By Alistair Rennie
GM, Collaboration Solutions
IBM Software Group
The iPad 2 and Kindle Fire will top many holiday wish lists this year. But not only can you play Angry Birds on these devices; tablets can be used at work, too.
Increasingly, employees are bringing in the technology they use at home and demanding the IT department accommodate them.
For years, companies have issued mobile devices to busy executives and sales representatives who depend on their company-issued devices to get the job done. However this thinking is antiquated. In today’s increasingly mobile culture, accessing critical business applications via mobile devices is a must-have for all employees.
In response, many organizations worldwide are adopting a BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) approach. Approximately 72 percent of firms surveyed by Aberdeen Group say they allow employees to use their own smartphones or tablets for work. And a recent IDC survey said that 95 percent of workers have used technology they purchased for themselves for work. I recently met with a CEO of large and fairly conservative company in Germany who purchased 1,000 iPad devices for their employees.
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Steve Hamm in
Andy Stanford-Clark lives on the Isle of Wight, just off the southern coast of the United Kingdom. He commutes several times per week via ferry to his job as an engineer at IBM’s Hursley software lab. Frustrated that he would sometimes arrive at the island’s ferry terminal in the morning only to find that weather conditions had slowed or halted ferry traffic, Stanford-Clark invented a method for alerting ferry riders when the transport system had shut down or there were delays. It involves tracking the location of ferries via GPS sensors and sending out alerts via a Twitter account. At the heart of the system is a messaging protocol called Message Queuing Telemetry Transport, or MQTT for short.
MQTT is not easily digested by non-techies, but know this: it has the potential of doing for the Internet of Things what the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) did for the Internet that connects people. It makes it possible, potentially, for every device on the network to communicate and share information with every other device.
Today marks a new departure for the protocol. Its creators, IBM and Italy’s Eurotech, are contributing the software to the Eclipse Foundation where it will be available to anyone who wants to use it under an open-source software license. The goal is to turn MQTT into a pervasive, cross-industry standard that will accelerate the transmission of information not just between machines but from businesses to businesses and from businesses to consumers–as in the Isle of Wight ferry application. “The goal is to get people to come together around this protocol and use it to connect all sorts of device and systems–so we can share information more easily,” says Andy Piper, a software researcher at the Hursley lab who is involved in the strategy for messaging technologies.
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Lia P Davis in
Guest post by Jonathan Taplin, Professor at the University of Southern California and the Director of the school’s Annenberg Innovation Lab.
What a thriller! After 11 innings last night, the St. Louis Cardinals forced a winner-takes-all Game 7 with tonight sure to be a great finale to close out this October classic.
The historic Game 6 also forced the Twitterverse to crown two new tweet and sentiment leaders in IBM and USC Annenberg’s latest analysis from the USC Social Sentiment Index. Due to their late inning heroics, the Texas Rangers’ Josh Hamilton netted the highest volume of tweets and an 88% positive sentiment while the biggest hero of the night, St. Louis Cardinals’ David Freese led his team in tweets and an 86% positive sentiment. Extra innings afforded diehard fans the opportunity to share their sentiment and push these two players over the top.
So what does Game 6’s analysis tell us? Social media fans are highly vocal, generating the largest volume of tweets during the final moments of the game. These real-time fan insights could have tremendous impact on how and when marketers engage these fans.
Get ready for an awesome Game 7 and a final World Series analysis where we’ll not only crown the Social Media MVP of the series but take a closer look all the cool trends we found with fans’ sentiment toward both teams’ managers, highest spike in a player’s tweets and much more. Stay tuned!
- Learn about how IBM and USC AIL are conducting the social media analysis project.
- Read more about “Behind the Diamond: Understanding MLB Fan Sentiment.”
- Read more about social media analysis from Games 3 & 4.
- Read about social media analysis from Games 1 and 2.
- Check out images from the World Series Social Sentiment Index
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Back in the 1960s, when a single mainframe computer filled an entire room, most of the data was stored on huge reel-to-reel tape drives. Today, most business computers use disk drives for storage, but, for the media and entertainment industry it’s back to the future.
