Articles about Automation

High Motion Software has announced the release of ImBatch 2.0, its comprehensive image batch processing tool.

As before, you can use the program to resize or rotate photos, tweak colors and contrast, apply effects, set tags and more. But now you’re also able to apply new "AutoEnhance" tasks, which do their best to automatically optimize your target images.

Continue reading →

Analysts and journalists periodically voice concerns over smart machines stealing middle-class jobs.  According to Kenneth Brant, research director at Gartner, "Most business and thought leaders underestimate the potential of smart machines to take over millions of middle-class jobs in the coming decades".

This is quite an assumption to make. Machines have been tools for efficiency for centuries now. They’re not as terrifying as some might think.  The results have actually been quite the contrary. Rather than leaving workers on the streets, using "smart machines" to automate repetitive, manual tasks has allowed people to progress to more skilled labor, work fewer hours, and experience greater job satisfaction overall. It makes employees more strategic and empowered.  And the story continues. Now, as computers grow ever faster and more powerful, we’re on the edge of another Industrial Revolution -- not on the factory floor -- but in the back office of business.

Continue reading →

Business automation specialist Automation Anywhere has launched a new application aimed at helping businesses identify tasks and prioritize them based on the crowd-sourced wisdom of their user community.

Called Cumulus (could this possibly be using the cloud?) the application is launching via the Yammer enterprise social network. It will be available as a featured application via Yammer's app directory. Using Cumulus, anyone in an organization will be able to suggest a task to be automated, vote on the tasks that seem most valuable, contribute suggestions to existing initiatives, and track any active automation projects.

Continue reading →

In 1986, when BusinessWeek introduced "Management’s Newest Star," inviting us to "Meet the Chief Information Officer," the idea of adding anyone else to the C-Suite was not only revolutionary, it was frightening. Business computing was still a burgeoning field. Typewriters and paper files were the status quo. A CIO wasn’t just a new officer: a CIO was a new way of doing things -- everything.

And yet, less than 30 years later, it feels as if the CIO role has always been there: making decisions on key hardware and software purchases, working with his business-side counterparts to determine how to align software and strategy, monitoring new trends and technologies to determine which are worth implementing and which should be ignored. It’s hard to imagine any mid- to large-sized businesses without a CIO on board.

Continue reading →

At the Android Keynote on the first day of Google I/O 2011, Google announced the next version of Android called Ice Cream Sandwich will unify tablets, phones, and Google TV devices under a single version of the operating system. Yet a new facet to Android was introduced today that may turn out to be the most left-field announcement of the conference: Android for embedded devices and home automation.

Android founder Andy Rubin summed up the operating system's progress in the following way at a press conference Tuesday morning: Android started with phones, then grew to tablets, and now it should grow to everything.

Continue reading →