Archive for June, 2011
Be prepared for another Canada Post service stoppage
Jun 30th
Canada’s small businesses learned a tough lesson in business continuity readiness this month when Canada Post locked out its workers and snail mail came to a full stop.
The mail is an essential service for many businesses even in a world where more business is being done electronically all the time. Until 3D printers are combined with quantum tunneling technology by some sort of genius mad scientist to invent teleportation technology, we’re stuck wrapping stuff up in thin brown paper, taping it up, and sending it off in the mail. When your business is in selling physical goods, it doesn’t do you much good to be taking orders online when you can’t fill them.
Brian Jackson, Associate Editor, ITBusiness.ca
Lync the hidden gem in Office 365
Jun 29th
By Robert Dutt
After more than eight months of hype from Microsoft, Microsoft’s cloud-based productivity suite, Office 365, formally goes live Tuesday with Microsoft launch events from New York and around the world.
As usual, opinions are varied on whether Microsoft’s second take at a cloud-based productivity suite meets the mark or is doomed to total failure. Some have lambasted it as too expensive when compared to competitor Google Docs, others have proclaimed it virtually cost-free.
Why tech innovation comes slow in legal profession
Jun 27th
By Monica Goyal
This past weekend, I was a panelist on “Legal Techs in a Brave New World” at lawTechCamp (hosted by the University of Toronto, Centre for Innovation, Law and Policy). My co-panelists were Michael Carabash, an Ontario lawyer and founder of Dynamic Lawyers, and Terry Taoussanopoulos from Brooks Barristers & Solicitors, a lawyer and founder of a legal referral site. Jordan Dolgin, a lawyer active in the Toronto start-up community, chaired the panel. The discussion focused on the challenges that legal tech startups face, why innovation will be slow to come to the legal profession, and on some interesting developments in the legal profession. Here are a few of the points we covered during the discussion.
Law and Technology
Bridging the legal and technological professions is tough. “Lawyers aren’t naturally good at building websites or computer programming or stuff like that,” writes Michael Carabash on his blog at Dynamic Lawyers, “They come from arts programs (there are only a few with engineering backgrounds). We take courses like history, political science, and philosophy. We know how to analyze, research, and write. But ask us to build a website or a computer program, and most of us will be lost.” Read the rest of this entry »
6 mobile tech game changers
Jun 27th
If there’s ever been an area in technology that been so fast changing, all encompassing and sexy to boot in recent years it must be mobile.
The moment engineers found a way to un-tether the telephone, we have moved from Gordon Gecko’s brick-sized mobile phone, to tiny feature phones, to sleek touch screen smartphones and exciting media tablets in less than two decades. The third screenas futurist and author Chuck Martin call them, are taking over the television and computer screens as users’ source of information. The questions asked by many small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) are: How to I hitch a ride on this fast moving mobile bandwagon? What aspect of mobile tech is appropriate for my business? What’s the next big thing? Dr. Sara Diamond, president of the Ontario College of Arts & Design (OCAD). Diamond, an artist and designer and a researcher in the field of mobile media, recently outlined several ongoing developments that she says are game changers in the mobile tech space. Read the rest of this entry »
Staples should pay customers to wipe data
Jun 24th
When you want people to do something for you that is tedious and just altogether easier to skip, nothing works better than cold, hard cash.
Staples Inc. should consider paying its customers to effectively wipe their data off of storage devices they are returning to the retailer. The payment could come in the form of a credit towards the replacement storage device they buy, or just a cash refund that is a small percentage of the overall purchase. But why would Staples want to do this, you ask?
Brian Jackson, Associate Editor, ITBusiness.ca
A thought on cloud security…
Jun 22nd
By Brian Bourne
There have been no shortage of Cloud service failures recently. The latest being discussed in this ITBusiness article: “Dropbox drops the ball on account security”.
So this raises the question. How scared should the average business owner be about moving to the cloud? Of course it’s a complex question. If you look at it completely academically, you’ll need to value assets, calculate risk and all the rest. But let’s cover a few practicalities here.
