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Domain: citeworld.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to citeworld.com.
Stories · 21
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Nonprofit Builds Salesforce Cloud For the Blind
Gamoid writes When we talk about "accessibility" in tech, we're usually talking about things like mobile apps and API compatibility. But for the sizable percentage of the world's population with vision impairment or full blindness, "accessibility" means they can use a computer, phone, tablet, or whatever, in a way that's comfortable for them. There have been great strides in that area, but it's still a tremendous challenge. So it's worth pausing to appreciate the work that the 99-year-old Bosma Enterprises, an Indiana-based nonprofit with the mission of reducing the 70 percent unemployment rate among the visually impaired and blind, has put into building out an enterprise cloud -- based primarily on Salesforce, with a handful of other applications built in -- that can be used by people with any level of sightedness across any line of business. -
VMware Unveils Workplace Suite and NVIDIA Partnership For Chromebooks
Gamoid writes At VMworld today, VMware introduced the Workplace Suite, a platform for securely delivering applications and content across desktops and mobile devices from the cloud. The really cool part, though, is a partnership with Google and NVIDIA to deliver even graphics-intensive Windows applications on a Chromebook. From the article: "The new VMware Workplace Suite takes advantage of three existing VMware products: Tools for application, device, and content management as well as secure cloud file storage that comes from the January acquisition of enterprise mobile management company AirWatch; VMware Horizon for desktop-as-a-service; and brand-new acquisition CloudVolumes for app delivery. " -
How One School District Handled Rolling Out 20,000 iPads
First time accepted submitter Gamoid writes This past school year, the Coachella Valley Unified School District gave out iPads to every single student. The good news is that kids love them, and only 6 of them got stolen or went missing. The bad news is, these iPads are sucking so much bandwidth that it's keeping neighboring school districts from getting online. Here's why the CVUSD is considering becoming its own ISP. -
Ask Slashdot: How Many Employees Does Microsoft Really Need?
An anonymous reader writes: Yesterday, word came down that Microsoft was starting to lay off some 18,000 workers. As of June 5th, Microsoft reported a total employee headcount of 127,005, so they're cutting about 15% of their jobs. That's actually a pretty huge percentage, even taking into account the redundancies created by the Nokia acquisition. Obviously, there's an upper limit to how much of your workforce you can let go at one time, so I'm willing to bet Microsoft's management thinks thousands more people aren't worth keeping around. How many employees does Microsoft realistically need? The company is famous for its huge teams that don't work together well, and excessive middle management. But they also have a huge number of software projects, and some of the projects, like Windows and Office, need big teams to develop. How would we go about estimating the total workforce Microsoft needs? (Other headcounts for reference: Apple: 80,000, Amazon: 124,600, IBM: 431,212, Red Hat: 5,000+, Facebook: 6,800, Google: 52,000, Intel: 104,900.) -
Here Comes the Panopticon: Insurance Companies
New submitter jbmartin6 writes: The Panopticon may be coming, but perhaps not how we think. Instead of a massive government surveillance program, we might end up subjected to ubiquitous monitoring to save on our insurance premiums. The "internet of things (you can't get away from)" makes this more and more possible. Here a company saved money on its health insurance premiums by distributing Fitbits and an online service to enable reporting fitness gains back to the insurance company. We've already seen the stories on using black boxes to monitor drivers. There is even an insurance company named Panoptic! Heck, why not a premium hike for owners of this or that "aggressiveness gene"? What if in the future we got a quick "+50 cents" tweet for every scoop of ice cream? I suppose the natural stopping point might be the balance between an individual's willingness to be monitored and the desire to reduce insurance premiums. -
Firefox OS Will Become the Mobile OS To Beat
mattydread23 writes with an opinion piece naming a few reasons Firefox OS is likely to succeed "It's geared toward low-powered hardware in a way that Google doesn't care as much about with Android, it's cheap enough for the pre-paid phones that are much more common than post-paid in developing countries, and most important, there are still 3.5 billion people in the world who have feature phones and for whom this will be an amazing upgrade." I'd push greater commitment to keeping the essential components of the system under FOSS licenses onto the head of that list. -
The New York Times Has Lessons For Others Making the Slow Transition To Digital
mattydread23 writes "You may not think your business has much in common with the New York Times, but the newspaper is a perfect example of how to maintain investment in a large but declining legacy business while simultaneously investing in new areas that will drive future growth. Surprisingly, 10% of the paper's revenue now comes from digital subscriptions and other all-digital products (not including advertising)." -
