New Florence. New Renaissance.

Salesforce.com’s Social Marketing Cloud

“Salesforce.com took the next step toward becoming a new-era marketing player on Wednesday by announcing the Social Marketing Cloud, a collection of services aimed at helping companies to manage their brands and engage with customers across social sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

The Social Marketing Cloud is the product of Radian6 (now Salesforce Radian6), the cloud-based social media monitoring service acquired this spring. It's a collection of cloud-based services aimed at a business discipline that is rapidly changing. “

another component

“Social Websites provides cloud-based Web content management capabilities through Salesforce.com's Siteforce system. The new service includes the ability to integrate trusted social network comments into appropriate areas of a Web site. A catalog page, for instance, might be enhanced with relevant customer comments about specific products. “

InformationWeek

 

The fascinating history of Zero

This is a tangled story of two zeroes: zero as a symbol to represent nothing, and zero as a number that can be used in calculations and has its own mathematical properties. It is natural to think the two are the same. History teaches us something different.

Zero the symbol was in fact the first of the two to pop up by a long chalk.

The New Scientist (sub required)

The article does not go into Zero as a brand - a more recent phenomenon. Photo Credit

Book Excerpt: Chapter 6 – Elegant: In a World of Flashing 12s

I am excerpting on this blog roughly 10% of my next book, The New Technology Elite due out in February (and available for pre-order on Amazon – see badge on left) . Chapters 6 through 17 cover 12 attributes of what I call the elite. Here are excerpts from Chapter 6 which focuses on Design Elegance. Note: the text is going through the publisher’s edits and subject to change.

An Amazon subsidiary called Lab126, which designed its Kindle ebook reader, says on its website: “We want the devices we design and engineer to disappear as you read. . . .”

Barnes and Noble’s response with Nook: “Books don’t have buttons. . .so we felt that was not only an authentic place to be but also great competitively against the Kindle”—which has a keyboard.

Microsoft says in a product announcement: “With Kinect, technology evaporates, letting the natural magic in all of us shine.”

Bose says about its VideoWave Entertainment System: “No clutter, no confusion.”

Not just in reading and entertainment, we are seeing it even in more complex areas. Siemens Healthcare, in introducing its MAMMOMAT Inspiration Mammography System, emphasized its light panel, which provides a warmer environment for the patient by illuminating soft, pastel colors.

The De Dietrich DTiM1000C 90CM Induction Hob features multiple inductors beneath the ceramic glass surface. Should you move any of the pans. the hob’s automatic pan detectors ensure that the temperature of the pan remains constant, wherever it is moved.

Technology “disappearing” and “evaporating” . . .welcome to the new age of minimalism even as technology proliferates around us and our old VCRs continue to flash 12s.

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The Maya site calls McManus “Chief Mad Scientist,” and you get a sense of that if you watch a presentation he did at TED where he talks about containerization, liquid currency, and the possibilities of a trillion-node world and what nature’s design patterns can teach us about computing.

But don’t let that fool you—his firm is about simplification. “On one end is the customer who is cautious, almost scared to use a product. At the other end of the spectrum is smug. We help iterate products to a point where most users can feel smug.”

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Google’s simple search box interface and its discipline of no more than 28 words on its home page set the standard for minimalism in technology. Indeed, to add the word Privacy (which linked to a policy statement) at the bottom of its page, it replaced its own name to not violate that constraint.

But even within that constraint, Google has managed to blaze a trail with its doodles.

“When doodles were first created, nobody had anticipated how popular and integral they would become to the Google search experience. Nowadays, many users excitedly anticipate the release of each new doodle and some even collect them!” says its website

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History tells us that Alexandria, Egypt, once had the largest library in the world, which was tragically burned to the ground. In its place today, stands the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, a majestic structure designed by the Norwegian architecture firm Snøhetta. The Oslo Opera House, which won the European Union award for contemporary architecture in 2009, was also designed by Snøhetta. Its sloping roof slides into the water’s edge, and visitors can walk freely over the building and the roof. Snøhetta has also been selected as the chief designer to transform New York’s Time Square to improve “the pedestrian experience in the plazas as well as the infrastructure for the various events held in Times Square throughout the year.”

