The combination of the physical and digital world is occuring before our eyes. Its possibilities are as limitless as ones imagination. Increasingly you will see examples of these applications. Be it the GE smart grid promotion or business cards created by Zehnder Communications; both shown in the videos below. This is just the beginning. If you want to learn more, and you should, Kevin Bonsor shares a great article on the topic here. Discover how the integration of digital and physical will increasingly impact our lives.
Let's face it, email has become an extremely undisciplined form of collaborative communication for organizations. From my own experience I see it every day. It starts with a question or comment, copied among a group, and then spreads, unknowingly, to become a waste of resources and time. What to do ? Well we've all been participating increasingly with social networks and there are a lot of potential there. Its just that organizations using social networks haven't been able to leverage their potential as efficiently as they could be until the advent of tools like salesforce.com's chatter.
Salesforce.com announced at its Dreamforce event in San Francisco this past week something called Chatter, a "collaboration cloud" platform that integrates social network features. Chatter proposed to bring the flexibility and ease of use found in applications such as Facebook to businesses, enabling feeds from business applications, content and users that can be followed, profiled and shared. Salesforce.com plans to begin offering Chatter in 2010. The end of email as the mainstream method of communicative collaboration is approaching.
"Only by getting people to "Shop different" will Apple get people to "Think different" . . . and ultimately, to Buy different", that was the comment shared by David Lang a number of years ago and he was some what correct. Despite possible channel conflicts and other challenges, Apple's is becoming a retail powerhouse, unveiling another 50 stores this year in 8 countries around the world including the new Manhattan location on the left - watch the video on abc news here and from the WSJ below. Impressive to say the least.
According to an article at MacCentral, Apple concluded that "'destination' locations such as Best Buy and Office Depot won't work for the 95 percent of non-Mac computer users." In doing so they realized the need to create "experiences" via retail space that engages consumers to understand unique attributes of their products and brand to grow market share. In this case bricks and mortar distribution is a synergistic strategy that serves to educate consumers in a unique way. This strategy integrates physical retail into a largely digital distribution model. When considering how other concept retailers like the "Discovery Store" or Sharper Image were unable to make this work, we'll see how sustainable Apple's strategy for retail will be in the long-term. Regardless, when visiting these new locations - they certainly are all about the customer.
Not to get ahead of myself, which I do at times, but you must watch some of the videos below, they'll blow your mind - and its only the beginning.
In all industries there will be an increasing move by insightful participants to benefit from the merger of the physical and digital. This strategy enables the creation of new value paradigms; thus continuing the relevance of business models - like magazines, among others. For example, Esquire Magazine's 2009 Best and Brightest issue includes "Augmented Reality", which layers data like audio, graphics, and animation over live video. Wow !
The Augmented reality term was coined in 1992 by Tom Caudell while working for Boeing, where factory workers used AR to sort parts. Now, with video cameras available in so many electronic devices, AR applications range from advertising to architecture and gaming to pizza boxes. The technology had not been applied in an editorial scale, until Esquire did it. The Barbarian Group is a leader in the application of this and other technologies.
Here is my initial thought: are you kidding me ? David's theory is that the adoption of Cloud Computing would be far more "acceptable" (aka politically correct) if we didn't have executives like Unisys's Richard Marcello saying: "We were able to eliminate a whole bunch of actually U.S.-based jobs and kind of replace them with two folks out of India to serve a 1,200-person engineering organization."
To be fair, I think David is a really brite guy and he correctly observes that technology innovation often sets forth unrealistic expectations when it comes to realizing cost reductions and other benefits. But to read this: "The message here is that the cloud computing industry needs to think a bit about what it's saying in the promotion of cloud computing. Some of the "cloud computing experts" are sending wrong and inaccurate messages. In other words, they're not helping." What are they not helping ? Don't you believe that enhancing the quality of systems and reducing the expense of deploying them for the benefit of customers isn't at the core of innovation ? Isn't that what its all about ? For those who don't think so I suggest a view of Danny Devito's Larry the liquidator speech from the movie Other People's Money below. Amen, you just heard a prayer - the prayer for the "dead".
Bottom line is significant segments of IT, along with players in a variety of industries, are in peril because their value paradigms are erroding, no longer as relevant to the market. Its only a matter of time until a combination of forces including globalism, technology advancements and mega cultural shifts turn over their proverbial apple carts. David do you honestly believe that the "press" people get around the "truth" (being that reengineering significant aspects of business models via cloud computing will eliminate vast segments of the job market and redeploy them abroad) will stop this revolution ? That's analogous to what GM thought ten years ago about its industry. You get the idea. Perhaps it would help advance our industry to be more transparent about obsolesence, change, and continuing to get an increasing share of a shrinking market. Think about the buggy whip example Larry cites in his speech.
