Get Started for FREE
Sign up with Facebook Sign up with X
I don't have a Facebook or a X account
 Your new post is loading...
Scoop.it!
MIT researchers recently managed to create self-assembling robots. The researchers even released a video demonstrating their success. 
No comment yet.
Sign up to comment
Scoop.it!
Farid Mheir's insight:
Anyone running an eCommerce website should at least look at this checklist. It covers all bases (homepage, product, page, checkout, etc.) and plugs some specific solutions.
Scoop.it!
DRIVE BUSINESS TRANSFORMATION WITH DIGITAL CUSTOMER EXPERIENCES
Digital customer experience has become a key business differentiator, and application development and delivery (AD&D) leaders of front-office, web, mobile, and digital development must step up to support their firm's initiatives. A broad focus on digital customer experiences carries great risks for your firm: too much experimentation for not enough return; too much duplication and waste; and too little use of data to drive and measure business results.
Farid Mheir's insight:
Aimed at application development professionals, this playbook brings together various research papers. What is worth noting is the organization the playbook provides to help guide developers from vision to implementation.
Scoop.it!
Ars gets a look inside at the first GM-owned data center in nearly 20 years.
Farid Mheir's insight:
The concept of utility computing is one step closer. This is important because it means a reversal of 20 years of outsourcing by GM. It also means computing and data are seens as essential components of future growth and innovation at GM. Outsourcing has allowed GM to shed its "old school" IT resources and replace them with a new breed that is more cloud friendly, big data savvy. GM needs 100 times less resources to run the new DCs than it did the old ones. And new workers are not unionized. Going the private cloud way is also an interesting sign, stating that technology is reaching the point where it becomes affordable for large corporations to build their own - even though there is a lot of technology missing that needs to be developed. GM has gone from 23 DCs to 2. Looks like privacy was a big contributing factor as well. Also worth reading is the gigaOM review of this new datacenter along with an analysis of what this means for other Fortune100 corporations. Paper also states that economics for private cloud mega datacenters is good once you reach a certain scale.
Scoop.it!
To translate one language into another, find the linear transformation that maps one to the other. Simple, say a team of Google engineers. The new trick is to represent an entire language using the relationship between its words. The set of all the relationships, the so-called “language space”, can be thought of as a set of vectors that each point from one word to another. And in recent years, linguists have discovered that it is possible to handle these vectors mathematically. For example, the operation ‘king’ – ‘man’ + ‘woman’ results in a vector that is similar to ‘queen’.
Farid Mheir's insight:
Going digital means finding ways to "convert" things into the digital format. Here is an interesting example of mathematical representation of language concepts that become helpful in machine translation, bringing us one step closer to universal translation.
Scoop.it!
Celia Pronto is Group Marketing and Ecommerce Director at Ford Retail, and her expertise is in working with multichannel businesses experiencing vast transformation. She will be speaking about Ford Retail's digital transformation, and the importance of customer experience.
Farid Mheir's insight:
Key messages: digital transformation takes time, customer expectations are high and retailers have yet to meet them
Scoop.it!
IT strategy is a business question with a technical answer. Digital business strategy is a digital question, with a business answer, which may include non-digital solutions, such as getting into different businesses, or changing strategic posture. A classic example is logistics companies such DHL, UPS, FedEx getting into financial services for their clients, based on digital (informational) capabilities.
Farid Mheir's insight:
Read this short interview to get good answers as to what digital is for an organization and the difference between digital and IT.
Emma Sands's curator insight,
September 30, 2013 3:03 AM
Key insights to help companies reach that "digital epiphany" and bring the realization that, as the article says, digital "is not just digital marketing." And an extremely useful insight into the role of the Chief Digital Officer to "encourage/support/orchestrate" digital innovation on a business strategy level.
Scoop.it!
Tim Steiner, founder of U.K. giant Ocado, on the rise of e-commerce and online grocery's chances in North America.Online isn’t an economically sensible activity for incumbent retailers to enter into. It cannibalizes the physical store in favour of the online store, and it’s more expensive to fill an online order using existing physical assets. As has been demonstrated in the U.K., using existing store networks is unlikely to be the answer.There are still significant costs for running click-and-collect: You have all the costs of the traditional supermarket plus additional picking costs and costs of building and running separate click-and-collect pickup points. The winner would be the operator with the lowest fulfilment costs.
Farid Mheir's insight:
Ocado has been running for 10 years and clearly state the challenge of ecommerce many businesses face: canibalization of store sales and higher costs to sell online due to added labour. Pure plays do not face this problem, which may indeed lead to a time when online grocery shopping will be cheaper than in store. When will this be? When online volume is sufficient to have low cost of goods as existing retailers have?
