Singapore’s Top 100 People To Know - Nice To Be One Of Them

Nice to be identified as one of the "Singapore’s Top 100 People to Know Online", a list compiled by Sparkah Business Strategy.

Just goes to show that all of that tweeting and blogging over the years sometimes pays off in recognition and free advertising!

Big (Data) Does Not Always Mean Better

"Big data naturally appeals to many data geeks, high-priced consulting firms, and IT professionals" says Dr Mark Kotkin, former Director of Consumer Reports and now a market research consultant.

The essence of his recent article on Big Data is that data big or small, is only of value when it is subjected to robust analysis, but that poor data can never deliver results of worth.  What you may be including in your data analysis could have been open to bias and different data can produce quite differing stories.

Methodology matters.  So long as we keep in mind that any data set has strengths and weaknesses, the results achieved through Big Data analysis will be of value.

Real-time does not guarantee 'good times' for businesses without an understanding of context and some thoughtful analysis of results.

As Mark Kotkin reminds us "..while there is some general sense that big data arrives at warp-speed and involves huge data-sets from very diverse sources and methodologies, there is no consensus and little discussion of what comprises meaningful and valid “big” data-sets".

The age of Big Data also brings with it other hefty concerns; the security implications of having such data widely available, issues of privacy, ethical considerations of 'open' and 'social' data, and the impact on the political environment.

Being able to access petabyte and exabyte-size data-sets may have become increasingly commonplace but what are the broader implications for society?

Governmental Overview

Such considerations are exercising the minds of governments around the world including the White House, which has established a Big Data and Privacy Working Group.

They came to the following six conclusions:

1. Big Data saves lives - doctors can now monitor millions of data points providing more immediate and better diagnosis of a patient's condition.
2. Big Data makes the economy work better - transport, utilities and services save time and money and can adjust with alacrity to peak demand.
3. Bid Data saves taxpayer dollars - predictive analytics helps identify and counteract fraudulent activity
4. The balance of power between government and citizen is changed and can "chill the exercise of free speech or free association".
5. Intimate personal details can be extracted from Big Data sets - effective consumer privacy protection needs to be in place to counteract this.
6. Big data can lead to discrimination -  having our lives increasingly governed by algorithms and automated processes can potentially discriminate against certain societal groups, especially in the areas of housing, employment, and credit.

There is a growing realization that current privacy laws are outdated and social and private data already released globally, can never be retrieved.

But as with all data, big or small beware of over-hyping the subject and avoid spurious data associations and correlations.

Accept that Big Data can, and is, changing the world even though some can't yet see it. Obama’s re-election chief number-cruncher is on record as saying “Big data is bullshit” and a Cambridge professor summed it up in one word -  "Bollocks".

You may not know your 'Petabytes' from your 'Hadoops' but do you really need to?  Big Data is already making big decisions that affect our lives so we need to learn to live with it.

Related articles

• White House Takes Aim at 'Big Data' Discrimination
• Findings of the Big Data and Privacy Working Group Review
• The backlash against big data
• 5 Things to Lessen Your Anxiety About Big Data

I Know What I 'Like', Or Do I?

Somewhere in the steamy streets of Dhaka an earnest posse of veiled women and young men are busily becoming admirers of a bevvy of stars and businesses around the world.

They are employees of what are euphemistically termed 'click farms'; a sort of agricultural production line of fake 'Likes' that pepper Twitter, Facebook and other social media.

In the good old days we had automated bots that did this job and social media companies such as Google waged a war to counter the automated trend.  To a certain extent they won the battle, but the fake brigade still smelt money and re-focused  their operations on human keyboard-tappers instead.

While the capital of Bangladesh, Dhaka, is a recognised hub for click farms so are other places such as Cairo and Indonesia.  It is no coincidence that these centres are located in countries where workers get paid a pittance.

The Guardian reports:
"For the workers, though, it is miserable work, sitting at screens in dingy rooms facing a blank wall, with windows covered by bars, and sometimes working through the night. For that, they could have to generate 1,000 likes or follow 1,000 people on Twitter to earn a single US dollar."

