Izenda Embedded Analytics and Technology Blog

Jun 10
0

Sears Turns Shuttered Stores into Data Centers

By | Business, IT and Engineering

In this week’s brilliant business news…

There is nothing more satisfying than seeing a long-established and behemoth business make a brilliant business move. It doesn’t happen as often as we’d like. But Sears has definitely done it.

a Sears department store storefrontUnder a newly-created unit of Sears Holdings, Ubiquity Critical Environments, the company will utilize its shuttered Sears and Kmart facilities for data centers, disaster relief sites, and cell phone tower sites. The company has a massive real estate portfolio, with 3,200 properties comprising more than 25 million square feet of space. As dozens of the stores included in this total have closed over the past several decades, Sears hopes to make this conversion a solid shift into the 21st century, digital-based economy.

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Jun 05
0

Cloud Capabilities Will Quadruple the Power of Xbox One

By | IT and Engineering, Microsoft

Microsoft’s Xbox One News

Xbox One console and controllerBuy one Xbox One console, get three virtual consoles along with it — those companions will be stored in the cloud.

That’s the news to come out of Microsoft since its announcement of the Xbox One. Xbox Incubation and Prototyping program manager Jeff Henshaw said that for each console built, the company will provision the CPU and storage equivalent of three consoles in the cloud. Sources on the subject conclude this will allow for immense resources for developers to build bigger on and for the new console.

Sources have also been quoted purporting the new system to be ten times more powerful than the Xbox 360, and “effectively forty time greater” in terms of processing capabilities, because of the cloud.

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Jun 03
0

What’s Next for .NET?

By | For Developers, Microsoft

Microsoft .NET logoWe thought we’d bring this discussion back around, following Rockford Lhotka‘s somewhat fatalistically-titled post, asking the question: Does .NET have a future?

The short answer is, of course. But theย WHYย part of the “of course” answer is the truly interesting part. Yes, it’ll stick around for awhile, because the infrastructure of today’s development is built around it, indeed, .NET is deeply entrenched in many industries and products. So the quick “of course” response is primarily because successful technologies, like .NET, take years, decades or longer to fade away.”

.NET, Azure, and the Future of Development

With the success of Windows Azure, it is important for developers and independent software vendors on the .NET platform to take stock of where Microsoft is headed with the framework. Check out the DotNetConf .NET Open Source Panel discussion that took place in April to hear what a few industry guys had to say.

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May 28
0

Small Business, Big Data

By | Business, Customer Success, IT and Engineering

I run a small software business, what do I do with Big Data?

Large volume of data streaming 0's and 1'sIt’s a buzz word that has spread across seemingly every industry, from healthcare to media analytics to education. Not only are leaders across industries still trying to wrap their heads around this concept, it seems like everyone is tripping over their competition to have “the most” — and the most advanced — big data first.

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May 20
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Still True 3 Years On: 10 Golden Principles of a Great Web App

By | Customer Success, For Developers, Tips

Fred Wilson’s 10 Golden Principles of a Great Web App

What makes a great web app?

You know it when you see it, its function is clear, and it makes intuitive sense to the users. It’s beautiful, and it runs smoothly with few bugs.

But plenty of apps are built that fail to meet these requirements, and they land quickly in the web app graveyard, or never get the love and attention they need from developers to make things right.

That’s why we turn to experts like Fred Wilson, whose company invests in apps that have a certain set ofย characteristics. These ten points, when put together, make for a great product, that people want to use. At the Future of Web Apps Miami conference in 2010,ย he laid out these principle. We recently ran across them again, and found them just as meaningful now as three years ago.

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May 15
1

SQL vs NoSQL: Which is Better for Your Business Data?

By | Customer Success, Microsoft

The Relational Database Dance

For the past few decades, the relational database has been the dominant model for database management. But non-relational — the “cloud” or NoSQL option — is gaining ground now, as a strong, viable alternate as businesses see that a relational database model may not be the best solution for all.

drawing of person choosing SQL vs noSQLIt cannot be ignored: choosing SQL or NoSQL to manage your database is important. If your data matters, then it also mattersย whichย query language is applied to your databases. You cannot afford to leave it to the IT experts alone.

Each has its strengths and weaknesses, its benefits and drawbacks for your enterprise.ย So which one is best? That depends on what you need it to do.

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May 13
0

The Hunger Games Interactive Website: Cutting-edge Web Technology

By | For Developers, IT and Engineering, Microsoft

Internet Explorer hits the mark for web engagement with The Hunger Games Explorer. The film adaptation ofย Catching Fire, the second in theย Hunger Gamesย trilogy, doesn’t come out until November. But Internet Explorer partnered with theย Gamesย web team and RED Interactive Agency to give fans an edgy, interactive online portal that gives them everything they need to whet their appetite while they wait.

Hunger games website screen shotThe team built this site on some of the very latest web technologies, and it’s especially designed for the touch-screen, tablet experience. There’s all the regular stuff, like trailers and exclusive photos, but there is also content to keep users coming back. Fans can sign up and get their own District ID, and go behind the scenes on the making of the film via this futuristic online content portal.

The team took special pains to ensure the technology lives up to the demand for excellent user experience. This comes across in the responsive grid layout designed to be just as engaging no matter whether the user is on a mobile phone or tablet. “Taking a mobile-first approach [to back-end design] allowed us to ensure we used a single code base across multiple platforms and devices,” the behind-the-scenes website reveals. The grid was built using JavaScript.

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May 08
0

What Does the Future Hold for JavaScript?

By | For Developers

Javascript code exampleWillย JavaScriptย take over the programming world? Or is it a lady already wearing too much make-up, only getting worse? This question has been up for discussion on the O’Reilly Programming website and further discussed on the web.

While it might actually top the list of programmers’ least-liked languages, JavaScript could end up dominating through its sheer ubiquity. It’sย everywhereย and it’s popular. However, the author doubts it will take over the general-purpose language space. This is for a couple of reasons, particularly the shift towards more of a compilation approach in spaces where JavaScript was for a long time the only way to do it — or at least was the dominant way. This frees developers who weren’t too keen on JavaScript to work with something more comfortable to them. And it leaves the door open for those who do enjoy JavaScript, but still want to try another tool.

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