To master tools and software, many professionals use Lynda.com, an online learning company that offers 1, 869 video courses on technology, software, creative and business skills.

WSJ: Learning New Software

"We think it's really powerful, " said Gabriel Trisca, a Boise State master's degree student who developed GROVER's software.

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In a fabulous lecture discussing true motivators of human behavior (in a nutshell: self-direction and to master good ideas and worthwhile skills) writer Daniel Pink describes Atlassian Software.

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Unstructured customer conversation content is very difficult to map to enterprise transaction and master data management systems, which form the core of enterprise business application software.

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Mr. Beckers, a 39-year-old physicist from France, graduated from Stanford University with a master's of business degree in 2011 and set out to build software that could decipher heart defects from MRI readings.

WSJ: A New Push for Entrepreneur Visas

He was a master at defusing rows caused by over-promising salesmen, the premature release of bug-ridden software or the downright arrogance that Oracle can sometimes demonstrate.

ECONOMIST: Oracle

The PalmPilot runs on top of Palm OS, an extremely user-friendly, stripped-down bit of software that is just about perfect for an electronic organizer, although it would struggle to master anything much more complicated.

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The combined forces of the Software-as-a-Service deployment model, the role of Salesforce.com as the master data aggregator and integration point, buying habits of marketing departments and cooperative efforts among vendors have created a situation in which IT plays almost no role in supporting the use of marketing technologies.

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