Drawing digital pathways on the new trade maps.
Trade drives the way people interact. People, products, money, and ideas follow the trade routes and impact everything in their path. Keeping pace with the way trade routes are changing is essential to success or even survival. New Trade Routes is working to better understand the changes so we can help our clients, investees, and grantees improve their chances of success.
Everyone in our solar system knows about the pain going on at HP. I would not be surprised if even a few extra terrestrials know about HP’s roller coaster ride of CEOs, acquisitions, write downs, re-orgs, lay offs, and other painful stuff.
Read MoreIt seems that just about every week I see something that reinforces how IBM is way out front in the customer centric-ness of big data. Here is a great video they posted on YouTube showing what they are talking about when they say Smarter Marketing:
If you want a bit more of the IBM Smarter Marketing juice, they have a whole bunch of great content on this web site:IBM Smarter Planet: Marketing
There are several good articles in the NY Times Sunday Business section today that serve to illustrate the coming world of Big Data.
30% of customers opt in to driver monitoring. This is Facebook meets car insurance. I am amazed that this many people willingly subject themselves to this kind of monitoring. Here is my post about how insurance companies have detached themselves from the basic concept of insurance. In short, insurance companies are increasingly able to exit the insurance business. They have always wanted to collect premiums, and not pay claims --- now they can do it.
Building snow skis from skier's DNA. For $1,750 you can get custom skis made to your skiing DNA (not your biological DNA thank goodness). It would be very interesting to know how unique the 1,000 pairs of skis this guy made last year are. I would not be surprised if they all boil down to a dozen or less basic designs. This kind of short run (run of 1 in this case) manufacturing brings to light IP that is actually protectable - the design process and the distribution of actual designs. Very interesting.
Dr. Langer's Lab at MIT succeeds at tech transfer. This one is a bit more of a stretch, but any new medical product involves a mountain of testing data and data proficiency and the cross over from one product to the next is indeed changing very fast due to better data management techniques.
Happy reading.
When the rental car web site says Ford Taurus or equivalent I just groan. Anyone who has done any traveling at all knows the feeling. Just as fun as finding out your hotel room is next to the elevator winch room, or that your toothpaste blew up in your bag.
Ford has been making a big push into the tech business. Advertising on all of the geek sites and pulling out all of the stops at CES. The revival of the Mustang has been well executed too. I have rented a few Mustang convertibles while on vacation and really loved them.
Getting your product in front of potential new customers in a real life trial is risky because it produces both potential new customers but if the product is not well matched to the customer, it can easily eliminate potential customers.
In the last two weeks I have been dealt the Taurus card twice and I have to say they have been great. What a surprise! Stylish, well put together, and fun to drive. The rental introduction certainly worked for me with Ford.
Not so lucky with Microsoft and Sync. I was eager to try out Sync and it is a disaster. I got it to connect to my phone by bluetooth, but it would sometimes work and other times not work. The user interface is not intuitive and any of the voice activation stuff will require half a day spent with the manual.
This is just one more situation where Microsoft shows up on the consumer radar as a company that just cannot make products that work -- let alone that are fashionable. Lucky for Ford, I have not found other auto computer systems to be all that easy to use either. So maybe Microsoft Sync will not prevent people from buying Fords. But Microsoft Sync will turn people off to other Microsoft products.