mip's scan

mipcast podcast - February 17th Weekly Update

 Here is the latest podcast in mp3 format.  It is the same audio content as what I posted over on the mipcast minus the enhanced items that are found in the one posted at the mipcast (by enhanced I mean pictures and links embedded right into the audio file).

Items of interest in today’s podcast are:

1. • mip’s using iPodcastudio software on his iPhone to record the podcast.  A full review will come tomorrow on how it worked out for this podcast
   

2. • some thoughts on blogging and the value of blogging
   

3. • some thoughts on what is taking shape in the mobile wireless space, specifically around SmartPhones.

Hope you enjoy it!  

Mipcast-february-17

The Potential For iPad Magazines

I came across a brief post and excellent video over at Wired.  I watched it, was excited and Twittered it.  Now, as the day has drawn on, the video demonstration of what their magazine will look like and how it will behave on the iPad has stayed with me.  A few times through my working day, I've paused and thought 'That is the magazine I want.'  The type of rich content that magazine will be able to deliver will be fantastic.  It will transcend the written word and begin to deliver a rich, robust experience.  

Even the types of advertisements will have the potential to deliver value and not simply behave as a marketing tool.  Rather than simply showing a product and building brand awareness or informing, ads will have the ability to provide value, to engage users and allow users to interact with the products/services they are advertising.  In a sense, the ad will cease to be an add.  It'll become content.  

You might think I'm simply drinking the Koolaid on this one.  You might think that if that type of transformation was going to happen, it would have happened on the web.  I say no.  It is something that could have happened on the web, but it didn't.  Publishers simply took print versions of their products and moved it to the web - for free.  Here, with the iPad, they have the chance to create new content-centric products that provide new value to the end consumer.  You might think I'm right out to to lunch on this.  I challenge you - watch the video and tell me you don't get goosebumps.  Tell me you wouldn't pay for that product that you see there?  

The iPad will transform consumption.  It is a content-consumption-centric device and the publishing industry is poised to capitalize on it.  Exciting times ahead!

Feeding the Realtime Web

I was sitting this evening tinkering with some prototype ideas for a client-facing iPad application.  That led me to think about the iPad and the effect that it will have on the consumption of content.  This was something I'd written about before and won't retread here in this post.  I only mention this little side-note because it was those thoughts that led me to another aspect of the changes that these devices are going to bring about.  Not so   much the iPad (and other such devices that will surely follow), but more so, the smart phones.  It is the smart phone and the real time web that are creating a very interesting "perfect storm" for disruptive innovation.  What do I mean?  What I'm talking about is how, for example, the iPhone and Android smartphones are feeding the real time web.  These devices a driving enormous amounts of network usage.  

We've heard about how much bandwidth iPhone users are using.  What I'm talking about though is that all that network usage isn't just downloading/consumption of content.  I posit that there is a lot of outgoing bits & bytes that are a result of users feeding the real time web.  Yes, some of that outgoing traffic is outgoing email and other such "traditional" usage, but I think that the outgoing traffic is increasingly traffic that contributes to the realtime web.  Applications like Twitter, Foursquare, Facebook and such are just the tip of the iceberg.  I think that applications will emerge that are going to flood the Internet with realtime data and information.  We will flood the Internet with micro-content and that in turn will result in users consuming increasing amounts of micro-content in the form of "context-sensitive", "location-sensitive" information and alerts.  

Pharma Vertical Teaming With IT

I read with interest an article from the Globe & Mail entitled Big Pharma eyes IT alliances.  The crux of the article, on the surface, is that the pharmaceutical industry is trying to demonstrate value of their medications.  

One of the parts of the article that caught my eye was the following paragraph.

Novartis, for example, signed a $24 million deal last month with U.S.-based Proteus Biomedical to create “smart pills” that can transmit data from inside the body to monitor patients' vital signs and check they have taken medicines as prescribed.

 What struck me, as so often does these days, is that the underpinning success to what they are trying to do is going to be found in the data.  It's all about the data.  Big data.  What I mean by big data is that there will be vast amounts of data.  As I started this post above, the pharmaceutical industry wants to demonstrate/prove the value of their medications.  The fact of the matter, though, is that to demonstrate value, you have to first understand what that value is.  You can't do that by just collecting data.  You have to analyze that data.  In this case, as I eluded to, there are going to be mass amounts of data.  Imagine how much one person would generate in terms of data being transmitted from one of these smart pills.  Now multiply that by a week, by a month, by a year.  When you are done that, multiple it by 1000 people, 10,000 people, 100,000 people.  You see where this is going right?  There will be millions and millions of rows of data streaming into databases.  That is big data.

