Indeed -- the world’s largest job site -- has just launched a new research study that determines that almost half (49 percent) of young people in Britain are not taking the issue of job automation into account when choosing their career.

Furthermore, Indeed’s study reveals that 17 percent are not aware of the industry trend towards automation and the effect it will have on future employment both at the low and high end of the skills market.

Turning lights on and off remotely may seem lazy, and honestly it is, but it's also strangely satisfying. Not moving from the couch while things in your home are turned on and off is a priceless feeling and there is an increasing number of products on the market that aim to provide that satisfaction.

The problem is the lack of cohesion in the market, as different lines are proprietary, at least to a certain extent. That's slowly changing, but we'd like to see the process sped up a bit.

Home automation is a catch phrase these days, though some of it is not quite ready for prime time. But things are improving all the time with new products being released at a rapid rate. Logitech's Harmony brand of remote controls has been at the forefront of controlling these devices.

Now, after adding things like the Nest thermostat, the company is announcing compatability with even more devices. This time around it's adding ZigBee and Z-Wave.

The Internet of Things is everywhere these days, and has become almost unavoidable. Reaction can be a bit mixed, ranking from calling it SkyNet to embracing the technology. It doesn't always work as planned -- I'm reasonably certain that one of my colleagues here could turn off my lights (don't get any ideas guys).

Now MivaTek aims to fix those problems with new solutions for both home and business. Included are security cameras, water leak sensors and monitoring for disruptions to the alarm system. More importantly, it can keep track of health and send help if needed.

That's a broad topic for a headline, and one that could fill a book. It dates back much further than people think. Thanks to today's modern technology and graphics, we don't need to write that book. It's all laid out before us in a nice infographic that shows the highlights of what you need to know about how we arrived at things like Harmony, Nest, Philips Hue and more.

The concept of home automation has been around for a long time but the technology just wasn't there. Many science-fiction writers included it in stories, Ray Bradbury famously among them.

If you haven't used a Harmony remote then you're missing out. The device can control almost any object in your home theater. Lately it's been adding more home automation features as well, and the latest update enhances that aspect of the universal remote.

"We’re proud to celebrate the continued expansion of our smart home compatibilities with the integration of four great new partners into the Harmony ecosystem, and we hope you’re excited about the new possibilities coming your way. Now, homes with Harmony can control even more devices and create brand new Activities combining smart home devices in unique ways", Logitech announces.

More than 18 months since its last major release, Nitro has launched a major new version of its award-winning 'Acrobat alternative' tool for creating, editing and converting PDFs, Nitro Pro 10.0.

Version 10 introduces a new Batch Processing tool for repetitive tasks, plus adds drag-and-drop support for creating PDFs and copying pages between documents. It also adds PDF Portfolio creation, PDF/A conversion, and wider support for various cloud-based storage services.

Home automation and the "Internet of Things" are the next frontiers for the technology world. Now that Wi-Fi is ubiquitous, the landscape is set for smart homes more than ever before. What used to seem like science fiction has become a reality. You can now turn on lights with products like Belkin's WeMo switch or monitor your pets with a Dropcam Pro camera. Heck, with products like the Nest thermometer, your home can actually learn from your behaviors.

Today, Betabound by Centercode is offering BetaNews readers an exclusive opportunity to apply for a beta test of an exciting new smart home system. Will you be selected?

Home automation and the Internet of Things have become popular topics today. Users either love it or fear it, the latter thanks to very real security problems which have been discovered. Nest is no stranger to problems, thanks to its Protect issue from not long ago, but that hasn't stopped the company from moving forward, adding further integration.

The latest move is to partner with more home automation products in an effort to make everything play nicely together. The company, known for its smart thermostat, has joined forces with Whirlpool, Jawbone and LIFX under a program it calls "Works with Nest". It has also been working with home automation makers to get better integration.

Enterprise technology as we know it is changing. Several years ago, significant improvements in IT were viewed by the business as "nice to have" but not essential. Today many companies use their IT enterprise to deliver differentiated customer service, business intelligence (BI) and a more efficient supply chain. Still, some organizations lag behind. In fact, many businesses continue to rely on a loose federation of siloed applications and disconnected manual tasks to support their most critical operations.

Smart businesses recognize the short-sightedness of this outdated approach. These companies view IT infrastructure as a source of important competitive advantage core to business development. They use their enterprise to maintain -- and enhance -- their market position. Today IT success is business success. They are inevitably connected.

When writing about new programs we’ll normally start with a general outline of what they do, but FastKeys ($9.99) makes that unusually difficult. It’s a highly versatile Windows automation program with support for several time-saving technologies, but how these are used is very much up to you.

The program could be a simple Start Menu replacement, for instance; move your mouse to the top edge of the screen and a basic Start menu appears. This starts off with just a few links (Office, system applets, Documents folder, a few web shortcuts, shutdown options), but can easily be expanded to add more.

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.

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.

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.

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.