Building an IT Infrastructure Today vs. 10 Years Ago
rjupstate sends an article comparing how an IT infrastructure would be built today compared to one built a decade ago. "Easily the biggest (and most expensive) task was connecting all the facilities together. Most of the residential facilities had just a couple of PCs in the staff office and one PC for clients to use. Larger programs that shared office space also shared a network resources and server space. There was, however, no connectivity between each site -- something my team resolved with a mix of solutions including site-to-site VPN. This made centralizing all other resources possible and it was the foundation for every other project that we took on. While you could argue this is still a core need today, there's also a compelling argument that it isn't. The residential facilities had very modest computing needs -- entering case notes, maintaining log books, documenting medication adherence, and reviewing or updating treatment plans. It's easy to contemplate these tasks being accomplished completely from a smartphone or tablet rather than a desktop PC." How has your approach (or your IT department's approach) changed in the past ten years? -
Amazon Jumps Into Desktop Virtualization With "WorkSpaces"
mattydread23 writes "Amazon is getting into the desktop virtualization space. This is potentially huge news for providers like Citrix, but as writer Nancy Gohring points out, the company is starting small. Very small: 'The administrator console only allows managers to provision five WorkSpaces at a time. It's possible that will change when the service becomes generally available. For now, Amazon is accepting sign ups for a limited preview of the service. '" -
Stop Listening and Start Watching If You Want To Understand User Needs
rsmiller510 writes "It would seem on its face that simply asking your users what they need in an app would be the easiest way to build one, but it turns out it's not quite that simple. People often don't know what they want or need or they can't articulate it in a way that's useful to you. They may say I want Google or Dropbox for the enterprise, but they don't get that developers can be so much more creative than that. And the best way to understand those users' needs is to watch what they do, then use your own skills to build apps to make their working lives better or easier." -
Box CEO Talks European Plans, Warns About Meeting BlackBerry's Fate
mattydread23 writes "Earlier this week in London, Box CEO Aaron Levie gave other enterprise software companies a warning: If they continue to ignore what users want and how they work, they could easily end up like BlackBerry. The shift to cloud computing makes easy for companies to abandon you: 'This shift means the onus more than ever is on the vendor. If we don't stay competitive, if we don't build whatever that that next thing is the user wants to do and build it in as simple a way as they expect from the consumer tools they are using, then we will get swapped out.'" -
Fighting the Number-One Killer In the US With Data
mattydread23 writes "Often, the signs of eventual heart failure are there, but they consist of a lot of weak signals over a long period of time, and doctors are not trained to look for these patterns. IBM and a couple heathcare providers, Sutter Health and Geisinger Health System, just got a $2 million grant from NIH to figure out how better data analysis can help prevent heart attack. But the trick is that doctors will have to use electronic records — it also means a lot more tests. Andy Patrizio writes, 'What this means is doctors are going to have to expand the tests they do and the amount of data they keep. Otherwise, the data isn't so Big.'" -
How DirecTV Overhauled Its 800-Person IT Group With a Game
mattydread23 writes "Most gamification efforts fail. But when DirecTV wanted to encourage its IT staff to be more open about sharing failures, it created a massive internal game called F12. Less than a year later, it's got 97% participation and nearly everybody in the IT group actually likes competing. So what did DirecTV do right? The most important thing was to devote a full-time staffer to the game, and to keep updating it constantly." -
How Data Analytics In Education Could Create a New Class of Haves and Have-nots
mattydread23 writes "Every student learns differently. Some educators are starting to use data analytics to figure out how to tailor teaching techniques to individual students, rather than using the 'one size fits all' approach. But Alec Ross, a senior advisor on innovation at the U.S. State Department, worries this would create a new class of haves and have-nots. Speaking at the Schools for Tomorrow conference last week, Ross said, 'A lot of what I see is the ability to productize and commercialize very intensive assessments of individual limits. So what I imagine is parents getting their kids essentially a $30,000 educational checkup where they extract enormous amounts of data about the kinds of learners their children are, the kinds of education deficits they have.'" -
Intel's Haswell Chips Pushing Windows RT Into Oblivion
