Acer’s C270P touch-equipped Chromebook checks in at a mass market price. Google has lowered the price of entry for touch-equipped Chromebooks with the Acer C270P, a brand new offering that costs $1,000 under the powerful Pixel. Touchscreens have pervaded our everyday computing lives. All smartphones and tablets are equipped with displays that react to taps, swipes, slides, and pinches. Moving from a tablet to a laptop may be frustrating, especially when the laptop requires users to navigate the screen with a trackpad as opposed to with their fingers. That’s why Google introduced the Pixel Chromebook earlier this year. The uber-Chromebook strongly resembles Apple’s popular MacBook Air line of portables, and incorporates a high-resolution touch display. It is a premium machine. The price, however, is astronomical at $1,299. Pretty much as good because the Pixel is, the price outweighs the advantage of the touchscreen device. Enter the Acer C270P. It’s built at the same chassis because the C270, but ups the ante around the board. This... Read More »

FLIR says its thermal imaging attachment for iPhone 5 and 5s has camping, remodeling, and security applications. 10 Wearables To observe At CES 2014 (Click image for larger view and slideshow.) At CES 2014 on Tuesday, industrial sensor maker FLIR Systems introduced a thermal-imaging attachment for the iPhone 5 and 5s. Thermal imaging may be faked fairly easily with Adobe Photoshop or another image manipulation app. But when you desire a true thermal imaging device — one with an exact infrared sensor — the associated fee may be substantial. FLIR’s professional thermal cameras cost thousands of bucks, some up to small cars. The FLIR One is anticipated to be available for under $350 when it ships inside the spring. It snaps onto an iPhone 5 or 5s like other protective cases and give the user with extra battery capacity — 50% extension of battery life — in addition to the facility to capture real thermal images. Its sensor, developed for military applications, is set for... Read More »

Consider these three wrong how you can develop enterprise apps — and avoid them. Most enterprise mobile apps have far to head before they are often considered great mobile apps. Unfortunately, apps often fail for a similar reason over and over again, with organizations neglecting to look the issues before it’s too late. Soon, user adoption plummets, shadow apps (those not approved by IT) become commonplace and your enterprise begins to suffer. With this in mind, listed below are three guaranteed tips on how to screw up your online business mobile app – and the way to circumvent doing so.  1. Give users exactly what they ask forStart by finding your best business analyst and spend some weeks compiling a listing of necessities in your app. Upon getting an excellent handle on what you wish to have, put out a request for proposal (RFP) and look for a vendor that does not understand your small business to implement the app.  [In a mobile business, you... Read More »

Rich Wolski, known for his work at Eucalyptus Systems, argues that architectural features that outline how each cloud works are more important than a cloud’s APIs. Editor’s note: This contributor argues that the services behind a cloud API are more important than the API itself. The writer founded the open-source project that created APIs and services to compare Amazon’s. You can not agree, but in any case, he says, it’s the success of the underlying services in attracting developers, who create applications to make use of them, that determines the actual value of APIs. His firm, Eucalyptus Systems, is predicated at the same premise. Its software for personal clouds generates services/APIs that closely mimic Amazon’s. There remains a healthy debate over the significance of APIs within the modern world of Web services and cloud computing. ages back, my peers Ben Black of Microsoft, Adrian Cole of Netflix, James Watters of Pivotal, and that i were bantering from side to side at the subject. Eucalyptus CEO... Read More »

Cloud services, mobility, and digital disruption have upended the conventional methods of handling change within a firm. Change is going on throughout us at lightning speed — and a company’s ability to answer change is an important consider deciding whether it would sink or swim. Consider that there was greater than 70 percent turnover for the worldwide Fortune G500 companies over the last 10 years. Companies dropping off the list were unable to control an accelerating pace of change: pervasive Internet connectivity, cloud-based applications, mobile devices that connect everywhere, information workers who use their very own tools to do corporate work on their lonesome time. To that end, the standard change-management approaches that emphasize the change lifecycle, tips to plan and communicate change, and establish and train owners of change, while important, aren’t enough for the recent world. Change occurs too quickly. Executives and alter-management agents at senior-level positions, once expected to anticipate and drive change, are struggling to take action. Enterprise business agility is the... Read More »