Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

November 15, 2015

Sick of apps, mice and menus? Finland's Solu might have an answer

It involves an all-you-can-eat software subscription and near unlimited storage. It is also blending Mozilla's HTML5-led approach with Firefox OS -- which it hoped to draw web developers to its open mobile platform -- and the path trodden by BlackBerry and Jolla, which developed their own OSes but equipped them to run Android apps. "We have a revenue-sharing model for our subscription a bit like Spotify, which is whenever people use your applications we pass on that subscription to the developers. This means that developers get money even by accident -- for example by users collaborating," Lawson said.

A Lifelong Learner’s Path from Library Science to Data Science

Kurt recognized that the entry level to math and software “is really boring, really difficult, and doesn’t have a lot of reward,” but he believes that: “one of the most dangerous things is the ingrained sense that I don’t know math, and can’t. The irony is when you look at the upper level advanced stuff in math, the skills needed are related to creative skills. The danger then becomes that the barriers of the tech industry keep the wrong people out. Poking at what’s happening and trying to find something more interesting about it fits both the mathematical and the creative mindset.”

OPNFV Won’t Be a Product

As to why OPNFV was even formed when there were already so many open source groups, Sen said NFV “brings stuff from all the other open source efforts. When we started, we thought we were building one platform, but it’s really a framework where you have a lot of choices.” Chris Wright, chief technologist with Red Hat, said network users’ expectations are being set by Internet companies where orders are self-service and immediate. “Tomorrow’s network is software-centric, with apps that scale out on-demand,” he said. However, network environments are much more complex than many of these Internet companies that have raised the bar.

CIOs receive low marks on IT reform report card

"This scorecard is not intended to be a juridical, prescriptive exercise. It should not be considered a scarlet letter on the back of a federal agency," says Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.). "It is," he says, "an initial assessment, a point-in-time snapshot, much like the quarterly report card one might get from the university or at a school. The intent isn't to punish or stigmatize -- it is in fact to exhort and urge agencies to seize this opportunity and use the scorecard as a management tool to better guide decision making and investments within the agency." "To me the real measure will be six months or a year from now, did we really move the needle on these things?" says U.S. CIO Tony Scott.

Strong data security is not optional

A truly game-changing ruling in Remijas v. Neiman Marcus has made it easier for consumers to sue companies after breaches involving their personal data. Historically, even when sensitive information such as credit card numbers, birth dates, government ID numbers and medical records have been accessed, it’s been hard for consumers to sue companies over the breach. Companies have typically been able to avoid these lawsuits by invoking a Supreme Court case,Clapper v. Amnesty International. The case, which was about phone records and national security, required a showing of a risk of “imminent” and “concrete” injury in order to have standing to bring suit.

How social media can help employees perform better.

When someone connects with people who share similar perspectives and relationships to their own, those new connections typically don’t offer new insights or alternative viewpoints that person couldn’t have accessed before. The natural tendency to be drawn to people similar to yourself can create an “echo chamber,” which can lead to network structures that are detrimental to individual and organizational performance. Enterprise social networking platforms may be better able to offer features that counteract or overcome of our typical social tendencies. Social networking platforms can provide features that allow users to overcome these inherent limitations in our natural networking tendencies, allowing people to develop and maintain networks more beneficial to an organization’s purpose and to their own performance.

7 Key Risks All Businesses Should Manage (But Often Don’t)

Risk is inherent in doing business. The best way to fail is never to take any risks. But there are two kinds of risks: the kind you take consciously to move your company forward, and the kind that sneak up on you and pounce when you’re not looking. The latter are the kind companies must actively manage to avoid being wiped out. When it comes to managing risks, many companies prepare for natural disasters, fire, or maybe theft prevention (even though many small ones don’t even do that), but I think there are bigger risks companies of all sizes should manage. If you have a plan for what to do in case of physical emergency, you should also plan for ...

Claimed Breakthrough Slays Classic Computing Problem; Encryption Could Be Next

Computer scientists measure the difficulty of a problem by looking at how much the computational resources an algorithm needs to solve it grow as the size of the initial problem is increased. Graph isomorphism is considered extremely difficult because the best known algorithm needs roughly exponentially more resources as the size of the graphs it was working on increases. That algorithm was published in 1983 by Babai with Eugene Luks of the University of Oregon. Babai claims that his new algorithm experiences a much less punishingly steep increase in resources as the graphs it is working on get larger, giving graph isomorphism a major difficulty downgrade.

A New Architecture for Information Systems

Just as we can describe a new system, we can also assume a new architecture. Today’s systems architects deliver a crucial business function—carefully planning the relationships between nodes that include networked devices, software, services, and data in the context of business activities. The artifact from these activities typically takes the form of areference architecture. As such, information architecture activities relate equally to the concepts, contexts, language, and intents that foster UX planning, or architecture, activities that articulate a strategy and roadmap for digital user engagement. As businesses and technologists embrace digital transformation and digital experience as vital strategic paradigms, they must mature their digital initiatives by extending their notion of the system to include the thoughtful consideration of information architecture and customers’ digital experience.

Google Cloud gains security for Docker containers

From a security standpoint, though, it's a challenge to tell whether the containers have any vulnerabilities or if there are issues with how the application is being developed. ... Twistlock's Container Security Suite scans the applications both in image registries and in runtime to detect vulnerabilities present in the Linux distribution, application frameworks, and custom-developed application code. It also has activity monitoring and smart profiling capabilities to detect misconfigurations and malicious activities and to take appropriate action, such as blocking the containers from launching and killing misbehaving containers dynamically. The suite can also apply enterprise access control policies to the container environment.

Quote for the day:

"Be clear about your goal but be flexible about the process of achieving it." -- Brian Tracy

November 14, 2015

How Cloud Computing Changes Storage Tiering

New challenges in controlling data traversing the data center and the cloud have emerged. How do we handle replication? How do we ensure data integrity? How do we optimally utilize storage space within our cloud model? The challenge is translating the storage-efficiency technology that’s already been created for the data center — things like deduplication, thin provisioning, and data tiering — for the cloud. ... cloud computing adds an extra tier. “Cloud introduces another storage tier which, for example, allows for moving data to an off-premise location for archival, backups, or the elimination of off-site infrastructure for disaster recovery,” he said. “This, when combined with virtual DR data center, can create a very robust cloud-ready data tier.”

3 Tips for Managing a Boss You Don't Even Like

“You don’t have to love your boss but you need to be able to work well with them. One of the main reasons employees leave their job is because of their boss. A troubled relationship with your boss can negatively affect your morale, your productivity, your happiness, and of course, your career. A positive relationship can improve your morale, productivity and happiness which could lead to more career success in the form of promotions, raises and higher self-esteem.” Everyone can contribute to the workplace happiness, which means that much too often, no-one does.

