September 05, 2012

Orange turns Samsung Galaxy S III into 'Quick Tap' payments device
The system is based on near-field communication (NFC) technology, which is fast becoming a staple feature of smartphones, and now Quick Tap has come to the flagship Android smartphone of the day


How Four Financial Giants Crunch Big Data
According to Allen Weinberg, co-leader of the Banking and Securities Technology and Operations practice at research group, McKinsey & Co, financial services organizations often scratch their heads when it comes to rationalizing investments in big data. After all, they argue, isn’t this something they’ve been investing in for years—albeit without the fancy buzzword?

Big Data: The Current State of ETL into and on Hadoop
Organizations can now leverage Hadoop to cost-effectively store and process massive amounts of data on the order of petabytes without having to resort to the bad habits of hand-coding ET


India IT firms need to keep faith in software, services
Despite their recent poor performances, India's top IT vendors should still focus on innovating in software and services but find lucrative niches to capitalize.


Data Monetization in the World of Big Data
Digital media companies like Yahoo, Google, Facebook, and Twitter have worked to master the data monetization process. They have to, as their entire business is built on data. These companies work with bytes, unlike most other companies who work with atoms to build physical products like shoes, tractors, houses, and burrito bowls with double chicken and guacamole.


Beauty is in The Eye of the Beholder
In this InfoQ presentation, Alex Papadimoulis attempts to define ugly code, how one can recognize it, providing advice on avoiding writing such code and refactoring old code to get rid of it.


Windows Identity Foundation in the .NET Framework 4.5 Beta: Tools, Samples, Claims Everywhere
With .NET 4.5, WIF ceases to exist as a standalone deliverable. Its classes, formerly housed in the Microsoft.IdentityModel assembly & namespace, are now spread across the framework as appropriate.


Outsourcing Weathers IT Skills Gap with the Cloud
Cloud computing and as-a-service are emerging as a viable choice over staff offshoring as a way to address the gap in IT skills with enterprise application development and data programs, according to a new market assessment.


IBM SmartCloud Enterprise Webinar
What's new in SmartCloud Enterprise? Release 2.1, that's what—from new service level agreements to data centre upgrades. See it in action during our Webinar on Septermber 6.


The Future of Big Data: Crawling Over Broken Glass?
The early adopters were not the people in the glass houses, the data center managers. Rather, they were marketing managers and other business executives, eager to circumvent the ever-so-slow IT department and have complete control of new applications, especially the new data mining tools that allowed them to gain new insights from the big data explosion of the late 1980s and early 1990s.


The purpose of Enterprise Architecture
Enterprise architecture is in reality one of the most powerful management approaches that can be used by an organisation. It is not intended to be used (only) at a solution or project level but for the big decisions that an organisation’s leadership team have to make.

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Quote for the day:

"Vision without action is merely a dream. Action without vision just passes the time. Vision with action can change the world." --Joel Barker

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September 04, 2012

Touch Targets for Application Design
In this video, in addition to general guidelines, Luke also showcase a before and after design that converts a keyboard and mouse application to a touch-optimized interface by rethinking navigation, input controls, and more.


10 Things You Didn’t Know About Yelp
Next to Google, there’s probably no more important site for small businesses than Yelp. Yet perhaps no other site is as poorly understood. For instance, is it a good idea to encourage your customers to give you good reviews on the site? Does Yelp pay for reviews? How do you go about countering bad reviews?


Is the Era of Innovation Over?
The conclusions that Dr. Brander comes to are less than comforting (if you agree with his view of innovation); his research found the pace of innovation to be slowing dramatically in four key areas: agriculture, energy, transportation, and health care.


Leaders in Beta: Testing What Works
Due to the complex challenges we face in the world right now, leaders would benefit tremendously by embracing a ‘beta mindset’ by not only having a clear, long-term vision of where they want to go, but also being able to adapt quickly, by continually collaborating with those that are affected by their leadership.


New Microsoft agreement: No class action suits for you
Microsoft has notified users of changes to its Services Agreement. Effective October 19, users waive their rights to class action lawsuits - among other fun clarifications.


