Monthly Archives: September 2015

Biometric Security…Maybe Not

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A lot of people are very excited about the idea of biometric information—physical information about a person such as your fingerprint, voice, retina, or image—as a better form of security or at least as a nice substitute for passwords. I thought I liked this idea as well. However, for the very first time (at least to my knowledge), the US Office of Personnel Management (OPM) system breach has leaked a great deal of other very sensitive and personal information including 5.6 millions fingerprints which are now in the “ether”. We’ve all seen movies that included a clever way to get someone’s fingerprints, and I never thought much about it. Now a huge number of these biometric signatures are in the dark side of society. (I have no idea about the risk to which these folks have been exposed or what they can do for remediation, but I doubt they’re very happy right now.)

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U2 Makes Their Music Game Debut With A Pair Of Songs In ‘Rock Band 4’

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When Harmonix sent over an early review copy of Rock Band 4, the usual embargo restrictions applied. We can’t give you any critical impressions until October 5, can’t talk in detail about the hardware. You know the drill! But it also arrived with a secret that was excruciating to contain: U2 was making history with a pair of tracks on the disc, representing songs #64 and #65 to complete the Rock Band 4 setlist. Fortunately for us, Harmonix has now decided to dispense the good news early.

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Let’s Get Real About Real-Time Data

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Alan Kay, the Xerox PARC founder and visionary computer scientist, once said, “don’t worry about what anybody else is going to do… The best way to predict the future is to invent it. Really smart people with reasonable funding can do just about anything that doesn’t violate too many of Newton’s Laws!” 
Alan wasn’t the first* to express the view that the future can, at least in part, be invented, but he was one of its leading proponents laying much of the groundwork in the early 1970s for what would become the personal computer and ultimately, the digital revolution.
For corporate leaders and their companies in the midst of the transition to becoming digital enterprises, that future is real-time computing, or what I prefer to call ‘in the moment’ computing – the ability to make instant decisions based on live rather than stale data.
Real real-time
Technologists have been talking about real-time computing for years, but it is only in the last few years that new technology platforms like SAP’s HANA (which is built around a reimagined database with built-in analytics and other functionality) and in-memory computing have made real, real-time computing possible.

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iPhone 6S Activations ‘Down Forty Percent’ Against iPhone 6

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Now that all the noise and bluster of the iPhone 6S and iPhone 6S Plus launch is over, just how well have Apple’s latest smartphones performed out of the gate? Mobile Marketing technologists Fiksu note the iPhone 6S Plus is following a similar level of user activations to last year’s iPhone 6 Plus, but the smaller iPhone 6S is lagging behind the iPhone 6 rate by forty percent.

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