Top Three Technology Trends in 2012

Technology industry has been evolving continuously since its inception. The evolution was hastened by the commercialization of “Internet” in 1995, making internet publicly available for everyone. Rapid expansion of internet in all the continents saw a major behavioral change in the community. There was an era of well-informed and resourceful users, who knew the power of information. This trend never stopped and has now given way to three major trends which are adding to the old wave of internet.

Cloud computing

Let’s start with a simple definition of Cloud computing as given in the bible of modern World, the Wikkipedia.

“Cloud computing is the delivery of computing as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices as a metered service over a network (typically the Internet)”

Figure 1: Overview of Cloud Ecosystem

The Concept:

In simpler words, Cloud computing is a way of eradicating the need of costly infrastructure necessary for any IT business venture to survive and expand. So, an organization can start benefitting from the IT services right from the word go.

Visualize an example of every individual in the city generating in-house electricity for solving individual electricity problems compared to the central regulatory authority producing electricity at one common place and then supplying it to every household and billing them accordingly. The concept of cloud computing is somewhat similar. Providers, all over the World, are setting up their infrastructure for providing computing power to individual users or small medium organizations in order to satisfy their demands, and charging them nominally for the services used.

Now imagine if you have set up a new organization, and you just started its website. The website is hosted on a server which you bought for your organization. As the traffic on your website increases, your website slows down, and you need to have additional servers to maintain the user experience. This is an expensive and time consuming process, and when traffic is low, you still need to maintain the servers, thus incurring huge maintenance costs for the company. This is where cloud computing can deliver the edge. Instead of buying and maintaining new web-servers, you can now put your website on the web-server online, and instantly scale up or down the capacity and computing power, without having to invest in the actual infrastructure.

You don’t need to be a creative genius to understand the benefits of this concept. One non-evident benefit can be reduced carbon emission per server. Below are the popular models of Cloud Computing and their key benefits.

Popular Models:

1. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) – Allows applications to run online on the provider’s hardware. This means that your existing applications over your Data Centre can now be migrated to cloud and maintained from there only. Amazon’s EC2 is a popular example of IaaS.
2. Platform as a Service (PaaS) – This model allows the users to create their own applications, for example Google provides “App engine”, and Microsoft provides “azure”, Salesforce offers “Force.com” which allow users to create new applications in a rapid and low cost manner. This is the perfect tool for developers to build applications and host them almost instantaneously without the hardware hassles.
3. Software as a Service (SaaS) – This model is generally used by application or product based companies who can offer their service on a “Pay per User” model. SaaS is the way to consume off-the-shelf applications over the internet. For example, Google docs, application which provides the flexibility to you and your co-workers to work on the same documents while based out of any location, work on any machine, and independent of time constraints. Online office is powerful software offered over the cloud by Microsoft. So, you don’t need to buy those expensive licenses, instead you can simply register your number of users, and pay as they access office online. Clarizon’s online project management tools and Salesforce’s customer relationship management tools are other popular resources in this segment.

Benefits:

1. Device and Location Independence: With globalization and outsourcing, companies need their employees to be available at the time that might be the best in their local region, or may want them to login from the devices that are not necessarily on their office desktop. Bottom line is that the employee may have to access that critical information from anywhere on any device. While conventional client-server models might be restricted to provide such a solution, Cloud computing aces in enabling such a freedom of access.
2. Cost Advantage: As explained in the above examples, an organization may have to buy more servers, to ensure a good user experience. But, imagine that the traffic on that website dried all of a sudden.  What will happen to the newly added server?  Who will bear the cost of maintaining that server? To address these issues, cloud computing gives the cost advantage, by charging the customers only for the services used, with Pay per User model. This substantially adds to the cost savings of the organization, and provides flexibility to young entrepreneurs to venture without worrying about the cost of Infrastructure.
3. Performance: User experience is directly proportional to the processing capacity of your servers. The better the processing capacity, the better the performance. But, how expensive is it to consistently provide the same user experience? I would say very expensive, specially having a server for, let’s say, 100 users. Again, if the number of users increases exponentially, maintaining the performance will be very expensive. Hence, Cloud computing provides the optimum mix of cost and performance.
4. Scalability: As seen in the above models, Cloud computing makes certain that processing power, storage capacity and other resources can be immediately scaled up or down. This is an important aspect in today’s business environment as users are connected 24×7 to your servers, and organizations do not have the time to keep their websites down for couple of hours and increase their server power. Also, with ever increasing internet population, young entrepreneurs (and SMEs) can’t be sure of the server capacities which can guarantee a consistent bandwidth and other necessary resources.

