Tag Archives: Microsoft

TechVibe Radio to Feature Viper Network Systems, Microsoft, Gateway Analytical and Tech Export

Posted on by Jonathan Kersting

Be sure to tune in to TechVibe Radio this Saturday at noon on FM News Talk 104.7.

We’re ending 2012 in style with an exclusive interview with Microsoft’s Jane Boulware. She was in town last week to launch Windows 8 and took time to talk to us about the new OS. Viper Network Systems will tell you all about its new PacketViper technology that filters network traffic by country. Gateway Analytical will also get behind the mic detailing its unique forensics services, and learn all about export opportunities in Canada.

With the Holidays in full swing, we’ll rebroadcast this show on December 29, too! We’re looking forward to more TechVibe Radio in 2013.

Hosted by the PTC’s CEO Audrey Russo and Director Visibility Initiatives Jonathan Kersting, TechVibe is on the air every Saturday at noon bringing you interviews and conversations from the Pittsburgh region’s fast-moving technology and entrepreneurial communities.

Stream TechVibe Radio on www.wpgb.com or iHeart Radio.


Missed a previous broadcast? We have a massive library of podcasts right here.

TechVibe Radio is sponsored by Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney, Chorus Call, DQE Communications, EyeFlow, The Hartford, Highmark Blue Cross Blue Shield, PTC Employee Benefits Group, Pittsburgh International Airport and PNC.

Pittsburgh, you’re on a roll…don’t let illegal software slow you down

Posted on by theprossman

By Luke Sossi, Enterprise Sales Manager for the Mid-Atlantic District, Microsoft Corp.

These past few weeks have been filled with good news for small businesses in Pittsburgh.  Recently, On Numbers ranked Pittsburgh as having the strongest small business sector of 21 major Eastern metros as part of the publication’s annual ratings of small-business climates across the country.  It’s exciting to see Pittsburgh’s ranking in this survey skyrocket over the years, from 17th in 2010 to sixth last year to taking top honors this year.

Also, the most recent PNC Economic Outlook finds that, among several positive trends, Pennsylvania business owners showed a significant improvement in business expectations and optimism compared to Fall 2011 for hiring, profits and sales.

Small business owners in Pittsburgh are on a roll. With such great momentum moving our local small business economy forward, we at Microsoft are focused not only on providing technology solutions that help businesses grow, but also on protecting business owners from technology dangers that can hold them back.

These dangers can be especially insidious as they often come in small packages, like software purchased for a company.

How can something that takes up so little space cause so much harm? Consider how powerful your company’s productivity software is and the efficiency and accuracy benefits it delivers.  If counterfeit, something as small as the discs housing these resources can seriously compromise your company’s security, reputation and legal standing.

Here in Pittsburgh, I work closely with local businesses and can confidently say that, when equipped with the facts about illegal software’s dangers, they make more informed decisions about software purchases. However, these conversations have also revealed that some do not have the basic information around why and how counterfeit software impacts business viability. If you fall into that category, consider this a primer on counterfeit software’s dangers:

  • Increased vulnerability, decreased productivity: Purchasing software from a non-reputable website or software vendor increases the chances of downloading malware or viruses, which makes PCs or laptops slower and less reliable. It also exposes your – and your customers’ – data to fraud.  By purchasing softward from reputable Microsoft partners, you’ll decrease your chances of downloading malware and viruses or losing your critical business data, problems that are symptomatic of using counterfeit software.
  • Nowhere to turn: If your business is in the habit of moving fast to keep pace with competitors and customers, the last thing you want is to be locked out of technical support in a time of need.  Counterfeit software doesn’t give you access to protection such as a complimentary subscription to Microsoft Security Essentials, the award-winning antivirus solution from Microsoft. 
  • Legal repercussions: An individual or a company can be found legally responsible for pirating software even if business owners are unaware of copyright infringement.  Businesses in possession of counterfeit or non-genuine software face hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines, years in jail, or both.

This is why your company’s computer software – and where you buy it – matters. By installing only legal Microsoft software, or purchasing a device on which it’s pre-installed, you get the experience you expect and deserve for your investment. For Microsoft software, always look for a Certificate of Authenticity (COA), which helps identify a genuine Microsoft product. Product keys can also be a sign of genuine software as no product key is ever sold separately for Microsoft. Also be wary of online auctions, peer-to-peer networks, and websites that appear legitimate but bear no sign of being verified Microsoft vendors and sell software at a price far below market value.