SmartAboutThings sends this excerpt from Technology Personalized: "Intel has started shipping the fourth generation Haswell chips for tablets, which brings power-efficient processors and hence much better battery life to Windows tablets. According to IDG, Intel has now started shipping new low-power, fourth-generation Core i3 processors, including one that draws as little as 4.5 watts of power in specific usage scenarios. These new Haswell processors could go into fanless tablets and laptop-tablet hybrids, bringing longer battery life to the devices. This is a great news for Windows lovers, who have had to sacrifice performance for battery life (and vice versa) until now. Now, with almost 50% better battery life as promised by Intel for Windows tablets, the OEMs have no real need to come out with Windows RT based tablets and hybrids anymore." -
What Marketers Think They Know About You and What They Really Do
mattydread23 writes "Data broker Acxiom did something a little unusual this week. It launched a service that lets you see the data they've collected on you. CITEworld writer Ron Miller checked it out, and found it to be mostly laughably inaccurate. Among the things they got wrong included his religion, his interests, and the number of kids he has. But worst? It pegged him as a Windows user." -
MS Office For Android: Pretty, But Woefully Incomplete
mattydread23 writes "The new Office 365 app for Android, launched a week ago, has a super nice UI, but lacks a bunch of basic features and has some really weird oversights — including a classic Microsoft dialog box that offers a choice that makes no sense. 'Overall, it still feels like Microsoft is still trying to funnel people toward its own Windows Phone if they want a better experience. In fact, in a question on an FAQ about how the Android Office app compares to the Windows Phone Office app, Microsoft says this: “Office Mobile on Windows Phone 8 provides a richer, more integrated experience,” and goes on to specify how. That’s a losing strategy when so many other apps — many of them free — offer a richer experience on Android and iOS.' " -
Pentagon Approval of iOS and Samsung KNOX Is Bad News for BlackBerry
rjupstate writes "The Pentagon is quickly moving to approve the latest devices and platforms from BlackBerry, Samsung, and Apple. That's good news for two of those companies. It's not-so-good news for BlackBerry. 'The Pentagon currently has about 600,000 smartphone users – almost all using BlackBerrys – but ultimately aims to have as many as 8m smartphones and tablets, under the terms of a scheme made public last November.' 'In its effort to expand into the high security government niche, one that BlackBerry has enjoyed near singular control of for years, Samsung recently created a government advisory board made up of Samsung executives and security experts from various U.S. and foreign government security agencies. ... In the end, the program will likely elevate that status of both Apple and Samsung within military and civilian government agencies in the U.S. and other western countries.'" -
Not Even Investors Know What Google Glass Is For
bdking writes "Google says it plans to ship its Google Glass Explorer Edition by the end of April to developers and consumers who paid $1,500 to test the computer-enabled eyewear, with vague plans for a general release (at a lower price) by year's end. But what will you really be able to do with Google Glass, beyond having information presented before your eyes? Even investors who are set to spend millions funding apps development for Google Glass have no clue. Is Google Glass being overhyped as a 'transformational' device?" I bet every real estate agent in the world would like one of these hooked up to a database of houses for sale, so they could instantly scan all the relevant information. -
Google's Idea of Productivity Is a Bad Fit For Many Other Workplaces
New submitter rjupstate writes "Google places a lot of value on the spontaneous creativity that can occur when two employees from completely different parts of the company meet. It's an ideal that Google has perfected over the years, but it's not something that will work for most other organizations. Executives trying to replicate Google's approach could even create major problems among their workforces." -
The RFP and IT Logistics For Washington's "Pot Czar"
Esther Schindler writes "Last fall, the state of Washington passed a marijuana legalization referendum, and needed to acquire an outside consultant to run the program. 'As it normally does, the state put out a request for proposal for a consultant to run the new legal marijuana program,' writes Ron Miller. 'As word leaked out that there was an RFP open for what essentially was a "pot czar," the floodgates opened. It would be the most popular RFP in the state's history. The Liquor Control Board needed a way to process these requests quickly and cheaply.' In a typical RFP scenario, they would get maybe half a dozen responses. This one got close to 100. Miller writes about the cloud workflow required to solve the task: 'He chose these particular tools because they all had open APIs, which allowed him to mash them together easily into the solution. They were easy to use, so reviewers could learn the system with little or no training, and they were mobile, so users could access the system from any device. In particular he wanted reviewers to be able to use the system on a tablet.' I suppose this could have been written about more mundane RFPs, but I bet you'll find this more interesting than most."