Die Mobilfunk-Industrie stellt sich immer wieder die "Henne-Ei-Frage": Was war früher da? Die Henne oder das Ei? …mehr
Der Aufbau eines EU-weiten Mobilfunkdienstes über Satellit kommt nicht wie geplant voran. …mehr
Die Schummelvorwürfe gegen Verteidigungsminister zu Guttenberg (CSU) rufen Plagiatsjäger im Internet auf den Plan. …mehr
Die Hightech-Messe CeBIT wendet sich in diesem Jahr wieder verstärkt dem Verbraucher zu. …mehr
In der weltweit stärksten Internetnation China ist das größte Social Network Facebook bisher kläglich gescheitert. …mehr
Derzeit stehen interne Restrukturierungsmaßnahmen im Zuge der Umsetzung gesetzlicher Anforderungen auf der Agenda der Versorgungsunternehmen und ihrer IT. IT-Investitionen sollen aber auch Schwung in Vertrieb und Marketing von Versorgungsunternehmen bringen. Denn der zunehmende Wettbewerb rückt die optimierte Kundenversorgung in das Zentrum der Aufmerksamkeit. …mehr
Jedes sechste deutsche Unternehmen mit mehr als 500 Mitarbeitern nutzt im Personalwesen ein gemeinsames Shared Service Center im Konzernverbund. Bei weiteren zwei Prozent der Unternehmen ist der Einsatz einer zentralen Unternehmenseinheit geplant. Dies ergab eine Befragung von mehr als 300 Personalleitern, die RAAD Ende 2010 durchführte. …mehr
Immer weniger deutsche IT-Entscheider wollen Abstriche bei der E-Mail-Sicherheit machen und bevorzugen Spezialanbieter gegenüber Herstellern mit einem großen Produktportfolio. …mehr
Die London Stock Exchange (LSE) hat das Linux-gestützte Handelssystem "Millennium Exchange" in Betrieb genommen. Es soll das auf Microsoft .NET basierende TradElect ersetzen. …mehr
Der Halbleiterhersteller Infineon hat nach Jahren schmerzhafter Verluste laut Vorstandschef Peter Bauer die Trendwende geschafft. …mehr
Seit dem 14. Februar hat die weltgrößte Mobilfunkmesse ihre Pforten geöffnet. Wir zeigen Ihnen alle Trends und Entwicklungen rund um Smartphones, Apps und Tablet-PCs. …mehr
Das Ingenieurbüro Manfred Dillmann, kurz madicon, hat eine Lösung für die Verwaltung von Besprechungsprotokollen mittels der IBM-Groupware Notes/Domino parat. …mehr
Wie steht es um die mentale und körperliche Fitness und damit auch um die Arbeitsfähigkeit von Freiberuflern? Wie lässt sich die Leistungsfähigkeit erhalten? Diese Fragen will eine Studie beantworten. …mehr
Vom Hype zum Business - der 3. Teil der Webcast-Serie zum Thema Cloud-Computing am 24. Februar um 11 Uhr zeigt, wie Unternehmen heute schon neue Betriebsmodelle und zahlreiche Geschäftsmöglichkeiten im Bereich Hosted Cloud nutzen. …mehr
Die Experton Group hat einen Cloud-Kalkulator entwickelt, mit dem Firmen ausrechnen können, was sie gegenüber ihrem eigenen Rechenzentrum mit einer Cloud-Variante einsparen könn(t)en. …mehr
Vom 17. Februar bis 2. März 2011 beantwortet der Münchner Personalberater Thomas Hegger Fragen zu den Aussichten vor allem von IT-Fachleuten, die in der Konstruktions- und Produktionswelt zu Hause sind. …mehr
Wie wird die Cloud unser Leben verändern? Microsoft-Vordenker Dan Reed wagte auf der Digital-Life-Design-Konferenz einen Blick in die Zukunft und beschreibt, wie die Cloud uns zusammen mit vernetzten Geräten helfen wird, unseren Lebens- und Arbeitsalltag besser zu bewältigen. …mehr
Die Hirnwindungen waren nicht so schnell wie die Schaltkreise: Beim US-Spielshowklassiker "Jeopardy" hat der IBM-Supercomputer "Watson" zwei menschliche Champions geschlagen. …mehr
Noch ist LTE nicht auf breiter Front ausgerollt, da propagiert die Industrie bereits den Nachfolger LTE Advanced. Andere fordern jedoch, erst die LTE-Kinderkrankheiten zu beseitigen. …mehr
Das Dell Inspiron Mini 1018 ist eigentlich ein ganz normales Netbook. Im Test fielen aber Details auf, die es von anderen Mini-Notebooks unterscheiden. …mehr
Es ist zwar viel initiiert, aber mit der Umsetzung hapert es oft. Michael Pitsch, Geschäftsführer Health & Public Service beim Berater Accenture, über den neuen elektronischen Personalausweis und warum Deutschland in E-Government-Rankings so oft auf den hinteren Plätzen zu finden ist. …mehr
Die App "Simplenote" von Codality erlaubt es Anwendern, neben Mac, PC oder Web-Dienst auch mobil via iPhone/iPad auf Notizen zuzugreifen. …mehr
Der Canon i-Sensys LBP3010 ist ein günstiger Einstiegs-Laserdrucker für den Arbeitplatz. Die Druckgeschwindigkeit und -qualität des Schwarzweiß-Drucker ist okay. …mehr
Die Wirtschaft wirbt wieder um den IT- und Ingenieursnachwuchs. Karrieremessen erleichtern das gegenseitige Kennenlernen. …mehr
Projector manufacturer InFocus has released a short-throw projector aimed at businesses that face space and budget constraints. …mehr
