Monthly Archives: November 2014

My Favorite Reads of the Week

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Each week I share a few of the more interesting tech and business pieces which I have read. Uber and Barbie got a lot of ink last week. You probably read enough about Uber, but did you see the scorn of the book, Barbie: I Can Be A Computer Engineer? If Barbie wants to become a real developer, she should review the list of highest paying programming languages.

I. These Are The Highest-Paying Programming Languages You Should Learn, Ranked By Salary

Interesting list. It tops out with Ruby-on-Rails at $109K/year. But becoming a Salesforce architect pays almost twice as much. By Lisa Eadicicco, @LisaEadicicco, in Business Insider.

Credit Jeff Sheldon

Credit Jeff Sheldon

II. 50% of CIOs Think Mobile App Development Takes Too Long

In this post, Eric Carlson, @ericjohncarlson, of Propelics refers to new data from a recent Kinvey survey entitled, The State of Enterprise Mobility. The survey data indicate that the average app takes 8 months to develop at a cost of $270K. Kinvey, Propelics, and Mobile Helix each provide ways to make the development of enterprise mobile apps easier and quicker.

III. Georgia Tech Student Rewrites Barbie Book

Did you read about this last week? A blog post about the 2010 book, Barbie: I Can Be a Computer Engineer, went viral. As one Amazon reviewer had written, “Barbie admits, ‘I’m only creating the design idea, I’ll need Steven and Brian’s help to turn it into a real game.’”  In response, a Ph.D. student at Georgia Tech wrote a “remix” of the book with Barbie a full-fledged developer. You can view, and even download, the remix here. From hometown paper, The Atlanta Journal Constitution, by Adam Carlson, .

IV. 2015 Corporate Equality Index 

The Human Rights Campaign Foundation’s 13th report on workplace LGBT equality across U.S. enterprises has been released. This year 386 businesses earned the top score of 100%. The Legal sector is the highest scoring sector. Law firms make up 89 of the top scoring entities.150 companies in the Fortune 500 achieved a 100% score.

Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours!

–Maureen, @MobileHelix

My Favorite Reads of the Week

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From my favorite recent reads, a 13-year old develops a Braille printer which Intel invests in, the legal destiny of APIs, what is COPE and signs that you have found your life’s work.

I. This 13-Year-Old Is So Impressive, Intel Is Investing Hundreds Of Thousands In His Startup

LEGO® lovers alert: Inspiring story of Shubham Banerjee, 13-year CEO of the Braille printer-maker Braigo Labs. Take a look at the terrific photos of the prototype which he made with the LEGO Mindstorms EV3 set. By Eugene Kim, @eugenekim222, in Business Insider. 

II. COPE Offers IT and Workers an Alternative to BYOD

This is an informative piece which irons out the difference between COPE (Company Owned, Personally Enabled) and COBO (Corporate Only, Business Only) and BYOD programs. From what I see in the industry, I have a hard time envisioning most companies footing the bill for smartphones and service packages for all of their information workers. In the BlackBerry era, phones were mainly issued to executives and customer-facing employees. Today, most employees in information-related jobs want and need mobile access. Will an insurance company provide smartphones and service packages for 20,000 employees? Tom Kaneshige, @Kaneshige, provides a clear contrast of these approaches, in CIO.com.

III. 8 Signs You Have Found Your Life’s Work

Does your life’s work feel like “work?”. Is committing to you life’s work an honor? Ask yourself these 8 questions from Amber Rae, @heyamberrae, in FastCompany.

IV. Computer Scientists Ask Supreme Court to Rule APIs Can’t Be Copyrighted

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, @EFF, has filed a brief with the Supreme Court of the United States, arguing on behalf of 77 computer scientists that the justices should review a finding that application programming interfaces (APIs) are copyrightable. This case began several years ago when Oracle sued Google over its use of Java APIs in the Android OS and has broad ramifications in software and hardware development.

–Maureen, @MobileHelix

 

"Design Tools" Miguel Angel Avila

“Design Tools” Miguel Angel Avila

My Favorite Reads of the Week

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Each week I post a few of my fave reads related to tech and business. This week: addictive apps, being a minority in tech, what you owe your employer, and why some workers don’t love BYOD.

VW bus

Why Your Workers Hate BYOD

Hoping to get away without sharing your location with your law firm IT department? Using a health-related app on your personal smartphone? Device management by employers is getting some backlash. Tom Kaneshige, @kaneshige, writing in CIO.com, explores these concerns with BYOD. Disclosure: our Mobile Helix Link mobile app does not track employee movements or capture information regarding personal apps.

Five Things You Owe Your Employer – And Five You Don’t

Liz Ryan, @humanworkplace, CEO and founder of Human Workplace, with some solid pointers. For example, you do owe your integrity; you don’t owe your soul.

The Other Side of Diversity

A sobering narrative of Erica Joy’s career moving from “a young black lady to a black woman in the predominantly white male tech industry.” From Alaska to the San Francisco Bay area and points in-between.

Why Messaging Apps are So Addictive

Who doesn’t want to build a habit forming app? Nir Eyal, @nireyal, author of Hooked: How to Build Habit Forming Products, outlines how hooks work in apps. This is good stuff.

–Maureen, @mobilehelix

My Favorite Reads of the Week

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Slack’s $120M raise was big news this week. Learn why selective wipe on mobile devices is not enough on its own. Of course, Tim Cook, CEO of arguably the most admired company in the world, delivered a significant message.

I. Tim Cook Speaks Up

In an essay in Business Week Apple CEO, Tim Cook, @tim_cook, wrote, “I’m proud to be gay, and I consider being gay among the greatest gifts God has given me.” Cook decided that the potential good of his message on human rights and equality out-weighed his own valued privacy. Beautifully written.

II. Selective wipe: The secret to getting users to report lost mobile devices

Employees are often reticent to report a lost or stolen mobile devices to employers for fear of losing personal data if the device is wiped. It is important that IT use a mobility solution which allows selective wipe of data. Selective wipe means, for instance, that only business content on a smartphone or tablet may be wiped, not personal content. The next challenge is that employees need to be informed as to what the company procedure will be when a device is reported lost. In this piece in InfoWorld, Ryan Fass, @ryanfaas, makes the case that transparency and communication when a device is lost need to be part of the company’s mobility policy.

III. Stewart Butterfield explains why Slack is now worth more than $1 billion

What is Slack? One of the fastest growing enterprise software companies in history. The Slack platform was released to the public in February 2014. It is used by 30,000 teams to send over 200 million monthly messages. Slack raised $43M in April and just raised an additional $120M at a $1.12 billion post-money valuation. Writing in Fortune, Dan Primack, @danprimack, interviews founder and CEO, Stewart Butterfield, about Slack, the competition (HipChat and Yammer), and selling his first company, Flickr, to Yahoo.

IV. Following iPhone 6 and 6 Plus Launches, App Marketing Costs Hit an All-Time High

The launches of the new iPhone 6 phones sent an influx of new users to the App Store for mobile apps. Sarah Perez, @sarahintampa, explains in TechCrunch that advertising costs to win them over are up. In addition, the upgrade to iOS 8 caused users to have a free up a lot of storage space on their devices, which lead to users deleting many apps.

–Maureen – I tweet at @mobilehelix