Big Data and Social Listening

The purposes behind social listening are simple: To extract unsolicited opinion, to gather real world case studies, and to examine sentiment about products and services. For example, a company that makes smartwatches wants to know what its competition has done correctly, where the flaws are in its products, and how consumers feel that the products could be improved upon. The company wants to gather opinions, ratings, reviews, and sentiments about competitor’s smartwatches before investing time and money into a product that has no advantages over current offerings. To gather this information manually would put the company out of the proper release cycle and perhaps make the product obsolete by the time it debuts.

Service design thinking

This move towards service design thinking is not even necessarily an adjunct of the digital movement - better service design need not involve technology at all, but instead brings a long-absent focus on the users of public services and their needs in place of the internal imperatives of the providing organisations. Pioneering initiatives from the "The Public Office" in 2007 to the joint seminar series on "Innovating Through Design in Public Services"hosted by the London School of Economics Public Policy Group and the Design Council in 2010-11 highlighted some of the art of the possible. At last, some of that thinking finally seems to be entering the mainstream.

You Don’t Have to Choose Between ‘Big Data’ and ‘IoT’

With the technologies that are at our disposal today, we can attempt way more than we were able to in the past. In fact, we now can uncover problems that we didn’t know we had. The key is to examine each process that makes a difference to the business and ask questions that challenge the status quo – it is important to imagine new ways of doing current tasks and to ponder the possibility of doing things we always wished we could do but didn’t have a way of doing. To those out there who are trying to decide where to spend their IT budget, don’t get trapped in the mindset that you have to consider a “big data” or an “IoT” initiative. Make the call solely on the merits of the problem at hand and make a commitment to using the most capable technology platform out there.

Agile, DevOps and Cloud, 1 + 1 + 1 can equal more than 3

Where agile breaks the barriers in development, DevOps (development and operations) integrates operations. It industrializes the process of creating software and gets it into production. Webopedia defines DevOps X as a phrase in enterprise software development used to mean a type of agile relationship between development and IT operations. The goal of DevOps is to change and improve the relationship by advocating better communication and collaboration between the two business units. ... Cloud enables the developer to provision his development environment at the touch of a button. When he logs on, he’s provided with a number of development environment options. He chooses the one most applicable for the job and has it provisioned quickly. His advantage is that he doesn’t need to construct his development environment any further.

The seven people you need on your data team

You’ve been asked to start a data team to extract valuable customer insights from your product usage, improve your company’s marketing effectiveness, or make your boss look all “data-savvy” (hopefully not just the last one of these). And even better, you’ve been given carte blanche to go hire the best people! But now the panic sets in – who do you hire? Here’s a handy guide to the seven people you absolutely have to have on your data team. ... The one I have in mind is a team that takes raw data from various sources and turns it into valuable insights that can be shared broadly across the organization. This team needs to understand both the technologies used to manage data, and the meaning of the data – a pretty challenging remit, and one that needs a pretty well-balanced team to execute.

Building a Recommendation Engine with Spark ML on Amazon EMR using Zeppelin

Spark is commonly used for iterative machine learning algorithms at scale. Furthermore, Spark includes a library with common machine learning algorithms, MLlib, which can be easily leveraged in a Spark application. For an example, see the "Large-Scale Machine Learning with Spark on Amazon EMR" post on the AWS Big Data Blog. Spark succeeds where traditional MapReduce approach fails, making it easy to develop and execute iterative algorithms. Many ML algorithms are based on iterative optimization, which makes Spark a great platform for implementing them. Other open-source alternatives for building ML models are either relatively slow, such as Mahout using Hadoop MapReduce, or limited in their scale, such as Weka or R.

Microsoft open sources Distributed Machine Learning Toolkit

The toolkit, available now on GitHub, is designed for distributed machine learning -- using multiple computers in parallel to solve a complex problem. It contains a parameter server-based programing framework, which makes machine learning tasks on big data highly scalable, efficient and flexible. It also contains two distributed machine learning algorithms, which can be used to train the fastest and largest topic model and the largest word-embedding model in the world. The toolkit offers rich and easy-to-use APIs to reduce the barrier of distributed machine learning, so researchers and developers can focus on core machine learning tasks like data, model and training.

The Biggest Misconception About Information Security

Technologies are used to protect information and ensure its confidentiality, integrity and availability. But according to a recent survey by the Ponemon Institute on “Risk & Innovation in Cybersecurity Investments,” 90% of respondents said their organization invested in a technology that was ultimately discontinued or scrapped before or soon after deployment. In other words, these technology investments become “shelfware” which means they sit on the shelf instead of being properly implemented or utilized. There are a variety of reasons to explain this shelfware phenomenon but they predominantly boil down to people and process issues. Some organizations lack the resources to properly staff and support their technologies, a problem that many are able to solve through the use of Managed Security Services.

Quote for the day:

"Strength comes from overcoming adversity, not avoiding it." -- Gordon Tredgold

November 13, 2015

Luring Top Campus Talent to the Field of Data Analytics

“Many students discover they love the challenge of analyzing the data and coming up with meaningful insights and recommendations. It has changed the career trajectory and aspirations of many students,” Dykes said. Adobe has hired more than 20 students from this competition, and many others have gone on to work in the field of analytics for ad agencies and other companies, according to Dykes. “When I was a manager in Adobe Consulting, it was one of our best hiring channels for new talent. Many of our hires from the competition went on to be our best consultants and then took roles in product management, product marketing, and consulting leadership at Adobe,” Dykes said.

Business commerce: Can B2B really get ‘friendlier’ online?

The eCommerce sites aimed at consumers have polished their customer experiences to remove any hint of friction. However, B2B buying is more complicated – while some purchases might be simple commodities that could go through B2C-style experiences, many are long “considered purchases” that involve multiple stakeholders and capital expenditure. Here, removing friction would not speed up procurement – it would only make it more pleasant. Managing the purchase process and making it go faster is a goal for all B2B companies on both sides of the buyer and seller divide. However, it can be harder to remove some of the friction that exists than you think, unless you can put the right data in front of the right people at the right times.

Accounting And Finance Professionals Play Increasing Role In Cybersecurity

The number and severity of damaging cyberattacks has brought to the forefront the importance of providing the finance profession with the tools they need to protect the personal and corporate financial information they handle. With the amount of sensitive information they handle, accounting professionals are at the center of the fray, making it critical that they are prepared to prevent and respond to cyber threats. “For accountants, measures must be taken to ensure that the sensitive personal and corporate financial information they handle is safe: accountants need to be at the forefront of cybersecurity,” said the report’s author, Dr. Jonathan Hill, Interim Dean at Pace’s Seidenberg School of Computer Science and Information Systems.