Another dubious example is Shareyt, whose owner Sharaf al-Nomani, told the same newspaper that: "around 30% or 40% of the clicks will come from Bangladesh". The Guardian equated this statistic to 25,000 people in Dhaka repetitively punching their computer keyboards, hour after hour, to enhance the visibility of a client's product or service.

But these sweatshop conditions doesn't seem to deter well known clients; some of which may surprise you.

For example, the USA State Department recently had its knuckles rapped for spending US$630,000  to boost its Facebook fan following.  Most of these new fans came from Cairo, which given the current political sensitivities has an aura of the absurd.

There is nothing covert about click farm companies and the 'Likes' they generate are quite genuine, in the sense that a human being created the action.  Take a company such as WeSellLikes.com. Its domain name choice is clearly not attempting to mask its activities.  If I was so inclined I could buy 10,000 'real worldwide likes' for less than $US100.

Practical yes, ethical...barely. So why do businesses indulge in such activities?.  

The greatest motivation is fear. Fear that their enterprise will look pathetic with its 200 genuine Facebook Likes compared to Competitor X down the road who has 10,000. A common belief is that customer perception of their brand might be adversely affected by such a discrepancy in numbers.

While there may be an element of truth in this assumption (according to  research 31% will check out reviews, ratings, likes and followers before buying), buying 1 million twitter followers from an Indonesian web entrepreneur for $US600 for your farmhouse cheese brand, isn't necessarily going to solve your online marketing woes.  

Customers are becoming increasingly aware of the ruse and the more savvy they become, the less effective these click farms buy-ins will be.

But one business often begets another. Click Auditors are the new breed, with London's Status People being one such service provider. They assist companies to block out the fakes for as little as $US5.50 per month.

The real trouble for a business begins when you start to believe your own marketing hype and strategically plan based on false social media analysis. I would like to say that such folly does not exist but regrettably it does.

Of course this being a genuine blog post I would welcome genuine 'Likes' and 'Followers' - although it is highly doubtful that Mr Sharaf al-Nomani, will do so personally.

Reference:

• How low-paid workers at 'click farms' create appearance of online popularity - The Guardian
• 4 Ways Click Farms Screw Your Business  - Inc
• Click farms are the new sweatshops - The Washington Post
• Selling social media clicks becomes big business - San Jose Mercury News
• 1000 fake followers for US$10 - NZ Herald
• State Department bureau spent $630,000 on Facebook 'likes' - Washington Examiner

Fly Me To The Moon...Or Wherever

Those with an eye for innovation will have noted the recent launch of the Indian mission to Mars.  While they haven't got there yet, at time of writing all seems to be progressing nicely.

Quite apart from the desire to be the first Asian country to reach Mars, what is it that motivates a society like India to take up these challenges?  By extension, what innovation processes are necessary to achieve such a goal?

The Psychology Wiki defines innovation as referring "to both radical or incremental changes to products, processes or services. The often unspoken goal of innovation is to solve a problem."

Some may argue that there is no problem to be solved by sending a spaceship hurtling towards Mars, and the real problem remains at home with the grinding poverty of many of India's citizenry.

But such innovation more often than not adds value to society in the broader global context.  In addition, those countries and enterprises that do not innovate run a real danger of being surpassed or destroyed by those that do.

There are two basic types of innovation; sustaining and disruptive. For companies, the former means continuing to approach their core markets in a similar fashion while the latter "significantly changes a market or product category".

By now most people recognise that innovation and a good dose of creativity are essential to an organisation's survival. Globalization, increased competition and the increasingly rapid changes in technology, mean that those enterprises that do not change and adapt simply wither on the vine and die.

Paul Simpson, writing about the psychology of innovation, says:

"Homo sapiens have, since the 10 commandments, had a bit of a soft spot for concise lists which tell us what to do. They imply that if we follow their advice we will be suitably rewarded. 

