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Beacon marketing has been a major focus for marketers for several years, but they've had surprisingly little traction in the real world. Find out why. 
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Surfer en toute liberté, c'est possible! Il existe des alternatives aux Gmail, Slack et autres Dropbox, qui collectent vos données en échange de leurs services. Guide pas à pas pour reprendre le contrôle.
Farid Mheir's insight:
(in french) Afraid that Google and others know too much about you? Want to know how to live and work outside of the major tools and solutions? This blog post offers a list of solutions to help you do just that.
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Crafting with CNC mills, routers and other power tools isn't all that easy, especially if you're new to it. You'll frequently want a template, and it's all too easy to mess up a cut if you haven't developed a steady hand. Shaper doesn't think it has to be daunting, though: it's launching Origin, an augmented reality power cutter.
Farid Mheir's insight:
This is a great idea: a power tool with intelligence that drives the motors and controls the drill bit, ensuring you cut to perfection every time. Basically you've become just a fancy motor for the tool to travel and perform its work. Brilliant. Watch the videos to see how it works for real. Expect to see more of this in the future: smart tools that go beyond the mundane to invade all aspects of the physical world, including in this case the construction industry.
Also: https://www.engadget.com/2016/08/23/hololens-24-core-chip-makes-vivid-ar-possible/
Not a surprise but rather an interesting news snippet: dedicated chipsets for AR are starting to appear. This paves the way for lower cost, better quality solutions. Be aware, AR may become a reality in the coming years as forecasted...
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Ecommerce research, latest blog posts and training. Includes case studies, recommended reports, buyer's guides and supplier search.
Farid Mheir's insight:
A great blog on different elements regarding eCommerce, from strategies to solutions and statistics. Here, one post that identifies the issues that prevent ecommerce deployment.
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Elon Musk recently explained at Code Conference why he believes we're all living in a simulation. His argument that such a simulation is possible is based on the exponential developments in video game graphics: "If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then the games will become indistinguishable from reality, even if that rate of advancement drops by one thousand from what it is now. It's a given that we're clearly on [that] trajectory."
Farid Mheir's insight:
Just watch the video and you'll see. We live in the matrix! ;-)
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Thanks to a sleek new computer chip developed by IBM, we are one step closer to making computers work like the brain. The neuromorphic chip is made from a phase-change material commonly found in rewritable optical discs (confused? more on this later). Because of this secret sauce, the chip’s components behave strikingly similar to biological neurons: they can scale down to nanometer size and perform complicated computations rapidly with little energy.
Farid Mheir's insight:
A detailed description of the new computer chip by IBM that mimics more closely than ever the workings of our brain neurons.
WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT When Intel created the integrated semiconductor in 1971, it marked a revolution because it allowed electronics to be mass produced and operate at higher speed. Today, neurons are built using digital technologies and often are coded in software. With this chip, we have the opportunity to integrate many neurons into a single computer chip, and possibly achieve improvements in artificial intelligence.
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Plastc helps you pay any way and anywhere you want*. With a magnetic stripe and barcode display, your Plastc Card will work in all the places you already frequent. Plus, with NFC and Chip and PIN capabilities a software update away, you'll soon be ready for the future of payments.
Farid Mheir's insight:
A single credit card that can emulate all your other cards. At 155$ and 50$/year subscription, it is not cheap but a great idea to replace all cards in your wallet.
I have not tested the device however.
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Two new Google machine learning APIs can be used by mere mortals in businesses to build better software, the company said.
Farid Mheir's insight:
A review of recent frameworks and APIs that Google has made public to help in the creation of artificial intelligence solutions.
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$72 million-worth stolen, Bitcoin price plummets, individual customer accounts hacked despite multisignature protection
Farid Mheir's insight:
Describes how multisignature transactions can protect digital currencies - and the limitations of that technology.
WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT Blockchain technology that is behind bitcoin currency remains immatures and open to fraud. I expect this to improve in the coming years as large FInancial organizations come to leverage this new tech.
