I write occasional articles for the Times’ Circuits and Business sections on interesting ways that technologies intersect with businesses. Here are links to the pieces that have run, you might need to register first on the Times’ site to get the full text.
- Getting in Sync, Electronically (3/17/09)
- Keeping Your Rivals From Minding Your Business (11/13/08 )
- Where businesses go for Internet reliability (10/1/08 )
- Technologies at the Abe Lincoln Museum (3/12/08 )
- So Much Data, and So Many Ways to Guard It (online backups, 2/20/08 )
- Contact management for small business (11/14/07)
- Raising charitable children (11/12/07)
- Now you can send email to your car’s dashboard (10/24’07)
- Managing YourCompany.com (9/26/07)
- Outsourcing I.T. To Unlikely Places, Like America (9/12/07)
- Making calls, cheaply (VOIP options for business, 5/16/07)
- Music, Photos and Printouts, Beamed Through the Air, Bluetooth-oriented gifts for geeks (11/1/06)
- Parking and Paying get EZier, new parking technologies (10/25/06)
- How a Google Search Can Become a Security Threat, the art of Google Hacking (9/27/06)
- Calling over the Net, a review of Skype and Vonage mobile products (5/3/06)
- I.M. Generation Is Changing the Way Business Talks (4/5/06)
- Finding New Connections When Wi-Fi Is Not Enough (1/25/06)
- How much can the Department of Homeland Security do about cyberattacks? (8/25/03)
Hi David-
I read your NYT article today with interest (“So Much Data…”)- you have hit on an important theme- the shift from home or in-house to online cloud-based data storage.
I wanted to alert you to a rapidly growing storage industry you didn’t note: online storage of valuable corporate data (software source code). Globally there are 250,000 software and technology businesses who write some form of digital documents: software, websites, image/graphic files, and documents, etc. A major cost for these companies is setting up the global infrastructure that allows their teams of developers, writers, and artists to work on the same project data, simultaneously, from perhaps continents apart.
The recent emergence of secure, hosted providers who provide tools that help these companies work productively and securely online is helping change how development teams work together. Dev teams are going virtual, with hubs of senior engineers and architects in the US/UK managing heavy lifting teams in India/China. They can also share project data with clients in real-time, again regardless of where the company or client is located.
In our recent CVSDude survey (we received 241 completed applications), we learned that the hosted service we provide, which includes providing version control, collaboration tools, bug-fixing, data backup, security, all packaged into a single hosted service, would cost the AVERAGE company $157,000 in labor time alone (2350 hrs per year) if done in house. In comparison, our plans range from several hundred to a thousand dollars per year (economies of scale).
The point is: hosted development environments are transformational, making software development easier, cheaper, and far more productive. As an emerging industry, this area is only just starting to get real press coverage (see http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/02/04/cvsdude-to-grease-odesks-outsourcing-wheels/), although Gartner has been early-profiling “Hosted Development Services” since as far back as 2002.
Look for this industry to skyrocket in the next 2 years (Forrester predicts that 80,000 companies will be using Subversion, one of the tools that we host, by 2009). If you would like to learn more or break this story on a broader scale, I would be happy to email or talk more.
Best regards,
Guy Marion, Ph.D.
CVSDude
Hi David,
Thanks for the New York Times article on Getting in Sync. We appreciated being mentioned, plus learning about the other solutions out there. We have linked back to the Times article at our Home Page.
TJ
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