That’s because TV networks and movie studios have so much digital video content to store (686,000 petabytes, growing to 1,780,000 petabytes in 2015, according to Coughlin Associates) and they can’t afford to stash it on expensive disk drives. So they need tape drives that are updated for modern times–enabling them to easily find just the section of video they want, when they want it.
Now, imagine a tense scene on a highway in the Nevada desert in March of 2009. David Pease, an IBM Research scientist, was driving a rented van toward Las Vegas while Michael Richmond, another researcher, typed away on his laptop computer and made frequent phone calls to Lucas Villa Real, an IBM scientist based in Brazil.
They were putting the finishing touches on a technology that’s now called Linear Tape File System (LTFS), which was designed to provide broadcasters and movie studios with the responsiveness and searchability of disk storage at the price of tape storage. They were set up to demonstrate the technology to attendees of the National Association of Broadcaster’s annual convention. The drive from IBM Research – San Jose to Vegas took 10 hours. Richmond and Real were coding and debugging all the way. “It was down to the wire, but it worked well enough that people saw the potential of it and they got very excited,” says Pease.
He and some of his IBM colleagues will be attending the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Primetime Emmy Engineering Awards ceremony today at the Renaissance Hotel in Los Angeles. At the ceremony, IBM and Fox Networks Group will receive an Emmy for media workflow transformation and pioneering the development and application of LTFS.
Here’s the famous Did You Know 4.0 video about the proliferation of digital media and communications.
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By Trent Taylor, Strategic Marketing Director, XO Communications
The telecommunications industry is ultra-competitive and growing at a rapid pace as more and more people become active Internet and mobile users. This presents both enormous opportunities and challenges for communication service providers (CSPs) who have to keep pace with an ever-changing marketplace, and meet rising consumer demands efficiently. Where Internet and mobile phone access used to be considered a luxury, it is now a necessity. Simply consider the landscape for the consumer today: Continue Reading »
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Lia P Davis in
Guest post by Jonathan Taplin, Professor at the University of Southern California and the Director of the school’s Annenberg Innovation Lab. Next week Professor Taplin will be participating in the IBM Information on Demand and Business Analytics Forum (IOD11).
Two more World Series games played and millions of tweets later, IBM and USC Annenberg Innovation Lab students uncovered new findings in fans’ social sentiment in our ongoing World Series analysis.
Despite lower TV ratings for Game 3, we saw the volume of tweets increase from Game 2 as baseball’s diehard fans continue to turn to the Twitterverse and other social media platforms to pontificate about the game play and players and coaches on the field.
Using the same metrics from our initial World Series analysis, the number of “sentiment” tweets – that is, tweets both positive and negative, in our most recent sampling showed:
– In Game 3: St. Louis Cardinals’ Albert Pujols and the Texas Rangers’ Nelson Cruz were the most tweeted among players and coaches.
– In Game 4, the Cardinals’ Albert Pujols kept his crown and the Rangers’ Derek Holland led his team for total number of tweets.
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Great game play not only can result in a W for the team, but also a W for individual social media accolades. In this most recent analysis, St. Louis Cardinals’ Albert Pujols, amassed unbelievable numbers following his historic baseball performance, receiving the most tweets on his team for both Game 3 and Game 4 and the most positive sentiment at 81% and 87% respectively. The same could be said for the Rangers’ Derek Holland in Game 4, who received the most tweets and an 83% positive sentiment. Rangers’ Michael Young netted most positive sentiment on his team for Game 3 with 83%. For those keeping score at home, the positive sentiment is the result of ‘T’ scores – the ratio of positive to negative sentiment indicated in tweets.
Our second analysis accurately correlates players’ large volumes of tweets to fans’ positive feedback, reiterating how important social media platforms are to capturing consumer sentiment and uncovering actionable insights. More importantly, it affords us an opportunity to view consistencies and inconsistencies with sentiment—what players continue to stay hot amongst fans, who is falling off the bandwagon, via real-time data to make or change decisions, be it promotions or other marketing efforts. It also goes to show those relying solely on mediums such as TV to uncover new fan insights will be at a disadvantage to their peers who are turning to social media to analyze sentiment to get a real-time temperature check on public attitudes as well as customer segments like diehard baseball fans that can result in making more insightful decisions.
