You may use the camera application on a regular basis. Taking photos of family gatherings, of the scenery around you, or just a self-photo with you and your friends. But, as you may find out, pressing that picture button on the screen is not the easiest thing to do. You may not hit it when you attempt to press it, or you aren’t sure if you pressed it at all.

In a recent update by Apple, the iPhone can now take photos without the use of that button. Although you may continue to use it, an easier method to take photos would definitely be pressing your volume buttons. When you have everyone situated, and ready to take a picture, you don’t have to move your finger over to the camera button. Just put your finger on one of the volume keys on the left hand side of your phone, and press it, and your iPhone should take the picture! It’s just that easy.

Information Technology (IT) tools are here to support your business in the global market. Effective communication is key for IT and business experts to collaborate effectively in search of solutions. Consulting, reaching out for help to a third-party, can bridge the gap between your business marketing experts and IT operations experts, especially with the emergence of big data analytics and its implication on the global market. Having the right consultants equipped with business knowledge and data technology expertise can make a difference.

Your marketing organization is probably familiar with digital tools and conducting global research. Its results can uncover the journey customers take to purchase your products or use your services. It can highlight the pain points and frictions that prevent their experiences with you to be delightful and amazing. Armed with this knowledge and beautiful compelling presentations, marketing executives expect that IT operations leaders will translate these insights into actions.

But people in IT operations are too involved in meeting key performance indicators that have nothing to do with the end customers. Meeting requirements of faster and cheaper don't translate very well into customer satisfaction. A classic breakdown in communication is described in a Harvard Business Review article, “A Technique to Bridge the Gap Between Marketing and IT.” The author goes on to describe how a new CIO at a bank found IT to be focused on the internal organization as their customers, rather than the real end customer. Moreover, no one was looking at the incident reports which clearly showed that incidents were increasing. And nobody looked at what these incidents were doing to the bank’s customers. The startling and scary numbers of incidents were caught and addressed and brought down from 1,000 to 600 or (40%) and later to 450 per week.

Surprisingly, these type of seemingly isolated scenarios are still being discovered within organizations presently, sometimes internally, and through third party insights such as consultants.  By engaging consultants to provide a perspective based on what they’ve experienced before, they can often bring new and innovative ideas or possible challenges to the table that an internal processes probably wouldn’t have been able to see on their own.  Often, third party input can help to provide the translation needed to go from marketing research results into actions that IT operations can understand and make sense in their high-performance culture. When companies understand and use this knowledge to reassess how to improve their customer experiences, they work backward from what customers want to achieve significantly higher improvements. 

IT and business management are more and more being asked to move away from their traditional roles, such as IT being the "technology infrastructure gatekeeper", and instead become enablers across the enterprise of effective collaboration, big data consumers, and key players in driving desired business outcomes. Marketing leaders look to technology as a way to facilitate the customer's journey and his positive experience of it, bring more clients, and meet increasingly higher loyalty goals. They rely on IT projects to enable big data-based behavioral targeting anywhere in the global market. This means projects to analyze search engine results, improve website personalization and optimization, and building of mobile applications for a more personal experience. All these are projects that consultants with their communication, consulting and technical expertise are well prepared to help in order to bridge the expectation gap between IT and other business organizations.

In order to meet these 21st-century business challenges, Information Technology organizations have been transitioning from waterfall stage-gate project management approaches to agile development. The stage-gate method applies a step-by-step approach where waiting, reviewing and approving are required before moving to the next step in the project. Agile management emphasizes collaboration, no decision hierarchies, and few people roles for making quick, customer-focused small changes over time to deliver solutions that delight and amaze customers. Agile development has allowed many businesses to respond quickly to changing customer desires and expectations. But moving to continuous delivery is a struggle requiring focused, dedicated teams that are not well suited to the traditional matrix organization where people are resources whose time must be "chopped" into many pieces and shared among many projects. Agile teams meet frequently as often as daily but never waiting more than a week to do so.

Marketing people are externally focused. IT people are internally focused. The first works with customer emotions. The second works to increase efficiency. Big data analytic tools are used by the first and supported by the second. Consultants can be the glue that helps both come together in effective collaborations that deliver positive business outcomes in both global and local markets.

Javascript has a lot of features which are often overlooked by web developers, and one such feature is the ability to have timed events. If you do not understand what that means do not worry because all will be explained in this tutorial.

Timing events allow you to write code which will execute within a set amount of time. As an example, say you wanted to display a clock on your web page. You could use javascripts' built in timing functions to make the time change every second or every minute.

Of course there are other uses for such functions, but we will stick with a simple timer which creates a dialog box with the words Hi There on it every 3 seconds, that way you can get a feel for how to work with timing.

To get started we are going to need a basic web page. Just create a blank page and add the following code in the script tags:

The earning potential of a software developer largely depends on their knowledge, their chosen area of expertise, experience and flexibility to relocate if necessary.  In the ever changing landscape of Information Technology, many argue that the way to make more money is to specialize in a technology that fewer people are using.  As an example, there are tons of Java programmers out there, but nowhere near enough in lesser known languages such as Perl or Python.  However, there are plenty of opportunities for folks who are willing to burn the midnight oil to gain skills in these niche disciplines.

Because the Information Technology Industry is a rapidly evolving entity, gunning for the "Next Big Thing" is constantly an arm’s length away.  For this reason, developers looking to get requisite knowledge to successfully compete can, for the most part, expect to resign their weekends for the LOVE of code and studying.   And, it’s fair to say that a stick-to-itiveness to teach yourself how to code can be more important than any degree when job prospecting.  Sam Nichols, a mobile developer at SmugMug, puts it this way: “Build a table, build a computer, build a water gun, build a beer bong, build things that will take a week and build things that need to be done in 40 minutes before the party. Making stuff is what this field is all about and getting experience building things, especially with others, especially when it breaks and fails along the way can help with perspective and resiliency.”

Software developers already skilled at writing code are readily able to translate that knowledge to web development. The fact that the information technology sector has shifted largely to web-based infrastructure and software application as system (SaaS) database and operating system capabilities, means that software developers have a wide variety of opportunity in the web development segment of the consulting and job market.

If you are a software developer seeking to increase your earning potential, gaining expertise in  Web development  enhances your ability to attract new opportunities. The more creative a software developer, the far better chance they will have at benefitting from current market demand for new technologies and software innovation. Customization is hot right now, and software developers involved in the creation of updates and unique features to SaaS can add extra value to their portfolio with very little time and effort involved.

 In order for software developers to stay abreast of their field, continuing education and is required to ensure that technical skills are up-to-date. Gaining knowledge in design of computer applications is one of the main objectives in the development and planning of software products.
Once adequate knowledge has been acquired, many software developers can use those insights to develop custom software for a client as a consultant.