Types of Popular Internetworking Technologies

Internet technology comes in many forms, such as the connection and communication options. The use of the Internet requires a desktop computer, laptop computer, a web enabled device, or a smartphone or other wireless device. Today, it is almost a basic need for every individual to use internet technology, to perform his daily activities. In this article, we list some of the basic internet technologies which have grown popular in emerging economies.

DSL

One type of Internet connection that is common for many households is DSL. DSL is provided by your phone company and uses the existing phone line to your home. Speeds are offered at different prices to meet any type of need. A special modem is needed to connect your computer to the Internet. A wireless connection can be created in your home by adding a wireless router to the modem.

Cable

A second type of Internet connection for households in large cities is cable Broadband. This connection uses a cable connection to your home for the Internet. Cable connections are shared by other connected to the same cable line. This means that speeds will vary depending on the time of day. A special modem is also required to connect your computer to the Internet.

Satellite

A third type of connection for homes in rural areas is satellite. A dish needs to be installed on your roof to receive a signal for an Internet connection. The speed is similar to A DSL connection and will be the best option if no other connection options are available.

WiFi

This is a type of wireless connection that is available at many locations, such as restaurants. The use of a WiFi connection requires a laptop computer or web-enabled wireless device. WiFi is a free option for anyone to use to connect to the Internet. Users without an Internet connection at their home should find a local WiFi hotspot.

Dial-Up

Homes that only have a standard phone line may still use a dial-up connection. This connection needs a modem that is installed in a desktop or laptop computer. A dial-up connection uses the phone line and is the slowest type of Internet connection for a home. One downside is the inability to make a call when a connection is made to the Internet.

Communication Options

Many types of communications options are available for high speed Internet connections. The use of an Internet connection that is high-speed is required for most communication options. Communication can be done via voice and even video over the Internet. Some of the popular communication options are as follows:
VOIP

One communication option that is used on the Internet is VOIP. This is the Internet technology used by many companies offering phone service over the Internet. You can use VOIP at your home if there is a high-speed connection available. The use of VOIP allows you to cancel your land line service and only use Internet technology to make voice calls.

Skype

Skype is a computer application that uses the Internet to make calls. You can make a voice call or make call with video using a web camera. This software needs to be installed on your computer to make calls to other Skype users for free. Calls can also be made to land line numbers at a price that is peanuts when compared to ISD calling rates.

Author’s Bio:

Want to know more on the local internet providers? Go through more of Jason King’s articles which are rich in internet provider related information. He works for Internetbyzipcode.com.

Windows 7 – The Mango Phone

Microsoft has finally launched the next generation operating system for the smartphones.

Once the leader in the Smartphone operating system developers, Microsoft has currently a penetration lower than 5% in the smartphone market towards the end of 2011, currently ruled by Android. Android now has a third of the global market share  (33%). RIM’s share has plummeted to 29%. Apple is barely holding at 25% and Palm, which is barely worth mentioning anymore, fell another point to 2.8%.

Microsoft is targeting to gain considerable market-share upto 10% for the time being and slowly regain its otherwise lost competitive advantage. By collaborating with HTC (Radar), Samsung and Nokia, Microsoft is targeting a mass market where it can reach out to its potential customers.

A question that may worry many technocrat is that with all the added GUI that microsoft has pumped into the Mango phones (Windows 7 and Windows 7.5), how will the added power consumption be handled by the high end processors added to these really smart phones (1 GHz processors are the norm now). Smartphone users are often plagued by the battery support that forces them to recharge their phones every alternate day or even everyday, if one talks for 4-5 hours. While, due to this very specific need, smartphones from Blackberry (RIM) and Nokia Symbian Smartphones are still in the market, its time to realize that business users of smartphone often value these hard performance factors over GUI improvements.

Another major area of focus is connectivity, especially over web. Most of these smartphone sucker out while being connected over 3G. If you are online, in most phones, if not all, you are likely to need to recharge your phone everyday, and effectively after a year, your battery starts showing signs of stress. I personally sometimes miss those days when I could charge my mobile once a week and that would satisfy all the phone-calls I needed to make. While I thrive on the web, it has its costs too.

