Join us in Austin for Gigaom Change where we will explore the impact of seven technologies that will change the way you do business forever.
Over an immersive two and a half days, we will cover Artificial Intelligence, Virtual + Augmented Reality, Robotics, Nanotechnology, Cybersecurity, 3D+ Printing, and Human-Machine Interfaces to understand how these technologies are transforming industry, and why this all matters.
Helping bridge the gap between today’s business operations and tomorrow’s demanding expectations, our carefully curated league of 20+ innovative speakers will showcase how business leaders can stop wondering what the future will bring, and instead start building for it.
We’re excited to announce three new speakers added to our lineup for Gigaom Change 2016!
Speaking on the subject of nanotechnology is Dr. Heike Riel, IBM Fellow & Director Physical Sciences Department, IBM Research. Dr. Riel’s work focuses on advancing the frontiers of information technology through the physical sciences. Her research interests include nanoscale materials and novel device concepts for applications in electronics, optoelectronics, energy harvesting and cognitive computing.
Discussing the subject of robotics is Rodolphe Gelin, EVP Chief Scientific Officer, Aldebaran. Rodolphe Gelin has worked for decades in the field of robotics, focusing primarily on developing mobile robots for service applications to aid the disabled and elderly. Most notably, he heads the Romeo2 project, a large-scale effort to create a humanoid personal assistant and companion robot.
Addressing human-machine interface is Mark Rolston, Cofounder & Chief Creative Officer, argodesign. Mark Rolston is a renowned designer who focuses on groundbreaking user experiences and addresses the modern challenge of design beyond the visible artifact – in the realm of behavior, the interaction between human and machine, and other unseen elements.
These speakers join an extraordinary group of 20+ global experts we’re lining up for Gigaom Change 2016 including:
Speaking on the subject of virtual & augmented reality is Jacquelyn Ford Morie Ph.D., Founder and CEO of All These Worlds LLC and Founder & CTO of The Augmented Traveler Corp. Dr. Jacquelyn Ford Morie is widely known for using technology such as Virtual Reality (VR) to deliver meaningful experiences that enrich people’s lives.
Discussing the subject of artificial intelligence is Rob High, IBM Fellow, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of IBM Watson. Rob High has overall responsibility to drive Watson technical strategy and thought leadership. As a key member of the Watson Leadership team, Rob works collaboratively with the Watson engineering, research, and development teams across IBM.
Addressing nanotechnology is Dr. Michael Edelman, Chief Executive Officer of Nanoco. Through his work with Nanoco, Dr. Edelman and his team have developed an innovative technology platform using quantum dots that are set to transform lighting, bio-imaging, and much more. Using real insights and examples, Edleman will share how this technology is currently disrupting entire industries.
On the artificial intelligence panel, Manoj Saxena, Executive Chairman of CognitiveScale and a founding managing director of The Entrepreneurs’ Fund IV, a $100m seed fund, will address the cognitive computing space; specifically, a new class of machine intelligence powered software that revolutionizing customer engagement, decision-making and productivity via complex, multi-structured Dark Data.
And last but not least, our opening night keynote speaker will be internet/ethernet pioneer Robert Metcalfe, Professor of Innovation, Murchison Fellow of Free Enterprise at The University of Texas.
Join us and 300+ visionary leaders along with 20+ global experts for the Gigaom Change 2016 Leader’s Summit on September 21-23 in Austin, Texas to explore some of the highly disruptive ways seven key technologies are shifting enterprise business.
If you are interested in sharing your work either on the stage or demonstrated in the venue, please contact us asap at change@gigaom.com as we’re finalizing things now.
Dr. Jacki Ford Morie is widely known for using technology such as Virtual Reality (VR) to deliver meaningful experiences that enrich people’s lives. From 1990 to 1994, Morie worked at the University of Central Florida’s Institute for Simulation and Training. While there, she developed multi-sensory techniques for VR that predictably elicit emotional responses from participants. In 1999, she helped establish the USC Institute for Creative Technologies, an Army-funded research lab finding connections between entertainment and military needs and expanding her work in emotionally evocative VR, including patenting a scent collar to deliver evocative odors to participants within immersive experiences.
In 2013 Morie started All These Worlds, LLC to promote virtual environments and technology for healing. Her Coming Home project, started in 2009, created a center in the online world Second Life, where veterans and soldiers in need could find stress relief and rehabilitation activities. She also recently created a virtual world ecosystem called ANSIBLE for NASA designed to provide psychological benefits for future astronauts who will undertake extremely long missions to Mars.
Dr. Morie’s other research interests include how space, identity and play in virtual worlds can positively affect our human nature, and she has presented this work at conferences worldwide. Her newest startup, The Augmented Traveler, is focused on bringing an augmented reality product to market that will enhance the way people experience travel to all corners of the world.
Dr. Morie will be speaking on the subject of virtual and augmented reality at Gigaom Change Leaders Summit in Austin, September 21-23rd. In anticipation of that, I caught up with her Tuesday, June 21, with a few questions about virtual reality and it’s potential impact on the business world.
Byron Reese: Your involvement with virtual reality goes way back. When do you remember of the first time you thought about it or encountered the term or fiddled with the device? When did what would become VR first popup in your life?
Dr. Jacki Ford Morie: In the late 1980s I became aware of virtual reality and I found a lab in Central Florida that was starting a virtual reality research lab. And so I ended up getting myself hired there so I could work on virtual reality. And that was 1989.
And when you survey, when you flash ahead 27 years to today, how has what happened unfolded in ways that you expected or that you didn’t expect?
Well, the thing about actual virtual reality is how amazingly comparable to reality it can be. It doesn’t have to be photo-realistic but it gives you a believable experience. And that is really the primary thing behind virtual reality. We’re able to give people a very engaging, compelling, believable, cognitively real experience. Even if it’s being presented through virtual means.
What’s happened now, 27 years later, is that everybody wants to be on the VR bandwagon and things are being called virtual reality that have none of those sort of affordances that virtual reality actually allows us to build on.
So things like 360 video, which is nothing more than wrapping a screen around your head on a sphere. That’s not virtual reality, that’s another kind of screen that gets wrapped around your head. So I guess the thing that has happened that I could never have anticipated is that many versions of things that are not actually virtual reality are now being called virtual reality and people just keep repeating it because they don’t know any better, they have a vested interest in making that be something sexy to the general consumer.
You mention the consumer. Do you see in the next 10 years virtual reality mainly being a consumer technology or do you see virtual reality, and augmented reality, having an impact on the business world?
Oh absolutely, it’s going to have an impact on many, many different businesses. The business that wants to get their message out there in a compelling way, there’s going to be nothing better than virtual reality or augmented reality to do that, because it’s a multi-sensory mechanism for bringing people into the experience you want them to have.
And that’s very, very compelling. We go to the theater because it’s an experience, but if you want to get that theater experience out to more people and preserve the kind of immersive experience that theater-going gives us, that social aspect, then you’re probably going to want to use virtual reality.
