10 strategic technologies for 2012

A strategic technology is one with the potential for significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years, according to research firm Gartner. Factors that denote significant impact include a high potential for disruption to IT or the business, the need for a major dollar investment, or the risk of being late to adopt.

A strategic technology may be an existing technology that has matured and/or become suitable for a wider range of uses. It may also be an emerging technology that offers an opportunity for strategic business advantage for early adopters or with potential for significant market disruption in the next five years. These technologies impact the organization's long-term plans, programs and initiatives.

Gartner recently named top 10 strategic technologies for 2012.

Media tablets and beyond

Users can choose between various form factors when it comes to mobile computing. No single platform, form factor or technology will dominate and companies should expect to manage a diverse environment with two to four intelligent clients through 2015.

IT leaders need a managed diversity programme to address multiple form factors, as well as employees bringing their own smartphones and tablet devices into the workplace.

Enterprises will have to come up with two mobile strategies - one to address the business to employee (B2E) scenario and one to address the business to consumer (B2C) scenario

Mobile-centric applications and interfaces

The user interface (UI) paradigm in place for more than 20 years is changing. UIs with windows, icons, menus, and pointers will be replaced by mobile-centric interfaces emphasizing touch, gesture, search, voice and video. Applications themselves are likely to shift to more focused and simple apps that can be assembled into more complex solutions. These changes will drive the need for new user interface design skills.

Contextual and social user experience

Context-aware computing uses information about an end-user or objects environment, activities, connections and preferences to improve the quality of interaction with that end-user or object. A contextually-aware system anticipates the user's needs and proactively serves up the most appropriate and customized content, product or service.

Context can be used to link mobile, social, location, payment and commerce. It can help build skills in augmented reality, model-driven security and ensemble applications. Through 2013, context aware applications will appear in targeted areas such as location-based services, augmented reality on mobile devices, and mobile commerce.

On the social front, the interfaces for applications are taking on the characteristics of social networks. Social information is also becoming a key source of contextual information to enhance delivery of search results or the operation of applications.

Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a concept that describes how the Internet will expand as sensors and intelligence are added to physical items such as consumer devices or physical assets and these objects are connected to the Internet.

The vision and concept have existed for years, however, there has been an acceleration in the number and types of things that are being connected and in the technologies for identifying, sensing and communicating.

These technologies are reaching critical mass and an economic tipping point over the next few years. Key elements of the IoT include: embedded sensors, image recognition and Near Field Communication (NFC) payment.


App stores and marketplaces

Application stores by Apple and Android provide marketplaces where hundreds of thousands of applications are available to mobile users. Gartner forecasts that by 2014, there will be more than 70 billion mobile application downloads from app stores every year.

This will grow from a consumer-only phenomena to an enterprise focus. With enterprise app stores, the role of IT shifts from that of a centralized planner to a market manager providing governance and brokerage services to users and potentially an ecosystem to support entrepreneurs. Enterprises should use a managed diversity approach to focus on app store efforts and segment apps by risk and value.


Next-generation analytics

Analytics is growing along three key dimensions: From traditional offline analytics to in-line embedded analytics. From analyzing historical data to explain what happened to analyzing real-time data from multiple systems.

Over the next three years, analytics will mature along a third dimension, from structured and simple data analyzed by individuals to analysis of complex information of many types (text, video, etc...) from many systems supporting a collaborative decision process that brings multiple people together to analyze, brainstorm and make decisions.

Big data

The size, complexity of formats and speed of delivery exceeds the capabilities of traditional data management technologies; it requires the use of new or exotic technologies simply to manage the volume alone. Many new technologies are emerging, with the potential to be disruptive (eg, in-memory DBMS). Analytics has become a major driving application for datawarehousing, with the use of MapReduce outside and inside the DBMS, and the use of self-service data marts.


In-memory computing

Gartner sees huge use of flash memory in consumer devices, entertainment equipment and other embedded IT systems. In addition, it offers a new layer of the memory hierarchy in servers that has key advantages - space, heat, performance and ruggedness among them.

Besides delivering a new storage tier, the availability of large amounts of memory is driving new application models. In-memory applications platforms include in-memory analytics, event processing platforms, in-memory application servers, in-memory data management and in-memory messaging.


Extreme low-energy servers

The adoption of low-energy servers -- the radical new systems being proposed, announced and marketed by mostly new entrants to the server business -- will take the buyer on a trip backward in time. These systems are built on low-power processors typically used in mobile devices. The potential advantage is delivering 30 times or more processors in a particular server unit with lower power consumption vs. current server approaches. The new approach is well suited for certain non-compute intensive tasks such as map/reduce workloads or delivery of static objects to a website.


Cloud computing

Cloud is a disruptive force and has the potential for broad long-term impact in most industries. While the market remains in its early stages in 2011 and 2012, it will see the full range of large enterprise providers fully engaged in delivering a range of offerings to build cloud environments and deliver cloud services. Oracle, IBM and SAP all have major initiatives to deliver a broader range of cloud services over the next two years.




-- Text courtesy: Time of India

Share iOS App without App Store for Testing

The process of sharing iOS App to friends for testing is done using AdHoc build, which your friends can install on their iOS device.

