It has become commonplace to hear news from the Big 5 in technology – Facebook-Microsoft-Apple-Google-Amazon. FMAGA for short, if you are like me and can’t recall who is in the Big 5 club. One day we hear from them about the cloud or the Internet of Things. The next day we hear about new phones, …
How the Big 5’s Mega Battle to Control the 3C’s is Unfolding Read More »
Two communications giants. What makes them similar and different? AT&T as Ma Bell ruled the roost as the biggest communications company for over a 100 years. It had a plethora of technology inventions, 100 million subscribers, and over a million employees before its break-up in 1984. Today, Facebook has well over 2 billion monthly active …
The promise of the Internet of Things (IoT) to create unprecedented economic value is a dominant topic of recent technology & business stories. What would it take to create and capture value from connecting vast number of unconnected physical objects to the Internet? A while ago, I talked about how the dance between business and technology in this …
It’s a Friday night. I am perched on a cozy corner of my couch, wine on one hand, my smartphone on the other. The smart TV is on. I am pulling up House of Cards on Netflix via the phone, projecting it to the TV via Google Chromecast. Life is good! And then I start to …
Lately, Software Defined Networking (SDN) has become de rigueur in the computer networking world. Before purpose-built networking devices came in to existence, networking was done via software running on expensive computers. That legacy makes the phrase software-defined to refer to networking superfluous. Clearly we must mean something more than just software when we talk about …
Several years ago I visited Parfumerie Gallimard in Grasse, France. Grasse is famous as the perfume capital of the world and Gallimard is the 2nd oldest perfumery in the world. There I learnt about how the les nez (“noses”– the perfumers who compose perfumes with their fine-tuned olfactory senses) create new perfumes. The vocabulary used to describe …
Lately, we in the technology world are bombarded by the word Analytics at every turn. We have endless debates verging on theology about the distinction between business intelligence and business analytics. Is it real-time synchronous? Is it time-delayed like a DVR? Is it about fancy reports? Is it about smart people walking around with charts …
Ever since my car got heated seats, every winter I wish that it would start to warm the seat 60 seconds before I got in the car. What if I could press a button on my App and tell the car while I am walking from my office to the parking lot! The car not …
In previous posts on utilities, I talked about the evolution of common utilities like water, gas, electricity, and lately computers (Part I), and utilities that connect us like transportation networks and communication networks (Part II). Now we have virtual social networks on a virtual transportation network. In this post, let’s de-construct that virtual social network to see …
In Part I of this series on utilities, I talked about consumable resources such as water, gas, electricity, and computing. We looked at their evolution from on-premise, consumer-generated and consumer-owned resources to resources available on tap from utility providers. Let’s now look at another class of utilities that connect places, people, and things. Roads, Telephones, …