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"Gartner Says That by 2017, 25 Percent of Enterprises Will Have an Enterprise App Store Growing Number of Enterprise Mobile Devices and Enterprise Adoption of MDM Will Drive Demand and Adoption of Enterprise App Stores Analysts Examine the State of the Industry at Gartner Application Architecture, Development By 2017, 25 percent of enterprises will have an enterprise app store for managing corporate-sanctioned apps on PCs and mobile devices, according to Gartner, Inc. Enterprise app stores promise greater control over the apps used by employees, greater control over software expenditures and greater negotiating leverage with app vendors, but this greater control is only possible if the enterprise app store is widely adopted.  "Apps downloaded from public app stores for mobile devices disrupt IT security, application and procurement strategies," said Ian Finley, research vice president at Gartner. "Bring your own application (BYOA) has become as important as bring your own device (BYOD) in the development of a comprehensive mobile strategy, and the trend toward BYOA has begun to affect desktop and Web applications as well. Enterprise app stores promise at least a partial solution but only if IT security, application, procurement and sourcing professionals can work together to successfully apply the app store concept to their enterprises. When successful, they can increase the value delivered by the application portfolio and reduce the associated risks, license fees and administration expenses."  Gartner has identified three key enterprise app store trends and recommendations of how organizations can benefit from them:  The increasing number of enterprise mobile devices and the adoption of mobile device management (MDM) by enterprises will drive demand and adoption of enterprise app stores. Enterprises already have numerous choices for downloading software onto PCs, but most of them don't include support for smartphones and tablets. Enterprises are beginning to f

"As a result of the internet, new technologies, the huge increase in mobile or home working, part-time jobs and today's 'always on', 24/7 culture, we found that most people now spend more time working than sleeping. In fact by 2015 around 40% of the total workforce will be mobile. The reason for this is that work is no longer where the office is but for mobile workers it is wherever they are - be that their car, home, coffee shop, the airport, customer site or even on holiday. This is just one area our report identifies as having a massive impact on the way we work;" explains Richard Watson. Other factors covered in the paper include: Ageing workforces: By 2050 over 65's will represent around 50% of the working population in Europe Millennials and Gen Y: More tech-savvy than any other generation The generation gap: Millennials think senior management do not relate to them and use autocratic command and control structures Gender: The huge economic impact of getting more women in the workforce especially at senior levels. Eliminating the gap between male and female employment would boost GDP by 9% in US, 13% in Eurozone and 16% in Japan (Goldman Sachs). Mobile working: By 2015 new technologies mean 1.3 billion (or 40%) of the total working population will be mobile Security of Information: Workers will have their own devices (BYOD) and potentially work remotely creating huge security and data storage/retrieval challenges. Where will new talent for workforce come from? Talent scarcities worldwide mean that by 2030 the USA will need to add over 25 million workers to its talent base to sustain economic growth and Western Europe more than 45 million.

"Amazon Flex allows drivers to get paid to deliver packages from their own vehicles. But is it a good deal for workers?"

Le business de la "sharing economy", c'est encore beaucoup la précarité des "employés".

"Advocates of these "alternative work arrangements"-many of which are enabled by sharing or on-demand apps such as Uber and TaskRabbit-bill them as a way to trade unemployment, burnout, or hating one's job for freedom, flexibility, and financial gains. Skeptics, meanwhile, point to the costly trade-offs: unstable earnings, few or no benefits, reduced job security, and stalled career advancement. But what do the gig workers themselves say? Gigged, a new book by Sarah Kessler, an editor at Quartz, focuses on their perspective. In profiling a variety of people in contingent jobs-from a 28-year-old waiter and Uber driver in Kansas City, to a 24-year-old programmer who quit his New York office job to join Gigster, to a 30-something mother in Canada who is earning money through Mechanical Turk-Kessler illuminates a great divide: For people with desirable skills, the gig economy often permits a more engaging, entrepreneurial lifestyle; but for the unskilled who turn to such work out of necessity, it's merely "the best of bad options.""