The Process is little complicated, which is as follows.

Step 1: Go to Provisioning portal of Apple Developer Center (ADC) and register the device IDs of your friends. The Device ID can get from iTunes after connecting the device and by clicking on the "Serial Number" field.

Step 2: Generate a distribution certificate for ad hoc distribution in the Provisioning Portal under Provisioning -> Distribution

Step 3: Download that certificate yourself (the .mobileprovision file) and install it into Xcode by dragging it on the Xcode icon.

Step 4: Duplicate your "Release" build setting in Xcode for an Ad Hoc build. Everything should be the same as Release, except in the "Code Signing" section you will want to select the new Ad Hoc profile generated in step 3.

Step 5: Make an Ad Hoc build by going to Build -> Build and Archive

Step 6: When Xcode brings up the organizer window, right click on the archived build and make a .ipa file by saving it to disk

Step 7: Tell your friends to drag the mobile provisioning profile to the iTunes icon (or with File -> Open for windows users) to install it on their phone.

Step 8: Tell your friends to drag the .ipa file you made into iTunes, and sync their phones


At this point, the app should be installed on their phone, but lots of things can go wrong, so you should definitely read Apple's documentation on the subject as well.

Note that this procedure won't work unless your friends are using iTunes to sync applications with their phones. Also, as noted, you will need to be a paying developer in ADC to even access any of the Provisioning Portal stuff.

Features of Google+

Avoid comment notifications

If you have commented on a post, but do not want notifications of the follow-up comments coming to your inbox, there is a simple way out. Go to the original post and on the right side you will see a drop down arrow. Click on the arrow and select 'mute conversation'. You can choose to shut off all notifications from Google+ settings as well.


Hide your circles

If you do not want others to see the people in your Circles, go to your profile page and click on 'edit profile'. On the left side, you will see a small grey disc just above the photographs of your Circle members. Click on the disc and in the box that opens, you can choose the visibillity of your circle members.

Notifications on SMS

You can setup Google+ to send notifications to your mobile phone as well. Click on the gear icon on the top right corner and select Google+ settings. On the page that opens, go to 'delivery preferences' and under your email address you'll see the option to add a mobile number to receive push notifications.

Enter your phone number and Google+ will first send you a verification code. After verification, you will start receiving free notifications on your phone by sms.

Video chat in HD

By default, video chat in Google+ uses standard definition video, but if your webcam supports it, you can enable HD video support. First, sign in to chat, hover the mouse cursor over the chat section on the Google+ page, click on the small triangle that appears and then click on settings. Here, you'll see a checkbox to enable HD video chat.

Photo editor

There is a built-in basic photo editor in Google+ as well. Select any of the photos uploaded to your profile and double click on it to edit. It will open the image in a full page - click on the 'actions' box below the image and here you can rotate the photos or click on edit to apply a variety of basic effects and tune-ups.

Empty Circle

The Circle feature can be used to save various shared links and notes if you want to read them later. Go to Circles, create a new Circle, name it whatever you want (like 'Read Later') and do not add anyone in it (Google calls it an Empty Circle).

Now, whatever you want to read later, share it on your Google+ status with only this empty Circle that you have created. It will work as your online repository for bookmarks, videos and any other thing you want to access later.

Faux banner

To add a faux banner to your Google+ profile page, you will need to do a bit of photo cropping and resizing using an image editing program. Paste a photo into a template, 750 pixels wide and 150 pixels high and resize it to fit. Then, split this image into 5 smaller photos, each with a dimension of 150 x 150 pixels. Go to your profile page, click on 'edit profile' and upload the images in the order that you want.

Share location

To share your location with a person or a circle, first click the share button on the top right of the Google+ page, then click the 'add your location' button in the text box that pops up. You may have to click 'allow' if a webpage notification comes up. Once Google+ has determined your location, just add names to add them to the share list, or add a complete Circle.


Integrate Google+ with Twitter

Using Google Chrome with Google+ gives you a whole host of new things to play with, thanks to free extensions. For example, an extension called Helper for Google+ allows you to share your Google+ posts toTwitter, while an extension called Surplus integrates Google+ right into the browser. With it, you can post/share though a pop-up or get desktop notifications even if the Google+ webpage is not open.

Sharing with non Google+ users

Let's say you want to share a specific post with someone new to Google+ - the easiest way to do this would be to share a permalink (permanent link). To get a permalink for a specific post, simply click the time stamp in the post - and it will open in a new page. Copy this link to share with anyone over email or chat, even if they don't have a Google+ account.

Style posts

Google+ allows you to post updates in a variety of styles. To post in bold, add an asterisk at the beginning and end of the word (i.e., * word *). To post in italics, add an underscore before the word and a plus sign after it (i.e., _ word +). To post with a strikethrough, add a dash before and after the word (i.e., - word -).

Get Facebook on Google+

To add your various other social networking websites or contacts to your Google+ profile page, first go to Google+ settings by clicking on the gear icon in the top right of the page. Then click on 'connected accounts' and add the accounts here. For instance, to add yourFacebook account, type . Your username in the box.