Look at Broadway, they’re maxed out on tickets, they’re maxed out on the prices of these things. How is it going to expand? It’s very expensive to send a troop to every city in the country. And yet, the demand is there. But imagine if we were able to create those Broadway shows with virtual reality characters who can either act predictably or have some sort of spontaneous elements to them. And this is going to take more doing in terms of getting believable characters who have some sort of emotion behind them.
Right now, real-estate agents are using it to give you tours of a place. So I’m looking to buy a house in Florida, let’s say. I don’t have to get on a plane and go to Florida and walk around 15 houses. I can actually take my first pass of those houses through a virtual reality walkthrough and get a sense of what it’s like to be in that house.
So here you have those kinds of things. It’s certainly what IKEA was doing with augmented reality with their catalogues, where you could take the furniture from the IKEA catalogue and place it in front of you in your room space to see what it looked like. That was a great use of augmented reality and we’re going to see a lot more of these things.
So I think what we’re going to find is a seamless continuum from reality to mixed reality, augmented reality, that purely virtual thing that can immerse you and separate you from the physical world. And I can think of very few markets that might not have a benefit from this kind of technology.
And to go back to a comment you made earlier about the phrase, “trying to mean everything and therefore meaning nothing,” do you consider augmented reality in the camp of really being virtual reality because they are immersive and they respond to your movement and all that, or is even augmented reality not something you would call virtual?
Well, they all use digital technology in some ways. The difference between virtual reality in its purest form and augmented reality in its original context is that pure virtual reality requires you to put on some kind of device, usually a head-mounted display, that separates you from the physical world to immerse you in something where any sort of extraneous signals coming from something that’s not the experience being provided to you in virtual reality, they can’t intrude.
So it’s amusing to go to the meet-ups and conferences right now where somebody puts you in a head-mounted display, mind you designed to separate you from the distractions of the physical world and allow you to focus on that immersive experiences that’s been created. And the first thing they do is tap you on the shoulder and say, “hey, you can look around.” Or what you’re hearing is the glaring sound from the exhibition floor.
Now, augmented reality by context is designed so that it overlays some sort of imagery on to the physical world. So it doesn’t work without the physical world. It’s augmenting the reality you have. So they’re kind of two ends of the spectrum. Maybe you put full physical reality at the very end of the spectrum and the augmented reality is in there. And there are favorites of that where it’s more augmented than it is reality or more reality than it is augmented.
So for example, your augmentation might be hold your phone up and it says, there’s a great restaurant down this street. And then at the other end you have experiences that require you to separate yourself from the physicality of everyday life. And that’s the pure form of virtual reality. So it’s a continuum. They’re all using virtual technology but in different ways for different purposes.
Do you think there’s a chance that a significant portion of the population will put on a virtual reality headset and never take it off?
No. I don’t think that’s going to happen.
And why do you think that?
Well, I don’t think there’s enough content in the world for somebody to put one on and never take it off.
But I don’t mean, literally never take it off. But the people who already spend enormous amounts of time in virtual worlds, now we’ve essentially made the virtual world even that much more immersive and believable. So that you have significant number of people that just kind of disappear into those worlds because they consider them more attractive than the real world.
Perhaps there is a subset of a population who was so unsatisfied with their actual lives for whatever reasons. They could be shut ins, or live in a very remote area or whatever. Those people might find a lot of satisfaction being primarily in a virtual space. I think well-rounded individuals will probably balance their time between the physical and the virtual for very good reasons.
You have to be getting something valuable out of immersing yourself in a virtual space and separating yourself from the physical world. I don’t see that amount of satisfaction, except for those cases I mentioned, for most of the population any time soon.
Maybe in a 100 years when we really need to go into something that’s been created for us because everything else has degraded to the point that we do have an apocalyptic future and we live in a matrix. That type of thing. But I really don’t see that happening. I think there’s too many things about life itself that can’t be delivered through a virtual experience and a head-managed display that is going to forego that kind of situation, where most people want to just live in their virtual space all the time.
And then there’s questions like, okay, how did those people even support themselves? And things like that. So, you know, there’s just a lot of social and economic barriers to that type of thing happening. I think if people talk about it it’s more of a scare thing than a reality that I envision happening any time soon.
Alright. Let’s leave it there. It was a great note.
Dr. Ford Morie will be speaking on the subject of virtual and augmented reality at Gigaom Change Leaders Summit in Austin, September 21-23rd.
Here’s something funny. While most complain that WebRTC isn’t suitable for the enterprise, it is probably the next best thing happening to enterprises. And it is all because we’re in the midst of a digital transformation.
WebRTC is a five-year-old technology, so it is rather new to the scene. At its core, WebRTC enables adding real-time voice and video communications to any website without the need to download a thing. Need to get a customer on a quick support call? Just send him a URL.
The naysayers dismiss WebRTC because it still isn’t available on Safari or Internet Explorer. While that is true, it is changing. Support already exist in the new Microsoft Edge browser with reassuring rumors about Apple and Safari’s plans towards WebRTC. UbiquitousWebRTC support everywhereis on the horizon.
Which brings me to enterprises.
Enterprises today are going through a digital transformation. In each and every vertical, businesses are being redefined by having the information that runs through the enterprise turned into digital assets that are then used to drive business processes and analytics.
This takes shape in many different ways: enabling customers to use self-service channels instead of using human operated contact centers, using big data and data lake projects to deduce insights and personalize services, streamlining sales processes through marketing automation, etc.
To make this happen, enterprises must integrate the different IT services they employ internally. The ERP system must connect to the e-commerce site, which must be integrated with the contact center, that in turn has to be accessible to the marketer.
Until a few years ago, such projects were only available to the largest of enterprises, relying heavily on protocols such as SOAP and products such as ESBs (Enterprise Service Bus). It takes many man months and lots of dollars to build such integrations, and they oftentimes end up failing due to their size and complexity.
In recent years, though, such integrations have shifted towards the use of REST. A lightweight cousin of SOAP. To explain REST, you need only look at your browser address bar – REST is essentially a URL call, similar to how you load a web page – but used by a program. While REST is rather loosely defined, the number of tools for handling it is growing rapidly and has come to a point where it is ready to replace SOAP.
Almost every new product or service that is being introduced to the market today includes a REST API, enabling integrators or developers to access it programmatically – in ways a lot easier than the older SOAP mechanism.
This change is coupled with the migration of IT towards cloud services. One where certain services are consumed from remote data centers instead of being installed and managed on-premise. This necessitates solid and publicly available APIs to use.
WebRTC fits perfectly in this brave new world.
Up until today, communications took place in a separate logical and often times even physical network. Be it cellular, wireline or VoIP service, these get built in its own private network or virtual LAN within the enterprise. And the interfaces built into these products in one of two ways: communication-based, which is hard to handle (think SIP or Megaco as an API layer for IT developers); or on some proprietary API that is hard to interface and integrate with.
WebRTC changes all that. It not only makes VoIP more accessible as a technology, but it almost forces developers to think with standard web protocols on how to use and deploy it. As an example, it gets your CRM vendor build his own contact center, many times with players such as Twilio who offer their ownWebRTC SDK.