Analyzing Unstructured Content
UIMA document provides an overview of how to develop simple and aggregated analysis engines. I found this document gripping (which is not a term you normally associate with technical documents). It not only explains the conceptual thinking behind UIMA, but also triggers several ideas and thoughts for further reading.


Can 4K ever become a household technology?
Bizarrely, 4K works better the closer you sit. Even on Sony's 84-inch monster. Sony group manager Paul Colley told us that to get the best viewing experience, they recommend a seating distance of 1.5 metres for 4K video, 3 metres for HD and 6 metres for SD.


10 Steps to Effective Data Governance for SMBs
Data Governance is an emerging business priority. In a recent survey sponsored by IBM, two-thirds of all companies are implementing or planning to implement a data governance program in the next 18 months. Seventy percent see data governance growing in importance in the next three to five years.


Malicious malware targets journalists, free press organizations
An opportunistic assailant attempted to deceive Committee to Protect Journalists and load malicious malware onto a computer belonging to the the organization's director.


Bringing Google+ to work
Whether you’re across the street or across the world, you can hold face-to-face meetings, share updates with colleagues and friends and work on a presentation together in real time. Like Google Apps, we think Google+ can help colleagues collaborate more easily and get things done—and get to know each other along the way.


From MongoDB to Riak at Shareaholic
Robby Grossman talked at Boston Riak meetup about Shareaholic’s migration from MongoDB to Riak and their requirements and evaluation of top contenders: HBase, Cassandra, Riak.

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Quote for the day:

"The person who can drive himself further once the effort gets painful is the one who will win." -- Roger Bannister

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September 03, 2012

The Toolbox
A collection of the best time-saving apps, tools, and widgets from around the web


5 Ways to Improve Your Company's Team Presentation Skills
Your staff may be individually brilliant. But unless they're conscious of communicating as a team, you won't achieve the impact you're hoping for. And that means prospects, customers, clients and constituents are going to be let down.


Uninterrupted DBMS operation — an almost-achievable goal
There are no iron-clad assurances of zero downtime; if nothing else, you could crash your whole system yourself via some kind of application bug. Even so, it’s a worthy ideal, and near-zero downtime is a practical goal.

Doing more with nbsp
The gaps are intended to provide a separation between the weekly, quarterly and semi-annual data. Providing a blank for the gap values works if there is only one. But putting two blank values, they get treated as one category value, resulting in one gap.


12 (Really) Controversial Programming Opinions
Code that does not talk directly to the CPU and the OS, but is instead run by some other program that does talk directly to the CPU and the OS, is not a program; it's a script.


The future of Microsoft .Net
With Windows 8, Windows RT, .NET Framework 4.5, and Windows Azure, Microsoft has reached its latest existential moment. Can Microsoft make another big platform leap? Yes, but the odds are long. So much of Microsoft’s future growth and profitability is tied to the success of this platform, and the obstacles to success with Windows 8 and WinRT, and to some degree Windows Azure, are great. This is a shift that Microsoft must get right or face serious constraints on its growth in future year


The Unstructured Information Management Architecture
The Apache UIMA framework is an Apache licensed, open source implementation of the UIMA Architecture, and provides a run-time environment in which developers can plug in and run their UIMA component implementations and with which they can build and deploy UIM applications. Here is a 54 page PDF with overview of UIMA.

 

Running R on Hadoop: Why MapReduce? Why R?

If you find a good way to put together two things that excel at what they are doing, you’ll most probably get a gold nugget. That’s what I feel when thinking about integrating R and Hadoop.

 

On Lack Of IT Readiness – And Innovators Dilemma. VMware Delivers A Sad Reality
The seeming lack of innovation amongst VMware’s customers is important since it gets to the very heart of corporate IT’s ability (or lack thereof) to deliver what the business, and individual users within the business, need.


10 signs that you aren't cut out for IT
 For anyone considering getting into the world of IT, or for those considering getting out of IT… how do you know? How do you know whether you are really cut out for the career that chews up and spits out its young? Well, I have a handy list of signs that maybe IT isn’t the best fit for you.