With other features in the mobile market going for a rat race (like cameras, internal memory, etc), a major decision point in the purchasing behavior may be these factors. Also another decision factor may be the accessibility to services and distribution channels, something which Microsoft is targeting in a very focused manner by collaborating with Nokia, which has one of the most extensive servicing and distribution channels.

While in the days of cloud computing, what everyone else is using is also adding drastically to the experience of using a smartphone, it is necessary to understand that jumping into the smartphone bandwagon should be a decision taken more judiciously for every user, based on a smart analysis of one’s actual needs.

It remains to be seen who will win this fight for market-share in the operating systems market. It indeed is getting intensely competitive. Will Microsoft be able to turn over its bad times with this Windows 7 series? Only time will say. What do you think?

Information Technology and Information Systems

People often use the terms Information Technology and Information Systems interchangeably, although both the terminologies have established identities of their own. However it is crucial for every professional and individual to understand the subtle differences that defines the individuality of these disciplines.

Information Systems (IS) is a discipline bridging the business field and the well-defined computer science field (popularly called information technology) that has been evolving since it was coined in the early 1970s.An information systems discipline therefore is supported by the theoretical foundations of management social science, information theories and information technology such that students of the discipline have unique opportunity to explore the academics of various business models as well as related algorithmic processes within a computer science discipline. Typically, information systems include people, business procedures or processes, data, software, and hardware that are used to gather and analyze digital information. Specifically Information Systems are the intersection that people and organizations use to collect, filter, process, create, & distribute data (computing) through its business processes, and implemented by its human capital.

While Information Technology (IT) typically is the acquisition, processing, storage and dissemination of digitized information, often represented technically as “Data” through electronics-based media built upon the disciplines of computing and telecommunications. The terminology was first coined in a 1958 by Leavitt and Whisler who defined it as “the new technology that does not yet have a single established name. We shall call it information technology.” Essentially, in its raw form, it comprises of Hardware, Software, the platforms to support both, communication networks and protocols.

It is crucial to understand that while “Information Technology” is a huge discipline with an identity of its own, it essentially is a subset of the discipline “Information Systems”, although the latter evolved much later. The discipline of Information Systems specifically studies the intersection of Business Processes (which may or may not be technology enabled), People (who will be part of the business processes and will use information technology) and Information Technology.

Hope this clarifies your thoughts. Do let me know what you think or would like to discuss further,

Why Technology Reuse fails

Today, a lot of stress is on code reuse, in the IT industry. In fact, the industry is thriving on the same. The problem is every business requirements have its very own set of specific needs which often are not met with by using standardized software packages and code modules, besides other barriers to success.  Ideally software should be designed to complement and automate business processes. But since this becomes costly, modules and packages are standardized and IT business analysts try to fit the standard things to all problem domains. The net result is mayhem and chaos.

In theory, organizations should recognize the value of systematic reuse of internal assets and reward internal reuse efforts. In practice, many factors act as barriers to success in technology reuse. Software reuse often fails for the following reasons:

• Organizational impediments: In house developing of software systematically, to create reusable software assets requires a deep understanding of application developer needs and business requirements. As the organization size grows, coordination problems are often a major challenge.
• Business need impediments: Similar business units within the same organization often have different needs which are not always apparent. Trying to force fit the same solution to different problems is a sure recipe for chaos.
• Economic impediments: Supporting the development of reusable technology requires an economic investment, and often IT teams operate as cost-centers and thus their priorities are ignored.
• Administrative impediments: It is hard to document reusable technology properly for usage across multiple business units within large organizations, although the same may be reusable in the smaller business units. Hence business units may end
• Political impediments: The teams that develop reusable technology are often viewed with suspicion by the rest of the technology team, as they may no longer be empowered to make key architectural decisions. In group rivalry is also a major barrier to the development of reusable technology.
• Psychological impediments: Application developers often feel “top down” reuse efforts as an indication that management lacks confidence in their technical abilities and an insult to their capabilities.

