In the process, Netflix killed a lot of companies – Hollywood Videos (Remember anyone ?). Thats what happens when any enterprise takes business model by default. Then came the next wave with online streaming. What did it offer ? Why the subscription multiplied ?
1. Stay at home, instant watch (gratification)
2. Watch anything.
3. Same price

4. No need to wait if you dont like the one that you started.

In the process it almost killed or in the process of doing that to Blockbuster. Again the same problem, Blockbuster did not prepare for this master stroke. But while business model was a driver for eliminating the competition, but one important aspect that probably left out in the process is – Content. This is a content heavy industry. Netflix today stores a bunch of stale movies. Enter “Redbox” – Early entry of content. Self dispenser and simple. What innovation it brought with the enriched content is
Reach – Its available in grocer shops, Gas Station and probably every conceivable place that you are supposed to stop by. While Business Innovation is a dispensing process, ultimately a great product prevails. I am counting the days for Netflix”ed” to be used upon itself.

P.S> All Logo and mention of brands are copy right of their respective owners. i am still a subscriber of Netflix and is just an analysis of the situation and representation of business analysis.

2. Data explode.

3. Competition

4. Need of Intelligence

5. Real time vs Batch

In this parlance, before going towards a big data analytics way, ask yourself and your architect the below questions.

1. Whats my data growth ? per month, per year

2. Is my storage framework capable of handling the growth ?

3. What is the cost of growth purely from storage perspective ?

4. Do my BI capabilities cover the information that i can extract ?

5. What percentage of the data is structured vs. unstructured ?

6. Is my organization capturing enough unstructured data like sensors, feeds, streams ?

While the above are a primer questionnaire to ask, they are not comprehensive. Some of the cases i have seen that BI is thought to be the alternative (or vice versa) big data analytics. Trust me the use and applicability of both are completely different and complementary. In subsequent blogs i will try to put my focus on the implementation perspective of it. ]]> http://tapanmishra.com/?feed=rss2&p=140 0 http://tapanmishra.com/?p=131 http://tapanmishra.com/?p=131#comments Sat, 12 May 2012 06:32:15 +0000 Tapan http://tapanmishra.com/?p=131

Looking back in time, one can observe always that a great product or a great concept has a lifeline of its own. Ideas/Products which are oriented to touch people have a longer shelf period than the rest. Android based phones are not the only devices which area build on top of Android platform. Now there are cell phones, TVs, music players, cars, security system, cameras and a full phethora of smart devices which have housed android for their every day juice. Lets have a fair comparision with the product line of of android competitors.

While the comparision looks little weak against apple based competitors, we have certain other factors which will definitely distinguish android from its competition.1. Open Source : This has been the driving power of android all the while. While Jail braking is still possible in iOS devices, the stigma of the whistle blowing by apple makes it not a peaceful option. Look at Android, its completely open. In this category, it beats the competition pants down.2. Crowd Sourced : Android developers are you and me (common people) where as you need a mac system to even consider developing an utility or program for apple. So in no time you will see the apps in the google Play overtaking itune. Remember java ? the main reason Java as a programming language picked up the ride was bacause it was open and people can write their own libraries and understand the internals. The same is true for great programming language like C or C++. Strikingly different strategy was taken for VB fraternity and you can see the result.3. Re-invention : What has not worked for android is that its not an exclusive device(cult) unlike apple. But to its advantage, there is a version of android (flavour) every day.Don’t believe it ? go to forums.xda-developers.com. The only way a product gets a relife (or an extended life is when we introduce some innovation after some time and we keep on innovating). Android’s operating model makes it natural. Look at apple, it brought in 5.1, 5.1.1,5.1.2. Did you “mark any difference ?”. One thing we have to give it to apple, they have perfected the touch technology. But anything is reproduceable.There is so seemingly similar trend between rise of android platform like that of Java. In 5 years we will not be surprised if android is the defacto operating system for all portable devices.

