Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

January 06, 2014

New types of RAM could revolutionize your PC
The chips would enable the same instant-on capability that's common on tablets, but at much higher performance, said Tom Coughlin, founder of Coughlin Associates. "We're seeing the development of new solid-state storage technologies that are starting to play a role," he said. "MRAM is one that we're seeing playing a role providing a non-volatile memory technology, and there's some talk about resistive RAM doing some things."

Dashboards: Convenient But Not Informative
Another drawback with dashboards is inherent in their designs and the processes used to support them. In most cases, data is gathered by a data analyst or someone from the IT organization who generates a report, or a series of reports, that’s then entered into the dashboard for a team of managers or executives to view. The information that’s presented is typically one-dimensional, where the users of the dashboard aren’t able to manipulate the data themselves or probe more deeply into the data. They can only view the information that’s presented and make their own best judgments against it.

Top 5 open source project management tools in 2014

Last year, Opensource.com covered some popular open source project management tools (ProjectLibre, ]project-open[, and OpenProject.) We found these articles to be valuable to our readers, so here we take a look forward at what we think 2014 holds for these open source project management tools. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but each tool listed here has been deliberately selected based on a rich feature set.

What's driving big data and predictive analytics in 2014?
It's not that they fail to see the benefits: 85% of organisations surveyed said that predictive analytics had a positive impact on their business, and 77% believe that it helps them gain the upper hand over competitors. The main stumbling block was skills, with three quarters of respondents finding that new data science skills are needed within the organisation to take advantage of the technology. TechRadar Pro talks to SAP's VP of Marketing and Analytics James Fisher on what's driving predictive analytics and big data in 2014.

How GPS Can Keep Track of Earthquakes and Flooding
The meteorological side of the project relies on the fact that ground-based GPS stations are in frequent communication with orbiting satellites above. The amount of time it takes a signal from the satellite to reach the ground can be used to calculate moisture levels in the troposphere. This moisture data, combined with data from barometers and thermometers, can improve the accuracy of predictions about rainfall and flash floods.

Making Wearable Devices Gets Easier with Freescale's Warp Development Kit
The kit is targeted at the do-it-yourself community and device makers looking to prototype and develop products, Freescale said. "Companies can use this platform as a basis for their own wearable product and invest their resources into innovation and differentiation instead," said Robert Thompson, director of consumer business development for microcontrollers at Freescale. The Warp -- which stands for "wearable reference platform" -- is like a miniature version of the Raspberry Pi, an uncased Linux-based computer the size of a credit card.

Worldwide Enterprise Software Spending To Grow in 2014
“Investment is coming from exploiting analytics to make B2C processes more efficient and improve customer marketing efforts. Investment will also be aligned to B2B analytics, particularly in the SCM space, where annual spending is expected to grow 10.6 per cent in 2014,” said Richard Gordon, managing vice president at Gartner. “The focus is on enhancing the customer experience throughout the presales, sales and post sales processes.” The Gartner Worldwide IT Spending Forecast is the leading indicator of major technology trends across the hardware, software, IT services and telecom markets.

“Sexy” Data Science is a Team Sport
Expectations hit data scientists from all sides. “One of the biggest errors executives make,” Dyché said, “is to bring in data scientists too early, before they understand where the gaps are. You can’t model data you can’t find. You can’t discover 'unknowns' until you understand the 'knowns.' And you can’t expect someone to recommend new business actions to people who don’t want to change.” That’s more than data science. That’s organizational politics or even social work. Most people in other jobs just make the best of it. But at current, “sexy” prices, dysfunction is expensive.

Developing leaders: It’s your job
If you are an organizational leader and this is how you think about developing others, you might want to rethink your stance. Put simply, it’s your job. It should be one of the most important things you do, and for the best leaders (meaning those leaders who understand the importance of people to their organization), it is a pleasure to assist and watch others grow and develop. There are lots of reasons to spend time developing leaders in your organization. Some of the most important include:

Need an enterprise data strategy? Cultivate people untainted by data science
The assistant professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management urged chief financial officers (CFOs) to start cultivating talent in their own backyards -- especially if their companies hope to reap business benefits from data. Why? Because your own people are the ones best equipped to know a data breakthrough when they see it. Correlation does not imply causation. As Cavallo put it, Argentina's rise in inflation isn't brought on by solar flares, which both happen every 10 years.

