New smart cities can’t escape the same old problems

Posted by & filed under Green Technologies, IT Governance.

Quayside, Toronto What it promised: Sidewalk Labs, a subsidiary of Google, proposed a high-tech and sustainable neighbourhood on Toronto’s eastern lakeshore. Among the ideas were heated pavements to encourage year-round walking, trash-collecting robots, winterized outdoor spaces protected by plastic “raincoats,” self-driving delivery vehicles on an underground tunnel network, traffic sensors and adaptable street layouts. How it’s… Read more »

Ron Bouganim is transforming “the operating system of government.”

Posted by & filed under Competitive Advantage, Emerging Technologies, IT and Politics, IT Governance, IT Infrastructure, IT Investment.

Source: CNN Date: February 25th, 2016 Link: http://money.cnn.com/interactive/technology/15-questions-with-ron-bouganim/index.html?iid=ob_homepage_tech_pool&iid=obnetwork Discussion 1) Comment on Ron’s statement that “since government is the glue of society, I can’t think of a more scalable way to have personal impact every day.” 2) “The government isn’t typically known as a bastion of innovation, but Ron Bouganim is banking on changing that perception.”  Are there… Read more »

The Global Amazon Landscape

Posted by & filed under E-Business, E-Commerce, Intellectual Property, IT and Politics, IT Governance.

Many Amazon Associates are unaware of the full scale of Amazon’s global footprint. To cater to their global audience and because of differences like currency, language, shipping, and digital rights restrictions, Amazon has created 14 different storefronts around the world. 11 of these offer both physical and digital goods in countless categories. 12 of these… Read more »

European schools told to drop Dropbox

Posted by & filed under Big Data, Cloud Computing, Cyber Security, Electronic Surveillance, Intellectual Property, IT and Politics, IT Governance, IT Security, IT Standards.

The European Court of Justice recently ruled that US firms signed up to what is called a “Safe Harbour scheme” with European companies could no longer be automatically considered to provide “adequate protection” to personal data they had received from the EU.  The “Safe Harbour scheme” was put in place to allow European companies to store data… Read more »

Cybersecurity bills aim to prevent ‘digital Pearl Harbor’

Posted by & filed under Cyber Security, Electronic Surveillance, IT Governance, IT Infrastructure.

Discussion:  Foreign spies and organized criminals have access to virtually every companies’ network, which makes the issue of cyber security a national security issue.  Analysts agree that cyber criminals or terrorists have the capabilities to shut down the country’s financial, energy or communications infrastructure.  Much of our countries’ infrastructure is privately owned, making prevention and surveillance a… Read more »

Movement aims to decentralize Internet

Posted by & filed under Cloud Computing, IT Governance, IT Infrastructure, IT Standards, IT Trends, Social Computing.

Discussion:  Issace Wilder, founder of the Free Network Foundation, is aiming to decentralize the internet so that it cannot be controlled and monitored by corporate or governmental regulating bodies.  His non-profit foundation is trying to prevent the actual physical internet from being consolidated and controlled by a few corporate transit networks, while also trying to publicize… Read more »

FCC scrambles to cope with data avalanche

Posted by & filed under IT Governance, IT Infrastructure, IT Planning, IT Standards, IT Trends, Wireless.

Discussion:  The need for space to transmit the growing amount of data on smartphones and other handheld devices is expanding exponentially, and will soon overrun the current capacity.  The FCC is trying to come up with  a solution to help solve this problem, and so far the answer is to capture the staticy space between… Read more »

Social media and the security risks they pose for business

Posted by & filed under Business Analytics, Business Intelligence, Cyber Security, E-Business, Interview, IT Governance, IT Infrastructure, IT Security, IT Strategy, Social Computing, Social Networks.

Discussion: As more and more businesses see the value in social media applications like Twitter and Facebook, they face a big dilemma: allow these applications to go through their current network without the proper security infrastructure or block them altogether.  Nir Zuk, co-founder and CTO of Palo Alto Networks, says the next big thing in… Read more »