The mobile revolution continues: ZendCon has released a new development suite that enables PHP developers, hitherto excluded from the mobile apps party, to develop native apps in iOS and Andriod platforms.

Big Data on its own is as dumb as it sounds: the process of extracting stories, information and patterns is what adds value to this commercial raw material. And Hadoop is the technology that adds the smarts to that process. 

William Ernest Henley’s poem Invictus isn’t, as the recent Clint Eastwood movie of the same name portrayed it, a lyrical formula for achieving a moment of supreme glory but a poem about ceaseless struggle and relentless contest (in Henley’s case the struggle was against tuberculosis of the bone which awarded him a life of excruciating pain).

If it does have resonance today it’s with the contemporary job market, particularly the IT sector with its celebration of constant disruption and its demand for the techie’s continual re-invention. The end of social and job guarantees really does mean that the individual is master of his fate.

In the summer of 1916 the residents of the placid Sussex coast could hear the distant thump of the great guns from the western front firing across the breadth of Flanders.

It’s a similar situation in the European mCommerce market right now with a relatively calm industry ticking over to the very faint but still audible crump of the big guns in the same market in the US