Quote for the day:

"No institution can possibly survive if it needs geniuses or supermen to manage it." -- Peter Drucker

January 05, 2014

MDM and SOA: Be Warned!
At the heart is the adaptation of the existing process organization required for use as part of the MDM. The standards and parameters associated with the master data must be integrated into the company's operating and recurring work cycles. On the one hand, this affects the operating core processes and their activities, which users perform as part of their line function or roles. On the other hand, MDM-specific administrative processes and data governance must be implemented to ensure operational capability and continuous improvements in how master data are used.

An AI Chip to Help Computers Understand Images
The prototype is much less powerful than systems like Google’s cat detector, but it shows how new forms of hardware could make it possible to use the power of deep learning more widely. “There’s a need for this,” says Culurciello. “You probably have a collection of several thousand images that you never look at again, and we don’t have a good technology to analyze all this content.”

Barracuda Brings Award Winning Firewall To Amazon Web Services Cloud
The Barracuda NG Firewall had recently earned a five-star rating in SC Magazine’s 2013 Application and Web Security Group. SC Magazine had reviewed six enterprise-class solutions as part of this group test. SC Magazine had commended the Barracuda Firewall for offering customers a strong feature set, indicating that “the tool sports an extensive feature set, including most of the functionality one would expect in an application firewall and a few that raise this product above most others.”

Cloud Services: 5 Key Questions Before You Buy
If you have been charged with buying cloud resources, do your due diligence. Demand case studies, testimonials, white papers, and use cases that explain the offerings and demonstrate their value and savings. And remember, just because a resource is in the cloud doesn't mean it will be inexpensive to implement and maintain. As part of your process, be sure to include various lines of business. Many organizations rely on IT to ask and answer all the key questions. That's a bad idea. You need input from all your stakeholders.

6 Reasons Leaders Make Bad Decisions
Leaders that are focused on their own hidden agendas lose sight of the bigger picture, quickly get disconnected from their employees and fail to build a team that lasts. They make bad decisions on complicated issues with the intention of advancing their own agendas and career ambitions first. To help you identify those leaders that are not ready for their leadership roles and are prone to fall into the trap of making bad decisions, be on the look-out for the following six behavioral patterns:

Samsung Announces 'New Era Of Smart Home'
To start, the service will cover three main areas, which Samsung identifies as Device Control, Home View, and Smart Customer Service. Device Control, as you might guess, allows users to control home devices using a mobile device remotely. The feature also allows for voice commands so if, for example, you're going to bed, you could tell your smart TV "good night," and it would know to turn off and tell the lights to dim gradually. Home View will give users a peek inside their own home with "in-built appliance cameras," while Smart Customer Service will notify you "when it's time to service appliances or replace consumables."

Predictions for 2014 – the year of everything
People generally make predictions about the future around this time of year (almost as if they are asking Santa Claus to make it so!). To avoid being left out, this post provides my thoughts on some of the things to watch for in 2014. First, let’s be fair: I’ve already read other people’s predictions, and I have no scientific evidence or quantitative measures to prove that my crystal ball is close to being accurate. Without doubt my own biases have crept into my thinking, and I have a Canadian perspective.

Nanomaterials Could Enable Large, Flexible Touch Screens
3M will begin selling flexible transparent conductive films made of silver nanowires for use in touch screens. These nanomaterials could enable wider adoption of large touch screens for interactive signs, displays, and personal computers. And the flexible films may come to be used in future foldable, curvy personal electronics, too. ... The films are mostly empty space, so they’re transparent. But the nanowires and the ink are formulated so that these films are still highly conductive.

When Log Data Meets BI
"Logs will give you those symptoms," said Sarathy. "The big challenge for CIOs has typically been that they've had to search for those issues. And often times you have to know what you're searching for." In essence, the log data tells the CIO what's going on, which in turn enables a more proactive response. "If, for example, your Web server that serves a million customers the week before Christmas is overloaded, you could fix the issue before it impacts any one of those millions of customers."

Design Patterns: Magic or Myth?
Of couse, there’s a sound basis for this idea. It’s normal for designers in any discipline to later reuse positive experiences, adapting designs to meet new goals as appropriate. The software design patterns community tends to cite Christopher Alexander’s ideas about patterns in architecture as their touchstone,1 but we can see similar use of this concept in the design of motor vehicles, clothing, public transportation systems, libraries, and so on. Some uses involve static forms, but others are processes, rather like software.

