vendredi 28 février 2014

Apple améliore ses outils de déploiement des appareils iOS

Depuis iGen. Apple semble désormais s'attaquer à la problématique MDM et MAM, qui représente une problématique non négligeable en entreprise. Il faudra être crédible sur le point de la sécurité, ce que sont des acteurs tels qu'AirWatch.

mercredi 26 février 2014

Why and how did I migrate on Blogger?

I just migrated Synapteek from Wordpress to Blogger. The rationale of it is quite simple. Willing to make my blog more appealing, attract more readers and, why not, monetize it, I decided to give it a brand new name (Synapteek).

First thing first, I needed a domain name that I purchased at 1and1 (synaptic.fr), but unfortunately, Wordpress does not allow .fr domains to be mapped to its hosted blogs (WTF !). Anyway, I then purchased a .net one (synapteek.net). But then, Wordpress asked me fees to map it to my blog (WTF bis !).

I then decided to open a blogger account, export my Wordpress blog entirely (theme excepted) and import it into Blogger in a blink.

I then had to map my synapteek.fr domain name to my Blogger blog following carefully instructions provided for 1and1 registered domain. This implied the creation of a www.synapteek.fr sub-domain with specific DNS configuration as well as another one for security reason.
I then configured synapteek.net to redirect synapteek.fr and I get a blog mapped on my own domain name. Yes !

A last think nevertheless, I need also to have an auto post feature from my new blog on Blogger to my LinkedIn account. I tried Hootsuite to do so, but didn't find a way to configure it properly (I am even not sure it is possible, maybe Hootsuite is just not designed for this purpose). I then found IFTTT services and loved it. Simple, straightforward and powerful. Exactly the kind of service I was searching for, with an additional feature. I added also an auto post from my Blogger blog to my Wordpress one, which allow me to keep it for a while.

So I now have a Blogger blog as a master with automatic posting on LinkedIn and Wordpress as slaves.

Next step is to refresh my Blogger theme to get something more appealing, but the inastructure is there. 

Synapteek moved from Wordpress to Blogger

Tech´revolution is dead, long life to synapteek...

I opened this blog some months ago to share my thoughts about new technologies, innovation and IT topics. At this time, the idea being to issue some posts with no idea of its future, no effort was put to baptize it.

But time is going by and It is now time to give it a true name. Tech'revolution then becomes Synapteek.

It will still be available through the current URL (http://echampommier.wordpress.com) for some time but through http://synapteek.fr or http://synapteek.net as well.

See you then on Synapteek and long life to it.

E. Champommier

dimanche 23 février 2014

10 leçons qu'il faut retenir du rachat de WhatsApp par Facebook - Challenges

Il y a trois ans, indique The Verge, ce fonds de capital-risque américain, l'un des plus gros de la Silicon Valley, avait investi 8 millions de dollars dans WhatsApp pour une part de capital comprise entre 10 et 20% (l'information n'est pas publique). Ce qui veut dire qu'il va récupérer entre 1,6 et 3,2 milliards de dollars dans l'opération. Au mieux, le retour sur investissement sera donc de 40.000%. Et peut-être davantage encore, puisque, selon Fortune, Sequoia aurait investi 60 millions de dollars dans la start-up.

via 10 leçons qu'il faut retenir du rachat de WhatsApp par Facebook - Challenges.

J'aime la phrase finale
En tout cas, il a du panache, que l'on assimilera, au choix, à de l'audace, de la folie ou de l'inconscience.

 

Tesla’s most disruptive product may not be its cars – Quartz

Tesla’s most disruptive product may not be its cars – Quartz.

To be continued...

samedi 22 février 2014

WhatsApp victime de son dysfonctionnement mensuel

Difficile lendemain de cuite pour WhatsApp ? Le service de messagerie instantanée est en panne depuis le début de la soirée. Lorsqu'on lance l'application, celle-ci ne parvient pas à se connecter.

via WhatsApp victime de son dysfonctionnement mensuel.

Voilà de quoi énerver quelque peu Mark Zuckerberg...

