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All startup companies start small with limited capital and resources that are stretched to cover expenses. Personnel often multitask and perform more than one role in small companies. As the company grows, reaching strengths of say 50-100 personnel, enterprise heads have to look at new ways to optimize IT management and resource consumption. At the very least, they have to start planning to prepare for the future.

Instead of ramping up in an unorganized manner, SMBs look at smart innovative options that are available to them today. One approach to improving profitability and optimizing resources is to take advantage of cloud computing solutions and outsourcing. By offloading non-business centric tasks to external caretakers, SMBs can reduce infrastructure, management and operational costs. At the same time, they can allocate more resources and funds towards the core competencies of the organization and its services.

According to a whitepaper released by IDC, demand-side research shows that small businesses consistently cite revenue growth as their number one business priority, but efficiency has become more important, especially as firms grow in size beyond 50 and 100 employees into the midsize space.

Tapping cloud computing options

The Solution-as-a-Service (SaaS) model has been around some time. Cloud computing solutions have evolved and matured to offer viable Platform-as-a-Service, IT-as-a-Service, Video-as-a-Service and other specific services. Moving to the cloud offers huge savings – in terms of cost, time, resources, scaling, agility, access to advanced technology, software and hardware management, etc. – but it also requires some ground level changes in your existing setup.

SMBs should look at cloud computing as an enhancement rather than a replacement. Comprehensive transition to the cloud does not work well for small enterprises and it’s best that some parts of the business remain on premise, in direct control of internal IT. The decision to move to the cloud should be based on the predicted ROI and cost increment following expansion. The company may open a new branch, possibly in another part of the world. The cloud computing solution should be capable of delivering results efficiently and effectively around the clock.

IT Outsourcing

Small companies cannot afford big changes fast. But when it comes to IT, it could mean short-changing yourself by not taking advantage of the performance gains of moving to latest technology. This is where outsourcing helps. Look at IT outsourcing solutions and SLAs that:

• Offer some guarantees of performance
• Support flexibility in case of unprecedented changes or requirements
• Provide a clear breakdown of costs
• Do not require lock-in periods of commitment
• Support smooth transition of proprietary data to your premises when and if required

Cloud computing and IT outsourcing can make a big difference in business profitability. At the same time, the approach prepares the company for the future, allowing company heads more time to focus on market opportunities and growth.

Gamification is the use of game design techniques and game mechanics to non-game applications to make them engaging and fun. The technique is being incorporated in application design, especially in the mobile domain, to engage users in activities such as learning, training, skilling, and marketing.

Research from Gartner indicates that by 2015, 50% of organizations that manage innovation processes will gamify those processes, and that by 2014 more than 70% of Global 2000 organizations will have at least one gamified application.

Courtesy: InformationWeek

As defined on Wikipedia, “Typically, gamification applies to non-game applications and processes, in order to encourage people to adopt them or to influence how they are used. Gamification works by:

• making technology more engaging
• encouraging users to engage in desired behaviors
• showing a path to mastery and autonomy
• helping to solve problems and not being a distraction
• taking advantage of humans’ psychological predisposition to engage in gaming

The technique can encourage people to perform chores that they ordinarily consider boring such as completing surveys, shopping, filling out tax forms, or reading web sites.”

Gamification of applications involves various elements including:

Rewarding accomplishments

Microsoft pioneered the awarding of badges in online gaming with the Xbox Live service in 2002. The practice lives on. Many apps give rewards to users on achieving milestones. Be the first to complete your profile page and you get a star or a badge. The pull of a reward, the accompanying status and acknowledgement, works like a carrot.

Foursquare uses badges to promote location sharing via “check-ins.” App users are invited to review apps and regular reviewers get prestigious badges tagged to their name. Shopping website or app members get ranked and get privileges. Various learning apps use badges to set goals, assist in instruction follow up, acknowledge expertise levels, enhance status, and promote collaboration among users with similar interests. Badges are great motivators.

Virtual appointments

Some apps need you come back to the app after a specific time interval to take care of something. Via gaming it creates a feedback loop during which the user can be taken another step ahead.