It is no wonder that enterprise vendors are adopting WebRTC en masse. Adopters include Oracle, IBM, Cisco, Atlassian, Slack and many others. The enterprise is where the advantages and ease of integration of WebRTC shine.
In a way, WebRTC is the last piece of the enterprise puzzle of migrating to the cloud and going through its digital transformation.
Doist has released version 800 of the team task management solution, Todoist, effectively moving the tool into the work management category. In particular, Todoist now supports activity ‘logs’ (or ‘streams’), project notes, improved microsyntax for quickly creating tasks, and a reworked notification system user experience.
Work managementis a term that has emerged in recent years as teamtask managementtools were enhanced with various social communication capabilities, principally derived from design motifs that originated inwork media (or enterprise social network) tools (like Yammer, IBM Connections, and Jive).
The new activity stream includes recent comments and project notes (although they are named ‘comments’ in the activity stream.
The new project notes is basically a reuse of the existing model for task comments. This has the benefit of being familiar, but falls short of what I’d like to see since task comments and, now, project notes, are not visible until the icon is clicked, and then they appear in a hover box, covering the task list in the project.
It would be much better if display of project and task comments was more like the new activity stream. Imagine that I click the comment icon in either case, and instead of the hover window instead the comments would be displayed below the title in a scrollable list. Here’s a mock-up:
And I would like to see explicit replies, too. A flat series of notes or comments creates all sorts of headaches.
Bottom Line
The most important takeaway is that Todoist has now moved from team task management to being a true work management tool. While there’s a lot still to do with the new features, Todoist’s traditional strengths — ease of use, flexibility in ordering and nesting of tasks and projects, and smart integration with Gmail — are still in place. But now Todoist is gaining important features for workgroup cooperation and coordination.
I have to confess that I’ve been surprised by the valuation for DocuSign, which was valued at $3 billion in a funding round last year. I’ve had niddling doubts about the growth possibilities for a company that is basically built around the document signature use case, especially since the idea of ‘electronic signatures’ feels like a skeuomorph crying out for disruption by other approaches to identity verification, most notably fingerprint recognition on smartphones.
Perhaps those questions are being raised by others as well. According to Bloomberg, Rick Osterloh, a former Motorola Mobility exec, had been picked to lead the company forward to an IPO, but just before the announcement he balked and took a job as head of hardware at Alphabet. DocuSign is left with Keith Krach as CEO, who said last fall he wanted to step down.
Basically, verification of identity is now in the hands of the Internet giants, like Google and Apple, and DocuSign is a dinosaur just waiting for the shower of meteorites to come raining down.
So, here’s a small prediction, based on the senior executives that have been bailing out of the company — four out of nine top execs left this year: one of the majors — Google or Microsoft? — will buy DocuSign, and for less than the $3 billion valuation. The company is unwilling to share its financials, and has invested heavily to meet the requirements for eIDAS regulations in the EU, going into effect on July 1.
Just over 2000 years ago, Philo of Byzantium sat down and made a list of the seven wonders of the world at that time. Like any such subjective list, it was met with criticism in its own time. The historian Herodotus couldn’t believe the Egyptian Labyrinth was left off and Callimachus argued forcefully for the Ishtar Gate to be included.
At Gigaom Change in September (early adopter pricing still available), we will explore the seven technologies that I think will most affect business in the near future. I would like to list the seven technologies I chose and why I chose them. Would you have picked something different?
Here is my list:
Robots – This one is pretty easy. Even if you make your trade in 1’s and 0’s and never touch an atom, robots will still impact some aspect of your business, even if it is upstream. Additionally, the issue of robots has launched a societal debate about unemployment, minimum wage, basic income, and the role of “working for a living” in the modern world. We have dreamed of robots for eons, feared them for decades, and now we finally get to see what their real effect on humanity will be.
AI – This is also, forgive the pun, a no-brainer. AI is a tricky one though. Some of the smartest people on the planet (Hawking, Gates, Musk) say we should fear it while others, such as the Chief Scientist of Baidu say worrying about AI is like worrying about overpopulation on Mars. Further, the estimates to when we might see an AGI (artificial general intelligence, an AI that can do a wide range of tasks like a human) varies from 5 years to 500 years. Our brains are, arguably, what make us human, and the idea that an artificial brain might be made gets our attention. What effect will this have on the workplace? We will find out.
AR/VR – Although we think of AR/VR as (at first) a consumer technology, the work applications are equally significant. You only have to put on a VR headset for about three minutes to see that some people, maybe a good number, will put this device on and never take it off. But on the work front, it is still an incredibly powerful tool, able to overlay information from the digital world onto the world of atoms. Our brains aren’t quite wired up to imagine this in its full flowering, but we will watch it unfold in the next decade.
Human/Machine Interface – Also bridging the gap between the real world and the virtual one is the whole HMI front. As machines become ever more ubiquitous, our need to seamlessly interface with them grows. HMI is a wide spectrum of technologies: From good UIs to eye-tracking hardware to biological implants, HMI will grow to the point where the place where the human ends and the machine begins will get really blurry.
3D Printing – We call this part of Gigaom Change “3D Printing” but we mean it to include all the new ways we make stuff today. But there isn’t a single term that encapsulates that, so 3D Printing will have to suffice. While most of our first-hand experience with 3D printing is single-color plastic demo pieces, there is an entire industry working on 3D printing new hearts and livers, as well as more mundane items like clothing and food (“Earl Grey, hot”). From a business standpoint, the idea that quantity one has the same unit price as quantity one-thousand is powerful and is something we will see play out sooner than later.
Nanotechnology – I get the most pushback from nano because it seems so far out there. But it really isn’t. By one estimate, there are two thousand nanotech products on the market today. Nano, building things with dimensions of between 1 and 100 nanometers, is already a multi-billion dollar industry. On the consumer side, we will see nano robots that swim around in your blood cleaning up what ails you. But on the business side, we will see a re-thinking of all of the material sciences. The very substances we deal with will change, and we may even be said to be not in the iron nor stone age, but the nano age, where we make materials that were literally impossible to create just a few years ago.
Cybersecurity – This may seem to be the one item that is least like all of the others, for it isn’t a specific technology per se. I included it though because as more of our businesses depend on the technologies that we use, the more our businesses are susceptible to attacks by technology. How do we build in safeguards in a world where most of us don’t really even understand the technologies themselves, let alone, subtle ways that they can be exploited?
Those are my seven technologies that will most effect business. I hope you can come to Austin Sept 21-23 to explore them all with us at the Gigaom Change Leader’s Summit.
Slack has announced a new mechanism for third party apps to better integrate with its work chat platform. Rather than relying on so-called ‘slash commands’ — like /trello add Taco Drone Delivery — and then sending subsequent messages to assign values to the metadata of that task, third party apps can be configured to present a UI much more like that in a native app, including buttons that can be pressed to assign values.
Here’s a animated gif for the new Trello integration with message buttons:
Note that the buttons can cascade, as when the user selects ‘due date’ and then various options for the due date are presented. Also note that ‘attach conversation’ will attach a link to the Trello card pointing back to the chat context where the task was created.
