How Services (Not Apps) Make the World Go Round

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The amount of time spent on mobile apps has increased by 21% from 2014 to 2015, with the mobile app market being worth an estimated $58 billion. That amount will rise to $77 billion by 2017, according to research conducted this year. But it’s not the mobile apps themselves that generate all this money – it’s the services behind them.

At the dawn of the app store gold rush – as the media affectionately calls it – apps were low in numbers and simplistic: reminders, photography, note taking, doodling apps, match-three games etc. As time progressed, not only were there more apps to be found, but their complexity grew as well, and so did the hardware they ran on. Their numbers grew from mere thousands to billions, as more developers started leveraging newer, more advanced technology, but also another game changer

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UC&C Is Headed to the Cloud

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Success in business depends as much on innovation as it does on adaptability, strategy, marketing, and of course solid investments. The evidence in favor of digital investments as a key driver is overwhelming. In the not too distant future, a company’s communication and collaboration efforts will be inherently reliant on cloud technology. And the reason is simple: everybody’s doing it, and he who doesn’t falls behind in reach, discoverability, customer satisfaction and many other areas that make or break a business.

Fierce competition, but also the always-on nature of cloud solutions, forcefully dictate the need to incorporate technology as a business strategy. Research conducted by IDG Enterprise gives us a bird’s eye view of the direction of spending, areas of investment and drivers, with a focus on the communication tools employed (or soon-to-be-employed) at large companies

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Your Invisible Business Phone

We developed Hubgets with the goal to make our teamwork as smooth as possible. Then, we shared it with the world. With Hubgets, you can have cohesive teams and a flexible work policy. You can reach people half way across the globe using the same mechanism you would to buzz a colleague 10 feet away. Today, we’ll look at the Phone component in Hubgets.

Business phone in the browser

Hubgets Phone

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Quote of the Day by Bruce Dickinson

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Sales, marketing, consulting… these are paid positions that society finds useful in many contexts, but the world and its future are not dependent on these occupations. Engineering, however, is something the world cannot do without.

Engineering can be considered the world’s oldest profession because it predates humanity. Just ask Charles Darwin, whose famous theory of evolution is based on the idea that nature constantly engineers itself to survive and adapt. Bruce Dickinson surely agrees. According to the famous rocker, engineering is one of the most important things you can teach a child to aspire to

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Technical and Financial Advantages of UC&C

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Communication infrastructures established in the ’90s are becoming increasingly incompatible with today’s connected economy. When it takes too long for partners to connect, or to fulfill customer needs, you know there’s a problem somewhere. For every problem, there’s a solution.

Unified Communications (UC) was born out of the need to enable faster decision making, but also to make collaboration more efficient. UC merges real-time communications (voice, video, instant messaging) with real-time data (presence, file sharing), and we often end up using the term Unified Communications & Collaboration (UC&C) to describe these solutions. Provided as-a-service, UC&C has a series of technical and financial advantages that make it a key asset for virtually any business today

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Mass Messaging Done Right

Not all collaboration apps are made equal, everybody knows it. There are features that all users need and there are features all users dream about 😉 In addition to the voice and video features, file sharing, topic creation, presence, availability, and other neat tricks, Hubgets has another ace up its sleeve: selective mass messaging. When you have urgent notices to send out with no time to open a new chat window for every person, mass messaging is a must-have. Hubgets does it in more ways than one.

Mass Messaging Done Right

Sending a mass message in Hubgets

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Research Shows How Our Computer Mice Are Betraying Our Feelings

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A friendly interface goes a long way, but building software with the entire User Experience (UX) in mind helps achieve a more straightforward path to the ultimate goal of usability. Researchers at Brigham Young University want to open a new chapter in UX by determining exactly what people are feeling when they are sitting in front of their computers – all through mouse movement interpretation.

The research, Inferring Negative Emotion from Mouse Cursor Movements, reveals how “attention control theory” can leverage our trusty point-and-click devices as real-time indicators of negative emotions. When people experience anger or frustration

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Let the Hacking Begin! Verb Days 4.0 Kicks Off [Liveblog]

Verb Days 4 kicks off!

The date is December 18. The year 2015. And Verb Days is back in the house!

We’re live from Verb Days 4.0, the fourth edition of our annual hackathon. Five teams brimming with coding badassery and creative prowess are about to duke it out in the open space area of our HQ. This year’s mission? Give birth to a brand new and exciting integration with Hubgets, our teamwork app. As part of this year’s contest, we’re not just having fun, we are also making Hubgets a better collaboration tool for every user.

The main evaluation criteria for each project remains unchanged. Innovation will count the most, while each team will have to pick a member who doesn’t fumble with words to give a presentation of their brainchild. If we’re going to offer it publicly, we’ll have to be the first to like it.

Let the hacking (and the liveblogging) begin!

On your marks…

get set…..

CODE!

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UC Mobility – An Opportunity to Tap Today

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Calculating the true size of the Unified Communications & Collaboration (UC&C) market has never been easy as many organizations are still operating a multi-vendor mix of communication and collaboration solutions, and so the data is scattered all over the place. However, there is one key area of UC&C that has shown steady growth over the years, and it’s poised to grow even more in the coming years.

IDC forecasts that UC&C services in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) are set to rise from $7.7 billion in 2012 to $11.7 billion in 2016, but more importantly that the main driver for this growth is mobile UC. Most other think tanks agree that mobility is arguably the fastest-growing component of UC&C. IDC, for its part, has calculated a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 32% per year. However, the mobile UC ecosystem is still a fountain that sits largely untapped

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7 Factors to Consider when Choosing a UC&C Vendor

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Most small-to-medium businesses (SMB) don’t have legacy UC&C software to grapple with, making them more likely than enterprises to move to pure cloud-based UC&C services, according to data gauged by IDG Enterprise. The ratio is 20% versus 7%, respectively.

In its 2015 Unified Communications & Collaboration Survey, IDG uncovered that 33% of IT leaders plan to increase spending in Unified Communications and Collaboration (UC&C), both hosted and hybrid – a combination of hosted and on-premise services. Spending will increase by an average of 9% through 2016, while enterprises currently lavish an average of $8.1 million on UC&C products and / or services alone. In 2012, a similar survey uncovered that 49% of respondents still used on-premises solutions. That number has only slightly increased to 51% so far, but things are about to change

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