Recent Blog Posts

As our contribution to the bit of fun that is Throwback Thursday, we're taking a weekly stroll in the Freeform Dynamics archives.  The first thing that struck me when I re-read our 'Linux on the ...

Over the last few months Computer Weekly has asked readers about their early experiences of computing and their first computer. A number sent in stories of how they learned programming on the home ...

So, we’ve had number of standalone elements emerge in recent years: cloud, SD-WAN, virtual anything and everything that- together – create what you could readily term a next generation network, as ...

Nobody needs to be reminded that 2020 taught us to be kinder, nicer and more caring to people. Many companies have decided to take the chance this year to explain just what they stand for over and ...

A senior lecturer in management at the University of Exeter has suggested a number of wise-cracking robots have the emotional intelligence required to make them suitable for leadership roles. ...

If Jamie Oliver (other celebrity chefs are available) launched a service named Tastiest Ever Chef, you might not think it that unusual… but it’s a brand naming convention that we don’t often find ...

As part of the 2020 Computer Weekly diversity and inclusion event, in partnership with Spinks, we ran a number of workshops in the leadup to the day covering a range of different topics relating to ...

Babel is a term long associated with language and many of us have read the Tower of Babel pages on Wikipedia and elsewhere. When doing this, if nothing else, you can get some bible study in and ...

Welcome to our last edition of Tech in APAC for the year. One of our key stories in November was a piece we did on Snowflake, which made its debut in September on Wall Street as the biggest ...

Deep in the Inspect-a-Gadget lab, our elves don’t always get out and see the light of day that much; they’re quiet reflective characters who sometimes prefer the dim light of the backlit keyboard ...

Within appropriate boundaries governing personal security, identity protection, data governance and information sharing compliance, there’s a strong argument for making all facial recognition ...

Google wants to help the programming community work more confidently with open source software. The search-cloud-platform tech giant has developed a new scorecard system intended to allow software ...

The decision to delay over £3 billion of spend is one that deserves "robust" scrutiny by the hundred or so MPs whose parliamentary majorities may depend on improve on-line access to education, ...

If there is something a CIO could do to enable the business to increase its earnings by 5%, everyone would be listening. McKinsey recently highlighted the difference in performance between those ...

This week we are heading back to 2006, when we reported on that sadly-perennial favourite: IT access security, and more specifically, Managing Access Securely. As our contribution to the bit of fun ...

The FT’s ever-excellent, San Francisco-based Richard Waters has reported on a prospective acquisition of Slack by Salesforce. Slack, notes Waters, has evolved from being a chat app to a broader ...

This is a guest post for the Computer Weekly Developer Network written by Rob Tribe, VP of systems engineering for EMEA region at Nutanix. Tribe contends that today, none of us can attend a ...

This dystopian shambles of a year has reached a new, personal low, after a PR email revealed that a robotics company based in Reading has completed its first successful trial of a VR-controlled ...

The stuff of legends? The original Ali Baba for sure, but the tech firm Alibaba is also hoping to go down in the history books. TechTarget’s Aaron Tang has already detailed some of the firm’s most ...

This has been a shot in the arm for those who have long overlooked their health.

In this guest post, Tony Jacob, vice president of design and construction for Europe, Middle East and Africa at colocation giant Digital Realty predicts what the next decade holds for the ...

After months – some would say years – of frustration and delay, tech suppliers have largely welcomed the latest government initiative to establish a digital identity ecosystem in the UK. The ...

Software intelligence company Dynatrace enjoys tracing, dynamically, obviously. As such then, the fourth generation of its distributed tracing and code-level analysis technology, PurePath captures, ...

Champion of continuous intelligence Sumo Logic spends its time looking inside the state of the modern application technology stack, including changing trends in cloud and application adoption and ...

All laptops are pretty much the same today, right?  Open the packaging and you get your basic clamshell unit, a power cable and adapter, a little warranty leaflet that you leave in the back of the ...

This is a guest blogpost by Stuart Bernard, Iron Mountain’s VP of Digital Solutions. In it he writes about a new study suggesting Covid-driven digitisation of business processes could be ...