Drawbacks:

1. Privacy: How comfortable would your customer be, if you tell him that his personal information is not in your database but on cloud of external vendor? Also, this information might be sold to some advertising or Data Analytics Company for money and you may start receiving Credit card and loan calls. Thus, a common regulation needs to be in place before signing up for Cloud Computing.
   
2.  Security: Thinking from hacker’s point of view, in order to gain access to the confidential information of 20 different companies, he does not need to breach the security of 20 different companies, but instead just one place.
3. Vendor Restriction: There are constraints on languages and tools when you use platform as a service model. This means that if you have built your application on Azure, then you cannot run that application anywhere other than on Microsoft platform.

Predictive Analytics

Again starting with the simple definition of Big Data as given by Wikipedia:

“Big data is a term applied to data sets whose size is beyond the ability of commonly used software tools to capture, manage, and process the data within a tolerable elapsed time. Big data sizes are a constantly moving target currently ranging from a few dozen terabytes to many petabytes of data in a single data set.”

The image below shows the plotting of structured vs. unstructured data against persistent data vs. Real-time streams of data generated via social media.

Figure 2: Major players in the ecosystem of Predictive Analytics

The Concept

Marketers have always complained about how the product is not good enough to attract the customers. Is that the truth? Were they targeting the right audience? Was marketing budget spent on the right activities? How does one estimate the effectiveness of marketing campaigns? What will be the next purchase of my customer?

All these questions were answered by the technology called Predictive Analytics, which was feasible because of information. But, where does this information come from? The answer is pretty straight forward. Yes, you are bang on! It is the social networking and e-commerce websites like LinkedIn, Amazon, Facebook, Google and many more. In short, any activity of your potential customer is recorded and stored in a relational database, on which the predictive analysis is done. The heaps of data are analyzed like customer demographics, age, location, gender and even behavior like which websites he’s visiting, which products he’s checking, his online spending pattern, that help you predict the right offers for the customer, at the right time.

Have you recently thought of purchasing a mountain bike, and all of a sudden, while browsing through websites, you see a banner trying to sell you one. This is the power of “Predictive Analytics”. Figure 3 describes the MAP framework used for Predictive Analytics. Further details on the process of Predictive Analytics are beyond the scope of this study.

Figure 3: Predictive Analytics within MAP Framework

Popular Models:

Similar to Cloud Computing, Predictive Analytics is also finding its role in various industries like e-commerce, financial services, insurance, retail, pharmaceutical, healthcare, media, technology and telecom. If I consider horizontals, then marketing, supply chain, and risk analytics are the areas where Predictive analytics is most commonly used. Three key models currently used are:

1. Predictive Models: As the name suggests, this is the model used to predict the customer’s future behavior. This model takes past activities of the user as the feed, along with the live transactions of the user, and come up with the human simulation in that situation. This is finding its use extensively in fraud management and marketing.
2. Descriptive Models: Descriptive models can be seen as a means to segment the customers based on their attributes like demographics, age, gender, product preferences etc. This model tries to use relationship between product and consumer and then classifies consumers into groups. Like a consumer buying baby diapers will also be interested in buying baby milk powder etc. So, a category is made and this customer will be placed in this category.
3. Decision Models: This model collates all the other models and information and predicts the result of decisions involving multiple variables. Past, present and predicted data is used as an input, generating the outcomes for multiple scenarios. The model is finalized through a three stage process starting from formulation, followed by evaluation and finally appraisal of the given model.