Scoop.it!
Tim Steiner, founder of U.K. giant Ocado, on the rise of e-commerce and online grocery's chances in North America.Online isn’t an economically sensible activity for incumbent retailers to enter into. It cannibalizes the physical store in favour of the online store, and it’s more expensive to fill an online order using existing physical assets. As has been demonstrated in the U.K., using existing store networks is unlikely to be the answer.There are still significant costs for running click-and-collect: You have all the costs of the traditional supermarket plus additional picking costs and costs of building and running separate click-and-collect pickup points. The winner would be the operator with the lowest fulfilment costs.
Farid Mheir's insight:
Ocado has been running for 10 years and clearly state the challenge of ecommerce many businesses face: canibalization of store sales and higher costs to sell online due to added labour. Pure plays do not face this problem, which may indeed lead to a time when online grocery shopping will be cheaper than in store. When will this be? When online volume is sufficient to have low cost of goods as existing retailers have?
Scoop.it!
Digital Strategy 101 is an overview of the current state of digital strategy and an exploration of core concepts, deliverables, and thought-leaders relevant to young practitioners.
Farid Mheir's insight:
Great insight into the new reality of advertising in the digital age.
Scoop.it!
Farid Mheir's insight:
Look at slide #9 for an overview of the approach.
Scoop.it!
Farid Mheir's insight:
The post provides six "high level characteristics" or personality traits that digital workers should have. I find them interesting in that they show the need for digital teams to transform the way things are done, change the status quo and lead by example. It is a good starting point but hardly a reference or a how-to guide. Makes for an interesting read and an eye opener, that's it.
Emma Sands's curator insight,
September 26, 2013 4:32 AM
A common sense approach which can counteract the "let's hire a miracle-worker" syndrome. A Digital Team can only improve your business and operations if you have long term goals (and strategy) as a framework for the shorter term targets.
Scoop.it!
Farid Mheir's insight:
This is a long piece which drive a very important point across for anyone interested in digital transformation: no industry or sector is protected from digital disruption. This is so because the digital world breaks down two factors—opacity and agility—that have long made consulting immune to disruption. The paper provides ample examples of disruption in the Legal and Consulting industry, as well as provides checklists and implications that should be must read for anyone of my friends in the consulting field.
Scoop.it!
The American clothing and lifestyle brand launches in Canada this week (with real time price conversion, synthesized taxes and duties and free shipping over $50, landsend.com).
Farid Mheir's insight:
Another american retailer offering delivery to Canada is one example of why Canadian retailer face increasing global competition.
Scoop.it!
Online grocery shopping is growing faster in the UK than elsewhere, and a lot can be learned from what’s happening there, especially related to shoppers’ response to supply and demand. Ocado is a good place to look. Ocado, the pure-play online grocery retailer that’s driving UK growth in this sector, is a good place to look. Redburn has pulled together a very complete analysis (pdf) that lays out why and how Ocado is expected to grow. Here are two points that caught our attention:
The current growth in online grocery shopping is being propelled by shoppers’ increasing use of and dependence on the internet, and lower costs made possible by new, higher-efficiency distribution systems.
Farid Mheir's insight:
The 70 page Redburn report is filled with data and analysis of Ocado, a grocery retailer in the UK. It provides very useful information of an actual pureplay eCommerce player, information that can be leveraged in business cases and other eCommerce analysis. Must read if you are in the eCommerce business.
Scoop.it!
Price battles may lead customers to believe that little separates one public cloud vendor from another. But there are surprising differences in the services Google, Amazon and Microsoft offer customers.
Farid Mheir's insight:
Interesting insight into differences in service level agreements. This is going to become more and more important over the years as organizations move production-grade high availability business-essential components to the cloud.
Scoop.it!
Here is a quick guide for marketing departments, techies or individuals to assist in burying negative search results on Google. Do keep in mind that the effectiveness of these actions will be determined by 1. the effort you are able to put into it and 2. The SEO and value of the site hosting the negative content.
Farid Mheir's insight:
Part of the new reality of the digital life, is how to manage the good and the bad. Here a very practical (if not easy) approach.
Jean-Marie Grange's curator insight,
September 23, 2013 10:14 AM
Simple approach to manage online reputation.
Scoop.it!
As the U.S. newspaper crisis continues, the level of newsroom employment has reached a 30-year low.
Farid Mheir's insight:
Another data point in favor of recent MIT study that claims as much as 50% of US jobs will disappear in the next 20 years due to computerization. Also goes well with the digital cliff that has happened in certain industries, news print and media for example as this chart demonstrates. My advice: retrain, retrain, retrain. Half of US jobs are vulnerable to computerization- How Technology Is Destroying Jobs via @MIT http://sco.lt/8dBxlR
Scoop.it!