Microsoft has unveiled its new , a free browser toolbar designed to expose all the latest and greatest features of Redmond's search engine--many of which you may not know exist. To make all of this goodness happen, however, you'll have to open up a little--well, a lot--to Bing's toolbar, which collects information about your computer and searches, as well as the addresses of the websites you visit. Who knows, it may even be silently judging you as well. …mehr
The for the prestigious BAFTA games awards, and it's mostly business as usual. A predictable range of games have been nominated and small, lower-budget titles have, with one notable exception, been left by the wayside. In fact, the only surprising thing about the list is that industry darling Red Dead Redemption is up for just one award: the publicly-voted GAME Award of 2010. …mehr
Last week, in , we learned that an obscure cyber security company was trying to take out a whistleblowing site on behalf of a Fortune 50 corporation, thanks to a shadowy group of uber geeks whose identities are as yet unknown. …mehr
We at Geek Tech have seen some pretty spectacular Kinect hacks, but this latest mashup of a Kinect plus an Android tablet has incredible potential for awesome, portable applications. …mehr
No doubt about it -- gamers love a good hacker story. Today's special comes from Malaga, Spain where somebody thought it'd be a great idea to blackmail Nintendo. …mehr
Apple has released an update to Digital Camera RAW that adds support for six new cameras. This compatibility update, version 3.6, affects iPhoto and Aperture users. …mehr
Campbell Such says becoming CIO was not a specific goal for him when he left university with an engineering degree. It was the result of taking on a series of opportunities locally and offshore, which led to his current role as general manager IT at Bidvest New Zealand."But having done it, I love it," says Such who has been with the food supply company for nearly two-and-a-half years. "For me, the key is not the technology per se. It is how you can use technology to help the business achieve its goal. That is the essence of what I love about my role. It is working with customers, working with our internal teams building those relationships, and then helping business to grow through the use of technology."The company is a wholesale distributor for the food service and hospitality industry, being part of an international group with operations in Australia, the UK, South Africa, Europe, Singapore and China. Customers include hotels, cafes, restaurants and aged-care facilities. "We have more than 11,000 customers in New Zealand and close to 30,000 product lines."The company has grown significantly in the past 10 years and continues to do so."We have gone from small to medium to large [enterprise], and we need to keep our IT systems ahead of the business requirements. The business is prepared to invest for the future. Where I am at the moment, is continuing to build the foundation to grow the business on. That is where I will be over the next two to five years, working with the business to continue growth."He and his team are in the midst of an infrastructure and applications refresh to ensure their systems can support this growth. He compares it with changing the foundation of a house that has become too small for the occupants. "We are lifting it out, pulling out the foundations, replacing the foundations and the plumbing and the wiring, and then putting it back down hopefully without affecting the business too much. We are building a platform from where we will build a 10-storey building as the business grows.""We can't run the business without technology," says Such, who cites the company processes some 180,000 invoices a month alone. "We know that going forward, technology is going to be just a bigger and bigger part of the business. But I want to isolate the techie technology from the people that need to be able to use it. They should just be able to use it [to do their jobs].""We are seriously thinking about what we need to take on board in our systems. The company is prepared to invest to provide the environment to support our customers' requirements."In conjunction with the building of the infrastructure, you must keep an eye on technology that will help the business," he says. "What are the opportunities and what are the potentials of the technologies. And of the systems we can use to help to continue to grow the business?"What he finds advantageous is support from the top for these initiatives. "There is a willingness and understanding of technology in our business right at the highest level."Being