The Potential of Geolocation for Revolutionizing Retail

One of the most exciting areas of development is the marrying of mobile apps, location sensing technologies (e.g., GPS), and data analytics to improve the in-store experience for customers. Location sensing technologies in retail typically involve customers using the retailer’s app, or a third-party app, and ceding permission to track their location in return for a better experience or reward. The customer’s location can be determined through the phone’s GPS capability — or more accurately within the store via WiFi, light-based triangulation or beacons. ... Many retailers, from Macy’s to Walgreens, are already experimenting with location-sensing technologies, with most of the focus to date on navigation, location based promotional offers, and reviews of nearby products.

4 ways CIOs can speak better CFO

“I’ve worked with my CFO for seven years, and I’ve never been told ‘no’ for a project, partly because I only come to him when it’s something I really need, and because I’ve also developed a great relationship with him,” says Darren Schoen, director of technology infrastructure at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts. But achieving that level of report isn’t something that happens overnight, it’s something that takes time and persistence, Schoen says. “Some CIOs and IT folks are intimidated by the CFO, but you shouldn’t be. If you talk to them in a language they understand and start working together, that intimidation dissipates and you start developing a truly collaborative relationship,” Schoen says.

Teradata’s Embrace of Hadoop

Teradata, if you don’t know the company’s products, has been working towards a Unified Data Architecture (UDA) for years. If you don’t know what a UDA is, it’s a little like the Grand Universal Theory that physicists have been searching for and failing to find for years. It’s a single unified data architecture that can launch queries effectively and efficiently over any kind of data. Until I completed research for that algebra book (The Algebra of Data by Sherman and Bloor) I believed that such an architecture was a mirage of the kind that moves further into the distance the closer you get to it. After all, nowadays we have relational databases, document databases, graph databases and even triple-stores. But now, because it’s mathematically possible – and provably so – I have more confidence in Teradata’s ambition.

Gathering intelligence: how manufacturers can use Big Data

Research by the MTC suggests there are three essential areas that companies should be prioritising, if they are to get the most out of the rise of Industry 4.0. These are data on product quality, including faults or components not meeting their required specifications; information on the health of production equipment, such as maintenance and repair data; and any data that allows them to be more flexible, by allowing them to more easily meet customer demands for increased customisation of their products. In addition to these, information on the power consumption of each machine, and therefore the energy efficiency of the production line as a whole, is also an important area that companies may wish to analyse, she said.

Five super-easy IP traffic monitoring tools

For system admins, one of the most important tasks is keeping an eye on the network. When things go bad in your world, a rogue ne'er-do-well could be the cause. Whether that malicious entity is a hacker, a compromised system, or a bad piece of hardware, it's essential to sniff out the issue. To that end, you need the right tools. One of the first tools you might turn to is an IP traffic monitoring tool. The good news is that there are tons of these tools ready to serve you. The bad news... some of them are a bit complex. That's why I thought I'd find the easiest IP traffic monitoring tools and list five of them for your network monitoring pleasure.

Microsoft CEO seeks a Visual Basic for new digital age

Nadella’s vision is data-centric with information sucked in to spit out smarter human-computer interactions. “It’s going to be data. There will never be a search box that doesn’t autocomplete or have recommendations.” In the same way that Visual Basic programming opened up Windows development to a broader constituency, Nadella wants Microsoft to be at the heart of democratising cloud computing so it’s “much easier to write applications that fuel the world”. Technology pillars for this new generation of data-driven apps will include some of Microsoft’s full house of analysis technologies including Cortana Analytics, Azure Machine Learning, Kinect Computer Vision and Bing Web Understanding.

Digital Don Accused of Hacks at JPMorgan, Dow Jones Over 8 Years

“The conduct alleged in this case showcases the brave new world of hacking for profit,” U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara in Manhattan said Tuesday in announcing two of the indictments that laid out parts of the scheme. “It is no longer hacking merely for a quick payout,” Bharara said. “It is hacking as a business model.” The allegations are perhaps the starkest illustration yet that even the most sophisticated computer networks, run by companies at the heart of the global financial system, may be vulnerable in the age of the Digital Don. The latest revelations come just three months after U.S. authorities arrested several men they accuse of lurking inside servers where corporate press announcements were awaiting release, in order to trade on the information before it went public.

Quote for the day:

"There is no greater learning experience than teaching." -- Gordon Tredgold

November 12, 2015

Next Generation Session Management with Spring Session

This article will demonstrate how the recently released Spring Session APIs help surmount some of the limitations of the current approach to session management, traditionally employed by enterprise Java. ... Spring Session provides an app server independent way to configure pluggable session data stores within the bounds of the Servlet specification without having to rely on any application server specific APIs. This means that Spring Session works with all app servers (Tomcat, Jetty, WebSphere, WebLogic, JBoss) that implement the servlet spec, and it is very easy to configure in exactly the same way on all app servers. You also get to choose whatever external session data store best meets your needs.

How Apple Is Giving Design A Bad Name

Apple is destroying design. Worse, it is revitalizing the old belief that design is only about making things look pretty. No, not so! Design is a way of thinking, of determining people’s true, underlying needs, and then delivering products and services that help them. Design combines an understanding of people, technology, society, and business. The production of beautiful objects is only one small component of modern design: Designers today work on such problems as the design of cities, of transportation systems, of health care. Apple is reinforcing the old, discredited idea that the designer’s sole job is to make things beautiful, even at the expense of providing the right functions, aiding understandability, and ensuring ease of use.

Medicine On The Cutting Edge – The Bionic Eye

Prof Paulo Stanga, consultant ophthalmologist and vitreoretinal surgeon at the hospital, said the first results of the trial were a total success. “Mr Flynn’s progress is truly remarkable. He is seeing the outline of people and objects very effectively. Stanga is recruiting four more patients to the trial in Manchester. “On behalf of the Manchester Royal Eye hospital, we feel privileged to be conducting the world’s first study into retinal implants for patients with AMD. This technology is revolutionary and changes patients’ lives – restoring some functional vision and helping them to live more independently,” he said.

Quantum computers aren’t perfect for deep learning

Deep learning, though, is a whole other thing. Generally speaking, it requires a model and a set of values for parameters, and you can’t make a prediction until you have both of those things, Greg Corrado, a senior research scientist at Google Research, told reporters at last week’s event. “The number of parameters a quantum computer can hold, and the number of operations it can hold, are very small,” Corrado said. He explained that recognizing a cat in a photo, for example, might require millions of parameters. It would involve taking “billions upon billions upon billions of steps,” to make out the cat’s granular characteristics, such as its whiskers, and then eventually identify the image in the photo at a higher level.