But the bad news about innovation is that suggestion-boxes, brainstorming sessions, away days, consultants and 183 techniques to encourage creativity (as listed on Wikipedia) won’t, by themselves, transform your business into the kind of free-thinking, ground-breaking, market-leading corporate utopia you might be hoping for".

It is really all about company culture and not fancy creativity suites.  It also takes dedicated time and budget.

Ranjeet Laungani, Nielsen's VP for Innovation Practice, examined how India innovates in a recent study. Five of his key findings were:

1. It takes 50% of Indian companies one to two years to bring an innovation from concept to launch.
2. In the year that they launch their innovation they spend as much as 34% of their budget on advertising and another 30% on trade and consumer promotion.
3. 75% of organisations measure the level of innovation success by their growth in market share. This followed by brand awareness and health measures and the Return On Investment (ROI) that the innovation has delivered.
4. Nine out of 10 organizations surveyed identified that sharp consumer insight led to innovations in their organisations.
5. 20% of industry professionals across sectors relayed that more than 25% of their ideas made it to the shelves

Ranjeet also reminds us that 90% of newly introduced products fail in the year they launch, so innovation is not in itself a guarantee of success.  There are also several factors that can impede the progress of innovation within an enterprise. These include:

• Too lengthy a period from idea to market
• Long-term strategic planning being hijacked by short-term priorities
• Insufficient budget to fund innovation
• Internal teams with conflicting priorities
• An unwillingness to accept that failure is very much part of the innovation process

So while the success of a mission to Mars cannot be guaranteed it does prove the point that any innovation is based on risk taking.  As the old adage says "nothing ventured, nothing gained". 

Amartya Sen, the winner of the 1988 Nobel Prize in Economics, hypothesises that development is the key to freedom.  Perhaps ultimately it is this motivation that drives mankind to innovate.

Related articles

• What India's space scientists and street children have in common
• Will India get to Mars? A guide to the dangers ahead
• Failure isn't just good, it allows for extraordinary innovation
• Nobel Prize Winner Amartya Sen to Deliver the 2013 Kellogg Biennial Lecture on Jurisprudence

On the Rocks? What a Shipwreck can teach us

The plight of the ill-fated Costa Concordia (pictured) is by now well known.  How someone could navigate as 114,000 ton company asset on to the rocks in a sea of calm is quite mind boggling. 

Equally impressive, but in a more positive vein, are the logistics of salvaging the huge liner. The assembly of cranes, experts and tons of concrete as well as the professional expertise needed to right the ship.  

The marshalling of assets is something all companies face albeit rarely on the scale of a liner salvage or in the face of such a human disaster.  But it is not uncommon for poor asset management within an enterprise to figuratively and quite literally 'sink the ship'. 

 If you are relying on spreadsheets to manage allocation and asset redundancy then you face the likelihood of following the fate of the Concordia, being left high and dry while others go about their business in a successful fashion. 

A recent article in Business Day came to the conclusion that if an enterprise is aiming for service, performance and financial improvement it needs to devise a good asset management strategy.

"Every asset needs to be managed and maintained to ensure it functions within the design parameters". 

 "The operational phase of an asset is the most useful period of its life and this is when the asset is managed and used to deliver services to support the core business of an organisation." 

Allocating,  tracking and monitoring physical asset depreciation all all key elements in the success of any business.  Being fully aware of the life-cycle of any asset is important.  It is no good waiting for a financial shortfall or the sudden realisation of an assets age to prompt action on asset management.  

Whole-life asset management is the name of the game if you hope to get the best out of your investment. 

The advance of technology also means that the assets you have invested in today will not necessarily be the assets you need tomorrow.  Consider for example, how data centres and company IT departments  full of server hardware have been largely superseded by server virtualization, which in turn made infrastructure clouds possible. 

