Rain Dances
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Is a Business Coach Worth It?
The IT industry, like many other industries, has a good number of business coaches and consultants ready to help you reach your goals. As individuals, each one has their own expertise and take on how to run, foster, and grow a business. A business coach much like a sports coach, can provide specified training, [...]
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The Key to Growing your Business
Wouldn’t it be great if there were a magical way to grow your business? Plant a seed and watch it grow, climb the beanstalk and collect your gold? Unfortunately this is not the case, growing a business takes hard work, dedication, experience, and patience. The reality is there are many “giants” out there looking to [...]
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Intel Shutting Down Motherboard Business
Intel has announced plans to get out of the motherboard manufacturing business in the next three years. This surprise move which speaks to the continued fading sales of desktop PC’s, is sure to impact the few remaining IT companies that build and white label PC’s. Though this may have a small affect on the SMB [...]
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5 Terms Your Clients should Never Know and their Alternatives
In the world of IT, there are acronyms, words, and products that we refer to on a regular basis. These terms become such a part of our daily speech that we tend to assume that everyone knows and can understand our geekspeak. The reality is that most people have no clue what we are talking [...]
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Private Bid Option for Best Buy may just speak to How Bad it Really Is
Best Buy has been having an extremely difficult year and reports of founder Richard Schulze requesting board approval to bid for private acquisition of the company, may show just what level of difficulty they have reached. The company which has recently announced layoffs and restructuring, as well as had Schulze step down in June; continues [...]
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Is Internet Explorer IE9+ the Y2K for Web Developers?
In an earlier post on Looks Cloudy we talked about how Internet Explore has been dethroned as the king of web browsers in “Google Chrome is now Bigger than Internet Explorer”. In that article we pointed out the fact that many websites are not compatible with IE9 and above, and that many developers have shied [...]
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Mythbusting CISPA
At Looks Cloudy we don’t discuss politics. Unless the political topics explicitly make an effort to raise significant concerns for service providers and cloud users in general. So today, without prejudice, we’re offering you some interesting reading about CISPA, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act. Much like it’s predecessor (SOPA) which was defeated after [...]
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Cloud Gear, Cloud To Go, Rain Dances
Who is the biggest victim of IT consumerization?
Research in Motion has been no stranger to the total domination of Android and iPhone – in fact it lost a remarkable part of it’s market share to the new consumer-friendly phones and it just has not been able to keep up with the gadgets. Blackberry used to dominate the business world and is the [...]
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FTC’s irrelevant report on Privacy and why it matters
Today FTC released it’s final report on online privacy and recommended that privacy should be designed as a part of the product, management of what is private and public is up to the consumer and that there needs to be more transparency regarding what is collected and who is collecting it. To sum it up [...]
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Is PayPal Here Another Case for Mobile Device Management
Yesterday PayPal launched Paypal Here, dubbed “The Future of Commerce for Small Business”, over a year after Square launched arguably prettier device that has enjoyed great commercial success. Both devices come with free iPhone app that turns your phone into a credit card terminal – just swipe the card and you’re done. So far the [...]
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Microsoft vs. OnLive: Compliance, Licensing & Family Drama
It seems that these days Microsoft cannot escape the iPad shadow, even when it brings popularity to its own products. Case and point: Microsoft is alleging OnLive iPad Windows / Office application is in violation of Microsoft licensing terms and is currently working towards a resolution. OnLive, which provides Windows 7 desktop, Office and storage [...]
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NSA’s Off-the-Shelf Ultra-Secure Android Phone: Highlighting Lack of Interoperability
The NSA has developed an “ultra-secure” Android phone, designed to comply with the NSA’s tough information security rules yet be as cheap and easy to use as possible. The primary security design goal was a 0solution routes all traffic through the enterprise first. According to a piece published this morning on SC Magazine, the NSA [...]
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More Musings on the Post-PC Era for Business IT: When the User Shouldn’t Have Control
Sarah Perez wrote on TechCrunch yesterday that we are already in the Post-PC era. This, she contends, is evidenced by what I’ve called the “rogue” mobile device trend in workplace, and some new Forrester research illustrating that trend. The key point that the Perez made was that the post-PC era means more devices, and means [...]
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Application Kill Switch: Coming Soon to A Windows 8 Machine Near You
A kill switch is a security mechanism used to shut off a device in an emergency situation in which it cannot be shut down in the usual manner. Not only is it an exciting and dangerous sounding term, but a kill switch is also kind of a scary concept when we combine it with our [...]
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The Red Queen’s Hypothesis And Your IT Business
In a scene from Lewis Carroll’s classic Through the Looking-Glass, known as “the Red Queen’s Race,” the Red Queen herself famously says: “It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.” The scene and the line have been used to illustrate a number of different situations in different fields, but [...]
