Microsoft has taken an important step to promote sustainability and transparency among its global suppliers. If more firms showed such leadership it would hold more suppliers accountable for protecting human and workers’ rights, and reduce the legal and reputational risks that companies and their shareholders face.
Kinect has had an amazing first year, says Kevin Schofield, general manager of Microsoft Research, which played a key role in developing Kinect. “It’s amazing and fun and fascinating to watch the snowball effect of Kinect,” he says. “Kinect has taken something that was really hard to get and really expensive, and made it easy to get and inexpensive.”
Under the recommendations from IBM, a central command centre will integrate and interconnect information from various systems and services within the township to improve safety, prevent and anticipate problems and improve the quality of life of residents. For example a resident’s smart device will be alerted to current traffic conditions or residents can check parking availability or changes to traffic conditions due to large sporting event or a natural disaster like flooding.
Brazil is a key growth market for IBM. The expansion of IBM’s Global Entrepreneur initiative into Brazil earlier this year, is part of IBM’s ongoing efforts to engage with entrepreneurs in key emerging markets, such as Brazil, India, China and Turkey. Collaborating with entrepreneurs helps fuel global innovation and growth and plays a role in IBM’s ability to deliver value to clients.
John Fowler, Executive Vice President of Oracle Systems, will lead the session on “Systems Engineering,” commenting on the latest hardware and software offerings such as the recently announced SPARC SuperCluster T4, T4 Servers, Solaris 11, the Oracle Database Appliance and the Sun ZFS Storage Appliances and Pillar Axiom Storage Systems.
