Toronto-based point of purchase printing specialist Artisan Complete, which for the last few years has been building a business and reputation as one of the leaders in content strategy and production for digital signage, has pulled the plug on its Artisan Live group.
Mike Brown had been leading the group and left recently, and then on Thursday the well-known face of the Live group, Stephen Ghigliotty and creative director Kris Steeves were shown the door. The group had at least a half-dozen people in it going back two or three years, and had won awards and a lot of recognition for its work.
Both Stephen and Kris are great, talented guys and will be good picks for anyone who wants to grab them, Stephen on strategy and Kris on creative.
It's too bad, as good, innovative work was getting done. But this has been a tough year for the printing industry and the people hooked in to it. The other big content shop based in Toronto, Alchemy, has been very quiet the last few months, as well, but I know it is still active. Alchemy's Dave Dolejsi, one of their key guys, had a cryptic Twitter note up on Thursday about a big account win of some sort.
I don't know if it is just me, but it strikes me as a few companies that manged to wobble their way through the worst of the recession are starting to run on fumes, and being forced to make some hard choices. Maybe the worst of the recession is ending, but I think we will continue to see more right-sizing and exits from the sector.
This is how you find Stephen (and he can get you on to Kris, I'd imagine):
Kris Matheson, the other Artisan guy well known for his involvement in the sector, is still around but has been involved in non-DS stuff with the company for quite a while now.
This is the third in a series of five initial articles, in which I'm going to put my thoughts and findings on the subject of Enterprise Mobility. For this article I've decided to discuss the Opportunities that lie in front of companies that undertake an Enterprise Mobility Strategy.
A round-up of the wide range of important issues and timely topics due to be discussed by over 100 industry experts at SYS-CON's 4th International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo, being held at the Santa Clara Convention Center, November 2-4, 2009. From Building Scalable and Extensible RIAs in the Cloud to Yahoo! Cloud @ Internet Scale.
The ultimate goal of any software vendor is...to make sure that their software runs on iPhone. The time will come when entire J2EE stack with EJB will run on iPhone. Singing... You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one.
Imagine there's no iPhone
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today
Imagine there's no iPhone
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace
You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one
Imagine no iPhones
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world
You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope Flash Player'll join us
And the world will live as one
Sorry, John :)
Built with Application Studio, a mobile application platform from Pyxis Mobile, UpperClass from AT&T is a customizable application delivering a wide range of campus-related information to students, administrators, faculty, parents and alumni. The application provides a college community with real-time access to the information they need, virtually wherever they happen to be, including class information, student and faculty directories, scheduling, administration and community information, social networking, ticket purchasing and fundraising options, along with campus wide alerts such as weather conditions or class cancellations.
My favorite blogger, Bob Lefsetz, writes about the entertainment industry, and he had a great line in a post yesterday: “The glory days of the music business are history. They’ll only return when the glory days of music come back.” He’s writing about music — but he’s right about everything. The glory days of the car business will return when we have American companies producing more glorious cars that customers REALLY want. Whatever your business, you can have glory days in your industry when you create and deliver something really remarkable for customers. The economic rising tide we experienced a few years back lifted all boats. Which, of course, means that mediocre players were also doing very well. However, when the recession hit us in the face, it appeared that the “glory days” were done. And, they were…for those of moderate performance.
Friday I’m speaking at the Mobile 2.0 conference in Mountain View. The topic is “iPhone for Business”, which, if I took the topic literally, raises many issues about distribution and maintenance of smartphones in the enterprise. But I’m really just going to focus on the narrower issue of “iPhone apps for business”: how do you [...]
This is the second in a series of five initial articles, in which I'm going to put my thoughts and findings on the subject of Enteprise Mobility. For this article I've decided to tackle the way that Business is now viewing Mobility. This has definately changed over the last few years and has been caused by various factors.
There are millions of opinions about entertainment being expressed on Facebook, Twitter, blogs, message boards and other social networks. Fizziolo.gy turns these individual opinions into trackable, scored data. Mentions are measured by volume and analyzed to determine sentiment by trained social media analysts. Fizziolo.gy uses people rather than automated keywords because social chatter -- especially in regard to entertainment -- can be impossible for computers to interpret (for example, "That was a SICK movie!" can be positive or negative based on context). The Fizziolo.gy combination of volume and sentiment creates a unique scoring system for entertainment properties to be compared, ranked and tracked over time.
Funambol introduced the world's first open source 4G (fourth-generation) mobile cloud platform for device management and synchronization. The platform enables management of mobile devices, and synchronization of diverse mobile media, over WiMax and LTE with social networks, email systems and PCs. The company's software leverages the prevailing Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) standards for device management (DM) and data synchronization (DS). Funambol is working with some of the largest companies in the industry to deploy innovative 4G mobile cloud sync services over the coming months.
How can you manage the cloud so you – and your data – sleep safe and secure? In a Live Webcast and Interview from Times Square today October 8, Sam Gross, vice president, Global Information Technology Outsourcing Solutions, Unisys Corporation, will answer these questions and more. SYS-CON.TV viewers will have the opportunity to interact directly with Gross, who will be in the SYS-CON.TV studio with Cloud Computing Expo conference chair Jeremy Geelan.
