Culture change is hard, that’s why few organisations take it on. There’s a reliance on new people coming in to an organisation to drive change in a way that hasn’t been seen before and yet all too often those people will come up against brick walls.
Build a better mousetrap, as the cliché has it, and the world will beat a path to your door. That line of thinking has even been applied to the most rudimentary corners of the technology world: standards and protocols that have stuck around for decades, yet viewed as creaky and badly in need of replacement. But few old-guard standards have seen as many pretenders to the throne as the SMTP/POP3/IMAP email triumvirate has. If only someone could come up with an alternative that did everything email did but better, more securely, and with less hassle, wouldn't it be worth it?
Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night can compare with the challenges currently facing the United States Postal Service. Email continues to have a crippling effect on the centuries-old agency: The volume of first-class mail, or stamped mail, plummeted by 2.8 billion pieces in 2013.
The online world has spawned a virtual content creation and aggregation boom. Digital marketers flood online channels with YouTube how-to videos, Instagram photos, Tweets, Facebook posts, Web pages, graphics, blogs and more. In turn, consumers rely on Google search to help them sift through the rubble and find nuggets of useful information.
Hosting provider Atlantic.net launched a $0.99 per month cloud server this fall, which is significantly less expensive than the $0.013 per hour starting price for market-leader Amazon Web Services' on-demand Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) virtual machines.
Most people don't want to be caught at work with Facebook open on their computers or smartphones, but that may change very soon. Facebook is working on a new social network for the workplace, called "Facebook at Work," that would pit the king of social media against more business-savvy stalwarts such as Google, Microsoft and LinkedIn, according to the Financial Times.
While Google and Microsoft are using large amounts of free cloud storage to sell inexpensive consumer notebooks, Apple has stood above the fray.
It was all the way back in the Spring of 2011 that Google released <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebRTC">WebRTC</a>, its nascent real-time, browser-based, HTML5-powered, no-plugin-required video chat project to the public. In the three and a half years since, the Internet Engineering Task Force and the W3C have been working together to try to formalize the standard, prepare the stable 1.0 release, and get it ready for prime time.
Separate announcements Tuesday for business conferencing services, one from AT&T and the other from Sprint, highlight the radically changing business models at U.S. wireless carriers.
Is Google Glass dead?
By now, you've likely <a href="http://www.computerworld.com/article/2837807/one-missed-email-and-google-inbox-will-be-in-trouble.html">heard about Inbox</a>, Google's bold new plan to reinvent email with a smarter, more context-sensitive interface that treats messaging like just another to-do list.
People may feel overwhelmed by the deluge of email arriving in their inboxes, but will they trust Google to show them the most important messages?
With a series of Cloud announcements on Monday, Microsoft moved to put a stake in the ground with hybrid Cloud computing and emerge from the shadow of Cloud rivals Google and Amazon.
When evaluating the marketplaces of the big three public IaaS cloud providers - Amazon Web Services, Google and Microsoft - AWS stands out in terms of the maturity of its platform for partners to offer products and services on top of its cloud. But Microsoft, too, has a formidable partner program that could rival Amazon's in the future, analysts predict.
It's so far been another sorry, sorry year in the technology industry, with big name companies, hot startups and individuals making public mea culpas for their assorted dumb, embarrassing and other regrettable actions.