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The Western caricature of Chinese internet firms needs a reboot. GOOGLE left. Facebook is blocked. Amazon is struggling to make headway. And if further proof were needed that China’s tech market is a world apart, this week seemed to provide conclusive evidence. Uber, a ride-hailing service that is the world’s most valuable startup, decided to sell its local unit to Didi Chuxing, a Chinese rival (see article). Its China dream, like those of so many before, is dead. For many, the lessons of this latest capitulation are clear. China is a sort of technological Galapagos island, a distinct and isolated environment in which local firms flourish. Chinese firms are protected from external competition by government regulation and the Great Firewall. And that protection means that they need not innovate but can thrive by copying business models developed in the West. In short, China is closed, its firms are cosseted and their talent is for mimicry.
Farid Mheir's insight:
Provides context on the recent merger between UBER and DIDI for ride sharing in China.
WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT China has graduated to a real technology startup hotspot that competes quite well with Silicon Valley/Alley and others in the USA. When creating digital strategies for global companies and markets, you may be wise to prioritize China over the US as the new economic world order takes shape.
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Farid Mheir's insight:
Summary post that explains what deep linking is and what it is used for in mobile devices and apps. Links to a full length report (for a fee).
WHY THIS IMPORTANT mobile apps have limitations when you need to link to specific pages or products from digital mobile apps for examples. This technology and solutions such as Branch may provide a solution for digital marketing teams.
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The enterprise-architecture (EA) department can play a central role in reducing the complexity associated with digital transformations. Most companies have a dedicated EA group embedded within the larger IT organization. This group typically oversees the entire systems architecture, including business processes and IT infrastructure. It helps to establish rules for and processes around technology usage to ensure consistency across business units and functions. As such, this group can help the CEO and others on the senior leadership team redesign their companies’ business and IT architectures so that they can avoid some of the pitfalls cited earlier and compete more effectively in a digital era.
Farid Mheir's insight:
A very positive viewpoint on the potential contribution that enterprise architecture can play in a digital transformation.
WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT EA groups has historically failed to deliver the value they promised. Here McKinsey suggests they can be an essential team to bridge the business - technology gap. I remain sceptical as most EA groups lack the desired skills to communicate effectively because they focus on technology and infrastructure. Let's use this article to guide EA teams to improve and truly contribute.
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From
zapier
Bots are handy little assistants that hang out in your app, wait for commands, and then find or create the thing you need. They're another way to use your favorite apps without needing to open those apps, running automated tasks for you. They're the big new thing—a core part of Slack, Facebook Messenger, and Telegram's newest features—and yet they seem too complicated to build and use. Turns out, bots are simple enough for anyone to make. Here's how you can make a bot to do anything you want in a few minutes without any coding—along with a dozen examples of bots that real teams are using today, and a Slack bot cheat sheet for a handy reference to help build your own bots.
Farid Mheir's insight:
A detailed how-to article on how to build a chat bot using Zapier, a popular online programming automation tool.
WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT Robots or "bots" will become more and more common in the near future as they integrate seamlessly into our most common chat programs such as Facebook messenger. They will become popular because they allow any company to have a presence inside popular mobile apps and do not require any installation from users: they just type in requests and get responses in return. Directions, orders, and information will be streamed by those autonomous programs to help you fulfill daily tasks. This article highlights an important aspect of bot programming: they will become easier and easier to create, especially for common and recurring problems.
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Leaders who understand and pay attention to technology can make the difference between success and failure.
Farid Mheir's insight:
A summary of the PWC 2015 digital IQ survey.
WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT Digital transformation has had a profound impact on the role of the CIO, with business unit spending more than IT on digital technology. This has been predicted by Gartner years ago and it appears to materialize now. In that context, what should the role of the CIO be? This paper provides some direction.