Stay tuned for our final analysis at the conclusion of the World Series. Enjoy the rest of the Series!
- Read about social media analysis from Games 1 and 2.
- Read more about “Behind the Diamond: Understanding MLB Fan Sentiment.”
- Learn about how IBM and USC AIL are conducting the social media analysis project.
- Check out images from the World Series Social Sentiment Index
Mobile money is all the rage in developing markets around the world. Ordinary people who don’t have credit cards or even traditional bank accounts are using their mobile phones to make payments, buy things and manage their money in Kenya, South Africa, the Philippines, India and elsewhere. But there’s a glitch: Today’s mobile money systems are vulnerable to theft and fraud. That’s why scientists at IBM Research – India are developing analytics technologies to make mobile money a safer bet for individuals and society.
I don’t use the word “society” lightly. The stakes are high. The Indian government, for instance, has identified what is calls “financial inclusion” as a national priority. Hundreds of millions of Indians have not benefited from the country’s rapid economic rise. If they don’t see progress eventually, their discontent could destabilize the country. “This is a large business opportunity for us, and it has major social implications,” says Manish Gupta, director of the India lab. One of the lab’s top agenda items is developing technologies tailored for emerging markets–where rapid growth and severe privation often walk hand in hand.
Gupta and his colleagues are working with telecommunications and banking companies to develop technology solutions that will address the mobile money crime problem as it emerges. Gupta also expects the initiative to be a topic for discussion at the lab’s IBM Centennial Colloquium, which is being conducted in a Delhi hotel today. The theme of the colloquium is India 2020: Technologies for a Smarter Nation.
The confab is part of an IBM Centennial program designed to convene thought leaders – including leading researchers and scientists, academics, leaders of industries, public policy makers and key IBM clients — for a series of talks and panel discussions on transformational technologies and their potential impact on the world. In India’s case, about 250 students are also attending.
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By Marie-Anne (Kui) Kinyanjui
IBM external relations, Kenya
What seems like a random question was actually a something that was being asked this week by leaders from government and business that attended the Smarter Cities Roundtable in Nairobi this week. Stakeholders from the Kenyan government, private sector and civil society gathered to identify Nairobi’s most significant challenges in order to frame discussion on technology could ease the city’s transitional growth.
In the next 20 years, Nairobi’s population – already the largest on the East coast of Africa – is set to exceed that of these three mega cities in coming years. The Kenyan capital’s population will balloon by 65 per cent over the next decade to stand at between 8-10 million, presenting a unique challenge to a city that is already struggling under to accommodate the needs of its residents. The main challenges are transportation, utilities, safety and security and urban planning.
So as leaders from government and business look for best practice from other cities for how have tackled their urban challenges, the examples of Rio, London and Singapore are actually more relevant than we might have suspected.
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Jack Mason in
UPDATE: You can now catch the replay of the webcast recorded live Wednesday, April 27, from 12:30 -1:30 EST.
Topic: Companies increasingly need to transform functions from operations to customer care via new digital techniques and technologies. But can they do this fast enough, and far enough, to keep pace with the growing power of their connected customers?
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Panelists:
- Ragna Bell - (moderator) IBM Institute for Business Value, Strategy & Transformation Leader
- Robin Carey – CEO, Social Media Today
- Saul Berman – IBM Global Business Services, Global Innovation & Growth Strategy Leader
- Andrew McAfee - a principal research scientist at the Center for Digital Business in the MIT Sloan School of Management
- Paul Papas - IBM Global Business Services, Global Leader, Smarter Commerce
About the ibm Global Business Services vPanel Series: vPanels are webcam-based interactive webcasts to foster dialogue between thought leaders and viewers. Viewers can participate via the integrate chat to share their views and questions. Subscribe to the series to sample past discussions and to be alerted to new ones.
Download the complete IBM Institute for Business Value study (1.30MB)
