Sign up for our Technology Newsletter 
Intel Rewards RealSense Developers
Intel has awarded $1m to a number of developers as part of its RealSense 3D App Challenge, which was launched last year.
Announced by Intel president Renee James at Computex 2014, the RealSense App Challenge was part of Intel’s efforts to boost RealSense globally and generate software innovation around the ecosystem.
More than 7,000 software creators in 37 countries applied to compete, and 400 were selected to develop new applications for entertainment, learning and collaboration.
Several hundred developers of creative app ideas in these categories received the latest edition of the RealSense 3D Camera and RealSense software development kit, which included free tools, examples and application programing interfaces with which to develop their ideas.
Intel announced on Thursday that the grand prize winner, who picks up $100,000, is Brazilian developer Alexandre Ribeiro da Silva of Anima Games.
His Seed app requires gamers to use reflexes and rational thinking to solve puzzles. The goal of the game is to guide a little floating seed through its journey to reforest a devastated land.
The second prize of $50,000 was awarded to Canadian developer David Schnare of Kinetisense. His OrthoSense app uses RealSense to help medical professionals remotely rehabilitate a patient who has suffered a hand injury by tracking their range of movement over time.
“This practical application of human-computer interaction is an impressive example of how technology can make our lives better,” Intel said.
Another notable winner was Lee Bamber from the UK, who received recognition for his virtual 3D video maker. The app allows a user to record themselves as a 3D hologram and then transport to a variety of scenes.
Once recorded, they can then change the camera position over the course of the playback to add an extra dimension to a video blogs, storybook or v-mails, for instance.
“The idea of the app is that you can choose the backdrop then set the lighting as you would in a studio then do the acting,” Bamber explained in his video.
Doug Fisher, SVP and general manager of Intel’s Software and Services Group, said in a blog post that now the app challenge is complete “the real work begins”, as Intel Software will continue to encourage all finalists to bring products to market.
“We also will continue mobilising our resources to inspire, educate and advance innovation through programmes such as the Intel Developer Zone, where developers can engage to find new software tools and build industry relationships,” he said.
“Human-computer interactions will no longer be defined by mice, keyboards and 2D displays. Our physical and digital worlds are coming together. When they do, the opportunities for us as consumers and businesses will explode.”
New Data Suggest IT Hiring Increasing
November 21, 2014 by admin
Filed under Around The Net
Comments Off on New Data Suggest IT Hiring Increasing
Whenever IT hiring increases, as it did last month, the default explanation from analysts is this: The economy is improving.
That might be true, and it may well explain the U.S. Department of Labor’s report today that showed the U.S., overall, added 214,000 jobs last month.
Of that total employment gain, IT hiring grew by 7,800 jobs in October, compared with a gain of 6,900 jobs in September, according to TechServe Alliance, an IT industry group.
Another IT labor analyst group, Janco Associates, calculated last month’s IT gains at 9,500 jobs.
Government data can be reported in different ways, depending on which job categories are included in the IT job estimates, and it is why analysts report job numbers differently.
Hiring trends are also affected by Labor Department adjustments, and the government’s adjusted data adds nearly 25,000 telecom jobs over the past two months, according to Janco. Because of this adjustment, Janco termed the recent growth in IT over the past several months “explosive,” while TechServe put last month’s results as “modestly stronger.”
There is no one reason for October’s gain. An improving economy may be at the heart of any answer. Independent of the government numbers, Computer Economics, in a recent report on contingent versus full-time hiring, said it is seeing a drop in the use of contract workers at large companies and more reliance on full-time workers, which is a sign of an improving economy.
Will Facebook Enter The Healthcare Arena?
October 16, 2014 by admin
Filed under Around The Net
Comments Off on Will Facebook Enter The Healthcare Arena?
Facebook Inc already can tell who your friends are and the what types of things grabs your attention. Soon, it could also know the state of your health.
On the heels of fellow Silicon Valley technology companies Apple Inc and Google Inc, Facebook is plotting its first steps into the fertile field of healthcare, said three people familiar with the matter. The people requested anonymity as the plans are still in development.
The company is exploring creating online “support communities” that would connect Facebook users suffering from various ailments. A small team is also considering new “preventative care” applications that would help people improve their lifestyles.
In recent months, the sources said, the social networking giant has been holding meetings with medical industry experts and entrepreneurs, and is setting up a research and development unit to test new health apps. Facebook is still in the idea-gathering stage, the people said.
Healthcare has historically been an area of interest for Facebook, but it has taken a backseat to more pressing products.
Recently, Facebook executives have come to realize that healthcare might work as a tool to increase engagement with the site.
