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Showing posts from 2013

Between The NSA and Google. The Big Data Squeeze for Joe Social Pack

We are all feeling a little squeezed now days. We can thank our friends in Wall Street and our lax governmental institutions for that. The later have simply been debased by our ever present and amazingly effective lobbying monarchy. If that was not bad enough, there is another more worrisome monarchy emerging around the concept of big data. For those uninitiated, big data is all the data that is being collectively captured by all of us as we go about our day using our diverse technologies. This means your actions on the web, on your mobile devices, in your cars. It means data generated by your credit card activities, your shopping patterns, your health care patterns. Everything is now 'capturable' and available for analysis. All these data points are now available to the content providers and of course our spy agencies like the NSA. Some of these data points are innocuous, perhaps, when viewed independently. But they are immensely powerful when triangulated and analyze

MOOC And The Future Of Education

I just completed my second online course and I must say, I am addicted. What a wonderful experience to learn on one's own time and communicate and exchange ideas with brilliant people all over the world. There are many fascinating facts about MOOC (massive open online course) starting with how easy it is to adapt to the format which is largely video based.  For both my courses I used: www.coursera.com. Both courses were taught by professors who were new using MOOC but both were able to adapt their teaching styles and were quite effective in conveying knowledge via video. Another aspect of the experience is the sheer size of the numbers of online students. In the first course something like 25K students signed up and actually started and while I do not know how many finished, I recently read that only 10% complete the course and do the work required to earn a certificate of completion. Everything you do in MOOC is measurable and since class participation is a big part of the exp

BroadSoft, Operators and Technology Adoptions

The week of October 14th I had opportunity to participate in BroadSoft's Connections event in San Diego, CA where they brought together operators, systems integrators and technology partners to discuss the future of communications (increasingly video and increasingly cloud-based). Over 1k people were in attendance and widely discussed the challenges of moving enterprise services to the cloud. One particular insight that was quite revealing to me from listening to BroadSoft customers such as Telstra (Australian Carrier), The Red Cross and University of Michigan, discuss their challenges in moving from legacy systems to cloud-based offerings is the immense resistance to change and adoption of new technologies. Video is a case in point. There seems to be a bifurcation of video as an entertainment medium (lots of people watching passively on their mobile and table devices) but not so many people using it during business and every day communications. The CTO of The Red Cross was very

Teaching How To See

Innovation management teaches many things and one of them is how to filter the world around us to be able to better identify potential markets that are within reach with nominal transformation. In innovation management parlance this is called adjacent innovation, meaning markets that are adjacent to existing lines of business that could be developed with a targeted strategy. One of the tools that many innovation management practitioners use to filter business opportunities is called future-scenario planning. This tool is basically used as a way to visualize how a specific business or customer-base may look like in the future. Another tool is the use value-based analysis, which looks at a businesses’ workflow and assigns value parameters to each step in the process of delivering value to customers.   The aim is to find areas of competitive advantage and where a company may take a stance and compete effectively with those that are disrupting their businesses.