November 08, 2014

Does Watson Know the Answer to IBM’s Woes?
The hope is that the technology will be able to answer more complicated questions in all sorts of industries, including health care, financial investment, and oil discovery; and that it will help IBM build a lucrative new computer-driven consulting business. At the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, a version of Watson is helping doctors develop treatment regimens from a patient’s symptoms based on an analysis of thousands of pages of medical papers and doctors’ notes. There is good reason for IBM’s management to hope that the technology might provide the spark for its reinvention.


Why Amazon Echo is the future of every home
As artificial intelligence, voice recognition, speech recognition and other technologies related to virtual assistants improve, these interfaces will do amazing things for us. They'll understand, interpret and make decisions based on past behavior. We'll blurt out "Alexa" or "Hey Siri" or "OK, Google Now" or "Yo, Cortana" followed by something cryptic and colloquial: "We need paper towels!" The assistant will know your preferences and will have access to your credit card, so it will go ahead and order the paper towels and have them shipped. It's not hard to see why this is important to Amazon.


Windows 10 Enterprise Features Revealed
Microsoft also announced Friday that Windows 10's device management options will be more expansive than Windows 8.1's. In the latter OS, Microsoft introduced mobile device management (MDM) capabilities that allowed enterprises to manage PCs, tablets, and smartphones with one technique. This addition was designed primarily for BYOD scenarios, but in Windows 10, Microsoft will add MDM options for corporate-owned devices. The additions will include support for managing multiple users who share a single device, full control over the Windows Store, VPN and device-wipe capabilities, and the configuration of Enterprise Data Protection policies.


How to Master Google Analytics
Google analytics is a free platform which integrates seamlessly with any website and has a tremendous amount of data that can easily be extracted once users are familiar with the interface. In addition, Google analytics is a platform that will grow with the company without any additional investment. There are other analytic platforms out there such as Clicky, which are low-cost and have a few different bells and whistles than Google analytics does, but in my opinion this analytics platform has all the things you’ll need to get started and grow your online business.


Mark Zuckerberg's Great Vision for the Next 10 Years of Facebook
Facebook will be investing in ways to better target and measure campaigns through data. It wants to help brands measure online to offline sales conversions. Currently advertisers only spend about 11 percent of their budgets on mobile, according to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, because the right tools aren't yet in place. Finally, Facebook wants to build the next major computing platform, which Zuckerberg believes could be augmented reality and Oculus. He also wants to bring the internet to more people through Internet.org. "We're going to prepare for the future by investing aggressively," Zuckerberg said.


Using Open Source Solutions for Cloud-Ready Big Data Management
This growth and reliance around data will be offloaded to the only platform that can handle these types of demands: the data center. Any growing organization must look at data center hosting options as a viable solution to an ever-evolving business and IT environment. Whether this is a cloud solution or a manage services option, the modern data center is the spot that can support changed business needs and evolving IT solutions. Database administrators have been forced to find new and creative ways to manage and control this vast amount of information.


“Dark Web” Version of Facebook Shows a New Way to Secure the Web
The Tor software works by connecting to a network of computers around the world known as “nodes.” When you access a website via Tor, your data hops between three of those nodes in encrypted form before traveling to the operator’s server. Data sent back to you by that server gets the same treatment. Tor software for website operators allows them to create a .onion address – known as a “hidden service” – and obscure the true identity and location of their servers. By using that, Facebook is the only major Web company to join what is dubbed the “dark Web.”


Monetizing Big Data: A Q&A with Wells Fargo's Data Chief
The incentive piece is tough. It's my job to show how there's a mutual benefit. Take online bill pay: it tells you a lot about customer relationships. Customers use online bill pay to pay other banks for products they don't have with us. If a customer has a deposit account in online bill pay with us but not a mortgage, and they own a home, they're paying a mortgage with a different bank, so that's why you should care about online bill pay if you have the deposit account. If someone's paying a different credit card with their online bill pay, that's why you should care about their data.


Data-Driven Intuition
The definition of intuition is “a direct perception of truth or fact independent of any reasoning process,” i.e., what is often referred to as “going with your gut.” In his quest to find a successful individual who truly used their gut and nothing else to make decisions, Ma discovered he needed to redefine intuition as “a direct perception of truth or fact independent of any documentedreasoning process” because “no one successful truly makes decisions without some reasoning process. ...  or they may not have the sufficient information to document that reasoning process, but it’s clear in all cases I explored that there was a method behind the madness.”


Getting the most out of impact mapping
Impact mapping is a strategic planning and visualisation technique with roots in user experience strategy and design. An impact map visually connects solution ideas (deliverables, such as user stories) to business goals through impacts on stakeholders and customer segments. By putting deliverables into perspective of user needs and behaviour changes, and putting user needs into the perspective of overall organisational objectives, an impact map visualises assumptions. This helps to create a big picture for software delivery and facilitates many good product management techniques, such as customer research and iterative planning, as well as helping stakeholders align and prioritise iterative delivery.



Quote for the day:

"Keep true, never be ashamed of doing right, decide on what you think is right and stick to it." -- George Eliot

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