I am currently engaged with mentoring some young technology start-up businesses.  What strikes me about these companies is that they spend the majority of their time utilising their skills to deliver their product.  They are agile, knowledgeable and very hungry to succeed and to create.

When do they find time to “learn” new emerging technologies?  They seem to have learnt it “on the fly” as they go along – such is the pace of technology at the moment.  With cloud computing, mobile computing and social media now becoming the current “bubble”, I realised just how easy it is for anyone in IT to become out of date quite rapidly.

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There is an old saying which says “use it or lose it” and I will add “use it, grow it and keep your eyes open to what is happening around you, always”.   In this process we must keep learning.

Stopping learning, even for a few months or a whole year can make a huge difference.  It is like being having a motor car – use it regularly and it works fine (sure it may need a little maintenance), but leave it parked outside for a year unused and the battery will be flat, tires a bit softer, oil a bit tired, the gas will have lost its vitality etc.  (Of course it does depend on where you park it – it may not even be there when you return!)

Learning is the same, especially in IT (and most other professions – like medicine, law, tax etc) we need to keep up to date, and even a few months “out of the game” will render us less sharp, and left with an uphill battle if we want to regain our status.

If “IT” is our career, then we need to learn on a regular basis, via personal learning, e-learning, books, attending classes, or as I am realising, by working with very sharp entrepreneurs who are leveraging the three technology areas listed above without even breaking into a sweat.

What are your experiences of keeping yourself in the best shape you can?

What is Microsoft® myTech·Ed ?

myTech·Ed is a social networking and content resource developed for the technology professionals that attend Tech·Ed North America in-person or virtually online. The year-round engagement with like-minded professionals provides members with opportunities to LEARN and advance their depth of knowledge with Microsoft technologies; CONNECT with Microsoft experts, partners, and community members; and SHARE information with peers – before, during, and after each event.

The myTech·Ed Windows Phone 7 App enables on-the-go access to your Tech·Ed schedule, contacts, discussions, locations and more. With this app, you can:
• Connect with peers in the Tech·Ed directory, and send messages to or arrange meetings with other attendees.
• Engage in conversation in technology-focused discussion forums.
• Quickly build your schedule by adding sessions to attend and exhibitors to visit.
• Receive alerts about important changes to your schedule.
• Build an annotated Trip Report compiled of your sessions, contacts, discussions and exhibitors to share with your boss or colleagues.

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Carnegie RoboBowl robot challenges will address healthcare, manufacturing, security realms

With the goal of taking ideas for new robots off the drawing board and moving them into real-life situations, Carnegie Mellon University will host a series of competitions aimed at bringing new robotic technologies for manufacturing, healthcare and national security applications. Microsoft 70-640 Training .”

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Carnegie calls the competitions “RoboBowls” and says they will feature next-generation robotics challenges “intended to find and foster start-up and early-stage companies seeking to develop ‘big idea’ products and services that address unmet and underserved market needs in targeted industrial sectors.  In doing so, the RoboBowl expects to help address the nation’s need to create new jobs and viable businesses by catalyzing the adaptation and commercialization of emerging next-generation robotics technologies.”

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According to the RoboBowl Web site, “competitions are expected to take place at various locations throughout the nation.  Each will be open to US-based start-up and early-stage businesses from across the country with an idea of how next-gen robotics technology can be used to develop and bring to market a compelling product or service that addresses unmet or underserved market needs in one of the targeted industry sectors; vis-a-vis teams seeking funding for an applied research and development project or for their really cool idea.”

The first RoboBowl will take place in Pittsburgh on Oct. 13 and is focused on will focus on next-generation robotics systems covering all aspects of healthcare. Five finalists will each get $5,000 and an invitation to a final competitive round, the winner of which will take home an additional $20,000. Microsoft Free MCTS Training and MCTS Online Training.