Microsoft reportedly dropping licensing fees for Windows 8.1 amid competition from Apple and Google

Google and Apple definitely shaked the PC market.

mercredi 19 février 2014

Data quality @home

I recently began to go through my own photo library. To give you some ideas, it contains 16,500 photos from year 2000 to today. I had several ways to sort it, but one that made sense to me was to:

  1. Ensure proper dating of photos

  2. Associate keywords to them

  3. Localize (or “geo-tag”) them

  4. Identify people represented in it

In other words, for each photo being considered as a "data", I defined several properties (or "meta-data") to index and retrieve it afterward. And then arise some echoes with my current work around data quality.

I propose to have a look on each of these properties through a data quality categorization.

Completeness

I will consider a picture as totally indexed if:

  • It has a proper dating (so potentially redressed if needed)

  • It has at least one keyword associated

  • It is geo-tagged

  • All the people represented in it and belonging to my first family and friend circle are identified

A first level of completion is obtained with the three first assertions. Let’s call it C1. If I add the fourth assertion, I obtain a full completion that I call C2.

Accuracy

Dating is provided as an automatic feature when you shoot with a digital camera. Unfortunately, it appears that sometimes camera settings are not properly set (in particular when you change batteries or considering jet lag). You may then enter into a real nightmare... Believe me. So the typical question is: what makes sense to me in matter of dating accuracy? In order to retrieve photos back, I would say that an accuracy of days or so should be sufficient. Hours may have a sense also, but more to have a sorted display of photos on a given day.

Keywords have to be accurate enough to help me to differentiate photos. If I put something like "family", the risk is to have too many photos responding to this criterion and not being able to find a specific one. At the other extremity of the spectrum, providing too precise criteria would be useless, as I would not think about it when searching for particular photos. Providing that, I opt for a finite set of keywords on which I provide my own semantic. As an example: "vacations" will be used for any holiday's period of more than 2-3 days or so. "Travel" will be added when I consider a travel abroad from France. This is clearly my own semantic and provides only sense to myself.

Geo-tagging on its side is a huge matter. I recently had a trip to Japan. I may geo-tag all my photos to Japan, but would it be sufficient? In particular, it won't help me to retrieve pictures from (and only from) Tokyo. So I would choose an accuracy of city. The only problem with this choice is that in the particular case of Paris, city where I live, it would clearly be not enough as I have so many pictures from Paris. I did not find the perfect level of accuracy for geo-tagging so far, or more exactly, I do not know how to rationalize it. Considering that I use geo-tagging to retrieve pictures afterwards, I just use my own memory to "geo-tag" it and it should be enough. The only limit on that point is that my wife as a pretty better memory than I have, and by this way is far more accurate in its pictures searches than I am... The good point for the future is that more and more camera provides now an automatic geo-tagging feature. This is already the case for most of smartphones and they are becoming a common source of pictures. So the technology will certainly help in the future my poor human memory.

People represented on photo also needs some decisions regarding accuracy criteria. Do I want to search any people I encountered once or twice that appear in only a couple of pictures (yeah... I am sure you have such a case, just have a look on the pictures of the last weeding you attend)? I certainly wouldn’t. So I decided to restrain my tags to people of my first circle of family and friends. And it represents already a big piece of work.

Uniqueness

It could seem a bit weird to address such a topic in this context, but if you consider all the operations (copy-paste, editions and so on…) that you may do on a daily basis on your pictures, you inevitably will encounter such issues. Having used an automatic tool to detect these multiples, I had found about 150 of them and even after removing it; I still found some rare evidence of pictures being present several times (not considering pictures being present in colours as well as B&W or with and without frames around it).

Rating

After a first manual data cleansing operation I obtain estimations of the data quality rate of my photo library.

Considering completeness, I have so far a rating of 85% of pictures considered as C1-complete. Adding the fourth one would of course drastically decrease this rate, considering that 11,300 people are detected in my pictures library without having been properly identified (9,500 for the C2-completed pictures).

For accuracy, I am still searching for a proper way to measure it, either on keywords or geo-tag. Next step will be to execute some data profiling to help defining some rules to measure.

Last, but not least, regarding uniqueness I now consider that the cleansing has been done, reaching a rate of 99,99% or so.

Considering the whole picture the Pareto's law, it seems that a long way is still in front of me. But this is quite typical for a data quality topic, isn’t?