As the pandemic shutdowns struck in March 2020, many businesses found themselves flat-footed with nothing to do but shut their doors. Businesses that had already embraced selling to customers — both in-store and online — could still count on revenue from their online stores. But most models called for revenue to flow through their doors as well as their portals.
Chaos looms in the online advertising industry. Chrome, the web’s biggest browser with a 65% market share, plans to eliminate support for third-party cookies by the end of 2024. Other browsers, notably Firefox, Safari and DuckDuckGo, already block third-party cookies by default. But Chrome’s massive market share is making the earth move under advertising’s feet.
Third-party cookies are...
The first thing to know about Pivot Tables is that there is nothing a Pivot Table does that an advanced user can’t also do through writing formulas. The value of the Pivot Table is that the data can be sliced and diced quickly and the drag-and-drop interface means that there is no need to wrestling with sometimes-unwieldy formulas. Instead, Pivot Tables help you explore the data and visualize the...
Days Payable Outstanding or DPO is the average number of days between the time the company receives an invoice and when the invoice is paid. DPO is typically calculated on a quarterly or annual basis. If a company has a DPO of 23 for its most recent quarter, that means it took 23 days on average to pay its suppliers during that time. DPO is a key cash-flow metric that indicates how well a compa...
A key step on a product’s long march from inventor’s brainchild to customer’s favorite gadget is manufacturing. Technically, manufacturing is the process of assembling raw materials into products on a large scale using machinery. But manufacturing is no brief stop on the journey and it must be planned for and nurtured just like any other phase in a product’s birth. An optimized manufacturing pr...
Take, for instance, the complex but necessary issues of globalization. Growing companies that have international markets in their sights will need their accounting software to seamlessly integrate multiple currencies, multiple tax jurisdictions, and multiple languages. But the key to the difference between ERP and simple accounting software goes well beyond features which can come and go. The...
...structured data can be defined as a controlled and hierarchically organized vocabulary used to describe and classify entities, be they news articles or a business’s products and services. In organizations, structured data helps make information more accessible and easier to analyze, leading to deeper insights. On the internet, it helps make information and web pages become more discover...
Metadata is frequently described as “data about other data.” Whether describing the contents of a web page, providing the technical details of the kind of camera used to capture an image, or the administrative information of usage rights, among many examples, metadata provides additional information that helps assets get found and used more efficiently. In fact, metadata is mainly designed to be m...
HTML, short for HyperText Markup Language, is the simple language at the heart of the World Wide Web. Created in 1989 by computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee, HTML was originally considered to be a solution to help scientists at the CERN Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. The first website went live in August 1991. It was a page written by Berners-Lee explaining how to write HTML. To say it caug...
The shift to remote and hybrid work over the past year and a more mobile workforce has made the matter worse, as attacks rose and workers became more susceptible. More than half (51%) of respondents to The State of Email Security 2021 report (SOES) reported an increase in BEC attacks that exploited brand impersonation, and 63% reported an increase in phishing attacks that targeted their employees....
When the first bits were dropped on the first hard-disk drive, it’s not likely that computer scientists imagined the onslaught of data just 50 years would bring. But those pioneers probably recognized that data management was going to become a challenge. Part of meeting that challenge is data modeling: the practice of developing data storage and retrieval solutions that fit the requirements of a p...
In the data mart model, marketing, sales, finance and each operational business unit has access to the segment of the data warehouse and the information that is most relevant to them. Instead of live queries run against mammoth tables, queries run through a data mart are tight and targeted — and fast. Just as important, data marts provide frameworks to deliver actionable reports more rapidly....
That is exactly how blockchain works, however super-charged by computers to have thousands or tens of thousands of nodes. When an authenticated transaction is posted to one node, that information is automatically posted to them all. So, as did Scrooge in the example above, a discrepancy can be found out by checking across nodes. And since computers are at play here, a thousand nodes can be checked...