Benefits:

1. Personalized sales almost real-time: In today’s connected environment, customers demand the right offers not only at the right time, but via channels like social media, mobiles, online, email etc. So, as a marketer, you can no longer wait for him to pass through the billboard and read your campaign. You need to do it instantaneously, right when they are reading those articles or browsing the net to make his next purchase.
   
2. Measurement of marketing campaigns: Traditional marketers often found themselves in a fix when asked about “How successful was the marketing campaign?” Not anymore! With interactions becoming more and more personalized, marketers now instantaneously know “Which campaign drove the online purchase?” This makes it relatively easy for the marketers to gauge the success of their campaigns and quantify the returns.
3. Identifying the latest trends: Imagine you are to launch a new product, in which you have invested millions. What is the right time to launch? What is the right price for your product? With predictive analytics, you can follow the trends and easily decide the optimum time of launch and price point for the product.

Drawbacks:

1. Processing Capacity: Big Data ranges from few dozen terabytes to many petabytes of data in a single data set. All organizations do not have the processing capacity for handling this humongous amount of data. Even the companies operating in this arena are facing difficulties in maintaining the capacity to process this data.
2. Contextualization of Big Data: Data collected cannot be simply used or mean anything unless you know the context. For example, you accidentally visit a mountain biking website, and from then on you start receiving mountain bike ads, when you had no interest in buying one. This is the biggest challenge that the Big Data analytic companies are facing today.

Smart-phones and tablets

Preserving the sanctity of the article, let’s start this trend by some definitions.

“A smart-phone is a mobile phone built on a mobile computing platform, with more advanced computing ability and connectivity than a featured phone.”

“A tablet computer, or a tablet, is a mobile computer, larger than a mobile phone or a personal digital assistant, integrated into a flat touch screen and primarily operated by touching the screen rather than using a physical keyboard.

Onset of this wave of technology was identified by “Popular magazine” in 1999, quoting Ericsson R380 Smart-phone to be most important advances in the field of science and technology. What happened afterwards, how iPod touch paved way for iPhone which prepared the customers for iPad is just history. Figure 4 shows the usage patterns of Mobile and tablet users. Take a look!

Figure 4: Situational usage patterns of US customers

The Concept:

The concept of smart-phones and tablets started in late 19^th century with players like Ericsson, Nokia, HP and Microsoft investing billions to create this technologically advanced market. Studded with email, web browsing, Wi-Fi, Camera and many other features, smart-phones started a behavioral shift. Though many players tried their hands in this market, none could do it the way Apple did. In 2007, Steve Jobs, with his ace product, “The iPhone”, also branded as the most innovative product in the history of technology, gave users an experience of multi-touch interface, with a large enough screen which removed the need of complimentary devices like Stylus, Keyboard etc. This new way of interacting with technology, along with the support for third party “web 2.0 applications” saw a huge tide of content/ application developers for iOS. Strategically formed App Store, provided a one stop shop for buying applications, closing all the loose ends and creating a strong Apple ecosystem. Starting with mere 500 applications, today App Store has more than 5 million applications, and increasing.

Soon, other players, like Samsung, HTC, and Nokia realized the potential and started to target this market. But, why did it become inevitable for these players to be present in this industry? What was the urgency?

The answer is clear, the behavioral shift! People wanted to stay connected all the time, to access news on the fly, to share it with their friends and families, to make informed decisions about the commodity they were buying, and much more. It’s the thought process that has changed.

Popular Models:

The following are the top three operating systems that have been the drivers of this paradigm shift:

1. iOS: This is the platform on which Apple runs its products. Basically it is a Unix-like operating system supporting data manipulation and multi-touch gestures, built in C and C++. iOS currently has 26% of market share and is the 3^rd most used OS in smart-phone/tablets category.
2. Android: This is the most popular OS in the market with close to 50% market share. Such high market penetration can be attributed to the fact that Android is based an open-source model. With close to 4 million applications, Android has successfully created its own ecosystem.
3. Windows 7.5: Since, Nokia and Microsoft could not come up with the right products at the right time Nokia lost majority of Mobile market share to Samsung, Apple and HTC. Now, Nokia has paired up with Microsoft that has come up with a platform for Nokia’s new range of smart-phones. How successful will this partnership will be? I guess we have to just wait and watch.

