Fintech adoption and revenue have grown quickly and consistently enough to inspire some hand-wringing by banks and on their behalf, and to prompt speculation not just about which company will be the next unicorn, but how finance will react, and how the fintech industry as a whole will develop.Media coverage seeking the next dominant power — a fintech version of Amazon — may miss an important trend underlying the fintech industry growth. Fintech companies have tended to succeed through partnership and collaboration, reaching new markets and expanding services by finding mutual benefit with another company.“The fintech industry will only continue to grow, and this will be aided by an influx of collaborations between financial institutions and fintech companies to come,” wrote Alice Chen in a blog post for Due, a digital wallet for payments online.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It’s hard to come by any enterprise that operates offline these days. Enterprise connectivity is now central to any digital workplace strategy. A tech-savvy workforce also demands robust, stable, and fast infrastructure that would enable them to be at their most productive. However, keeping pace with all the changes technology can be a real challenge for enterprises.Workplaces are also increasingly becoming collaborative. Projects are now utilizing remote teams where members can be geographically distributed all over the world. As such, the infrastructure must be able to accommodate remote access not just but cross-border as well. Mobile enterprise is also on the rise.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Decision making comes with its challenges as it’s part of a process of nurturing a variety of perspectives, usually by encouraging discussion and debate. However, when competing points of view are left unmanaged, it can easily – and without warning – digress into an unhealthy conflict. Proponents are often passionate about their views and become blind to certain, inconvenient, facts.Today, data has become a reliable arbiter for such debates. This is why business intelligence (BI) has emerged as crucial to the decision making process. BI provides actionable insights that are based on numbers. A growing number of organizations are recognizing its value. In 2016, 73 percent of businesses increased their analytics capabilities.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Artificial intelligence (AI) was once a topic reserved for high-level computer scientists and futurists. Today, it doesn't come with such daunting baggage.Developments in the field have made AI accessible to just about everyone. AI subfields such as machine learning and natural language processing have even become buzzwords that we now constantly hear and read about in the news. And according to estimates, by 2020, the AI market will approach $50 billion.+ Also on Network World: Why AI will both increase efficiency and create jobs +
Writing about the expanding AI market, California-based entrepreneur Gurbaksh Chahal says AI will eventually reach every industry, including real-time bidding, biometrics, marketing and speech recognition.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Ecommerce competition is heating up globally, with giants Amazon, Apple, Alibaba, Tencent and eBay all vying for bigger stakes in the market. Retail sales are expected to surpass $27 trillion by 2020, and ecommerce is expected to account for more than $4 trillion of that figure.One key area that is becoming the next battleground for these companies is payments. Payments may seem to be an inherent part of ecommerce platforms that facilitates the checkout process. However, the boom of financial technology (fintech) has made payments a major segment in financial services, creating major opportunities for these businesses to tap into wider markets.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The volume of data available to businesses is expected to reach 44 zettabytes by the year 2020. That’s a mind-boggling huge body of information, one that businesses can use to assess the effectiveness of marketing initiatives, to use as barometers for better performance, and to identify new optimization opportunities in all areas of operation.To make use of all that data, though, you need the right tools in place. And with the average salary for an experienced data analytics professional starting at $65,000 annually, smaller businesses may be at a disadvantage.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Joomla has exploded in popularity as an open-source website creation tool for individuals, small and medium-sized businesses, enterprises, and developers. It has been downloaded 78 million times and currently powers millions of websites.Joomla websites have not been entirely unaffected by the cyber crime problems that have plagued content management systems (CMSs) and the internet in general. A wave of fake jQuery attacks hit Joomla and WordPress sites in 2015 and 2016, affecting over 4.5 million sites.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Joomla has exploded in popularity as an open-source website creation tool for individuals, small and medium-sized businesses, enterprises, and developers. It has been downloaded 78 million times and currently powers millions of websites.Joomla websites have not been entirely unaffected by the cyber crime problems that have plagued content management systems (CMSs) and the internet in general. A wave of fake jQuery attacks hit Joomla and WordPress sites in 2015 and 2016, affecting over 4.5 million sites.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
As the number of consumers turning to online shopping increases, the rise of online fraud is also rising.Those committing internet crimes are depriving their victims of either funds, interests, personal property and/or sensitive data. As the threat escalates, consumers and companies alike are seeking various methods to tackle the phenomenon.Ecommerce fraud has a long and controversial history. Thus, providing a forecast for the months ahead can help retailers adopt an adequate solution to confront the many challenges in 2017.1. Identity theft and friendly fraud
The main threat will remain identity theft. Fraudsters will seek your personal information. Their main goal is to use a different identity and, for example, place an online order. Identity theft also includes a concept known as man-in-the-middle attacks where credit-card data is intercepted and copied as it is transferred online. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
As the number of consumers turning to online shopping increases, the rise of online fraud is also rising.Those committing internet crimes are depriving their victims of either funds, interests, personal property and/or sensitive data. As the threat escalates, consumers and companies alike are seeking various methods to tackle the phenomenon.Ecommerce fraud has a long and controversial history. Thus, providing a forecast for the months ahead can help retailers adopt an adequate solution to confront the many challenges in 2017.1. Identity theft and friendly fraud
The main threat will remain identity theft. Fraudsters will seek your personal information. Their main goal is to use a different identity and, for example, place an online order. Identity theft also includes a concept known as man-in-the-middle attacks where credit-card data is intercepted and copied as it is transferred online. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
From mobile hardware breakthroughs to the explosion of cloud services and leaps in mobile and wireless network speeds, many factors have contributed to the rise of smartphones and mobile devices as prominent tools in the office and workplace.More and more companies are now adopting Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) strategies and issue tablets and smartphones to their employees to access company email and digital resources. According to analytics firm IDC, 90 percent of companies support BYOD policies. Further, Flurry Analytics, the firm that monitors mobile app usage and statistics, says business app usage had a 30 percent year-over-year growth in 2016. And every year, more enterprise applications offer mobile app versions or become mobile friendly.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cloud computing has become common in enterprise IT, and the hype around it remains as adoption soars. Research by IDG shows that 70 percent of enterprises currently use at least one cloud application, and in 2018, organizations with cloud-only IT infrastructure will become the majority.The global market for cloud services was worth $148 billion in 2016, according to Synergy Research Group, and it is growing by 25 percent annually. Amazon Web Services (AWS) alone reached $3.23 billion in revenue in the third quarter of 2016, while Microsoft Azure, the second-largest cloud provider, announced Thursday that revenue has nearly doubled in the past year, giving it an annual run rate of $14 billion.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cloud computing has become common in enterprise IT, and the hype around it remains as adoption soars. Research by IDG shows that 70 percent of enterprises currently use at least one cloud application, and in 2018, organizations with cloud-only IT infrastructure will become the majority.The global market for cloud services was worth $148 billion in 2016, according to Synergy Research Group, and it is growing by 25 percent annually. Amazon Web Services (AWS) alone reached $3.23 billion in revenue in the third quarter of 2016, while Microsoft Azure, the second-largest cloud provider, announced Thursday that revenue has nearly doubled in the past year, giving it an annual run rate of $14 billion.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Ralph Tkatchuk