Blog – Page 3 – PCIS Ltd.

Lenovo climbs mount stupid, plants a flag and takes a selfie.

February 27, 2015

This is a lesson about greed, bad communications and stupidity. Somewhere deep inside the executive offices of computer giant Lenovo, somebody had an ingenious plan: Let’s extract more money from our customers. To refresh your memory, Lenovo has long been a manufacturer of desktop computers, laptops and other electronics. The company first came to the spotlight when it purchased the laptop (remember ThinkPads? Yes they are still around) division from IBM, phones from Motorola/Google and the latest, the Intel-based server…

Forget the measles. There’s no vaccination for this problem.

February 18, 2015

Thought Leadership

No Comments

Back from an evening out you open your front door to discover that your house has been broken into, many valuables are stolen. You take out your phone and dial the police. To prevent this startling scenario, most people protect their homes with deadbolt locks, alarms, angry German Shepherds, and perhaps cameras. What most people don’t understand is that all of those things do precious little to secure their computers and their information on the Internet. Most people have likely…

50 Shades of Samsung – Privacy, Security or Convenience?

February 12, 2015

Thought Leadership

No Comments

Samsung has been very naughty. And not the 50 shades of Grey kind. Over the last weekend we discovered that Samsung has been playing “peeping Tom” in our homes. Through privacy disclosure, Samsung revealed that its TV sets might listen to our conversations and even share them with third parties (http://g3t.ca/Fii9y2). All the pundits and defenders of privacy are now racing to find the right adjectives to properly scold Samsung and demand higher levels transparency from the company. The Samsung…

How much debt does your IT department owe?

February 4, 2015

Thought Leadership

No Comments

The future is here…. Accumulating IT Debt This is a story about IT debt, and it begins with the recent request by the Chinese government asking all foreign companies to disclose the source code for their software (http://g3t.ca/tCIB7P http://g3t.ca/740LW7) According to the Chinese, these rules should ‘only’ affect software and hardware meant for the financial sector. Their given reasons are that the financial sector is so very important for China and they wish to: a) make sure there is no…

Is your business prepared for On-Demand delivery?

January 26, 2015

Thought Leadership

No Comments

It’s January again, so everyone is revealing their 2015 predictions on what’s going to be the hottest technology and which company will suddenly take off and go through stellar IPO. Let’s keep it simple and predictable, shall we? The internet is here to stay, the world of mobile and the internet of things (IoT) will grow, companies will be hacked and our privacy will be compromised. There you have it: your 100% guaranteed accurate predictions for 2015. The much bigger…

DropBox goes to the office

December 17, 2014

Thought Leadership

No Comments

DrobBox the cloud-based hard drive service with unlimited storage (for a price) offering convenient synchronization between all your devices. You get started with few free gigabytes to get you going and few extra gigabytes when you sign up a friend. It has quickly become the nightmare of IT departments around the world. The zero-barriers entry, ease of use, and ease of sharing files with colleagues, customers and friends makes DropBox the new Trojan horse of IT. Once again, IT managers…

Uber has some Über problems

December 10, 2014

Thought Leadership

No Comments

Uber, the controversial startup taxi company has been shaking up the taxi business in cities around the world and growing rapidly. Uber has now raised even more money to fund this massive expansion with this financing round valuing the company at $40 billion (http://g3t.ca/UCQ68e) Uber has grown to 250 cities from 60 cities a year ago and operates 50 countries worldwide up from 21. This growth wouldn’t be possible without the customers to fuel it. It seems that the customers…

Google is Breaking Bad

December 4, 2014

Thought Leadership

No Comments

The European Union (EU) decided the time has come to break up Google http://g3t.ca/vyBTFr – Why? Because Google has more than 90% of market share in Europe and the EU does not like the fact that the internet giant is trying to offer the best user experience and capture the majority of the advertising euros. To the EU, Google is for lack of a better word, a monopoly. Let’s consider for a moment the possibility that Google would be broken…

What do real estate and dating have in common?

November 26, 2014

Thought Leadership

No Comments

As mentioned in the previous post, last week I attended the Data Leadership Summit – http://www.datasummit.ca in Vancouver. It brought together a diverse audience to see speakers from different industries with different perspectives and experiences. In my opinion, there were two presentations which were particularly compelling. One was from real estate brokerage Redfin, the other from the online dating service Plentyoffish. I found it interesting that both shared many common themes. For instance, the level of exaggeration when one describing…

The Rosetta Mission (feat. Matt Taylor)

November 17, 2014

Thought Leadership

No Comments

Last week, we witnessed an amazing technology feat. After 10 years in space, (see the timeline here – http://g3t.ca/byvugE) Rosetta space probe released a lander module Philae. Philae landed on a comet 67P and sent us first close up pictures of the comet. Unfortunately, the scientists didn’t include the Energizer bunny, nor its batteries and for now the lander has ran out of juice. To our dismay, it landed in shade. The probe sent some data back. We were hoping…