Big Data:
What: This is a theoretical renaming of the volume of data that is created and dealt within an enterprise on a period basis. You could imagine the amount of data that gets created, re-created, interpreted, summarized in side any organization or outside. Think about the information posted in twitter, Facebook on a daily basis. Think about the wikis and the blogs and the forum posts that happen every minute, it will give us a general idea about the growth of volume of data.
Storage: Now the next step would be to understand the complexity arising due to this growth. The biggest challenge with the data is the storage requirement. Considering the rate of growth of this data, its definitely a challenging process for the legacy way of looking at data storage in a database.
Structure: One unique thing about Big data is the structure. It might be multi structured, structured or unstructured. Data collected is sometimes very complexly related. There is no way to fit them in a schema that is driven by the relational nature of data storage. Sometimes the data itself is not binary. Considering these, there is a new schema or storage scheme that needs to be encompassed to help this cause.
Processing: An enterprise collecting this humongous amount of data definitely wants to extract value from it and turning it into an asset How do you remove the noise from this high velocity, highly variable data and discover key insights while they are still relevant. These needs are driving the enterprise to create a value creation analytic platform which can model this data to user readable inference by identifying trends
Use: The clues that lie in big data can be the key to an enterprise’s future success, offering insights to optimize supply chains, uncover consumer behavior patterns, identify traffic and energy patterns, and much more. Rather than be a burden, all of this newfound knowledge can allow businesses to make effective long-term and real-time business decisions.

How : The best way of handling big data and supporting the extreme processing involved is to deploy custom hardware and software solutions for processing different types of big data workloads, and then combine these solutions with the existing enterprise data warehouse to create an integrated  information supply chain to deliver the analytical results to business users

Trends that suggest that Big Data is Happening.

Flurry of Custom Tools/Connector: Remember the lunch of IPHONE 4? Before even the due date arrived, a host of vendors started selling the case, screen protector ET all (accessories). That definitely gave a clue to the market that iPhone 4 is coming. Similarly there are flurries of custom tools offered in the markets which address to different segment of improvisation. Though the core offering is Hadoop, there are flavors of it mushrooming everywhere. Tablue and R have already devised and released connector to Hadoop for analytic and dash boarding.

Market Place: Biggest reason why all technology exists is that there are buyers or business reasons. Consider the possibility arising due to collaboration of market data with the data collected by weather stations (minute wise) and predicting the buying pattern of the demography. There are new collaboration and new market place arising to harness this possibility.

Change in Data Philosophy: Relational databases are completely failure in accommodating unstructured data and mulch-structured data. They need so much of tune and redesign to bring these formats to the form that can be stored in relational way that, the meaning and usability of the data is lost. A lot of important information is now being captured in silo and needs to be stored before relationship to other agents can be established. Shift in paradigm of usability of data has helped the cause of big data.

Need of Visualization : Enterprise and business users have started questioning the basis on which the analytic information is provided to the fraternity. So the need for visualizing the basis of deduction of the inference has become critical. A platform to facilitate is definitely most welcome.

Me too : This is a unique things about the indication of a successful trend. Every product vendor has lined up it Big Data offers. Be it IBMs Infosphere based platform or EMC or Oracle. When there are competing products on a same concept, it does a world of good – to the concept (remember cloud computing),

Though these are not the only reason for which Big data as a concept will be a buzz word for some time, these are definitely critical assessments and reason for which it will be considered.

Often it’s noticed that the technology graduation happens in such a seamless way that it’s difficult to draw a line between the generation. Cloud computing, which evolved from various concepts like optimization, virtualization and utility computing etc, is bit difficult to explain. However it’s easier to assign attribute the features to it which adds up to the success criteria. Does it mean that all framework satisfying these features, would be successful? The answer is ‘NO’. However necessarily all cloud computing should have these minimum traits to succeed.

On-Demand: This is anyway the most lucrative attribute of cloud computing. The resource availability when needed. There is minimum excess capacity and maximum utilization. If the cloud computing set up does not address this aspect, it’s a non-starter

No-Touch Availability: Expansion or reduction of wants of resources should not be human intervened. When I want to have the resource available to me, it’s already there. It’s almost like a retail shopping cart. Add the feature and pay for it.

Charge Model: This is probably the most important point in relation to adaption of the service. If a cloud model does not have a financial charge model which has certain abstraction and granularity of features, it’s not going to be successful.