The Institute of Civil Engineers (ICE) provide a very good guide on realising a world class infrastructure and the guiding principles of asset management.  In looking at the future they identified the following challenges:

• Adapting your assets to climate change given the impact that this having and will have in the future
• Social change with different demographics and the way we will interact with our infrastructure
• Economic challenges of asset maintenance, made more difficult when world economies are sluggish
• Critical skills shortages to manage and maintain older technologies and assets
• Political inability to foresee the need for infrastructure provision and the impact that will have on society
• New uses of technology which for some will be a challenge but is also an opportunity to overcome ineffective data capture and knowledge management.

So investment in a good asset management system has become a must to keep your business ship on a  true course

Beauty and The Beast - When Flying Becomes Really Interesting

Flight Trails

The joy of flying and visualisation combine in Contrailz, an interesting project from Russian software engineer Alexey Papulovskiy and his collaborator Nikolay Guryanov.

There are those of us who find beauty in these transport patterns and no doubt others who see them as evidence of the beastly spread of CO2 emissions.

For lovers of abstract art these visualisations have a certain ring of familiarity as the Singapore/Malaysia map (above) and Stockholm (below) demonstrates.

Flight Trails

Alexy began by  collecting tracking data for civil plane routes from Planefinder.net. The data set of 1 billion “dots” was for the month of October,2012.

Flight Levels are colour coded, with the red signifying lower altitudes and blue, higher altitudes. The project mapping demonstrates that commercial aircraft have specific routes that they follow and these routes regularly intersect.

All of which goes to show why you can see so many aircraft at different holding altitudes as you are preparing to land at a busy airport such as Changi or Heathrow (below).

And while you suddenly realise how much you are in the hands of your pilot and rush to check your travel insurance, take a good look at  the data source, PlaneFinder.  It picks up "ADS-B plane feeds used by commercial and private planes to transmit their name, position, callsign, status and lots more."

The crowded skies of the USA - PlaneFinder

Happy Travels!

Related articles

• 'Contrailz' visualises flight paths around the world
• 20 Signs You're an Airplane Nerd

Bitcoins, Baubles and Business

E-Commerce and its currencies can be a topsy turvy world.  Just when you thought everything was on an even keel along comes a (relatively) new kid on the block that shakes up the status quo.

So it it is with Bitcoin, which is either a boon or a bubble depending which side of the fence you choose to sit on. There are those who firmly believe it is the currency of the future but for folks who are not economists, it is difficult to see objectively beyond the hype.

Semil Shah of Tech Crunch at least attempted to make sense out of Bitcoin by asking five economists their take on the online currency.  Harvard Professor Chris Roberts neatly sums up the nagging feeling that many of us have about Bitcoin's longevity in his statement:

"It would really be something if intelligent people chose to invest more trust in a currency system built and managed, in large part, by anonymous computer hackers than they did in currency systems built and managed by governments of the people, by the people. Fortunately, we are not there yet."

In the same article Peter Rodriguez, Professor at Virginia’s Darden School of Business, makes two further points about the currency:

"In some ways, Bitcoin is just a virtual pack of smokes. But in other ways, it’s revolutionary. Cigarettes have inherent value and alternative uses, like cotton and even gold. Bitcoins are valued in and of themselves. They have even less alternative uses than paper currency or baseball cards".

"Even it they just serve to measure the value of goods ultimately transacted in ‘real’ currencies, Bitcoins will have become something entirely new: a true, stateless, virtual currency rooted in nothing other than confidence in the set of rules that surround them".

It is perhaps this last dimension, a stateless currency that is a huge part of Bitcoin's attraction, especially in an economic climate where traditional currencies and banking systems have been taking such a hammering of late.

Rwanda-based Nyaruka suggests that it is developing countries that will and do benefit most from Bitcoin and its pretenders.

"Rwanda, like its neighbours, is very much a cash society, which means that most digital goods are out of reach, not because they aren't affordable, but simply because most Rwandans don't have credit cards."

As this very good blog article states, Bitcoins are simply digital cash and because of this works well in any society where cash is the norm.  And of course digital cash is far easy to get hold of without going through the hassle of applying for, and managing a credit card.