Benefits:

In today’s era of globalization, staying connected is inevitable. Smart-phones and tablets are aiding this new human need for information and socializing.

1. Connectivity: With advancements in technology like 4g spectrum, Web 2.0, these smart devices help us in remaining connected with the world 24X7.
2. Mobility: Strong battery backup and almost negligible weight makes it convenient to carry these devices, enabling the network accessibility on the fly.
3. Ease of Access: One touch operations, speech commands and image recognition facilities have made the use of these devices so simple that people of all age groups are hinged to these super powerful yet simple to use machines.

Drawbacks:

1. Expensive: Top end models of these devices are still very expensive, and are away from common man’s reach. There have been some local technology advancements but still to make it available to all will take some more time.
   
2. Delicate: The lighter these devices are, the more prone they are to physical damages. In order to keep these devices light, companies are missing out on the physical robustness. Take an example of Xperia Arc or an iPhone. A callous drop on the floor can shatter these machines into pieces.

Conclusion:

To conclude the article, I would say, the trends/technologies mentioned above are important not because companies are making billions out of them, but because these are alluring a paradigm change in how information is generated, analyzed and consumed by the users and organizations. Companies that were not bothered by consumer’s activities are now paying close attention to every move of the user. They don’t want to repeat another Nokia blunder! Don’t be surprised if I tell you that Google or Facebook knows more about you than some of your closest friends. What, where, when, how and why are the circle of questions that need to be addressed when we think about Data or I should say Information! Choice is yours! Are you ready to shake hands with the future and get on the power of Cloud!

References

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oX9B-YPvBC4&feature=related

www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BeXZpGSZUQ&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QayMTpTQrQk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibfxxITfF6M

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omRl0ivJAFY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7pVTNqtdqg&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyIa4MKGP6o&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqUpk2344Kg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hplXnFUlPmg&list=UUbiGcwDWZjz05njNPrJU7jA&index=18&feature=plcp

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictive_analytics#Predictive_models

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tablet_computer

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing

27% Wasteland in India!

Do you know, India is the 7th largest country in the World, with a total land area of 3,287,263 square kilometres (1,269,219 sq mi). Out of the total land area of India, 1.5 million square kilometer is uncultivated and 0.9 million square kilometer (nearly 27%) is categorized as wasteland. One of the major problems we have in India is of a large population mainly concentrated in some major cities. Population density of India is 324 per square kilometer, distributed unevenly across the country, with Delhi’s density of 9340 and that of Arunachal Pradesh as 17. Take a look at population density map.

India's population density - 2011

Why are we progressing only in metropolitans? Let’s take an example of Common Wealth Games. Had we planned to organize it in some other state, like Arunachal Pradesh or Rajasthan, we could have provided a lot of opportunities to its people by allocating money to develop infrastructure and promoted it as a tourist spot. More importantly, we could have utilized the vast wasteland in those areas.

The metropolitans are flooded by farmers who eventually take up small jobs like driving an auto rickshaw, working as domestic helps or as a cheap labor in factories. Why are they forced to leave their native lands? Why can we not create job opportunities at their native places? Why are they forced to give up farming? Is it because of poor health facilities, sanitation and electricity? Why is the wasteland still growing at the rate of 9%? Why is agriculture growing at 1 % while manufacturing growing at 7%? Why are we not taking steps to help the villagers pursue farming and convert waste lands into irrigational land, by using latest techniques?

In my opinion, we can first target to improve the land by creating water bodies such as reservoirs, ponds so that nearby land can be irrigated. This will help in creation of planned habitats free from pollution and provide facilities such as clean water, sanitation, green surrounding, hospitals, educational institutions etc. We can develop solar farms and wind energy farms, if land is in acres, with government giving incentives to the builders who take such initiatives. Creation of industries in such regions will not only provide employment to the locals, but will also lure talent from throughout the country to take benefits from the opportunities. More talent and better salaries will automatically benefit the housing and hotel projects in that area which in turn will generate more employment opportunities.