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Mckinsey ran a comprehensive study of nearly 800 different jobs in the United States, ranging from CEOs to fast food workers. Between these roles, they found 2,000 individual work activities, and assessed them against 18 different capabilities that could potentially be automated. In their analysis, they found that 45% of work activities representing $2 trillion in wages can already by automated based on proven technology that currently exists. A further 13% of work activities in the U.S. economy could be automated if the technologies used to understand and process human language were brought up to the median human level of competence.
Farid Mheir's insight:
An interactive chart that graphs 800 different jobs along with their automation potential - as estimated by McKinsey.
WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT If you are in school or just out of school, this chart should be of particular interest. For all the others, this is essential must read tooling when preparing strategy and planning for the future of your business unit, organization - large or startup.
Jobs with highest potential for automation represent opportunities for cost reduction, process improvements to reduce lead times, or creation of the automated tools and software that will replace them. For example:
And 798 other sources of inspiration.
Abel Linares's curator insight,
July 30, 2016 1:08 PM
Potencial amortización #digital del #trabajo según Mckinsey.
Gráfico interactivo que analizar 800 trabajos diferentes. Concluye que con la tecnología actual el 45% del trabajo se puede automatizar, un 13% adicional cuando las máquinas entiendan el lenguaje humano a un nivel de ciudadano medio. Las previsiones son instalar 1.3 millones de robots entre 2015 y 2018
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Stay up-to-date with the latest product announcements and new advancements from Automated Insights.
Farid Mheir's insight:
The company automated insights uses its AI tools to automatically write summary of baseball games (http://bit.ly/2a9g7qR), financial portfolio (http://bit.ly/2a9gG3T), and many other. This blog describes many of these applications.
WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT I wrote about automated insights in the past (http://sco.lt/7FRff7) as it was starting and have been watching ever since. It is important to take notice that AI has been hired by the Associated Press to write summary texts that go straight to the wire without human intervention (http://sco.lt/7FRff7).
This is a trend worth watching as it means AI is slowing replacing human workers with machine intelligence in fields that were previously though impossible - here the redaction of human readable texts and stories. I wrote about data on why no job is safe from automatization and robotization (http://sco.lt/64xeyX).
Anyone putting together a digital strategy must absolutely consider the use of such AI tools in the coming years, and thus have a roadmap with trials starting as soon as NOW.
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To address this problem, we began applying machine learning two years ago to operate our data centres more efficiently. And over the past few months, DeepMind researchers began working with Google’s data centre team to significantly improve the system’s utility. Using a system of neural networks trained on different operating scenarios and parameters within our data centres, we created a more efficient and adaptive framework to understand data centre dynamics and optimize efficiency.
Farid Mheir's insight:
Google uses artificial intelligence to analyze energy consumption in its data center to improve cooling and reduce energy consumption by 40%.
The paper also links to other most interesting links on data center operations including:
WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT Energy is the main cost of data center operations so this is great news. Companies should thus use this news to further move their computing to the cloud as large data centers - Google, Amazon, Microsoft and others - are way more efficient than anything even large corporations can do.
This is true for energy consumption, and I contend it is also true for many other areas including security and speed of implementation. It is essential that any digital transformation make cloud computing the primary de facto standard over any on-premise operation.
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Those who identify the potential of new technologies, trends and technological progress at an early stage have a competitive advantage and build the foundation for innovation. Constantly increasing technological complexity is leading to a growing number of areas that are relevant for our company to keep an eye on.
Farid Mheir's insight:
A report that highlights key technology trends in the insurance industry.
WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT Always good to know what is hot and what is not in different industries. Take with a grain of salt, as with all predictions...!
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From
qz
When programmers at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory set out to develop the flight software for the Apollo 11 space program in the mid-1960s, the necessary technology did not exist. They had to invent it. They came up with a new way to store computer programs, called "rope memory," and created a special version of the assembly programming language. Assembly itsel
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For 2016, we have a first-timer with our decision to stick to the 37 trend blocks that we have identified for 2015. We feel that they are — without an exception — completely relevant to describe the technology trends for 2016. Then again, although you will see the same players, the stories will turn out to be quite different: there are new cases, new links, new perspectives,
Farid Mheir's insight:
This is Capgemini business IT transformation guidance. In 146 pages, it presents cases studies of digital transformations and key technology building blocks that were used to deliver them.