The goal of Eucalyptus is to allow sites with existing clusters and server infrastructure to host an elastic computing service that is interface-compatible with Amazon's AWS, but can also support multiple interfaces such as Google's AppEngine and the Sun Cloud open API. Rich Wolski, Chief Technology Officer and Co-founder of Eucalyptus Systems, will discuss this and more in a breakout session to be given at SYS-CON's 1st Annual Government IT Conference & Expo (GovITExpo).
Recursion Software is about to say that it’s ported its high-performance C++ Toolkit to five of the most popular mobile operating systems so programmers can finally write a single app that can run on any phone using those systems with virtually no modifications. The Symbian release is available now, with iPhone, Android, Windows and Linux support planned for release this winter.
"I am asking my followers on Twitter to also follow my example and to do their part to help out those involved in these tragedies," said MC Hammer (http://twitter.com/MCHammer). "Thousands of people here at home and abroad are facing a very difficult time, which is why I'm urging everyone to support Feed The Children, a tremendous organization helping to get these victims back on their feet." MC Hammer has a long-standing relationship and history of charitable work with Feed The Children. At a recent event sponsored by Cash4Gold, he and Cash4Gold CEO Jeff Aronson helped the organization hand out meals to families hard hit by the recession in the Stockton, CA area.
How can organizations adopt Cloud-based applications while maintaining total control of their private and sensitive data? John McGoldrick, Director of Sales and Marketing at PerspecSys, will discuss this and more in a breakout session to be given at SYS-CON's 1st Annual Government IT Conference & Expo (GovITExpo).
The SDW, which was built using Jaspersoft and is today deployed in support of more than 8 million customers, reduces the time required to research and respond to issues and decreases costs associated with ad hoc information requests. Since the initial implementation of the SDW for voicemail, BT has expanded its deployment to include analytics for the BT Text and Managed SMS services. This expanded deployment has yielded the significant benefits of providing a "one stop shop" for messaging analytics and has simplified the provision of this information within BT.
QuickBooks 2010 for Mac gives small business owners powerful new tools to help them be more productive and profitable with the simplicity they expect from a Mac product. Available in late October, QuickBooks 2010 for Mac, from Intuit Inc. (Nasdaq:INTU), helps business owners save time, make money and get paid.
Funambol, the leading provider of open source mobile cloud sync and push email for billions of phones, today announced that its new version 8 software is generally available. Funambol v8 makes it easy to keep the data and content on billions of mobile phones in sync with social networks, email systems and personal computers via the Internet cloud. Funambol v8 has a completely redesigned AJAX web portal. The portal's striking interface makes it simple for users to access mobile data and rich media in the cloud, using any modern browser
Taking a page out of Cisco's book - from the chapter on so-called smart cities - IBM late Thursday announced that the city of Dongying near China's second-largest oil field in the midst of the Yellow River Delta is going to build a cloud to promote e-government and support its transition from a manufacturing center to a more eco-friendly services-based economy. Dongying, which can turn the widgetry into a revenue generator, means to use the cloud to jumpstart new economic development in the region.
The survey showed that 86 percent of U.S. drivers believe handheld texting while driving is "very dangerous" and 93 percent support a nationwide ban on texting. At the same time, only 42 percent of respondents believe drivers would stop texting behind the wheel if the practice was banned. However, more than 75 percent believe there would be more compliance if hands-free or voice-activated technologies were widely available.
Research and Markets (http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/3d123b/mobile_wimax_devic) has announced the addition of the "Mobile WiMAX Devices—2009 Global Mid-Year Update" report to their offering. This report provides an update to In-Stat's annual 802.16e, mobile WiMAX, device forecast. Due to the rapidly changing nature of the market in terms of vendor and service provider support for the technology, In-Stat will start updating the forecast twice a year.
Thousands of companies use NetSuite to manage their key business processes, leveraging its Software as a Service (SaaS) design to access invoicing, customer records, inventory, and financial reporting from any Internet-enabled computer. Now, for the first time, iPhone and iPod touch users can access NetSuite functionality using a rich interface designed to run natively on iPhone and iPod touch, adding to the anytime, anywhere features already offered by NetSuite's cloud computing platform. Additionally, if a company has implemented custom fields, custom records, role-based security or custom dashboard elements in their NetSuite account, they will all be seamlessly reflected in the NetSuite app.
Reuven Cohen launched today Cloud Security Journal on Ulitzer. Cloud Security Journal offers dedicated coverage of cloud security & privacy news, practical insights and editorials that give readers a unique virtual perspective of the rapidly evolving area of cloud security, threats and privacy. Reuven Cohen is Founder & Chief Technologist for Toronto based Enomaly Inc. - leading developer of Cloud Computing products and solutions focused on enterprise businesses. Enomaly's products include the Enomaly elastic computing platform, an open source cloud platform that enables a scalable enterprise IT and local cloud infrastructure platform. Cohen is a thought leader in the emerging cloud computing industry and maintains a blog at www.elasticvapor.com.
I have a good one, did you hear the joke about the telco who promised everything and started falling apart at the seems because we wanted it all? This may be the curse of AT&T.
SmartPhones are taking the mobile phone industry by storm. The most popular of these phone brands includes the Apple iPhone, Palm’s Pre and an increasing number of Google Android phones. The challenge for any developer is to build solutions that will run across all of these platforms. There may, however, be an easy way to deliver solutions that work consistently across all of these platforms. That consistent technology is HTML5.