SAP's Big Mobile Plan SAP, the enterprise software company, has a crazy ambition. It wants to get a billion people using its software by 2015. That's about double the footprint the company has now—and a lofty goal for a company that, despite its reach into the innards of businesses, is hardly a household name. The plan largely rests in the hands of Sanjay Poonen, who heads the company's mobile division and is also responsible for its analytics, database, and technology products. Poonen talked with Business Insider this week and told us how SAP's going to do it: mobile apps, mobile apps, and more mobile apps, with a little cloud mixed in. Just to give that billion-user goal some context: Apple has sold about a half a billion iPhones and iPads so far, although at the rate it is selling them, it should hit the billion mark by 2015, too. Still, it's one thing for the beloved gadget maker to get a billion mobile customers. So here's the plan: SAP is revamping a lot of its enterprise apps to run on mobile devices.
What Will the 'Phone' of 2022 Look Like? - Alexis C. Madrigal A romp through the weird, scary, awesome future of mobile communications. Edited Reuters. The near-term future of phones is fairly well-established. Reflecting on Apple's recent product launches, author and professor at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program Clay Shirky told me, "They're selling transformation and shipping incrementalism." The screens, cameras, and chips have gotten better, the app ecosystems have grown, the network speeds have increased, and the prices have come down slightly. "Is the iPhone 5 the last phone?" Danny Stillion of the legendary design consultancy IDEO calls our current technological moment the "phone-on-glass paradigm," and it's proven remarkably successful over the last half-decade, essentially conquering the entire smartphone market in the United States and around the world. No one has tracked these market shifts better than Horace Dediu at Asymco. What might their input methods be? Let's start with Dediu and how we interact with our machines.
The “Lost” Steve Jobs Speech from 1983; Foreshadowing Wireless Networking, the iPad, and the App Store Steve Jobs giving a speech at the 1983 IDCA – Courtesy Arthur Boden In 1983, Steve Jobs gave a speech to a relatively small audience at a somewhat obscure event called the International Design Conference in Aspen (IDCA). The theme of that year’s conference was “The Future Isn’t What It Used To Be”, which looking back seems all too fitting. Circumstances being what they are, very little is available on the Internet regarding this Steve Jobs speech. First, I’d like to thank one of my oldest clients, John Celuch of Inland Design. [Update - Read The "Lost" Steve Jobs Time Capsule article now] Here is the cassette tape I digitized this recording from. After listening to the recording, I did some research in an attempt to find some pictures of this speech. Regarding the speech, it is amazing to hear Steve Jobs talk about some things that were not fully realized until only a handful of years ago. He mentions that computers are so fast they are like magic.
W&L Entering Students Continue Trend Toward Apple An annual survey of the entering students at Washington and Lee University has shown that the shift from Windows-based computers to Apple Macintosh has continued to grow. The survey, conducted the W&L Office of Institutional Effectiveness and Information Technology Services, found that 70 percent of the respondents brought Macintosh computers with them as opposed to 30 percent who are using Windows-based machines. That represents a 10 percent increase in the number of first-years with Macintosh computers in the past four years. More than 98 percent of the entering class completed the survey, which identified the types of electronics the students brought to campus with them when they arrived earlier this month. When it came to telephones, all but one of the 471 respondents to the survey brought a cell phone to campus, and the vast majority of those (89 percent) were smartphones. IPhones were the dominant choice among smartphones with almost 70 percent.
Technology Innovation: To Whom It May Concern: Home matches and challenges I love presenting to techies – they’re my folks, and speaking with them and exchanging ideas comes as naturally to me as gathering around the kitchen table with the family and shooting the breeze. (Recent SAP Inside Track Netherlands in Eindhoven, organized by the fabulous Twan van den Broek and others, where I hosted two sessions, was such an event.) I also love a challenge – so it’s nice to present to a crowd where it’s not necessarily a home match. A difficult audience The most recent instance, which prompted me to write this blog post, was just yesterday. They aren’t technologists and don’t care much for technology as such, but as product owners of the suite of SAP-based business applications my employer creates, they prioritize all change requests to the applications suite and decide which features will be implemented, and in which release. I, on the other hand, am 100% a technologist and technology strategist. What technology means to non-techie audiences
Iqbal Brainch: The Soul of Apple The news first came in the form of a text from a friend: "Just heard on the news that Steve Jobs died." I dismissed it as another erroneous report. Moments later my iPhone buzzed again with an AP Alert confirming the news. I stood stunned. On the surface things are going well for Apple -- the stock is near all-time highs, the demand for the iPhone 5 is off the charts, and the company is on the verge of introducing an iPad mini which is sure to be the must-have gadget for the holiday season. Leadership Void It's hard to replace Steve Jobs. The Maps App Debacle Apple has always believed in seamless integration of hardware and software to promote the best possible user experience. Complicating Matters Jobs was relentless in his focus on simplicity as key to the user experience. None of these individual miscues by Apple mean its downfall is imminent.
