The Discovery process is an intense collaboration tailored to find relevant and innovative answers to the digital challenges faced by enterprises.

Outsourcing software development projects can address some challenges. Discover the 8 benefits of outsourcing in one infographic.

What is it like to work at Spiria? That question is best answered by Spirians themselves. Five of them talk about what makes Spiria special.

Are off-the-shelf software solutions no longer meeting your needs? Are you thinking of bespoke software development to support your company’s growth? Here are eight helpful tips that’ll be especially useful if you’re on your first development…

The first step in choosing the ideal software development partner–and perhaps the most important one–is finding the right company to turn your idea into a software. Your choice of companies will influence your project’s chances of…

In early December, Google introduced version 1.0 of Flutter, its new cross-platform mobile SDK. Here’s what you need to know about it, plus our forecast for its success.

The blockchain is a technology based on shared, decentralized ledgers. A ledger is a list of transactions that are copied and saved on several different computers, rather than centralized on a single server. Each transaction (or group of…

In the era of Big Data and megadata, consider Snowmobile, a most seasonable solution next time you need to transfer a couple of exabytes to the cloud.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that artificial intelligence will be the great revolution of our century. AI stands at the crossroads of technology, ethics, morality, and the human factor. And that’s what makes it so fascinating.

All Smart City strategies have one thing in common: a nervous system of connected objects that gather and transmit data. These objects may do any number of things – monitor pollution levels, check water levels, measure noise levels, optimize garbage…

Technological change is happening at an ever-increasing pace. To remain competitive and ensure their future, companies can’t just adopt digital technology; they must embrace it. The mere use of digital tools is not enough: to become “digitally…

Single-Page Applications (SPAs) are web apps that interact with users by dynamically updating the current page rather than loading whole new pages from a server. This strategy creates a fluid web experience by avoiding the interruptions caused by…

When it comes to adapting Web sites to go mobile for smart phones or tablets, there are two radically different technical solutions. Neither one is inherently superior to the other; they both have advantages and disadvantages. The nature of your Web…

The Design Sprint is an intense team creativity session, spread over five consecutive days, designed to find answers to company objectives. Launching a new product or service, an application, changing an offer, or increasing a rate of…

A legacy system is any software, hardware, or storage peripheral that is still in use despite being obsolete. And it doesn’t have to be that old; for example, it could be a version of a software that’s just been out a couple of years but no longer…

Big Data is what everyone’s talking about. Its long list of successes has us enthralled. But the reality is far more prosaic: Big Data is simply the science of managing huge (and growing) volumes of varied data and mining them to extract information…

Deep Learning is capturing the imagination of programmers and stimulating their creativity, particularly in the fields of image and sound processing. Here are seven especially exciting applications, some of which are milestones in the history of…

When you lead a company, finding the right balance between immediate needs and long-term growth is vital. When assessing your software needs, making the right choice between off-the-shelf and custom-made is crucial. So, how do you know if it’s time…

Synthetic DNA is durable and can encode high density digital data, making it an attractive medium for long-term data storage. Microsoft is spearheading research into this cutting-edge technology.

The connected objects that are part of the IoT/M2M world have a vital need to communicate — it is their very essence. But they have some economic constraints, in terms of financial costs and energy consumption. Faced with these constraints, not all…

Geoffrey Hinton, a major figure in the history of deep learning, introduced a completely new type of neural network. This did not fail to arouse the curiosity and enthusiasm of the artificial intelligence research community. Capsule networks will…

Malicious attacks on corporate IT systems are becoming more frequent and sophisticated. The consequences of an intrusion can be disastrous, and can even threaten a company’s very survival. Here are 10 best practices to reinforce IT security.

For several years now, the Internet of Things (IoT) has been the talk of the technological town. The promise of connecting millions of devices, from toasters to automobiles, seems to be on the brink of materializing, as experts tout the advantages…

Lately, we’ve been hearing more and more about Progressive Web Apps, and since Apple is finally onside, there’s no doubt they’ll soon be coming to a smartphone screen near you.

ConuHacks is a yearly event that takes place at Concordia University, in downtown Montréal (Québec). This 24-hour hackathon is an opportunity for more than 650 students from all over North America to excel by working together, and to meet industry…

To celebrate Spiria’s 15th birthday in style, Spirians gathered together for two days at the Château Montebello country inn. This unprecedented meeting of our teams from Boston, Gatineau, Montreal and Toronto was an opportunity for us to learn, get…

When you find a recipe that works, you keep it! Beer, sausage and technology were once again a winning combination, and almost 250 people dropped by our offices for Techtoberfest II.

At its recent Ignite conference, Microsoft announced it had been working on a programming language for a non-existent machine: the quantum computer. The language was mostly developed at Microsoft’s Station Q lab in Santa Barbara, which the company…

The iPhone X, to be released on November 3, will include a fun little feature that is turning out to be a surprise hit for Apple: Animojis! These “animated emojis”, mimicking users’ facial expressions, stole the show at the unveiling of Apple’s…

The GIF image format — the proper pronunciation of which is still up for debate — is already 30 years old, and going stronger than ever!

From the very first payment cards at the beginning of last century, to today’s Apple Pay and Google Wallet, transactional innovations have had a hard time getting accepted. Even the latest “smart cards” seem headed for failure. The payment methods…

The Stack Overflow report is based on a survey of tens of thousands of software developers from 213 countries and territories around the world.

In a recent blog post, we mentioned Machine Learning as one of this year’s 7 biggest technological trends. Here is one of the more fascinating applications of machine learning we’ve seen lately.

