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Print out digital photos or risk losing them, Google boss warns

Internet pioneer Vint Cerf says it is time to start preserving the vast quantities of digital data before they are lost forever

Google's vice president has warned internet users to print out treasured photographs or risk losing them.

Vint Cerf, the internet pioneer, said it was time to start preserving the vast quantities of digital data which are produced before they are lost forever.

Warning that the 21st century could become a second "Dark Ages" because so much data is now kept in digital format, he said that future generations would struggle to understand our society because technology is advancing so quickly that old files will be inaccessible.

Speaking at a conference in San Jose, California, Mr Cerf likened the problem to the Dark Ages, the period in Britain between the 5th and 8th centuries where little is known, following the collapse of the Roman Empire.

“If we don’t find a solution our 21st Century will be an information black hole.

“Future generations will wonder about us but they will have very great difficulty knowing about us.

“We think about digitising things because we think we will preserve them, but what we don't understand is that unless we take other steps, those digital versions may not be any better, and may even be worse than, the artefacts that we digitised.

“We stand to lose a lot of our history. If you think about the quantity of documentation from our daily lives which is captured in digital form, like our interactions by email, people's tweets, all of the world wide web, then if you wanted to see what was on the web in 1994 you'd have trouble doing that. A lot of the stuff disappears.

“We don't want our digital lives to fade away. If we want to preserve them the same way we preserve books and so on we need to make sure that the digital objects we create will be rendered far into the future.”

Selfies are likely to stay in digital format only Mr Cerf said there was a huge problem with the ability to preserve and run software over long periods of time. He said he felt a ‘great burden’ to find a way to create digital formats which can still be accessed in thousands of years. He is recommending the creation of a system which will not only store a digital format but preserve details of the software and operating system needed to access it, so it can be recreated in the future.

In the meantime, he recommended printing out important documents such as treasured family pictures to avoid losing them through outdated operating systems.

“We have various formats for digital photographs and movies and those formats need software to correctly render those objects. “Sometimes the standards we use to produce those objects fade away and are replaced by other alternatives and then software that is supposed to render images can't render older formats, so the images are no longer visible.

“This is starting to happen to people who are saving a lot of their digital photographs because they are just files of bits. The file system doesn't know how to interpret them, you need software to do that. Now you've lost the photograph in effect.

“If there are pictures that you really really care about then creating a physical instance is probably a good idea. Print them out, literally.’

Some selfies may be better off lost Mr Cerf said it was unclear what would be the most important data of our generation so it was important to preserve as much as possible.

“Historians will tell you that sometimes documents, transactions, images and so on may turn out to have an importance which is not understood for hundreds of years. So failure to preserve them will cause us to lose our perspective.”

However David Oren, of CISCO systems warned that preserving all data meant that information would never be destroyed.

“There is an expectation that we can make information disappear if we reach in with a digital hammer. I think we should disabuse ourselves of that.

“If information is created and ever escapes, the bits cannot be destroyed. So that is the flip side of the argument.”

Mr Cerf and Mr Oren were speaking at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual conference in San Jose, California.

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Is it Back to the Future for Enterprise Tech? Business & Technology Predictions in Asia Pacific for 2015

As I peer into my proverbial crystal ball to see what the future holds in Enterprise Tech for the year ahead, I can’t but help going back to my early teens to the year 1985 and reminisce one of my favorite movie of all time.  In the the smash hit Hollywood trilogy Back to the Future, director and creator Robert Zemeckis imagineeered what our world would be like in the year that now stands before us, 2015. Fan’s will recall in his second installment, the eccentric Doctor Emmett Brown who incarnated a time machine out of coupe propelled the teenage rock star wannabe Marty McFly in a flying Delorean thirty years into the future to give us this glimpse.

Despite Zemeckis’ loathe to create a film that predicts the future, he did manage to get a few things right!  And even if we don’t have flying cars zooming across our skies, those uber cool self lacing Nike’s or hover boards (there are a number of promising prototypes), innovations like video phones (Skype), controllerless motion sensing  video games (Microsoft Kinect & Nintendo Wii) and biometric identifying payment systems (Apple Pay & Hitachi’s Finger Vein technology) are very much part of our lives today.

Economists and even psychics will admit predicting the future is super hard to do, but arguably Zemeckis’ greatest achievement in this film is depicting just how much technology has become embedded in every day life.