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Of course, (Mercedes’) Gloria, though impressive is no match for IBM’s Watson. While Watson dazzled everyone by beating experts at the game of Jeopardy!, the real gem from that exercise was the computer’s ability to process natural language. “I think Watson has the potential to transform the way people interact with computers,” said Jennifer Chu-Carroll, an IBM researcher working on the project. “Watson is a significant step, allowing people to interact with a computer as they would a human being. Watson doesn’t give you a list of documents to go through but gives the user an answer.” Just a few months later, Apple introduced Siri, its “personal assistant” in its iPhone 4S, which understands commands in conversational English, French, and German.

But why even bother to talk? There is the brain-machine interface like the NeuroSky technology in the Mattel Mindflex Duel game described in Chapter 1. If you want to see a really head-turning application, though you had to be at FutureEverything festival in Manchester, UK in May 2011. Absolut Vodka used the NeuroSky technology to show cocktail drinkers a visual representation of how their brain is enjoying their drink.

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Robert Brunner, like Ive, has an impressive design track record. He is credited with Apple’s Powerbook and Newton and amazon’s first Kindle. He is now helping Barnes and Noble (redesign the Nook) and Polaroid, among other clients at the firm Ammunition.

But where do you find the Brunners and the Ives?

“Not in business or engineering schools” says Bruce Bendix, Director of Growth Strategies at Baker Tilly.

Martin Scorsese on creativity

For someone whose own innovations are numerous--the introduction of a certain New York street vernacular in Mean Streets and Who's That Knocking at My Door, the intimacy of the boxing scenes in Raging Bull, the rush and flow of Goodfellas, and now, with Hugo, a reinterpretation or rediscovery of how 3-D can bolster a film's beauty without intruding on the story--Scorsese understands himself as a product of, and a battler against, the Hollywood system.

FastCompany

The magic of diasporas

Diaspora networks—of Huguenots, Scots, Jews and many others—have always been a potent economic force, but the cheapness and ease of modern travel has made them larger and more numerous than ever before. There are now 215m first-generation migrants around the world: that’s 3% of the world’s population. If they were a nation, it would be a little larger than Brazil. There are more Chinese people living outside China than there are French people in France. Some 22m Indians are scattered all over the globe. Small concentrations of ethnic and linguistic groups have always been found in surprising places—Lebanese in west Africa, Japanese in Brazil and Welsh in Patagonia, for instance—but they have been joined by newer ones, such as west Africans in southern China.

The Economist

Book Excerpt: Chapter 5: “Crossover Executive” Guest Column

I am excerpting on this blog roughly 10% of my next book, The New Technology Elite due out in February (and available for pre-order on Amazon – see badge on left) .  The text is going through the publisher’s edits and subject to change, but each chapter has a case study or guest column.

Chapter 5 has two guest columns from what I call “crossover” executives. Vendors are hiring talent from user organizations; user organizations are hiring talent from vendors and startups. Tony Scott, CIO at Microsoft went there after stints at Disney and GM, and in the other direction, Vijay Ravindran, the Chief Digital Officer at Washington Post, did stints at Amazon and other startups.

Here are some excerpts from Vijay’s column

In the late summer of 2008, I was approached by an Amazon.com director, my former employer, about my possible interest in a unique position being created by Don Graham, the CEO and Chairman of The Washington Post Company. The position would be focused on digital news, specifically of innovating beyond the quarter-to-quarter improvement all operating businesses hope to make, but instead on a “big swing” looking out five years and beyond, and seeing if we can “skip a generation.” So began the recruitment and my eventual hiring as Chief Digital Officer.

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This role demands tremendous breadth. I currently divide my time across a variety of initiatives and roles:

· The WaPo Labs team continues to grow and the team launched Trove, a personalized news aggregation site with associated apps, and is mainly focused on growing Trove as consumer destination while componentizing aspects of the personalization technology to offer back to Washington Post and Slate. Trove offers cutting-edge personalization of news using users’ Facebook personas to help create a unique news reading experience.

· Using technology originally developed at Avenue100, we’ve incubated SocialCode, a Facebook advertising agency that leverages Facebook’s self-service advertising platform but targets big brands and their agencies as clients. The business has gone from not existing 18 months ago to being a real company with dozens of employees working across many dozens of clients.

· I work closely with the leadership of Slate and Washington Post on new endeavors and selected business development. Both sites are undergoing major software infrastructure upgrades, including their core content management processes. In the case of the Washington Post, the entire online business was managed as a separate company until 2008, and the integration has been a complex process of people and infrastructure.