Quote for the day:

"Any experience can be transformed into something of value." -- Vash Young

January 04, 2014

Agile development practices: Three predictions for 2014
It's no secret that Agile development practices have taken the software industry by storm.Application lifecycle management, or ALM, vendors continue to come out with products and tools that help development teams embrace collaboration and continuously improve. Looking to 2014, I predict Agile will mature in three primary ways: More "custom" Agile processes; Growth of large-scale Agile; and Continued growth of DevOps

Human Technology Interfaces - What The Future Has In Store
Gadgets like Brain Link are already in the market, which coupled with related applications on smartphones gives beneficial gaming experience like attention training, meditation, neuro-social gaming, research and knowledge about brain. Most of us would have watched the movies 'Surrogates' wherein humans would stay indoors while their surrogates would go out to work and 'Minority Report' where the police and justice department would get alerts the moment some one think of committing a crime.

This Credit Card Startup Has A Way To Thwart Target-Style Hacking
“The root cause of fraud is the exposure of this information,” says William Gomez Jr., the co-founder and CEO. “The Epic One card does not hold any details of any credit cards. Neither does the Epic One application that runs on your smartphone. None of these devices hold any of your credit card information. The Epic One card grants you temporary access to your cloud wallet that is stored within Epic One’s back-end systems.”

Five Data Mining Techniques That Help Create Business Value
When developing your big data strategy it is important to have a clear understanding of what data mining is and how it can help you. The term data mining first appeared in the 1990s while before that, statisticians used the terms “Data Fishing” or “Data Dredging” to refer to analysing data without an a-priori hypothesis. The most important objective of any data mining process is to find useful information that is easily understood in large data sets. There are a few important classes of tasks that are involved with data mining:

17 exploits the NSA uses to hack PCs, routers and servers for surveillance
Some of the exploits are deployed remotely and others are physically installed. Those hands-on operations may occur while the product is being shipped; it could be snagged during shipping so an obscure group like an FBI black bag team can do the NSA’s domestic dirty work. There are too many exploits listed in the leak to cover in one post, but I thought you might like to know about some that target servers, routers and PCs.

Software requirements: Why the term 'nonfunctional requirements' misleads
You don't just need a bunch of usability. Usability is not nonfunctional. Usability is only relevant with respect to functionality. Moreover, usability requirements frequently differ from one function/use to another, and the differences are defined in terms of relevant characteristics, not some sizing unit as the single-entry-per-type approach implies. Consequently, when gathering data to discover requirements, inquiries about various functions each need also to address applicable nonfunctional characteristics, of which there may be many.

What to expect of Internet of Things in 2014
“Right now, if you think about it, the Internet of Things in your household will probably require you to go and re-purchase many devices that you have today, and I’m not sure how many of us can take that hit in one calendar year,” Robert Stroud, a member of ISACA’s Strategic Advisory council and vice president of innovation and strategy at CA Technologies, says. “I actually think it might apply more in commercial ventures first.”

Durandal: Quick Start
With RequireJS as its base and a thin layer of conventions, Durandal can provide amazing productivity while helping you to maintain SOLID coding practices. Pair that with out-of-the-box support for rich UI composition, modal dialogs, eventing/messaging, widgets, transitions, routing and more....and there's no doubt you'll be able to build whatever apps you can imagine. While Durandal has only been publicly available for about a year now, the community has grown at a breakneck pace.

3 Key Risk Management Trends for 2014
In a recent interaction with a leading banking and financial services organization, MetricStream (my employer) discussed how risk and compliance scores were being used to drive vendor negotiations when renewals arose. At another institution, risk and governance metrics directly impact the performance-linked financial incentives taken home by the management circle. This shift toward leveraging risk metrics as it pertains to performance metrics and business critical processes has elevated risk intelligence from a nice piece to a "must have."

Enterprise Architecture: Getting Organized For The New Year
“The architecture describes primarily the current system/enterprise,” Grigoriu writes. “It may also describe the target system/enterprise in order to visualise its end state. The architecture is employed in the process of enterprise transformation to ensure that projects are aligned in an enterprise-wide portfolio covering all enterprise entities, the business and technology issues and their dependencies.” What a concept – knowing how changing a system will affect other parts of the system before it happens. In this regard, EA is the antithesis of spaghetti – whether it’s spaghetti code, spaghetti cabling, or something else.