This is a serious advance for Slack integration, and specifically, the cognitive dissonance problem with a /slash command-style integration like the one with Trello. I wrote about this recently in Slack ‘Spots’, not just Bots, where I suggested that Slack was probably working on something like this. And yes, they were.
Computational linguists and computer scientists, among them University of Texas professor Jason Baldridge, have been working for over fifty years toward algorithmic understanding of human language. They’re not there yet. They are, however, doing a pretty good job with important tasks such as entity recognition, relation extraction, topic modeling, and summarization. These tasks are accomplished via natural language processing (NLP) technologies, implementing linguistic, statistical, and machine learning methods.
Computational linguist Jason Baldridge, co-founder and chief scientist of start-up People Pattern
NLP touches our daily lives, in many ways. Voice response and personal assistants — Siri, Google Now, Microsoft Cortana, Amazon Alexa — rely on NLP to interpret requests and formulate appropriate responses. Search and recommendation engines apply NLP, as do applications ranging from pharmaceutical drug discovery to national security counter-terrorism systems.
NLP, part of text and speech analytics solutions, is widely applied for market research, consumer insights, and customer experience management. The more consumer-facing systems know about people — individuals and groups — their profiles, preferences, habits, and needs — the more accurate, personalized, and timely their responses. That form of understanding — pulling clues from social postings, behaviors, and connections — is the business Jason’s company, People Pattern, is in.
I think all this is cool stuff so I asked two favors of Jason. #1 was to speak at a conference I organize, the up-coming Sentiment Analysis Symposium. He agreed. #2 was to respond to a series of questions — responses relayed in this article — exploring approaches to —
The Analytics of Language, Behavior, and Personality
Seth Grimes> People Pattern seeks to infer human characteristics via language and behavioral analyses, generating profiles that can be used to predict consumer responses. What are the most telling, the most revealing sorts of thing people say or do that, for business purposes, tells you who they are?
Jason Baldridge> People explicitly declare a portion of their interests in topics like sports, music, and politics in their bios and posts. This is part of their outward presentation of their selves: how they wish to be perceived by others and which content they believe will be of greatest interest to their audience. Other aspects are less immediately obvious, such as interests revealed through the social graph. This includes not just which accounts they follow, but the interests of the people they are most highly connected to (which may have been expressed in their posts and their own graph connections).
A person’s social activity can also reveal many other aspects, including demographics (e.g. gender, age, racial identity, location, and income) and psychographics (e.g. personality and status). Demographics are a core set of attributes used by most marketers. The ability to predict these (rather than using explicit declarations or surveys) enables many standard market research questions to be answered quickly and at a scale previously unattainable.
Seth> And what can one learn from these analyses?
People Pattern Audience Page
Personas and associated language use.
As a whole, this kind of analysis allows us to standardize large populations (e.g. millions of people) on a common set of demographic variables and interests (possibly derived from people speaking different languages) and then support exploratory data analysis via unsupervised learning algorithms. For example, we use sparse factor analysis to find the correlated interests in an audience and furthermore group the individuals who are best fits for those factors. We call these discovered personas because they reveal clusters of individuals with related interests that distinguish them from other groups in the audience, and they have associated aggregate demographics—the usual things that go into building a persona segment by hand.
We can then show the words, phrases, entities, and accounts that the individuals in each persona discuss with respect to each of the interests. For example, one segment might discuss Christian themes with respect to religion, while others might discuss Muslim or New Age ones. Marketers can then use these to create tailored content for ads that are delivered directly to the individuals in a given persona, using our audience dashboard. There are of course other uses, such as social science questions. I’ve personally used it to look into audiences related to Black Lives Matter and understand how different groups of people talk about politics
Our audience dashboard is backed by Elastic Search, so you can also use search terms to find segments via self-declared allegiances for such polarizing topics.
A shout-out —
Personality and status are generally revealed through subtle linguistic indicators that my University of Texas Austin colleague James Pennebaker has studied for the past three decades and is now commercializing with his start-up company Receptiviti. These include detecting and counting different types of words, such as function words (e.g. determiners and prepositions) or cognitive terms (such as “because” and “therefore”), and seeing how a given individual’s rates of use of those word classes compares to known profiles of the different personality types.
So personas, language use, topics. How do behavioral analyses contribute to overall understanding?
Many behaviors reveal important aspects about an account that a human would struggle to infer. For example, the times at which an account regularly posts is a strong indicator of whether they are a person, organization or spam account. Organization accounts often automate their sharing, and they tend to post at regular intervals or common times, usually on the hour or half hour. Spam accounts often post at a regular frequency — perhaps every 8 minutes, plus or minus one minute. An actual person posts in accordance with sleep, work, and play activities, with greater variance — including sporadic bursts of activity and long periods of inactivity.
Any other elements?
Graph connections are especially useful for bespoke, super-specific interests and questions. For example, we used graph connections to build a pro-life/pro-choice classifier for one client to rank over 200,000 individuals in greater Texas on a scale from most likely to be pro-life to most-likely to be pro-choice. By using known pro-life and pro-choice accounts, it was straightforward to gather examples of individuals with a strong affiliation to one side or the other and learn a classifier based on their graph connections that was then applied to the graph connections of individuals who follow none of those accounts.
Could you say a bit about how People Pattern identifies salient data and makes sense of it, the algorithms?
The starting point is to identify an audience. Often this is simply the people who follow a brand and/or its competitors, or who comment on their products or use certain hashtags. We can also connect the individuals in a CRM to their corresponding social accounts. This process, which we refer to as stitching, uses identity resolution algorithms that make predictions based on names, locations, email addresses and how well they match corresponding fields in the social profiles. After identifying high confidence matches, we can then append their profile analysis to their CRM data. This can inform an email campaign, or be the start for lead generation, and more.
Making sense of data — let’s look at three aspects — demographics, interests, and location —
Our demographics classifiers are based on supervised training from millions of annotated examples. We use logistic regression for attributes like gender, race, and account type. For age, we use linear regression techniques that allow us characterize the model’s confidence in its predictions — this allows us to provide more accurate aggregate estimates for arbitrary sets of social profiles. This is especially important for alcohol brands that need to ensure they are engaging with age-appropriate audiences. All of these classifiers are backed by rules that detect self-declared information when it is available (e.g. many people state their age in their bio).
We capture explicit interests with text classifiers. We use a proprietary semi-supervised algorithm for building classifiers from small amounts of human supervision and large amounts of unlabeled texts. Importantly, this allows us to support new languages quickly and at lower cost, compared to fully supervised models. We can also use classifiers built this way to generate features for other tasks. For example, we are able to learn classifiers that identify language associated with people of different age groups, and this produces an array of features used by our age classifiers. They are also great inputs for deep learning for NLP and they are different from the usual unsupervised word vectors people commonly use.
For location, we use our internally developed adaptation of spatial label propagation. With this technique, you start with a set of accounts that have explicitly declared their location (in their bio or through geo tags), and then these locations are spread through graph connections to infer locations for accounts that have not stated their location explicitly. This method can resolve over half of individuals to within 10 kilometers of their true location. Determining this information is important for many marketing questions (e.g. how does my audience in Dallas differ from my audience in Seattle?) It obviously also brings up privacy concerns. We use these determinations for aggregate analyses but don’t show them at the individual profile level. However, people should be aware that variations of these algorithms are published and there are open source implementations, so leaving their location field blank is by no means sufficient to ensure your home location isn’t discoverable by others.
