Group items tagged

Cost savings — The lowering of the overall cost of the service to the business. This will involve reducing the scope, defining quality levels, re-pricing, re-negotiation, and cost re-structuring. Access to lower cost economies through offshoring called "labor arbitrage" generated by the wage gap between industrialized and developing nations.[10] Focus on Core Business — Resources (for example investment, people, infrastructure) are focused on developing the core business. For example often organizations outsource their IT support to specialised IT services companies. Cost restructuring — Operating leverage is a measure that compares fixed costs to variable costs. Outsourcing changes the balance of this ratio by offering a move from fixed to variable cost and also by making variable costs more predictable. Improve quality — Achieve a steep change in quality through contracting out the service with a new service level agreement. Knowledge — Access to intellectual property and wider experience and knowledge.[11] Contract — Services will be provided to a legally binding contract with financial penalties and legal redress. This is not the case with internal services.[12] Operational expertise — Access to operational best practice that would be too difficult or time consuming to develop in-house. Access to talent — Access to a larger talent pool and a sustainable source of skills, in particular in science and engineering.[13][14] Capacity management — An improved method of capacity management of services and technology where the risk in providing the excess capacity is borne by the supplier. Catalyst for change — An organization can use an outsourcing agreement as a catalyst for major step change that can not be achieved alone. The outsourcer becomes a Change agent in the process. Enhance capacity for innovation — Companies increasingly use external knowledge service providers to supplement limited in-house capacity for product innovation.[14][15] Reduce time to market — The acceleration of the development or production of a product through the additional capability brought by the supplier.[16] Commodification — The trend of standardizing business processes, IT Services, and application services which enable to buy at the right price, allows businesses access to services which were only available to large corporations. Risk management — An approach to risk management for some types of risks is to partner with an outsourcer who is better able to provide the mitigation.[17] Venture Capital — Some countries match government funds venture capital with private venture capital for start-ups that start businesses in their country.[18] Tax Benefit — Countries offer tax incentives to move manufacturing operations to counter high corporate taxes within another country. Scalability — The outsourced company will usually be prepared to manage a temporary or permanent increase or decrease in production. Creating leisure time — Individuals may wish to outsource their work in order to optimise their work-leisure balance.[19] Liability — Organizations choose to transfer liabilities inherent to specific business processes or services that are outside of their core competencies. [edit] Implications

Eric Emerson Schmidt (born April 27, 1955(1955-04-27))[3] is an engineer, Chairman/CEO of Google and a former member of the Board of Directors of Apple Inc.[4] He is the author of the lex lexical analyzer software for Unix. He has also sat on the boards of trustees for Carnegie Mellon University[5] and Princeton University.[6]

Schmidt was born in Washington, D.C. After graduating from Yorktown High School,[7] Schmidt attended Princeton University where he earned a BSEE in 1976.[8] At the University of California, Berkeley, he earned an MS in 1979 for designing and implementing a network linking the campus computer center, the CS and the EECS departments,[9][10] and a PhD in 1982 in EECS with a dissertation about the problems of managing distributed software development and tools for solving these problems.[11] He was joint author of lex (a lexical analyzer and an important tool for compiler construction). He taught at Stanford Business School as a part time professor.[12] He lives in Atherton, California, with his wife Wendy.[13] He is also on the list of ARTnews 200 top art collectors.[14]

laptop is a personal computer designed for mobile use that is small and light enough for a person to rest on their lap.

As the personal computer became feasible in the early 1970s, the idea of a portable personal computer followed. A "personal, portable information manipulator" was imagined by Alan Kay at Xerox PARC in 1968,[2] and described in his 1972 paper as the "Dynabook".[3]

The IBM SCAMP project (Special Computer APL Machine Portable), was demonstrated in 1973. This prototype was based on the PALM processor (Put All Logic In Microcode). The IBM 5100, the first commercially available portable computer, appeared in September 1975, and was based on the SCAMP prototype.[4] As 8-bit CPU machines became widely accepted, the number of portables increased rapidly. The Osborne 1, released in 1981, used the Zilog Z80 and weighed 23.6 pounds (10.7 kg). It had no battery, a 5 in (13 cm) CRT screen, and dual 5.25 in (13.3 cm) single-density floppy drives. In the same year the first laptop-sized portable computer, the Epson HX-20, was announced.[5] The Epson had a LCD screen, a rechargeable battery, and a calculator-size printer in a 1.6 kg (3.5 lb) chassis. Both Tandy/RadioShack and HP also produced portable computers of varying designs during this period.[6][7] The first laptops using the flip form factor appeared in the early 1980s. The Dulmont Magnum was released in Australia in 1981–82, but was not marketed internationally until 1984–85. The $8,150 ($18,370 in current dollar terms) GRiD Compass 1100, released in 1982, was used at NASA and by the military among others. The Gavilan SC, released in 1983, was the first computer described as a "laptop" by its manufacturer[8] From 1983 onward, several new input techniques were developed and included in laptops, including the touchpad (Gavilan SC, 1983), the pointing stick (IBM ThinkPad 700, 1992) and handwriting recognition (Linus Write-Top,[9] 1987). Some CPUs, such as the 1990 Intel i386SL, were designed to use minimum power to increase battery life of portable computers, and were supported by dynamic power management features such as Intel SpeedStep and AMD PowerNow! in some designs. Displays reached VGA resolution by 1988 (Compaq SLT/286), and color screens started becoming a common upgrade in 1991 with increases in resolution and screen size occurring frequently until the introduction of 17"-screen laptops in 2003. Hard drives started to be used in portables, encouraged by the introduction of 3.5" drives in the late 1980s, and became common in laptops starting with the introduction of 2.5" and smaller drives around 1990; capacities have typically lagged behind physically larger desktop drives. Optical storage, read-only CD-ROM followed by writeable CD and later read-only or writeable DVD and Blu-Ray, became common in laptops soon in the 2000s.