Very soon you will be able to earn money just by walking.A new app is about to be launched which will convert your steps into a cryptocurrency similar to Bitcoin. With Bitwalking you simply generate money by walking. Once installed on your phone, the free app converts steps to Bitwalking dollars (BW$) that you can manage and use as you wish. The money you generate accumulates each day, and remains in your account until transferred or spent. This is presented by the app designers as a disruptive and revolutionary innovation (they usually are) but also one with a moral mission. It is proposed that it can help to improve health and happiness by encouraging more exercise. Also, it can improve the environment through pushing us into walking rather than driving and because it mine coins through human movement rather than via computers. (...) Even more audaciously Bitwalking is also suggested as a enabling freedom and equality. We believe that everyone should have the freedom, and ability, to make money. A step is worth the same value for everyone - no matter who you are, or where you are. What matters is how much you walk. The drive to do social good has been presented as central to the development of this new app with the creators including developing countries, such as Malawi, amongst their test sites. Sportswear brands, charities, health insurance companies and environmental groups are to be targeted for involvement in the Bitwalking marketplace where the virtual currency can be used to buy goods or trade for real money. Also, the data will be made available to advertisers(with security and anonymity safeguards, of course). I have previously developed an argument that self-tracking is contributing towards a reconceptualisation of exercise into labour. Here I suggested that the standardisation of exercise activities through tracking and digitisation and their subsequent accumulation into valuable (to advertisers, insurers and others) data means that

""At this time, compensation is tied to roles, and the badges encompass the work or skills being done in those roles," says Lisa Jewett, who has the role of "@Badge_Librarian" and is leading how compensation works in the Zappos Holacracy. "However, we are currently in the process of building a more robust badging system that will allow people to build their salary based on the avenues they would like to pursue." Essentially, that means that the pursuit of badges may eventually resemble a "leveling up" process from video games, where the acquiring of a new badge automatically equals a bigger paycheck. As of now, employees looking for a raise submit an application to Zappos' Compensation Circle, a group of employees responsible for approving salaries. "

The value of products and services today is based more and more on creativity - the innovative ways that they take advantage of new materials, technologies, and processes. Value creation in the past was a function of economies of industrial scale: mass production and the high efficiency of repeatable tasks. Value creation in the future will be based on economies of creativity: mass customization and the high value of bringing a new product or service improvement to market; the ability to find a solution to a vexing customer problem; or, the way a new product or service is sold and delivered. Organizational structure will have to change to meet the new reality of creativity as a core component of value and continuous innovation as the mechanism to sustain it. The new organization will include structures that support innovation 24/7/365 and at increasing scale. They will be more like organisms than machines. They'll be structurally fluid - bringing individuals together in creative networks designed to adapt to an ever changing landscape of customer needs and desires, often at a moment's notice. Management will be the job of those who oversee creative economies, ecosystems, and communities; it will be the job of managing innovation on a continuous basis where scale is used to create differentiated products and services to solve problems and meet needs on a customer by customer basis - all in real or near real time.

"INNOVATION, the elixir of progress, has always cost people their jobs. In the Industrial Revolution artisan weavers were swept aside by the mechanical loom. Over the past 30 years the digital revolution has displaced many of the mid-skill jobs that underpinned 20th-century middle-class life. Typists, ticket agents, bank tellers and many production-line jobs have been dispensed with, just as the weavers were."

Internet-enabled technologies allow people to connect in unprecedented ways. Although everyday social practices are widespread and well known, these same tools are reconfiguring key aspects of work. Crowdsourcing and distributed labor technologies increasingly allow companies to outsource everything from mundane tasks (e.g., Amazon Mechanical Turk) to professional services (e.g., oDesk). Sharing economy - or peer economy - tools (e.g., Airbnb) allow people to barter goods or services or get paid for these exchanges outside of the dominant business framework. These services have enabled new forms of contract or freelance labor and reduced risk for companies; however, there is often an increase in risk for the associated laborers. At the same time, divisions between what constitutes work, hobby, and volunteerism get blurred, especially as many organizations rely on volunteer labor under the assumption that it's mutually beneficial (e.g., blogs and journalistic enterprises that republish work or see the offer of a platform as valuable in and of itself). While all of these labor issues have unmediated precedents (e.g., free internships), technology magnifies the scale of these practices, minimizes the transactional friction, and increases the visibility of unpaid and freelance work. Collectively, this raises critical questions about what fair labor looks like in a networked world, where boundaries dissolve and existing mechanisms of labor protection do not address the varied work scenarios now available.

