IT NEWS
New Job Search Site Promises Easier Access to Careers
Does the world really need another job
search portal? Evidently Adicio, a web-based classified software
maker, thinks so with its launch of CareerCast.com, a portal that
claims to help recruiters reach specialized applicants easier.
Up for fewer than three weeks, the new site already lists half a
million jobs. Not bad compared with a similar aggregater like
Indeed.com, which reports 855,964 new jobs in the last seven days.
But CareerCast is not just another national portal, publisher Tony
Lee told The Standard. Boasting listings only from Adicio's
500-plus newspaper, broadcast, trade publishing and niche clients,
it offers highly specialized job opportunities that seekers won't
find elsewhere.
"Say, for example, pediatric cardiologist. You won't find that on
Craigslist," said Lee.
In turn, highly specialized recruiters don't have to waste time
sifting through hundreds of less qualified applicants that sites
like Craigslist tend to attract, claimed Lee. According to a press
release, CareerCast lets employers post their positions to
market-leading sites in more than a dozen industries such as
health care, retail, engineering and energy.
CareerCast offers the usual tools found on other big job portals
such as Monster.com, like a resume builder. It also has a blog, a
daily job video and, most intriguing, job ratings. The site ranks
200 professions from best to worst based on work environment,
physical demand, stress, income and hours worked. (Best job:
mathematician. Worst: psychiatrist, rating below telephone
installer.)
Source: CIO Insight
Open Systems Help
During Financial Crisis
With budget cuts across industries, yet high demand for
service quality, the current global financial crisis is seen as
"the perfect occasion" for the integration of open systems with
proprietary software.
"We see this crisis as the marriage between open source and
proprietary software, a synergy of both," said Anson Uy, president
and founder of Touch Solutions Inc., an open systems solutions
provider.
Uy claimed using open systems is the best way to develop software.
In fact, his company has made it a mission to lead the industry in
the use, adoption, development, and propagation of open systems
enterprise-class solutions.
"Not only it is efficient but most of all cost-effective since
open systems is free," Uy added.
However, Uy clarified they are not campaigning against proprietary
software or the exclusive adoption of open systems.
"We simply believe the integration of both is the best way to go,"
he said. "We're doing this because customers are demanding their
marriage."
Uy, along with Boom Villaba, vice president of sales in Touch
Solutions, announced that their company is ready in providing
Oracle Enterprise Linux solutions, including the selling of Oracle
Unbreakable Linux Support for businesses of all sizes.
"With this new offering, we hope to help organizations achieve a
cost-effective, flexible and efficient IT foundation that promotes
faster development and lower maintenance costs through reusable
services," Uy said.
Boom said Oracle Unbreakable Linux delivers enterprise-class
support for Linux with premier backports, comprehensive
management, cluster software, indemnification, testing and
more--all at significantly lower cost.
"Oracle Unbreakable Linux is a support program. It is not a
distribution," Boom explained. "Oracle Enterprise Linux, however,
is another distribution. It supports any enterprise Linux."
During a recent press conference at the Mandarin Hotel in Makati
City, Touch executives demonstrated the Oracle VM (virtual
machine), meant to create virtual machines and automate them. For
example, they showed how Windows XP ran on Linux.
"With Oracle VM you don't need to buy proprietary software
licenses for each user's PC but they can use the software if
they're connected to the Oracle VM that has it," Boom said. "It's
like extracting the juice from that box."
Uy said while most of their clients are the bigger financial and
telecommunications companies, Touch Solutions would also be
tapping SMEs (small and medium enterprises) for the Oracle
Enterprise Linux subscription products.
Targeting the SMEs in 2009 would most definitely be timely because
a lot of these companies will be looking for smart solutions to
help them cut on expenses, especially on these hard economic
times," Uy said.
Source:
CIO
How to Plug Security
Holes in Your Browser
You depend on your Web browsers to link you
with the information you need every day. But don't let your
browsers bank information about you that may be damaging or
embarrassing.
Browser History Snooping
Why You Should Care: Maintaining your online privacy can save your
job--and your marriage.