How can we protect the internet’s undersea cables?

Sabotage has actually been rare in the history of undersea cables. There are certainly occurrences (though none recently), but these are disproportionately publicized. ... The fact is it’s incredibly difficult to monitor these lines. Cable companies have been trying to do so for more than a century, since the first telegraph lines were laid in the 1800s. But the ocean is too vast and the lines simply too long. It would be impossible to stop every vessel that came anywhere near critical communications cables. We’d need to create extremely long, “no-go” zones across the ocean, which itself would profoundly disrupt the economy.

TensorFlow could be Google’s new, open-source, central nervous system

That’s an important advance, since Google’s machine learning initiatives are some of their most important, at this point. Machine learning is increasingly how Google sifts the mountains of data we provide for them, how it pulls salable signals out of seemingly endless volumes of noise. Machine learning lets the company burrow ever-more-invasively into people’s lives by providing services too interesting and valuable to pass up, from translation to facial recognition. It’s also the main technology driving the epic Now-versus-Siri-versus-Cortana triforce of corporate one-upmanship, which could very well end up determining many users’ choice of mobile platforms over the next five years.

Huawei predicts the 'superphone' by 2020

"Inspired by the biological evolution, the mobile phone we currently know will come to life as the superphone," said Shao on Thursday afternoon. "The intelligence of the superphone will continue to evolve and develop itself into digital intelligence, capable of empowering us with interactions with the world. Through evolution and adaptation, the superphone will be more intelligent, enhancing and even transforming our perceptions, enabling humans to go further than ever before." The Chinese company said the superphone will take advantage of advancements in big data, cloud computing, and digital intelligence by tying in with the Internet of Things (IoT), where all physical things are digitalised.

8 tips for hiring a Web designer for your business

Many ecommerce and website platforms claim to be so easy to use that even nontechnical folks can create an attractive website. However, if you are like most people, you are still probably going to need some design help if you don’t want your site to look like everyone else’s. So how do you find a good Web designer – and by “good” we mean an individual or agency who has designed in your preferred Web platform, has a great portfolio, understands your business and goals, but won’t charge you tens of thousands of dollars? Following are eight suggestions, along with pricing guidelines and advice on where to find talented Web designers.

Building a design-driven culture

One essential to running a design-driven company is making sure the right people with the right skill set are in the right place. To start, that means ensuring a chief design lead has a seat at the table where strategic decisions are made. That person could be a chief design officer, a chief digital officer, or a chief marketing officer. All that matters is that whoever has the responsibility is the primary customer advocate. He or she must bring the customer’s point of view to business decisions, translate business goals into customer-friendly initiatives, and build a culture in which employees think about how what they do affects customers.

Automation Will Change Jobs More Than Kill Them

“It makes a lot of sense to look at automation at the task level, as a way to think about redefining jobs,” said Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor at M.I.T.’s Sloan School of Management and co-author of “The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies.” The McKinsey authors emphasized the potential for automation to enrich work, liberating people to focus on more creative tasks. Apparently there is a lot of room for improvement on that front. According to one calculation in the report, “just 4 percent of the work activities across the U.S. economy require creativity at median human level of performance.”

Quote for the day:

"People are smarter than you think. Give them a chance to prove themselves." -- Tim Ferriss

November 11, 2015

App companies propose new model for worker benefits

The on-demand model has been touted by many startups as an option that lets workers decide to work whenever they want to, and in multiple jobs, but there has also been criticism that the companies use the model to avoid paying the workers a variety of benefits that they would have paid their employees. The use of independent service providers by companies apparently in their core operations has led to worker lawsuits against many app companies including Uber, Lyft and Instacart, demanding that workers should be classified as employees with attendant benefits and not as independent contractors.

5 Technologies That Are Changing The Future of Driving

A multitude of technological developments that have been going on for years have a chance of converging to drastically affect the way we think of driving, and transportation in general. If this convergence happens the results could be nothing short of incredible, and the impact can go beyond transportation alone. Here are five technologies that may very well represent the future of driving, and in doing so, drive us towards a very interesting new world of possibilities

Cisco Extends Security Everywhere with Broader Visibility, Control, and Protection

The value of Cisco architecture is its emphasis on embedding security spanning the extended network – including routers, switches and the data center – closing gaps across the attack continuum and significantly reducing time to detection and remediation. Specifically, Cisco is adding Cisco® Cloud Access Security (CAS), which provides visibility and data security for cloud-based applications; Identity Services Engine (ISE) enhancements, extending visibility and control for network and endpoints with new location access controls; and Threat Awareness Service, which provides organizations with threat visibility into their networks.

Data Science Education Gets Stronger, But It’s Not There Yet

Universities and corporations are responding to the data analytic skills in the marketplace by launching new educational programs aimed at boosting the number of qualified data scientists. One observer noted that, over the course of the past five to six years, the number of master’s-level data science and data analytics programs at American universities has gone from the single digits to about 90. “You can’t walk onto a university campus anymore and swing a cat without somebody telling you that they have an analytics program,” says Jennifer Lewis Priestley, a professor of applied statistics and data science at Kennesaw State University, and the creator of KSU’s data science Ph.D program.

The open source model works for eLearning business

The fun is often at the edges—the differentiating features that disproportionately add value by strongly aligning to a business's or a sector's specific requirements. Some of those innovations—not all—find their way back into the core product, and that accelerates the innovation cycle. Each "player" benefits because promoting and collaborating on a common platform helps grow the market opportunity for everyone participating. Partners can focus (and differentiate) on the implementation services, support, and innovations the customers really value whilst alleviating the challenges of sustaining investment in bespoke or the alternative of proprietary solutions on their own.

Big Data Investments Pay Off Big, But Oh Those Costs

According to the newly released Global Technology Adoption Index from Dell, investments in those areas are definitely leading to improvements in efficiencies and organizational growth. But cost remains a major barrier to implementation for many organizations, the study revealed. Still, there is some good news on the big data front, as more organizations report they are less unsure on what to do with it all. “While the GTAI findings remained consistent year-over-year in that 44% of organizations globally still do not know how to approach big data, we were pleased to see that gap closing in one region in particular, North America,” a Dell spokesperson told Information Management.