part of an international business has given him opportunities to talk with his counterparts in other areas of the globe, particularly in Australia. "Their business is four times bigger than ours."He says weathering the recession was a challenge, but that the business had the resilience and the strength to grow through it. He finds having a "fantastic, very entrepreneurial team" in the support area of the business and the branches a big help. He says Bidvest has grown in New Zealand, but still retains a "small business heart"."We are not a corporate structure with command and control." For instance, there is no headquarters; instead there is a central support office with a network of distribution centres (DC) around the country. Each distribution centre is a stand-alone profit centre. "The DC general managers are empowered to do what they need to do to operate the business successfully in their region."The IT team is also set up to support this type of operation. Such says the IT operates from the central office. It is an internal team of five with outsourced support around software development and infrastructure. "We run an internal help desk," he says. "But if we need more help or more resources, we work with our outsourcers."He holds regular meetings with the other senior executives. "Each month, we hold an IT steering group meeting. I meet with the managing director and one of the senior execs to review what is going on, what their priorities are and to make sure I am working on the right things. That is the chance to understand more about what we need to do and how we need to do it, and how we can positively impact the business."He is encouraging the other business units to discuss with IT what is going on in their departments. "We are not looking for control, it is more around supporting people."A key success factor for him is communicating what IT is doing with the rest of the Bidvest staff. His team produces a newsletter every two months with online and print versions that detail what projects they are working on. He finds this to be a very useful process. "It helps me to better communicate with the business and to do that on an ongoing basis. Communication is really important. Trying to find the best way to communicate with the business in what we are doing and the value that we can add is something that I have a particular focus on."He says one thing that has never changed in the industry is this: "IT is there to support the business and do what it needs to do to achieve this [growth]."If at all, the shift is around , who has gone beyond being seen as a technology leader. "The CIO is now engaged with the rest of the business, [and is] more around the support of revenue generation."I see IT as such a key part of the business. We could not run our business without it. I see my role becoming the consultative adviser and to become part of the teams across the business, when they are doing their planning and decision-making."We have seen IT leaders move into general management roles or senior roles in business," he says. "I see the role more as becoming closer and closer to the decision-making and strategy process."In the past two years, his focus has been on the internal systems and building the platform to grow the business. But in the next 12 to 18 months, Such says he is looking at other things for the business to grow.At the time of the interview, Bidvest has just issued iPads to eight members of the executive team as part of a pilot project. The initiative came from Bidvest managing director Nigel Boswell. For Such, the pilot is part of preparing for the expected rise in user demand and requirements for mobile tools. Bidvest has an online ordering system where 40 percent of its business is transacted. That is a huge amount of business, he says, as he estimates that with a turnover of more than $500 million in a year, this means more than $200 million goes though the online ordering system.A chef finishes for the day, gets online at 2 am and sees what he wants to order. They have the ability to create menus online and to have the cost of those worked out and to place orders for automatic delivery the next day. "It has become hugely important for our customers and it has been a fantastic benefit for us in terms of our own operational ability to do things more quickly," he says.The online ordering system, with its "incredibly business-focused applications", has been a success for the company having been running for around seven years. But he says the company continues to develop it, citing an ongoing project to develop an application that will run on the