One catalyst: the unexpected success of Facebook’s “organ-donor status initiative,” introduced in 2012. The day that Facebook altered profile pages to allow members to specify their organ donor-status, 13,054 people registered to be organ donors online in the United States, a 21 fold increase over the daily average of 616 registrations, according to a June 2013 study published in the American Journal of Transplantation.
Separately, Facebook product teams noticed that people with chronic ailments such as diabetes would search the social networking site for advice, said one former Facebook insider. In addition, the proliferation of patient networks such as PatientsLikeMe demonstrate that people are increasingly comfortable sharing symptoms and treatment experiences online.
Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg may step up his personal involvement in health. Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan, a pediatric resident at University of California San Francisco, recently donated $5 million to the Ravenswood Health Center in East Palo Alto.
Any advertising built around the health initiatives would not be as targeted as it could be on television or other media. Pharmaceutical companies, for instance, are prohibited from using Facebook to promote the sale of prescription drugs, in part because of concerns surrounding disclosures.
Bitcoin Use Growing
September 8, 2014 by admin
Filed under Around The Net
Comments Off on Bitcoin Use Growing
Bitcoin is gaing greater acceptance at U.S. online merchants including Overstock.com and Expedia, as customers use a digital currency that just a few years ago was virtually unknown but is now showing some staying power.
Though sales paid for in bitcoin so far at vendors interviewed for this article have been a fraction of one percent, they expect that as acceptance grows, the online currency will one day be as ubiquitous as the internet.
“Bitcoin isn’t going anywhere; it’s here to stay,” said Michael Gulmann, vice president of global products at Expedia Inc. in Seattle, the largest online travel agent. “We want to be there from the beginning.” Expedia started accepting bitcoin payments for hotel bookings on July 11.
Until recently a niche alternative currency touted by a fervent group of followers, bitcoin has evolved into a software-based payment online system. Bitcoins are stored in a wallet with a unique identification number and companies like Coinbase and Blockchain can hold the currency for the user.
When buying an item from a merchant’s website, a customer simply clicks on the bitcoin option and a pop-in window appears where he can type in his wallet ID number.
Still, broad-based adoption of bitcoin is at least five years away because most consumers still prefer to use credit cards, analysts said.
“Bitcoin is a new way of making payments, but it’s not solving a problem that’s broken,” said George Peabody, payments consultant at Glenbrook Partners in Menlo Park, California. “Retail payments aren’t broken.”
There are also worries about bitcoin’s volatility: its price in U.S. dollars changes every day.
That risk is borne by the consumer and the bitcoin payment processor, such as Coinbase or Bitpay, not the retailer. The vendor doesn’t hold the bitcoin and is paid in U.S. dollars. As soon as a customer pays in bitcoin, the digital currency goes to the payment processor and the processor immediately pays the merchant, for a fee of less than 1 percent.
“We don’t have to deal with the actual holding of the bitcoin: it’s the payment processor that takes the currency risk for us,” said Bernie Han, chief operating officer at Dish Network Corp, in Englewood, Colorado. “That’s what makes it appealing for us and I guess for other merchants as well.”
Is The Tech Industry Going Independent?
Comments Off on Is The Tech Industry Going Independent?
The tech industry is undergoing a shift toward a more independent, contingent IT workforce. And while that trend might not be cause for alarm for retiring baby boomer IT professionals, it could mean younger and mid-career workers need to prepare to make a living solo.
About 18% of all IT workers today are self-employed, according to an analysis by Emergent Research, a firm focused on small businesses trends. This independent IT workforce is growing at the rate of about 7% per year, which is faster than the overall growth rate for independent workers generally, at 5.5%.
The definition of independent workers covers people who work at least 15 hours a week.
Steve King, a partner at Emergent, said the growth in independent workers is being driven by companies that want to stay ahead of change, and can bring in workers with the right skills. “In today’s world, change is happening so quickly that everyone is trying to figure out how to be more flexible and agile, cut fixed costs and move to variable costs,” said King. “Unfortunately, people are viewed as a fixed cost.”
King worked with MBO Partners to produce a recent study that estimated the entire independent worker headcount in the U.S., for all occupations, at 17.7 million. They also estimate that around one million of them are IT professionals.
A separate analysis by research firm Computer Economics finds a similar trend. Over the last two years, there has been a spike in the use of contract labor among large IT organizations — firms with IT operational budgets of more than $20 million, according to John Longwell, vice president of research at Computer Economics.
This year, contract workers make up 15% of a typical large organization’s IT staff at the median. This is up from a median of just 6% in 2011, said Longwell. The last time there was a similar increase in contract workers was in 1998, during the dot.com boom and the run-up to Y2K remediation efforts. Computer Economics recently published a research brief on the topic.