· I serve on an advisory group for Kaplan Test Prep’s innovation efforts. Kaplan’s Test Prep business faces a completely different set of challenges than a decade ago. And while my current role is quite small, there are quite a few legacy parallels to the challenges faced by the Washington Post. For instance, just like Washington Post faces niche content challengers across local news and politics, every specific test prep area is battleground for Kaplan with new upstarts.

· I help TWPC make several angel and Series A investments in technology startups including those in Ongo and Fab.

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The biggest impact I had in the first year, and continue to have, is to reshape the image that technical leaders to the existing senior management both at Corporate and the operating units. They had only thought of technology as “IT” and the technical organizations were fairly subservient organizations. By Don’s creation of my position, I’ve been able to showcase the level of product and business thinking that can turbocharge having a deep technical background. The kind of technology executive that is at Amazon and its peers had finally made it to a company that had never seen anything like it before.

Photo Credit: Washington Post.

When the Post launched its iPad app in 2011, it created a humorous video of a befuddled Bob Woodward being pulled away from his trusty typewriter and asking his editor, Ben Bradlee, about the allure of the iPad. It was a throwback to the huge influence the newspaper had in the 1970s in bringing down the Nixon Presidency with its investigative coverage of Watergate,

Popular Science Best of 2011

"For 24 years now, we have seen physical dispatches from the future, held them in our hands, and marveled. They felt impossible a year ago and even today seem almost magical. And yet, here they are.

All 100 are showcased here: the products you can buy, like the dramatic JawSaw; the ones you can't yet but might own a version of some day, like the espionage hummingbird; and winners like the longest train tunnel ever built, a wonder of engineering you'll have to go see."

Popular Science

Learning Science Manga Style

Since 2008, No Starch Press has been translating and publishing a unique series of Manga Guides (originally from Japan) that offer comic introductions to tough topics like Calculus, Physics, Molecular Biology, and Relativity. It's called educational manga or edumanga, and it works.

The latest volume, The Manga Guide to Biochemistry (No Starch Press, Nov. 2011, 272 pp., $24.95, ISBN 978-1-59327-276-0), tackles tricky topics like how the body metabolizes carbohydrates, lipids, and alcohol; how mitochondria produce ATP; and how DNA is transcribed into RNA. The book follows the protagonist, Kumi, as she unlocks the secrets of healthy eating by learning the science of biochemistry.

Photo Credit

Shopping Apps

For Black Friday and beyond…

Time has a few suggestions including Shop Savvy which allows you to scan a UPC or QR Code and shows you prices at nearby stores based on your network/GPS location.

 

So much to be thankful for

I don’t think I will complain ever again how long it takes a PC to reboot. Because over the last year, I have watched with amazement (and some frustration) how my own body has “rebooted”

Last Thanksgiving I had been back from the hospital about a month, and my worried nephews and cousins came to visit. I was not very good company – weak, still dazed. The only good news was I had lost so much weight, I could eat as much pumpkin pie as I wanted. But I did not have much of an appetite.

This year, I will have to be careful and choose between Margaret’s sherry trifle, and pumpkin pie and apple pie. The appetite is back.  Amazingly, in the last few months I have delivered a whole new book. Posted over 500 blogs on this and Deal Architect. The reboot continues well.

So many big and small things to be thankful for. I have seen my son enjoy his first car. I have seen my daughter blossom from little to big sister at her sorority. With my reduced travel I have enjoyed the many walks and time with my beagle, Peanuts.

And I have so many people to thank for that.

Starting with Margaret.  Herself a medical professional, she advised me to also seek unconventional treatments like hyberbaric chamber sessions (the theory being the brain as the biggest consumer of oxygen would heal better with the pure oxygen infusions), acupuncture, and biofeedback. She did so while shepherding two teenagers in their worry about their father. She joined me in many of my trips this year.

But Margaret’s biggest contribution was encouraging me to reduce my travel and instead concentrate on the book and blogs. Peanuts must have bribed her:)

Which brings me to my readers and my sponsors. So many of you sent me good wishes. So many of you saw me at events and made a point of saying “you look great” whether I did or not. Thanks to my blog sponsors for their support. Thanks to many consulting clients who worked with my reduced travel regime.

Why do we only dedicate a day a year for Thanksgiving? I have so many more to thank – friends, doctors, neighbors, service personnel and on and on.

Last week I heard the oldie “Signs” by Five Man Electric Band. With so many protests around the world, the song just sounded so timely. But I particularly liked the ending

So I got me a pen and a paper and I made up my own little sign
I said, "Thank you, Lord, for thinkin' 'bout me. I'm alive and doin' fine."