Description: Groupon has had huge growth and success in the area of marketing businesses. Is there any downside in using Groupon for small business?
Source: Msnbc.com
Date: November 21/2011
Questions:
2. What criteria would you use as a business manager in trying to decide to utilize Groupon?
Description: Dr. Mitchell led the development of ResolutionMD Mobile, the world’s first smartphone radiology product to win regulatory approval for primary diagnostic use.
Source: globeandmail.com
Date: Nov 16, 2011
For two years, the Mayo Clinic has been using the original desktop version of ResolutionMD to help stroke victims in rural Arizona. As such web-enabled technology comes into wider use, it will change medicine, Dr. Mitchell predicts. Pooling data online will allow physicians to access it cheaply, wherever and whenever they need it – and colleagues on different continents will be able to discuss the same image on their screens.
“You could bring advanced medicine to rural parts of Africa or Asia,” Dr. Mitchell says. “And this is where the power comes. It’s not just in the mobility; it’s in the ability to link this up and get a network effect.” READ REST OF STORY
Questions for discussion:
2. What is the biggest barrier to adoption of smartphones and tablets?
Description: Steven P. Jobs never cared much for selling Apple products to big businesses. A funny thing happened, though, in the last few years. Big companies started buying Apple products — a lot of them — for their employees.
Source: NYTimes.com
Date: Nov 15, 2011
While corporate technology buyers say Apple does not try to hide the fact that consumers are still its top priority, they note that the company has gotten easier to work with in recent years, adding features to its devices that make them more palatable to business. It also doesn’t hurt that Apple’s new chief executive, Timothy D. Cook, is known to be far more at ease meeting with the C.I.O.’s Mr. Jobs once so memorably disparaged.
“What they’ve done in the past few years is really started thinking in a deeper way what the enterprise needs,” said Rich Adduci, chief information officer of Boston Scientific, a medical device manufacturer that has distributed about 3,000 iPads to its field sales people, and expects to buy 1,500 more by the end of the year. READ REST OF STORY
Questions for discussion:
Description: CNNMoney’s Laurie Segall talks about the latest trend in tech: outsourcing your errands to people looking to make money.
Source: cnn.com
Date: Nov 15, 2011
Questions for discussion:
Description: Google Inc. is entering the online music market almost a decade too late to pose a threat to Apple Inc., the largest seller of songs on the Web.
Source: businessweek.com
Date: Nov 16, 2011
The service, scheduled to be unveiled at a Google event in Los Angeles today, will let users store songs online and listen to tracks on multiple devices, people familiar with the matter said. Apple opened the iTunes store in 2003 and made popular the legal downloading of music from the Internet.
Google’s new challenge to Apple escalates the rivalry between the two companies, already locked in a fight for smartphone users and mobile-advertising customers. The Internet- search giant also faces budding competition from Amazon.com Inc., which has bolstered its music-download and storage service, and Spotify Ltd., whose partnership with Facebook Inc. has buoyed U.S. membership this year. READ REST OF STORYQuestions for discussion:
2. What is the biggest barrier to adoption of Google music in this market that is dominated by itunes?
Description: For years, Coca-Cola has told us that so many parts of life “go better” with the iconic soft drink. You can now add social media to the list as well.
Source: www.usatoday.com/
Date: Nov 8, 2011
Advertising Age this week named Coke its “Marketer of the Year,” citing it as an example of how small and midsize brands also “can use creative stunts and strategic partnerships to get a lot done on a smaller budget.”
On Facebook, Coca-Cola has received more than 35 million “likes,” and Wendy Clark, Coke’s senior vice president of integrated marketing who oversees the social-media effort, says having all those fans respond to Coke is meaningful.
“Fans are twice as likely to consume and 10 times more likely to purchase than non-fans,” she says, in an interview at Coke headquarters here. READ REST OF STORY
Questions for discussion:
2. Can Coke’s social media strategy be copied by most other organizations?
Description: How much does cloud computing really cost? Anyone know yet? Last week, I mentioned some estimates which suggest that companies can save up to 30% in IT costs over a three-year period employing cloud resources versus on-premises equipment.
Source: www.forbes.com/
Date: Nov. 8, 2011
A relatively small operation with two application servers and two database servers could expect to pay about $106,000 over a three-year period, versus $149,000 for internal IT.
That’s for adoption of public cloud services, of course, which involves paying a monthly subscription fee and not really worrying about all the behind-the-scenes IT. But there are even more “private cloud” projects going on within the walls of enterprises than public cloud engagements. READ REST OF STORY
Questions for discussion:
1.Why is it important for organizations to measure the TCO of Cloud computing?
2. “TCO is not a useful metric for the “soft costs” of cloud.” What are soft costs?
Description: Apple’s Siri personal assistant app on the iPhone 4S can do even more than Google’s Voice Actions and provides intelligence that Android doesn’t yet match
Source: www.businessweek.com/
Date: Oct 18, 2011
Apple (AAPL) reported on Monday, Oct. 17, that it has sold 4 million iPhone 4S handsets in the debut weekend of the new smartphone. Some may have purchased it for the dual-core processor, while others were sold on the updated 8 megapixel camera and intelligent imaging software. But as a longtime Android owner, one feature alone pushed me to add an iPhone 4S to my stable of smartphones: Apple’s Siri service that turns the handset into a personal assistant.
GOOGLE HAD VOICE COMMANDS A YEAR AGO
“But wait,” the Android users are crying out. “Google has voice services, too!” Indeed, Android devices do have similar voice services. READ REST OF STORY
Questions for discussion:
Description: A Pfizer-led group plans to buy access to hospital records in New York State to help identify and enroll participants in drug studies
Source: www.businessweek.com/
Date: Nov 3, 2011
Pharmaceutical companies can easily spend years—and more than $1 billion—bringing a new drug to market, in part because they can’t find enough patients to do the required testing of the compound. Such delays can cost up to $1 million a day, fritter away valuable months of patent protection, and allow rival developers to catch up. One remedy: pay hospitals to sift through the health records of their patients. READ REST OF STORY
Questions for discussion:
Description: Mr. Rosedale, 43, is back with a new business called Coffee and Power, where people buy and sell most any kind of task, like making Halloween costumes or writing sophisticated software.
Source: www.nytimes.com/
Date: Nov 6, 2011
To prove his point that a work exchange could function, Mr. Rosedale built the software for his new company by hiring programmers from around the world and dividing up the work into about 1,600 individual tasks, from setting up databases to fixing bugs.
“We think it’s the new model for how software will be written,” he said. “It worked so well that we decided to extend it to all sorts of work.”
Coffee and Power has storefront space in a nondescript part of San Francisco’s Market Street where people can drop in and offer to do jobs or hire people for tasks. They can even start working together on the spot. Mr. Rosedale works upstairs, along with a handful of full-time staff members. READ REST OF STORY
Questions for discussion:
2. Do you see this business model giving any company a long term competitive advantage? Explain
Introduction to Information Systems, 3rd Canadian Binder Ready Version Update Edition
R. Kelly Rainer, Casey G. Cegielski, Ingrid Splettstoesser-Hogeterp, Cristobal Sanchez-Rodriguez
ISBN: 978-1-119-13385-8
August 2015, © 2016
CDN $98.95; CDN $114.95