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Bob's Byte

The End of Printer Profits?

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The End of Printer Profits?

Xerox Corp. reports decreasing demand for printer equipment and consumables as their printing, photocopying and document management business suffered a 12% profit decline. Some industry experts call this latest quarterly financial report the tipping point where the cash cow of the printer/consumables hybrid goes dry and dryer...

Driven by innovative printers , multifunction devices and document management software, the printer business has been lucrative, allowing partners to sell highly profitable consumables (cartridges, ink, paper etc) as well as maintenance services.

But today, as an example, Xerox gets about 33% of its business from printers and consumables, 20% from photocopies and the rest from professional services and business process outsourcing. That's right, Xerox is almost more an IT integrator than a printer/photocopier maker-- and that's a tipping point!

In its new business, Xerox is competing against Hewlett-Packard Professional Services (formerly EDS) (among others), another printer company that's embracing IT services instead of hardware/consumables. Read more...

A Sense of Multitouch

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A Sense of Multitouch

Touch is so obvious, yet so little understood that if was ice cream, most people would think it only came in vanilla. And the industry is in desperate need of jargon police to watch over the use and abuse of "multitouch" for the diverse emerging market segments.

Touch can be a single point of contact with a screen, multiple points like several fingers on a hand, full hands-on (with all 10 fingers), and even full hands with multiple parties (more than one person using full hands).

When someone tells you their product is "multitouch," you really need to ask "What kind of multitouch?"

The company MultiTouch Ltd. of Finland lives in the upper end of the touch business; let's call it "hypertouch" for lack of a better word. The world of hypertouch is the world of big touch screens in large, public fixed installations.

It's a world where you need to have more than 5 touch points to claim "multitouch." While other multitouch techniques merely see points of contact where fingers touch, MultiTouch Ltd. technology identifies even the hands. It can even distinguish between your hand and mine on the screen and tell which fingers belong to whom. Now that’s hypertouch. Read more...

Five Millennial Myths

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Five Millennial Myths

Jennifer J. Deal’s Five Millennial Myths is subtitled: Forget what you think you know about your Gen Y employees.

That part was easy: I didn’t know much.

The conventional wisdom, apparently, is that “…everyone under the age of 30 is needy and narcissistic. They want the corner office and a company car, but they aren’t truly committed to their organization. They don’t take kindly to criticism, but can be easily won over with the next hot gadget.”

Deal asks: “Can companies afford to put their trust in these types of characterizations?”

For the past 12 years, she studied the so-called generation gap through empirical research, and found the stereotypes of millennials in the workplace asinconsistent at best and destructive at worst. With data collected from more than 13,000 participants in for-profit, nonprofit, and government organizations, Deal dentifies five key myths that companies believe about their younger employees.

Myth #1: Millennials don’t want to be told what to do.

The reality: Wrong! Their research shows (unexpectedly, she admits) that millennials currently in the workforce are more willing to defer to authority than either baby boomers or Gen Xers.

Millennials are more likely to thrive if they know the ingredients for success in the workplace, starting with the basics. For example, although it may seem obvious to an older manager, millennials may appreciate being told what time they are expected to arrive at the office, and precisely how quickly they should turn around a project (beyond just “ASAP”).

Read more...

How You Can Make Your Integration Fortune

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How You Can Make Your Integration Fortune

Most headlines touting a waiting "fortune" come with a catch. This one doesn't. It's exactly what an IT entrepreneur like Mark Cuban says he would do...

Precise is a developer of application performance management system. When it spun out of Symantec and became a private company, they had 1000 customers to support with limited IT resources. Instead of keeping their licenses for SAP and other enterprise software packages, they took the leap from traditional licensed software (and annual capital expenses on equipment) in favor of cloud, SaaS and virtualization.

Nothing they chose was revolutionary... they chose Salesforce and NetSuite for the front and back-office solutions. For customer support,they picked Drupal and Marketo for— both integrated using WebSphere Cast Iron Cloud Integration. Read more...

It's Not Only CeBIT That Hannover is Now Famous For...

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It's Not Only CeBIT That Hannover is Now Famous For...

In our industry, Hannover in Germany is famous for CeBIT. Now the success of a Hannover police stratagem may capture worldwide attention from police forces.

In Hannover, the local polizei have a pilot scheme (Fahndung via Facebook or Manhunt via Facebook) that uses a photofit technique delivered by social media to harness the public to locate criminal suspects.

Photofit is now generally known as Electronic Facial Identification Technique (E-FIT), as today it is a computer-based method that produces facial composites of suspects based on eyewitness descriptions. (Janina Kaminska in the UK Home Office first proposed the name "E-Fit"in 1984.)

Read more...

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