Friday, first day of spring, 7:30 PM. 150 people in a wedding venue. The atmosphere was pretty dull. After walking in, I knew I wasn’t going to pitch. Not only that, but I was asking myself what I was doing there in the first place. I had an idea, and I made a short presentation in my head in the previous days, which I polished it until it got to one minute. At first I didn’t know whether I wanted to present my idea or not, but I came to terms with myself that I will make a final decision when I’ll arrive at the event, depending on the atmosphere.

Tim Huckaby is focused on the Natural User Interface (NUI)- Touch, Gesture, and Neural in Rich Client Technologies like HTML5, Silverlight, WPF, & IOS on a broad spectrum of devices that include computers, tablets, the Surface, the Kinect, and mobile devices. Tim has been called a “Pioneer of the Smart Client Revolution” by the press. Tim has been awarded many times for the highest rated technical presentations and keynotes for Microsoft and many other technology conferences around the world. Tim is consistently rated in the top 10% of all speakers at these events.

Liberty Technology Park Cluj is the first technological park in Romania, a park for creative ideas built in a revolutionary place, designed to offer exceptional growth and quality environment for companies in the IT&C and R&D domains, all in one unique area both conceptually and architecturally.

The topic of this issue is straightforward. We want to build a common timeline for as many IT companies as possible in Cluj. We started with the idea of creating a list to populate the IT map (from the previous issue), using varied and unstructured sources, without attempting to comprehensively explore the business environment. For example, the IT Cluster members’ list, ARIES, the companies present at JobShop, the BestJobs ads, the LinkedIn contacts, the business cards stacked on the desk, etc.

These recent years have shown us that online applications push forward and forward the web limits. We might have all been edgy about web applications at some point. We hoped that at some point the world will calm down and see that the web cannot sustain complex applications and the whole Universe would return to normal. Big applications are for the desktop and web applications are just dreams of some Google enthusiasts. But then almost out of nowhere HTML5 arose. And HTML5 revolutionized not just the web of the big business applications, but also it opened wide the gates of multimedia applications on the web – especially games.

Back towards the end of the nineties, most of the CDs that accompanied books were labeled as “multimedia” CDs: 3 images and an audio file were enough to promote that CD stuffed with 600 pages of text to a “multimedia” CD. Similarly, software companies that used to produce “applications” started to brand themselves as producing “enterprise applications”.

While paradigms such as MDD (Model Driven Development) or TDD (test driven development) play an important role in today’s software development, a new paradigm, called AOP (Aspect Oriented Programming) has become increasingly popular lately. The role of AOP is to modularize some central aspects of an application, also known as called cross cutting concerns.

The Business Analyst’s main responsibilities are: understanding the business need, analyzing and modeling the business processes associated with the software projects development. Usually, these projects are complex and therefore the Business Analyst must obtain information from all the available sources, from all the key stakeholders. And it is not an easy job to do.

Even if many aspects of human evolution are controversial, one thing is unanimously accepted by anthropologists: We moved! (Brain Rules, John Medina; 2008). Over several hundred thousand years, from Homo Habilis to Homo Erectus and later Homo Sapiens, our brain developed by moving on distances of “about 10 to 20 km a day for men and about half that distance for women”, says the anthropologist Richard Wrangham.

NoSQL – one of 2013’s trends. If three or four years ago we rarely heard about a project to use NoSQL, nowadays the number of projects using non-relational databases is extremely high. In this article we will see the advantages and challenges we could have when we use NoSQL. In the second part of the article we will analyze and emphasize several non-relational solutions and their benefits.

BigData - a fashionable topic that’s confirmed in this current issue where we write about it. BigData concepts and introduction were made in the previous numbers 2, 3 and 4 of the magazine. To summarize, BigData means storing and analyzing large data volumes, of Terra Bytes magnitude. Handling such data amounts raises problems in terms of volume, speed and variety.

Issue #3 of the magazine the article on Big Data makes a reference to a distinct NoSQL system: column oriented database. A concept at least curious that deserves attention. The mission of this article is to take an x-ray of one of the systems that implements this concept.

Recently we had to take a decision – our hosting solution was becoming inadequate for the performance needs of our system & our clients. He decision to take was choosing between a better dedicated server (actually a pair of servers + a load balancer) or migrating to a cloud based hosting solution. I believe other businesses are also confronted with this choice (the number of comments on this article will indicate whether I’m writing or not) so I will present:

This is the final article in the series on the challenge of leadership by Martin Mackay, recently appointed CEO of Neverfail. In the first article Mackay laid out the strategic framework he is employing at Neverfail to drive change. In the second he discussed in more detail the five key responsibilities a leader has to recognise. Here he addressed the 7 key behaviors a leader has to demonstrate to be effective.

Over the summer of 2012, I decided to go for the Project Management Institute (PMI) launched an agile project management certification, the PMI-Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP®). PMI recommended some 10 books to read in preparation for the certification. I found the books very helpful and informative. I learned some new terms and new methods of working. Even though I have several years of experience with different agile methods, it was difficult to align those new ideas with the project management practices I was already using.

Having success – easy and fast - further away of being a goal which could belong to a community - it is, still, one of the most discussed editorial subjects in business publications and many more. Of course, the innate ambitions of human beings nourish this subject, but - in the meantime – there is also being nourished an illusion: that success it is a purpose in itself, or, simply put, a superior limit we must achieve at any stake. Success it is a destination, an absolute achievement.