Month: November 2016

ESA/Foster + Partners

The director general of the European Space Agency, a German civil engineer named Johann-Dietrich Woerner, has for more than a year engaged in a charm offensive to unite the primary spacefaring nations. The goal? Creating a “village” on the Moon. Woerner has pressed his case for the Moon even as his agency’s closest ally, NASA and President Obama, have pushed for a human “Journey to Mars.”

But time, and the inescapable challenge of sending humans to Mars, may be on Woerner’s side. President Obama, who famously dismissed the the Moon by saying “we’ve been there before,” leaves office in January. His choice for NASA administrator, Charles Bolden, will likely follow him out the door. And when a new president faces the question of a destination for NASA’s human spaceflight program, he or she may well favor Woerner’s vision.

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The one certainty in business software and services is that there will always be more acronyms. At the moment, though, there's more to the sector than just another jargon explosion: we're moving towards a new way of looking at IT, one that applies best-practice business processes to any company—however small it may be, and however fast it may grow.

This sounds good, but wading through websites full of perky lists of generic benefits can leave many IT managers still wondering exactly what they’re being sold.

For this feature we spoke to a bunch of major vendors—SAP, Sage, Microsoft, and IBM—about the new breed of business services they offer. We'll look at benefits of buying IT as a service, what working in the cloud really means, and how to move towards fully integrated business management, now more commonly known as enterprise resource planning, or ERP. We will mostly focus on SMEs (small and medium sized enterprises or businesses), but much of what’s discussed here is also easily applicable to larger organisations that haven’t yet moved to modern business software.

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The next addition to Huawei's Mate family is here: the Chinese company announced the Mate 9 smartphone today. Huawei's message with this handset is lifetime efficiency. The company updated the 9's internals and made improvements to its Emotion UI that should, hopefully, make the handset smarter and more resilient as it ages. No doubt Huawei is hoping to build upon the over 100 million smartphones it sold by the beginning of October this year with the new Mate 9. We know the Mate 9 will come to the US as well as other countries that Huawei typically serves, although we don't know exactly when yet.

The Mate 9 doesn't look unique from the outside, but there are small differences that set it apart from the Mate 8 and some of Huawei's other handsets. Its all-metal unibody is a design we're used to seeing in flagship smartphones, and its 5.9-inch FHD display is bold, bright, and sharp. The slim sides of the handset only have the power button and volume rocker. On the lower edge is a USB Type-C port for charging, and on the top edge is a headphone jack.

The back of the handset is slightly curved, which makes it more comfortable to hold than geometric smartphones. The Mate 9 may appear to be just another rectangle, but it doesn't look or feel as blocky as devices like Huawei's P9 or Honor 8. The fingerprint sensor and the Leica-developed camera are on the top half of the back of the handset. This is the second-generation of Huawei's camera collaboration with Leica, which features a combo of 12MP RGB and 20MP monochrome sensors, while the front-facing camera is an 8MP shooter.