Scenario: Just because you think you have nothing to hide doesn't
mean that your PC's record of your browsing history can't get you
in trouble. In the absence of any clarifying context, an observer
might easily misconstrue entries in a list of sites you recently
visited.
Fix: Try using your browser's private browsing feature--but don't
depend on it. Long a feature of Apple's Safari browser, private
browsing is praised as a way of surfing the Web without leaving a
trail of Web site addresses behind you. Once you turn on Private
Browsing in Safari, Apple says, you won't leave any traces of the
sites you subsequently visit.
Add-ons for the Firefox browser offer Windows users the same
benefits: Distrust gives Firefox 2.x and 3.x users a way to manage
their browsing history, though some files that Firefox temporarily
writes to disk don't get erased until the end of the browsing
session. Firefox 3.1 (currently in beta form) is likely to add
more-comprehensive private browsing features to the browser
itself. To help users manage the new features, two add-ons--Private
Browsing and Toggle Private Browsing--provide granular control
over the settings. (Warning: In recent testing by a security firm
to see which browsers' tools do the best job of protecting against
tracking by Web sites, Safari's private browsing capabilities came
in last place; Firefox, Google's Chrome, and Microsoft's Internet
Explorer 8 beta also fared poorly.)
But no browser can completely prevent sites from tracking your
visit. For maximum anonymity, you need to use a service such as
the fee-based Anonymizer or the free Tor.
Tell-Tale Browser Cache
Why You Should Care: A browser's cache is a treasure trove of
valuable personal information.
Scenario: Maybe you've just received some bad news from your
doctor--a diagnosis of a serious medical condition, something you
may not be ready to reveal to others. You decide to do a little
Web research on the topic, but don't want any trace of what you
were doing to remain on the PC, lest someone stumble upon your
secret. Or perhaps you've been shopping for the perfect engagement
ring. If the intended recipient were to see the names of jewelry
Web sites among the list of fragmented files during a defrag
session, it could spoil the whole surprise.
Source:
PC World
TRENDS
Netbook Popularity
Reshapes Tech Sector
We've all heard about the netbook phenomenon. They're small, low
on power, ultra-cheap, super portable and the fastest growing
segment of the computer industry. But some believe netbooks also
have the power to dramatically reshape the tech sector, for better
or worse.
Source: PC World
Top Three
Outsourcing Initiatives for 2009
It is not a stretch to presume most people were happy to see
2008 come to an end, yet most analysts and experts predict 2009 is
going to be worse. As we stumble into the New Year, executives are
challenged with the cyclical routines of planning, budgeting,
forecasting, and so forth. It is hard enough to do these tasks in
normal times, but it becomes a nightmare in the uncertain economic
environment we live in now, but outsourcing can help.
Given this uncertainty and chaos, it is a good time to look at
outsourcing as a means to save money, propel new business
ventures, and improve efficiencies. It is also a good time for
CIOs to review, rationalize, and evolve their outsourcing
programs. In light of this, the top three outsourcing initiatives
for 2009 include:
1. Reviewing Deal Structures
Most current outsourcing deals and models are outdated and
ineffective because they are people-based and not demand-based.
Companies have a need for resources to do the work that is
required; they negotiate a rate with a vendor; and determine
contract durations. The contracts primarily follow a simple model:
People x Rates x Duration.
It is easy to understand why a people-based model is being used
today, since outsourcing (especially Indian outsourcing) grew out
of the Y2K era. Companies first engaged outsourcing companies in
staff augmentation models to address their Y2K needs, and hence,
all subsequent outsourcing models have been people-based. While
outsourcing companies have grown in leaps-and-bounds over the past
three to five years in terms of their capabilities, there has been
little evolution in deal structures.
People-based outsourcing contracts are the equivalent of paying
rent. The rent is due each month regardless of use. In a "rental
agreement" there is no mechanism or incentive to drive
productivity improvements, efficiencies,
higher-value-add-services, faster time-to-market, and deeper cost
cutting efforts.
Demand-based contracts and models are revolutionary and will drive
unbelievable results if properly implemented, executed, and
governed. IT organizations will become better-aligned with their
business partners and CIOs will have much more flexibility in how
they allocate and spend their funding.
