After augmenting Windows 8 with some mobile-friendly features, it looks like file management is next to go under the knife. Not the sexiest part of an OS, granted, but one you’ll use almost every day — a fact not lost on Redmond. Based on newsgroup feedback, Windows 8 will sport a stack of tweaks hoping to make some of the more mundane tasks, well, less mundane. For example, if you copy duplicate files to a directory, it’ll make decisions based on size, name and modified date to determine if it’s the same file or not. For long copy jobs, error messages will be mercifully left until the end, allowing the rest to complete. Other simple touches include EXIF orientation data, which will be reflected in Explorer’s preview, updates to the slightly contentious Ribbon, plus a bunch more user-driven goodies. We’re reserving judgement until we get hands-on of course, but if you want to know more, there’s a full rundown in the source after the break.

Windows 8 file management: You ask, Microsoft listens originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 31 Jan 2012 12:02:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  MSDN  | Email this | Comments
Engadget

After releasing a revised financial forecast for FY 2011 that predicts an annual .3 billion loss, its third in the last four years, NEC announced it will cut around 10,000 jobs. Bloomberg Businessweek reports President Nobuhiro Endo announced the cuts, revealing most of the cuts will come from the company’s mobile-phone handset business, with 7,000 of them expected to be in Japan. The company reportedly had 115,840 employees as of March so there should be a few folks left around to keep the lights on and maintain ventures like its new JV with NTT Docomo, Panasonic, Samsung and Fujitsu, the NEC Lenovo PC alliance, and its recently announced work on the Hayabusa 2 asteroid explorer. Still, we’ll have to wait and see how the cuts affect upcoming cellphones, like any potential successors to its super-slim MEDIAS N-04C seen above.

Continue reading NEC will cut 10,000 jobs after forecasting .3 billion annual loss, mostly in mobile phone biz

NEC will cut 10,000 jobs after forecasting .3 billion annual loss, mostly in mobile phone biz originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 29 Jan 2012 15:56:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  NEC, Bloomberg Businessweek  | Email this | Comments
Engadget

It’s not news that more and more businesses are allowing workers to bring their smartphones and sometimes tablets of choice to the office. But would you have guessed that two of the most highly regulated industries (finance and healthcare) would be the ones leading the charge for this BYOD (bring your own device) trend? That’s what a study undertaken by Good Technology, makers of enterprise mobile security software, found. Good’s data also shows that size of the company is not an impediment to making BYOD work, and that even when workers are paid a small stipend toward a device they bring, businesses save money overall by having more productive workers.

Good’s survey includes responses from 400 of Good’s largest customers, with 2,000 employees or more, in October. And according to the results BYOD is being very clearly embraced: 70 percent of respondents said they currently let employees bring their own smartphone (or tablet) to work, 19 percent are considering allowing it, and just 9 percent said they had no plans for BYOD programs.

Being a large company isn’t a deterrent: among those polled, 80 percent that allow BYOD have 2,000 employees or more, 60 percent have 5,000 or more and 35 percent have 10,000 or more. And of those companies, half allow employees to bring their own smartphone or tablet to work as long as they pay for all the costs, while 45 percent offer some kind of stipend for employees to use toward buying a device or a way to expense monthly costs.

BYOD is not as popular among retailers and government agencies, according the the study. But the reason that it’s finding so much success at highly regulated industries, like healthcare and finance — which have very high bars for security and compliance — is the existence of software available that allays those concerns. (Like Good’s, hence their survey.) New mobile software can be installed on personal iPhones or Android phones that “create strong separation between business data and what’s happening on the personal side of the device,” John Herrema, SVP of Corporate Strategy at Good, said in an interview. That separation helps hospitals, banks and other meet compliance standards like HIPAA, PCI data security and more.

As far as what kinds of devices these workers are bringing in when given the choice, it’s not a huge shock: “Overall, our customers are absolutely activating iOS and Android to the exclusion of everything else we support,” said Herrema. “Historically, we’ve supported Windows Mobile, Symbian, some are even on old Treo devices. Bu these days it’s all about iOS and Android all night.”

The exact breakdown among smartphones brought to work (among Good’s customers) is: 60 percent are iPhones, and 40 percent Android. In tablets, it’s not that close: 95 percent of tablets brought to work are iPads, just 5 percent are Android-powered.