Coding bootcamps question the need for computer science degrees

Computer science now applies to almost every field of work, yet universities continue to treat CS firstly as a theoretical natural science rather than an engineering discipline. Even the most cutting-edge computer science subjects such as quantum computing and deep learning are being adopted by industry today. If a computer science topic cannot be given a practical, industrial framing in the classroom, it begs the question whether that topic is worth exploring at all. One consequence of this academic focus on theory is that many computer science students leave college incapable of programming. Daniel Gelernter, CEO of Dittach writes about why he doesn’t hire computer science majors for his tech company:

Data is NOT Information

Information architecture is an often misunderstood, and overlooked architectural domain that logically sits between the business and application domains. It provides a crucial link between business process and, the applications and data used by an organisation. By identifying the information assets necessary to conduct business, and how these are structured, information architecture scopes the requirements for current and future data technologies while abstracting away the complexities of application design and data management. With the current popularity of Big Data, and increasing data storage and cost, the need to understand thevalue of information derived from this data is as important as ever.

Real-time Data Processing in AWS Cloud

Modern enterprise apps are about everything: complex backend, rich frontend, mobile clients, traditional and NoSQL databases, Big Data, Streaming and so on. Throw those into clouds, and voila — you’ve got yourself a project worth years of development. In this article, I will discuss a bio-informatic software as a service (SaaS) product called Chorus, which was built as a public data warehousing and analytical platform for mass spectrometry data. Other features of the product include real-time visualization of raw mass-spec data. ... Frontend application should serve the images to the end-users providing the endpoint for browser and desktop apps hosted on Amazon EC2. Backend services consisting of business logic, rules, data access and security layer are also hosted on Amazon EC2.

Block storage on the open-source cloud platform

Through the use of a common interface and APIs, Cinder abstracts the process of creating and attaching volumes to Nova compute instances. This means storage can be provided to OpenStack environments through a variety of methods. By default, Cinder volumes are created on a standard Linux server that runs Logical Volume Manager (LVM). This allows physical disks to be combined to implement redundant array of independent disks (RAID) data protection and to carve out logical volumes from a physical pool of space, called a volume group. Cinder volumes are created from a volume group called cinder-volumes, with the OpenStack administrator assigned the task of deciding exactly how this LVM group is mapped onto physical disk.

Quote for the day:

"If you really want the key to success, start by doing the opposite of what everyone else is doing." -- Brad Szollose

November 09, 2015

H2O and the Magic of Machine Learning

What’s really interesting to me is if you think about how this pattern recognition technology can enable insights to be derived from data. It’s really compelling because before machine learning you needed people to come up with creative ideas and essentially superimpose their own perspective on to a data set. Whereas now with machine learning, you can, essentially, get some insights via machine learning into the different patterns that exist in the data. You’re basically facilitating that first step of a human being working with the information to try to understand what the segments are, maybe what they mean and give some direction to where that person goes and try to better analyze the data and then come up with some ideas, right?

Watch a man turn his arm into a virtual keyboard using a device

Japanese electronics powerhouse NEC is working on a system called, fittingly, “ARmKeypad,” which creates a virtual keyboard using a set of glasses and a smartwatch, The Wall Street Journal reports. NEC told the Wall Street Journal the keyboard’s main advantage is that, unlike voice-operated devices, it can be operated in noisy environments. The company sees it being useful in healthcare, manufacturing, document management, and security. The idea of typing on whatever surface we happen to be looking at is something long promised by science fiction films but that's been slower to move into reality. And the arm is a start. The company plans to publicly release the ARmKeypad in 2016.

Gartner Predicts Our Digital Future

Here’s a scene from our digital future: You sit down to dinner at a restaurant where your server was selected by a “robo-boss” based on an optimized match of personality and interaction profile, and the angle at which he presents your plate, or how quickly he smiles can be evaluated for further review. Or, perhaps you walk into a store to try on clothes and ask the digital customer assistant embedded in the mirror to recommend an outfit in your size, in stock and on sale. Afterwards, you simply tell it to bill you from your mobile and skip the checkout line. These scenarios describe two predictions in what will be an algorithmic and smart machine driven world where people and machines must define harmonious relationships.

Deep Learning in a Nutshell: Core Concepts

Feature engineering is the most important skill when you want to achieve good results for most predictions tasks. However, it is difficult to learn and master since different data sets and different kinds of data require different feature engineering approaches. Only crude guidelines exist, which makes feature engineering more of an art than a science. Features that are usable for one data set often are not usable for other data sets (for example the next image data set only contains land animals). The difficulty of feature engineering and the effort involved is the main reason to seek algorithms that can learn features; that is, algorithms that automatically engineer features.

Taming today's cyberthreat landscape: A CIO checklist

One of the few things the "experts" seem to agree upon is that cybercrime is a clear and present danger to our national security. These issues have gone way beyond the province of esoteric IT journals and cultish science fiction novels -- they have invaded our daily collective consciousness and well-being as individuals, as families, as companies, as governments, as a society and as a culture at large. Many opine at great length on how the cyber landscape has become the new battleground upon which future wars will be fought: Nations will rise and fall based upon their techno-prowess to aggressively attack and defend against the new breed of cybercriminals.

Flash storage: Is there a tipping point anytime soon?

Flash is still too expensive for general use when compared to conventional disk storage, which offers much higher capacities than flash at a fraction of the cost. Now the signs are that we are going to see that situation changing -- but if the analysts are to be believed, that is not going to happen quickly. "When you go to refresh your technology, you look at flash and now you think about phasing it in," said Valdis Filks, the expert on flash storage at analyst house Gartner. But as he explained, this will take some time: "It is only after two or three cycles [of technology upgrades] that most companies can bring in a complete change in technology, like a move to all flash".

The Data Movement Dilemma

Most organizations quickly realize, if they analyze their situation, that it isn’t possible to adopt a single solution for data movement. There will already be a variety of different approaches implemented throughout their systems, and in most cases, the technology will be fit for purpose. Nevertheless, they are also likely to discover that the dynamics of new applications, coupled with data growth in many areas, will inevitably stress some data movement technologies as time passes. The problem is to “maintain the plumbing” and replace only those parts that are under stress and in danger of being overwhelmed. The only solution that comes to mind is a capability that can to manage data movement with an automation capability, like Automic’s, that can monitor every data transfer and provide actionable information when specific service levels are threatened.

Japan its own enemy in push to improve cybersecurity

"In the U.S., if they find a problem, they have to report," he said. "The Japanese engineer feels he fails his duty if he escalates a report. They feel ashamed." To be sure, the cybersecurity industry around the world, not just in Japan, frequently echoes the call for greater transparency within and among organizations. The U.S. Senate last month passed the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act to ease data sharing between private companies and the government for security purposes, although civil liberties advocates warned it posed a threat to privacy. But the problem may be particularly acute for Japan's private sector behemoths and government ministries. These sprawling bureaucracies are wrapped in a "negative culture that cuts against wanting to communicate quickly," said William H. Saito, the top cybersecurity adviser to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

CloudFlare Supplies Security At Network's Edge

"We're equivalent to CloudFront, Amazon's Edge product, but we're built to have more flexibility," said Matthew Prince, cofounder and CEO of CloudFlare in San Francisco. Prince was literally moving between 665 Third Street and 101 Townsend Street, CloudFlare's new home, when InformationWeek caught up with him in the South of Market section of the city, not far from where the Giants baseball team plays at AT&T Stadium. CloudFlare's building is still a work in progress -- a former warehouse converted to offices a long time ago but still needing a lot of modernization and some finishing touches. The move was delayed by the need to get the building rezoned for offices.