Quote for the day:

"The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to venture a little past them … into the impossible." -- Arthur C. Clarke

January 03, 2014

GRC professionals' salaries increase as demand for their skills rises
As factors such as mobility and the cloud create new data security risks, GRC professionals should continue to expect their skill sets to be highly sought after, said Derek Gascon, executive director of the Compliance, Governance & Oversight Council. "Their skills are going to be unique, at least for a while," Gascon said. "All of the data that is being distributed through those mechanisms has to be managed somehow, and the governance people understand what kinds of policies are going to be necessary."

A year of living with Windows Phone: What I've learned so far
With Windows Phone my go-to-device, that aging iPhone is still part of my kit bag, only now it's relegated to iPod status. It turns out that the real tether that holds you in the iOS ecosystem is iTunes, and the myriad albums you've bought and ripped over a decade. Microsoft still hasn't delivered a workable tool for copying music from PC to phone - and while Spotify, Xbox Music and Nokia MixRadio meet my streaming needs, they're not really music library management tools.

The search for data scientists may not always mean IT
"We are focused 100 percent on data and infrastructure," Hoskins says. Hoskins agrees that big data is every bit the big deal that is being made of it. No hype here, he claims. "We are in the age of data now," Hoskins says, "and data is what really matters. I don't think it can be overstated the significance that this has for business and for all of us." More specifically, predictive analytics is what organizations are scrambling to master: turning mountains of data into identifiable patterns of behavior.

What Is Object Storage?
Object Storage is a technology where data is stored in self-contained entities called objects. Think of an object as a file. But unlike traditional file systems, this storage method is not dependent on a hierarchical layout of directories and sub-directories. Objects are given unique ID numbers which are managed in a ‘flat’ index reducing significantly the amount of metadata (data about data) needed to store and retrieve a file. Storage systems that have an object storage foundation can deliver a series of capabilities that should be of interest to data centers that need to store large amounts of files or objects.

How Big Data is changing the security analytics landscape
"The goal of Big Data analytics for security is to obtain actionable intelligence in real time," said Alvaro Cardenas, lead author of the report in the CSA press release. "Although Big Data analytics holds significant promise, there are a number of challenges that must be overcome to realize its true potential. We have only just begun, but are anxious to move forward in helping the industry understand its potential with new research directions in Big Data security."

What’s So Innovative about Innovation?
Are we as innovative as our competitors? What are we doing about being innovative? How do we get some of that innovation stuff? This author even jumped on the bandwagon by recently writing a column about successful CIOs that indicated how important the need for innovation was. However, after writing the piece a little handwringing ensued over what innovation really means, or perhaps should mean, to CIOs in the insurance industry.

NSA looks to crack all encryption with quantum computer, report says
The U.S. National Security Agency is attempting to build a new breed of supercomputer that theoretically could make short work of cracking most keys used for encrypted communications. The project to build "a cryptographically useful quantum computer" is part of an $80 million research project called "Penetrating Hard Targets" that is taking place at a campus in College Park, Maryland, according to The Washington Post. The newspaper quoted documents it said were provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

A CIO's journey to IT transformation begins with 10 steps
With so much new stuff coming our way, we simply do not have the time to keep our focus on the old stuff. For the first time in the history of the world, we are the persons and teams who can help the organization own the future. ... The organization needs us to be effective in leading change, delivering value and moving into the future (because the future is all about technology). A friend recently asked me what I meant by "transformational leaders."

Fifth Third Bank Pilots Analytics-Driven Deposit Pricing
Pricing is often more art than science, he points out. "The art of it is, you can look at what your competitors are offering," he says. "You might put that information in spreadsheets so you can sort and trend it, but it's still largely art and there's not a lot of science behind it." As it brings more science in, Fifth Third will analyze millions of records per month, looking at demand curves, interest rates, and deposit flows within households in reaction to product changes, aiming to find that ideal price point based on the volume of deposits it wants to gather and the maximum amount of interest expense it's willing to incur.

Top 6 Wi-Fi Trends to Expect in 2014!
The new 802.11ac standard is the call of the season. It represents a basic change in innovation of 802.11 standard protocols that boost gigabit speeds during wireless networking. This protocol increases performance of all the 802.11 ac devices by delivering more than one gigabit every second. ... Wi-Fi specific location analytics play a big role for the organization to improve business intelligence, determine security policy as well as improved customer Wi-Fi experience. You must expect Wi-Fi to offer more than just internet accessibility. The users will definitely look for more site- specific applications.

