"Efficient use of technology is essential to running a successful business. By leveraging technology correctly entrepreneurs will be in a position to scale and grow in a more efficient manner - and in many cases, with limited upfront investment required,” says Padraig Healy, executive director global for Dell Limerick. Infrastructure investment may be the single largest investment a small business can make. Beyond the initial purchase cost, maintenance and updates throughout the life Read more

King Arthur isn’t the only one with a quest. For marketers, the ability to target ads to very specific demographics is a holy grail pursuit. And there’s good reason for this desire. Any marketer worth his or her salt knows there are only a limited number of people interested in their product. Add to that the fact that all marketing budgets are finite and you’ve got a pretty strong case Read more

Ever heard that wise piece of parental figure caution, “Money doesn’t grow on trees”? For startups, that’s doubly true. Tighter bank lending practices, cautious angel investors and crazy credit card interest rates are all squeezing entrepreneurs’ budgets worse than a “Seen on TV” gastric band. But while dollar bills aren’t freely sprouting from traditional funding sources right now, 2013 could be the year that non-traditional startup funding becomes a forest. When Read more

On June 30th of this year, a nasty storm caused an ill-placed lightning strike to wreak havoc on a data center. For those millions of American engaged in their regular weekend routines of photo sharing, website pinning and action film viewing, things were a bit disrupted. In fact, they were shut off for several hours. That bolt of errant electricity did its deed. Amazon’s AWS was knocked out and pulled Read more

You’ve planned for your business to grow. And now it’s happening. As your business begins to take off, it’s usually just a matter of time before your development team requires a corresponding growth in numbers to keep up with all the work that needs to be done. It’s a good thing, right?
Well, not so fast. For some dev teams, rapid scaling can cause severe problems, even life-threatening issues. So here’s Read more

Developing for Viral Growth We’ve all seen the YouTube video that makes the rounds ad infinitum, cluttering up our Facebook feed as it’s shared again and again. You know, the one with the cute kid politely protesting as he’s repeatedly bitten by his baby brother. Or maybe it’s Susan Boyle blowing away the reality show judges with sheer talent. Or the one that makes you sing about “Friday” all week long. Whatever Read more

Have you heard the buzz? That the whole world will be connected to the cloud within 5 years? Okay, okay, maybe not North Korea. But if you listen to the hype, we’re fast heading into a world even more connected and aggregated then the Matrix ever was. Gartner recently stoked the fire by releasing a study that postulates that by the year 2016, users will be storing over ⅓ of Read more

The smartphone revolution is officially here, folks. From Droids to iPhones, tablets to Blackberries and everything in between, almost everyone you hire is going to have their own computing device. In this connected day and age, they won’t go anywhere without their digital brains. And that includes work. In the stuffy corporate world of big business and even bigger security risks, IT departments try to keep a stranglehold on personal devices Read more

Which county has the world’s fastest Internet service? How about South Korea. That’s according to a new study from content delivery service Pando Networks that sampled some 35 petabytes of data from 27 million downloads and 224 countries. The service found that South Korea is top in the world in terms of download speed, averaging 17.62 Mbps. Romania has the second fastest Internet speeds on the planet, clocking in at 15.27 Read more

From the developer’s point of view, the latest site design is brilliant and intuitive. From the user’s perspective, the interface is annoying and the navigation is confusing. These two viewpoints must be reconciled, or else the site will consistently frustrate its users. As Xavier points out regarding his experience with trying to reset his password on a site, “...some people, in this case devs like me, don’t really use common Read more