This post originally appeared on LinkedIn. When you start out as an entrepreneur, it's just you and your idea, or you and your co-founder's and your idea. Then you...
Farid Mheir's insight:
Even in a digital world, Tim O'Reilly's sharing his lessons are great reminders that lots of important things are not digital: business acumen, human relationship management, attention to financials, etc. Thank you for reminding me.
Scoop.it!
Nearly 40 percent of tablet and smartphone owners use another device while watching TV, but the business models for second-screen programming and advertising are still in their infancy.
Farid Mheir's insight:
Eye opening article on different ways companies can leverage the time people spend watching tv and having a tablet at the same time. I thought that enhancement of programs or ads with additional "hidden" coupons or specials were interesting as it provides a direct link from tv to shopping behaviour that can be measured.
Scoop.it!
As you surf the Web, information is being collected about you. Web tracking is not 100% evil -- personal data can make your browsing more efficient; cookies can help your favorite websites stay in business.
Farid Mheir's insight:
I've been following collusion addon since its inception and I use it on a regular basis to remember all the digital breadcrums I leave behind as I roam around on the Internet. This is an awakening video but unfortunately the collusion software fail to offer us paths to minimize what behavioural tracking - aside from blocking all ads.
Farid Mheir's curator insight,
January 28, 2017 4:48 PM
If you don't know what behavioral tracking is about, this may be an "awakening" video: be prepared.
WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT I've been following the Firefox "collusion" add-on since its inception (it is now called "lightbeam" and you can find it here: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/lightbeam/). I use it on a regular basis to remember the digital breadcrumbs I leave behind as I roam around on the Internet. Unfortunately, the lightbeam software add-on can only help by blocking the digital ads that track us and cannot minimize the behavioral tracking itself.
On this Data Privacy Day 2017, we must use this opportunity to raise our knowledge of the digital tracking that occurs in both the virtual world and the physical world. It is now a reality that we are being tracked as much in the physical world because we carry in our pockets smartphones that track our every moves - literally. Be aware, and be careful.
Scoop.it!
What happened to recorded music is about to happen to you. But only a few banks are making the right moves from branches to online services.
Farid Mheir's insight:
Right inline with a post I wrote regarding the Digital Cliff (in french). This is so true!
Scoop.it!
The map above shows a sample of locations across the country, and line length represents distance to the nearest store. For example, in areas with a lot of lines headed to one spot is an area with fewer grocery stores. In contrast, mostly small line segments mean more grocery stores, and therefore less distance to travel to buy groceries. Places where residents have limited access to grocery stores are called food deserts. However, there's no exact definition of what limited access means or what a long distance is. Some set a 10-mile marker whereas others say a store should be less than a mile away where there is a lot of pedestrian traffic.
Farid Mheir's insight:
Just an amazing visualization
Scoop.it!
The good news is that it’s a lot easier to make the move into online by focusing on stock-ups. For one, fulfillment is easier for stock-up occasions. As stock-ups tend to focus much more on nonperishables (including nonfood items like trash bags and cleaning products), handling and temperature control issues are much reduced. And since most of the stock-up basket is not needed “right now,” the consumer will likely tolerate longer times between order and delivery. In addition, the need for precise delivery windows is substantially reduced, since nonperishable products can often be left on the doorstep.
Farid Mheir's insight:
I do not agree that Amazon is wrong (as evidenced from the success of online grocery in Europe, UK in particular), Clay highlights an important fact: specialization will make for a much easier entry-point in the online grocery eCommerce for established retailers. And maybe offer a nice niche for some startups.
Scoop.it!
Automation is reducing the need for people in many jobs. Are we facing a future of stagnant income and worsening inequality?
Farid Mheir's insight:
I am firm believer of the people-process-technology equilibrium. Digital transformation impact humans and if they are not willing to change, then technology implementation often fails. However, this paper makes the point that, over time, the transformation will occur and those that fail to change their way loose their jobs. What is even more interesting is the research that indicates which industries and sectors are most vulnerable in the next few years. Is your job on the list? A nice short companion article to read is Report Suggests Nearly Half of U.S. Jobs Are Vulnerable to Computerization
|
Curated by Farid Mheir
Get every post weekly in your inbox by registering here: http://fmcs.digital/newsletter-signup/
|
Digital transformations may take shape of robots, or machines. This may be a long shot but the video will provide some insights as to how far technology has come today - remember this is an MIT project so not a commercial thing. So look at it as something to keep on your digital radar.