Does the HP-Palm move make sense?

HP-Palm has become the hype that the mobile computing world could have done without. Is it really worth the hype? Will this $1.2 billion deal create waves in the already competitive market?
Hewlett Packard, the world leader in laptops (in terms of sales) has its own series of PDAs, less popularly known to the common man. The I-PAQ PDAs sold by HP does not rank among the top 10 PDA brands in terms of sales. With the focus shifting towards handheld computing devices, this may have been a desperate move by HP to claim its place in the competitive industry dominated by the likes of Blackberry, Apple, HTC, Nokia and O2.
This can really be an interesting analysis for strategy experts. HP, till date, was using the Windows platform in all its i-PAQ phones. Incidentally, I-Paq phones have been much criticized for not being very Windows friendly in a lot of user forums. By acquiring Palm, HP ensures it has its own operating system at last, the Palm in-house developed WebOS. WebOS has been specially designed to take are of all internet usage needs of the palm savvy netizens of the current cyber world. What remains to be seen is will the two interweave and create magic like the other smartphones? Or will it be like HTC’s earlier embrace of the Google’s platform, messy and non-productive.

HP has a very strong distribution channel globally, and this was something Palm was lacking, while it strived to compete with the movers and shakers in the industry, although it was amongst the first innovators of the PDA. While this gives the exciting opportunity to leverage Palm’s not so visible yet hgh quality phones through HP’s network, the core of HP can focus its internal R&D to what it does best, i.e. focus on the laptops, printers, scanners, work stations and servers. This again will mean an organizational restructuring may be on its way, surely for Palm, and possibly also for HP research.

So this may be a good time for the bigger players in the palmtop computing industry to do a SWOT analysis and rethink their strategy. With HP pushing Palm and given the parent company’s deep pockets (being one of the biggest technology company by far), we may be witnessing an interesting change of powerplay in this industry.

What do you think?

How to price IT products in 7 steps?

The technical team or the product development team has come up with a ground breaking product. The technology can have a deep impact on the customer. The technical team knows it, and so does the customer. The contract for a long term engagement is about to hit off, and then the customer asks how much will this technology cost his pockets? In this competitive world, the technology developers do want the best price for the technology, but at the same time, they really do not know what the best price is to which your customer will give the green signal for a long term engagement. So how does one price an IT product?

Since IT products are  intangible, it has been recognized that the best price for intangible products should never be determined by production costs. Cost can be the “floor” of pricing alternatives and the customer’s quantified benefit in monetary terms should be the “ceiling.” The best price lies somewhere in between and that should be based upon the value of the technology to the customer.

This pricing can be done in the following steps:

1. Decide the various unique benefits from your product, such that there is no overlap.
2. Quantify the objective of deliverables for each benefit, by discussing the same with your client.
3. Map each benefit to its monetary value from the client’s data (or industry average).
4. Ask the client how much percentage deviation is acceptable from the quantified objective of deliverables mentioned earlier.
5. Discount the monetary value of each objective with the deviation percentage.
6. Sum up the discounted benefits.
7. Discount that sum by the operating profit margin of your client, and quote the calculated price.

The major point of debate for any firm, when it decides to go for an investment, is what would be the return on its investment, as the ROI figures are what often drive investment decisions. This methodology helps the client deduct the exact ROI from his investment.

Read the linked paper to know more about how you can implement value based pricing.

To know more about the process by which an IT firm may use the mentioned pricing strategy, download and read the following paper.

This paper is a must read for product development managers in IT product companies. This paper has recorded as one of the top 10 downloaded papers of SSRN.

Did you read our article on the various pricing strategies used to price information technology products and service engagements?

4 Biggest brands launched the core i5 laptops

Today the world is walking on core i5 laptops. They are high speed mean machine, well built and easy to handle. The Core i5 is now powering performance laptops for those customers who have the capability to shell out a little extra. Since they are made on Intel’s cutting-edge 32-nanometer manufacturing process, it readily outperforms the older Core 2 Duo, giving much more satisfaction to tech-savvy customers.

