Paul Andrew, the technical product manager for Office 365 Identity Management, has blogged about the different identity models you can choose with Office 365. Learn how to move between them and choose the right one for your needs.
Read everything here http://blogs.office.com/2014/05/13/choosing-a-sign-in-model-for-office-365/
A WSJ article on the current situation. Things are not as easy as they seem to be: Online Learning Courses Look for a Business Model.
When it came to the Xbox, the befuddling feedback continued. “We were told we couldn’t call it the Xbox because X is the letter of death,” Fries remembers. “We were told we couldn’t make it black because black is the colour of death. I was like, isn’t the PlayStation black? Rules that apply to you as an outsider don’t necessarily apply to insider products.”
A very long but amazing reading. From Wesley Yin-Poole at Eurogamer: Why Xbox failed in Japan.
See on Scoop.it – Small Business Development
Facebook may acquire the key product behind Microsoft’s $6 billion aQuantive purchase.
Facebook and Microsoft are working on a deal that, if completed, would put Facebook one huge step closer to launching an ad network that could rival Google’s in size, and change the way advertising is done online forever.
According to several industry sources, Facebook is in negotiations with Microsoft to buy Atlas Solutions, the ad-serving product Microsoft acquired when it bought aQuantive for $6 billion in 2007.
Our sources are outside of Facebook and Microsoft.
Microsoft has been trying to sell Atlas for years, and one of our sources is close to a company that was interested in buying it. In recent days, Microsoft ended negotiations with this company, and said it was moving forward on a deal with Facebook.
Since then, Facebook and Microsoft employees have reached out to other…
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Is copying Wikipedia articles and assembling a textbook legal? If you sell it, there are issues. But what happens, if you just give it away? Boundless has created a system (with real people behind it) that creates textbooks for specific subjects with content collected from Wikipedia and other free online sources. It then provides you with an almost perfect textbook with the best price in the world: $0.00!
Educational publishers like Pearson and Cengage have already started the fight but venture capitalists are funding Boundless because they see a disruptive trend. A huge discruption actually when you consider that some of these books cost a couple of hundred dollars. A $6 billion industry in the United States alone…
Publishers today operate using what Mark Perry, a professor at the University of Michigan, calls a “cartel-style” model: students are required to buy specific texts at high prices. Perry has calculated that prices for textbooks have been rising at three times the rate of inflation since the 1980s.
Read the full article at MIT Technology Review: Free Textbooks Spell Disruption for College Publishers
I was reading an older article at the online edition of MIT Technology Review about mobility and productivity. An experiment at Boston Consulting Group with Deborah Lovich, a consultant and head of staff, and professor Leslie Perlow from Harvard Business School turned out to have very interesting results.
In one survey of 1,600 managers from multiple companies, Perlow found that about half checked e-mail continuously while on vacation or just before bedtime. Some didn’t stop there: 26 percent admitted to Perlow that they brought their mobile device into bed with them.
Perlow even wrote a book on this issue: Sleeping with Your Smartphone: How to Break the 24/7 Habit and Change the Way You Work.
I liked this part:
Some companies, particularly in Europe, are starting to enforce time away from e-mail during nonwork hours. Volkswagen has programmed its e-mail servers to stop sending messages to many of its German employees after their shifts end. Atos Origin, a French IT company, has plans to end internal company e-mail entirely, claiming it is a waste of time—only 15 of the 100 e-mails its average employee received each day were deemed useful.
How can we do this? Especially when you work for a company that handles customers from different timezones and different cultures. Weekend is not Saturday and Sunday for everybody out there…
Read everything here: How Is Mobile Computing Good For Productivity?
Statistics are sometimes very hard…
To say that Windows 8 has been met with mixed reactions is one of the greatest understatements you will likely read all day. There are those who love it, and those who would rather it simply not exist at all. Valve CEO Gabe Newell has been highly vocal on the topic, going so far as to call Windows 8 a “catastrophe” that has spawned a massive push for Steam on Linux. Apparently these opinions haven’t slowed the adoption rate of Windows 8 among Newell’s own customers, as Steam reveals that Windows 8 users now outnumber OS X users by a significant margin.
Steam’s monthly hardware and software survey does a great job of demonstrating what hardware the average user is packing. There’s not a lot of surprise here when you look at the specs. You’ve got 64-bit Windows 7 soaking up most of the glory, which is to be expected. If you take a…
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A few facts from the latest Microsoft’s shareholder meeting. Things are probably different than presented by part of the media industry (and the stock brokers who control the information)…
Newpapers and magazines are dropping their printed edition while everybody is jumping on the digital train. But, it seems that things are much harder than expected…
News Corporation shutters The Daily tablet newspaper as of December 15th
Τελικά ο φετινός Αύγουστος (όπως και η υπόλοιπη χρονιά) θα έχει πολλές εκπλήξεις. Η HP ανακοίνωσε ότι “πετάει” το webOS, το λειτουργικό για smartphones και tablets, που απέκτησε πριν λίγο καιρό με την εξαγορά της Palm για 1,2 δις δολλάρια. Το webOS ήταν αρκετά καλό (όπως το είδα για λίγα λεπτά σε ένα κατάστημα) με κάποιες καλές σκέψεις στην χρήση αλλά ήταν αδύνατο να ανταπεξέλθει στην πίεση των υπαρχόντων λύσεων (δεν είχε και σοβαρή υποστήριξη με εφαρμογές από τρίτους). Μαζί πετιούνται και ένα tablet, το TouchPad, και δύο smartphones, τα Pre 3 και Veer. Αν και πολλοί έπεσαν από τα σύννεφα με την ανακοίνωση, η πορεία αυτή δεν ήταν αναπάντεχη (Why HP might (ultimately) ditch WebOS for Android από τον Φεβρουάριο). Φυσικά, όταν τα λέγαμε, είμασταν απλά γραφικοί τύποι κολλημένοι με μια εταιρεία. Τα πράγματα στο mobility δεν είναι απλά…
Το πιο σημαντικό όμως στην ανακοίνωση αυτή είναι ότι σχεδιάζουν να αποκόψουν (ίσως και να πουλήσουν) το PSG, το κομμάτι δηλαδή των PCs και Notebooks, όπως είχε κάνει πριν από χρόνια η IBM δίνοντας το αντίστοιχο τμήμα στη Lenovo. Μάλλον κάποιος Κινέζος θα ενδιαφέρεται πάλι. Όλο το σημερινό δελτίο τύπου της HP εδώ: HP Confirms Discussions with Autonomy Corporation plc Regarding Possible Business Combination; Makes Other Announcements | Business Wire.
In addition, HP reported that it plans to announce that it will discontinue operations for webOS devices, specifically the TouchPad and webOS phones. HP will continue to explore options to optimize the value of webOS software going forward.
Paradigm Shift 