory chips, also known as DRAM

IT Risks Fumbling Cloud Governance
Lines of business (LOB) are going to reassert their spending power, and the opportunities they're chasing will create new challenges for you.

Quotes for the day:

"A successful man is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks others have thrown at him." --David Brinkley

"A leader is someone who can do everything him(her)self, but let's other people help him(her)." -- Don Rittner

September 15, 2012

Finding the Dollars in Big Data
“We cannot sell a platform to business, we can only sell solutions to people with a business problem, so we packaged a good sales template for salespeople, a good marketing version, a subscription version almost like apps for mobile.”

Pen and Paper: Killer Productivity Apps
When we take notes, however, we engage another part of the brain that connects to the incoming content, but only for the content that we put into notes. It works for classroom lectures, sales presentations, team meetings, conference calls and task management. Writing it down helps us remember it.

12 must-have Android apps
Narrowing it down to just 12 is a surprisingly difficult challenge, but it's an interesting and enlightening one. So without further ado, here are JR Raphael's must-have Android apps of the moment

Data Science U
This fall, prestigious Columbia University in New York City is offering a course entitled “Introduction to Data Science,” taught by a team under the direction of Google Statistician and Columbia Assistant Professor Rachel Schutt.

EnterpriseDB - competing with giants
EnterpriseDB has been working with the PostgreSQL open source community to make the technology better, faster, more reliable and better able to address customer requirements. Now is the time for the company to take steps to reach out to the suppliers that influence the selection of database product rather than just reaching out directly to customers' technical staff members

Microsoft finds new computers in China preinstalled with malware
Brand-new laptop and desktop computers sold in China contain preinstalled malicious software, which has infected millions of computers around the world, according to an investigation by Microsoft revealed on Thursday

IT spending to grow in 2012 despite economic woes, says IDC
Growth in emerging markets is still relatively strong, but has also been negatively affected, according to IDC. In China, IT spending is now expected to grow by 14 percent, compared to 25 percent in 2011. IT spending is also expected to grow by 14 percent in India and Brazil, according to IDC.

Study highlights importance of security in a virtualized environment
“End users need to be made aware that virtualizing a business environment without implementing adequate security measures may be counterproductive, as it could increase costs and reduce agility,” said Frost & Sullivan Industry Manager Cathy Huang.

7 Deadly Sins Of Big Data Users
There's a good chance you're familiar one or more of the Deadly Sins, which include Sloth, Negligence, Gluttony, Polemy, Imprudence, Pride, and, of course, Torpor.

Who's Really Using Big Data
First, the people we surveyed have high hopes for what they can get out of advanced analytics. Second, it's early days for most of them. They don't yet have the capabilities they need to exploit Big Data. Third, there are disconnects in the survey results — hints that the people inside individual organizations aren't aligned on some key issues.

Quote for the day:

"In a time of rapid change, standing still is the most dangerous course of action." -- Brian Tracy

September 14, 2012

Brian Marick on 4 Challenges and 5 Guiding Values of Agile Software Development
Brian Marick talks about several challenges for teams transitioning to Agile and 5 guiding values that successful Agile teams share. The major challenges covered are: courage, working software, naivete, and slicewise design. Successful teams share these guiding values: reactive, ease, solidarity, decency, and joy.

Testing Mobile Apps
In this InfoQ.com presentation Julian Harty covers various challenges and practices for testing applications for mobile devices.

This Indian Founded Startup is Built to Scare Dell, NetApp and EMC
The company’s mission is to pack a lot more of data for enterprises in tinier spaces without losing any performance. The company gained its popularity as it saves tons of money over traditional systems offered by Dell, NetApp and EMC.

iPhone 5: Why no NFC?
Apple's critics included a U.K.-based communications marketing company called Proxama. "NFC is going to progress at a pace without Apple," said Miles Quitmann, managing director of Proxama, in a statement. "This could be Apple's loss."

Helium-filled WD drives promise huge boost in capacity
Western Digital is preparing to launch a line of hard drives filled with helium gas that is said to drastically reduce internal friction and thus lower power consumption by 23% while increasing capacity by 40%.

Java-Based Apache Wicket Gets an Update
Version 6.0 of the lightweight, Java-based framework comes with a revamped AJAX JavaScript library, out-of-the box JQuery integration, and OSGi-compatible packaging, among other improvements.

