Posts in Category: industry

Find Out Which Platforms Sell Your Product

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Our experience with code has taught us that platform optimization plays a crucial role in grabbing and retaining a customer base – essentially creating your market share. Ship a half-baked app and customer loyalty is immediately affected. Ship a polished, seamless, airtight experience and they’re yours to keep.

Whether you sell physical goods or services, online or offline, it helps to know what devices people own. Smartphones and tablets have become de-facto platforms for ad delivery and shopping, and marketers everywhere strive to deliver a compelling viewing experience on these gizmos.

Device ownership heavily determines the way people

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Female Entrepreneurs – Leaders Born from “Disobedience”

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You might have heard us say this before, but here at 4PSA many of our software engineers are girls – more than what you’d find in a traditional tech company. And we wouldn’t have it any other way. We’re ‘naughty’ like that 😀

As it turns out, there are quite a few benefits to “a little bit of naughtiness or disobedience,” as highlighted by Lauren Knight, author of a column on parenting in the Washington Post. Disobedient children are entrepreneurial spirits that end up earning more as adults, research shows.

Truth be told, the signs have always been there. Only by challenging the status quo do we think outside the box, and it takes wits to defy authority as a child. Disobedient children are good candidates for

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Jobs Involving Communication Hardest to Replace by Machines

Want to stay relevant as machines gradually take over the world? Pick a job that can’t be automated. The work done by humans is getting systematically replaced by devices as time progresses and technology makes new leaps forward. It’s a fact of life that our society is all too familiar with. But there are still plenty of tasks that will be hard to replace by gadgets.

The jobs that machines fumble over are incidentally the same jobs that make life exciting. Choreographers, fire fighters, chiropractors, art directors, coaches, and many others can breathe a sigh of relief knowing that robots won’t render them irrelevant any time soon

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Why Cloud Doesn’t Equal Savings for a Finance-Driven Mind

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The biggest roadblock in cloud adoption everywhere is said to be lack of knowledge at an executive level. Technologically speaking, business leaders don’t always know what’s good for them in the long term. Clinging to outdated systems and processes is a sure way get left behind. Worst of all, the finance sector doesn’t feel it needs any transformative effects whatsoever.

The recent Cloud Business Summit held in New York saw financial and IT leaders debate the ripple effects of cloud adoption in corporate financial systems and processes. Finance is not an area in sync with technology, and nor should it, according to those working in this segment

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Is Today’s CIO Tomorrow’s CEO?

Current CIO strengths versus ideal characteristics of a successful CIO | Credits: Deloitte

IDC recently said that virtually every big organization will soon be a software company, capable of churning out its own code and sustaining its own digital existence. Here to lend credence to that forecast is a hefty report from Deloitte University Press which dots the “i” with a focus on CIOs and their job descriptions as of late

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Pizza as a Service [Infographic]

Remember the first time you landed on a paper about cloud computing “as a service?” How much of the tech jargon in there could you decipher? Chances are, not much, especially if your line of work rarely crosses paths with digital innovations.

Albert Barron, Sr. Software Client Architect at IBM, realized this on a bicycle ride when he rambled terms like SOA, WS, REST, JSON, SaaS, PaaS, and TLA to a friend who could barely articulate them back, let alone get the point of the story

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IDC: Every Company on Earth Will Be a “Software Company”

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Soon, the most precious resource of any business will not be physical, but informational. Today, only 1% of developers are focused on implementing cognitive systems to provide assistance in dealing with data. By 2018, that number will rise to 50%. In a few more years, every organization will essentially be a software company, IDC predicts.

This forecast from the fine gents at International Data Corporation (IDC) comes with the addendum that business is becoming more and more about arming yourself to the teeth with technical prowess, or else. Here are the most important predictions from IDC’s November 4 market intelligence briefing

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Are You Among the 5% with a “Great” Job?

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The most quoted jobs metric in the world, “Unemployment,” is misleading. And because we lack metrics to asses the quality of a position, we are also facing a problem in defining what a good job is. But recent undertakings shed more light on the matter, revealing where all the great jobs are, complete with the deficits that remain.

Gallup’s first World Poll was conducted a decade ago, in 2005. Then, like now, it was found that people crave a good job. Crudely speaking, this means 30+ hours per week and a decent paycheck. 1.3 billion out of the world 5 billion adults have a good job, based on this definition. 12% of these are engaged at work, in what can be considered not just a good job, but a great job

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The Secret Sauce of Innovation Is Not So Secret

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Innovation doesn’t grow on trees, granted. But it’s not that impossible to achieve either. Most people believe it takes genius, luck, and and huge capital investments. Actually, it’s much simpler than that.

Professors Chen Chen and Yangyang Chen of Monash University, along with Edward J. Podolski with La Trobe University have conducted a joint study to determine how employee treatment leads to corporate innovative success. Their findings, hardly surprising, confirm the often-ignored importance of morale in the workplace, a matter we consider paramount here at 4PSA

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Why ‘Agile’ Is the Perfect Recipe for Business

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87% of companies in a poll by BCS The Charted Institute for IT report that the ability to manage changing priorities was among the biggest benefits of jumping wholeheartedly into an agile business model, one that factors in technology and a flexible, modern culture to stay on top of the trends, give competitors a run for their money, and ultimately achieve a healthy bottom line.

Contrary to popular belief, in-person meetings aren’t all that useless (as long as the purpose of the meeting isn’t meeting itself). Data aggregated by Raconteur indicates that 80% of agility adopters have a daily stand-up meeting. This get-together makes communication go full-circle in a collaborative culture, as studies have shown that ‘digital’ cannot and should not replace the spoken word

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