Some business owners are motivated into action by understanding the risks, but just as many are inspired by knowing how legal software creates an advantage for their companies.  Fortunately, I have plenty of that information to share:

  • Someone who has your back: With legally-obtained, -produced and -licensed software, businesses have access to technical support; ongoing improvements and updates; and unparalleled protection like that from Microsoft Security Essentials.  Legal software also includes full documentation to help you get the most from your computing experience.
  • An economic boost: Your support of local, legitimate technology businesses fuels local jobs and tax revenue, and helps level the competitive playing field. The protection of marketplace intellectual property and marketplace opportunities are invaluable to businesses of all sizes, including yours.
  • Peace of mind: With authentic, genuine software, you’re positioning your business to win, and ensuring your customers a consistent, secure experience. No amount of savings on software from a suspicious source compares to the confidence your business will feel knowing it’s simply doing the right thing.

Don’t jeopardize the success of your company in this thriving marketplace because of misinformed software purchasing decisions. Learn more about how to make wise technology decisions for your company, employees and customers, by visiting www.microsoft.com/piracy/. And may your business ride this wave of good news into an even more successful future!

 

Picking the Brains of Strangers Improves Efforts To Make Sense of Online Information

Posted on by Jonathan Kersting

People who have already sifted through online information to make sense of a subject can help strangers facing similar tasks without ever directly communicating with them, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Microsoft Research have demonstrated.

This process of distributed sensemaking, they say, could save time and result in a better understanding of the information needed for whatever goal users might have, whether it is planning a vacation, gathering information about a serious disease or trying to decide what product to buy.

The researchers explored the use of digital knowledge maps — a means of representing the thought processes used to make sense of information gathered from the Web. When participants in the study used a knowledge map that had been created and improved upon by several previous users, they reported that the quality of their own work was better than when they started from scratch or used a newly created knowledge map.

“Collectively, people spend more than 70 billion hours a year trying to make sense of information they have gathered online,” said Aniket Kittur, assistant professor in Carnegie Mellon’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute. “Yet in most cases, when someone finishes a project, that work is essentially lost, benefitting no one else and perhaps even being forgotten by that person. If we could somehow share those efforts, however, all of us might learn faster.”

The research team, including Kristie Fisher and Scott Counts of Microsoft Research, will present their findings May 7 at CHI 2012, the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, in Austin, Texas.

They recruited 21 Microsoft employees for the study, asking them to create knowledge maps on three different subjects, one of which was to be created from scratch, one based on a map previously created by one person and yet another based on a map that had iteratively been modified by four other users. The participants took the least time to generate knowledge maps when they based them on iterated maps and self-reported that the quality and helpfulness of those maps were superior to those developed from scratch or from a map generated by a single person.

In most cases, the organization of the knowledge map, rather than any specific content, was most useful. For instance, two people looking to start a garden might live in different climates or settings, so the types of seeds they might plant could be different, but each would benefit from elements such as “design ideas,” “how to” and so on.

Using eye tracking, the researchers showed that as knowledge maps are modified successively by multiple users, new users spend less time looking at specific content elements, shifting a greater balance of their attention to structural elements like labels. “This suggests that distributed sensemaking facilitates the process of ‘schema induction,’ or forming a mental model of the information being considered,” Counts said.

But this structure did not start to emerge until a map had been modified at least once. This would explain why participants favored the iterated maps over the others, Fisher said.

One problem for distributed sensemaking is overcoming the “first iteration hump,” the researchers noted. Though the participants favored maps that had been improved by a succession of users, they also favored their maps created from scratch over those created by one other person. One way to get people to use newly created maps instead of making their own might be to pay them to modify another user’s map, or to require users to integrate some “first-round” maps before they are given access to the highly iterated ones. It may also be possible to use automated methods to produce maps that look more like maps that have been revised by multiple users.

This research was sponsored by the National Science Foundation, Microsoft and the Center for the Future of Work at Carnegie Mellon University.