“The difference now is that use of contract or temporary workers is not being driven by a boom, but rather by a reluctance to hire permanent workers as the economy improves,” Longwell said.
Computer Economics expects large IT organizations to step up hiring in 2014, which may cause the percentage of contract workers to decline back to a more normal 10% level. But, Longwell cautioned, it’s not clear whether that new hiring will be involve full-time employees or even more contract labor.
Passwords Continue As The Weakest Link
Comments Off on Passwords Continue As The Weakest Link
Passwords aren’t the only failure point in many recent widely publicized intrusions by hackers.
But passwords played a part in the perfect storm of users, service providers and technology failures that can result in epic network disasters. Password-based security mechanisms — which can be cracked, reset and socially engineered — no longer suffice in the era of cloud computing.
The problem is this: The more complex a password is, the harder it is to guess and the more secure it is. But the more complex a password is, the more likely it is to be written down or otherwise stored in an easily accessible location, and therefore the less secure it is. And the killer corollary: If a password is stolen, its relative simplicity or complexity becomes irrelevant.
Password security is the common cold of our technological age, a persistent problem that we can’t seem to solve. The technologies that promised to reduce our dependence on passwords — biometrics, smart cards, key fobs, tokens — have all thus far fallen short in terms of cost, reliability or other attributes. And yet, as ongoing news reports about password breaches show, password management is now more important than ever.
All of which makes password management a nightmare for IT shops. “IT faces competing interests,” says Forrester analyst Eve Maler. “They want to be compliant and secure, but they also want to be fast and expedient when it comes to synchronizing user accounts.”
IBM Sued Over Disaster
IBM has been hit with a multimillion-dollar lawsuit by chemical products manufacturer Avantor Performance Materials, which alleges that IBM lied about the suitability of an SAP-based software package it sells in order to win Avantor’s business.
In 2010, Avantor decided to upgrade its ERP (enterprise resource planning) platform to SAP software, according to the lawsuit, filed Thursday in U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey.
“Seizing upon Avantor’s decision — and fully aware that, given the competitive pressures of Avantor’s industry, and the specialized demands of its customers, Avantor could not tolerate any disruptions in customer service — IBM represented that IBM’s ‘Express Life Sciences Solution’ … was uniquely suited to Avantor’s business,” the lawsuit states. “The Express Solution is a proprietary IBM pre-packaged software solution that runs on an SAP platform.”
But Avantor discovered a different truth after signing on with IBM, finding that Express Life was “woefully unsuited” to its business and the implementation brought its operations to “a near standstill,” according to the suit.
IBM also violated its contract by staffing the project with “incompetent and reckless consultants” who made “numerous design, configuration and programming errors,” it states.
In addition, IBM “intentionally or recklessly failed” to tell Avantor about risks to the project and hurried towards a go-live date, the suit alleges.
“To conceal the System’s defects and functional gaps, IBM ignored the results of its own pre-go-live tests, conducted inadequate and truncated testing and instead recommended that Avantor proceed with the go-live as scheduled — even though Avantor had repeatedly emphasized to IBM that meeting a projected go-live date was far less important than having a fully functional System that would not disrupt Avantor’s ability to service its customers,” the suit states.
The resulting go-live, which occurred in May, “was a disaster,” with the system failing to process orders properly, losing some orders altogether, failing to generate need paperwork for U.S. Customs officials and directing “that dangerous chemicals be stored in inappropriate locations,” the suit states.
Avantor has suffered tens of millions of dollars in monetary damages, as well as taken a hit to its reputation among partners and customers, the suit states.
I.T. Spending On The Rise
Worldwide IT spending remains on track to increase by 6% in 2012 despite the grim economic conditions in Europe, thanks to strong software, storage, smartphone and tablet sales, according to IDC.
While 2012 has been a tough year for many IT vendors, they have done better overall than many expected in the first half of the year, IDC said.
For example, software spending has been robust, even in parts of the world where the economy has been weakest, as businesses hope software tools and applications will help them implement cost-reduction strategies.
The 6% growth compares to a 7% increase in worldwide IT spending last year. IDC expects 6% growth in 2013.
Software, storage, enterprise network and mobile device markets have offset weaker sales in servers, peripherals and PCs. However, the launch of Windows 8 during the fourth quarter should help the PC market recover next year, IDC said.
U.S. IT spending will grow by 5.9% in 2012, compared to 8.5% last year. However, the strength of the dollar during the first six months of the year means that IT spending in dollar terms will grow just 4% for the full year.