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Following yesterday’s news of the NHTSA’s investigation into a fatal crash involving a Tesla Model S, Mobileye, the Israeli technology company helping..
Farid Mheir's insight:
Fatal car crash of a Tesla on highway using automated driving mode. The post provides some information about the crash, which appears to be due to a condition that was never programmed into the system (side hit).
WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT Autonomous vehicles will become more and more popular in the future and this event reminds us of the complexities involved. We are very early in this field and much like aviation there should be formal investigations and corrective actions taken when such crash occur so that all manufacturers can learn from crashes. This calls for an international database of car crashes and there should be mandatory requirements for new self-driving systems to "pass" the exam ie. to ensure they all react correctly to previously seen car crashes and other incidents.
This thus becomes an opportunity to learn from the global past experience of millions of drivers and billions of kilometers driven in all conditions, across all countries. I am not aware of such a central database but would expect it to become a reality if we want autonomous driving to be a transformation beyond what we have today: each driver learning for themselve.
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Remember your first attaboy or attagirl... That pat on the back, look of approval, or recognition you deserved for accomplishing something special? There’s just
Farid Mheir's insight:
Explains how runkeeper uses eCommerce to reward customers and achieve impressive conversion rates of 4% to 7%.
WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT We too often think of eCommerce in classic, undifferentiated terms: catalog of products, shopping cart, checkout. This paper offers an interesting twist to the whole thing, embedding eCommerce within the mobile app and unlocking certain products based on goals achieved by customers. Retailers should apply this approach to leverage their eCommerce platform beyond the classic website: behaviour-based rewards, special categories, loyalty-based commerce, mobile commerce, social commerce, etc. The eCommerce platform should become a platform not merely a transactional tool.
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Snapchat has been known for some bold (and perplexing) moves in regards to content features, attempting to revamp event marketing through Stories, redefine..
Farid Mheir's insight:
Snapchat has been developing a pair of glasses with integrated camera, similar to Google glasses.
WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT Google glasses have suffered from bad publicity (labelling wearers as "glassholes") because of possible privacy infringements. However, it is only a question of time before those devices make it to market and revolutionize social networks, memories and our ability to merge digital with real world. I believe there is a huge opportunity in businesses to leverage solutions such as wearable glasses for all kinds of work: repairs, training, security, governance and recording for historical purposes and audits. Is this time the right one for smart glasses?
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Dark traffic is affecting your site and skewing your analytics, making it tough to figure out how your marketing is doing. Here's how to deal with it.
Farid Mheir's insight:
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.
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The annual Velocity conference in Santa Clara is just around the corner and everyone involved is full of anticipation. Interesting story—about 9 years ago, Steve Souders and Jesse Robbins realized that their separate "tribes" were talking about many of the same things. Frontend developers and engineers were figuring out how to make web pages faster and more reliable, while web operations folks were making deployments faster and more resilient. That's how Velocity came to be.
Farid Mheir's insight:
45min video presentation from 2009 that explains how Flickr development and operations team have agreed to work together to increase the speed and the quality of the code they deploy.
WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT This is the original talk that gave rise to the devOps movement. It is as useful today as it was 7 years ago, proving that devOps is a really important and profound cultural change. I urge every developer to listen to itt, but also avery IT resource, including and especially CIOs. Then ask yourself: how can we do devOps in our own organization?
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Curated by Farid Mheir
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Beacons promised to revolutionize marketing in stores. They were supposed to be everywhere by 2016 when they launched in 2014. Today they are nowhere to be found. This article identifies reasons for this, which are related to the immaturity of the technology and lack of operational support.
The post contains a number of very useful links.
Interested in a review of the potential for beacons? Then you should also read this post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/shane-paul-neil/is-ibeacon-marketing-fina_b_10508218.html