My impression is that People Pattern, with an interplay of multiple algorithms and data types and multi-stage analysis processes, is a level more complex than most new-to-the-market systems. How do you excel while avoiding over-engineering that leads to a brittle solution?
It’s on ongoing process, with plenty of bumps and bruises along the way. I’m very fortunate that my co-founder, Ken Cho, has deep experience in enterprise social media applications. Ken co-founded Spredfast [an enterprise social media marketing platform]. He has strong intuitions on what kind of data will be useful to marketers, and we work together to figure out whether it is possible to extract and/or predict the data.
We’ve struck on a number of things that work really well, such as predicting core demographics and interests and doing clustering based on those. Other things have worked well, but didn’t provide enough value or were too confusing to users. For example, we used to support both interest-level keyword analysis (which words does this audience use with respect to “music”) and topic modeling, which produces clusters of semantically related words given all the posts by people in the audience, in (almost) real-time. The topics were interesting because they showed groupings of interests that weren’t captured by our interest hierarchy (such as music events), but it was expensive to support topic model analysis given our RESTful architecture and we chose to deprecate that capability. We have since reworked our infrastructure so that we can support some of those analyses in batch (rather than streaming) mode for deeper audience analyses. This is also important for supporting multiple influence scores computed with respect to a fixed audience rather than generic overall influence scores.
Ultimately, I’ve learned to think about approaching a new kind of analysis not just with respect to the modeling, but as importantly to consider whether we can get the data needed at the time that the user wants the analysis, how costly the infrastructure to support it will be, and how valuable it is likely to be. We’ve done some post-hoc reconsiderations along these lines, which has led to streamlining capabilities.
Other factors?
Another key part of this is having the right engineering team to plan and implement the necessary infrastructure. Steve Blackmon joined us a year ago, and his deep experience in big data and machine learning problems has allowed us to build our people database in a scalable, repeatable manner. This means we now have 200+ million profiles that have demographics, interests and more already pre-computed. More importantly, we now have recipes and infrastructure for developing further classifiers and analyses. This allows us to get them into our product more quickly. Another important recent hire was our product manager Omid Sedaghatian. Omid is doing a fantastic job of figuring out what aspects of our application are excelling, which aren’t delivering expected value, and how we can streamline and simplify everything we do.
Excuse the flattery, but it’s clear your enthusiasm and your willingness to share your knowledge are huge assets for People Pattern. Not coincidentally, your other job is teaching. Regarding teaching — to conclude this interview — Sentiment Analysis Symposium in New York, and pre-conference you’ll present a tutorial, Computing Sentiment, Emotion, and Personality. Could you give us the gist of the material you’ll be covering?
Actually, I just did. Well, almost.
I’ll start the tutorial with a natural language processing overview and then cover sentiment analysis basics — rules, annotation, machine learning, and evaluation. Then I’ll get into author modeling, which seeks to understand demographic and psychographic attributes based on what someone says and how they say it. This is in the tutorial description: We’ll look at additional information that might be determined from non-explicit components of linguistic expression, as well as non-textual aspects of the input, such as geography, social networks, and images, things I’ve described in this interview. But with an extended, live session you get depth and interaction, and an opportunity to explore.
Thanks Jason. I’m looking forward to your session.
People Pattern uses data science methodologies to bring clarity to the vast amounts of social data available and helps you discover quality customers and create innovative people-based datasets.
I’ve recently been talking to Danila Kukarsky of Techinline Ltd., the developer of the FixMe.IT remote support service, about changes in the market for remote support technologies.
Delivering end user support services has long been the exclusive domain of the Service Desk. Either delivered in house or increasingly via out sourced service providers, it can be a deeply frustrating experience for client and support staff alike: Visualize the client’s inevitably imperfect description of their issue, identify a likely solution, and then laboriously walk the client through the steps to address whatever problem is at hand. It’s a process that can be painfully slow, and overrun with errors and missteps. The obvious way to eradicate this torture is through an endpoint management system which as well as providing configuration management, usually offer virtual deskside support services to deliver remote viewing and remote desktop control. These tools enable the Service Desk to see their client’s problem first-hand, shortening time to repair, and eliminating the frustrations of telephone support.
As good as today’s enterprise endpoint management systems are, there are an increasing number of situations where they cannot be used. The rapid growth of the consumerization of IT over the last five years has seen individual employees and departments bypass centralized IT services in favor of SaaS providers to plug the gaps in the enterprise supported application portfolio. Getting effective support for SaaS apps takes a little more work. Lacking any onsite presence, If SaaS venders want to provide virtual deskside support they can’t rely on their customer’s remote support systems, nor are they able to install large footprint endpoint management tools of their own. Instead they have to use lighter, small or zero footprint remote support apps, that can be run on demand without prior installation and without needing elevated privileges.
FixMe.IT straddles the boundary between being a lightweight web-based remote support app ideal for SaaS providers, and a not quite enterprise-class product. Its lightweight client makes it a good fit for SaaS providers, but at the same time it’s far more than just a remote control app and has enough advanced features to make of interest to SME customers looking for a richer remote support tool. As well as being able to either shadow or control the client’s desktop, support staff get both a virtual laser pointer and pen to annotate the remote display, tools that can be very helpful when it comes to supporting busy apps with complex user interfaces. There’s a well thought out admin console that enables support staff to manage multiple concurrent support sessions as well as a basic logging tool to keep track of time spent on support sessions. Support staff also have the option of recording support sessions for audit or training purposes, and can also share their own desktop with the customer, useful for one on one training, or for customer’s whose data security concerns make them unwilling to share their own desktop while still looking to benefit from visual hand holding. While admins might find FixMe.IT’s rich remote support features provide the biggest benefit from their customers’ perspective, it also provides great value as a flexible, easy to use alternative to Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Connection tool. Admins can create a list of remote physical or virtual systems authorized for unattended access. Once created, the FixMe.IT admin console makes it simple to switch between a client’s desktop and any remote systems needed to troubleshoot and resolve issues. And knowing that FixMe.IT is always available for ad hoc connections can bring peace of mind to those who need remote access to their workstations on the go.
FixMe.IT is offered as service; customers can choose either to buy a fixed number of support sessions, that can be consumed any way they wish, or buy a flexible use license limited only by the number of concurrent users on the service desk – there’s no license cost for the client-side component. And it’s well priced, at less than $1 per day for the subscription license, it’s the kind of product that is worth having around even if you only use it once or twice a month.
I particularly like how FixMe.IT maintains remote support sessions through client reboots. Making it possible for support personnel to install updates, reboot and reconnect without the customer having to do anything to reinstate the connection. It’s not a unique feature by any means, but it’s the kind of detail that is essential for anyone with an eye of good user experience. This persistence can also be maintained when restarting in Safe Mode and when switching user accounts. The one thing I didn’t like, was the lack of any obvious tell-tale to remind the client that their desktop was being shadowed, controlled, or recorded. The app does provide the client with a log showing that their desktop is being shadowed or controlled, but visible tell-tale in the foreground would be preferable. As it is, this won’t be to be an issue for much longer, Techinline already has plans to incorporate this in a future release.
