Initech Solutions

One buzzword on the rise is "intelligence." It's born of a real problem. Companies have data. They've digitally transformed. And now companies can find out what their sales tally was—but that's in a different system than customer preference data and marketing info.  You see, it's not enough to just have the information online: You need to make sense of it. Here are five things to know about intelligent data.  Lock-in isn't working out. Vendors hoped that being the provider of your data would keep you in their building. But normally, no one vendor has all of a company's useful data. And customers are demanding openness so they can use their Salesforce data with their Microsoft data, for example.  Startups have solutions. You say you want to combine data from different siloed services? We have the solution at startup with Data in the name! Our several billion dollar valuat...

In an important step toward a fully implantable intracortical brain-computer interface system, BrainGate researchers demonstrated the first human use of a wireless transmitter capable of delivering high-bandwidth neural signals. Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) are an emerging assistive technology, enabling people with paralysis to type on computer screens or manipulate robotic prostheses just by thinking about moving their own bodies. For years, investigational BCIs used in clinical trials have required cables to connect the sensing array in the brain to computers that decode the signals and use them to drive external devices. Now, for the first time, part of a longstanding research collaboration called BrainGate – uses artificial intelligence (AI) to interpret signals of neural activity generated during handwriting. The traditional cables are replaced by a small transmitter about 2 inches in its largest dimension and weigh...

Most young people will not consider taking a job unless it offers free food and flexible working, a new study has revealed. ‘Generation Z’ workers, aged 18 to 24, were also keen on work laptops, subsidized travel and online job interviews, according to the Ivory Research poll. The study, which included 2,000 young people, showed 87% would not take a job that required them to be ‘100 per cent office-based’ and instead wanted something more flexible. The age group, which is made up of 12 million people, would be happy getting paid between £30,000 and £40,000, the Mail Online reported. In total, 72% expected bosses to provide complimentary breakfast, lunch and dinner, along with unlimited snacks and drinks. The poll showed 60% of respondents required free work laptops and phones, and subsidised work travel. The same amount also need jobs not to require previous experience and an online interview for the position. Half of the people who replie...

Lithium-ion batteries have played a vital role in the development of electric vehicles and we love them for that. But at the same time, lithium is expensive to produce, unstable in high temperatures, and a finite resource whose mining often comes with supply chain problems. Battery researchers and manufacturers have been assiduously searching for a more sustainable replacement. One intriguing alternative they’ve discovered is another chemical element: sodium. Why lithium has been dominating Lithium and sodium are neighbors in the periodic table, which basically means that they offer similar properties and can both be used as charge carriers in the battery cell. However, each sodium ion is larger than an equivalent lithium ion. As a result, battery researchers have struggled to produced an anode — the battery’s positively charged electrode/terminal — that can absorb enough sodium ions to give a sodium-based battery cell the ener...

As jarring as the transition to remote work was during the coronavirus pandemic, it was modest compared to what’s coming next, says Adam Ozimek, a labor economist at the freelancing platform Upwork . He argues that the next phase of remote work will transform economies, as more companies revise their policies to accommodate employees who have permanently shifted to working remotely, and more workers move to places they’ve always wanted to live but couldn’t. Ozimek and the team at Upwork have conducted surveys on remote work since the pandemic’s start, and his outlook is based partly on those results. He predicts that remote-first startups will figure out new ways of working asynchronously, making fully-remote work more manageable than the version we use today. And he expects economic geography to shift in big ways, with workers free to live wherever they want to—from hometowns to ski towns—instead of wherever they work. Quart...

The offshore software development sector has grown at a breakneck pace in recent years. As a result, companies seek ways to scale up their businesses sustainably, and investing in offshore development teams has become a popular option. As a result, companies that partner with offshore development firms gain access to an allegedly large talent pool, more cost-effective pricing though often times hidden and indirect, and an overhyped growth potential.   Despite this, many people have started acquiring faith in the myths about offshore development. Building a virtual team in another country may sound daunting, but it doesn’t have to be so in today’s hyper-connected world. While some people have had a horrible first-hand experience (typically with outsourcing rather than offshoring), others have heard exaggerated second-hand and third-hand horror stories about security breaches, failed projects, and poor ...

 “Complexity kills,” Lotus Notes creator and Microsoft veteran Ray Ozzie famously wrote in a 2005 internal memo. “It sucks the life out of developers; it makes products difficult to plan, build, and test; it introduces security challenges; and it causes user and administrator frustration.” If Ozzie thought things were complicated back then, you can’t help but wonder what he would make of the complexity software developers face in the cloud-native era. The shift from building applications in a monolithic architecture hosted on a server you could go and touch, to breaking them down into multiple microservices, packaged up into containers, orchestrated with Kubernetes, and hosted in a distributed cloud environment, marks a clear jump in the level of complexity of our software. Add to that expectations of feature-rich, consumer-grade experiences, which are secure and resilient by design, and never has more been asked of devel...