Brian Bourne
It’s very common for small businesses (and some large ones) to have an attacker inside their systems for months if not years before anyone notices. When they do notice, there is seldom a competent forensic investigation to determine what has happened and for how long. Actually, what usually happens when there is a security incident is the sysadmin or IT provider does his/her best to patch it up and move on. So would you rather have someone directly inside your systems, or just have a bit of your data in a large pile of other data that a random person may or may not ever go through or use against you? Read the rest of this entry »
RIM needs to fix its tech roadmap
Jun 21st
By Kye Husbands
I just returned from a trip to California, home to some of the biggest companies in the world – Google, Apple, Facebook, eBay, NetFlix, Zynga to name a few – and it was an enlightening trip to say the least.
While en-route, I observed what appeared to be an abnormally high number of people that were all part of the white head phone wearing, or white AC cord charging tribe. It seemed like everyone was part of the – you guessed it – Apple tribe.
Like any good business person, we want numbers; after all, numbers don’t lie. So while waiting for my connecting flight in the Dallas airport (Major international hub by the way) I decided to move my analysis from anecdotal to empirical. In other words, I was determined to get some metrics to share with my team and prove my observation right or wrong. So I literally used the time (4 hour stop over) to count the type of smartphone devices people were using. Read the rest of this entry »
How Canadian tech start-ups can learn from Israel’s entrepreneurial spirit
Jun 20th
By Francis Moran and Leo Valiquette
“If Canadians were as good at innovating as we are at explaining why we’re bad at it, Canada wouldn’t rank 14th among industrialized nations in the Conference Board of Canada’s report card on innovation. And because innovation is the key to improving productivity, we wouldn’t be earning $7,000 less a person each year than Americans.”
That blunt comment came courtesy of none other than Conference Board president and CEO Anne Golden in an editorial published last August in the Globe and Mail titled “Canada’s innovation malaise: The cure’s in our culture.”
The Conference Board earlier in the year had released a report card on how well Canada had fared in innovation versus 16 of its peers through the economic downturn. For its purposes, the Conference Board defined innovation as “the ability to turn knowledge into new and improved goods and services.” In other words, it is the ability to move from the “R” to the “D” side of the R&D equation and create wealth from having built that better mousetrap. Read the rest of this entry »
lawTechcamp geared to bring the law and technology together
Jun 17th
By Monica Goyal
Lawyers are increasingly relying on technology to help them get their work done and improve the level of service they offer to their clients. Failure to adapt to new technologies and processes could spell the difference between success and failure for some in the legal profession.
Lawyers seeking a better understanding of how technology is changing their profession can check out the latest additon to the Toronto “unconference” scene: lawTechCamp. The morning of June 18th, 2011, legal and tech professionals are welcome to attend a first of its kind legal tech unconference.
Monica Goyal
“These are exciting times for a profession at a cross-road. The legal profession has only two choices: accept that the economic landscape has irreversibly shifted and adapt to new technology and processes, or keep its head fixed firmly in the sand where it will eventually die off as more nimble and efficient players enter the marketplace. How legal services are delivered in 2020 will be vastly different from how they are delivered today. ”, says Mitch Kowalski, lawyer, writer and entrepreneur, co-organizer of the event.
lawTechcamp is a BarCamp-style community for new media and technology enthusiasts, technology lawyers, technology developers in the legal space, legal information professionals, bloggers, tweeters, social networkers, and everyone else who is curious about new media technology and its intersection with the legal profession. Read the rest of this entry »
Something good out of LulzSec attacks
Jun 16th
By Nestor E. Arellano
In the simulated network attack used in the recently concluded SC Canada Congress security conference, organizers attributed the hypothetical theft of a fictitious company’s data to a secretive band of hackers known as LulzSec.
Nestor Arellano
The simulated attack which was the highlight of the session titled 2 ½ hours to network meltdown was a hilarious affair featuring a hapless operations chief of a network security team that scarcely had any idea how to handle the attack that was taking place.
But there is nothing to laugh about in the real attacks poised recently by the grey hat hacker group whose motto is ironically “laughing at your security since 2011”. Read the rest of this entry »