Four of the biggest brands have already launched the core i5 laptops together namely HP, SONY, TOSHIBA and DELL. Apple recently has joined the bandwagon and is going to launch core i5 laptops. Apple’s focus though is different, more stress is given on removing backlogs which are created by other brands.

Below there is detailed information about the HP, SONY, DELL and TOSHIBA laptops

1. Sony VAIO’S Core i5 Laptop: This laptop is not only light (only 4.4 lbs) and measures only 1.2” thick, it is durable and powerful also. The Sony VAIOs boasts of super high performance features, including an Intel core i5 processor with Turbo boost Technology, Intel HD Graphics for outstanding visuals, a back-lit keyboard and Intel Wireless Display technology, which allows you to wirelessly stream online media, videos, photos and more from the laptop to your HDTV. It also has Windows 7 Home Premium preloaded.
2. HP Core i5 laptops: These 14-inch HP DV4-2170 laptops are available for only $649 with the same Core i5 processor, 4GB of memory, a 320GB hard disk drive, and Windows Home Premium 64-bit. Staples lists the system at a regular price of $809.98 with $110 of ‘instant savings’ and a $50 rebate, which brings the price to $649
3. Toshiba Satellite L500-ST5507 Core i5 Laptop: The 15.6-inch Toshiba L500-ST5507 is the first Satellite L500/L505 series laptop to feature the Intel Core i5 CPU. Besides the Core i5-430M that integrates dual CPU cores and the GMA HD graphics processor, the L500-ST5507 includes a 1366×768 display, 4GB of DDR3 memory, a 320GB hard drive, a DVD burner, and Windows 7 OS.
4. Dell’s Core i5 Based Inpiron 17: Dell’s Inspiron 17 laptop is designed as a low cost desktop replacement option. With the recent announcement of the Intel Core i5 laptop processors, Dell has decided to offer a new version of the laptop with the new processor but with pretty much the same existing external design as the previous model. The price of the laptop does increase a bit with the new processor to slightly over $1000. With more and more speedy Core i laptops coming out of the woodwork, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to buy an older Core 2 Duo system.

What do you think about it? What would you buy?

Beowolf Clusters: Cheap supercomputers for poorer pockets

The demand for faster calculations can’t be met by only relying on the speed increase resulting from advances in computer technology as high end super computers are that much costly. One of the solutions to this problem for ‘not-so-deep-pockets’ is the distribution of the numerical tasks to a set of machines. So how to provide supercomputer capabilities cheaply? The answer is Beowolf Clusters. This process is called parallelization because the computers complete their tasks in parallel instead of the traditional step‐by‐step (serial) execution. As computer codes have been updated to use this new paradigm, the demand for parallel computers has grown. In general, such computers need to have:

• A large number of CPUs for the actual processing
• A pathway that enables the different processes to communicate with each other.

Cluster is a widely‐used term meaning independent computers combined into a unified system through software and networking. At the most fundamental level, when two or more computers are used together to solve a problem, it is considered a cluster. Clusters are typically used for High Availability (HA) for greater reliability or High Performance Computing (HPC) to provide greater computational power than a single computer can provide. Beowulf Clusters are scalable performance clusters based on commodity hardware, on a private system network, with open source software (Linux) infrastructure. The designer can improve performance proportionally with added machines. The commodity hardware can be any of a number of mass‐market, stand‐alone compute nodes as simple as two networked computers each running Linux and sharing a file system or as complex as 1024 nodes with a high‐speed, low‐latency network. Class I clusters are built entirely using commodity hardware and software using standard technology such as SCSI, Ethernet, and IDE. They are typically less expensive than Class II clusters which may use specialized hardware to achieve higher performance. Common uses are traditional technical applications such as simulations, biotechnology, and petro‐clusters; financial market modeling, data mining and stream processing; and Internet servers for audio and games. Beowulf programs are usually written using languages such as C and FORTRAN. They use message passing to achieve parallel computations. This clustered computing is being looked upon as the savior to the problems of the budget issues of SMEs which create an entry barrier for them to use high end analytics and computation intensive processes.

