Somewhat lost in our collective excitement about the end of the year 2020 – and many hoped, an end to all the unpleasantness associated with that year – was the fact that 31 December 2020 also marked the end of an important period in internet history: the Adobe Flash era.
No matter what your opinion might be of the pandemic or our collective response to it, one thing is clear: 2020 showed the business world how important it is to have a robust, agile digital transformation strategy. Companies with the flexibility to pivot – sometimes multiple times – with employees, customers, and production did better in 2020 than those with rigid systems and infrastructure.
In the classic Road Runner cartoons, you often see this when the Road Runner starts to run: His feet start moving, but the bird himself stays in place.
The global response to the COVID-19 pandemic is unprecedented.
As if being ostracized by big-tech hosting and supporting services was not enough of a controversy for a large and rapidly growing social networking provider, allegations recently surfaced that the provider’s user data was leaked. Reports indicate that before Amazon removed the provider from its hosting service, an Austrian hacker claimed to have accessed users’ image and video files that were uploaded to the website, along with the associated metadata. Regardless of whether this information was obtained from publicly posted materials or from a hack, the issue reinforces the need to regard data security as a top application priority.
For most modern software applications, the developer doesn’t have to think much about hardware integration. Many hardware components the software comes in contact with—displays, pointing devices, keyboards, cameras, mobile device GPS receivers, etc.—have application programming interfaces (APIs) or are represented by standard interfaces built into the operating system.