The Google Glass feature no one is talking about — Creative Good (Also: en français, en español, 简体中文, 繁體中文, На русском, in het nederlands, em Português) Google Glass might change your life, but not in the way you think. There’s something else Google Glass makes possible that no one – no one – has talked about yet, and so today I’m writing this blog post to describe it. To read the raving accounts of tech journalists who Google commissioned for demos, you’d think Glass was something between a jetpack and a magic wand: something so cool, so sleek, so irresistible that it must inevitably replace that fading, pitifully out-of-date device called the smartphone. Sergey Brin himself said as much yesterday, observing that it is “emasculating” to use a smartphone, “rubbing this featureless piece of glass.” Like every other shiny innovation these days, Google Glass will live or die solely on the experience it creates for people. Except for the awkward physical design, the experience of using Google Glass has won high praise from reviewers. I’m still not done.
Steve Jobs’s Real Genius Not long after Steve Jobs got married, in 1991, he moved with his wife to a nineteen-thirties, Cotswolds-style house in old Palo Alto. Jobs always found it difficult to furnish the places where he lived. His previous house had only a mattress, a table, and chairs. It was the choice of a washing machine, however, that proved most vexing. Steve Jobs, Isaacson’s biography makes clear, was a complicated and exhausting man. Isaacson begins with Jobs’s humble origins in Silicon Valley, the early triumph at Apple, and the humiliating ouster from the firm he created. Jobs ripped it off and mumbled that he hated the design and refused to wear it. One of the great puzzles of the industrial revolution is why it began in England. In 1779, Samuel Crompton, a retiring genius from Lancashire, invented the spinning mule, which made possible the mechanization of cotton manufacture. Was Steve Jobs a Samuel Crompton or was he a Richard Roberts? Jobs’s sensibility was editorial, not inventive.
IBM unveils computing architecture based on the brain | Cutting Edge IBM scientists unveiled an all-new computing architecture on Wednesday that's based on the human brain. In an announcement tonight, IBM Research said that its new software ecosystem was built to program silicon chips whose architecture is directly inspired by the brain's size, function, and minimal use of power. The company hopes that its breakthrough may support a next generation of applications that could mirror what the brain can achieve in perception, cognition, and action. "We are working to create a Fortran for neurosynaptic chips," IBM principal investigator and senior manager Dharmendra Modha said in a release. "While complementing today's computers, this will bring forth a fundamentally new technological capability in terms of programming and applying emerging learning systems."
Janell Burley Hofmann: To My 13-Year-Old, An iPhone Contract From Your Mom, With Love Dear Gregory Merry Christmas! You are now the proud owner of an iPhone. Hot Damn! I love you madly and look forward to sharing several million text messages with you in the days to come. 1. It is my hope that you can agree to these terms. xoxoxo, Mom WATCH: Janell and Gregory discussed this contract on "Good Morning America." How to Close the IT Talent Gap CIO — There is an old business adage attributed to Peter Drucker that says: "You can't manage what you don't measure." This means if you don't have real metrics in place and you aren't measuring performance, you'll never know whether you're doing better or worse. This adage is relative to many of things we do in IT and careers, because if you don't know where you are going, then you won't know the skills necessary to get you there. Consider this piece of data from the CIO Executive Council's report, Creating Your Future-State IT Leadership Team Today. Two hundred senior IT personnel were asked how important they thought development of their own people was. These IT leaders almost universally (96 percent) rated this as either important or very important, but when asked how adept their leadership was at tackling this integral part of employee management more than 30 percent rated themselves as not proficient. Why Perform an IT Skills Analysis Continue Reading
Android is better It was just meant to be a quick experiment. I started using a Nexus 4. I was going to go right back to my iPhone after a week. I was designing more and more Android interfaces at Twitter and realized I needed to more intimately grok Android UI paradigms. A week in it started feeling normal; the larger form factor was no longer a nuisance. Apple Lock-in? It only took that first week to realize I wasn't really locked into the Apple ecosystem and certainly not iCloud. Photo Stream? I do, however, miss iMessage. "No other company has embedded itself this deeply into my life." Most services I rely on daily are owned by Google. The list of Apple products I use daily largely amounts to OS X and Apple hardware. How I fell in love It started with the larger and wider screen. Then I got used to the Google Calendar widget I placed on my home screen. But when it comes down to it my love of Android lies heavily with the way Android handles notifications. Android just knocks it out of the park here.