How Carders Can Use eBay as a Virtual ATM

So-called “triangulation fraud” — scammers using stolen cards to buy merchandise won at auction by other eBay members — is not a new scam. But it’s a crime that’s getting more sophisticated and automated, at least according to a victim retailer who reached out to KrebsOnSecurity recently after he was walloped in one such fraud scheme. The victim company — which spoke on condition of anonymity — has a fairly strong e-commerce presence, and is growing rapidly. For the past two years, it was among the Top 500 online retailers as ranked by InternetRetailer.com. The company was hit with over 40 orders across three weeks for products that later traced back to stolen credit card data.

Quote for the day:

"The leader who exercises power with honor will work from the inside out, starting with himself." --Blaine Lee

November 08, 2015

AIOTI publishes recommendations on the future of the Internet of Things

The report from WG01 built on the work of the IoT Research Cluster (IERC) and is focused on boosting the IoT technological advancements and converging the shaping and development of new dynamic business models and IoT ecosystems. Aschair of the AIOTI WG01, Dr. Ovidiu Vermesan Chief, Scientist at SINTEFsaid: "our report will promote the market emergence of IoT and overcome the fragmentation of 'silos', architectures and applications. IoT technology is the needed enabler for eliminating the 'digital divide' and creating the basis for the implementation of the Digital Single Market".

What the Windows 7 Pro sales lifecycle changes mean to consumers and business buyers

Enterprise deployments are essentially immune from the Microsoft sales lifecycle. In big organizations, IT departments buy Volume License editions of Windows with the Software Assurance add-on, which give them the freedom to deploy a consistent image of whatever Windows version they've chosen as their corporate standard. The two-year extension makes it easier for small and medium-size businesses to get some of that flexibility. Because the end-of-sales date for consumer editions of Windows 7 PCs arrived as scheduled in 2014, new PCs running those editions are difficult to find. But business PCs with Windows 7 preinstalled can continue to be sold until late 2016.

Connecting humans and computers

It’s important to think about how wearable devices could incorporate larger viewing experience, either by extending the display or leveraging external displays opportunistically. There is some exciting research going on at Microsoft, Mitsubishi and Disney which is looking into projecting displays from wearables onto nearby walls, so that information within the device is easier to expose and interact with. As these devices become really small, I think that these factors will be critical to balancing user experience with form and maintaining the convenience that we have with desktop and notebook computing.The next issue with wearables is the quality of inference from sensor data. In my opinion as a researcher, Fitbit and other activity trackers of that sort are inadequate due to poor inference qualities.

Digital Transformation Going Mainstream in 2016, IDC Predicts

The digital technologies that are changing the economics and practices of traditional business — cloud computing, mobile devices, advanced data analysis and artificial intelligence — are better, cheaper and more widely available. “Mainstream companies in every industry are realizing they’ll be disrupted if they don’t get moving now,” said Frank Gens, IDC’s chief analyst and the report’s principal author. Many of these companies, according to IDC, are not moving fast enough. It predicts that a third of the top 20 companies in every industry will be “disrupted” over the next three years, meaning their revenue, profits and market position will deteriorate — not that they will go out of business.

How will blockchain technology transform financial services?

For the financial services sector it offers the opportunity to overhaul existing banking infrastructure, speed settlements and streamline stock exchanges, although regulators will want to be assured that it can be done securely. The developments potentially combine two of the most dynamic industries: the computing hub of Silicon Valley and the money management of Wall Street and the City of London. “We could go the way that file transfer technology changed music, allowing new businesses like iTunes to emerge,” says Michael Harte, chief operations and technology officer at Barclays. “That is why there is such feverish activity at the moment.”

The ironic history of the hybrid cloud

It is interesting to note that the frame of reference for this was the mainframe, which was the prevalent form of Enterprise Computing at the time. Ironically, in many ways cloud computing actually evolved from core concepts that are very mainframe centric. By the way, it should come as some surprise that the mainframe, which was called dead back in the 1980s, is growing at 20 percent year over year according to IBM’s latest financials [Disclosure: IBM is a client of the writer]. However Licklider’s vision went well beyond the initial Internet, which was more about communication. This vision was for everyone on the globe to be interconnected and able to access programs and data at any site from anywhere.

How NSX Simplifies and Enables True Disaster Recovery with Site Recovery Manager

The primary use cases are full site disaster recovery scenarios or unplanned outage where the primary site can go down due to a disaster and secondary site takes immediate control and enables business continuity. The other key use case is planned datacenter migration scenarios where one could migrate workloads from one site to another maintaining the underlying networking and security profiles. The main difference between the two use cases is the frequency of the synchronization runs. In a datacenter migration use case you can take one datacenter running NSX and reproduce the entire networking configuration on the DR side in a single run of the synchronization workflow or run it once initially and then a second time to incrementally update the NSX objects before cutover.

Microservices Decoded: Best Practices and Stacks

Earlier incarnations of microservice concepts were aptly titled 'Service Oriented Architecture' (SOA), however this term was too broad in scope and specific implementation strategies were vague. ... Clarity within software engineering field surrounding microservice architecture is currently a bit ambiguous. This is a result of the immaturity of the architecture itself and lack of industry agreed upon conventions. As microservice solutions gain notoriety the more refined, low-level definitions and specification criteria will also inherently evolve. Until these definitions and specifications mature we will can analyze and identify a number of generally accepted characteristics surrounding microservices based on pioneers who have implemented scaled and functioning microservice solutions.

Bitcoin is off to the races again - and it could soar higher

"The global banks and wire-houses have meaningfully gotten involved in the space," said Michael Sonnenshein, director of business development and sales at Grayscale Investments, which manages the Bitcoin Investment Trust, a publicly listed vehicle that tracks bitcoin. "In 2013, they were beginning to dip their toe, but primarily behind closed doors and within internal working groups." There are still lingering issues surrounding bitcoin's validity. To be sure, it is volatile and - because its loosely regulated - a draw for frauds and criminals. Some big names in the crytptocurrency community - perhaps most notably Blythe Masters, the CEO of Digital Asset Holdings - have been critical of bitcoin and say the underpinning blockchain technology is actually what's most sexy to Wall Street.

