A native Californian who’s active in the IT industry weighs in on Gov. Gavin Newsom’s planned Office of Digital Innovation and innovation academy. “Simply moving fast and breaking things isn’t the best ethos for government, where so many rely on core services,” says Anderee Berengian, co-founder and CEO of Cie Digital Labs and managing partner at RezVen Partners. Berengian is a member of the Forbes Tech Council. He advocates a blend of this revolutionary thinking with a vestige of “corporate innovation strategies.”
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Sometimes the most forward-leaning projects and experiments are done at the local civic level. Case in point: The city of Irvine now has an app that allows building-and-safety professionals to schedule city inspections and get the results from their phones. The city also has a site, developed by Selectron Technologies, with granular details about which codes to use for various functions and how to decode the results.
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New job titles pop up with increasing frequency in the IT sector. It’s no longer unusual for a large government agency to have a chief information officer (CIO), a chief data officer (CDO) and a chief information security officer (CISO). But the field of cybersecurity, the career path, might be more circuitous. Helpfully, Cyberseek has posted an interactive graphic connecting the dots between feeder roles, through entry-level cybersecurity jobs, and on to mid- and advanced-career positions. Each of the positions has pop-up data on the numbers of job openings, salary information and other relevant details. For those not familiar with Cyberseek.org, here’s its statement: “CyberSeek was developed by Burning Glass Technologies and CompTIA through a grant issued by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and supported by the National Initiative for Cybersecurity Education (NICE).”
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In a state that’s usually in drought conditions, water is a precious resource and one that’s attracting increasing levels of attention from the technology sector, public as well as private. In coastal areas, much of the focus is on seawater intrusion — the influx of saltwater into freshwater aquifers that are being depleted by overuse. Using remote sensors, electromagnetic technology and satellite imagery, “data marriage” may offer a solution, according to this fascinating article at Futurity.org.
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Ever wonder how you can prevent your Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant from going from a smart speaker to a nosy listener? Now there’s an app that lets you track which devices in the Internet of Things (IoT) are listening in on you. “… A team of Princeton University scientists built a tool that tracks every transmission that a smart home device sends out into the world,” says a story on Futurism.com. The app, called the Princeton IoT Inspector, uses a common hacking technique called ARP spoofing, according to a slideshow that the team published along with their app.
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And if you’ve done enough reading already this week, maybe a podcast is more suitable for a weekend bike ride or home project. Exabeam has you covered, with two podcasts aimed at CIOs. “Lessons Learned from a Virtual CIO” and “The Ins and Outs of Budgeting” will be of interest to the private and public sectors.
