February 20, 2015

What will soar and fail in tech and business in 2015
No one does predictions like Mark Anderson, whose forecasts about the intersection of the economy and technology are closely followed in Silicon Valley. He has a global view of what’s the next big thing and place along an eye for hot products and countries that about to take a dive. Anderson is head of Strategic News Service, a newsletter publisher for industry leaders and venture capitalists. It claims a readership that includes Dell CEO, Michael Dell, Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Microsoft’s Bill Gates. Recently, Mark Anderson listed his predictions for 2015 during a gathering in San Francisco. Here are his key points:


Best Practices for Enabling Employee-Owned Wearables in the Enterprise
It seems as if wearables have appeared almost overnight. It’s a new area for people to use technology to enhance their lives, particularly around personal health and fitness. And it’s a new area for IT to support and manage. At Intel, David Byrne is one person paying close attention to this technology in its infancy. He’s a mobility specialist in the Intel IT engineering group. In this podcast he talks about the increased wearable use by employees, how Intel IT is developing best practices to help support their use in the enterprise, and the business opportunities wearables present.


Mobile networks prep for the Internet of Things
It's good news for mobile users that they may not hear much about. A more efficient network leaves more free capacity for the video or application you want to run, and a more flexible carrier could quickly launch services in the future that you don't even know you'll need yet. The new architectures may even change how some businesses pay for mobile services. Just as enterprises used to buy separate servers for each application, carriers often use dedicated hardware for each function involved in delivering a service, such as billing and authentication.


How Large Companies Can Leverage Startups to Innovate
Our three business innovation experts represent a broad spectrum from investing in startups to guiding startups to being an entrepreneur inside a large organization.Evangelos Simoudis is a venture capitalist and an expert on innovation based in Silicon Valley; Todd Schofield runs the Innovation Centre for the London-based Standard Chartered Bank; and Philippe Mauchard is a partner with McKinsey and the co-founder of McKinsey Solutions. It is my hope that both startups and large companies will benefit from their guidance on how the two can come together for their mutual success.


Enterprise IT faces upheaval to move to cloud-first computing
"Unlike the situation where you have full control on-premise, you are outsourcing some of the control," said Kalush. "Even with a cloud service that offers 99.9% uptime, you need to assume there will be 0.1% downtime." As such, he said when building enterprise software for the cloud, the application needs to assume there will be breakages and failures.  Kalush added that the design of a cloud-based application requires a far more robust disaster recovery capability from day one compared to on-premise software.


The future of ‘everywhere ergonomic’ technology
In a recent interview with the Economist Intelligence Unit on ‘The Future of Work’, (sponsored by Ricoh Europe), Alan Hedge, Director of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Laboratory at Cornell University, points out that this type of technology is just the start, “we are at the very beginning of a revolution in ‘active’ objects and products that have sensors built into them.” Professor Hedge terms this interaction between people and design technology ‘everywhere ergonomics’. While smart chairs and surfaces may not have made their way to all workplaces just yet, many people will already be using everywhere ergonomics at home. It’s only a matter of time before the boom in wearable devices begins to have a transformative effect on the workplace.


Cognitive Computing (Slowly) Changes Healthcare
After over a year of research, we are capable of saying that cognitive computing is important to healthcare and is more than a science project. What we have found is that there is a divide between big health care business and smaller ones. The big businesses, the ones that are true centers of excellence in the provider, payer, and drug research arena are using the advances of cognitive computing machine learning and big data to innovate in fundamental ways. We also see the march to the main stream, as is always true in healthcare will be slow.


7 Modern Marketing Frameworks Every Startup Need to Know
As a young marketer navigating the digital landscape, I love frameworks. Not only do they help me plan and prioritize, but they help me visualize how everything I’m working on fits together. No, I won’t be talking about (and I’m looking at you, classically trained marketers) the 4Ps, Porter’s 5 forces, or SWOT analyses. Sure, those frameworks have their place, but they don’t provide much direction for startups looking to focus their energy on growth. Plus, they’re getting pretty old. The frameworks below were developed by modern marketing gurus. Together, they’ll help you make a growth strategy, select traction channels, and influence your customers’ behavior.


Police lost 20,000 stop-search records after 'wrong button pressed'
Assistant Chief Constable Wayne Mawson told members of the justice committee that 20,086 stop-search records were corrupted last year - because a computer programmer pressed "the wrong button". Now, as a former computer programmer myself, I question this. Even if it were that easy to delete thousands of records with one keystroke, most database management systems have a way to retrieve data - and, even if they didn't, why weren't back-ups made? If there are no back-ups to a system that loses data then my advice would be to mark that pesky keyboard button in red, and encase it in unbreakable glass to avoid any future errors.


Security professionals warn against relying on cyber insurance
“While insurance may help mitigate some of the financial impact of a security incident or breach, the reputational impact and the impact to the business operation cannot be mitigated with insurance in the same way,” he said. Lay said that businesses should instead aim to be smart with their approach and consider the people, process and technology elements when it comes to responding to the threats they face. “By taking this risk-based approach, businesses can ensure that they are dealing with the largest and most dangerous issues first,” he said. Lay said recent Fujitsu stud on digital enablement showed that for the 12% of UK consumers who said they never use digital services, security was a top concern.



Quote for the day:

"The leader has to be practical and a realist, yet must talk the language of the visionary and the idealist." -- Eric H

No comments:

Post a Comment