It may be a surprise to some to learn that the decentralised, cryptographic, Bitcoin isn't exactly new.  It was launched four years ago as an open-source digital currency by Satoshi Nakamoto, who it turns out is probably not 'his' real name and could in fact be a group of people hiding behind a pseudonym.  Hardly reassuring news to any enterprise assessing business risk and contemplating the digital currency.

Purely digital currencies such as Bitcoin have an inherent problem; that of double-spending. i.e. someone concurrently sends a single unit of currency to two different sources.

Thomas Lowenthal notes that "digital products like a movie or a text file are non-rivalrous. If you have a copy of my pseudo-trip-rock band's new MP3 album, there's still just as much MP3 to go around for everyone else who wants one. That's not a problem for files, but it is a problem with currency, since the whole point is that there's a limited supply."

The key question to me is, does the use of cryptography do away with the need for an intermediary verification process, such as that which Paypal uses?

I am personally not convinced at this stage that business adoption is a wise move but I would be delighted to be proved wrong.  You need to ask yourself, is it safer to mine Bitcoins or to mine gold - or for that matter neither?

Related articles

• Bitcoin's Bottom Billion - Why the Developing World May Be Bitcoin's Biggest Customers
• Bitcoin Is Changing The World
• Bitcoins Crash, Gold and Silver Plunge, What Is Next?

Should I Go or Should I Stay?

Corporate training is perceived as a bugbear by some and an 'essential' by others.  Up-skilling your staff and promoting your own products and services to others should be far more than a “day off” in the eyes of the participants.

As one who has attended and delivered many such sessions over the years, I would be the first to concede that the ones I have attended are often a mixed bag, ranging from the riveting to the down right soporific.

A good training programme is all about building staff engagement; getting them motivated and clued up so that they can make a meaningful contribution not only to your company but also to their own feeling of self-worth.

Engaged employees are pivotal to the success or failure of a business.  A recent Dale Carnegie blog post reports that 69% of ‘disengaged employees’ would hand in their notice and take up an offer with another company if that enterprise offered them just 5% more money.  With ‘engaged employees’ it would take a 20% raise on their current remuneration to make them consider a shift to another company.

Staff retention and turnover is a prime consideration and worry for many businesses and it is especially so in a country like Singapore, where job hopping is endemic.

Finance and accounting specialist recruitment firm Robert Half found that Singapore employees in their sector were the world's most chronic job hoppers, serving a shorter period of tenure in a job than anywhere else in the world. The reasons given were “better remuneration, promotion, a new challenge, an overseas posting or more flexible work arrangements”.

Not that personal gain is necessarily always the primary motivation to jump ship.  A 2011 study by NTU student Teh Kai Feng also suggested that the job-hopping trend in Singapore could also be partially attributed to way the education system is designed rather than purely personal motivation.

Human Resource consultant Angeline Seah told Ryan Ong of MoneySmart that she believes the Internet has also made it a lot easier for job-hoppers:

“Job hopping has become prevalent because of the Internet. In the past, it was a time consuming process to go from one employer to another. But the rise of job sites, like monster and JobsDB, has turned the employment market into a true marketplace. Nowadays, all you need is an Internet connection and five minutes. You can compare all the available jobs, and online applications are fast.”

She also cited waiting for a pay rise as being a contributing factor:

“Job hoppers work on the principle that switching jobs is easier than waiting for a pay raise. A job switch may raise income by 20% in a month. Pay raises are about 4%, and may take a year.”

What ever the reason, such a high turnover does not auger well for business continuity and is stressful for senior staff who are faced with the unenviable and repetitive task of recruiting replacements.

There was a time before the age of Millennials where a job for life was both an aspiration and for many, a reality.

Now only 31% regard a 'career-for-life' with one employer as "relevant" (Kelly Global Workforce Index (KGWI) survey). It is a reality that today’s employees are more self-centred than their predecessors.  Statistics also suggest that many of them will have changed jobs half a dozen times before reaching the age of thirty.