7 reasons why Apple’s I-Pad may fail.

Amidst a lot of hype as always, today 27th January, 2010, Apple launches the I-Pad. While it is being viewed as the product that will rejuvenate Apple’s revenues for years to come, a question many staunch Apple fans (and those who are not fans of course) will ask, is it really worth the hype? Apple has always created a market even when there is none. Will it be successful yet again this time?

1. While it looks sleek and captures the mind of all tech-enthusiasts, every one will admit that this product can not be the replacement of a smartphone or a palmtop due to its size.
2. It has the potential to be a great e-book reader and internet browser, but will users like a gadget only suited for that purpose, given that tablets of that size pack the same features (except the wireless carrier connectivity) and lots of processing power and data storage capacity. Also, colored screen may not increase the overall ebook reading experience on the i-Pad, given its shorter battery support, as compared to the other e-book readers
3. Is it worth the time for serious gamers, given its processing and memory configuration?
4. It does not sport a 16:9 aspect ratio, the standard for wide-screen entertainment, and by not doing so makes the iPad much less interesting for watching movies. This may affect sales.
5. I-phone’s huge list of applications will also run on the I-Pad. But will the usage of I-Pad revolutionize the development of applications as never before? Unless applications are developed custom made for I-Pad, the product will not see the meteoric success of the i-Phone.
6. The users would be keen to experience something radically different from the windows mobile, the Android sets and the ever stable Symbian phones. This the I-Pad may not be able to deliver, given its technical configuration.
7. Lastly, the price tag may appear too high even for the brand exclusivity, even for staunch Apple fans.

Apple has always been a great marketeer and has added value to the consumers even with products which were present before the “Apple way” became popular. What Apple provides its customers is the ooomph factor of being associated with the company, the exclusivity maybe. This positioning amongst its fans has always been the USP for the company. Because of its size, processing capabilities and functionality, it may be rejected as yet another gadget which fall in between the mobile phones (iPhone) and the laptops (Macbook), and thus fails to meet both requirements. But will that be enough to ensure a great reception of the i-Pad from the Apple’s fans? Will the early adopters be inclined to try out the hype? Only time will tell.

How to tackle the problem of security breaches in call centers

Outsourcing is the mantra of the day. Today, many large MNCs, all across the globe, outsource activities like customer relationship management activities to cheap labor countries where English speaking skills are not a problem. A major concern in such outsourcing is the security in customer’s sensitive data.
It has been estimated by a research that the average cost of security breach is $6.4million in 2009 and this cost is spiraling up, growing as fast as 90% sometimes, YoY. Security breaches incur costs from the following heads:

• Customer Notification and Follow-Up
• Cost of Lost Customers
• Legal Costs
• Customer Restitution
• Damage to Brand and Company Image
• Regulatory Fines and Penalties
• Increased Security and Audit Requirements
• Employee Downtime

Call centers have to keep audio calls transcribed for meeting legal requirements as well as for training purposes. In such a scenario, the cost of a breach becomes very high. Privacy protection for voice recordings is a technology to detect and mask private information from the audio recordings of the conversations. It has been applied to in telephonic conversations between agents and customers in CRM centers. In such settings, the system picks up calls from the recording system and masks out sensitive data such as credit card details, social security details and other sensitive information before storing the recordings. It is customizable to other settings easily where different types of data needs to be masked out. This technology can be extremely useful comply with various security legislation and compliance standards applicable to voice recordings. Fewcompanies actually are not meet the masking requirements and so go for multilayered 128 bit encryption of transcribed call data.

Today, multiple companies provide such security solutions. Few such companies are IBM, Envision, NICE, Protegrity and Vontu Solutions. These solutions either  mask sensitive data before storing transcribed call recordings or provide multi-layered security through encryption  or both.