Microsoft CIO Tony Scott Talks to TechVibe Radio

Posted on by Jonathan Kersting

Tony Scott

The Pittsburgh Technology Council brought Microsoft CIO Tony Scott into town earlier this week as part of its IT Speaker Series. We heard how Microsoft is embracing the almighty Cloud amongst other things. Tony took a few minutes to talk to TechVibe Radio about Cloud and other tech trends.

Listen to the podcast right here.

It’ll also air on TechVibe Radio April 28 at noon on Pittsburgh’s massive FM News Talk 104.7!

Cloud Technology: Bringing New Jobs to Pittsburgh

Posted on by theprossman

By Luke Sossi, Mid-Atlantic Enterprise Sales Manager, Microsoft Corp.

The real cost savings and efficiencies that businesses are receiving from the cloud have become increasingly evident: increased productivity; reductions in expenditures for IT hardware, software and maintenance; and the ability to free up IT staff from time-consuming routine tasks to focus on more mission-critical work. While these benefits were largely anticipated, it may be a surprise to learn that the cloud also is helping to restore economic health in our state.

In fact, a new Microsoft study conducted by the IDC research firm shows that, by the end of 2015, the cloud will be responsible for creating more than 1.1 million new jobs in the U.S. It may seem puzzling that a technology solution that automates and relocates work traditionally carried out by people in the IT department would actually lead to a growth in jobs, but the fact is that dollar savings from cloud computing is making it possible for businesses to invest more in hiring people all across their organizations.

Here’s how it works, according to IDC: cloud computing frees up organizations from their legacy computing systems and allows companies to invest in broader innovation in other areas of the company’s operations. These innovations create more profit and revenue to devote to new jobs. Indeed, IDC reports, increased revenues from IT innovation (enabled by the cloud) could reach $1.1 trillion dollars a year by 2015 in the 28 countries studied by IDC. Thus, a little money spent up front to reach for the cloud leads to impressive returns down the line.

The results of efficiencies gained from cloud computing are being applied to hiring more people in sales, finance, production, marketing and other areas. In some companies, IT personnel now are creating their own cloud services for the company’s customers, generating even bigger payoffs and more potential hiring dollars.

At Microsoft, we’ve seen firsthand how cloud is facilitating business results and job growth for our Pittsburgh-area customers.  For example, one of our manufacturing customers has benefitted greatly from cloud applications.  This particular business uses cloud to not only scale its operations, but to create a highly intuitive and engaging application that assists customers with purchasing. Through cloud, the company was able to make purchasing decisions easier for customers, resulting in higher sales and more opportunities for developers to innovate and increase the rate at which new customer offerings are available.

Cloud-fueled job growth will vary by industry, and here in Pittsburgh, two key industries that stand to benefit most are retail and education.  While the retail industry has traditionally been late to adopt new technologies, it has been a relatively early adopter of cloud computing.  Additionally, the education sector has adopted the cloud at a faster rate than other industries, as it offers schools solutions to combat budget constraints.  By 2015, worldwide job creation attributed to cloud in education is expected to reach more than 720,000 jobs, and nearly 640,000 new jobs are expected in the retail industry – giving us good reason to continue to expand upon cloud utilization in these key local industries.

When examining the number of jobs that might be created in a particular nation, the study factored such elements as projected level of spending on IT, degree of automation, workforce size and many others. Between emerging and developed countries, the numbers are driven more by the degree of IT spending and adoption levels of cloud, public and private, than by industry make-up.

Although many of the advancements in cloud computing have occurred in companies based in North America, the cloud-created jobs expected to benefit the U.S. are dwarfed by the number anticipated for other areas of the world, many of which have huge populations.  The Microsoft study projects that North America will have 1.17 million jobs by the end of 2015, Europe-Middle East-Africa will have 2.07 million, Asia/Pacific (excluding China and India) will grow to 2.87 million, and China and India alone will have more cloud-created jobs than all the other regions combined, with a total of 6.75 million in those two nations.

The cloud keeps exposing sunny opportunities for businesses and consumers alike. Now, many of us can add an important new cloud benefit to the list: enhanced job growth.

 About the author: Luke Sossi is Microsoft’s Enterprise Sales Manager for the Mid-Atlantic district, including Pittsburgh.