SaaS: 5 Trouble Spots
As the market evolves quickly, and ahead of vendor Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce conference, we point out a few of the obstacles rising to the top with software as a service implementations. Here are five lingering challenges with enterprise software as a service implementations.

Are You Making Management Too Complex?
In this world of increasing complexity, the best opportunities are for those firms, products and services that are minimally complex (simple). The same goes for those of us leading others and managing our organizations.

Finding the business value in big data is a big problem
Business leaders often "don't know what they don't know," said one frustrated IT manager, and therefore they are incapable of explaining to IT shops what to do with all this data that's being accumulated.

Managing Blind: Interview with Peter Benson
Peter has a vast amount of experience in Data Quality and Data Governance and has helped the industry move on considerably with his leadership of the ISO 8000 Data Quality standard. Here is an Interview with him.

Quote for the day:

"We must all suffer one of two things: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret or disappointment." -- Jim Rohn

September 13, 2012

Haswell: Intel's key for unlocking the post-PC world
Haswell is set to be Intel's key processor for mobile devices right up to servers and its combination of thrifty power consumption and advanced graphical capabilities could power a new generation of post-PC devices.

Your resume vs. your LinkedIn profile
Your LinkedIn profile should complement your resume, not mirror it. Take the time to create a strong profile that provides more depth about your unique skills and experiences to reach a broader audience.

43 Technologies that will impact Indian cos in next 10 years
“Some technologies, such as cloud computing, data deduplication and virtualization, enable new ways of doing business across industries, which will result in a major shift in industry dynamics and will also lead to the creation of a new and improved — and sustainable — ecosystem.

Oxygen Cloud Breathes Life into Content Virtualization
The underlying technology is a virtual file system and that's the key to it all. It is the basis for the synchronization, and then a number of management and policy elements kick in. So, in a way it is the best of both worlds.

High Performance Computing (HPC) in the Cloud'
High performance computing is no longer limited to those who own supercomputers. HPC's democratization has been driven particularly by cloud computing, which has given scientists access to supercomputing-like features at the cost of a few dollars per hour.

Microsoft axes many of its Forefront enterprise security products
Microsoft is ceasing development of many of its Forefront products, choosing, instead to integrate more security capabilities into a number of its other products and services.

Visual Studio 2012 bends to shifting IT landscape
Today's workforce employees expect to do their jobs across a wider range of devices, not only PCs and laptops, but also tablets and smartphones. And they expect their data to be accessible to all of these devices.

Ten ways to spot an egomaniac in business
Do you have an egomaniac in your firm? Just how damaging can this type of personality be in business? And how do you spot them? Here are ten signs that someone is being driven by their ego —and suggestions for a better way.

Yet Another Court Says You're Not 'Negligent' If Someone Uses Your Open WiFi To Infringe
In July, a district court in New York rejected this argument quickly, noting that the position was "untenable." And now a California district court has ruled similarly, completely rejecting the negligence theory on three different points.

Introducing Creating Value
Whatever the motivation, at the end of the day, it all comes down to creating value, whether it’s business value or personal value. Surprisingly, though, not enough business owners think about this.

Quote for the day:

Really great people make you feel that you, too, can become great -- Mark Twain

September 12, 2012

Ultrabooks with iPhone Siri-like voice interaction to come in Q4
Ultrabooks will come with Nuance's Dragon Assistant Beta voice recognition software, which will enable direct interaction on ultrabooks based on voice commands, said Dadi Perlmutter, vice president and general manager of Intel Architecture Group, during a keynote at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco.

Get what you want: 4 new negotiating tips
In Getting More: How You Can Negotiate to Succeed in Work and Life, author and negotiation expert Stuart Diamond shares the tips he teaches to his students at The Wharton School and executives at the 200 Fortune 500 companies for which he's consulted. Here are four of his tips for never-fail negotiating

Microsoft Rolls Out Mobile Cloud Services for Windows 8 Developers
The first public preview of Windows Azure Mobile Services is designed to provide an on-ramp for Windows 8 developers who want to build connected applications--without the learning curve.

Dramatic Price Increase for EA License Renewals
For instance, an EA for Windows may have started out with a price of $125.31, but it jumps to $179.31 at renewal, according to Software Licensing Advisors' calculations. For an organization with 2,000 computers, that amounts to "an extra $94,000 over a three-year renewal, due to this pricing sleight-of-hand," according to the consulting firm.

Measuring the Business Value of Projects with Agile
Measuring business value is a challenge regardless of the methodology you use. Our Agile Architect explains how agile principles and practices can be used to ask the right questions.