Scalability: This feature is not from the prospective of end user. Its more from the prospective of design of the infrastructure for cloud. If the provision to add additional capacity is not a inherent design, at some point of time the cloud will become a shared service like set up. Not only from the prospective of growth of the virtual infrastructure, also from the prospective of optimization and elasticity, this set up is a must have.

For an enterprise it makes a lot of sense to build a cloud strategy grounds up looking at business need and end user usages rather than from the prospective of ad-hoc cost reduction.

Even after having worked in Latin America for more than 4 years now, the Caribbean region was still, and even more now, an unknown territory for me. I looked upon the World Map and it took literally couple of minutes to locate this tiny island country at the northern most tip of South American continent. Gazing at the map, I wondered who on earth would have inhabited this island for the first time. Little did I know that those 2 days that I would spend there would put more questions than answers in me.

To put some statistics on the table, Trinidad and Tobago (T&T) is a miniscule island with a population of 1.3 million. With Port of Spain as its capital, it is one of the Caribbean countries that form a part of so called West Indies with countries like Jamaica, Barbados, Saint Lucia, Suriname, Guyana, Antigua etc constituting other part. Port of Spain (POS) has a good connectivity with United States with many major airlines providing daily services. There is no visa requirement for Indians to enter T&T. In this world, it is hard to imagine that there still are countries out there where we Indians do not need a Visa. Had it not been for my beautiful Maharastrian wife, looks like, specially being from UP, I would have needed a visa to go to even ´Aamchi Mumbai´ one day… I am serious!

I boarded a 5 hour non-stop Continental flight from Houston. Having started early morning from Guadalajara, I had in fact fallen asleep almost immediately (something strange as I rarely sleep in-flight) the flight took off from Houston to POS. Having slept for almost 2 hours, I asked the air hostess for a cup of water (my sleep had already costed me my so -called free lunch) and just opened the window shade. A bright sky with patches of white clouds and beneath…Water with all possible shades of blue surrounding small un-inhabited archipelagos…Absolutely no sign of life (exclude aquatic) what so ever for hundreds and hundreds of miles…difficult to say whether it was a breath-taking view in a beautiful or a scary sense..After a while, putting down the window shade was the only way to put an end to that debate in my mind.

Port of Spain turned out to be a much smaller than expected airport. Immigration/Customs did not take more than 15 minutes. It was a 30 minutes drive to reach Hyatt…On the way, I listened to English version of Om Jai Jagdish Hare…Quite Innovative…Hyatt, in contrast, turned out to be a very good place…Situated on shore (sadly…not on the beach), it is one of the premium hotels in T&T. In fact, had I stayed just a day longer, the whole Indian cricket team currently on tour of West-Indies would have got a chance to meet me…Better luck next time guys…

The next 2 days were quite hectic with lots and lots of business presentations…The GOPIO (Global Organization of People of Indian Origin) chapter of Caribbean hosted this event and had called every VIP in T&T( including the Prime Minister). CII had also invited India´s Minister of Overseas Affairs and Civil Aviation. I was given the responsibility to present India´s capabilities in IT/ITES sector and how T&T can take advantage of that. Standing on a big dais in front of hundreds with at least 10 cameras recording me, I swear those 10 minutes were one of the toughest I ever had…I will never undermine Baba Ramdev´s presentation capabilities now on…

During the next days, I spoke with multiple people of Indian origin and was amazed as well as ashamed as to how less do I know about the history of my own people. T&T was inhabited primarily by Amerindians before 14th Century. Spaniards came thereafter and took control. They brought hundreds and thousands of African slaves along with them to work on Cocoa and Sugar-cane plantations. At the end of 18th century, British came here when they were at the peak of their world-influence. Spaniards ceded the country to them without any resistance just requesting to retain the names/languages etc. That’s why even till now, Spanish is the 2nd official Language after English here and Port of Spain, the capital.

When Slavery was officially abolished during 1800-1845, British started bringing Indians on deputation. No kidding. Indians, generally the poorer ones, were given option to come here for a period of 5 years during which they would be paid about 25 cents per day along with transportation and food. After 5 years, they would be offered some land in case they did not want to go back. Almost 150,000 Indians came to T&T between 1845 to 1917 by sea. No one knows how many died during transit. Majority of them came from…Believe it or not, Uttar Pradesh…Lot of local people with whom I spoke here mentioned their ancestors belonged to Meerut, Rai Bareilly, Faizabad etc…I hope Mayawati does not know this otherwise she will use even this data for her next election campaign showcasing UP´s global expat influence.

