Fire-Wired Blog

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com Some things in life are painfully inescapable. If you’re a parent at some point you inevitably be your child’s nemesis. No matter how friendly you are with your boss, on occasion you will see them as a brainless stooge. Finally, if you are a cable subscriber, without fail you will come to hate your provider with the fire of 1,000 suns. The list of awful is seemingly endless, but thankfully as society, time, and technology progress many of these problems get erased. The most recent to start disappearing before our eyes is none other than customer-combatant cable providers. Subscription cable is almost what economists deem an “inelastic good,” which means no matter the flux in supply or cost of a product, consumer demand will remain nearly the same. The reason cable is not a textbook inelastic good is because there are multiple alternatives supplying the exact same product; specifically satellite service, online streaming, and a...

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com Going out of business sales are a bargain shoppers dream. If you’ve done your homework and strike at just the right time, a penny-pincher can walk away with a deal that will an absolute steal. While cheapskates and moneygrubbers live for these big scores, so do businesses. Whether we’re talking mega-banks swooping in during the financial crisis to strip clean the carcasses of their collapsing peers or Google milking Motorola for all its valuable patents before tossing it to the curb, bargains are loved no matter the industry. Now it seems the organization ready to be torn apart any minute is Yahoo. Given its 10-year slide into tech industry joke, Yahoo has a surprising amount of valuable assets. Besides holding a large stake in the Chinese e-commerce site Alibaba, Yahoo owns Flickr (one of the largest, longest running photo hosting sites on the web), Rivals (a major online sports journalism and entertainment magazine), and Fin...

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com Everyone has to watch their expenses. Whether you’re a family, a startup, or a Fortune 500 company, every dollar truly counts. Frugality can be even more important when considering technology expenses as a poor purchase can hangover a corporation for five years or more. So security, dependability, integration, access, and ease of use push and pull against each other for every IT dollar. As if that wasn’t hard enough, consumer offerings are starting to become a viable alternative to longstanding enterprise level technology. One business making a strong marketing push for it's new enterprise option is Dropbox. Almost since its debut in 2007, Dropbox has been a hit with consumers. The ability to share files on multiple computers without any advanced computer knowledge is without question a godsend. While not the only company to offer this service, Dropbox has become synonymous with easy file-sharing among casual computer users. N...

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com Failure is a part of life. At some point we all have to deal with it and depending on when you encounter it for the first time, losing can either be devastating or formative. The most recent example comes from this month’s Superbowl. Heading into the game the Carolina Panthers offense looked unstoppable, cut to the end of the game after being demoralized by the Denver Broncos and the Panthers’ star quarterback put on the worst performance of poor loser, sportsmanship in recent memory. Losing sucks. However turning the world on its head, the tech industry wears defeat as a badge of honor. If you plan to wade into the waters of technology you will fail. There is no way around it. Setting aside the fact Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, and every other international tech conglomerate has failed at one point or another, failure is woven into the very fabric of technology development process. During what’s known as the pr...

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com It may seem counterintuitive but sometimes the best way to improve your product is to let others tinker with it. “Two heads are better than one” and “set it free if it comes back it's meant to be” may be annoying idioms but there is actually some very sound logic in them, especially when it comes to collaboration and product development. Nearly every commodity, good, and service you encounter is the outcome of a collusion of ideas. Whether writing a song or designing an automobile anywhere from a handful to thousands of collaborators worked as a team to create something new. Currently, the undisputed champion of collaboration is the technology sector. As of December 2015, more than 12,000 people are working for Facebook. That means if Facebook were a unit in the army it would equal 12 battalions. Of course 12,000 servicemen rarely are working on the same project, whereas the overwhelming majority of Facebook employees are focu...