The world of IT has to deal with the issue of data storage. The reason for this is that there is plenty of data produced and created daily on the internet and on various business applications. In the past, RDBMs or Relational Database Management Systems were used for storage. Even though they are still used today, there are other offerings that present competition and anyone wishing to purchase data storage systems needs to make comparisons. One such competing system is NoSQL or Not Only SQL. It has taken the market by storm because of the other possibilities that it offers which go beyon...

When I was in business school 25 years ago, I don't recall the term sustainability used. Maybe it was, but it certainly didn't register in my brain. The mantras that I recall were return on investment, shareholder value, revenue growth, and driving efficiencies in the business.But as I look at many of the challenges facing businesses today, it seems to me that the focus on performance and efficiency often comes at the cost of sustainability. This talk by Clay Christensen really drives that point home. The recent history of the steel industry in the US is a case study in managers doing everythi...

Summary: Could and should Bill Gates return to day-to-day responsibilities at Microsoft? Fortune is reporting there’s a rumor to that effect. Fortune reported on December 8 that there’s talk Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates might be mulling a comeback, largely to help boost Microsoft’s stagnant stock price and employee morale.I have to say I am very, very, very skeptical on this one.First, it seems this is a single-sourced report. Fortune says: “One prominent chief executive told Fortune he’d heard from someone close to Gat...

If you are person reading technology news much, you will find a large part of the tech news are about a few companies : Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft, in which the first four are today's "Big Four (platform)" as said by Google Chairman Eric Schmidt.These giants have both competition and cooperation in many areas, and each has its own place in the world, with Schmidt's words, Google dominates search, Apple designs device, Amazon occupies e-commerce and Facebook leads social. Although he did not talk about Microsoft (because he has kicked Microsoft out of the four major platforms...

WHEN I first started as a freelance writer, I was eager to sell myself — but not eager to have to discuss money. So I more or less took whatever was offered. Then I read somewhere that no matter what price a new client states, you always say in a polite but firm tone, “I expected more.” The first time I tried it, I was sweating and I doubt my tone was firm — it probably sounded more like pleading — but to my great surprise, it worked. With that one sentence, I made an extra few hundred dollars. Negotiating a salary when you have a job can be...

There are a wide range of engineering degrees out there, reflecting the variety of specialties that an engineer can pursue in their professional lives. Engineering is definitely a solid career choice, and there is a specialty to appeal to anybody. You will, of course, need to learn to love math, as that will be at the heart of any engineering degree.But, no matter what type of engineering degree you are studying for, you will need a laptop to do your work on. In fact, depending on the engineering degree you are doing, you might need quite a specialized laptop; one that can handle 3D modeling a...

Earlier this year, in July to be precise, one of the world's largest ecommerce platforms, Shopify, and one of the world's biggest online marketplaces, eBay, announced that they are partnering up in such a way that would benefit both these companies, but also the people who buy and sell on them.How both Companies WinShopify is one of the fastest growing ecommerce platforms out there, with the last numbers showing more than 360,000 stores being run on the platform. Their revenue has been on a steady rise for a while now, constantly putting up new company records. It was, therefore, no surprise t...

A friendly reminder:The problem isn’t you. The problem is the problem. –Steven PressfieldSome stuff is just hard.We start thinking we messed up. That it’s an issue with us. But it’s not. The work is hard and the problem is hard. You need to solve the problem, not fix yourself.The quote above is from Steven Pressfield’s incredible Do the Work. The audiobook (that’s a store link) is about 90 minutes long, so it fits in a single dreary London commute and costs less than lunch.My problem as of lateMy previous businesses have b...