Selling goods and services is hard. These days, all business owners have to put “salesperson” as an important part of their job description.

When you regard yourself as a salesperson, you are accepting a tough job. You are almost always in direct competition with other people who want your prospects as their clients.

We told you this day would come, and so it has. Remember all the warnings about how vulnerable the internet of objects was, because they lack even the most rudimentary of protections? Most people read those warnings and shrugged it off. Today, however, we’re waking up to a threat several times larger than Heartbleed.

Karsten Nohl, and Jakob Lell, a pair of techs working out of Secure Research Labs, seem to have discovered a weakness before the hackers have. The good news is that no hacker has launched this sort of attack yet. The bad news is that now that the weakness has been discovered, attack is inevitable.

The Internet Mavens in Silicon Valley have decided that the time of credit cards has come to an end. They seem less sure about what exactly will replace them. At the moment there are two companies both trying to change the landscape of digital payments, and interestingly, they’re not competitors in the least.

Media monitoring is one of the components of competition monitoring. The basic idea is that you select various monitoring targets, then do a periodic sweep through various media channels to see how many times whatever you’ve selected for is being mentioned.

Recently, Bluebox Security has discovered a serious security flaw in the Android OS that impacts all versions of the OS from 2.1 (Eclair) to 4.3 (Jellybean). In looking at the total number of devices running these OS versions, the impact potential runs into the millions.

Companies are relentlessly striving for new and better ways to gain insights into their customers. How customers and followers interact with images posted on social media is a fantastic way to help gauge brand awareness and associated gains made on that front.

A new and rather unusual video game has just been released for the PlayStation by Dutch design studio Digital Dreams. The basic idea is that video games are inherently data driven. Sure, that data is masked by fancy, often photo realistic graphics, but whatever the plot of the game, when you move your character from one point to another, when you shoot at an enemy on the screen, all of that is ultimately controlled by data.

When things are going well and the profits are pouring in, then perhaps a focus on cost savings doesn’t have to be at the top of your priority list. Most companies though, in these days of slim margins, need to pay attention to areas where savings can made.

IBM’s latest project is called SyNAPSE, and its purpose is to create a computer with a system architecture that closely resembles a human brain. This, it is believed will be the Next Big Thing in computing, allowing us to take processing to heights greater than anything we’ve been able to imagine to date.