According to Carnegie, teams will be judged by a panel of people who are experts in their fields: venture capitalists, private investors, and successful entrepreneurs. The business summaries of all semi-finalists will be published and made available to judges and sponsors. Teams who advance to the semi-finals will have an opportunity to present to a panel of judges and receive invaluable feedback. Finalists are also invited to attend the ensuing “Innovation Accelerator @ Carnegie Mellon” event being organized by the Innovation Accelerator, including an all-day workshop on National Science Foundation (NSF) Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) funding the following day.

Microsoft has added support for another Linux server distribution with its Hyper-V virtualization software, its latest move to compete better with virtualization market leader VMware.

IDG News Service — Microsoft (MSFT) has added support for another Linux server distribution with its Hyper-V virtualization software, its latest move to compete better with virtualization market leader VMware (VMW).

Customers can now run the CentOS flavor of Linux as a guest operating system in supported Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V environments, Sandy Gupta, general manager for marketing in Microsoft’s Open Solutions Group, was due to announce at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco Monday.

Microsoft already supports Hyper-V environments that include Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Suse Linux Enterprise Server. It added CentOS because it’s a popular distribution for hosting providers, a market Microsoft hopes to do well in.

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The support is effective immediately, Gupta wrote in a blog post.

“This development enables our hosting partners to consolidate their mixed Windows + Linux infrastructure on Windows Server Hyper-V; reducing cost and complexity, while betting on an enterprise class virtualization platform,” Gupta wrote.

Once contemptuous of open source, Microsoft has become more pragmatic about Linux in recent years. The company has realized it must interoperate with Linux and other OSes if it wants to do well in data centers, which are typically mixed environments.

“We’ve found that the Microsoft-only IT shop — even in the smallest organizations — is becoming a thing of the past,” said Dan Olds, principal analyst at Gabriel Consulting Group. “It’s important for Microsoft to recognize this fact of life and extend support to various Linux operating systems if they want Hyper-V to come out on top in the virtualization wars.”

At the same time, Microsoft continues to assert that Linux and other open-source software products violate various patents that it holds.

VMware has bundled new versions of its vSphere, vCenter Site Recovery and other products into an integrated suite

Setting the stage for cloud deployments, VMware will update many of its core products and bundle them into an integrated release, called the Cloud Infrastructure Suite, the company announced Tuesday.

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The idea behind the package is to allow organizations to set up an infrastructure that will allow them to make use of hosted cloud services, said Paul Maritz, VMware CEO, in a webcast announcing the releases.

ANALYSIS: 12 ways the cloud changes everything

“Allowing [organizations] to aggregate their resources into larger pools, operate them more efficiently and to tie them to externally provisioned infrastructure is the fundamental starting point for this transformation” to cloud computing, he said.

The package includes new versions of VMware’s flagship vSphere virtual machine manager, vCenter Site Recovery Manager, the vShield security framework, the vCloud Director management console and a new product, vSphere Storage Appliance. The package also includes vCenter Operations, which was released earlier this year.

Overall, the new set of products features more than 200 changes from former releases, according to the company.

VSphere 5 features the ability to run extremely large virtual machines, one capable of utilizing 32 processors and one terabyte of memory. It can also execute what VMware calls “policy-based” automation, which can make advanced decisions on where to deploy a virtual machine.

A new product, the VMware vSphere Storage Appliance, can be used to turn internal, server-based storage into a common storage pool, minimizing the need for a separate SAN (storage area network). “Traditionally, we’ve required array-based replication to move your data and your virtual machines between sites. We can now bring replication directly into the software and use the network to copy between two sites,” said VMware CTO Steve Herrod.

VMware Site Recovery Manager now offers the ability to replicate workloads from the primary site to the backup site, and back to the primary site again. This ability to do “automatic failback,” Herrod said, is “a major capability,” in that it allows organizations to move workloads across different data centers more easily.

VCloud Director provides a portal for end users to manage their workloads and pick the applications they wish to deploy. The new version of this software can be accessed from an iPad.

VMware expects to release all of these products by the end of September, according to the company.