Spreading Life with Drones

While not as good as sowing seeds for trees the old fashion way, a former NASA engineer wants to increase the planet's forest canopy by deploying seedlings via drone. Using off-the-shelf technology, he suggests drones that first fly above an area and report on its potential for restoration. IF appropriate, the quadracopters would take up a position 10-15 feet above the ground and deploy pods containing seeds that are pre-germinated and covered in a nutritious hydrogel.

BioCarbon Engineering would plant germinated seeds using precision agriculture techniques. Their scalable, automated technology significantly reduces the manpower requirements -- thus, costs. Finally, mapping from the company's unmanned aerial vehicles will provide invaluable intelligence on planting patterns, landscape design and other factors.

Read more here....

Good News, Everybody! (well, bean-counters) SAAS is Deductible!

The Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) released an accounting standards update, which covers the fees paid for cloud computing. This is part of FASB's simplification initiative aimed at eliminating unnecessary complexity in accounting standards. In the first update, “Accounting Standards Update No. 2015-05—Intangibles—Goodwill and Other—Internal-Use Software (Subtopic 350-40): Customer’s Accounting for Fees Paid in a Cloud Computing Arrangement,” FASB noted that existing GAAP does not include explicit guidance about a customer’s accounting for fees paid in a cloud computing arrangement. These can include software as a service, platform as a service, infrastructure as a service, and other similar hosting arrangements. FASB said it heard from stakeholders that the absence of explicit guidance resulted in some diversity in practice, along with unnecessary costs and complexity, in evaluating the accounting for those fees.

The guidance already exists in the FASB Accounting Standards Codification, but it's included in a subtopic applied by cloud service providers to determine whether an arrangement includes the sale or license of software. The amendments in the latest update provide guidance to customers about whether a cloud computing arrangement includes a software license.

If a cloud computing arrangement includes a software license, then FASB said the customer should account for the software license element of the arrangement consistent with the acquisition of other software licenses. If a cloud computing arrangement does not include a software license, the customer should account for the arrangement as a service contract. The guidance will not change generally accepted accounting practices GAAP for a customer’s accounting for service contracts.

Read more at... Accounting Today!

Ask Your Developer: Is this a Web or Cloud App?

When a customer asks, should we go Cloud vs Web, my response is frequently, what's the difference? Then, I try to illuminate with the following. These days cloud applications are all the rage… but what’s the difference between a cloud app and a web app, if they both run in your browser? And are mobile apps cloud-only? Confused? Don’t be. Here’s a quick primer on the differences (and similarities).

Let’s start with web applications — software accessed over a network such as the internet or an intranet via a web browser such as Safari or Chrome. Such tools are built with= a browser-based language (e.g. JavaScript), displayed with HTML and accessed with a common web browser. In web apps, the software as well as the database resides on a central server. This saves software developers from building and maintaining multiple client versions for a specific operating systems.

Cloud apps are hosted by cloud providers (Amazon, Google, others) and are accessed over the Internet. The software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider owns the software while the customers “rent the app” in a pay per use model. As web apps, they are used through a web browser so nothing needs to be installed locally. Cloud apps are generally architected to support multi-tenancy — enabling multiple customers (tenants) to be aggregated into the same application). Pricing is based on actual usage or per-user.

They seem similar, don’t they? Both types of apps are stored on a server and delivered through a browser interface over the internet. Cloud apps should have high availability (through mirrored installations in multiple locations) as a feature, while many web apps are limited in ability to support a fixed number of users. Cloud apps may offer extra security and integration with other systems via web services. Administrators of cloud apps can easily configure workload and traffic patterns in order to utilize the exact amount of infrastructure offered. Web applications are usually developed for a given platform, limiting scalability.

Mobile apps that access the same back-end over the internet would be considered cloud apps if the architecture and supporting infrastructure are cloud-based.

Driving Change, Faster than an Über Car

It is possible we will enjoy the benefits of auto-piloted transport very soon. In as many as 30 locations by 2016? That might be optimistic, but here's a round-up of autonomous vehicle reports, lately.

Mercedes is on the forefront, including trying out a cool concept in San Francisco. More important than passenger traffic, what if package delivery were to be automated, not just by drones?

Of course, with Google in the mix, one naturally assumes the biggest company in the world would have a toe in the water, and it seems Apple is up to something.

Would autonomous driving lower insurance rates? Very possible -- as well as save lives, of course.

And the new industry will either ruin people's lives, or make us all rich.

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UPDATE 3 March 2015
In Wired... we will want fewer cars...

Use Kanban for Visual Project Management

With kanban boards, there is a visual approach available to manage tasks. With a simple post-it note system, you can see work in progress and understand complex processes, activity relationships, and you/your team’s impediments to completing work on schedule.

We humans are visually oriented — it is easier to process information with a visual aid. A kanban board helps teams to understand all aspects of a project. A visual management tool means your team doesn’t need to sift through email threads to find the piece of information regarding a specific task. You won’t have to decipher a massive spreadsheet to determine whether a task or project has been started or completed.

Of course, the beauty of kanban is simplicity. Get started with a kanban board by writing a sticky note and pasting it to a whiteboard — anyone can use them for just about any purpose. Even just leveraging the visual nature of kanban boards will help you keep track of your daily goals.

Every project manager can appreciate the effectiveness of the kanban board as a collaboration tool. You spend less time communicating status updates because the boards create transparency — it is literally on the wall! Team members working either on-site or remotely can see the status or a project in real time if you go the electronic route. Either way, kanban improves overall team efficiency, and can even be used by individuals to manage their own workload.