A NeXT Computer was used by Berners-Lee as the world's first web server and also to write the first web browser, WorldWideWeb, in 1990. By Christmas 1990, Berners-Lee had built all the tools necessary for a working Web:[7] the first web browser (which was a web editor as well); the first web server; and the first web pages,[8] which described the project itself. On August 6, 1991, he posted a short summary of the World Wide Web project on the alt.hypertext newsgroup.[9] This date also marked the debut of the Web as a publicly available service on the Internet. The first server outside Europe was set up at SLAC to host the SPIRES-HEP database. Accounts differ substantially as to the date of this event. The World Wide Web Consortium says December 1992,[10] whereas SLAC itself claims 1991.[11][12] This is supported by a W3C document entitled A Little History of the World Wide Web.[13]

Radio-frequency identification (RFID) is the use of an object (typically referred to as an RFID tag) applied to or incorporated into a product, animal, or person for the purpose of identification and tracking using radio waves. Some tags can be read from several meters away and beyond the line of sight of the reader. Radio-frequency identification involves interrogators (also known as readers), and tags (also known as labels). Most RFID tags contain at least two parts. One is an integrated circuit for storing and processing information, modulating and demodulating a radio-frequency (RF) signal, and other specialized functions. The second is an antenna for receiving and transmitting the signal. There are generally three types of RFID tags: active RFID tags, which contain a battery and can transmit signals autonomously, passive RFID tags, which have no battery and require an external source to provoke signal transmission, and battery assisted passive (BAP) RFID tags, which require an external source to wake up but have significant higher forward link capability providing greater range. There are a variety of groups defining standards and regulating the use of RFID, including: International Organization for Standardization (ISO), International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), ASTM International, DASH7 Alliance, EPCglobal. (Refer to Regulation and standardization below.) RFID has many applications; for example, it is used in enterprise supply chain management to improve the efficiency of inventory tracking and management. Contents [hide]

describes an ongoing process by which regional economies, societies, and cultures have become integrated through a globe-spanning network of exchange

A mobile phone (also called mobile, cellular phone, cell phone or handphone)[1] is an electronic device used for full duplex two-way radio telecommunications over a cellular network of base stations known as cell sites. Mobile phones differ from cordless telephones, which only offer telephone service within limited range through a single base station attached to a fixed land line, for example within a home or an office.

In addition to being a telephone, modern mobile phones also support many additional services, and accessories, such as SMS (or text) messages, e-mail, Internet access, gaming, Bluetooth and infrared short range wireless communication, camera, MMS messaging, MP3 player, radio and GPS. Low-end mobile phones are often referred to as feature phones, whereas high-end mobile phones that offer more advanced computing ability are referred to as smartphones.

A mobile phone (also called mobile, cellular telephone, or cell phone) is an electronic device used to make mobile telephone calls across a wide geographic area. Mobile phones are different from cordless telephones, which only offer telephone service within a limited range of a fixed land line, for example within a home or an office

A virtual office is a combination of off-site live communication and address services that allow users to reduce traditional office costs while maintaining business professionalism[1]. Frequently the term is confused with “office business centers” or “executive suites” which demand a conventional lease whereas a true virtual office does not require that expense[

Virtual Assistant A virtual assistant is often a “lone eagle” working from home, who rarely meets their clients face-to-face[9]. A virtual assistant typically has no access to CTI Software[10]. Rates run $15 an hour and up[11].

AOL Inc. (NYSE: AOL), formerly known as America Online and logo typeset as "Aol.", is an American global Internet services and media company.[4][5] AOL is headquartered at 770 Broadway in New York.[6][7] Founded in 1983 as Quantum Computer Services, it has franchised its services to companies in several nations around the world or set up international versions of its services.[8]

Virtual Machine Interface[1] ("VMI") may refer to a communication protocol for running parallel programs on a distributed memory system. Virtual Machine Interface[2] is also the name given by VMware to the proposed open standard protocol that guest operating systems can use to communicate with the hypervisor of a virtual machine. An implementation of this standard was merged in the main Linux kernel version 2.6.21. A number of popular GNU/Linux distributions now ship with VMI support enabled by default. Since newer AMD and Intel CPUs allow for more efficient virtualization, VMI is being obsoleted and VMI support will be removed from Linux kernel in 2.6.37[3] and from VMWare products in 2010-2011 timeframe [4].

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP, Voice over IP) is a general term for a family of methodologies, communication protocols, and transmission technologies for delivery of voice communications and multimedia sessions over Internet Protocol (IP) networks, such as the Internet. Other terms frequently encountered and synonymous with VoIP are IP telephony, Internet telephony, voice over broadband (VoBB), broadband telephony, and broadband phone. Internet telephony refers to communications services — voice, facsimile, and/or voice-messaging applications — that are transported via the Internet, rather than the public switched telephone network (PSTN). The basic steps involved in originating an Internet telephone call are conversion of the analog voice signal to digital format and compression/translation of the signal into Internet protocol (IP) packets for transmission over the Internet; the process is reversed at the receiving end.[1] VoIP systems employ session control protocols to control the set-up and tear-down of calls as well as audio codecs which encode speech allowing transmission over an IP network as digital audio via an audio stream. Codec use is varied between different implementations of VoIP (and often a range of codecs are used); some implementations rely on narrowband and compressed speech, while others support high fidelity stereo codecs.