Similarly, the interplay between business and technology appears not only more seamless than ever before, but critical.  As we have seen exciting new markets emerge, age old companies falter and consumer service expectations forever changed, the winners of tomorrow’s economy are those who are transforming today.

The Business Defined IT era is here, and the need for IT organizations to embrace the third platform that is built on mobile devices, cloud services, social networks and big data analytics is now.  The CIO must respond to these trends and become an architect and broker of business services rather than technology builder focused on data center infrastructure.

Here in Asia Pacific, although CIO’s have won the respect of the business, moving upwards may take more convincing.  According to a recent study from the Economist Intelligence Unit, almost nine-in-ten (89%) surveyed believe the CIO has a strategic role that goes beyond managing the IT function.  However nearly one-in-three (30%) respondents do not believe the CIO should be a candidate to succeed the CEO.

Together with Hu Yoshida’s top 10 technology predictions for 2015, I have set the time circuits on to identify how they will play out in 5 key social and business trends evolving in this dynamic region;

#1 - Smart City initiatives will drive greater investment in the Internet of Things Asia Pacific countries are amongst the largest and fastest-growing urban areas on the planet.  It also has some of the worlds most underdeveloped infrastructure, densest cities, fastest growing energy consumption, busiest transport routes, active natural events and arguably most at threat of climate change.  The opportunity for Internet of Things and Machine to Machine interaction is now apparent, as a number of Governments across the region have committed to national initiatives to propel the proliferation of smart cities. 

#2 - Competitive industries will ramp up Big Data initiatives to gain competitive advantage Although adoption of Big Data across the region remains low comparatively to other geographies, organizations operating in competitive industries are no longer looking at it as an initiative, but as an imperative.  As initial projects show promising new insights and customer engagement, other companies will make similar investments to drive a new “arms race” in key verticals.  

#3 - Hybrid Cloud will emerge as the preferred way to deploy Enterprise Applications As cloud platforms reach a level of maturity and established vendors and service providers in the region fiercely compete for market share, the stage is set for organizations to transform their core applications on a mix of Private and Public clouds.  Solutions which integrate both platforms to deliver a seamless Hybrid Cloud experience will help organizations realize better alignment of cost whilst at the same time meeting important privacy and compliance requirements. 

#4 - The mobile explosion will prompt supporting information infrastructure to be more data-driven Asia Pacific is the world largest mobile region, with analysis showing 1.7 billion unique subscribers in 2013 making it half of the global connected population.  Over 750 million new subscribers are expected to join over the next 5 years. The launch of high-speed 4G services across the region are helping remove limits on internet use and giving smaller businesses greater outreach to customers, and fundamentally changing the way in which we interact. 

#5 - As technology drives more implications for personal privacy, business will increase investments to address compliance With technology now pervasive and Government’s introducing new or updated privacy regulations across Asia Pacific, organisations will be forced to place greater emphasis on their internal privacy policies and look to technology to assist them. Organisations that successfully transition to the new privacy-protected era will have introduced a culture of compliance to their employees, and made smart investments in their data collection and audit practices.

So buckle up and lets take this puppy up to 88 miles per hour…

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8 Enterprise Software Predictions for 2015

What does the future hold for BI, CRM, ERP and enterprise software in 2015? IT experts discuss which enterprise software trends will have the greatest impact on IT organizations in the coming year.

If only senior IT executives had a crystal ball. Then they would be able to see what software they would need, or want, to license – and could plan and budget accordingly.

Instead, senior IT decision-makers must rely on vendors, marketers and analysts (and technology reporters) to show them what the future may have in store for them. And while no one truly knows what trends will dominate the enterprise software space in 2015, experts in BI, CRM, ERP and enterprise software believe these eight are worth paying attention to.

1. Hybrid cloud goes mainstream. “[We] saw a spike in multi-cloud strategies in 2014, and that will continue into 2015,” says Chris Wolf, CTO of the Americas, VMware. “CIOs will continue to seek out the flexibility that [hybrid clouds offer]. And senior IT decision makers will invest in hybrid cloud architectures to future-proof their applications and services.”

“The cloud has been a hot topic for a number of years, with companies moving applications to the cloud for speed to execution, lower costs, higher level of service and/or preservation of capital,” adds Marc Malizia, CTO of RKON Technologies, a managed cloud solutions provider. “As we move into 2015, we are going to see a continued increase in organizations shifting to some form of the cloud. Most will adopt a hybrid model, mixing cloud provider services with their in-house cloud computing platform.”