Best Practices for Optimizing the Requirements Process

This web seminar will focus on best practices for creating a fully optimized requirements life cycle that can be leveraged by any organization into project success. Drawing upon years of experience from many successful projects, the experts from Greenridge Business Systems will offer insight into how to take advantage of a “people, process and technology” approach to requirements that can have a dramatic positive impact. A case study involving a large-scale government project will also be showcased. Attendees will also learn requirements gathering best practices when large numbers of stakeholders are involved and how visualization reduces confusion through real-time collaboration and the use of fully immersive and functional simulations.

Quote for the day:

"People don't resist change. They resist being changed." -- Peter M. Senge

November 07, 2015

Why use NGINX as a load balancer?

In addition to being free, scalable, and easier to maintain, the key reason many organizations want an open source load balancer is that it provides a more flexible development environment, which helps organizations adopt a more agile development process. Sarah says that when compared with other options, NGINX offers huge performance improvements. "With NGINX, organizations can deliver applications reliably and without fear of instance, VM, or hardware failure," she says. "This is crucial as websites and applications make their way into our everyday lives." In the typical setup in most organizations, web server and ADC (application delivery components, often hardware) are separate components. But when it comes to web application delivery, NGINX is changing that approach.

Cyber-security: The cost of immaturity

All sorts of companies offer cyber-security services, from small, specialist outfits to giant arms companies such as BAE Systems (which TalkTalk has hired to sort out its mess). The biggest firms are finding it hard to keep staff. As in the public-relations and corporate-intelligence industries, if you know your stuff, you can make more money starting up on your own. Venture-capitalists are not showering money on the industry as prodigiously as they did a year ago, but the fast growth rate means that raising capital is still easy. The big companies are still able to trade on their brand name (nobody gets fired for hiring IBM) but the mammals are beating the dinosaurs.

Mobile Collaboration: Where Does It Rank on Your Priority List?

Collaboration is a major driver for increased mobile usage. We’ve used chat and messaging tools to maintain personal connections for years with popular apps like FaceTime, WhatsApp, Voxer, and many others. With their success in fostering simple and straightforward communication, it was only a matter of time before these apps found their way into the business world. This “consumerization of IT” is paving the way for new breeds of business-class technology to redefine the boundaries of the workplace. But it is more than technology fueling this shift. The way teams form and work together has changed as well.

How data screwups may decide the fitness tracker wars

The fitness tracker war won't be won or lost on hardware design, app graphics, the ability to track exercise and sleep or the response to a well-heeled rival like Apple or Samsung. The fitness tech game will be won on how well vendors handle your data. Every relationship has a breaking point -- the one moment when you say enough and move on forever. Apply that axiom to the fitness tracking industry and the breaking point is when your favorite wearable loses your data. In recent months, I've suffered data losses about a dozen times across two vendors. If you use a fitness tracker, there's nothing worse than going for a run, hitting 20,000 steps and watching the app give you credit and then refresh and lose the information. It's like the run never happened.

Mocking Financial Middleware System

Integration is primarily core part of any financial application as either way you have to integrate with banking host or middle ware and this is not an easy job at all. Do keep in mind that Host systems usually refers to Core Banking Systems and Middle ware is actually channel integrator that talks to host systems like ATM, SMS, phone banking, IVR, WAP, etc In the development environment the most critical challenge is to write integration code offsite because middleware or host systems are not available at development centers. This critical limitation forces companies to do all the integration onsite which obviously increase the development and post production support cost because in majority of cases fixes needs to be investigated onsite.

Delivering Software with Water-Scrum-Fall

Agile is a mindset, a set of guidelines, Scrum is a framework that can be deployed, it has strict rules and events to follow, they are not the same thing. Agile thinking exposes our inability to deliver fast, it drives out what the customer actually wants and improves quality by providing multiple opportunities for continuous feedback, which in turn focuses the developers towards how to build the right thing right. There some simple things you should start to be aware of and look to change. Firstly collaboration. This has to start with engaging your customers, they need to understand how you work, especially if you are going to use Scrum or even just looking to change the way you work. Your customers will need to understand what is capable and what role they will need play.

Jane Austen on Python: The intersection of literature and tech

Creative thinking is required to determine where our code might break, to build in checks, and to return useful data. Any programmer can return the error message, but to compose an error message that is helpful—rather than intimidating—requires a programmer who is also a creative thinker and possesses excellent written and verbal communication skills. When you're writing good tests, you're doing world building: Accessibility requires empathy, and empathy requires imagination. You can leverage that awesome feeling you get when you get lost in a book and identify with the main character by putting yourself in the shoes of the people using your code. Imagine their struggles and frustrations. Create a persona for them. Fix the things that hinder or annoy them about your app.

Why Ford is shifting its focus from cars to 'mobility'

Ford has taken several steps to address these larger transportation issues. A big piece is a new focus on e-bikes. In June, they unveiled the MoDe:Flex, a versatile bike that can be used in different needs such as the road, mountain or city riding. Another is "GetAround"—in which customers who finance through Ford credit can allow vehicles to become part of a peer-to-peer carsharing service. The company's innovate mobility series challenged cities around the world to solve different mobility problems, specific to local communities. In Mumbai, for example, the problem was how to get around in monsoon season. The solution: Using data you could get from the car. Windshield wipers, Klampfl said, could indicate heavy rain in different areas.

A Twitter app for rural Kenyan potato farmers

“SokoShambani is a market-based micro-logistics platform that enables small-scale farmers to trade directly with high value market entities,” explains Stephen Kimiri, the CEO and developer. Farmers subscribe to a free SMS service on the 8988 short-code powered by Twitter and @ViaziSouthRift. “Through this, they are able to trade directly while sharing farming intelligence, market reports and updates,” explains Kimiri. The startup has singled out potato farmers in rural Kenya after noting that potato is a staple food second only to maize in Kenya and that farmers are usually given a raw deal for their produce in the markets. “With such a small number of big consumers with stable and obvious demand, an ineffective supply chain and large number of small-scale participants, it makes this value chain particularly ‘ripe’ for intervention,” says Kimiri.

SharePoint Server 2016: IT's Ultimate Swiss Army Knife?

Information technology leadership faces unique strategy concerns that simply didn't exist 10 years ago. Managing the relationship between cloud, mobile and on-premises applications requires an eye toward innovation and change -- and a willingness to take a few risks to improve business practices. A recent Gartner Inc. report, "Flipping to Digital Leadership: Insights from the 2015 Gartner CIO Agenda Report," best describes the challenges of IT decision makers. "Seizing this opportunity requires flipping long-held behaviors and beliefs -- from a legacy perspective to a digital one in information and technology leadership, from a focus on the visible to the genuinely valuable in value leadership, and from control to vision in people leadership."