However, none of these people now have any contacts, what so ever, with anyone in India. They do not know any of their relatives, do not speak Hindi, never been to India…All the ties were cut when their ancestors started their journey. But still, in their sub consciousness, they seem to have that unsaid connection to India even till today. Seems, the clock just stopped for them in 19th century. Most of them listen to Hindi songs (very old ones) although no one knows Hindi. In fact, I had not heard most of the songs that I listened in cabs, restaurants etc during those 2 days. I jokingly told one of the other participants that if my son ever visits here after 20-25 year, they may have advanced to Kumar Sanu and Udit Narayan…Can you believe that there are more than 4 FM channels dedicated to Hindi oldies? One of the ladies even sang a song: ´Meri dosti mera pyar in typical firangi accent. I was literally on the verge of crying… Some people told that they want to go to India to participate in Ram-Lila. They in fact contacted some Ram-Lila organizers in Delhi and may be coming in October 2011.

Now the actual punch… During one of the lunch sessions with the people of Indian origin, one of the ladies asked me to recommend some boys from India who can marry their girls. She mentioned that the boys in their community are not being serious towards education, job, marriage etc. Before I could respond, she asked: Are you married by the way?  Seems she had not seen my Delhi Belly.  I just nodded with a sad face. She said: Not a problem for us! I could not respond back but just kept staring at her… I could see my mom-in-law´s hands grasping her neck with full force supported by my mom…

The 2 days that I spent in Trinidad were full of eye-openers. The whole stay reminded me of M Night Shyalam´s  ´The Village´. When my flight finally took off back to Mexico, I could see from my window, the country, slowly, getting left behind, leaving me with mixed emotions. I really do not know whether I will ever go back there again… Sometimes, we never even think that the decisions that our ancestors took can so drastically change the future generations. I just thought, had my forefathers accepted British offer (assuming they were offered) to come here 150 years ago, I would have cheered for Brian Lara instead of Sachin.

Strange World after all!

Rajeev Gupta,

Guadalajara-Mexico

The biggest thing in the innovation process is to realize the problem. It’s never the solution that matters. As the most difficult thing is to realize the problem or even to admit that it’s a problem. For example – I am a moderately flying professional working in a multi-national company. I would definitely have a trip in a week for business. I had never felt the need of being able to charge my computer on board until one day my laptop dried up all the juice. Once we find out the problem, the solution is the next big thing.
The thing about solution is a bit complex. We will not for the argument sake take problem to be our focus point. We would stick to the trends of solution. A technological or a business innovation is often driven by individual brilliance or stupidity. All inventions are made out of accidents and each of them often led a corporate to achieve extraordinary financial gains through commodization of the result.