2. Subscription pricing for enterprise software. “Competitive pressures and new efficiencies will cause enterprise software pricing to continue to shift further toward subscription models,” predicts Engin Kirda, cofounder and chief architect, Lastline, which provides protection against malware. “Rather than large lump sum licensing or costly preloads on proprietary hardware, enterprise software will be increasingly priced on a per-user and/or per-year basis,” he says. “Not only will end-user-centric applications be priced this way, but other enterprise software and services, including data center management and breach detection, will also adopt this more predictable and scalable pricing model.”

3. Mobile CRM – and other enterprise mobile apps – will take off. “Salesforce set the stage for this trend in 2014 with investments in their mobile app and getting their integration partners to use it,” says Mark Seemann, CEO of Synety, a cloud-based software and communications business. And in 2015, “mobile will continue to be a crucial battleground for the larger CRM players, who will continue to bring their mobile app functionality closer to the level of their main Web product,” he predicts.

“As employees spend less and less time in the office, having solutions – CRM, BPM, etc. – that are mobile friendly will be essential,” says Michael DeFranco, founder & CEO, Lua, which provides secure messaging for the enterprise. “To succeed in the enterprise, solutions must prioritize the needs and behavior of mobile workers in their design, to ensure they are connected wherever they are, and are able to communicate and collaborate with colleagues back at the office.”

4. In-memory computing will become a leading differentiator in ERP. “In-memory computing approaches like SAP HANA and Oracle In-Memory Applications will become the main battleground area for ERP product differentiation, especially in the large enterprise space,” predicts Glenn Johnson, senior vice president, Americas, Magic Software Enterprises, a provider of application platforms, enterprise mobility and business integration solutions. “As market noise around Big Data continues, ERP brands that fail to offer in-memory computing solutions will fade when compared with leaders in this area.”

5. Deeper ERP integration. “ERP is becoming more versatile, providing deeper integration with procurement, human resources and customer service software,” says Michael Golz, senior vice president & CIO, SAP Americas. “SAP has made a number of strategic acquisitions, most recently with Concur, that help customers expand the value of their ERP system,” by having it to “interact with new areas.” That increased integration and depth will continue to blur the lines between enterprise software systems and help organizations derive greater value from their IT investments.

“Historically, ERP and CRM have been viewed as two separate systems of engagement,” notes Jeremy Roche, CEO, FinancialForce, a provider of cloud ERP software on the Salesforce platform. “However, many businesses are starting to realize the immense value in eliminating distinctions between front and back office processes, bringing ERP to the forefront,” he explains.

“Rather than continuing to allow vital customer information to be scattered among various pieces of a business,” he says, “companies will begin to merge ERP and CRM into one single system of customer engagement, so they can better support the entire customer journey, from the initiation of interest to the delivery of a product.”

6. Open source will continue to gain ground. “Data warehousing and BI has long been the domain of proprietary software concentrated across a handful of vendors,” notes Ali Ghodsi, cofounder and head of product management and engineering at Databricks. “However, the last 10 years has seen the emergence and increasing prevalence of Hadoop and subsequently Spark as lower-cost open source alternatives that deliver the scale and sophistication needed to gain insights from Big Data,” he explains.

And open source software will continue to gain a foothold in the enterprise space in 2015, predicts Ghodsi and others. “The Hadoop-related ecosystem is projected to be $25 billion by 2020,” says Ghodsi. “And Spark is now distributed by 10-plus vendors, including SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, and Teradata, with support for all major BI tools, including Tableau, Qlik and MicroStrategy.”

7. Business Intelligence software will become more visual – and easier to use. “In 2015, BI solutions will look as good as they operate, and will operate as good as they look," says James Richardson, business analytics strategist, Qlik, a provider of business intelligence and data visualization software. “Enterprise customers have been asking for BI solutions that are easier to use – self-service solutions. And visualization is key to this,” he explains. “By rendering data in easy-to-read graphs and charts, users will be able to understand their data in a way that is natural to them, breaking down the barriers between people and their data.”

8. Social intelligence gets even smarter. “In 2014, we saw organizations begin to analyze social data in earnest,” says Ellie Fields, vice president, Product Marketing, Tableau Software, a provider of business intelligence and analytics software. In 2015, this trend will continue to grow. “Tracking conversations via social will let companies find out when a topic is starting to trend and what their customers are talking about,” she explains.