These hitherto unused parts of motherland can be brought to good use without any doubt. I strongly feel that, if we can utilize the wastelands, we can curb many evils that haunt India and stand in the way of its transition from a developing to a developed country.

Fisher Pry Analysis of Kinect – 99% replacement in next 10 years

Billions could be saved, only if we had a crystal ball. What happens in future is of interest to everyone. Apple, Microsoft, Sony, Samsung, and above all Nokia, each one of these companies is investing multibillion dollars in understanding the demand patterns, product life-cycle and setting up market research departments.

Researchers, data analysts, scientists and mathematicians have developed different forecasting methods like Bass Model, Fisher Pry, Gompertz formula, assisting us in developing the diffusion patterns for a particular technology in a given time frame. In this article, I am going to focus on Fisher-Pry model and use Kinect to develop a model.

Fisher Pry model is used for predicting diffusion of new technologies, and applies specifically to those technologies which do not require major behavioral changes. When there is a major behavioral change, it is preferable to use Gompertz model. Fisher Pry equation is given by:

f(t)=1/(1+e^((-b*(t-t_50)) )

Where f(t) = Percentage of market served by the technology at a given time t
b = rate of adoption of technology in a given market,
t_50 = time taken to reach 50 percent of the total target market
Let’s try to see how this model works for technology like Kinect. This is how Wikipedia describes Kinect:

“Kinect, originally known by the code name Project Natal, is a motion sensing input device by Microsoft for the Xbox 360 video game console. Based around a webcam-style add-on peripheral for the Xbox 360 console, it enables users to control and interact with the Xbox 360 without the need to touch a game controller, through a natural user interface using gestures and spoken commands”

Launched in November 2010, Kinect has already sold 18 million units, with a record of being the “fastest selling consumer electronics device”, selling 8 million units in first 2 months of launch. Predicting for devices like these can be fun, especially when you know every upgrade in these technologies will drive similar levels of sales.

Fisher Pry Model framework essentially has 3 steps:

Step 1

• Identify the total market – 66 million units

• Estimate maximum potential market

Step 2 Inputs:

• Time for 50% replacement
• Rate of migration (b)
• Migration Curve

Step 3

•  Apply adjustment factors, if necessary

Now, Let’s analyze the Fisher-Pry variables and understand how their values are defined.

In Fisher-Pry model, “b” is the variable which determines this fluctuation. In past for the time periods ranging from 1922-1998, “b” value has ranged from 0.18 to 0.32, but in 21st century this value has grown, primarily because of awareness brought by internet and globalization, and heavy spending on Marketing by companies.
The nature of technology, its uses and accessibility to its collaborators play a major role in setting of “b”. For my study, I considered following points relevant to adoption of “Kinect”:

• A new and exciting way of indulging gamers
• Motion sensing technology
• Voice recognition technology
• Content available for the technology, network of collaborators
• Sold with a successful Xbox 360, and possibility of Xbox720 to be launched soon
• 66 million units of Xbox360 sold till date. This defines the total market of Kinect.
• Possible use of Kinect for uses other than gaming has not been considered for this study
• Affordability of the technology.
• Possibility of Kinect incorporation in Xbox console itself.

There are many other factors, and having considered these, I have taken a safe value of “0.7” for “b”. Note that “b” value defines the shape of the S-Curve.
Now, let’s focus on t_5o, which describes the time taken to reach 50% of the target market. Considering this value for different industries, I have taken this value to be 3.5 years, which is close to the actual time taken by Xbox(4 years) to reach 50% of its current market.

Next, I created an excel model and plugged these values. Please be careful when creating the excel model. “b” value is time frame dependent, i.e. if you are considering doing monthly analysis, divide b value by 12, if doing quarterly divide it by 4. Beyond this, like any consultant/analyst, I did sensitivity analysis, I got following results:

Based on the above results, we can safely deduce that in next 10 years, Kinect will cover 98-99 percent of overall Xbox market. Looking at the current market trend this number looks feasible, and with the launch of JDK toolkit for developers, multiple avenues are seen for Kinect specially in Healthcare, Robotics, Aeronautics and of course in Business World. Previously unforeseen uses, now pose the perfect platform for Kinect to be diffused may be sooner than what this study reveals.