OpenUK is the open technology advocate organisation for open data, open source hardware and open source software in the UK - so yeah, pretty open all round. The organisation has now joined the ...

With just a couple of weeks left of 2020, it is worth reflecting on what IT professionals can take away from this year. First and foremost, the hard work put in by IT staff, enabled many, many ...

To emerge stronger in 2021, print industry players must adopt a future forward mindset to address the rapidly evolving cloud and hybrid workplace era – or risk being left behind. The office print ...

As our contribution to the bit of fun that is Throwback Thursday, we're taking a weekly stroll in the Freeform Dynamics archives.  This week I look at a report we produced back in August 2006, the ...

The Labour Party has called for emergency laws to prevent social media companies from playing host to anti-vaccine content. You’d’ve thought the ruling elite would have already got the memo to ...

As Tears For Fears would say: everybody wants to rule the world…  … but as Equinix, Inc. would say: everybody wants to scale to the breadth of potentially web-scale operational scope and the best ...

Whenever anyone tells you that technology needs an ever-increasing injection of agility, you would be forgiven for a) possibly starting to yawn - but also b) predominantly thinking about the ...

Question: how do you build a hybrid cloud strategy? To start with, it’s a good idea to think about having Kubernetes at the core, to enable the orchestration of container workloads around the ...

Jetstack wants to be seen as a ‘proper’ open source company i.e. not just a corporate beast with an ‘open technologies’ department that is guilty of open-washing its wares by popping the off bit of ...

Let’s go back to basics and step back in time. When you’ve had a pair of (now considered ‘retro’) Sennheiser headphones in your teens (example shown here) the experience tends to leave you with a ...

Shipa is a cloud native application management framework company. Ketch enables developers to deploy cloud native applications to Kubernetes without a single YAML file, so no Kubernetes expertise ...

The rise of the virtual workplace and its implications for inclusivity and Generation Z.

This is a guest blogpost by Kevin Hurd, Founder & CEO, Digital Hive. In 2015 Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella famously said: “every business will be a software business”. And it’s hard to argue ...

It’s the time of year when many IT leaders will be setting budgets for 2021 and trying to persuade their boardroom why they should have more money to invest in technology. After the year we’ve all ...

Version control is important. There now - we’ve said it, do you feel better now? Revision control or source code control are also important, mainly because they’re all the same thing i.e. the ...

People who use the free Google Drive service for personal use to store, share and collaborate on documents, will be aware that the company has been slowly shifting consumers to pay for cloud ...

GUEST BLOG: In this contributed post, Laurent Homeyer, retail and hospitality industry advisor in EMEA & APJ, Workday, explains how retailers can properly plan their strategies during the ...

In this edition of Tech in APAC, we cover the top news headlines in the region for the month of October. Early in the month, we published an interview piece with Joe Beda, one of the co-creators of ...

We’re not ashamed to admit we don’t understand how the graphic tweeted by Boris Johnson to congratulate president-elect Joe Biden came to faintly display “Trump” in the background. Downing Street’s ...

The Inspect-a-Gadget team elves are a confirmed bunch of gamers.  Having started gaming life with TV Pong games back in the late 1970s and then graduating to the Atari 2600 in the 1980s, we’ve also ...

Nobody ever stops to ask why infrastructure configuration compliance and automation company Puppet, is called Puppet. But of course, it’s obvious, a ‘real world’ puppet’s core infrastructure is ...

Splunk derives its name from the American term for potholing or caving. Spelunking Spelunkers dive down into the depths of the earth to look for the lower substrate layers that make up our planet. ...

As workplaces increasingly pivot to virtual presence and digital collaboration, how can we stay connected?

If there were ever proof needed that we’re a planet going to mobile-first technologies, then surely we need look no further than the extension of GitHub to mobile.  Officially known as GitHub for ...

A new Huawei smartphone is always a bit of an occasion - and it’s usually an occasion that comes with the top brass from HQ flying into town to book out London’s ExCeL centre with an accompanying ...

