A blend of opinions & news on tech topics like cloud, mobile, big data, app development and app performance from geniuses inside the technology industry.
While consumers look for the latest sleek gadget to come out of Apple’s WWDC each year, developers look for other ways to take advantage of the cool that is Apple. Consumers circulate rumors about smart TVs and the iWatch. These gadgets, though fun to have, don’t always spark the same interest in developers, since many of them don’t have wide access to such devices. This year, though, there’s no need for developers to be disappointed: … [Read more...]
Nate Silver is the author of one of my favorite books, “The Signal and the Noise”. The term explains itself but the premise is that the “signal-to-noise ratio is sometimes used informally to refer to the ratio of useful information to false or irrelevant data in a conversation or exchange” (Wikipedia). Nate does a great job of illustrating this concept in his book. In my mind, signal-to-noise is the ratio of usefulness to … [Read more...]
IBM mainframes still matter for much the same reason Willie Sutton robbed banks -- because “that’s where the money is.” That may be an anachronism, however. If Willie Sutton was alive today, would he still be robbing banks? In a previous blog I took a look at the early phase innovation of the iPhone using physics as our guide. In this blog I’d like to look at the IBM mainframe (software specifically) through a calculus lens. And what … [Read more...]
One of the infrastructure issues facing many rural communities around the world is the lack of wired Internet. The idea of connecting to a wide swath of the population makes sense, but in emerging markets, especially, it can be difficult to reach people who don’t have access to the Internet. Rather than build out wired Internet as it is doing with its Fiber network in mid-sized cities in the United States, Google is looking for ways to … [Read more...]
Recently, Samsung announced that it is testing 5G phones. According to Samsung, their 5G phones will come with a download speed of 1 Gbps. This is superfast, especially when one considers that current 4G phones max out at around 75 Mbps. However exciting this news might be, though, the reality is far from a fantasy world of 5G smartphones in the next five years. Samsung and other smartphone manufacturers aren’t likely to have such a … [Read more...]
For the past year I have been involved in a consortium of local companies whose mission is to expand the technical talent pool in Detroit. "IT in the D" is trying to close ‘the gap’ between students’ education and the skills and abilities they need to succeed in technology careers through experiential learning externships. We have found that academia needs to focus on soft-skills that are more important to technology success, such as … [Read more...]
Split second decisions. As I was driving over the Memorial Day weekend, I was reminded of all the important decisions we make daily. While merging onto the expressway there was a car next to me and I had to do the quick calculation we all do on whether to speed up or slow down. Since I was slightly behind it, I slowed to go behind. At work we are paid to make quick decisions daily. Determining when programs can be moved into … [Read more...]
When you have a question, the first place you are likely to turn is to Google. We tend to think of Google as omniscient, but the truth is that every day Google runs into 500 million queries that it has never seen before. This can slow down the return of search results, since Google has to work a little harder to find data that might be relevant to the search. Google engineers, of course, want to reduce the number of searches (currently 15% … [Read more...]
To help illustrate my point, our pretend e-commerce example will be referred to as TescaraHats. They are a European market leader in manufacturing customized hats and did not achieve the expected sales increase with its new e-commerce site. It offered its customers the ability to customize and order hats online instead of visiting its brick and mortar locations, but customers seemed disinterested. TescaraHats learned quickly that there is much … [Read more...]
An unfortunate side effect of innovation is change. Well, unfortunate to those that don’t embrace change. As great as the steam engine, the telegraph, the telephone, electricity, the internal combustion engine, the airplane, the transistor, the personal computer or the mobile phone are, they were technical inflection points in history. What innovations forced your business to adapt? Are we missing any ruined industries that refused to … [Read more...]