Anyways, I hope the article benefits you, and should you have any questions, feel free to drop a comment.

Note that this article is my personal study, and by no means contains data/numbers from any official source.

Happy Forecasting!! 😀

Online Job Portal of TCS – Is it ever used?

By the means of this article, I want to draw the attention of TCS employees, who are maintaining the given website:
https://grs.tcs.com/DTOnline/CareersDesign/Jsps/EntryLevel.jsp?status=Mgmt

Looking to carve my career in consulting, I was attracted by one of the biggest names in the Indian IT Industry, TCS. So I decided to create my profile on their online job portal.

Here, I chose the relevant option, and I was forwarded to an online form which to looked something like

I was happy that the page finally loaded, but then the filling of the form was more painful than I had ever experienced. No keyboard shortcuts, no tabs, field have business rules which don’t even let you write proper English, no regard for punctuation etc. It was a nightmare. But, I was only being prepared for the worse.

After filling out all the details on the subsequent page about my educational background, which, by the way, was another experience. I was forced to submit the details for last 12 years. starting from when I was 16 years old boy. They asked me to give details about my 10th Class enrolment number. Now, luckily I had my degree scrolls with me. I was thinking about people in senior positions who have to go through this process.

Anyways, coming back to the main part. After filling out my educational details, I was asked to put my professional details. I completed my details for my last organization, and tried to add a new row, when system prompted, “Please enter date in proper format”. I thought, I had done something wrong, so I chose the dates again from the “date selection helper”. But alas, I was again prompted with the same error, and it was a deadlock. There was no possible workaround for this, except that I had to put my details in the system without any professional experience.

Towards the finish, I added my contact details, thinking I will receive an auto-generated mail, with details and a provision to change the profile, but again I never received any confirmation mail.

Does this mean that when you want to apply for TCS, you should always look for a headhunters, online job portal of a 3rd party vendor or some other way. Doesn’t this raise the very question on why this system is in place?

Brand Building is a gradual thing, and TCS has done the hard work by investing millions in it. But, mistakes like these somewhere shows the complacency in the company’s attitude towards quality.

Thus, I request TCS to look into this matter and try to do justice to the global brand name they have established over the period of time. You are providing best of the IT products, and services to World’s biggest firms, you must raise your standards to sustain this growth and brand name.

I personally admire TCS, and this post should be seen as an attempt to improve and maintain the TCS Brand name.

Forecasting for Apple Products

Forecasting has been a full-fledged profession, and with all the tech gizmos and new technologies coming every few months, forecasters are facing real difficulties in gauging the real potential and coming up with adoption or diffusion rates. For example, iPad, broke all the records, and became the fastest adopting non-phone electronic product. Do you think forecasters were able to predict the number? I doubt it.

Apple’s forecasting behaves in a different manner than most electronic devices.Generally, people are slow to adopt the new technology or product, which is depicted by the stretched introduction and growth phase. Once technology has been tried and tested, the mass adoption occurs, which gradually comes to a plateau. One would see a typical S-curve of a product life-cycle.

On the contrary, with any of Apple’s products, except iPod, which followed the traditional trend, the initial hype is such that their majority of sales happen during initial 1-2 years, and then immediately dry up.  This whole distortion can be attributed to the huge fan following of Apple, who  are not only loyal, but also want to experience the new product before others.

This distortion should be considered before making predictions or forecasts for Apple. As a result of this, it is evident that time to reach one million sales for Apple has drastically decreased from its first revolutionary product. Apple sold 1 million iPods in 1.5 years after its launch. 1st generation iPhone, on the other hand, took 2.5 months (74 days) to reach this milestone. Some statistics are mentioned below for iPhone. Try to see the trend, specially what happens from 2008, Q4 onwards.

3rd product on the same lines is iPad, which has by far beaten all records, and sold 1 million products in just 28 days. Were forecasters able to predict this?

Having said that, I still wonder how forecasters can factor in the launch of products which are providing the same functionality at half the price. Yes, you are right, I am referring to Amazon’s Kindle fire, which has prompted the industry analysts to think again about their forecasts.