iPhone and iPad.He says there are two broad sets of people who will be impacted by wireless -- the next generation of chefs who use these devices and who will expect to have that stuff available to them to do things. Then, there are also the people they want to attract as employees. "We need to consider how we will be able to provide the tools and the environment for them to be attracted to us as a business, and to grow our customer base and bring on good employees."Such is the first CIO [GM IT] for Bidvest New Zealand. He joined the company from Healtheries New Zealand, which produces health and food supplements for the retail sector. His first exposure to IT was in a technical marketing role with Data General (now part of EMC). He worked for a small business and then went back to IT when he ran a digital imaging bureau, before taking on the role of systems manager with Jenkins Group. Through contacts made in this role, he was offered the role of director of IT for Sinclair Systems International based in California.His three-year stint at Sinclair gave him the unique chance to lead teams based in the US and the UK, simultaneously. For nearly five months, he commuted back and forth between the offices in Fresno, California, and the head office in Norwich, England. "It gave me a chance to get out of New Zealand and get more of a global perspective," says Such."That was an interesting take on different cultures, different ways of doing business," he adds "It was a great opportunity for me to broaden some skills and understand how different people can be in different cultures.""The American and British cultures are quite different," he says. "The MD of Sinclair used to say it was two countries divided by the same language."Such came back to New Zealand to work as general manager for Productivity Software, running the development arm of the software vendor that specialised in ERP systems for the printing industry.A little known insight in his career path, which this writer gleaned during a background research, is some part-time work Such did at university as a model. Queried about this career derivation, Such says the work came about when his sister, who was doing a modelling course at that time, told him they were looking for male models."I was in my early 20s and so I went along," says Such. "They took some photos and I got work out of it for probably a couple of years."He recalls doing a television advertisement for a chocolate bar. "It was interesting and it was fun.""It was just a short-term thing," he says, with a laugh. "And they never called me from the Ford modelling agency in New York.""IT management -- it is much more fun." …mehr
Novell's shareholders have approved the sale of the company to Attachmate for about US$2.2 billion, although the deal depends on Novell getting approval to sell hundreds of patents to a consortium led by Microsoft. …mehr
In , I described my career move from to . For many observers, this may seem like a counterintuitive move. Why would someone working at one of America's corporate icons make the jump to working with small businesses? It's a question I've heard more than once from friends and family. …mehr
LinkedIn is rolling out an entirely redesigned privacy and security settings page aimed at helping users find important information quicker and navigate controls easier. …mehr
While pundits may joke about elected officials' inability to accurately tally just how much they're spending, a newly-formed caucus of CPAs in Congress may help change this. …mehr
Two new large format printers from Canon are ready for their big close-up at the Wedding & Portrait Photographer International (WPPI) Convention in Las Vegas next week. …mehr
The possibilities for the next Assassin's Creed installment trumped pretty much every other piece of news today. Too bad we don't have much more to go on than a vague mention. …mehr
Reputation once lost is hard to regain, goes the adage. …mehr
A recent study reveals the irony of smartphones -- they are so "smart" that consumers are having difficulty using them. And service providers are challenged supporting their users. …mehr
In the third night of man vs. machine on Jeopardy, trounced its champion opponents. …mehr
The Privacy Commissioner's report into the of some four million Vodafone customers' billing and call records has found failings on the telco's behalf.m." …mehr
Logically speaking, if wrongs don't make a right, then it must take at least three. Fortunately, we've got at least that many: a supposed revolt of Nokia shareholders? Bzzt. Apple and a game company having a tiff? Nope. And don't even get me started on a Dell marketing stunt--who ever thought that would go ? If being wrong is right, then the remainders for Wednesday, February 16, 2011 don't want to be, uh, right. …mehr