In this guest post, Kyle Myers, director of environmental health, safety and sustainability at colocation giant CyrusOne on why the colocation community needs to look beyond carbon reduction ...

This is a guest post for the Computer Weekly Developer Network written by Taariq Lewis, CEO and founder of  Promise  -- the company delivers onchain credit reputations, for the world, using digital ...

AI is used to find hidden meaning in large datasets. What if an AI system could truly understand an end-to-end business process. What if an AI system could optimise a business process autonomously? ...

No coach potatoes in residence this month at Couchbase, or so it appears.  The self-styled multi-cloud-to-edge NoSQL database company (yeah, it’s a mouthful) has announced version 2.8 of Couchbase ...

Akri is a Greek village in the north of the country in the Elassona municipality. Akri is also a new (as of Oct 2020) open source project initiated by Microsoft to connect ‘leaf devices’ like ...

Ireland-based Siren didn’t just make ten one louder, the company has pushed its open source investigative intelligence analytics technology to version 11.0 this month. Siren 11.0 is designed to ...

Red Hat, Inc. is still just that i.e. Red Hat, Inc. Now nestled under the IBM parent umbrella, the company appears to be very much its own entity.  Some media reports have even suggested that Red ...

GUEST BLOG: In this contributed blog post, Layla Porter, senior developer evangelist at Twilio, talks about how in many cases developers are now self-taught.  Coding is becoming an in-demand skill ...

Time was when the Computer Weekly Developer Network wouldn’t pass a 12-month without attending a veritable handful of Adobe developer events, seminars, conferences, use case tutorials and all ...

GUEST BLOG: In this contributed blog post, Carol Leaman, CEO of Axonify, talks about her journey into the technology sector, and how others can consider a career in tech too. As a young girl ...

Keen to stress its multi-tool abilities, MongoDB these days calls itself a modern ‘general purpose’ database platform company. The firm is stressing its general (i.e. width and breadth) ...

We recently noticed a feature on the BBC’s website titled The man who taught Uber how to say sorry. After a frantic scan of the article, we learned the name of this man, and can therefore sadly ...

Are you a so-called ‘urban adventurer’ at heart? That’s what Huawei sub-brand company Honor wants you to be with its latest smartwatch.  Actually, you could be an office-based user (oh okay, it’s ...

This is a guest blogpost by Ben Tomlinson, Personally Identifiable Information Security Officer and Marketing Manager at Atlas Cloud. Data is arguably now the most valuable resource on earth; the ...

There are those who write papers predicting the future. There are prophets whose followers demonstrate and delay change by getting in its way. Far rarer are those who envision the future and gently ...

If there is one constant that seems to be an ailment of the tech sector it is the fact that the same problems seem to crop up time and time again. “Never reinvent the wheel,” as the saying goes. ...

Dynatrace has presented an enhanced, bi-directional automatic integration between its own Dynatrace Software Intelligence Platform and the ServiceNow Now Platform.  The union is intended to deliver ...

This is a guest post written by John Mertic in his role as ODPi program Director at The Linux Foundation -- founded in 2000, the foundation is dedicated to building sustainable ecosystems around ...

This is a guest post by Tom Kellermann, head of cyber security strategy at VMware Carbon Black 2020 has been a year like no other. The global pandemic has quickly changed work and business as we ...

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt spends his webcam chat for the Wall Street Journal Tech Live event insisting we should all be grateful to the tech giants, despite the fact they’ve become, by his own ...

A recent survey from price comparison site, comparethemarket.com, has highlighted the subtext, which obscures a host of unfair assumptions made in the depths of computer systems. These assumptions ...

International Pronouns Day, which falls on the third Wednesday of October each year, aims to make it an everyday occurrence for people to educate themselves about, and respect, people’s personal ...

Open source database software and services company Percona is not your usual tech firm. It’s annual developer, DBA, data architect convention is a relaxed affair with a no-frills (but rich in ...

Tel Aviv headquartered Frontegg is a curiously named company. Does it translate to something special in native Hebrew? Did the company want a name that was completely new and unique? Did the ...

