IBM Analytics Help Memphis Cops Get ‘Smart’

Posted by & filed under Analytics.

Description: Software enabling IBM to find patterns in crime data is one of thousands of so-called smart-city projects aimed at improving urban services around the world

Source: www.businessweek.com

Date: December 5, 2011

Memphis Police Lieutenant Paul Wright arrived at a shooting scene in the city’s Frayser neighborhood on Nov. 17, just as an ambulance was speeding away with the injured victim.

An instant later, a nearby officer pulled out an HTC Corp. smartphone to file a police report. Within an hour, the information would be scoured by International Business Machines Inc. software, helping the Memphis Police Department determine whether the incident was part of a widespread pattern.  READ REST OF STORY

Questions for discussion:

  1. Do you feel that the use of data analytics in the area of crime prevention is always ethical? Why or Why not?
  2. What other areas of our society would benefit most from the use of this data analytics technology?

Keeping Up With Posts and Tweets Down East

Posted by & filed under FaceBook, Social Media, Twitter.

Description: WHEN the phone rings at a call center inside a former department store here, it’s as much story time as sales time. As in: I was in Maine four summers ago. What’s it like in the winter? Or: Our dog ate my husband’s favorite slippers. Can you help me replace them before he finds out?

Source: www.nytimes.com

Date: December 7, 2011

As the holiday orders pour in, some 3,600 L. L. Bean employees in this old mill town and elsewhere in Maine work the phones, answering questions, taking orders and, quite often, listening to warm, fuzzy stories. Customer service is a hallmark of this venerable Maine retailer, which turns 100 next year.

But this Christmas season, there’s a new twist: in addition to traditional phone orders, L L. Bean is wading boot-deep into social media. A 10-member team was recently created to interact with customers on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.  READ REST OF STORY

Questions for discussion:

  1. What should be the policy of businesses in using social media to market their company??

2.  Is it appropriate to use social media as a business but to portray your presence in Social Media as an unattached third party rather than an interested employee agent of the firm?

Cellphones Test Strength of Gym Rules

Posted by & filed under addiction, Blackberry, disruptive technology, Hardware, industry analysis, IS ethics.

Description: LIKE movie theaters and libraries, many fitness clubs have insisted for years that their workout areas should be cellphone-free.

Source: www.nytimes.com

Date: December 7, 2011

Their logic is as simple and straightforward as a push-up: they want to prevent people from yakking on their phones and annoying the fitness buffs who want to crank out reps and mileage in relative peace. Safety is another reason, because texting while running on a treadmill can be hazardous to your health.  But what makes sense in theory is becoming harder to police in practice. Gym owners say their members are dividing into two camps, those who can’t stand cellphones on the gym floor and those who see their phones as indispensable to their workouts as a bottle of water.  READ REST OF STORY

Questions for discussion:

  1. What are the pros and cons of banning smartphones in public places?

2.  Who should make the rules of who and where people can use their very private smartphones?

Millions of printers open to devastating hack attack, researchers say

Posted by & filed under hackers, Hardware.

Description: Could a hacker from half-way around the planet control your printer and give it instructions so frantic that it could eventually catch fire? Or use a hijacked printer as a copy machine for criminals, making it easy to commit identity theft or even take control of entire networks that would otherwise be secure?

Source: www.msnbc.com

Date: November 29, 2011

Printers can be remotely controlled by computer criminals over the Internet, with the potential to steal personal information, attack otherwise secure networks and even cause physical damage, the researchers argue in a vulnerability warning first reported by msnbc.com.  They say there’s no easy fix for the flaw they’ve identified in some Hewlett-Packard LaserJet printer lines – and perhaps on other firms’ printers, too – and there’s no way to tell if hackers have already exploited it.

The researchers, who have working quietly for months in an electronics lab under a series of government and industry grants, described the flaw in a private briefing for federal agencies two weeks ago. They told Hewlett-Packard about it last week.

HP said Monday that it is still reviewing details of the vulnerability, and is unable to confirm or deny many of the researchers’ claims, but generally disputes the researchers’ characterization of the flaw as widespread.  Keith Moore, chief technologist for HP’s printer division, said the firm “takes this very seriously,” but his initial research suggests the likelihood that the vulnerability can be exploited in the real world is low in most cases.       READ REST OF STORY

Questions for discussion:

  1. Why are millions of computer printers open to devastating hack attacks?

2.  What type of damage or maleficence could be perpetrated by attacks on printers?

Laptop Wi-Fi said to nuke sperm, but caveats abound

Posted by & filed under Digital Policy, education, healthcare, Human Resources.

Description: The digital age has left men’s nether parts in a squeeze, if you believe the latest science on semen, laptops and wireless connections.

Source: www.reuters.com

Date: November 29, 2011

In a report in the venerable medical journal Fertility and Sterility, Argentinian scientists describe how they got semen samples from 29 healthy men, placed a few drops under a laptop connected to the Internet via Wi-Fi and then hit download.

Four hours later, the semen was, eh, well-done.

A quarter of the sperm were no longer swimming around, for instance, compared to just 14 percent from semen samples stored at the same temperature away from the computer.

And nine percent of the sperm showed DNA damage, three-fold more than the comparison samples.