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Quote for the day:

"In the business world, the rearview mirror is always clearer than the windshield." -- Warren Buffett

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September 02, 2012

Using Cloud Collaboration and Sharing Tools to Start Your Entrepreneurial Project
Your next business needs to progress from being an idea in your head to a plan and on through several other stages even before the nominal Day 0. For many would-be founders, a new class of cloud service can provide early momentum for starting a new business, turning a hobby into a source of income or forming a “skill team” that fills an unmet niche in your locale.


A New Series: The Future of Robotics, The Next 20 Years
From deep sea and space exploration, processing waste, helping the police to helping the elderly and handicapped live better, longer lives, medical surgery that can do what a human can’t do, cleaning our homes, smart homes, cars and cities, robotics will begin to make its way into our lives in earnest.

Cloud computing: the backlash starts
This had to happen sometime - Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has come out against cloud computing. Commentators haven't been universally sympathetic - here's a report which clearly laments his view - but you can't help but wonder how much of our technology and information we're placing in the hands of other people


Efficient Map Operations for Arrays in C#
This article compares the performance of various techniques for implementing a map function for transforming arrays and introduces a novel high-performance implementation of map that uses expression tree rewriting.


Why corporate strategy needs to change with Cloud?
Cloud computing changes everything, including corporate strategy as a practice. I have listed five reasons why, although I’m sure there are many more. Long story short: Corporate strategists need to get out of their 20th century mindset and into the 21st century.


Sometimes the Weakest Excuse can topple the Strongest Business Case
... the purpose of this blog is to (1) make you more aware of LAME excuses so that you recognize them for what they are and do not let them prevent forward movement, and (2) to remind you to use the entire assortment of tools in your arsenal as an information professional ...


Hearing what isn’t said
Drucker said, “The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn’t being said.”


Servers Too Hot? Intel Recommends a Luxurious Oil Bath
That’s a technique that Intel has been testing out over the past year, running servers in little oil-filled boxes built by an Austin, Texas, company called Green Revolution Cooling. As Gigaom reported on Friday, it turns out that once you take out the PC’s fans and seal up the hard drives, oil-cooling a server works out pretty well.

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Quote for the day:

"Spectacular achievements are always preceded by unspectacular preparation." -- Roger Staubach

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September 01, 2012

Choose your target carefully
One often-overlooked part of data preparation is to clearly define the problem, and, in particular, the target variable. Often, a nominal definition of the target variable is given.


America's Economy Has Split Into Two Different Worlds, And One's About To Die Out
What used to require some intelligence at the brick and mortar work place has been seeded and ceded into the cloud. Every smart company wants to become smarter and the way to do that is not by asking their employees to communicate orally or in writing to management; it's by automating everything.


Audit Analytics 101: Bridging the Data Integration and Business Intelligence Gap
The data gap isn’t new, but it is certainly getting worse. It’s partly due to the limitations of spreadsheets and traditional business intelligence platforms, which were designed back in the 1980s and 1990s when data wasn’t quite so big or varied or fast moving.


Three Tips for Leaders About to Miss Their Forecasts
It's a scary moment when a company realizes that the goals it has set for a quarter or a year are simply not attainable. And yet in today's continually choppy environment, leaders are encountering that moment with increased frequency.

The Top 10 Audio Books That Every Entrepreneur Must Listen To
With a million and one things on an entrepreneur’s agenda, it is almost next to impossible to find the time to read a book from front to back. Well what if we told you that you don’t have to push hours aside and that you can even soak in all the knowledge of a wonderful read while you walk the dog, go for a jog or drive to work? Well now you can with these downloadable audio books that come highly recommend for any entrepreneur looking at expanding their knowledge and taking their life and


Turning Big Data Into Big Dollars to Grow Revenue
“If you aren’t efficient you won’t be able to stay in business,” said Ted Luchsinger, financial services industry principal at SAP, an IT company in Waldorf, Germany. “The future is around the flow of data and using it to drive operational responses.”

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Quote for the day:

"You get the best efforts from others not by lighting a fire beneath them, but by building a fire within." --Bob Nelson

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