Today, we celebrate Earth Day, the perfect time to show support for environmental protection and ultimately love for our beautiful mother planet, Earth. For businesses around the world, this could translate in making their workplace more eco-friendly. Sustainability measures have been in progress for years. However, recent advancements in technology make it even easier and more affordable to go green and reduce your organization’s carbon footprint.
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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
Envisioning the world of tomorrow is not enough to make it. Our society is heavily reliant on execution, and that means equal parts of form and function. Design makes all the difference in how we perceive the world, how we choose to buy a certain something over something else, but also how technology makes its way into our hearts (and homes). Where form meets function, our world isn’t just more appealing, it’s also more efficient.
In this discourse we will focus on three areas where design enhances our perception of the world, turns computers into companions, and makes us truly feel at home in our homes.
There’s bad marketing, there’s good marketing, and then there’s really great marketing. I’ll let you guess which category this falls into
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They say technology dehumanizes us. But not everyone buys it. It changes us, granted, but does it strip us of what makes us human – that is, exercise our intellect? As onlookers of the food chain, humans have the luxurious ability to imagine and then create a tool for just about anything. So it would appear that technology not only doesn’t dehumanize us, it defines us.
Having more options never hurt anyone. Professor Stephen Hawking surely agrees. He’d find it very hard (harder than it already is) to bless the scientific community with his ideas without the assistive technology that enables him to speak. A stranded person would give an arm and a leg for a radio. A long-distance relationship would be hard to bear without instant messaging. And so on, and so forth. Communication has benefited immensely from technological feats like the telephone, the radio, and the Internet. Below, we will focus on three often-overlooked scenarios where communication, in the absence of technology, can be a serious burden
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The term “cloud computing” was (supposedly) first used to describe the appearance of networked-servers on schematics. These diagrams used circles to represent the outline of a server (essentially the server’s reach within a network). When overlapped, the circles came together to form the appearance of a cloud. But clouds don’t have a perfectly defined edge, just like in reality.
In the same way that cloud computing has abstracted resources like compute, storage and bandwidth, fog computing has become the go-to name to describe the
The fourth annual Global Technology Innovation Survey by KPMG predicts a number of technologies that will enable the next revolution in the consumer world. These include including cloud computing (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS), mobility, the Internet of Things (IoT), data & analytics, biotech, 3D printing, cyber security, artificial intelligence/cognitive computing, and digital currency platforms.
Different countries are banking on different things. Everyone agrees that the Cloud is going places, and the easiest to convince is China. Because of their faith in cloud computing, the Chinese are also vying with great enthusiasm for Artificial Intelligence (AI). But this is more common sense than it is insight.
A more important takeaway from the lofty report is the part about
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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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
If you’re a frequent visitor on our blog, chances are you’ve read our recent analysis of the impact of IoT (Internet of Things) in the foreseeable future. And if the Privacy Panic Cycle is indeed about to be renewed, it’s probably a good idea to stay informed about the next wave of intimidating technologies.
So what exactly is the Internet of Things? Harbor Research in cooperation with Postscapes decided to answer this question once and for all using the best way you can convey information – an infographic
“In the next century, planet earth will don an electronic skin. It will use the Internet as a scaffold to support and transmit its sensations.” – Neil Gross 1999
Did you know that society undergoes a “privacy panic cycle” every time new technologies come out? It’s true. The Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF) has documented this well. The non-partisan think tank has put together a diagram that shows exactly how the process takes place, and if research by Deloitte is any indication, we’re in for a new wave of panic. A tsunami even