Posts in Category: industry

Graphene And Its ‘Cousins’ Need More Than Just A Killer App

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Graphene isn’t exactly a hot topic anymore, but its properties remain unchanged – and vastly unexplored. Andre Geim, one of the fathers of the exotic material, admits this much in an interview with Nature magazine.

Together with his colleague Konstantin Novoselov, Geim won the Nobel Prize in Physics for being the first to isolate and explore the impressive properties of the material – a single sheet of carbon, one-atom thick, with foreseeable application in computing, aeronautics, and pretty much every other industry. If anyone should be asked about the state of graphene, it should be him.

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Africa Skips Landlines, Goes Straight To Mobility

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The death of fixed phones is near. But there’s one place on the planet where this is more obvious than anywhere else: Africa. Landlines are almost nowhere to be found south of the Sahara desert, while cell phones are anything but scarce, according to the results of a Pew Research Center survey of seven African nations. But despite the cell phone’s increased popularity in Africa, far less people own a smartphone there than in the United States.

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The UC Market: The Place Where Bad News Is Good News

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According to the “Enterprise Unified Communications and Voice Equipment” report by IHS Infonetics, global enterprise PBX revenue fell 6 percent in the first quarter of 2015 (year-over-year), as more and more businesses are said to have discovered the cloud.

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5 Ways To Achieve Cloud Maturity & Taste The Sweet Fruits Of Victory

The cloud is on the rise. Just shy of 80% of organizations are seriously considering adoption in one form or another, and almost 40% have already implemented cloud products and services in their operations. But according to research carried out by International Data Corporation (IDC) on 19,080 worldwide IT and LOB (line of business) respondents, mature Cloud-centric organizations are hard to come by.

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Mobility Nurtures Communication, And Teens Are Living Proof Of That

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What is social networking if not a giant fulcrum of communication? Even when we claim to be posting photos just to chronicle your trips, we all light up with joy when we see those virtual thumbs pointing upwards.

Posts and pokes, likes and dislikes, comments and replies, instant messaging, group messaging, forums, communities – all these mediums have one big thing in common: sharing information.

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It’s Official: Everybody Owns 2 Phones*

Remember the 90s, when cell phones were no longer a product of science-fiction? Brick-sized, with black & white screens and pixels the size of a walnut, these devices were state-of-the-art back then. They were also scarce.

Even in the late 90s, people could hardly afford one, let alone multiple units. But fast forward to 2015, mobile phones are not just hundreds of times faster and more versatile, they’re also vastly more affordable. And they’re so popular that one simply isn’t enough anymore.

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Why Emotion Matters In Business (Explained Scientifically)

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Businesses sell products, services and information to other businesses much in the same way they sell to individual customers. There are more similarities between B2B (business-to-business) and B2C (business-to-consumer) than you would care to imagine. For example, fruitful B2B commerce relies on emotion. Just like you appreciate good design or a catchy ad, so do companies like to be touched deep down inside before spending on services, or products in bulk.

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Education Is Key When Building a Collaborative Culture

Driving adoption of anything within an organization is difficult enough, because people tend to resist change. Even more so when it comes to all-new collaboration tools. So how do you ensure their buy-in and ongoing support for the tech? Easy. With some good old fashioned education.

We should know

It’s crucial not to take deployment lightly. We say this from experience. If you hand the management department a flimsy brochure or a demo video that just scratches the surface of the product, it might do more harm than good. Sometimes higher-ups may be even more resilient in the face of change than the workforce on the ground floor. When it comes to communication & collaboration tools, knowing the numerous benefits of each feature in part lets you align those features perfectly with your business.

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With The Right Collaboration Tools, Office Time Is Still Your Time

Photo by Lukas Blazek on Unsplash

Quick: what are your staffers doing at this very second? If you’re like most organizations, there’s a good chance many of your staffers are attending to personal matters. But who says it’s acceptable just because it happens in other offices too?

According to a recent survey of 2,000 office workers conducted by AtTask and Harris Interactive – experts in management and market research – employees at various firms said they only dedicate 45 percent of their time to getting stuff done. The remainder (55%) of the time gets spent sifting through emails, or in meetings that could easily be replaced by conference calls. Also on the list of common pastime activities was “miscellaneous interruptions.”

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