The culprit? Electromagnetic radiation generated during wireless communication, say Conrado Avendano of Nascentis Medicina Reproductiva in Cordoba and colleagues.  READ REST OF STORY

Questions for discussion:

  1. Do you feel this research is legitimate and if so what should be done about this information?

2.  Is this problem better solved with legislation or just individuals being left to make their own self interested decisions?

Codecademy says it can turn anyone into a Web programmer

Posted by & filed under Human Resources, industry analysis, revenue model, Software.

Description: It’s a tough economy out there, but there’s at least one skill in high demand: programming.  Industry veterans insist that almost anyone can master the basics of software coding.

Source: cnn.com

Date: Nov 28, 2011

“Coding is going to be the literacy of the 21st Century, and we think we have the easiest way to do it,” says co-founder Zach Sims.

After working with a variety of startups in business development roles, Sims, who is 21, dropped out of Columbia to focus on his own venture. He teamed with Ryan Bubinski, 22, who graduated from Columbia with a degree in computer science and biophysics — and, more importantly, an extensive knowledge of programming.

Codecademy isn’t the first site out there to teach people programming skills, but Sims says its secret sauce is its focus on making training accessible and affordable.

“It’s totally different from books that are one-way learning experiences,” he says. “We think it should be more interactive, more fun than something in a book, where you read for half an hour and then you go code.”

Right now, everything on Codecademy is free. Users receive badges and points for completing lessons. The site currently has four multi-part courses available — a “coding 101” class and three JavaScript trainers — but it hopes to ramp up quickly.     READ REST OF STORY

Questions for discussion:

  1. Do you think this business model for training programmers will work?

2.  What is this firm’s competitive advantage? Is it sustainable long term?

Minding Mobile Manners at Work

Posted by & filed under Apple, Blackberry, Digital Policy, free speech, Human Resources, IS ethics, Uncategorized.

Description: A new Intel survey on mobile etiquette in the workplace finds user should execute more restraint.

Source: cnn.com

Date: Dec 2, 2011

Questions for discussion:

  1. Do mobile manners at work make a difference for the employee?

2.  Who should set what are the right “mobile manners”?

Can Facebook Persuade Advertisers to Forget About Clicks?

Posted by & filed under branding, business models, FaceBook.

Description: Facebook has also been working on improving its offerings for advertisers, as it tries to generate enough revenue to justify its alleged $60 billion market value.

Source: www.businessweek.com

Date: Oct 7, 2011

One of the newest moves in this direction is an addition to the Page Insights dashboard, which Facebook provides for brands as a way of seeing all the analytics related to what used to be called their “fan” pages. Along with being able to see the usual “likes” and sharing associated with a page, as well as the demographic and gender breakdown of those who have interacted with it, Facebook now shows something it calls “People Talking About This.” READ REST OF STORY

Questions for discussion:

  1. Why does Facebook not want to use the industry standard metric of “clicks”?

2.  D you feel that Facebook’s claim of their new metric has merit in the advertising industry?

Textbooks Finally Take a Big Leap to Digital

Posted by & filed under Amazon, Copyright, Ecommerce, education, iPad, online education.

Description: Amazon, which got its start selling books online, announced this year that, for the first time, its digital books had outsold paper books. This trend of going digital does not hold true for all books.

Source: www.nytimes com

Date: Nov 23, 2011

Textbooks are gaining, though, as publishers take advantage of the popularity of tablets like the Kindle and iPad, expanding their catalogues and offering products like rental digital books that expire after a semester or two.

The potential for digital growth is leading publishers to experiment with products that stretch the boundaries of traditional textbooks, slowly turning away from static text and images toward a multimedia, intuitive approach, publishers say. READ REST OF STORY

Questions for discussion:

  1. Why have textbooks been so successful in digital market?

2.  What are the long tem consequences for textbooks entering the digital realm? Who are the winners and who are the losers in this trend?

Peggy Noonan On Steve Jobs And Why Big Companies Die

Posted by & filed under Apple, Business Intelligence, industry analysis.

Description: The salesmen who led the companies were smart and eloquent, but “they didn’t know anything about the product.” In the end this can doom a great company, because what consumers want is good products.

Source: www.forbes.com

Date: Nov 23, 2011

What’s interesting is that Steve Jobs lived long enough to show us at  Apple [AAPL], in the period 1997-2011: what would happen if the firm opted to keep playing offense and focus totally on adding value for customers?  The result? The firm makes tons and tons of money. In fact, much more money than the companies that are milking their cash cows and focused on making money. Other companies like Amazon [AMZN], Salesforce [CRM] and Intuit [INTU] have demonstrated the same phenomenon and shown us that it’s something that any firm can learn. It’s not rocket science. It’s called radical management.

Fifty years ago, “milking the cash cow” could go on for many decades. What’s different today is that globalization and the shift in power in the marketplace from buyer to seller is dramatically shortening the life expectancy of firms that are merely milking their cash cows. Half a century ago, the life expectancy of a firm in the Fortune 500 was around 75 years. Now it’s less than 15 years and declining even further.   READ REST OF STORY

Questions for discussion:

  1. What does Jobs think is the reason why tech companies decline over time?

2.  What is Jobs solution to ensure that Apple stays a long term creative company?