Every New Year brings in a new batch of smartphones, some of which are already generating quite the buzz. Here is a sneak preview of some of the most highly anticipated models.

Given today’s evolving work environment, including telework, the advantages of cloud-based work tools are that much more attractive.

Facebook has just made a surprising announcement: it is going to open a start-up incubator in Paris, called Startup Garage. This is the first experience of its kind for Facebook, and will help up to 15 startup companies fine-tune their projects in…

It went unnoticed, yet it was probably the IT world’s biggest news of the year: Windows 10 is going to be compatible with ARM processors.Microsoft has had some experience with ARM processors (ARMv7), with a more tablet-specific operating system…

The Accelerated Mobile Pages Project, or AMP for short, is considered to be Google’s answer to Facebook’s Instant Article format. Free and open-source, this framework seeks to enable faster-loading pages for mobile devices. The incentive for…

Sammy Kamkar, security researcher, whistleblower and expert in “applied hacking”, recently revealed his latest masterstroke, which should worry Web users and IT security managers alike. PoisonTap, a device running on an inexpensive Raspberry Pi…

Nowadays, all the main technologies used on the Web follow World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards. Be it HTML, CSS, or SVG, its implementation must follow the rules set out in a standards document called a W3C Recommendation. The goal of these…

It seems that the Cloud has taken the world by storm; yet everyone seems to be a little foggy as to what it is exactly. Simply put, Cloud computing consists in using computing or storage resources remotely over the Internet, the Cloud being a…

We already had security-based concerns about the rampant ubiquity of new gadgets enthusiastically developed by connected object developers with the best of intentions and scant awareness of software vulnerability issues. Recent events have…

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the launch of the World Wide Web for the general public. In 1991, Tim Berners-Lee posted the seminal “WorldWideWeb Project” document in various Usenet newsgroups and provided the alpha version of a basic Web…

Frederic Filloux, co-editor of the Monday Note, along with Jean-Louis Gassée, dedicated last Monday’s note to the increasing bulk of Web page code, lamenting the fact that a single page of text requires between 6 and 55 pages of code. As an…

The hegemony of Moore’s Law over the IT industry is reaching its predictable end. In just a few years, we will look back on the 1965-2015 half-century as the golden age of microprocessors.What is Moore’s Law?Gordon Moore’s maxim has been so bandied…

At the crossroads of design and technology, 3D printing keeps us in its thrall. As it spreads to ever more fields, it is extending beyond models and prototypes and on to serial production, or additive manufacturing. The entrance of heavyweights in…

On July 18th, SoftBank Group, a Japanese multinational telecommunications company founded in 1981 by Masayoshi Son, who also owns Sprint, announced its acquisition of British multinational ARM Holdings, a microprocessor development company. The…

Just about everyone knows that augmented reality is used to catch Pokémon with Poké Balls. Those who keep up with tech news know that virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) are the future of video games. But few people know that VR/AR is…

[Illustration by Alex Asfour.]

Tabulation Separation … Ever heard of a breakup caused by indentation? She’s a space cadet, he’s a tabsolutist. Could such a piddling detail spell the end of a relationship? That was the storyline of last Sunday’s episode of Silicon Valley…

If you are interested in the ever-evolving world of communicating objects, we recommend the following blogs:TelefónicaSpanish telecoms operator Telefónica has been running a blog dedicated to IoT since 2012. Well done and the topics are varied.

The question “What is the best car?” is naive. There is no best car. Some cars are better than others, but the question should be “What is the best car for my needs?” If you live in the Canadian boreal forest, a Lamborghini would not be appropriate…

As we have seen, the Kanban system as applied to software development is quite far removed from its original form, which was devised in Japan to build cars. The only thing the two still have in common is similar objectives and the use of cards to…

[Photo Spiria.]Toyota’s KanbanKanban is a scheduling system for just-in-time manufacturing. Developed in the 1950s at Toyota, it has since become a rational organization standard for a wide variety of assembly lines the world over.

We’ve got one! We were able to get our hands on a HoloLens, though not before we parted with US $3,000. At the beginning of the month, Microsoft shipped the first wave of Development Edition HoloLens to selected developers and business partners. For…

56,033 developers from 173 different countries responded to the annual survey run by Stack Overflow, the well-known Q&A platform dedicated to programming. The results of the survey, first run in 2013, provide a good snapshot of programming and…

Joomla is a PHP-based CMS that still enjoys widespread use despite its advancing age. In fact, Joomla is popular world-wide, except, oddly, in North America. Joomla, the second-most used CMS, is losing ground to front-runner WordPress, not due to…

Typo3 is said, perhaps rightly, to be a heavy-duty engine developed for the programming pleasure of Bavarian engineers: it is a labour-intensive, complex platform, rather popular in Europe, especially in Germanic countries. The field in which this…

Atlassian is a software editor that is little-known by the public at large, yet has a worldwide following among companies that practice the Agile work methodology. Atlassian has brilliantly demonstrated how to succeed with a product that is not…

Last December, after Flash Professional CC was retired in favour of Animate CC, some tech publications proclaimed “Flash Is Dead, Long Live Adobe”, or “The Final Nail in the Flash Coffin”. The truth is more complex and nuanced. In fact, Animate CC…

Ruby on Rails, or RoR, the free MVC Web framework, appeared on the market in 2005 and quickly gained pre-eminence for Web application development, seducing developers with the ease and elegance of its functional prototype building. RoR’s star waxed…

The Internet of Things is an idea that has long been mythicized and has sometimes stoked irrational fears. It refers to the wide-ranging concept of interconnected objects for general as well as professional use. Basically, these objects can be any…