So what can you do to counteract this trend?

Providing excellent training opportunities for your employees will go some way towards retaining them as I have suggested above. The Kelly Services survey also showed that there is a common belief by over half of respondents (53%), that the only way to develop their skills and advance their careers was to leave their current position.

Your business challenge is to prove that this isn't necessarily so; offer employees a career path within your organisation and give them the training they deserve to better themselves, and by extension, your enterprise.

The need for specialised skills is increasing not decreasing. High value jobs such as those in IT, sales & marketing and finance require increased levels of skills and so workplace education is critical.

If you are not going to provide it they feel even more motivated to leave you and find a company that will.

Perhaps the final word, on why training must be high on your agenda, should come from Josh Bersin of Deloittes:

"Today’s business climate is one of global skills gaps. New technology, shifting markets, and changing demographics mean that manufacturers, service providers, telecommunications companies, technology companies, healthcare providers, and many other industries live and die by their skills. 

As companies globalise their businesses, the ability to build skills has become a deep competitive advantage."

Reference: 

• How Corporate Learning Drives Competitive Advantage
• Hiring Wisdom: Top 10 Ways to Guarantee Your Best People Will Quit
• Five top tips for hiring top talent

Stop The Spread Of Vacationitis

The Hilton and The Onion; hardly a marriage made in heaven one would think, but based on this innovative campaign one would be wrong.

Onion's creative arm, Onion Labs have partnered with the hotel company to produce a web site that encourages a worker to diagnose their ills and recommends vacations as a 'prescription'.

The Urgent Vacation Centre also features the 14 symptoms of Vacationitis and a plea to stop the spread of this malignant disease.

I can particularly emphasise with the malady 'Acute Retinal Monitoritis' !  The viewer has the ability to download a large or small version of each symptom for their office cubicle or share same through social media.

Yellow Post-It Fever doesn't look too pleasant either.

According to the New York Times, more than a third of the business of Hilton Hotels and Resorts is generated by leisure travelers.  The new campaign is directed at them, said Andrew Flack, vice president for global brand marketing.

“We are particularly targeting working professionals. It’s becoming harder and harder to switch off work, harder for people to think about and plan vacations. This time of year is popular for people to plan vacation travel. When they come through Christmas, they think ahead for the year, think about where they might go.”

It all goes to prove that when it comes to advertising a little humour goes a long way; in this case hopefully a long way away from a cluttered desk and a frenetic office.

2013 - The Year Ahead - Lucky For Some?

Here is a snapshot of the mega-trends and predictions for 2013.

1. Your personal data locker will become increasingly important to you and, if you haven't got one you already, you should probably consider it.

According to Forrester Research the business of managing personal data, which is already worth billions, will grow substantially in the next two years. Taking the US as an example, more than $2 billion is spent each year collecting data from third parties.

A cloud-based data locker has been described by CNN as "part virtual safe and part personal digital assistant.

"Dave Siegel, author of Pull: The Power of the Semantic Web to Transform Your Business, argues these cyber vaults will eventually replace PCs, tablets, iPhones, and Microsoft's (MSFT) Windows and Apple's (AAPL) Macintosh operating systems. Yes, Google (GOOG) Android, too."

      2.  Home Sweet Home:

The Connected Home is a component of the Internet of Things; where devices talk to devices, in many cases without human intervention.

Cloud-based smart home systems allow you to monitor and control your house from your smart phone, tablet, or computer, no matter where in the world you are at the time.  An example of this is Lowe's Iris system.

Iris can be installed directly by the home owner and the basic level of monitoring service is free. This includes text alerts to the home owner when alarms are triggered; remote control of connected devices, thermostats and locks; and access to remote video streaming from cameras in the home via smart phone or computer. Lowe has partnered with AlertMe to  produce this product.

          3. Programmatic buying will get bigger

Programmatic buying allows advertisers to bid, often in real time, on ad space largely based on the value they have assigned to the consumer on the other side of the screen.  It uses a range of technologies to achieve this.  As this New York Times article notes, "major advertisers and many of the world’s largest ad agencies creating private exchanges to automate the buying and selling of ads."

