Big Data, Big Impact: New Possibilities for International Development. Global Pulse is a UN initiative aimed at bringing together expertise from the public, private, development, and academic sectors to develop approaches for harnessing data for policy and action. Data collected through mobile device usage can spur effective action by reducing the time lag between the start of a trend and when governments and other authorities are able to respond to them.
Businesses that want to be successful in the world created by the perpetually connected will have to:
- Overhaul their technology — all of it: consumer-facing digital products, services, and support; technology to equip employees; in-store technology; sales process and delivery chain
- Hire people across the company who understand how digital interactivity affects their business role.
- Evolve internal processes to incorporate new talent and technology in the most effective and efficient ways possible.
- Restructure departments to implement these new processes in the smartest ways.
- Rethink how and what they forecast, measure, and budget for.
- Retrain their employees not just on these new processes and how to use the technology at their disposal but also on the speed and kind of service the new customer demands, whether that service is being delivered digitally, on the phone, or in person.
While one-quarter of the visits to e-commerce sites occur on mobile devices, only around 15 percent of purchases do, according to data from I.B.M. According to Google, 85 percent of online shoppers start searching on one device — most often a mobile phone — and make a purchase on another.
At eBay, one-third of the purchases involve mobile devices at some point, even if the final purchase is made on a computer. Once shoppers log in on a device, they do not need to log in again. Their information, like shipping and credit card details and saved items, syncs across all their devices. If an eBay shopper is interested in a certain handbag, and saves that search on a computer, eBay will send alerts to her cellphone when a new handbag arrives or an auction is about to end.
State of the Media: The Social Media Report 2012
Social media and social networking are no longer in their infancy. Social media continues to grow rapidly, offering global consumers new and meaningful ways to engage with the people, events and brands that matter to them. According to Nielsen and NM Incite’s latest Social Media Report, consumers continue to spend more time on social networks than on any other category of sites—roughly 20 percent of their total time online via personal computer (PC), and 30 percent of total time online via mobile. Additionally, total time spent on social media in the U.S. across PCs and mobile devices increased 37 percent to 121 billion minutes in July 2012, compared to 88 billion in July 2011.
(via goodideaexchange)
It Doesn’t Pay For Your Employees to be Workaholics When it comes to the 24/7 working culture in the U.S., employees may be their own worst enemy according to Leslie A. Perlow, the Konosuke Matsushita professor of leadership at Harvard Business School. Perlow conducted some research involving a team of high-powered, workaholic consultants to see if they could disconnect after working hours and also discover the results of their decisions.
The key to her research was committing as a team. With the joint effort to solidify time off, the consultants communicated more, supported one another, and held each other accountable for connecting after working hours.
Certain features are unique to a platform, because, fundamentally, they service customers and members in different ways. Taking a picture of a check to make a deposit works best on a mobile phone. That experience cannot be exactly replicated through any other channel, even though we use similar technology with ATM (image deposit), branch (branch capture) and remote (home scan) channels.
Another mobile-exclusive feature is the capability to instantaneously turn your debit card “off and on” depending on usage. In order to avoid fraud, you can keep your debit card deactivated until you need to complete a transaction. Using your mobile banking app, you can activate the card for that one purchase. The capability is also important if you are out and notice your debit card is missing. Instead of spending time on the phone with your institution while someone is running up charges on your card, you can pull out your mobile device and instantly turn the card off, then reach out to your bank to report the issue. Unless consumers carry their laptops with them while shopping, this is a feature that is exclusive to the mobile channel.
Haptic devices such as gloves or “rumble packs” used in gaming have existed for years. But we use them in closed environments where the touch doesn’t actually connect to where we are in reality. We at IBM Research think that in the next five years that our mobile devices will bring together virtual and real world experiences to not just shop, but feel the surface of produce, and get feedback on data such as freshness or quality.
The touch of something translated, based on accumulated data in a database down to an end user’s mobile device could also have the power to help us gain new understandings of our environment. Take farming, for example. Farmers could use a mobile device to determine the health of their crop by comparing what they’re growing to a dictionary of healthy options that they feels through a tablet.The technology could evolve beyond communicating textures retrieved from some database, and toward real time touch translation gained from accumulated user interaction with the technology. What is one of the first things a doctor does when treating an injured patient? Touch the injury. The patient could send a photo of an injury to let the doctor feel the injury remotely to help make a faster diagnosis – before or perhaps instead of visiting the doctor in person.
Sensr, an authoring environment, enables citizen scientists without programming skills to build mobile data collection and management tools for collecting data about the environment and their communities.
Via Follow the Crowd
In community banking, technology has been the proverbial double-edged sword. One effective edge is the ability to sell valuable products and services tailored for the individual customer. The dangerous edge is the complex and expensive burden on the banks, many of which are ill-equipped to administer the IT necessary to support these necessary advancements.
But cloud technologies will enable the sword to be swung safely – to enable banks to return to the simplicity of the past, but also serve and thrive in the future.
— Howard Bruck, CIO, Hudson Valley Bank
A new IBM study focused on Cloud and the telecom industry indicates a definite “Cloud-shift” ahead. While only 24 percent of the telecom respondents currently use cloud for sweeping innovation, more than half plan to rely on Cloud for business model innovation within the next three years. For example: gaming on TV and remote management of home appliances.
Via Is There a Cloud Hanging Over Your Business Model? - IBM Power in Data