What FixMe.IT doesn’t have today is support for Apple OS X or Chrome OS. With PC sales in steady global decline, the only growth markets today are for Chromebooks and iMacs, especially in K-12 education where Chromebook sales have exploded in the last 18 months. This is a deficit that Techinline is working to address. Kukarsky tells me that support for both OS X and Chrome are in the pipeline for delivery in 2017 but isn’t yet ready to share exactly when they will be available.
I have been using a new app for the past week or so, called Missive (missiveapp.com). When I first looked at the tool it was just a social email client, by which I mean a client for email that also support social communications extrinsic to email, but possibly about email. However, at that time I found that I could use a Google exention to integrate it with Todoist (see Missive looks like a MVP ‘Social Email’ tool). But now, they’ve released their own task implementation.
Here’s a screenshot to reprise the basics of Missive:
Above, on the left you see an email being edited — a reply to an email from Carlos Kelly — but on the right is a chat among Rafael and others working at a company called Conference Badge. They can share docs — like the PDF quote — and talk about the email thread. The email becomes shared, as are the chat comments and attachments.
Missive also supports group chats not explicitly linked to specific emails, as shown above.
But what is most exciting — and what I have been waiting for — is the addition of tasks to Missive. These have been implemented as a special version of the basic comment feature in chats, except the user selects the task option:
Above you see a comment being created, and as you see they can be assigned to one of various users.
And above, you can see that tasks have a status box so that someone can check off the task as done. (Personally, I favor a three state model — created, in process, completed — but I will wait to convince them of that.)
All open tasks are visible in the ‘tasks’ section of the client, which shows all chats with tasks and provides a count — like 1 of three — to indicate how many tasks are contained and completed.
Missive builds on Gmail, and allows users to file emails in gmail labels. These will be for personal, private use.
I’ve been told that this simple organization technique — I’ve been bumping my head on it for just a week or so, painfully — will be extended in the very near term with tags. As a result, I will be able to pull into a single list all the tasks that are tagged ‘#projectXYZ’ or ‘#finance’ no matter what chat they were originally created in.
Tags, unlike labels, will be shared and available to those in your Missive ‘organizations’ or teams. I am eagerly awaiting the release of tags in Missive, to make it a richer experience and one that is much more manageable. I am also awaiting due dates, and other metadata for tasks, but tags are the most important, I think.
The Bottom Line
Missive is an example of content-based work management — where the tasks are embedded in chats associated with specific email threads or chat contexts — based on a social email foundation. I believe this is one of the few models of work management that will attract a large user base following the decline of web 2.0 era work media tools (like Yammer, Jive, IBM Connections, and so on). Yes, Slack and its work chat direct competitors are getting a great deal of the buzz at present, but email is here to stay, and the emergence of social email — like Missive and its competitors — will be giving email another decade or more of life.
I recently learned about Amplement, an intriguing tool for professionals to communicate and interact, with a clean and minimal design with features drawn from work chat, video chat, and professional networks. I had a chance to ask some questions of the founder, and I’m even more intrigued afterward.
About Adrien Sommier
Adrien Sommer
Adrien founded France-based Amplement in 2010, and leads the company as CEO. Previously, he worked in web strategy and communications for several large companies in France. Amplement has grown to 15 staff members, and has over 500,000 users.
The Interview
Gigaom: Amplement seems like a modern and minimal competitor to Linkedin and Xing, where professionals can interact in private and public groups, and also find job offers that match their profiles. Those interactions are a lot like chat in Slack, it seems. Is that a motivation?
Adrien Sommier: Amplement is a web application which enables users to collaborate and discuss in real time with other professionals around the world. We aren’t like Linkedin or Xing because we aren’t a social network.
Before Amplement, professionals couldn’t use a single website for business interaction. They were forced to use many tools: Slack for collaboration, Linkedin to find profiles of other professionals, and Skype to conduct real time discussions or video calls.
Amplement is the only web application which brings together — on a single platform — all the tools professionals need. It’s a single page application.
So, to answer your question precisely, we are a little competitor for Slack, for Yammer, for LinkedIn, for Skype. You see?
G: An all-in-one tool for professional communication. I see. But the challenge for you is this: will people that are already using Slack, Skype, Yammer, and so on switch to using Amplement?
AS: There’s basically nobody in the professional world who doesn’t already use one of those tools. That tells me that most, if not all, of the 700 new users we get each day are open to trying alternatives.
The thing that keeps people from adopting new platforms is hesitation to add “yet another app” to their workflow. We don’t face that issue because we’re condensing their workflow, not bloating it. That and we have an extremely short learning curve, so those who can’t yet replace their use of Skype, Slack, etc. entirely don’t have anything to lose with us.
G: Is job search the primary use case, or just a way to monetize the professional network?
AS: No, in fact the job search isn’t hasn’t yet launched in the U.S. Unlike LinkedIn, our job search feature isn’t there for monetization, but instead because it’s an important feature for our members. On a professional platform, people want to manage their professional careers.
G: Which means connecting with others and sharing profiles? Is that the model?
AS: That’s right. And since you use the same profile for your career development and your daily work, employers can import the same profiles they used to hire someone directly into their work channels. They’ll be all ready to work before their first day in the office!
G: I’ve read that Amplement has over 400,000 members, and over 100,000 job offers have been made since the 2013 launch. What are the user expectations when they join?
AS: We have a half a million active users. Users join Amplement because it’s the fastest app for finding other professionals, communicating with them, and doing both quickly.
G: Amplement does not offer file sharing or integrations with Google Drive or Dropbox, at least not yet. Is that on the roadmap? What other features can we expect in the future? Bots?
AS: We plan to support file sharing soon. Users will be able to work with their teams on Amplement like other tools, such as Slack. We have not developed the integrations, but that’s underway.
G: What about LinkedIn’s approach to support posting, updates, and so on? Will we be seeing that in Amplement?
AS: Staying up-to-date with your network is a key part of your career, so absolutely. Many of those features are already finished.
The recent acquisition of Linkedin by Microsoft shows that the integration of professional networks and the tools that people use to get their work done makes sense. Amplement’s founder, Adrien Sommier, may have seen that future fusion coming earlier than others.
This post was sponsored by Amplement, but the content has been created by Gigaom.
Zenefits, the online HR platform that ousted its founding CEO recently as a part of a regulatory investigation regarding insurance sales (where the company makes its money), has announced more layoffs, an additional 9% of the company’s workforce, around 100 people. 250 were cut in February, as part of a revamp of sales and operations, following David Sacks — the former CEO of Yammer — assuming the helm as CEO. The company was valued at $4.5 billion in a raise of capital last year, and has disrupted the market for HR tools. Sacks has also jumped on the Zappos’ model of offering money for employees to leave in this reduction of force, he calls this ‘the Offer’. Sacks say he is making a new version of Zenefits: Z2. He spoke with William Alden of Buzzfeed, saying
The company isn’t making The Offer because we don’t want you. We do want you, but we want the best of you.
