Big Data’s big promise

By Gail Balfour
Backbone Magazine

Almost every company, large or small, has more data than it knows how to handle. And it can be downright overwhelming. Think of how many e-mails you read, answer and store in a day. Throw in your financial reporting, your corporate data, daily transactions and other core business information, and the list goes on, year after year. On the surface, these massive stores of data may seem like a burden, or even a liability. But what if you could use that information to make wiser business decisions, or predict problems before they happen? Does your data have a lot more value than you realize?

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Canadians are steadily developing digital telepathology networks

By Gail Balfour
Canadian Healthcare Technology

According to Dr. Andrew Evans, the benefits we will see from telepathology projects taking place throughout the country will go far beyond the ability to quickly share biopsy images with remote pathologists for consultation and diagnosis. This emerging technology will also have a profound impact on clinical education and research, quality assurance, accuracy and speed of diagnosis, as well as storage of data and integration with electronic health records.

Here’s why your website doesn’t rank higher

By Gail Balfour
Backbone Magazine

Have you ever Googled your own company? How about searched for terms that are related to your products or services? If you have, you may have noticed how difficult it can be to get your Web site to appear at the top of the search engine’s results page, or even on the first few pages. Yes, you are competing with countless other businesses worldwide, and a lot of other noise online, but is that why you appear so far down the list? Maybe it’s time to take a closer look at what you could be doing differently.

A balm after the storm

It sounds corny, but every time I see a rainbow these days it always makes me think of my parents trying to tell me not to forget them, to show me that there is still part of them left, and to remind me that there is sudden, expected beauty everywhere – you need only look up.

My latest rainbow

Cybercrime: A global epidemic nobody’s really talking about

By Gail Balfour
Backbone Magazine

Your credit card information is likely sitting on a hard drive somewhere in eastern Europe, and criminals may choose to use it at any time. At least, that is what Joseph Menn’s research suggests. Menn, a Los Angeles-based journalist and author of the non-fiction book Fatal System Error, gave a sobering keynote at the mesh conference held in Toronto earlier this year. His message: cybercrime is a global epidemic and it’s a war we probably will not win.

Cherry blossoms

In the springtime in High Park something strange and wonderful happens. People drift in ever widening groups like moths to a flame. The flames in this case are cherry trees, but I must admit they look much more like snow squalls than fire.

3 a.m. insomnia

Sometimes the night becomes so muffled that it wakes you…

Fog is like a balm to me. I can breathe much deeper.

Sometimes the night is so muffled that it wakes you.

Tweet risk

Twitter’s potential potholes and 3 ways to avoid them
By: Gail Balfour
Backbone Magazine

Using Twitter as a business tool may be all the rage right now, but before your company jumps headfirst, it pays to take a step back and assess the potential risks. One large financial services firm did just that, and discovered that the main danger lay in the fact that they were thinking about Twitter differently than other Web content. This may be due to its potential for immediacy.