IPTV under the Mass Customization Scanner

Introduction
IPTV, Internet Protocol Television, is defined as “multimedia services such as television/video/audio/text/graphics/data delivered over IP based networks managed to provide the required level of quality of service and experience, security, interactivity and reliability” by the International Telecommunication Union. What makes it interesting in the perspective of mass customization is its interactive nature, which leads to the creation of superior customer experience. This paper intends to analyze and assess how mass customization concepts can be applied to IPTV as a product and to give recommendation.
Applying Mass Customization Concepts: The Three Capabilities
ROBUST PROCESS DESIGN
In such cases providers of IPTV service utilize already available digital contents such as already aired TV programs, they are able to flexibly accommodate customers’ change of orders or requirements without incurring additional costs. It is important to note that suppliers are heavily dependent on IT infrastructure and digital contents to reliably and efficiently deliver the service. Providers of IPTV service require IT infrastructure namely high-speed Internet connection to deliver the service and digital contents database to provide resource efficiently.
To achieve this providers use the platform as marketing tool; the customized advertisements as source of revenue. Moreover scaling up the infrastructure is relatively simple considering that they already provide similar services in the Telephone and Internet space.
Supplier dependency and Supply Chain Issues are minimal because big players such as Ericsson provide the hardware, while the content is from broadcasters who have more to gain from aligning with IPTV providers because of their innovative marketing tools and ability to flexibly adapt to customers’ behavioral patterns. Horizontal integration benefits are considerable in this regard.
CHOICE NAVIGATION
IPTV minimizes choice complexity and makes search process enjoyable with the following features.

1. Assortment matching: Viewers of IPTV are able to choose from a variety of channels and programs regardless of the airtime of programs. Also it offers packages categorized per viewer purposes such as education, movies, sports etc.
2. Fast trial-and-error learning: The easy-to-navigate menu design facilitates trial and error learning process by inviting customers to actively express their preferences and opinions by transmitting signals back to the content provider.
3. Embedded configuration: IPTV “understands” or analyzes stored customized data of customers’ previous selections on channels and programs so that it could recommend contents. In addition to stored data of contents selection, IPTV stores in its database customers’ past clicks of advertisements on IPTV.

As per its interactive nature, IPTV recognizes viewers’ preference by the selections made by the viewers and modifies its recommendations and also by real-time evaluation and critic function made by viewers.
SOLUTIONS SPACE DEFINITION
Mass Customization in a communications services context means giving the customer the ability to control their service experience. It means enabling customers to select and change the services and options they buy, allowing them to tailor their service experience to their own unique interests at anytime. This creates a compelling buying experience for consumers because they are in complete control of their own experience and it creates freedom of choice by removing common barriers that currently create a less than satisfactory customer experience.
IPTV networks, which send information over secure, managed, high capacity networks, empower IPTV service provides to deliver the personalization that customers desire. For example, IPTV providers can offer customers channel personalization and network technology, such as a return channel, and presents entirely new ways for customers to personalize their viewing experience and interact directly to influence their quality of service.
It is even possible to enable customers to interact directly and make real-time purchases of items seen while watching their favorite program. Such technological capabilities can deliver customers the choice and interactivity they need to make real-time selections of the services and options that are tuned to their specific needs at that specific time.
The convergence of every aspect of the ICT industry on the customers TV and the device independence in viewing content anywhere and anytime, presents unlimited marketing opportunities beyond the traditional channels existing today.
Conclusion
As IPTV emerges as a true alternative to traditional home entertainment services, it is becoming clear that this new service type has the potential to deliver a vastly improved customer experience. But growth of IPTV revenue streams and gains in market share will not be based solely upon the customer personalization capabilities delivered by IPTV network technology.
An IPTV provider’s ability to enable customer personalization across its whole customer management and service delivery systems and processes will play a critical and differentiating role. Every interaction must provide the customer with a personal and involving experience to build trust in their brand, generate service uptake and ultimately grow revenues.

Intel’s 3d Architecture-What is their real game?