          4. A Sense of Touch and Smell

IBM believes that in the future computer devices will be able to mimic our ability to touch, taste, smell and hear.  Sophisticated algorithms will be able to analyse  why people like certain tastes and the chemical structure of food.

Download a copy

         5. Cyber Security or insecurity?

If you own a cyber security company you could be in the money as many predict that banks and other online transactions sites, who have been seen a surge in cyber attacks, are anticipating that these will get even more sophisticated as time goes by. As a result these entities will increasingly turn cyber security firms to combat these intrusions.

We are still slack about cyber security matters. A recent study found that 35% of all data required data protection in 2010, but despite this, less than 20% of it is actually protected.

Ericka Chickowski, writing for Dark Reading believes that security research firms will turn away from less lucrative vendor contracts in 2013 and instead sell the information they glean about software vulnerabilities on the open market.

"Cyber-mercenaries are becoming more protective of their discoveries as the technology involved becomes more complex and the secrets more valuable".

Now this should be a worry to all as these cyber-mercenaries don't need to reveal who they have sold their research to although some like Vupen are on record as saying that they wouldn't sell their findings to oppressive governments or criminals.

eWEEK has also compiled some 2013 predictions to help organisations prepare to counter increasingly sophisticated hacks and malware.

         6.  The amount of Data will grow and grow.

By 2020 that amount of data on planet earth will be 40 Zettabytes; one Zettabyte is 2 to the 70th power bytes. According the Computer Weekly that equates to 57 times the number of all the grains of sand on all the beaches on earth.  I 'll have to take their word for it as counting grains of sand is simply soporific!  Machine generated data is the main contributor to this increase, rising from the current 11% of all data top 40% by 2020.

 Predictions from other sources.

Juniper Research predicts the following for wireless in the year ahead:

• Big Data to Become Big Business
• Smart Glasses & Other Wearables: 2013, the year of ‘announcements’
• BYOD trend on the rise, as security issues escalate
• Retail to embrace the in-store mobile strategy
• Operators to adopt seamless WiFi & LTE connectivity
• Mobile Becomes the Connectivity Hub
• The Year of Microsoft
• The multi-screen, seamless user experience becomes a reality
• New mobile and tablet form factors to emerge
• Social Gaming is on the Rise

CIO sees an end to offshore outsourcing. IT robots  and autonomic systems will be taking over.  So you will no longer need to be an engineer to create software or intelligently manage IT infrastructure. An example is Blue Prism; giving companies a software development toolkit and methodology to create their own software robots to automate rules-driven business processes. According to the company there are significant cost savings with its robot full-time equivalents (FTEs) costing a third of offshore FTEs.(video below)



And finally, the digital playing field is levelling out thanks to Cloud computing with developing countries able expand their role in the global economy. The University of California, San Diego's Dean of International Relations and Pacific Studies, Peter F. Cowhey, and Senior Fellow at the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, Michael Kleeman, found that Third World countries can now utilise the cloud in the same way developed countries have in the past. This is due to the lower costs, resulting in higher Internet adoption rates.

Emerging market businesses can now access similar storage, compute, and uses application services as the Global 2000 do.

Related articles

17 digital marketing and ecommerce trends for 2013 by Econsultancy CEO Ashley Friedlein

• 2013: The year of cyber war or just cyber panic?
• Predictions for IT priorities and the cloud in 2013: Experts weigh in

In A Buying Mood - Pinterest Vs Facebook

If you are selling something and planning to use social media to do so, does Facebook or Pinterest offer the best chance of delivering what you want?

New research from Bizrate Insights has found that 69% of consumers who have visited Pinterest discovered something they then purchased or wanted to purchase.  This compares to only 40% for Facebook.

Large version

Even more compelling was the finding that 70% of consumers use Pinterest to get inspired about things to buy and 67% use this social media platform to keep track of things they like.