Users’ engagement

Interesting games tend to become addictive. If an app poses a challenge without being overwhelming, users come back to test and validate their skills. Gamers push themselves to perform better. That momentum transforms into learning.

Community platform

A game challenge that requires members to cooperate and work with each other encourages team bonding where cooperation gets more rewards than competition.

Countdowns

Including countdowns in activities is great to inculcate a sense of urgency and engender the quality of time management. The idea is not only to deliver but deliver on time.

Make them curious

Replace a mundane presentation with a story. Spin a tale to include points you want to cover while involving users personally. Include questionnaires or “Did You Know?” elements to surprise and engage. Hint at answers that can be found in subsequent content to pique their interest. This mode of learning leads to higher knowledge retention and a zeal to know more.

Loss aversion

Some games that include appointments send alerts to users before something goes bad in their game premise. For example, if not tended on time, crops die in Farmville. The psychology of avoiding loss triggers needed action in users.

Games incite a range of emotions that keep us going back to them. That’s the pull of gaming. Gamification brings that pull into ordinary applications.

Related articles

• 7 Examples: Put Gamification To Work (informationweek.com)
• Is Gamification A Great Motivator? (informationweek.com)
• 4 Tips For Gamifying Your Marketing Plan (mashable.com)

Oracle has announced the availability of Java SE 7 Update 4 and JavaFX 2.1 for Mac OS X 10.7. It’s Oracle’s first release of the Java development kit (JDK) and JavaFX for Mac OS X. Apple is tired of fixing Java bugs in the Mac version and is passing the buck to Oracle. It looks like 700,000 Java infections on Mac have done what Steve Jobs couldn’t.

But first, let’s get into the history of the whole story.

When Sun first released Java and its reference code, all the biggies – Microsoft, IBM, HP, and yes, Apple – picked it up to build their own version. Apple rolled out Java 1.0 for Mac OS 9 in 1996, and had the job of fixing, adding and updating the version for its Mac platform.

After many years of fixing and keeping up, Steve Jobs tried to get Sun (and later Oracle) to take over Java releases for Mac OS X but failed. In fact, in 2010, Jobs took Java out of the Mac completely, cutting ties between Java and iOS. His reasons, according to a response to a Java developer in the MacRumors forum, were “Sun (now Oracle) supplies Java for all other platforms. They have their own release schedules, which are almost always different than ours, so the Java we ship is always a version behind. This may not be the best way to do it.” In truth, that was never the situation. Apart from Windows and Linux, neither Sun nor Oracle supply Java for other platforms.

Fortunately, Tim Cooks has found a way to change Larry Ellison’s mind. 700,000 infections played a big part too. According to Dr. Web, the Russian company monitoring Macs that have been infected by the Java-borne Trojan horse Flashback, “the number of unique IP addresses with infected Macs has held steady around 700,000, and the number of unique infected Macs hovers around 580,000 to 595,000.”

Oracle has announced its plans to fully support Mac OS X Lion and later versions with new updates to the JDK, JRE and Java SE. While Apple too released Java patches for Mac OS X 10.7 Lion and Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, it’s not clear whether Oracle will release updates for OS X versions before 10.7. According to Dr. Web’s reports, 25 percent of the infected systems are running on Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) and 63 percent on Mac OS X 10.6. With only 12 percent infected systems on Mac OS X 10.7, a patch for the earlier versions is a critical requirement. However, as of now, these users can only rely on community efforts.

Java SE 7 Update 4 for Mac OS X is now the default version on Oracle’s Java page. It’s a turn for the better. As Henrik Stahl, senior director of Java product management at Oracle, says, “Oracle’s JDK and JavaFX release supports OS X Lion on any 64-bit capable Intel-based Mac. … There are community efforts based on OpenJDK to build JDK 7 [and JVM on 32-bit machines] for other configurations, easily found using your favorite search engine. We applaud these efforts! .”

Related articles

• Oracle Bypasses Apple, Brings Java Fix Directly To Mac Users (itproportal.com)