For the pharmaceutical companies to get value from all that data, there needs to be a robust business intelligence layer that sits atop a very robust enterprise data warehouse (EDW) infrastructure.  Without it, you don't see value.  You only have data.  

The challenge the article highlights is

The new era poses some notable challenges, not least the cultural gap between fast-moving technology companies, with rapid innovation cycles, and a more ponderous drugs industry, where bringing a new product to market typically takes 10 years or more.

but this is effectively overcome by leveraging an IT partner that engages in the rapid approach to business intelligence.  It isn't about the "fast-moving technology companies" at all.  It's about the shifting nature of data.  As they collect this data from new devices and couple that data with other sources, surprise findings will emerge.  That will challenge assumptions and upset well thought out long term plans.  Large business intelligence initiatives will yield little value.  Instead, a series of 100 day projects should be initiated, with each of these short burst initiatives doing two things:

1. providing value to the end-users, allowing the pharmaceutical companies to start to understand the value of their medications and demonstrate that value, and,
2. provide insight from lessons learned so that the next short 100 day initiative is better than the first.

These are things that I've seen inside industry verticals like telecommunication and financial services.  These industries grapple with making sense of what lay within their mass stores of data too.  I find it exciting that what the pharmaceutical industry is preparing to embark upon will allow them to transform their data into intelligence.  With that business intelligence, they can then move on to insight.  

iPhone Apps That Will Be Great on iPad: Panelfly

 A break from the recent business/tech posts - let me indulge in one of my long time interests/hobbies: comic collecting.  I want to write about apps that I think will be great on the iPad that have limited use on the iPhone.  Thought it would be fun to talk about Panelfly.  

The tagline for this app / service is "your local comic book store in your back pocket"  - that makes me smile!  I love comics.  Have collected them since I was 4 years old.  I'd seen this app for the iPhone and thought that the small screen size would be terrible for viewing such an illustrative form of content.  I like to pour over the detail in my comics.  I like to read the dialogue and study the art, picking up on details that the artist has poured his/her heart into.  

The iPad, with the larger screen and rich colour screen, will make Panelfly a gorgeous app to behold.  The iPad will change the way content is consumed, and it makes sense, that such a visual form of literature (comic / graphic novels) would be very well suited for the iPad.  Does that mean I'll stop buying comics at the local comic store?  No.  I view this type of app as something that will augment comic reading.  It doesn't seem to be available in Canada yet (boo boo), but hopefully it will become available in the near-future.  If it does, this would definitely be an app I'd have on my iPad that I wouldn't use on my iPhone.

Stay tuned for future posts about iPhone apps that I think will rock on the iPad.  If you have apps you'd like to suggest, feel free to post some thoughts in the comments below.

The Value of Blogging

I'm reflecting on blogging and I'll tell you why in a moment.  I've been blogging for quite some time and for a variety of reasons.  When I posted my first blog post, back in May of 2004 (wow - has it really been almost 6 years), my intent was to explore ideas.  Sure I did a lot of "latest news stuff" early on, but slow it morphed into what I wanted, which was me talking about tech I was using, both personally and in business.  I used the canvas of the blog as a place to explore ideas, share ideas and get feedback/input.

I've been reflecting on this idea-space via blogs over the past while as I've done work in the education vertical. While those of us in IT have blogged for a long time, and other early adopters as well outside of IT, from an industry perspective, many industries lagged behind and have really only just begun to explore, understand and leverage blogs.  They are starting to see that the blog is potential vehicle for students and teachers to create ideas, share ideas, build collaboratively ideas and ultimately build personal online portfolios.  As I've watched my clients within the education vertical discuss blogs and other social media tools I have most enjoyed seeing how it generates enthusiasm and passion coupled with value.