And this ‘social intelligence’ will allow companies to be more nimble and responsive to customer needs, desires and issues – and get a leg up on the competition.

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The "Facebook for Business" page is littered with comments from angry, frustrated advertisers

Last week, Facebook's reported that its Q3 2014 revenues were up by 59%, reaching a staggering $3.2 billion, but many people who contributed to that figure are pretty frustrated.

Social media marketers, brand advertisers and small business owners have taken to Facebook's "Facebook for Business Page" to voice their increasingly angry complaints about the social network's advertising features. A quick browse through the comments on the page shows just how upset people are with the ineffectiveness of Facebook ads, the lack of organic views their Page posts get, and Facebook's staunch refusal to give customers human reps to deal with.

Here's a look at the general themes of frustration:

Facebook hides all their Page posts:

We now know that Facebook shows a brand's posts to barely 2% of the people following its Facebook page, making organic reach virtually non-existent. But that hasn't stopped people from protesting against Facebook's algorithm, especially when it doesn't show the posts to people who have actively decided to follow the brand. A common defense (represented here by Facebook user Vicky Lewis) has been that people using Facebook for free shouldn't expect to use it as a marketing channel for free either. However, small business owner Matt Dongworth had a credible argument against that sort of thinking:

As the complaints against Facebook's algorithm got increasingly desperate, a Facebook rep responded with a Kafka-esque suggestion that Page managers simply tell their followers to turn on the "get notifications from" tab in their news feed options. But how do you tell all your followers to do that if Facebook only shows your posts to 2% of them?

Facebook mismanages their payments:

People who decided to pay for their Facebook marketing efforts weren't too pleased either. In fact most were upset at how ineffective the ads were in getting people to follow their pages or like their posts. On top of that a lot of users complained about payment problems where Facebook charged them for somebody else's ads:

Facebook's customer service doesn't exist

Probably the biggest complaint from Facebook advertisers was that unlike Google or Bing, Facebook refuses to have real humans dealing with its advertisers.. It was infuriating for people to see a Facebook rep respond to their complaint on the Page with a link to a tech support or FAQ page, leading to increasingly desperate requests for human interaction.

Facebook has been receiving a lot of attention lately as the premier channel for social media advertising. That's mostly because for the longest time, it was the only one that had the reach and sophisticated targeting tools that were so attractive to digital advertisers. But its hands-off approach and lack of empathy with the very people generating its mammoth revenues is surprising to see, and it could create a real opportunity for competitors such as Google and Twitter.

by OMAR AKHTAR, SENIOR EDITOR

http://www.thehubcomms.com/the-facebook-for-business-page-is-littered-with-comments-from-angry-frustrated-advertisers/article/380710/

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Why Your Company May Dump QuickBooks This Year - Forbes.com

By Gene Marks - Forbes.com

Believe it or not, your company is about to be part of an enormous wave of change in the next few years.

That’s because, if you’re like most small and medium sized businesses, you’re likely using an on-premise accounting application. And most likely that on-premise solution isQuickBooks. QuickBooks is by far the most popular accounting application for SMBs and deservedly so – it’s full featured, easy to use and well supported by Intuit. My company is an Intuit INTU +1.06% partner. We sell QuickBooks. But this year we’re going to look into selling other products as well. Why? Because as good as QuickBooks is, I believe that many of my clients are going to dump it starting this year and over the next few years. You too.

That’s because the cloud has caught up to the accounting world. And there are many competitors to QuickBooks standing by to pounce.

My consulting firm serves about 600 active companies. More than 90% of them currently use an on-premise accounting (or financial management orEnterprise Resource Planning/ERP) application. Isn’t it ridiculously obvious that within the next few years just about all of those companies will be using a cloud-based application instead? Of course it is. I’ve watched the enormous growth of software-as-a-service applications for customer relationship management, human resources and payroll. I’ve noticed the faster performance. I’ve witnessed their ease of access from tablets and mini-laptops and even smartphones. I’ve watched companies move more and more of their in-house systems to hosted ones, eliminating their servers and IT infrastructure. And I’ve seen my own clients, small business owners who look at any new relationship or technology with a wary eye, grow more comfortable letting other companies handle their data on managed servers over the past few years. We admit that though no one’s infallible, the security that they provide are better than our own. The environment is perfect for cloud based accounting applications.