Quote for the day:

"Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must first be overcome." -- Samuel Johnson

November 06, 2015

Cyber liability from perspective of board members and execs

What actually constitutes negligence by failing to take “reasonable efforts?” It appears to have been a sequel injection that led to TalkTalk being breached as well the JP Morgan Chase Corporate Challenge website. Yet “SQLi has been listed on the industry standard OWASP Top 10 for more than a decade. Should TalkTalk or the third-party contractor who built and managed JP Morgan’s site be liable for not finding such a common, well-known vulnerability?” ... Companies with “a dedicated CISO detected more security incidents and reported lower average financial losses per incident,” so should we “assume that a company that does not have a CISO is not making a reasonable effort to secure data?”

Microsoft and Red Hat Sign Unlikely Deal to Support Enterprise Hybrid Cloud

Developers will gain access to .NET technologies across Red Hat offerings,” giving developers the ability to build applications and include .NET services,” Paul Cormier, Red Hat executive vice president and president, Products and Technologies, said in a briefing. He called the partnership a “powerful win for the enterprise customer.” “I think everyone knows that there is no doubt now that Linux is a key part of enterprise computing today,” Cormier said. With “cloud at the center of Microsoft’s strategy going forward” the company sees its capabilities around hybrid cloud as a differentiation in the market, Scott Guthrie, EVP of the cloud and enterprise group at Microsoft said.

100 open source Big Data architecture papers for data professionals.

If you are a Big Data enthusiast or a technologist ramping up (or scratching your head), it is important to spend some serious time deeply understanding the architecture of key systems to appreciate its evolution. Understanding the architectural components and subtleties would also help you choose and apply the appropriate technology for your use case. In my journey over the last few years, some literature has helped me become a better educated data professional. My goal here is to not only share the literature but consequently also use the opportunity to put some sanity into the labyrinth of open source systems. One caution, most of the reference literature included is hugely skewed towards deep architecture overview (in most cases original research papers) than simply provide you with basic overview.

Microsoft risks IT ire with Windows 10 update push

Microsoft has made it clear that it will take on a greater role in managing the Windows update process with Windows 10. The company has also made it clear that it will aggressively push users -- both consumers and businesses -- to upgrade from Windows 7 and Windows 8 to its latest OS. With that in mind, it's hard to image either predecessor hanging around anywhere near as long as Windows XP. The decision to not only push updates out, but also ensure that all Windows 10 devices receive them in a timely fashion, fits well with the concept of Windows as a service. The change may even go unnoticed by many consumers. IT departments, however, are keenly aware of this shift -- and many aren't happy about it.

Facebook CTO: Firms should wait before jumping on VR bandwagon

"Compare it to the development of previous computing platforms, like phones and computers, I think the first smartphones came out in 2003," he said. "In the first year, I think BlackBerry and Palm Treo were the initial smartphones that came out. I think they each sold in the hundreds of thousands of units. So just to kind of give a sense of the time frame that we're thinking about this and how we expect this to develop, that's how we're thinking." Schroepfer also believes that VR headsets will grow to be as popular phones are today but that it's important not to mislead people on the rate of adoption. "I'm incredibly bullish on VR but it's a brand new platform and it will take a while to develop.

50 years of Data Science

This paper reviews some ingredients of the current “Data Science moment”, including recent commentary about data science in the popular media, and about how/whether Data Science is really different from Statistics. The now-contemplated field of Data Science amounts to a superset of the fields of statistics and machine learning which adds some technology for ‘scaling up’ to ‘big data’. This chosen superset is motivated by commercial rather than intellectual developments. ... Because all of science itself will soon become data that can be mined, the imminent revolution in Data Science is not about mere ‘scaling up’, but instead the emergence of scientific studies of data analysis science-wide. In the future, we will be able to predict how a proposal to change data analysis workflows would impact the validity of data analysis across all of science, even predicting the impacts field-by-field.

EU tells US it must make next move on new Safe Harbor deal

Safe Harbor was simple for European companies to implement, as all they had to do was contract with a U.S. data processor registered under the agreement. It was the responsibility of the U.S. company to ensure compliance. The alternative mechanisms provided for in the EU's 1995 Data Protection Directive -- standard contract clauses, binding corporate rules, or obtaining the informed consent of the person whose data is transferred -- put the responsibility squarely on the company at the origin of the transfer. "Whatever they choose, they must be able to prove that the protection is in place, that they guarantee the protection of data transferred to the U.S. This is especially a challenge for SMEs," Jourová said.

Semantic Technology Is Not Only For Data Geeks

Innovative data architects and vendors realize that semantics is the key to bringing context and meaning to our information so we can extract those much-needed business insights, at scale, and more importantly, personalized. Data relevance has always mattered. In today's hyperclimate, where customer and business success is measured in seconds and minutes, data relevance is measured in microseconds. Results of data relevance, or the lack of it, can be magnified. Think about the reaction to a retailer's stock and reputation when there is a security breach of customer credit cards. Consider how an ill-thought-out tweet by an executive of a clothing company alienates customers, bringing down sales and revenue as it speeds across social media and the news.

Embedded systems face design, power, security challenges

Prestridge notes that (despite the noteworthy hacks lately) the automotive industry has been working on security for years, as has the medical and aerospace industry. ... Prestridge outlines the challenge: “Functional safety-certified tools aren’t enough; code analysis tools (both static and runtime) can help ferret out potential security issues by spotting things like the classic buffer overrun exploit before the design gets in the field. By using code analysis tools, developers can prevent these problems before they ever get checked into a build. And by selecting a pre-certified tool that has already been quality-tested by an independent third-party organization specialized on safety requirements, entire companies can save valuable time and money.”

Dropbox Enterprise Targets Large Businesses

Box understood this early on, and has made headway in the enterprise market. Dropbox focused on growth before revenue, then launched Dropbox for Business in 2013. Now, it finds itself trying to bring more paying customers to its expansive, under-monetized user base of 400 million individuals and 8 million businesses. ... Dropbox Enterprise represents a new tier in the Dropbox Business offering. It adds deployment tools to help IT administrators rapidly migrate and create accounts. It offers domain controls to give administrators insight into personal Dropbox usage on corporate domains. It allows for collaboration visibility to provide IT with oversight of Dropbox files shared with external personnel. It also provides unrestricted access to the Dropbox API for integrating the service with existing IT systems, as well as access to a customer manager for assistance.

Quote for the day:

"In conclusion,IT has come a long way in India, today we're a nation of a connected billion. How do we use this connectivity going forward?" -- @Sampitroda