Occasional Teleworkers On the Rise

Working from home is an increasingly popular option for U.S. employees - at least occasionally.

The number of U.S. employees, contractors and business owners who worked remotely at least one day per month increased 17% in the past two years, from approximately 28.7 million in 2006 to 33.7 million in 2008, according to global HR association WorldatWork. In the five-year period since 2003, the total number of once-a-month telecommuters in the U.S. has risen 43%.

Read the full article.

Should you switch to open source software?

Here’s an interesting article from CIO.com explaining the benefits of switching to open source solutions.

As IT costs grow and the economic crisis puts pressure on global IT budgets, open source becomes irresistibly attractive to developers and IT decision makers who are being asked to do more with a whole lot less. Meanwhile, proprietary vendors react by increasing license fees by 15 percent to 45 percent, they continue to lock-in their customers, and they take away independence regarding choice and flexibility across the enterprise technology infrastructure.

Hot Technologies for 2008

Computerworld published this article a couple of weeks ago about the 8 technologies that experts think will be very hot this year. Here’s the list:

1. Virtualization
2. Automation
3. Integration
4. Real-time Collaboration (tools such as Google Docs)
5. Web 2.0 (blogs, wikis)
6. Ideation (I honestly have never heard of this term used in technology before, but it sounds like it’s basically just a tool where people post ideas and work on them)
7. Consumer-oriented devices
8. Unified Communications

We’re actually working on Unified Communications right now, it’s a pretty big project, so it’s good to know it made it in the list. Good stuff.