To gain necessary capabilities and expertise in mobile, social, cloud and analytics, organizations often need to partner for (out)sourcing.
(via IBM - The power of partnership: Has your outsourcing evolved? - United States)
The endless aisle. The outdoor gear and apparel retailer Moosejaw Mountaineer has 11 retail stores in the U.S., with 80% of sales (70% of in-store) coming from online and mobile commerce . Store associates use iPod touch and mini-iPads to check competitive prices and extend a price match. If a store does not carry what a shopper is looking for, store associates order the item online if it is in the warehouse and ship it to the customer for free.
” We are a few years away from an economy based on fun,” says consultant @marwschaefer. Games are the newest layer of engagement after augmented reality, mobil and social.
(via The future of business: Six layers of customer engagement)
60,000 pages of architectural drawings for Dallas-Fort Worth airport are put on cloud, saving over $1.2M in paper costs alone, as well as reducing contractor mistakes and making site planning more collaborative.
(via Huge construction firm uses iPads and Apple TV to save millions | CITEworld)
IBM Research: IBM Customer Experience Lab
To help its clients successfully navigate these changes, IBM has established the IBM Customer Experience Lab to invent new ways for them to provide best-in-class customer experiences across their many channels. Located at the T.J. Watson Research Center, with additional virtual collaborators around the world, the IBM Customer Experience Lab is a partnership between IBM Research and IBM Global Business Services. A dedicated team of researchers and consultants will work with clients on customer insights, customer engagement, and employee engagement through the use of mobile, social, cloud and analytics technologies.
Mobility and healthcare innovation
Mobility is a big part of the solution for healthcare innovators:
- Sproxil, in partnership with IBM, detects counterfeit medications. Patients scratch off a sticker to reveal a code they text to Sproxil, for authentication.
- Daktari 1525, from Safaricomm, is a 24-hour call-in medical service in Kenya, where healthcare providers are extremely scarce.
- Proteus Digital Health has created tiny sensors swallowed with pills that relay information to your smartphone about how the drug is affecting your body.
- Dexcom brings consumer electronics design sensibility to devices for continuous glucose monitoring — including LCD display and customizable alerts.
- Logiq from GE Healthcare is an ultrasound device as portable as a laptop. It provides 3D scans of major league players moments after an injury.
- Walgreens mobile app lists local pharmacists by expertise, medication minders and more.
- Athenahealth puts medical records in the cloud and will soon be able to provide doctors access to patients’ records on the go.
- Teladoc provides medical consultations by phone and video. The goal is to reduce unnecessary office visits, and allow physicians to connect directly with patients.
Via Fast Company, The World’s Top 10 Most Innovative Companies in Health Care | Most Innovative Companies 2013 ,
IBM makes big play for mobile enterprise
A major mobile initiative from IBM involves software, services and partnerships with other large vendors.
IBM. plans to deploy consultants to give companies mobile shopping strategies, write mobile apps, crunch mobile data and manage a company’s own mobile assets securely. Thousands of employees have been trained in mobile technologies and corporate millions will be spent on research and acquisitions in coming years.
New Year, New World | New Voices for Our Path Forward (by The GBS Social Business Channel)
Using mobile devices and a new, novel collaborative video production process, millennial generation IBMers share their perspective on the path forward for IBM’s consulting organization, Global Business Services
(via smarterplanet)
Mobile carriers in Africa poised for big data breakthroughs with advent of smart phones
Looking ahead, the most promising of the big data leapfrogging opportunities for Africa lie within the telecom industry. Mobile phones are now widespread, as are SMS based services such as mobile payments and money transfer. Next, observers expect rapid adoption of affordable smart phones capable of handling more sophisticated applications, such as social networking. It all adds up to a massive amount of data in the hands of the mobile carriers about what people are doing with their phones and where they are.
As the mobile market continues to develop, the carriers will be in a strong position to offer their customers new applications and services. They’ll not only own the relationship with the customer, but they’ll see data patterns in customer behavior that helps them anticipate customer’s needs. Marketers have long dreamed of being able to address not just market segments but individual customers. Big data could finally turn this dream into a reality.
Why mobile app development should come in-house
While it’s fine to strike out on your own with an agency for your first mobile app, as customers grow to expect more, you’re going to need to connect that app back into the systems of record and systems of operation that your company has. To do that you’re going to need to figure out how to effectively work with your IT organization, because they own that data and those systems.
— Jeffrey Hammond, principal analyst at Forrester Research, Cambridge, MA.
