At the presentation of the Luxembourg ICT Awards, Telindus Luxembourg won the prize for ‘Cloud provider of the Year’. The company was praised for its innovative cloud solutions and excellent record in customer satisfaction. Read more
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Thursday December 22nd, 2011Telindus Luxembourg is ‘Cloud Computing Provider of the Year’
Luxembourg ICT Awards
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Thursday December 15th, 2011“I hope to inspire women to start a career in IT”
Sabine Everaet, first female CIO of the Year
2.400 readers of Data News voted for Sabine Everaet, chief information officer of The Coca-Cola Company, in the top 3 of the CIO of the Year 2011. Everaet is since 2009 responsible for all IT-related activities of the company in Europe. Kurt De Ruwe, Bayer Material Science, and Bart Sijnave, UZ Gent, were also nominated. The jury chose Everaet as CIO of the Year in this 19e edition. Read more
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Friday September 16th, 2011The game breaker for tablets
In one of my previous posts, I stated that tablets are real cloud devices. The tablet is a small online gamer, conferencing, TV watching, news reading device, where most of the information is coming directly from the internet. And most of it is free to use. This means “anonymous” usage. You don’t need to type in any password for most of the applications that you use. But this will not be the case for all situations.
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Thursday August 18th, 2011Tablets don’t print
When the first personal computers came out on the market, back in the 80-90ies, they all had a “parallel” connector. 
Also called “Centronics” connector. It used to blow up the size of the computers. And it was designed to connect a personal printer to a personal computer, at a speed up to 4 Mbytes per second. Things have changed today, since we now have printers that are connected directly to the LAN or WiFi infrastructure.
So, tablets don’t need a printer connector as was the case back in the “good ol’” days. Tablets connect to the WiFi, so if the printer is connected to the network, we can print.
Well, kind of. Because I cannot print. First of all there are the technicalities. To print, you need a driver, generating the printable image in a language that that particular printer can understand. That’s why we have different drivers. Actually I have a printer driver per printer on which I want to print at the office. The driver is not only for the printable image. It is also used for the proper exchange of information between printer and computer (eg. “printer out paper”, “out of ink”, “memory full”, “paper jam”, etc). OK, I can understand. So I need a printer driver on my tablet. But the app stores do not have drivers for all the printers yet. I could find a driver for my home printer, but none for the office printers. And the one I got for my home printer can only be used for the pictures, not for the documents.
So how do you print, then ? Simply, by transferring the documents to another computer which has the required drivers. Well, actually, if this other computer has the required software to exchange files with your tablet. Or maybe with a USB stick.
But, on the other hand, silly question : do you really need to print from your tablet ? In a previous article I wrote that the tablet is a cloud device. Information is coming from the cloud : news, weather, videos, web pages, etc. Most of this information is not printed, or mostly rarely. You can take pictures with your tablet and maybe sometimes you will want to print them.
I can imagine that a field worker will want to print out a document (s)he just filled out while in the field. Some do have a small printer that is linked one way or the other to their portable computer. So solutions exist. But maybe some service company might offer a print service. You send your document to the service provider, and they print your document on any printer in the vicinity of where you are at that moment. Or they might just send it via postal service to where you want it to be, for example at the address where you are at the moment you order the print.
There is always the option to send the document in PDF format via e-mail, but then it is still not printed.
In other words : if you want to integrate tablets in your organisation : watch out and analyse the printing needs and solutions carefully.
News
Tuesday August 16th, 2011Tablets and cloud storage
This autumn, Apple will launch their iCloud service. It was perceived as a very nice present from Apple. The service will synchronize documents across different Apple devices, will synchronize music, pictures, videos. For the documents you get for 5 Gbytes of storage. Apple guarantees a one time pay for the music and apps you download from their stores. Nice. Documents that are stored in their iCloud are automatically synchronized. Cool. You make a change in a text document, and the new version is automatically pushed to the other devices. And they maintain a history with the previous versions. Really cool.
This indicates a nice need when you have a tablet. How do you exchange files between your tablet and your other 
computers ? Apple, of course in search of a closed ecosystem, offers a well-thought approach. Several apps are available on the stores to do one or the other kind of file transfer. They each time require the same software on your other devices. Hmm, will your employer allow you to install this software on your machine ?
Other companies provide cloud storage, like for instance Dropbox. Install a small client and you can exchange files via the cloud. In this case -just like with Apple’s iCloud- your files are being stored on servers “in the cloud”. I mean : you do not know where your files are being stored, you don’t know how your privacy will be guaranteed. For private files, it mostly does not do any harm. For enterprise documents it may become subject to security rules, corporate governance rules. Some organisations, like governmental or financial institutions will not accept the storage of internal information on “external” servers. Unless there is a clear contract that has been officially agreed by legal departments.
I have a colleague who uses a paying cloud storage in the US. It took several days before all his information was uploaded to the servers. Of course it all works and he seems satisfied of the service he gets. But we had another question : how long do they guarantee your data ? What if they become bankrupt ? Where are you with your data ? Where are you in case of a privacy breach ? Which legal actions can you take to a service provider outside of your country ?
Tablets initiate a number of additional opportunities ; they certainly push us to move further. At present day they push us harder than we can solve at this stage.
News
Thursday August 11th, 2011Applications for tablets
One of the things I do every day is checking the new applications that are being published on the app stores. I am really regularly enthusiastic about the software that is being published, and of course I am testing the new ones. And of course I regularly get updates on my credit card as well 
And there are some clear trends that I see and need to be mentioned. Read more
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Tuesday August 9th, 2011Manage your tablet utilisation costs
In the preceding article we wrote about the increased traffic on the networks due to increased multimedia usage. Most of us are not aware of the amount of traffic that is generated by every application, let be by streaming radio or TV.
As long as you are on a WiFi network where there is no price linked to traffic (at home, most hotspots, at work) there is also no need to know. But once you get billed for the volume of data exchanged, you might get what is called a “bill shock” (excessively high bills leading to a mental shock). This is most probably going to happen in three ways.
One bill shock can come from the app store. You might be buying too many paying applications. Or the kids might do 
this. Apple keeps your login active for 15 minutes after giving your password. This means you give the password for the first download, and during the next 15 minutes you can continue downloading apps. The counter goes up and you get the bill on your credit card afterwards. Mostly this is limited when being done by adults (eg. Less than 100€), but with kids you never know.
A second bill shock may come from for example iTunes. It is possible to do in-app purchases. Buying virtual goods within an application. This may happen in games (Smurfvillage is the most frequently mentioned) or in newsreaders for example. Apple now separated the app store login from the in-app login, such that when you download an app (you need to log in to do that), you will still need to do a login from within an app with in-app purchasing. These bill shocks might go up rapidly and become several 100€.
A third bill shock is the one coming from your mobile operator. The switch over between WiFi and mobile is seemless. Users may not notice at all that they are working over mobile data. Most of the tariff plans pay for a particular volume, with a second tariff once over the already-paid-for volume, which most of the time is higher. When you are abroad, the roaming tariff is even higher. If you then watch an HD movie during 2 hours, you may be surprised of your bill, which can go easily in the 1.000’s of euros and even over 10.000€. You better be warned.
The European Union rules the operators to send SMS’s to the users to indicate how much they transgress the volume limit. See for example the article on this subject. As long as the tablet allows to display these messages (and the user did not turn off the feature), the concept works well. Apple has turned off the possibility to receive SMS on the iPad, unfortunately for their users. Luckily enough there are more and more solutions to do telecom expense management, allowing to control your consumption, and you should definitely speak to your provider to find out their offerings.
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