What Mobile BI Used To Look Like, And Where It’s Going (Back to the Future!) Mobile BI has been around for a long time.
Starting in the late-1990s, the first SMS-enabled telephones became mainstream in Europe, with basic broadcasting of the latest figures available in your BI system (or email, fax, pager, etc.). By the end of the decade, the first telephones with WAP browsers were used to provide interactive BI, quickly followed by connected PDAs with basic HTML browsers. Here’s what SAP BusinessObjects looked like on the Nokia 7110 in 1999, on a Compaq PDA running Windows Pocket IE, an AvantGo PDA, and a Japanese DoCoMo i-mode phone in 2001: The arrival of all these new mobile devices was supposed to usher in a new dawn of mobile analytics. Here’s a slide from a presentation a decade ago by then-marketing-VP Dave Kellogg, including the heady prediction that “5-25% of companies indicated they already provide or will provide wireless access to BI within 6-12 months”. 2012 Is the Year of Mobile BI Barriers to deployment Next Steps Connect: Authored by: Timo Elliott.
The Robot Hiring Boom Has Arrived. The knock against many technology companies is they create too few jobs in their own countries.
That complaint needs serious amending. Tech companies are creating plenty of jobs for robots. Foxconn, the leading manufacturer of electronics in the world -- which makes Apples iPhones and iPads, among other products -- plans to build 500,000 robots over the next three years to either replace or augment the company's human workforce. Foxconn currently supplements its 1.2 million human workers with 10,000 robots. It remains unclear exactly what the somewhat secretive Taiwanese-owned company's plans are for mixing human and robot labor, but humans almost certainly stand to lose jobs. In one regard, this investment will help the company's labor relations. The official response to the media sounded every bit as cynical. Watch: What's the Big Idea? This could be a step in the right direction from both a business and humanitarian perspective. What's the Significance? Watch here:
The Future of Work. Hi, this is Steven Cherry for IEEE Spectrum’s “Techwise Conversations.”
This is show number 79. Sixty years ago, there were about 350 000 switchboard operators working for AT&T. Today, there are fewer than 20 000. Nowadays, automation is moving up the skills ladder in just about every profession. It’s not just toll collectors and supermarket checkers—with continual improvements to machine intelligence and robotic dexterity, it’s lawyers and nurse practitioners and engineers and maybe even taxicab drivers as well.
People have been alternatingly hopeful and worried about machines taking over their jobs almost since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. The future probably lies somewhere in between extreme utopia and dystopia, but it makes a big difference exactly where on the continuum things end up. My guest today is Andrew McAfee. Andrew McAfee: Hi. Andrew McAfee: That’s one way to think about the race metaphor that we keep using in the book. Steven Cherry: Very good. Is MyRobots.com the 'Facebook for Robots?' Verdict: Maybe. Yesterday saw the launch of a website called MyRobots.com, which aims to be a sort of social network and cloud communications system for consumer robots and other "smart" household objects.
It's a great idea, but like most great ideas, it may come with a catch. The idea behind MyRobots is to create a social network where robots can communicate with you and with each other. Just like Facebook, your robots get their very own profile (created by you unless your robot is a genius) and the ability to update their statuses whenever they feel like it. Unlike Facebook, these status updates will be useful information, like "I'm almost out of batteries" or "my dust bin is full" or "help the cat has me cornered, requesting authorization to deploy laser cannons. " But it gets even better than anti-cat laser cannons. The primary difference between MyRobots.com and a site like Facebook, Twitter, or Google Plus is that MyRobots is run by a company that wants to sell you robots: RobotShop.com.
Pearltrees.