And it’s a perfect environment for software developers too. “Most of the large software companies aren’t putting many resources into on-premise solutions any more,” Brian Jacobs, a partner at venture capital firm Emergence Capitaltold me recently. “They are basically pushing their customers into a software-as-a-service environment.” This is true. Emergence Capital invests in cloud based business applications and Jacobs believes the market is in its infancy. Ask anyone at Microsoft MSFT +2.02%, Sage, Oracle ORCL +0.4% or SAP and they’ll tell you what the guys at Salesforce.com have been saying for years: the cloud is the future for them. It’s a more profitable and more productive business model for a software company to distribute their products. “There are so many advantages of a cloud solution that I personally don’t see how these on-premise systems can move into the future,” said Rob Reid, CEO of Intacct, an online financial management application. “VCs are not investing in premise software companies any more.”

Which brings me back to QuickBooks. In the next few years it’s inevitable that you’re going to replace your on-premise QuickBooks system for something cloud-based. You won’t have much of a choice. And you’re going to take that opportunity to look around. And you’re going to discover there are some interesting alternatives.

There’s Xero, which just raised $150 million in October. And Intacct, which has received multiple rounds of financing over the past few years. There’s FreshBooks. There’s NetSuite and of course there’s QuickBooks Online. There are others but these, in my opinion, are the big players right now in the cloud accounting/ERP market. To oversimplify, Xero, FreshBooks and QuickBooks Online are arguably geared to the basic bookkeeping/invoicing/bill-paying customer – the startup, the very small micro-business, the mom and pop. Intacct and NetSuite are targeting the next level – those companies that employ controllers or CFOs, are growing, have multiple users and need advanced tools like sales order processing, purchase order, inventory and warehouse management, workflows, automation and more complex reporting for cash flow and consolidations.

These applications have been built from the ground up and support a better, more flexible web-based architecture. Smelling the opportunity, resellers and partners for these products (like me) are popping up everywhere. Migration tools to move away from QuickBooks are available. Deals have been struck to integrate these products with other popular online services and collaboration tools likeDropbox, Zoho, PayPal and Bill.com.

So what will happen? Many current QuickBooks customers (perhaps you?) who are frustrated with the software’s older architecture but have suffered with it because they/you did not feel the need (or were just too lazy) to change will now be forced to change in the next few years. And they/you will be looking at other alternatives. And, for the first time in a long time, there are many great other options to consider. “50% of the customers we are getting are coming from QuickBooks,” Intacct’s Reid told me. “And we’re expecting a tornado wave of activity in the next few years.” The company has experienced a 150% growth in bookings over the past year alone.

So be prepared: maybe this year, but certainly during the next few years you will be part of this enormous trend. That’s a certainty. Will you be one of the many who decide to dump QuickBooks?

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Mitigating WAN Downtime

Networks are subject to reliability issues - just like any computing resource. If they fail without any alternative resources in place work can grind to a stop resulting in significant losses. A Gartner report from several years ago attributed a 19% drop in net income for a single quarter to an outage at Hershey Foods. More options are available today for companies intent on avoiding these kinds or results.

Remote offices are a regular part of the enterprise world, and they all rely on connectivity to their corporate mother-ship in some way. Branch offices with local computing resources like application and storage servers may be protected from some outages but rely on relatively more expensive equipment and support needs. And branches that rely entirely on WAN connections to the centralized datacenter can be completely out of business when that connection fails.

Hybrid systems that combine the advantages of local computing with centrally managed storage, support, and applications are an option that, while the can't completely eliminate the threat of disconnection, are relatively immune to complete failure. This kind of deployment allows users in the branch to continue operation for most functions. Similarly, a branch that is completely destroyed by a disaster can be operated from a different location until it has been rebuilt because the branch data resides in the central datacenter.

Enterprises engaged in acquisition strategies that include onboarding branch offices are in position to leverage this hybrid approach to computing and may find it can simplify their integration efforts.

- See more at: http://www.convergeyourbranch.com/17/mitigating-wan-downtime

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Why Our Kids Must Learn to Code

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The Philippines’ oldest IT distributor launches its own series of tablets to compete with the likes of Cherry Mobile and CloudFone—and one of the devices even takes the “cheapest Windows 8.1 tablet” title.

By Yahoo – Wed, Jan 28, 2015

In what has become a trend among Philippine PC...