For those companies or IT managers hesitant about the practice, consider this: BYOD can help you save money. It’s fairly obvious that by having employees buy their own smartphone instead of issuing them a BlackBerry you’re going to see savings in your IT budget. But even those companies giving a stipend are seeing the financial benefit.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• Millennials in the enterprise, part 2: benchmarking IT’s readiness for the new digital workforce
• Mobile Q2: Smartphone growth surges; iPad’s rule continues

alt=''
border='0'
/>

GigaOM

convert FLV to MP4

Sustaining a easy registration process and curbing the mounting administrative prices are the main steps involved in good occasion planning. Harnessing the benefits of event registration software can simplify this job. This software is an built-in system that streamlines the process of attendee registration, arrangement, and promotion of your occasions, conferences, and conferences by a single click of your mouse. Extremely customizable instruments in it permit seamless mixing of assorted jobs, reminiscent of on-line registration, cost system, and promotional campaigns beneath an built-in application.

Currently, event registration software program is used extensively, not only for large events, but in addition for the small-and medium-sized ones. For a quick and easy accessibility to occasions, conferences, and conferences, occasion registration software is broadly most well-liked, in latest times.

Here’s a transient overview of how you can reap the highest advantages through the use of event registration software.

Creation and Customization of Occasion Registration Page

Event registration software enables you to create and publish your online registration page within minutes. Furthermore, it’s featured with a wide selection of customization instruments, which permit the user to present the registration page a brand id by inserting logos and images.

Scale back Workload with Elevated Effectivity

Utilizing event registration software reduces again workplace workload by alleviating all types of handbook processes. On-line registration allows the occasion attendees to entry the registration kind 24X7. Furthermore, the software helps your attendees to simultaneously register in a number of occasions by a single click of a mouse. The software program is completely automated and updates its database after every registration inside seconds. Built-in Cloud-primarily based solutions make it easier to to make use of the software program with out installing any additional devices. Quick and easy registration also boosts attendance percentage.

Cost Option through Secured Gateway

Occasion registration software out there presently gives simple payment transaction from the consolation of your property by a single click on of your mouse. Using such software program permits you to settle for funds from PayPal and through all major credit cards, checks, and purchase orders. Nevertheless, the customers may use their very own merchant card account to accept payments. Whereas the online fee gateway helps to put off handbook money handling, it additionally affords real-time authorization to the attendees on acceptance of each payment.

Advertising Tools for Complete Promotion of Events

Promo codes and present cards are a few of the leading marketing instruments, which you need to use whereas availing the occasion registration software. With promo codes, you can also make an extensive promotion of the event. Present playing cards with varied presents are likely to entice an growing variety of attendees to come to your events. You possibly can ship e mail notification and RSVPs to the attendees usually for the extensive promotion to your event.

Built-in Calendar Keeps Observe of Recurring Occasions

Event administration software program comes with the superior characteristic of constructed-in calendar, which keeps observe of a number of occasions organized by your company. Consequently, the attendees can stay abreast of different events organized by you and can attend these accordingly. Accessible online, this characteristic will be accessed 24X7, from any nook of the world and solely by a single click on of a mouse.

Attendee Administration with Decreased Administrative Cost

Event software program facilitates systematic attendee management. The automated database keeps observe of attendee participation in every occasion; it also displays the payment made by them. Since all the administrative workloads, proper from attendee registration to cost activities, are achieved online, administrative prices are diminished considerably.

Simple and Automated Reporting

Event software permits the person to keep a monitor of attendee participation with revenues earned at the end of each event. The cutting-edge answer additionally lets you conduct a web-based survey about attendee expertise after every event.

So, wait no more! Make your event a big hit through the use of cloud-based mostly software.

About The Creator

Jacob has been writing articles online for nearly 9 years now. Not only does this writer focus on Computers and Technology, you can even try his newest website on how you can convert FLV to MP4 with FLV to MP4 converter which also helps people find the best FLV to MP4 converter on the market.

