WHY IT MATTERS: Digital Transformation

Sometimes good to look back when you wan to se ahead.

WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT

Surveillance is part of the web browsing experience mostly due to ads and social beacons. Trying to block them off not only degrades the user experience but may not provide the expected benefits as it may provide a different type of surveillance. Ad blocking does not appear to be the solution after all. So what can provide more privacy when surfing the web? The question remains open.

Hello World is an amazing series of video reports on digital transformations and Internet and technology. I find this episode on Russia of particular interest regarding privacy - or the loss of privacy. Must listen.

Location services on mobile phone can reveal information you may not want others to know. This post describes in simple term what geolocation can reveal.

The web never forgets. This new site offers ways to remove some traces of your digital life. Useful.

I thought this was just useless and funny at the same time to repurpose old technology for new uses. Maybe there is something here when considering digital transformation and extending life of existing technologies...

WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT

That being said, there is so much work involved - write assembler code, build custom hardware - that you have to appreciate how much we have evolved in the past 30 years as this solution can now be developed much more rapidly and much more easily with current tools and technologies.

https://scotch.io/tutorials/building-a-slack-clone-in-meteor-js-getting-started 

Moving large amounts of data to the cloud - petabytes and exabytes - would take years to do if transferred using networks and the Internet. Amazon provides its customers with dedicated and secure hard drives - they call snowballs - and truck - they call snowmobiles - to move the data from one data center to the next.

WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT

There are limits to our network infrastructures and physical solutions often are required to migrate data to the cloud or digitize products. For example scanning paper files or converting books to digital ones often require specialized equipments in order to perform the work rapidly and cost effectively. Google had patented a book scanning equipment in order to create its Google books project in the past. I assume this same kind of innovation will start to happen in other fields as well.

http://www.theverge.com/2012/11/13/3639016/google-books-scanner-vacuum-diy 

https://books.google.com/googlebooks/about/ 

More on this here: http://uk.businessinsider.com/amazon-snowmobile-truck-is-a-funny-for-real-product-2016-11 

Describes recent DDoS attacks and provides links to Akamai State of the Internet report, a very useful reference.

WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT

Going digital often means relying on the Internet for critical business operations. This article is a stark reminder of the need to put security on the top of priority list.

A study of 250K people over 2011-2015 timeframe across 33 countries in OECD shows that most users can barely operate their computer of mobile phone.

WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT

Digital transformation strategies and roadmap often fail to allocate sufficient effort/budget/time/resources to accompany employees and users with the proper change management. This study shows why: most people don't know how to perform simple computer tasks. Put them in front of a new software or technology and they will fail, or even worse, they will discredit the solution so as not to show their inability. Accompany them and recognize that they need help and they will succeed in their transition. And you will succeed in your digital transformation.

A short post with links to useful resources claims that we may very soon have emoji URLs. Instead of the familiar www.cnn.com for example you may find emojis such as hearts and smileys.

WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT

Internet has become so important and the browser so essential to many that URLs have started to "mean" something instead of being purely a reference to a website. I remember the dotcom URL rush, where savvy investors were registering short URLs such as pet.com or meaningful ones like mcdonalds.com then sitting on them for months or years and selling those URLs for thousands or hundreds of thousands. Are we going to relive that era? Maybe...

A short run down on personal technologies coming our way soon.

WHY THISI S IMPORTANT

I've been speaking about the impact of digital technologies to transformation our personal lives and the opportunities this brings to business for a while in my "me.com" and "we.com" conferences (http://fmcs.digital/conferences). Looks like there is even more to it than originally I anticipated with the convergence of InternetOfThings, AI, BigData, and wearables. Your employees in the future will be even more connected and digital and companies should take notice and leverage it to 1) improve productivity 2) support work-life-wellness balance 3) tap the social networks to their benefits (ie. social recruiting).

A review of recent investments in startups that build intelligent bots for messaging apps and other tools we interact with.

WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT

With 50% of mobile users that have not downloaded an app in the previous month (http://fortune.com/2016/09/16/smartphone-users-apps/), the future of our interactions with our mobile devices will be concentrated - limited? - to a small number of high profile apps from the big names - Facebook, Google, Apple. How can companies compete? They will embed intelligent bots to listen and converse with their customers, employees and partners using intelligent bots. Soon you'll be ordering pizza by chatting with a dominos pizza bot or getting stock tips for an automated financial expert. Believe it.

http://mashable.com/2016/09/15/dominos-pizza-facebook-bot/#mouHyNNwIOq3 

http://www.wsj.com/articles/how-to-find-a-financial-adviser-1420516873 

Facebook explains how it tests its data centers resiliency to failure by removing some during real world operations.

WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT

There are limits to testing you can create. Nothing like testing in real situations to ensure your solutions work! Then again, they are not making planes or heart defibrillators - domains where live tests could have serious implications, even kill people.

Explain what dark traffic is - actually direct in google analytics - and explains how to reduce it in order to improve analytics results.

WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT

Analytics is an essential of digital transformation and very often the primary reason to go digital as it provides ability to monitor exactly what customers are doing, of ten in realtime. However, managing and exploiting the analytics data requires very careful analysis and planning and posting such as this one provides methods to improve the quality of your analysis and improve the visibility you get from your digital investment.

218 slides of jammed packed information. Soon I will be able to blog one slide of this Mary Meeker State of the Internet annual presentation per day for the whole year. Wow...

WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT

This is an annual event for digital experts: the state of the Internet. This year, it focusses on deep learning (think voice+image recognition) and cars. Because really the Internet growth is slowing down. So is mobile phone usage. The trend thus appears to be what we build on top of the Internet and not the Internet itself. Finally.

Every company executive and board member should listen to this talk. Even if you don't understand everything you should ask yourself: how is our company positioned to address those trends? In most cases I assume the answer will be: we are not. This should be cause for concern and action.

For previous year presentations, go to http://www.scoop.it/t/digital-transformation-of-businesses/?q=meeker 

Lots of good ideas that show how much flexibility we have when we design web pages, not just "news" homepages. Also provides some links to some of today's most progressive news delivery websites, including Quartz, Medium and others.

And then it lists the results of a brainstorm session, with many new ideas presented as handwritten notes. This is the most interesting part, as it uses the inline commenting features that are part of medium platform to get people insights into these new ideas.

WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT

It shows how a blog posting platform (medium) can be used to share information and gather readers insight embedded. Simply  amazing!