Asian companies listed in the Fortune Global 100 remains reluctant to engage stakeholders through Facebook, though they show the greatest year-on-year increase in official presence on this social network, said Burson-Marsteller's global research arm Wednesday. …mehr
Frankly, anything that reminds me of the untenable situation between the NFL owners and players right now just makes me want to cry into my Tom Rathman jersey. But when you compound it with EA and their monopoly over the video game license -- still a touchy subject -- it makes me really glad that opening day for the MLB is fast approaching. All of these millionaires arguing over just how rich they should they should be is driving me nuts, and that's not a shot aimed at the players. Everyone is guilty of putting on a sickening display. …mehr
?If you've been following the Jeopardy-IBM Watson faceoff this week, then you have witnessed a breakthrough in analytics and in new architectures for mining and analyzing diverse types of information in a single application. Watson and its successors may usher in a new approach to computing, combining as it does, so many disparate techniques to create a "thinking" machine. IBM has combined deep NLP with machine learning, a voting algorithm, a method of interpreting the questions and assessing them by formulating parallel hypotheses, and Hadoop and UIMA for preprocessing, as well as the usual search, fuzzy matching software and of course an in-memory caching system to save time in retrieval. To me, the strength of this system is the combination of all of these, and it is remarkable in that it doesn't rely on just one. In Watson, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. …mehr
All-in-One desktops generally have a tough time fitting into the Business realm. While convenient space-savers, they're generally pricier than similarly equipped tower models. But more importantly, those svelte chassis come at the cost of internal access -- often a deal breaker for IT departments that need unfettered access to their machines. …mehr
Microsoft may say it , but it certainly has a funny way of showing it. In fact, the company has now banned apps involving any open source licensing from its Windows Phone Marketplace. …mehr
today announced its music streaming service -- dubbed "Music Unlimited powered by Qriocity" -- will be available to Australians from today. …mehr
Scosche has released a new on-the-go backup battery that gives iPhone and iPad users a little extra juice when an outlet cannot be found. …mehr
I missed Tactics Ogre on the Super Nintendo when it came out in 1995. I blame PC games. I was already on to stuff like , , and of all things, Bethesda's Elder Scrolls followup, . Come on--that versus strategy gaming on a TV with a d-pad? …mehr
Apple has dominated close to 60 percent of the global touch panel capacity, causing its competitors -- including RIM, HP, and Motorola -- to fight for the remaining scraps to build touch screen smartphones and tablets, according to . Meanwhile, "second-tier" manufacturers (read: the creative minds behind ) are being pushed out of the tablet market altogether. …mehr
As I did yesterday, today I will be delving into the comments that the Fed has received on its draft rules implementing the "Durbin Amendment," which is the portion of the (section 1075) that affects debit card pricing and routing rules. The full text of the draft regulations can be found at the bottom of this post. Today's topic is the exemption for issuers with under $10 billion in assets, which apparently pleases nobody, least of all the very organizations it was intended to help. …mehr
Which BlackBerry applications should every new RIM smartphone owner download immediately? CIO.com's BlackBerry expert Al Sacco lists the best choices -- and all but one of these mobile apps are free. …mehr
That big massive ball of burning hydrogen in the center of our solar system has been getting more and more active as of late--the sun recently had three solar flares explode from the corona, its high temperature plasma atmosphere. Particularly powerful solar flares produce coronal mass ejections, which can reach temperatures of millions of degrees Fahrenheit at the time of explosion and can eventually reach Earth. …mehr
Sony is getting into the cloud-based game -- but its plan of attack seems almost built for failure. …mehr
Fox News host is unlikely to harm the Internet giant, analysts say. …mehr