The lion’s share of the product analysis carried out by Inspect-a-Gadget is typically hardware-based. They’re things, devices, tools, machines and extensions i.e. the focus here is gadgets - that’s ...

It’s autumn/fall conference season again, so pack your bags. Okay, we’re kidding (obviously), it is indeed autumn/fall conference season, but the only bag you’ll need to pack is one filled with ...

It may be an anniversary that passed people by in the current bizarre climes, but "good old" Ethernet recently celebrated its 40th birthday. I don't think any vendors released a special 40Gbps ...

Thirty years ago, the UK IT scene was led by two dominant suppliers – the global giant, IBM; and the British tech champion, ICL. Snapping at their heels were Hewlett-Packard (HP), Digital Equipment ...

This is a guest blogpost by Claus Jepsen, chief technology officer, Unit4 For decades now, users of enterprise resource planning software have been trained to believe that all the action must take ...

Complex elements of our existence can sometimes benefit from fragmentation. Fragmentation can be viewed as a way of breaking apart bigger, more complex and often more interwoven elements of ...

IBM’s decision to spin out its Global Technology Services business is an example of a business trying to remain relevant in the era of cloud computing. In the 1990s, the company pivoted to global ...

In a year of mass disruption to business networks, global & domestic supply chains, information exchange mechanisms (and indeed life itself), many technology vendors have gone to pains to ...

It was the summer of 2017, and a stock photo taken in Girona two years earlier was about to go global. That same summer, an Atlanta photographer walked through the doors of a dance studio to help ...

Digital overload from video collaboration The pandemic has created a surge of both personal and professional video conferencing. Zoom has seen use of its platform skyrocket as a result of the ...

Oracle is all about data, obviously. But the Oracle of this decade (and recent history) is more specifically all about data and information observability, autonomous control, analytics, diagnostics ...

The Computer Weekly Open Source insider team is fond of cloud-native open source distributed shared-nothing architecture multi-model NoSQL document-oriented database software... … but only if it’s ...

Sonatype describes itself as the company that scales DevOps through open source governance and software supply chain automation. Quite a mouthful, yes, but the firm is extremely developer-focused ...

The Computer Weekly Developer Network has been running a series of guest posts from technical authors who understand the application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) not ...

Element, the open source company behind the Matrix-based messaging and collaboration app, is acquiring Gitter from GitLab.  Element is the main source of investment for Matrix; the open network for ...

The more complex and high-end a product, the more complex, convoluted and potentially cumbersome the install and usage experience. That would be the general summation of many of the devices we’ve ...

The ailing Gov.uk Verify digital identity system was given a Frankenstein’s monster-like burst of energy back in April, when the lockdown-induced surge in Universal Credit applications brought ...

We users use Artificial Intelligence (AI) almost every day, often without even realising it i.e. a large amount of the apps and online services we all connect with have a degree of Machine Learning ...

A smart chastity cage that can only be controlled via its app was vulnerable to hackers putting almost 40,000 penises on lockdown, research has revealed. Sex toy manufacturer Qiui muses on its ...

At the end of September, 15,841 cases of coronavirus, over an eight day period, were lost due to an IT glitch. The bug meant that there were long delays in contact tracing staff reaching people who ...

In this edition of Tech on APAC, we’ll cover the top news headlines in the region for the month of September, starting with a notable win by Microsoft in Australia’s cloud market. In mid-September, ...

We’re conscientious souls here in the Inspect-A-Gadget lab i.e. we like to back-up.  With a couple of aging PCs that have been put through their paces (and ejected from a couple of airport scanner ...

This is part one of a two-part contributed piece for Computer Weekly Open Source Insider with part two linked here. This analysis of the role of open source in APIs is written by Postman CEO ...

This is part two of a two-part contributed piece for Computer Weekly Open Source Insider with part one linked here. This analysis of the role of open source in APIs is written by Postman CEO ...

Nutanix is the cloud software company with a pedigree in hyperconverged infrastructure solutions that wants to ‘make computing invisible anywhere’ - as the t-shirt slogans might read. The company ...