Top 10 Most Interactive Tech Blogs

There are blogs that are so great, so informative, so current — you’d be lost in your tech career without them. Here’s some we monitor daily. Add them to your bookmarks!

Mashable.com

Mashable is a global, multi-platform media and entertainment company. Powered by its own proprietary technology, Mashable is the go-to source for tech, digital culture and entertainment content for its dedicated and influential audience around the globe.

Gizmodo.com

Gizmodo’s been a must-follow site for a long time, with tons of relevant posts, a youthful vibe, and some of the funnier commenters on the Internet.

BusinessInsider.com

Business Insider was started six years ago by the former No. 1-ranked Internet analyst Henry Blodget. It has quickly become the digital news source for the emerging generation of business leaders, reaching more than 25 million monthly readers.

Get the latest news through Business Insider India on tech, finance, politics, strategy, life and entertainment.

GigaOM.com

Gigaom is technology research and analysis firm. Our focus is on helping business leaders understand the implications of emerging technologies and their impacts on business, media, and society.

In mid-2015, Knowingly, an Austin-based publishing start-up, acquired some of the assets of Giga Omni Media, principally the website, after the founding corporation closed its doors earlier that year. The legacy of Gigaom as a leading voice in the expanding world of technology lives on in the new, rebooted Gigaom.

TechCrunch.com

TechCrunch is a leading technology media property, dedicated to obsessively profiling startups, reviewing new Internet products, and breaking tech news.

ZDNet.com

ZDNet brings together the reach of global and the depth of local, delivering 24/7 news coverage and analysis on the trends, technologies and opportunities that matter to IT professionals and decision makers.

TheNextWeb.com

TNW was started to bring insight, meaning—and every now and again, the lulz—to the world of technology. But they didn’t want to stop there. Today the company has grown from those two parts to four pillars that brought forth TNW News, TNW Deals, TNW Conference and Events, our new tech hub called TQ and Index, our market intelligence platform.

ComputerWorld.com

Computerworld blogs cover a wide range of technology topics, including smartphones, tablets, software, security, operating systems, mobile, storage, servers and data centers, and technology companies such as Microsoft, Google and Apple.

VentureBeat.com

Founded in 2006, VentureBeat is the leading source for news, events, groundbreaking research and perspective on technology innovation. All of our content and events provide deep context to help executives, entrepreneurs, and tech enthusiasts make smart decisions. We aim to inform, connect and inspire.

ITBusinessEdge.com

Even if ITBusinessEdge.com weren’t an Inside Tech partner, we’d still give them a shout-out. An all-encompassing site that happens to have some of the better tech blogs out there, ITBE is essential for those in the tech industry.

Has the Internet of Things gone too far?

The Internet of Things (IoT) – with its network of objects and computers that collect and distribute data on our lives – has all the promise of making those lives easier. But are we in danger of IoT overload?

We live in an interesting age where virtually everything we own can be connected to the Internet. Your phone, television, security system, and car are just the start. These devices may connect directly – through your home Wi-Fi router or via Internet-connected devices such as your smartphone or even your home thermostat. Continue reading

The 5 Most Popular Articles Among Recruiters This Month

1. How “Blind Recruitment” Works And Why You Should Consider It

Blind recruitment, the practice of removing personally identifiable information from the resumes of applicants including their name, gender, age, education, and even sometimes the number of years of experience, is gaining popularity.

Organizations including Deloitte, HSBC, the BBC, powerhouse law firm Clifford Chance, and cloud-storage firm Compose Inc have committed to the practice.

Blind recruitment is used to overcome unconscious bias and promote diversity in the workforce, and it has gained an increasing foothold in companies after a series of studies showed that people with ethnic names needed to send out 50% more resumes before they got a callback than job hunters with “white”-sounding names. Continue reading…

2. Is Agency recruitment going to be ‘uber-ised’? The answer here.

At least twice a month I am approached by an HR Tech startup with a ‘new’ idea to ‘disrupt’ the recruitment industry. Plenty of these guys (and occasionally, gals) are super-smart, and all are earnest, (sometimes fanatical), in their belief that they have found ‘the holy grail’.

In many cases, indeed I think most cases, it’s very early in the conversation that I am told, ‘we will be the Uber of recruitment’ or perhaps, ‘we plan to uber-ise the defunct agency recruitment model’. Continue reading…

3. Employee Retention and Hiring – “Love the One You’re With” first

These are some of the lyrics to the classic Crosby Stills and Nash tune “Love the One You’re With” – #earworm. I was listening to this sometime over the weekend and it got me thinking about recruiting, HR and one of the pressing concerns we all have in companies large and small around the world – retention. Continue reading…

4. Leaders who are great at hiring do these 3 things

If you’ve never made a hiring mistake then I’d guess you haven’t hired that many people. Despite all the research, experience and so-called tools, ineffective recruitment decisions remain one of the biggest drags on any organisations performance. Continue reading…

5. Should HR rehire ex-employees?

The beauty of boomerang employees (or rehiring former workers) is that they often have a shorter learning curve and require less training, according to Bill Driscoll, district president for the staffing firm Accountemps.