Quote for the day:

"Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak - and to sit down and listen" -- Winston Churchill

January 02, 2014

Google's Eric Schmidt reveals his biggest mistake
While Google is often ahead of the game, Schmidt admitted that during his time as CEO, the company missed a trick when social media began to change the face of the Internet. "At Google, the biggest mistake I made was not anticipating the rise of the social networking phenomenon,” Schmidt said. "Not a mistake we're going to make again. I guess in our defense we were busy working on many other things, but we should have been in that area and I take responsibility for that."

Add semantic analysis to ward off big data/bad analytics syndrome
So feeding data into a model for analysis doesn't erase the potential for bias and misinterpretation. That's because models themselves are biased -- they are all just a representation of reality, he said. And people can engage in "over fitting" or placing too much significance on the results from a sample; or they mistake correlation for causation; or they have a false sense of confidence in "the big data approach" -- namely that having so much data and so many variables cancels other factors out.

Can-Do vs. Can’t-Do Culture
The trouble with innovation is that truly innovative ideas often look like bad ideas at the time. That’s why they are innovative — until now, nobody ever figured out that they were good ideas. Creative big companies like Amazon and Google tend to be run by their innovators. Larry Page will unilaterally fund a good idea that looks like a bad idea and dismiss the reasons why it can’t be done. In this way, he creates a Can-Do Culture. Some people would like to turn the technology startup world into one great big company with a degenerative Can’t-Do Culture. This post attempts to answer that challenge and reverse that tragic trend.

DataWind faces uphill climb in India's smartphone market
The Indian tablet and cell phone manufacturer recently launched three potentially revolutionary smartphones in one of the world's hottest consumer electronics markets. Its PocketSurfer smartphones range from around US$55 to US$105 and are outfitted with 5-inch screens, which generally are not available at those price points in India. The devices come with Linux and Android platforms. ... After all, the Indian market has exhibited an insatiable appetite for smartphones, growing at a sizzling 250 percent annual growth rate and primarily in the medium-low price range that caters to notoriously price-sensitive Indian consumers.

4 Steps to Removing Leadership Bias
The main theme involved in why there is so much to learn about leadership is how little we really know about ourselves. So much behind how we think, perceive and behave is elusive at best and could be one reason why we are so driven to find and express that rhetorical recipe that nails it. ... To grow as leaders we need to constantly improve ourselves and that requires improving our understanding of self. We need to understand when to act on gut feelings and when not to. If we already know why we respond to such feelings I would suggest pragmatically testing them for bias.

Unencrypted Windows crash reports give 'significant advantage' to hackers, spies
"This information would definitely give an attacker a significant advantage. It would give them a blueprint of the [targeted] network," said Alex Watson, director of threat research at Websense, which on Sunday published preliminary findings of its Windows error-reporting investigation. Watson will present Websense's discovery in more detail at the RSA Conference in San Francisco on Feb. 24.

Raspberry Pi: Hands On with Arch Linux and Pidora
Nothing special is required for this, either in terms of knowledge or equipment; you can do it on pretty much any Linux or Windows system. If you don't even want to do this much yourself, you can buy an SD card preloaded with NOOBS from most Raspberry Pi retailers, such as the Pi Shop in Switzerland, where I got mine (I found them to be very friendly, knowlegeable and helpful.) Then just stick the SD card in the Pi, plug in power and it boots to an installer menu. Honestly, I can't imagine how it could be easier.

Healthcare digital signage: Starting small, but growing
Digital signage solutions are built around a central content manager, which serves as the brains of the installation. The content manager schedules what information appears on a display and when. Miller said Hammond primarily uses Scala's enterprise-level content management software. He said most large customers install the content manager as a virtual appliance. A few host the virtual instance in the cloud, tapping providers such as Amazon Web Services, he added.

Business Analytics and Multi-Wavelength Astronomy
This is similar to the task of practitioners in the analytics and enterprise performance management communities. An organization cannot make better decisions and improve its performance by focusing on only one variable, such as cost, time, quality, service-level and so on. These factors are interdependent. So, it is a much more complex problem. Plus there is more volatility today, caused in part by reduced trade barriers from globalization, which has increased uncertainty about the future. Analysts are on a mission to reduce uncertainty.

I’d Rather Be Coding – Writing Things Down
There are many times in the life of a project when a little documentation goes a long way. But to get those benefits, developers must take time away from coding to write things down. Here are some examples where I think they will find the juice was worth the squeeze. ... If no one bothers to write this process down, there’s a good chance it will be performed incorrectly or steps will be missed, wasting even more time. Furthermore, there’s no practical way to automate a process without first writing down the steps.

Quote for the day:

"The day people stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them." -- Colin Powell