You may use Facebook more to maintain friendships, but Pinterest is clearly out in front when it comes to selling. Both are sites which online consumers use to connect with people who have similar styles and interests. Pinterest though is more often used as a destination for shopping inspiration, tracking, and product discovery.

It also seems that brand building is better on Pinterest than on Facebook.  Bizrate reports that:

"A greater percent (55%) of Pinterest users have engaged with retailers and brands via Pinterest, compared to the percent of Facebook users that engage retailers or brands on Facebook (48%).  But how customers engage differs for each of the two platforms.  Pinterest users are more likely to be “Creators”: adding and sharing retailer/brand related content, while Facebook users are more likely to be “Participators”: interacting with promotional activities developed by retailers and brands."

Large version

The reach of Facebook still blitzes Pinterest but awareness of the latter is trending upwards rapidly.  36% of online consumers had heard of Pinterest in March but by August this figure had risen to 46%.

The reports data from September 2012 showed that 63% of online consumers had a Facebook account and only 15% had a Pinterest account.  Facebook is not sitting twiddling its thumbs when it comes to luring purchasers. They are testing a new feature, "collections", that lets users create wish lists of products by clicking on "want" or "collect" buttons.

PCWorld believes that the want button, if adopted permanently, could drive a lot of traffic to brands on Facebook and encourage impulse purchases.  They could be correct in this assumption and if it does it will have some serious implications for Pinterest.

But Pinterest is on the right growth projectory with a recent ComScore study putting it in the top 50 most-visited Web sites in the US for the first time, with 25 million unique visitors in the month. Ranked at 50th it still has  along way to catch Facebook which is ranked 4th in the same survey.

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• Pinterest drives more than window shopping
• Pinterest stats: does it really drive more sales than Facebook?

On The Subject Of Subjects

If you don't give your email subject  lines serious consideration than your marketing campaign could well be a fizzer.

Recent research from Adestra suggests that subject line length and specific words and phrases have a major impact on your email marketing success or failure.

They took a a random sample of email campaigns, each of which were delivered to more than 5000 recipients, giving a total volume of 932 million emails sent over a six month period. As the average in one industry may not be to another they split the data down into six key industry groups – Publishing,
Events, Ecommerce, Charities, B2B and B2C.

Key Findings:

• For the e-commerce sector, character and word count results are paradoxical. The choice is clear – shorter subject lines drive clicks, and longer subject lines drive opens
• Subject lines with 70 characters provide give a significant boost click-throughs
• For Events the best click through rate comes from subject lines with 15 words/120 characters upwards
• Publishers should realise that a higher word count delivers more opens and click through rates
• If you are a Charity running a donation campaign then short subject lines are critical as these drive both opens and response
• Rather strangely they report that mentioning ‘kittens’ will increase your opens by 41% but if you mention 'children' the opening rate will drop by 28%
• For B2B's the more words the better with anything over 16 words delivering on both opens and clicks
• For B2C's a 20 word subject line appears to be clear winner

Parry Malm at Adestra who authored the report says: “Our new subject line research has produced some incredibly interesting stats. It’s only one aspect of your email marketing arsenal, but when approached in the correct way subject line optimisation can prove to be an effective, and quick, tactical winner to help drive response rates.”

Open publication 

Although interestingly these findings seem to be at complete variance to recent research by email provider MailChimp.  Their statistics from their own system released in September suggests that subject line length means absolutely nothing.

Mailchimp's analysis of 12 billion emails shows that as your subject line gets longer, nothing happens

Ian Creek of Econsultancy suggests that one email is never enough. He recommends this campaign schedule:

• Send the first email explaining the offer in full HTML. 
• Send a second follow-up email in a plain Outlook style from a named sales contact. 
• Send a final reminder of the offer (day before the offer ends), again this can be from the sales contact. Simple-not over-designed. 
• If you’re really cheeky you can even send a final email the day after the offer ends with a ‘special extension’.

Related articles

• This Just In: Subject Line Length Means Absolutely Nothing