2. Portfolio Rationalization
Portfolio rationalization has been one of the biggest trends in
the application outsourcing market over the past two to three
years. The industry has matured to a point where CIOs can now
review their portfolio of outsourcing partners and set themselves
up with better mixes of companies, countries and models. This is
not an easy task, since every company is different and there is no
cookie-cutter approach to finding the right mix of outsourcing
partners.
3. Cost-Cutting
The combination of hard economic times and the maturity of the
outsourcing industry will force and enable CIOs to find new ways
of cost-cutting. It is important to realize that there is no
silver bullet on cost-cutting and it is equally important to
understand that the biggest levers for cost-cutting are not the
rates themselves.
How can CIOs cut costs with their outsourcing initiatives?
• Offshore to Onsite Ratios—this is by far the biggest lever in
reducing the total cost of ownership of an application or suite of
applications. The more roles that can be moved offshore, the more
money can be saved. The industry benchmark is 80:20 (80 percent of
resources offshore and 20 percent onsite), but most companies
flounder with "fat" models and have too many people onsite. With
mature processes and governance, there is no reason 90:10 cannot
be the new benchmark. Plus, outsourcing companies make more money
on offshore resources, so they will be eager to help CIOs reduce
costs with better offshore-to-onsite ratios.
• Time-to-Market—if products and applications can be delivered
faster, companies will reap the benefits sooner. To do this, IT
organizations must work with their outsourcing partners on better
ways to execute projects, leverage reusable components and foster
knowledge-sharing.
• Quality Improvements—if products and applications can be
delivered with fewer bugs and defects there will be less time and
money spent on re-works. IT organizations must leverage the
knowledge, experience, tools and processes of outsourcing
companies.
• Productivity Improvements—productivity is married-at-the-hip to
the outsourcing model being deployed between the company and the
vendor. If companies embrace the demand-based models depicted
earlier, real productivity gains will follow because outsourcing
companies will be forced to increase productivity to control
costs.
• Rates—with the rupee depreciating against the dollar and the
cost-escalation coming under control in India, rates will become
more competitive..
Source: CIO
STUDIES
Health IT cuts death rate by 15% in hospitals
Researchers at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center
in Dallas have found that using electronic medical records may
save patients' lives.
Reuters reported that researchers found "patients treated in
hospitals that ranked highest in use of health information
technology to manage patient records and physician notes were 15
percent less likely to die compared with patients in hospitals
that ranked lower."
The study was led by Dr. Ruben Amarasingham and surveyed doctors
at 41 urban hospitals in Texas. The hospitals were divided into
three groups according to their technology usage. Amarasingham and
his team looked at the records of more than 160,000 patients over
the age of 50 to see if there were any links between the use of
health technology and the care given to the patients.
Patients at hospitals where more health IT was used had a 16
percent lower chance of having complications than patients where
less information technology was used, according to the study.
A closer look at the research, published in the Archives of
Internal Medicine also reveals a financial benefit to be had from
health information technology. Better information technology
resulted in lower hospital costs.
"They found that increased use of information technology was
associated with both lower costs and better outcomes," Dr. David
Bates of Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, told Reuters.
President Barack Obama has made it one of his administration's
goals to computerize all medical records. The Industry Standard
previously reported on his pledge to do this by 2014.
Source: The Standard
Self-fueling robot will "eat" plants
for power
Robotics Technology is developing a robot that consumes biomass,
such as plant material, and converts it to electricity to power
itself. The whimsically-named Energetically Autonomous Tactical
Robot (EATR) is intended for jobs where regular, conventional
fueling would be impractical, such as military recognizance.
The EATR will "forage" for its fuel, "engaging in
biologically-inspired, organism-like, energy-harvesting behavior
which is the equivalent of eating," according to a
recently-released Robotics Technology brief. "It can find, ingest,
and extract energy from biomass in the environment (and other
organically-based energy sources), as well as use conventional and
alternative fuels (such as gasoline, heavy fuel, kerosene, diesel,
propane, coal, cooking oil, and solar) when suitable."
Source:
The Standard