Before Steve Jobs had even passed away, people had already started playing the “who is the next Steve Jobs” game — trying to come up with names of technology and design visionaries who might be able to don the mantle of the Apple co-founder and CEO. Jeff Bezos of Amazon? Napster co-founder and Spotify investor Sean Parker? Those names and others have been floated by industry watchers, but listening to Twitter and Square founder Jack Dorsey at GigaOM’s RoadMap conference on Thursday made me think that he is at least as strong a contender for that mantle (if such a thing even exists) as any of them. Could Dorsey change the way we interact with technology and the world around us in as profound a way as Jobs?

Why do we even need an heir to Steve Jobs? The obvious answer is that we don’t. Jobs was unique, in both positive and negative ways, and the precise combination of those features made him who he was — and thus made Apple what it was. No one is going to be “the next Steve Jobs” because they will have a different combination of strengths and weaknesses, and they may not be as smart (or as lucky) in specific ways. But when it comes to the role that Jobs played in technology — the role of visionary designer, creator, instigator and disruptor — it’s a different story. We need those people more than ever, because visionaries inspire others, and they change the way we look at the world in fundamental ways.

Not just technology, but how it changes us as human beings

I haven’t spent a lot of time around Jack Dorsey, but based on his conversation with Om at RoadMap, he clearly spends a lot of time thinking about the big picture behind the technology that he is involved in. So it’s not just about Twitter and how it works — or what it looks like or even how to monetize it — but how it connects us to our own “humanness” as he put it, and enables us to experience things and see through the eyes of others. He described how he found this an incredibly powerful thing during the protests in Iran, and I think others have had a similar response to the events of the Arab Spring and the earthquakes in Japan and Haiti.

And when it comes to Square — the other company that Dorsey is helping shape and create — it’s not just making payments easier or more efficient that interests him, but how making that easier can help artisans and individuals more easily become fully functioning businesses, and how that could help change society.

Dorsey’s roles with two very different companies have also sparked some comparisons to Jobs, who helped revolutionize animated films with Pixar while also changing the personal electronics industry at Apple (the differences between Square and Twitter are arguably even more dramatic than Pixar and Apple, since Square is device-based and Twitter is an information network). And Dorsey was also forced out of the company he founded, much like Jobs was — after a dispute with former CEO Evan Williams, who funded the company in its early years — and then returned to become the product visionary.

The way Twitter has evolved as a service is also very different from the way things worked at Apple. The company excelled at product design during Jobs’ reign as CEO, but it was notoriously inept at anything service related: iTunes, to take just one example, is a total mess when it comes to usability and design despite years of evolution, and efforts like Ping have effectively been stillborn. One of the most powerful things about Twitter, however, is the way in which the service was transformed by its users, with additions like the @ mention and the retweet — features that were never even imagined by its creators. Steve Jobs, by contrast, wouldn’t even let people replace the battery in his products.

Steve Jobs’ replacement or not, vision is in short supply

From what I can tell, Dorsey also seems to be missing what could charitably be called the “difficult” elements of Jobs’ personality (other people have more blunt terms for it), which are detailed in Walter Isaacson’s biography: the shouting, the merciless humiliation, the ruthlessness even with friends, the crying in meetings, and so on. One of the questions that this description of Jobs raises is whether those things were a necessary part of his success, or simply character flaws. Would Apple products have been the same, or been as revolutionary, if he were a different kind of person?

So is Jack Dorsey the new Steve Jobs? Probably not (although even some early Apple employees think he could be). But he clearly has a vision about two fairly significant areas of the technology sphere — the way in which even a simple service like Twitter can change the way we interact with each other and distribute information in a digital and connected world, and the way a simple payment service like Square can potentially transform entrepreneurialism and small business. And he is thoughtful about the implications of those things in a way that many product or business-focused technology executives are not (he even has a fascination with Zen Buddhist design principles, as Steve Jobs did).

Dorsey has already altered the media landscape with Twitter, whether he knew that’s what he was doing or not, and he is also trying to alter the payment landscape with Square. Either of those would be a substantial undertaking for any technology CEO. Whether those changes turn out to be as massive and transformational as the ones Jobs unleashed remains to be seen, but one thing is for sure — we could definitely use more visionaries.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• Millennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforce
• NewNet Q2: Google closes the quarter with a bang

alt=''
border='0'
/>

GigaOM

A recently rediscovered videotape sheds light on the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs. Filmed more than a decade ago and excerpted for a PBS show in the ’90s, the hour-long interview will be shown in U.S. theaters this month.

Wired Top Stories