As we move ahead in the competitive world, the consumer is becoming demanding, restless and non-loyal to any technological product or model and to business solution that cant constantly upgrade and better themselves in a agile way. So a scenario like this enforces the ability of the organization to tap in to the brain of the common people – People who are ordinary, people who are not connected to the product or the problem, People who can think and opine. While reaching out to people for ideas of betterment is not new concept, and we have seen it in form of Surveys, Focus Groups, interventions etc, what is a cheap and readily available source is crowd sourcing.
What is Crowd Sourcing for an Enterprise: To be able to bounce an problem statement asking for ideas to solve the current problem or to better a product or model or strategy from common man prospective can be called crowd sourcing. There are several agents of this crowd sourcing – Facebook (is fore runner) , twitter, brainyard.com etc are definitely laudable. But, a enterprise runs a huge risk of opening of Facebook to enterprise for idea sourcing because of the following problem
1. Third Party dominance
2. Target Audience/ demography unknown
3. Possibility of losing competitive advantage on idea to competitors.
4. Lack of control of Security (mother of all)
5. Lack of control to run it as a program.
That leaves the organization to target a relatively tighter community of its associates working for the company. There are companies like 3M who are forerunners in innovation driven by the internal employee base. The advantages of the internal ideation process are many folds
1. Can serve as a medium of social recognition for associates
2. Can capture a lot of ideas without a lot of spending
3. Can tap into a very focused group’s brain
4. Can run like a program.
While this offers a lot of benefits to capture the internal brains of a company as the crowd knows about the product and company the most, there are basic logistical requirements that an organization faces for ideation process.
1. Platform: A platform to capture all ideas suggested or generated theme or non-theme based across the organization. It can be as naïve as an excel sheet and as complex as a Web 2.0 idea management portal. The basic needs of the platform are
a. Should be driven by workflow
b. Should have idea hierarchy
c. Should have mechanism to have themes
d. Should be non-hierarchical
e. De-dup facility
2. Moderation: It’s the ability of the organization to restrict the idea platform not to be a facebook for enterprise chatting, wastage of infrastructure and time. Its very easy for associates majority of whom are gen-y in social networking to get swayed away by the availability of the platform and start discussion which are not relevant or counter-productive.
3. Idea Filtration: This is the biggest challenge of crowd sourcing as such. Everyone likes to give idea. Most of them are repetitive (all of us almost think alike), some of them are not irrelevant and some are destructive and few are really GEM. So the most difficult task for an organization is to filter the idea based on some criteria which are pre-determined. Its also important for a corporation to park ideas which are irrelevant to the themes but can be useful some other time.
4. Program: Theme based ideation and a program driven approach to implementation is very essential for corporate to counter the risk of going off the topic. While idea generation is the easiest part, managing those ideas through a program is the most difficult one as it’s a completely voluntary process.
5. Encouragement/Culture: Why should I suggest, what is in it for me? Who cares? – These are some of the common question to deter the person from contribution to ideation process. What can be a major motivation is the social status of the contributor or a gift program based on the outcome of the implementation of the idea. It’s a give and take world. So Corporate should open up the channel to recognize and reward associate for ideating.

Crowd sourcing effectiveness is a study by in itself by a lot of consumer research, sociology and organizational behavior research process. But what is important in all these aspects is that the timing to avail crowd sourcing. The time is NOW.

March 11th it was and i took my wife for shopping to Concord Mills. Normally i am a reluctant window shopper. Hardly did she believe that i was proposing this to her. But little did she know my alter-motive. Well concord Mills also has a best buy and what a coincidence it was the launch of apple iPAD 2.0. LOL. To cut the long story short, i had a good 1 hour play date with the new darling. It has at least gone on Diet, lost some weight and fat around the love handles.

iPAD 2 is as good as the predecessor and even better as its slimmer and is feather weight. One of the complaints that i had with the version 1.0 was, that its hefty and cant be used as a reading machine in bed. I am sure the enthusiast who used it as a eBook reader, would have visited the physio couple of times. It was at best a lap machine.

The new one is slimmer, light weight and sexier. almost a size 0. With a 1 GHz dual core processor, we are talking about real power. Processing power muncher applications will be making a party for the launch. Its fast and snappier than the gen 1.

Honestly i did not like the camera. Not because its not good. But i am unable to understand the use of a camera (back) in a such a large device. Well camera can be leveraged as a device to scan, to read bar code or to goggle a product. But, not to do a camera core function. However like every apple device (ipod touch, iphone, )the camera is not great.

Verizon and ATT versions both have been released at the same time. Its not going to support 4G LTE though. But at least this move has kept the option for verizon devotees open. The best thing that it has done probably is, the availability of iPAD 1 in craiglist at a throw away price. (i am loving it).

decided that its high time that those ideas be captured and treasured. So my friends I invite you to come and join the force. I invite guest blogger to write on my blog. Well there are some ground rules though. As you know this blog is aimed at technology trend and business model, i will have to moderate the blog to ensure that the article posted are in those line.

If you are interested, kindly reply back in the comment section and i will create a blogger id for you to write and post. Kindly make sure the articles are not published anywhere else. Also 1 photo accompanying the article is required as the blog is designed to have 1 picture depicting the theme of the article. Also make sure the image is original work and not reused from flickr or similar services.

So pour in your creative brain and let the idea flow.