James Maguire

Noted tech observer Tim O’Reilly’s new book, WTF? What’s the Future and Why It’s Up to Us, is an in-depth look at the potentials and perils of today’s array of remarkable emerging technologies. As described on his publisher’s web site, “The core of the book’s call to action is an exhortation to businesses to DO […]

Also see: Top 10 Factors that Influence Your IT Salary When it comes to IT salaries in 2018, the good news for tech pros is quite good indeed: IT professionals are positioned to demand some hefty paychecks. This statistic from Robert Half 2018 IT Salary Guide is telling: “44% of CIOs say they miss out […]

Amazon Web Services has emerged as the leading cloud computing platform, services businesses of all sizes. Using AWS offers tremendous competitive advantage, due to the remarkably sophisticated toolset that the cloud giant offers. Yet getting the most from AWS requires deep expertise. To offer help to businesses on AWS, three experts discussed best practices and […]

The world of Ethereum, to be sure, has an element of the eccentric. Ethereum is a technology started 24 months ago by a 21-year-old college dropout, Vitalik Buterin. Among the facts listed on his slender bio: in 2011 he won third place in a high school programing competition. Yet Ethereum is now supported by JP […]

A private cloud is a software-defined data center that combines essential hardware and other computing resources into a unified virtualized unit A private cloud’s layer of hardware and networking abstraction – again, provided by software – enables enterprises to scale and provision resources more dynamically than is possible with traditional hardware-centric computing environments. In contrast […]

Video panel discussion: Governing Big Data Big Data offers enormous competitive advantages, yet managing Big Data presente an array of logistical and ethical concerns. To shed light on these issues, we discussed the following questions: 1) What does it mean to “govern” Big Data? What’s the most important best practice for governing Big Data?  2) […]

Given the complexity and expense of building an in-house Big Data platform, many companies are opting to use cloud-based Big Data. Google, the king of the algorithm, clearly has a competitive strength in data analytics. To find out more, I spoke with Fausto Ibarra, director of product management at Google Cloud. The topics we covered: […]

Video streams on this page on Friday, June 30, 12 noon PT. In his New York Times bestselling book The Inevitable, futurist Kevin Kelly identifies 12 key tech trends that will shape human life in the decades ahead. In a wide ranging discussion, we discussed many of these trends, including: 1) Some say we are […]

Video streams on this page on Friday, June 16, 12 noon PT. The distributed database technology Blockchain has the potential to disrupt business and finance in profound ways. To explore the topic, I spoke with Bernard Golden, CEO at Navica. Golden, who Wired magazine lists as one of the top ten experts in cloud computing, […]

Video streams on this page on Friday, May 26, 12 noon PT. Today’s hot new apps get all the buzz, but the truth is, it’s legacy tech that truly supports most everything. The problem is, as important as these systems are, they are often not properly maintained — leading to all manner of expensive problems. […]