Managing sign-in credentials has become a complex process. In the beginning, we had just password complexity (e.g. minimum length, at least one number, at least one letter) to deal with. Nowadays, a robust sign-in process also has to deal with password history (don't re-use passwords), account lockout (after a number of unsuccessful attempts), password recovery (security questions), and most recently, multi-factor authentication (using your mobile phone to retrieve a secondary passcode). Rather than dealing with this complexity, it is far simpler to delegate the sign-in process to a 3rd-party service. That's where OAuth comes in. It provides an open standard for performing that delegation.
Read moreNOW AVAILABLE: Alexa, ask Finite Wisdom
Alexa is a virtual personal assistant from Amazon. Similar in spirit to offerings from Apple (Siri), Microsoft (Cortana) and Google (Assistant), you can speak to these personal assistants and ask them to read the weather report, play a song or tell you a joke. What truly sets Amazon's Alexa apart from the other personal assistants, however, is that it provides an API that programmers (like us) can use to define new skills for Alexa — teaching it new tricks. As a demonstration, Finite Wisdom has developed and released a new skill for Alexa that allows it to connect to Harvest, the time tracking application that we use to track the number of hours we bill each day to each of our clients. With this new skill in place, one of our clients can have a conversation like the following with Alexa...
Read moreDEMO: Alexa, ask Finite Wisdom (Take 2)
Alexa is a virtual personal assistant from Amazon. Similar in spirit to offerings from Apple (Siri), Microsoft (Cortana) and Google (Assistant), you can speak to these personal assistants and ask them to read the weather report, play a song or tell you a joke. What truly sets Amazon's Alexa apart from the other personal assistants, however, is that it provides an API that programmers (like us) can use to define new skills for Alexa — teaching it new tricks. As a demonstration, Finite Wisdom has developed a new skill for Alexa that allows it to connect to Harvest, the time tracking application that we use to track the number of hours we bill each day to each of our clients. With this new skill in place, one of our clients can have a conversation like the following with Alexa...
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