As the electronic industry has been steered by iPhone in the realms of pocket computing, more and more demand for higher processing power is driving ARM and Intel on the path of collision. Touch pads and tablets are the growing PC markets now and are becoming more in demand, and so are the applications and software compatible with them. Gaming industry is moving towards ARM because of the processing power, low battery consumption and low heat release.  These features are strongly favoring ARM’s entry in the PC arena. ARM’s strong presence in mobile market also marks an interesting benefit for Apple and Google, that they can afford to make software only for one type of processors, giving them the benefit on economies of scale, bringing cost benefit and higher profitability. This looks like the sustainable advantage from ARM’s point of view, with proof coming from MS’s acceptance to ARM.

Intel, with its 3D architecture, certainly has the first mover’s advantage and its effect can be seen on smaller players like Soitec from the mobile industry. This can be seen as a strategic move targeted from Intel to establish itself as the main competitor of ARM, as Intel has the pocket to play on pricing, initially to enter in this arena. From PC industry’s point of view this can be seen as a retention move, helping Intel to maintain its dominance, at the same time attracting Apple and Google to start manufacturing tablets and PCs on Intel’s high performing chips which are power efficient too. In this way it is not only creating a “barrier to entry” for the competitors but also creating a “barrier to leave” Intel’s umbrella of chips, which promises innovation.

“Is more processing power still the need or the power efficiency will rule the future?” Answer to which, only time can tell, but for now Intel does seem to have a sustainable advantage.

Intel or ARM? Who will win the growing mobile market?

PC market is characterized by high-speed processors which come with a disadvantage of releasing high heat and high power consumption. This industry is worth multibillion dollars and Microsoft (MS) is the market leader in the OS with around 80% of PC’s running on Windows. Since, MS OS only supported the Intel processors; Intel was having a big advantage in the form of network externality from MS. Intel, thus, developed the core capabilities required to support the PC market. To satisfy the Moore’s law of doubling the number of transistors, Intel focused their R&D on the PC industry, enjoying the above average returns being in the monopolistic position with only AMD, holding the smaller market portion. Note that PC industry had bigger margins and user base than mobile industry until recently, making it attractive for Intel. On the other hand, the mobile industry looked like a non profitable venture because mobile market was characterized by a low margin industry, requiring just enough processing speed to support simple tasks. Thus it was ignored by Intel since it required a differ set of capabilities to support the needs of mobile industry.

For ARM, the design of their ecosystem allowed them to develop synergies with the Mobile and PDA manufacturers, as ARM only designs the chips and sells its licenses to the companies like Intel, Freescale etc., which manufacture the processors based on either their own designs or ARM’s designs. This helped ARM to maintain a sustainable growth in the low margin industry, and further helped them develop their operational capabilities for so long. Because of the core capabilities of ARM which lied in the area of increasing the processing power with special attention to heat release and battery consumption, ARM designs became the industry norms and were accepted by Apple and Google. Software and hardware were designed specifically for ARM designed chips, enabling ARM to capture 75% of the mobile and PDA market share creating a significant network externality and complementarities for ARM. On the learning curve, Intel has just entered this market but ARM knows the industry and its needs, time to market, cost of ownership and other parameters which Intel is yet to learn. Intel has to convince market leaders like Apple, Google and Blackberry to leave their long-term ties with ARM and start fresh with Intel which is possible but not until they promise a significant benefit to its collaborators. Change means cost to these companies as they have to design new softwares on new platform, implying a very high switching cost. Another point to note here is that Apple owns a portion in ARM, which can have its implications, making it more difficult for Intel to have that breakthrough in this market.

One point of view of this whole situation can be that Intel and ARM started from two extreme ends of the industry, one end as high processing power(Intel – PC) and other being low power consuming(ARM – PDA). Two factors played a role here, internal growth of each Intel and ARM meaning advancement of technology making both players move towards each other on the scale, and External factor, industry trend, which started moving towards higher processing power, smaller sizes and low power consumption. ARM here had an advantage, and thus it is safe to say that the whole industry was moving towards ARM, because of the demand, which was only satisfied by the rare designs of ARM, acting as the “lever” for ARM.