Twitter now allows self-retweeting, or what I want to call Twitter selfies:
Dropbox CEO Drew Houston says that the company has achieved a milestone that investors will like: the company is free cash flow positive, meaning operating cash minus capital expenditures. This will set the stage for an easier IPO, which is anticipated.
I’m announcing a few upcoming report projects from Gigaom in the next few days. One is the long-awaited 2016 Workforce Communications Narrative:
Workforce communications is a class of message-centric work technology that is principally geared toward the modern mobile workforce, especially geared toward enabling communications between workers in retail, manufacturing, transport, security, and construction. These are mobile-first applications, although they also support other enterprise functions, but with an emphasis on the efficient functioning of the mobile worker, often working outside the typical workplace, and in particular, often without access to PCs. They incorporate elements of messaging, chat, social media, and file sharing, as well as more workforce specific capabilities like shift scheduling, calendaring, task management, and other functional tools.
Here’s where workforce communications fits in the broad spectrum of work technologies (note that the chart below does not include all work technologies, just a few categories):
We will be scheduling briefings with vendors in the space — including Avaamo, Fieldwire, Lua, Red E App, Sitrion One, and Zinc (formerly Cotap) — in the coming weeks. If you are the representative of another vendor, please contact me.
I am also looking to work with at least one other analyst on this report, so please contact me if you are interested and you have a background in work technology and analysis.
At first, thinking about digital signage in the workplace makes perfect sense. We’re all familiar with big screens in airports, hotel foyers and sports stadiums, so, yes, how about seeing similar kit in business environments, for example in headquarter lobbies, or indeed in coffee rooms?
Yes of course, the concept can find plenty of use. Corporate visitors can be offered videos, presentations and data. Employees can more easily be briefed and can share their own content, such as the latest inter-departmental soccer results. Touch screens and kiosks also have a place, for campus navigation and training information dissemination.
The benefits are pretty straightforward — not only that content can be updated faster, or printing costs can be saved but also increased staff motivation and wellbeing, improved health and safety knowledge, higher productivity have been cited. As hardware costs come down, business cases become more evident (though of course, remember to account for the overheads of managing real-time content).
So, what’s the problem? Let’s take a look. Ultimately, such a signage-centric, “Let’s take what is working over there and deploy it over here” mindset is missing a trick. It’s worth reviewing a number of other areas where screen use is prevalent, and seeing these as input to the decision process.
First, the smart screen has come a long way. Back in the early nineties, I can remember de-boxing a whiteboard with a built in printer; since then such devices have become giant input and output panels. Pioneer in the field is education: from sharing an office with a manufacturer of interactive whiteboards for this sector, I’ve seen just how much of a difference such technologies can have on classrooms.
Most importantly, it’s not about the screen but the environment. Consider, for example, the ability to create information on a tablet computer, then share it onto a screen for somebody else to edit. Imagine being able to do this on a wall screen in the meeting room, with input from people in another office.
It should be straightforward, and both schools and home tutors are using such capabilities all the time, but they have yet to make an impact in the workplace.
Second, ‘telepresence’, the term coined by Cisco and also offered by HP to describe the immersive impact of seeing full-sized people on screens in a videoconference. Apart from (addressable through software) issues with eye movement, it’s like they are in the room.
When they were launched a few years ago, such technologies were too costly for all but head office installations. With today’s network bandwidth and with screen costs having plummeted, the ‘telepresence’ notion has a much broader appeal.
And third, we can look to transactional areas of the business for best practice in terms of screen use. ‘Starship Enterprise’ style, centralised network and equipment management hubs have plenty to offer in terms of what should be visible on the big screen, and how it should be presented relative to individualised views on smaller desktops.
Similarly, call centres and sales environments make extensive use of screens. From these parts of the organisation we can learn not only the options available, but also how to strike a balance between operational efficiency and keeping staff motivated.
Learning from these areas, the bottom line is that digital signage is only part of the opportunity offered by either passive or interactive screens. Direct information sharing, collaboration, workflow management, employee feedback, resource scheduling and booking, training, brainstorming and team building are just a few areas that a deployment can achieve.
Perhaps, yes, a quick win is to deploy some screens for the purpose of disseminating information. But,as some sectors are already discovering — such as non-obtrusive up-selling in the hospitality sector— active interaction yields new opportunities for enablement and empowerment, beyond passive information sharing.
So, it’s worth thinking outside the box, and treating screens as a viewport onto a shared data set, which can also be accessed via other devices. What starts as digital signage becomes a series of windows onto a brave new world, which drives a set of considerations, not least in terms of type, size and location, that should be considered before any deployment.
Microsoft has stirred up a swirling buzz of discussion around the Linkedin acquisition for $26.2 billion. There are a number of angles that have been considered in the gazillion news stories floating around. Here’s a few of those threads:
Linkedin is a Salesforce counter by Satya Nadella — It has been argued by Steve Nellis and others that Linkedin’s efforts at developing and selling the tools in the company’s Sales Solutions unit have not gone very far, but the data in Linkedin’s network — when coupled with Microsoft’s own Salesforce competitor — Dynamics — could become a real player. Note that Nadella’s rumored efforts to acquire Salesforce stalled because of a too-high price tag (10X revenues), while Linkedin was much more affordable (7X revenues). Plus, with Linkedin in there are other angles to play.
Linkedin is a professional social network, and could counter Facebook for Business — Facebook has not yet released its business variant, Facebook for Business, but it’s supposed to roll out this year. Nadella might be trying to get there first by offering a fusion of Linkedin’s current mix of blogging, social networking, and recruitment use cases with Office 365 productivity options. Linking together the professional graph (Linkedin) with the work graph (Office 365) and getting a premium on the integration of the two is probably a smart move so long as the seams can be made low friction. There is a devil in these details, but this is one of the most powerful visions for the merger.
Linkedin alone was a company with real problems — Linkedin stock got hammered earlier this year after lowered sales estimates. This would be bad in itself but doubly bad for Linkedin, since many of its best and brightest are compensated in part by stock grants, so when the stock falls, so does compensation. As a result, Linkedin was facing a mass exodus unless they could right the boat. This is one of the reasons Microsoft got the terms that it did. And now, people will be compensated in the more standard Microsoft way (as will the accounting for these expenses, which were clouded by non-GAAP practices).
Microsoft sees Linkedin as a way to deflect Slack — Personally, I don’t buy this conflation of threats to Microsoft. Yes, Slack is making huge inroads in work technology — specifically as the defining product in the exploding work chat space — but just because is has some of the features of a ‘social network’ (in that people are logged in for long periods of time each day, message each other, can coordinate outside of company boundaries) that doesn’t mean Slack and Linkedin are in some way head-to-head competitors. Yes, Slack is a competitor to Microsoft’s productivity/work technology products — most specifically Yammer, but also the core functionality slowly growing in Office 365 — but that doesn’t mean that Linkedin is intended as a Slack killer. Although Microsoft should be working on that, as well. I just don’t expect it will come from the Linkedin side of things.
