Yield Management of Knowledge

Mark Montgomery of KYield posts about Realizing the Theory: Yield Management of Knowledge. He defines it as: " ... Yield Management of Knowledge: The process by which individuals and organizations manage the quality and quantity of information consumption, storage, and retrieval in order to optimize knowledge yield ... " . Read the full post ...

Managing Social Media Presence

A short article on how to manage time for social media presence. Mostly common sense, but also worth a look.

Chief Listener

A good article in AdAge: My thoughts: Listening, whether it be to consumers, trends, the pulse of technology, is very important. Maybe it should be called observing or even interacting because it should not be passive ... you should be able to question, track and even prod the objects of your interest. It should also be done by the entire organization. We were told shortly after arriving that everyone in the company had a responsibility to observe the market in all of its contexts. What has never been completely solved is how to efficiently gather, analyze, synthesize and then redeliver this information to the right decision makers. Much opportunity there. A chief listening officer should work on that.

Autocad on the IPhone

In a very interesting development a version of the very well known CAD system will become available for the IPhone and IPad, available by this fall.... I used AutoCad early in the enterprise for manufacturing design applications. This won't be a complete application, I doubt you would want to extensive work on a smartphone. It could have some interesting location based applications. I will be curious to see that it will include, and how useful that subset of capabilities will be on smaller devices:

' ... Autodesk is bringing its AutoCAD architecture, design, and engineering software back to the Mac OS after an 18-year absence, the company announced this evening. But the company plans to do more than offer a Mac OS X version of AutoCAD: It says it will release a free version of the software, dubbed AutoCAD WS, for the iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch that lets users review, edit, and share AutoCAD files on those popular mobile devices.. "

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Independent Review of Recorded Future

I have now mentioned Recorded Future a number of times in this space, here is another independent review that does a good job of introducing it for niche research. Continuing to explore it myself. Love to hear of other experiences. My other posts on Recorded Future.

Tag Strategy at Wal-Mart

More in Storefrontbacktalk about Wal-Mart's RFID tagging strategy.

" ... When Wal-Mart this week confirmed it has been quietly testing item-level RFID in two Arkansas stores for several months—along with plans to “incrementally roll out [item-level RFID] throughout the chain”—it raised quite a few eyebrows because of the way it’s being done. The company is initially only tagging denim jeans, socks and underwear (let’s try and ignore the fact that a radio transmitter inside a guy’s boxers is nothing shy of creepy), and it’s leaving the tags active until customers opt to throw them away ... "

Digital Bread Crumbs

So if you don't have GPS, can you use digital bread crumbs to track your movements?

Brandery Welcomes Inaugural Class

Dave Knox welcomes the inaugural class to a concept he calls the Brandery on Monday. " ... If you’re consumer focused, you must be brand focused ... Apply for a 12-week program that includes 20K in financing as well as access to the partners, mentors and resources typically reserved for major corporations ... " . Intriguing concept we will follow. See also their blog.

Wrist Watch Comeback

With more people using data and information rich smartphones, wristwatches are not selling well beyond their jewelry appeal. But a new Blue Tooth 4.0 standard that will allow information to be transmitted from another nearby device, a watch could essentially be a small auxiliary display. This could also promote the addition of other close-by remote sensors.

BI Platform is Dead: an Interactive e-book

The BI Platform is Dead: A fresh look at what business analytics means for today's organizations

View this interactive eBook now (Registration with Information management required)
The promise of business intelligence (BI) has always been to empower business users with better information than they could obtain directly from operational systems. Traditional BI relies on a centralized, cleansed, and transformed store of data that business users can access through standardized reports and perhaps an ad hoc query tool. However, the development and maintenance of this type of system takes time and imposes constraints on the types of analysis that users can perform.

On a day-to-day basis, though, the types of decisions that business users must make frequently require information that is not yet (or never will be) in the data warehouse.

While traditional BI continues to fulfill certain needs, self-service BI addresses the problem with ever-shifting demands for information. Self-service BI shifts the emphasis away from the processes required to manage data in a centralized store and towards processes for finding, accessing, and integrating information on-the-fly. With self-service BI, a decision-maker is better able to respond to changes in business conditions quickly ... '

Retailer Helpers

In Bloomberg BusinessWeek: a Good overview article on a number of startups that are using smartphones to bring e-commerce advantages to real-world stores. Mentions a number we have looked at and some not. Some useful statements from manufacturers and retailers about how they are approaching these opportunities.

Considering the Whorfian Hypothesis

An extensive NYT Magazine article on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: That the language you speak effects how you think. Was often characterized by the observation that some far-northern peoples had many more words for snow, caused by the need for the specificity. But its much more than that, including things like the effect of differing genders for nouns. This was generally debunked, and I think they spend a lot of time getting to that fact. Some new and intriguing nuggets are tossed out, but it mostly plays to misplaced relativistic theories.

Field Agent Re-look

I mentioned the Field Agent IPhone App some time ago. It allows a retailer or manufacturer to pay people to perform simple tasks at a store and get paid for doing it. The companies get data about what is really on shelf and other data about real environments. Cheap for them. In my first look there was very little that was interesting to me, and most tasks had long drives. Not likely.

A second look shows a number of possible tasks at Sam's Clubs ... mostly include taking pictures of things on the shelf, for about five dollars. These tasks seem to be about display compliance. I think the directions may be too confusing for the average consumer. Pictures might be better to show the task steps. I still like the basic idea of the Field Agent App.

The RBR Group and other Sites Then and Now

I have been loosely affiliated with the RBR group since my retirement from Procter & Gamble over two years ago. They just updated their web site with some new features and information. P&G has also updated their web site, giving it a much cleaner look. Comparing these gives very different looks, with different purposes of course.

In the case of P&G, you can see what the site looked like to as far back as 1996 in the Internet Archive, when we designed it much more simply, and called it a 'global community', rather than a company site.

IBM Makes a Nano Map

IBM makes a clever nano world map 1000 times smaller than grain of sand . Small things can be useful.

Changing Your Privacy Mind

EchoEcho: A startup that lets you ask of anyone: Where are you? - The receiver can provide or deny the information. The approach is different because you can change your answer each time, not set it as a forgotten parameter setting.

Which leads to the GigaOM piece: Privacy is hard because people change their minds. Or even know what their choice was, or that they have the ability to change it.

RFID Location of Sponges, Instruments

In RFID Journal: The FDA has approved the use of passive RFID tags for the location and counting of surgical instruments and sponges. I recall this being brought up in application sessions ten years ago. Surprising that it has taken this long to get the approval. A fairly obvious and very useful application.

On Luring Shoppers to the Store

A good WSJ article on various uses of technology to get people to physical retail. This was an area we worked on extensively with a number of vendors.

Character Amnesia in Chinese

Lots of thoughts out about how technology is altering aspects of literacy. This article from Language Log, about how text messaging is influencing Chinese characters. From the language log:

" ... Pessimists and alarmists have long been lamenting the negative impact of computers upon the ability of Chinese to write characters by hand. See, for example, Jennifer 8. Lee's article entitled "In China, Computer Use Erodes Traditional Handwriting, Stirring a Cultural Debate" in the Technology section of the New York Times for February 1, 2001.

If the situation was bad already a decade ago, it is far more grave now that short text messaging is so wildly popular. In "China worries about losing its character(s)," Los Angeles Times (July 12, 2010), Barbara Demick provides graphic evidence of the starkly diminishing powers of supposedly literate Chinese to produce many characters that are essential for daily usage ... "

Also see the following article ... The comments in both posts are also interesting.