The tech billionaires’ space race is heating up. Jeff Bezos’s aerospace company, Blue Origin, aims to take people to the moon by 2024, he announced on Thursday. The company owned by the billionaire Amazon executive has been pushing to establish a lunar base for humans within the next five years. On Thursday, it made that goal public with the announcement of its new Blue Moon lander, an unmanned spacecraft that can carry up to 6.5 metric tons for deposit on the moon, allowing it to lay the framework for future human missions. The company has been developing the technology for three years, Bezos said. During his hour-long presentation at Washington DC’s convention center, Bezos waved his arm and a black drape behind him dropped to reveal the two-story-tall unmanned lander mockup, which he said can deploy up to four smaller rovers and shoot out satellites to orbit the moon. “We have been given a gift – this nearby body called the moon,” Bezos said, listing factors that make the moo...

Definition - What does Application Analyst mean? An application analyst is a professional who supports a particular application or set of applications. This can involve some types of computing and design or maintenance work, as well as facilitating particular use cases. An application analyst is also known as an application support analyst. FREE WEBINAR: Data-Driven: Achieving Digital Transformation Efficiently | Join us June 4th @ 11:00am EST Techopedia explains Application Analyst Application analysts often help with design and development of applications, but also work with other stakeholders to fine-tune design in terms of business requirements and operational goals. Many of these professionals need to have good time management, good communication skills, background in programming or IT and business experience. For example, a point person hired as an application analyst might be in charge of evaluating and participating in progress on a suite of telecommunications apps. As the...

I have a more pessimistic answer, unfortunately. The lucky ones retire early, living well off a lifetime of savings from their lucrative careers. They found a startup. Ninety-five percent of the time, this just dissipates their life savings, but two percent of the time, they hit a home run. They develop a library and make a modest living selling and supporting the library. In the days of open source, this is getting more difficult, but it used to be a thing. They lose a job during their fifties, one of many they’ve lost after a project completed or an economic downturn occurred, and have to retire because no one wants to hire an “old” software developer. They take a series of six month contracts. Contracts don’t pay as well as being a regular, full time worker (despite what you may have thought), but they have more control over their hours and working environment. Many contracts forbid the developer to work more than 40 hours a week for budgetary purposes, whereas the same companies w...

Q: How can data analytics help companies build stronger branding strategies? A: Many times data analysis will help you determine who your customer  actually  are vs. who you  think  your customers are. Once you know who your customers actually are and what value you bring to them, you can continue to build strategies that continue to build  .  in the best way. I use my personal example of when I first started my career and was doing sales at TBI. I started personally tracking information about my sales and started analyzing the data on my own. What I found was that I had a high closing ratio when I spoke to customer  in the hospitality industry. Part of it was that I was more of a solution seller, meaning that my conversation was around solving problems they had with their network.  The other part was that I had. Built some  specific bundles  with emerging market products that worked really well within the hospita...

Q: What skills are required get a job in data analytics? A: I think I look at this a little different than most. At the very minimum, you need mid-level Excel skills, curiosity, critical thinking and that ability to learn quickly. From there, you want to know how databases  work and how to code SQL so you can dig deeper into the data sets that you have. It is also important to have the ability to visualize results into an easy-to-read manner. My rule of thumb is that it should take no longer than three minutes to look at a visual and understand what it’s trying to say. What will make you stick out, though, is if you also have some knowledge on data cleansing, ETL (extract transform & load) processes, knowing how to code Python, ability to use APIs to extract data and even more recently a statistical programming language called R is being used to apply more statistical analysis to your data sets.