After all the dust settles I expect that we’ll see a reoriented Linkedin, with a greater focus on CRM technologies and networking, and also a much enlarged focus on people operations (HR) technologies and networking, an area that Microsoft has functionally no offerings. This will take the form of enlarged platforms, and an ecology of partners building on Microsoft/Linkedin capabilities, as well as other, subsequent acquisitions. And Linkedin will immediately find its operational core — and culture — pulled toward CRM and HR by the Microsoft sales operation.
I also don’t believe that Jeff Weiner will be at Microsoft for longer than his required tenure, two years or whatever it is. More likely he will find new worlds to conquer, and Satya will find someone in Microsoft or Linkedin who will better execute what will rapidly become an integration strategy, rather than a trailblazing one.
I confess to have been a bit cynical when I started the call with Martin Scovell, CEO of software vendor MatsSoft, about this great new idea that is doing the rounds. Here’s the skinny — rather than having developers program business processes from scratch, you can use a drag-and-drop tool to create process models. Press play and, hey presto! You have an application.
If you thought you might have heard the ideas around ‘low code‘ before, you would be right. Such ideas have been doing the rounds for as long as I have had the term ‘analyst’ on my business card, which means going beyond industry analysis, to when I occupied the lowly position of a business analyst in the mid-Nineties.
Even before that I was writing about the prototype-based software development approaches which started to materialise in the mid-Seventies, but which no doubt had their roots long before. But despite the deep desire to yawn vocally in the face of this clear re-hash of old ideas, I remained intrigued. “Why now?” I thought to myself “What’s changed?”
My interest was piqued by the nature of MatsSoft’s arrival on the scene. Software companies form for a number of reasons, for example that someone has spotted a gap in the market and gone cap in hand to the VC’s. More intriguing are those companies that find themselves growing unexpectedly and base their business strategy upon that.
As was the case as process management tools provider MatsSoft. “As we started to expand, we found we had a really good code base but we were still a body shop, we still needed coders. If we paused and rebuilt, thought to ourselves, we could move beyond that.” Not only did MatsSoft find itself better able to meet its customer needs, it also discovered that customers could do the same for themselves.
So far so good — but has the company found itself in the front lines of a revolution, or has it merely reached the same epiphany as so many BPM tools providers before them (most of them subsequently bought by Tibco, Oracle, IBM and others)? The answer may well lie in the nature of computing today, and how the boundaries of innovation have moved beyond the IT department and into the lines of business.
This phenomenon has been called many names, not all of which are particularly polite. We talk about Shadow IT, consumerisation or how the CMO is getting a bigger technology budget than the CIO, for better or worse. Fact is that control over technology delivery has fragmented and is never likely to go back to the long-cycle, change request oriented approaches of the past.
Businesses want agility, they want to be able to innovate and move fast, in many cases fearful that if they do not, some upstart will steal their lunch. Mantras such as ‘fail fast’ or ‘test and learn’ are an increasing part of boardroom conversations. As such the impetus for technology-based innovation is coming as much from the business, if not more, as from the IT department.
As business use of technology matures, so it makes sense that the tooling the business needs also starts to grow up. Let me put it another way. Back in the day, when I would say to a business user, “You can do this bit yourself,” they would look at me as if I was mad. These days, the business is doing a number of things for itself, for better or worse, and is increasingly ready to take on the tools it needs to do so.
In consequence, while the tools may not be all that different, the user base is changing. Perhaps lines of business may not do the work themselves, but they can work with providers without having to go through the bottleneck of IT. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as IT’s role itself moves to being platform curator rather than keeper of the keys for all things tech-related.
The overall result is less cost, and therefore more opportunity to use tools that help smooth the activities of the business. “You can automate and standardise things that would not previously be dealt with because it was too expensive,” says Martin. Sure, this means more productivity, greater efficiency, more innovation, improved customer experience, all the things people say you can get out of process management tools.
More importantly however, is that it puts the business into the driving seat, at a time when the business is looking to drive. Yes, ‘low code’ might be yet another term to describe a familiar capability, but it is pushing on the door of a far more open and technologically savvy set of business user.
Not only this but, rather than presenting itself as something that can make the organisation more ‘agile’, the low code model is being offered in response to an organisation asking for increased agility. Of course, many organisations still play lip service to such terms but at least the request is coming from the right place.
For sure, we are not yet at the finishing posts. Such technologies, and our working practices, will continue to evolve but as says Martin, “There’s no going back – the die is cast. This is how the businesses we work with are choosing to embrace technology.” As organisations continue to mature, they will need the right tools to be used by the right people, in the business and in IT. If that means re-inventing the wheel or creating new terms to describe old mechanisms once or twice, that’s all good.
Speaking on the subject of nanotechnology is Dr. Heike Riel, IBM Fellow & Director Physical Sciences Department, IBM Research. Dr. Riel’s work focuses on advancing the frontiers of information technology through the physical sciences. Her research interests include nanoscale materials and novel device concepts for applications in electronics, optoelectronics, energy harvesting and cognitive computing.
Discussing the subject of robotics is Rodolphe Gelin, EVP Chief Scientific Officer, Aldebaran. Rodolphe Gelin has worked for decades in the field of robotics, focusing primarily on developing mobile robots for service applications to aid the disabled and elderly. Most notably, he heads the Romeo2 project, a large-scale effort to create a humanoid personal assistant and companion robot.
Addressing human-machine interface is Mark Rolston, Cofounder & Chief Creative Officer, argodesign. Mark Rolston is a renowned designer who focuses on groundbreaking user experiences and addresses the modern challenge of design beyond the visible artifact – in the realm of behavior, the interaction between human and machine, and other unseen elements.
Speaking on the subject of virtual & augmented reality is Jacquelyn Ford Morie Ph.D., Founder and CEO of All These Worlds LLC and Founder & CTO of The Augmented Traveler Corp. Dr. Jacquelyn Ford Morie is widely known for using technology such as Virtual Reality (VR) to deliver meaningful experiences that enrich people’s lives.
Discussing the subject of artificial intelligence is Rob High, IBM Fellow, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of IBM Watson. Rob High has overall responsibility to drive Watson technical strategy and thought leadership. As a key member of the Watson Leadership team, Rob works collaboratively with the Watson engineering, research, and development teams across IBM.
Addressing nanotechnology is Dr. Michael Edelman, Chief Executive Officer of Nanoco. Through his work with Nanoco, Dr. Edelman and his team have developed an innovative technology platform using quantum dots that are set to transform lighting, bio-imaging, and much more. Using real insights and examples, Edleman will share how this technology is currently disrupting entire industries.
On the artificial intelligence panel, Manoj Saxena, Executive Chairman of CognitiveScale and a founding managing director of The Entrepreneurs’ Fund IV, a $100m seed fund, will address the cognitive computing space; specifically, a new class of machine intelligence powered software that revolutionizing customer engagement, decision-making and productivity via complex, multi-structured Dark Data.
And last but not least, our opening night keynote speaker will be internet/ethernet pioneer Robert Metcalfe, Professor of Innovation, Murchison Fellow of Free Enterprise at The University of Texas.
