Big Data and Five Forces Shaping the Future. The 21st century didn’t start in the year 2000.
It started in 2010, the same way the 20th century began in 1908 with the advent of the automobile. It became the century of highways and freeways, the century of the auto—the American century. Similarly, if you look at what happened a couple of years ago, there were all kinds of crossover points that happened around the same time: more cell phones than landlines, more laptops than desktops, more debit cards than credit cards, more farmed fish than wild fish, more girls in college than boys. I am dedicated to the belief that if you get the right information to the right place at the right time and in the right context, you can make the world a better place. This is something I call the two-second advantage. The first is the massive explosion of data. Anything that can be reduced to a flowchart will be automated « 21st Century Prosperity.
Can A Pattern Recognition App Improve Your Creativity? InboundWriter Thinks So. When a company's bottom line depends on your app working the right way, you just can’t hand them a gleeful user experience and expect them to pay per seat.
Training, productivity and infallibility are the priorities, not the enthusiastic approval of the user -- but that presents a real conflict of interest if your product is a freemium service relying on word-of-mouth growth. “For enterprise, the elephant in the room is the expense of training the people who operate the software,” explains Alex Balva, CTO of InboundWriter, a search optimization service for bloggers and content marketers. “That’s the reason there are deterministic apps out there: they save money.” “Deterministic,” in this case, means "no fun at all.' A deterministic app railroads you through a step-by-step process without giving you any way to screw up.
Restrain Users Politely InboundWriter targets people like yours truly, who spend much of their day in Microsoft Word, Apple Pages, Evernote, or WordPress. How To Convince People They Already Know How To Pay By Cellphone. What happens when the industry shift you’re trying to affect is both huge and marginal at once?
At LevelUp, we’ve been hard at work trying to crack the code on the shift to mobile payments--one that the mass consumer market has not adopted yet. At issue: paying with a credit card is a perfectly acceptable way to pay. Plus, old habits die about as easily as a Marvel villain (or something like that). In fact, I’d argue that getting consumers to switch to a completely different thing is much easier than a marginal shift. Moving from bartering to currency was probably a much less painful shift than credit card to mobile, because people realized that giving up three goats was much less appealing than parting with a couple of coins or pieces of paper.
In all seriousness, massive shifts are all about seeing and feeling a clear, obvious benefit, such as moving from a horse-drawn buggy to an automobile. So how are we going about mastering the subtle shift? Let’s face it. A Unique E-Book Concept Merges Dead Tree Pulp With The Web. The very name of the Kindle Paperwhite, the latest version of Amazon’s e-reader, says a lot about the state of e-books today.
Convenient though they may be, as far as our eyeballs are concerned, ink on paper still sets the standard. But even as e-ink gets more ink-like and display pixels continue to shrink into ocular oblivion, e-books will never be able to replicate the tactile sensation of reading a real book. A recent project by a Polish art student, however, shows how we might preserve that familiar experience while still exploring the possibilities afforded by electronic books--not by translating physical tomes into digital apps, but by transforming the books themselves into electronic interfaces. Waldek Węgrzyn created his hybrid book, Elektrobiblioteka, as the final project for his masters degree at the Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice, Poland.
But the book is also an interface for a companion website designed by Węgrzyn. Węgrzyn’s confident that physical books are here to stay. After Broadband. Envisioning emerging technology for 2012 and beyond.