This reflection on blogging deepened for me as I witnessed my wife move into the blogosphere and social media yesterday evening.  She'd been wanting to explore ideas, chronicle things she was exploring with a specific focus on proactively exploring things in the area of health, fitness, family, cooking, getting back to the basics, travel, taking classes and other ideas.  In truth, she wasn't sure exactly where things would go.  She just wanted a forum to talk about some of the things she was exploring and thinking about.  So she create a blog which completely thrilled me.  I'd been using blogs for a long time.  I've been reading blogs of a technical nature and personal interest for a long time.  This thrilled me because it was using the tech in a completely non-tech area/way.  She launched Tomorrow I Will.... yesterday with a brief post.  Today, she was excited to post her most recent outing and thoughts.  She was enthusiastic, not just about the writing, but by the feedback.  It was the potential for conversing with people about these topics that really excited her.  Already, she's planned various people that she plans on chatting with, blogging about and perhaps even videoCasting about!

That got me to thinking about my own blogging and the importance of continuing to use mip's scan as a platform for developing/sharing ideas, providing insight with regards to things I've used/done and engaging in conversations with the many, many creative & smart people that abound.  If you find yourself in an industry / company that is looking to do the same, or if you are personally trying to expand your thinking, a blog might be the perfect vehicle if you haven't tried it.  I leverage Typepad and my wife decided to go with Wordpress.  Be sure to watch for a comparison post where I talk about our individual experiences using these two different blogging platforms.

If you've found a unique use for blogs and would like to share it, feel free to comment below.  I'd love to hear about and start a conversation.

mipcast videoCast - february 4, 2010

Hello folks.  Here is a videoCast that I did with Stephen Hayward for our Project X Ltd. blog and I thought I'd cross post here at mip's scan and over at mipcast.  This videoCast talks about some of the things we took away from MicroStrategy World.

Business Intelligence is More than Just Reporting

One of the major take away items, for me, at last week's MicroStrategy World conference, was the broader scope of business intelligence.  In my mind, because of what I'd been exposed to, I thought business intelligence was all about getting your data to the point where you could then design a report to present that data in an intelligent way.  I thought that MicroStrategy was a tool for designing and developing reports that answered business questions.

Two companies at the conference exposed me to how much broader the scope of business intelligence is.  I'm talking about BigDataLabs and Visual Crossing.  The offerings these two companies have brought to market, that build off of the MicroStrategy platform highlight that business intelligence is realized in the way you visualize the data & information.  In my strategic consulting work, I often work with clients to look at IT differently.  Often, industry groups that I haven't worked with before want me to participate to bring a fresh perspective to things that they have already been looking at.   Visualization of data is much the same thing; a different perspectives causes you to suddenly see something you hadn't seen before.

Thoughts on the Apple iPad

 What can be said about the Apple iPad?  I got asked over the weekend in person and via email: So mip?  What do you think of the iPad?  

In truth I haven't written anything since I heard about it for a number of reasons:

1) what else is there to say at this point that hasn't already been said about the specifics of the device.  

2) I haven't used it or seen it, so it's hard to comment, beyond what the tech specs are

3) I wanted to mull it over a bit; it left a deep impression on me.

Let's get a few things out of the way straight-off the bat.  Of course, I'm excited about the iPad.  I'm looking forward to buying one.  For all those people who want to complain about it's lack of camera or lack of GPS, or lack of [insert whatever you like here] - they are the same people who would have complained about the price, about the battery life, about the resolution of the camera, about [insert what you like here].  Many people are going to bash the iPad - they did the same thing when the iPhone came out and look foolish for it now.

I think that the iPad will surprise us, like the iPhone did.  I believe that somewhere out there, someone is creating an app right now that will take advantage of this new category of device and unlock potential we haven't yet thought of.  There will be an ah-ha moment like so many of us have had when we use our iPhones with that certain app that is just perfect for us.  I believe that certain industries will suddenly have ah-ha moments and be able to leverage the device in unexpected ways.

The other thing that amazes me when I watch the video of the iPad is that it is really freeing the Internet.  The Internet has been "stuck" in our computers - we have gone to it. Smartphones have given us some mobility, but their smaller size limits that experience.  The iPhone browser has done a decent job of tackling that size problem.  The applification of aspects of the web via the iPhone apps has further liberated the web.  The iPad, however, changes the game further.  It allows the Internet to come to us.  In a sense, when I look at the iPad, I don't see a piece of a hardware that has been elegantly engineered.  I don't see beautiful, user-friendly software.  I see the Internet incarnate.  You are holding the web in your hands.  That will change the way we interact, use, leverage, contribute, and consume the "Internet".  I will change the way we think about it.  

And that is really what Apple causes us to do - to think differently.