Driscoll added that if an employee resigned to complete further education or training, having them back will potentially bring new skills and ideas to the organisation. Continue reading…

Programming Languages – A Peek at the Future

Programming is changing briskly, and there is an explosion of new languages like Apple’s Swift, Facebook’s Hack scripting language and many more. Although there are zillion programming languages in the market, there is regular emergence of new languages every now and then, mainly from the corporate world. Some languages are meant to modernize classic languages, some are built for statistical analysis, whereas some are not even languages but are merely processors. There is no single language that fits all, however, computing is fast spreading to new platforms, challenging programmers to build bigger and more connected systems. It is like a quest for smarter and faster programming, with fewer bugs. There is a need for more structure and more abstraction, taking the automation to a new level and offering more leverage to the programmers.
15-Most-Popular-Programming-Languages-You-Must-Learn-in-2015

As a programming language, Java has a huge user base, and any new language will take years to achieve as much use as Java. Over the years, Java has grown much more than any other programming language since 2008, and this is mainly due to growing popularity of Android. JavaScript, Java, Ruby, PHP, Python, SQL, CSS, C++, C#, C and HTML are the top ten programming languages on GitHub today, which has a user base of 10 million. These languages have collectively laid the foundation of the technological world.
Programming-Languages-for-2016_graph

Although it is a tough task to predict the future, however, there are few languages that are lesser-known and could become big over the next few years. Some of the languages that are driving these technological revolution and are shaping the future of coding are:

1. R– Programming language R was designed by the scientists and statisticians, and comes with standard functions that are used in data analysis. It is well suited for data-driven science. R commander and R Studio are two main front ends that allow programmers to load their data and play around with it. Many developers use R inside an IDE as a scratchpad to work with their data. R has clever expressions for selecting and analysing subset of the data.

2. Swift– Swift was introduced by Apple when it became difficult for new programmers to code in Objective C. Swift hides creating header files and juggling pointers, works more like a modern language such as Java or Python, and is ideally suited to write for Mac or the iPhone. In addition to cleaning up of the syntax of Objective C, Swift also offers several new features which helps iPhone coders to spin out code quite quickly with cleaner syntax.

3. Java 8– Although Java has captured the world of computer languages, Java 8 is different. The new features offer functional techniques to unlock parallelism in the code. It helps write faster and cleaner code, with less bugs.

4. GoogleGo– Also known as goland, the language was created by three Google employees in 2009. It is open source, multiplatform and portable, fast and friendly, and has solid concurrency support. However, it is a fairly young language with young ecosystem without many libraries yet. Hence developers need to write libraries themselves. There are also not many learning resources for Go yet.

5. MongoDB– An open source document database written in C++ which works on the concept of collection and document. MySQL has been in extensive use since 1995, but MongoDB can meet the challenging demands of newer applications. It can handle more data types than relational database, and is a powerful aggregation framework for data analysis. This enables developers to build applications faster, manage these applications more efficiently at scale and handle diverse data types.

6. Rust– Developed by Mozilla, Rust was released in 2014 and focuses on parallelisation, performance and memory safety. As the language is built from scratch and incorporates several elements from modern programming language designs, it is free of a lot of baggage as compared to traditional languages.

7. Hack– Built by Facebook, Hack can build complex websites and software at a great speed while keeping the software code organized and relatively free of flaws. Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook using PHP, however as the user base grew to hundreds of millions of people, the limitation of the language became more and more apparent. It became difficult to manage all the code and keep it free of bugs. With the help of HHVM (Hip Hop Virtual machine) and Hack, the team has solved most of their problems as these languages together make it much easier to manage code and eliminate errors.

8. Julia– A high-level, high-performance dynamic language for technical computing that provides sophisticated compiler, numerical accuracy, distributed parallel execution and extensive mathematical function library. There is a large Julia developer community contributing several external packages through built-in package manager of Julia.

Despite their growth and potential, it is unlikely that these languages would overcome JavaScript, C# or the likes anytime soon. But in the long run, these languages could become stronger and assume much greater importance, and even replace the most popular languages today. Technology trends move fast, with constant evolvement of tools and means for building these technologies. Change to the cloud-based computing is driving the choice of the platform and programming language, revamping the old systems.

The Top 11 Information Security Conferences of 2016

In Part II of our 2015 Infosec Wishlist series, a number of security experts expressed their desire for the security community to renew its focus on collaboration, communication and unity in the New Year. To accomplish this goal, folks in information security will need to internalize this message and inject it into their dealings with one another. But how can we set this process in motion?

We feel that conferences are an excellent starting point. Indeed, these events are perfect for security personnel to share research, debate hot topics and learn from one another.

With this in mind, we have assembled a list of the top 11 conferences in the information security industry for 2016. We hope that everyone with the means and ability to attend these events will do so.
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