10 Habits of Remarkably Charismatic People
They build and maintain great relationships, consistently influence (in a good way) the people around them, consistently make people feel better about themselves--they're the kind of people everyone wants to be around...and wants to be.

Intel's even thinner ultrabook of the future
At its annual conference today, Intel released a slide (above) showing a touch screen ultrabook with a thinly-sliced 2.5mm keyboard (Microsoft's Surface tablet has a keyboard that is 3mm thin by comparison), a sub 0.5mm touch panel, and a 5mm hard disk drive.

Feature-Oriented Software development (FOSD)
In this two part episode of Software Engineering Radio Sven Apel the Eclipse-based FeatureIDE which covers important phases of the FOSD process, namely domain implementation as well as configuration and generation.

Apple's iPhone 5- Start Walking!
According to media reports, Apple's newest iPhone is expected to offer 4G wireless technology for the first time, and a 4-inch display, up from the current 3.5 inches.

Why CIO's need to embrace data quality management
... data quality management should be firmly on the agenda of every CIO for the reasons listed above and many more. Data quality improvement has been proven time and time again to help the business become far more agile and better able to cope with new situations.

Once upon a time: The importance of storytelling in leadership
Stories work for leaders as a successful communication technique for several reasons. Storytelling translates dry and abstract numbers into compelling pictures of a leader’s goals. Stories convey emotion effectively, and emotion united with a strong idea is persuasive

Quotes for the day:

"There is no such thing as an insignificant improvement." --Tom Peters

"A champion is someone who gets up when he can't." -- Jack Dempsey

September 11, 2012

GM to hire 10,000 IT pros as it 'insources' work
The announcement is part of far-reaching GM plan to hire as many as 10,000 IT workers worldwide over the next three to five years as the automaker takes work back from outsourcers, the company said.

VMs and backups: are yours securely stored, or indexed in Google?
Through recent research, I've unearthed an alarming number of VMs and backups in Google's index from companies, universities, and home users. Make sure your directories are protected!

Big Data: The perils of past performance
With Big Data especially, pundits and vendors imply that if we throw bigger and better data at a faster platform, we’ll eventually be able to predict the future with near certainty. Here’s why this is wrong.

Power, people and enterprise-architecture
People are great at transforming between energies – converting excitement and motivation into physical work, for example, or gaining aspirational satisfaction from resolving a technical challenge. But they’re also great at avoiding the work – and that’s where the problem really lies.

Are Application Frameworks Obsolete?
Frameworks aren’t obsolete, but most organizations often get it wrong when building them. Why is this? Often it's because frameworks are derived from a successful project and repurposed (often bringing too many characteristics of the original project with it), or designed by committee, with not enough consideration to how they might be used by a family of actual software products.

Google brings Big Query down to earth with Excel Connector
Google designed BigQuery as a cloud service for running fast queries against massive datasets, but with lofty ambitions there’s always room to take a step back. Now, users that don’t require super speed can run batch queries, and can connect to the service using Microsoft Excel

Enabling Big Data Analytics Inside of Hadoop: A Spotlight Q&A with Justin Borgman of Hadapt
This BeyeNETWORK Spotlight features Ron Powell's interview with Justin Borgman, Co-Founder and CEO of Hadapt. Justin explains how Hadapt integrates SQL and Hadoop in a single unified platform – no connectors, complexities, or rigid structure, and he shares the resultant benefits of that approach.

Step Into the Office-Less Company
The company has a San Francisco office for occasional use, but project management, brainstorming and water-cooler chatter take place on internal blogs. If necessary, team members fly around the world to meet each other face to face. And if people have sensitive questions, they pick up the phone.

U.K. Finally Gets 4G Mobile As Everything Everywhere Arrives
Britain today got its very own 4G mobile network as new provider EE launched with a promise of Nokia flagship smartphones and veiled hint that the new iPhone might also be on its books. The service will be switched on in London, Cardiff, Bristol and Birmingham today, and will envelop another 12 cities by the end of 2012.

25 tech toys for $25 or less
These items are useful, innovative and sometimes offbeat in a geeky way. So go ahead -- dig deep between the sofa cushions, and check your change jar. Chances are good that you'll find more than one budget-friendly gadget to buy.

Quote for the day:

"People are persuaded by reason, but moved by emotion; the leader must both persuade them and move them." - Richard M. Nixon