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Don’t you just dread waiting in line to get something as small as a box of Tic Tacs? How about having to cross the city just to sign a paper? Bureaucracy is still alive and kicking in 2015, despite technology lending a huge helping hand in virtually every field. But there’s one area that is seeing some much needed improvement: payments. And it’s all thanks to the cloud and mobility joining forces.
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Juniper Research has released a paper that forecasts rapid adoption for the 5G wireless standard from 2025 onwards, with 240 million active connections by then. Still, this figure would account for about 3% of global mobile connections, so this does not represent the all-encompassing vision that some technology giants (like Samsung) are hoping to make a reality.
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The annual Computerworld Forecast Study is out, revealing the IT priorities for this year in key spending areas like new technologies, and staffing up. According to the IDG-funded research, IT budgets are increasing and cloud services in particular are booming. IT is slowly but surely becoming a business in and of itself inside every company today.
With CIOs and CEOs joining forces to streamline IT decision-making, 2015 is showing growth in all areas and on all levels, according to the whitepaper. IT budgets have not only remained in place, but they’ve actually increased in 2015 by 4.3%. The spike potentially reflects a shift in IT decision making thanks to a younger generation of leaders.
If you’ve disassembled an electric motor at least once your life, you should pretty much know the basics of this fascinating invention. But motors come in all shapes and sizes, and for just as many different purposes.
A stepper motor isn’t very different from traditional electric motors, but it has a few particularities that make it, well… particular. The copper coils that traditionally wrap around the rotor’s blades
comScore is out with the latest “smartphone wars” data reporting key trends in the U.S. mobile industry by platform, OS, and apps. The results will come as no surprise to those keeping close tabs on the OEM battle and other aspects surrounding our beloved handhelds.
In a paper on the state of telecommuting, Telework Research Network acknowledges that the U.S. workforce is increasingly mobile, “but, beyond that broad statement, we know little about the rate of increase in mobility — how often people are out of the office, where they are, and what they’re doing. For that matter, there’s no agreed-upon method of defining who they are.”
Or isn’t there? Ctrip, China’s largest travel agency, joined forces with Nicholas Bloom, an economics professor at Stanford University, in order to find out how telecommuting impacts the worker, the boss, and the business. 250 of Ctrip’s employees volunteered as lab rats in the experiment, with half being deployed at home and half in the office. They found that the benefits were short term.
Pew Research loves to poll people. The think tank has an impressive number of fact sheets regarding phone usage in countless scenarios, including one about public usage, which reveals some interesting particularities about us using our handsets on the street.
As you can imagine, people use their devices for a wide array of tasks, from socializing to finding their way around the city. But here are the actual usage patterns of Americans:
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Ask yourself this: “am I using my phone too much?” If you’re like most people, chances are you’ll say “yes.” And it’s difficult not to, with so much connectivity at our fingertips and everyone doing it. But the reality is our cell phone usage today is moderate compared to what’s coming.
One big limitation that keeps us from constantly fiddling with our phones is battery life. On a full tank, we have no problem watching videos, playing games and browsing Facebook, sometimes for hours at a time. But the minute that battery meter drops below 20% we enter power-save mode. And I’m not talking about dimming the screen or switching from 4G to 3G either. No. I’m talking about literally going into power-save mode ourselves, by limiting actual usage of the phone. However, all that is about to change really soon.
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What’s the #1 attribute that a CEO must possess? According to the hundreds of chief executives polled by PwC for its 2015 Pulse survey, the key ingredient to be at the top of your game in this line of work is “strategy.”
The respondents were not named (for obvious reasons), but PwC highlighted some of their answers in quotes. One CEO piqued, “The crucial thing a CEO has to be capable of is to think strategically, which means to recognise changes in the market early and then formulate the consequences for their business.”
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AI is the talk of the town these days. Every major tech juggernaut is trying to grasp machine intelligence and Facebook seems to be on a very promising track with an all-new personal assistant called ‘M.’ Unlike Google Now, Cortana, or Siri, Facebook M doesn’t ask you to repeat what you said, nor does it dump a bunch of Internet links on you when the query is too difficult for the algorithms to handle. When it hits a search roadblock, it starts to ask around.