"Allen, a PhD chemist who works for the Dow Chemical Company in Pennsylvania, began to think about ways he could leverage r/science's massive reach to connect scientists to the general public. R/science is a default subreddit, meaning it's visible to people visiting Reddit.com even if they aren't logged in. According to internal metrics Allen has access to, r/science gets between 30,000 and 100,000 unique visitors a day; it's arguably the largest community-run science forum on the internet. So what if r/science were to form an AMA series of its own, focused solely on working scientists who are producing interesting, groundbreaking research?"

"Companies around the world are dreaming up a new generation of technologies designed to monitor their workers-from Amazon's new employee wristbands, to Uber's recording whether its drivers are holding their phones rather than mounting them, to "Worksmart," a new productivity tool that takes photos of workers every ten minutes via their webcams. Technologies like these can erode workplace privacy and encourage discrimination. Without disregarding the importance of those effects, I want to focus in this post on how employers can use new monitoring technologies to drive down wages or otherwise disempower workers as a class. I'll use examples from Uber, not because Uber is exceptional in this regard - it most certainly is not - but rather because it is exemplary."

"These workers travel the country, sightseeing and staying overnight in RV parks while laboring in low-wage temp jobs-and at least some of them love the lifestyle."

"The old model of slaving for 40 hours a week in exchange for a paycheck is eroding. When you can control your own time, you can control your own well-being--and that might be worth more than money."

"That wiggle room in the middle is a space that a new service called Breather hopes to occupy. The service, which launches today in New York City, works like this: Instead of paying monthly rent for a desk you use once or twice a week, the Breather app lets you duck into one of its small, cozy (and very nicely furnished) workspaces for an hourly fee. You simply pick a location on the map, reserve a space for anywhere from 30 minutes to a few hours, and unlock the door with a code on your phone. It's like an Airbnb or Zipcar for when you want to zen out, charge your phone, or sneak in a nap."

"The recent increase in the use of digital self-tracking devices has given rise to a range of relations to the self often discussed as quantified self (QS). In popular and academic discourse, this development has been discussed variously as a form of narcissistic self-involvement, an advanced expression of panoptical self-surveillance and a potential new dawn for e-health. This article proposes a previously un-theorised consequence of this large-scale observation and analysis of human behaviour; that exercise activity is in the process of being reconfigured as labour. QS will be briefly introduced, and reflected on, subsequently considering some of its key aspects in relation to how these have so far been interpreted and analysed in academic literature. Secondly, the analysis of scholars of "digital labour" and "immaterial labour" will be considered, which will be discussed in relation to what its analysis of the transformations of work in contemporary advanced capitalism can offer to an interpretation of the promotion and management of the self-tracking of exercise activities. Building on this analysis, it will be proposed that a thermodynamic model of the exploitation of potential energy underlies the interest that corporations have shown in self-tracking and that "gamification" and the promotion of an entrepreneurial selfhood is the ideological frame that informs the strategy through which labour value is extracted without payment. Finally, the potential theoretical and political consequences of these insights will be considered."

à lire / Digital labor

The cruel and back-stabbing environment described by The New York Timesin a report this weekend on the workplace culture at Amazon.com has struck a nerve with Jeff Bezos. In a memo to employees this weekend, obtained by GeekWire, Bezos says he doesn't recognize the company described in the article. In the memo, Bezos encourages Amazon employees to read the report, and requests that anyone seeing the type of abusive culture described in the piece should report it immediately to human resources or directly to him.