My article on IBM Mobile Business Insights Blog: Mobile Sense and the customer experience

Mobile applications are known for its first impression bias. As the Instagram founder says customer decides to download an app all within 30 seconds. Customers are very much task oriented in dealing with mobile apps and with their mobile usages. However 91% of the mobile users keep mobile with them 100% of the time. Hence mobile applications are at time a lucrative business opportunity and an ever challenging imbroglio. Please read more about this high profile business and technical challenge in the IBM Mobile Business Insights blog article : 

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How an MIT Tutorial for School kids can revolutionize cloud computing?

In search of a new topic on cloud and the various perspectives of cloud, I was going through various communities, wikis and internet for sometime. Somewhere I found the history of cloud, somewhere on the implications of private clouds in defense sector. Interesting, but not enough!

I went ahead in quest. Somewhere I found the coinage ‘Cloud plus Data’. 

Then I started hunting this keyword in Google. A few results down, I saw the link: Wiki.Scratch!: 

Wiki.scratch? This title intrigued me. Out of sheer bewilderment, I went on to read the page. The wiki page speaks about a newly developed programming language for kids and a data type called cloud data there. The surprise ended there. But the idea of ‘Cloud Data type’ persisted with me. Recently I had read about the concept of temporary social media in the MIT Review Blog. It was described as one of the top ten disruptive technologies for the year 2013. MIT Technology Review.

Temporary Social Media is a concept where content self-destructs itself to enhance the privacy of online communication and make people feel freer and be instantaneous in the world of internet. It can even be a minimal control to the current data explosion. Connecting the dots, I just began to think why can’t we think of a system of programming where cloud based variables and data types be used to create a temporary social media. Thus cloud can become the birthplace for a new mode of social media. 

Read more at my developerWorks personal blog DataVerse! and please share your comments!

Semantic Web and Social Web: Similarities and Differences !

Though semantic web and relational ontology has become a theoretical discussion among many pioneers of world wide web, it is yet to receive wider traction among the industrial use cases of internet. Yet the concept remains widely discussed in the academic circles and the research groups of enterprises focusing on online data distribution and search engines. However, semantic web as a paradigm has some differences from a social web where we can collaborate better and more meaningful.

Semantic web need to go way beyond the constructs and ambitions of autonomic computing if it should become a gateway to web socialization. Internet  should evolve to be more open web where we can create meanings and relationships within first degree of separation itself. I believe it is still very much skewed by the way search engines, resource identifiers, memory allocation architectures, data storage, binary approximation algorithms etc.

Social web is a world where society weaves a web of information around their social relationships and social use cases. It stems from the real web of information. Semantic web will be a subset of social web in this sense. If semantic web is dealing with information enterprise, social web is dealing with collaboration circles.Machines can become self aware and understand what is the cognizance of information that they process. But in social web, socialization will be the first phase and then semantic relationships will emerge. web sociology will depend on the the social coefficient that exist in various degrees of separation and the order of 'connectedness' in each collaboration circles.

The business dynamics of web sociology will depend on the market dynamics of software engineering economy as well. We cannot think of semantic or social web isolating it from the market ecosystem or software economic premises. In terms of social activities, what all are happening in web?

• Collaboration
• Conversation
• Construction
• Deconstruction
• Inspired connectivity
• Virtual sensitivity
• Cognitive mind mapping
• Symbolic learning
• Forgetting and temporary memory
• Recognition
• De-cognition
• Identification
• Crowd behavior
• Media affinity
• Informed passivity
• Social solitude
• Virtual sentiments 

This list goes on. Web sociology will need to come up with new frameworks where all these activities need to be aligned in the sociological perspective. Thus semantic web can generated meaningful association between machines and men. Semantic web can definitely write and read relationships with human beings. Socialization is something beyond communication. It is always an attempt to represent the social self and personal self to a wider audience. Only social web can aggregate and spread more meaningfulness, relationships and cognition in the collaboration circles. 

How IBM Watson helped me select the right mobile apps: A science fiction

How IBM Watson helped me select the right mobile apps

This is a fictional narrative on cognitive mobiles. With Supercomputers like +IBM Watson, cognitive computing has become an immediate reality. Can these cognitive computers solve our real life problems and confused mind? This article presents a dream where a man's misery with mobile app is resolved with the help of a cognitive computer! Please read more and share your thoughts at the IBM Mobile Business Insights blog! ...

What will you say about Mobile Enterprise in 10 seconds !

In the recently concluded #IBM Redbooks Social Media Residency for Mobile Enterprise thought leadership, we had great fun taking video shoot on the idea exchange on #MobileFirst. When I was invite to speak a few words, thoughts from all corner gazed at me. I strongly believe mobile is the best social computing platform which can be the intelligent interface between simple humans and complex machines. Thus humans, mobiles and complex machines like #IBM Watson together can build a smarter planet. More importantly, we should know why are we building it. It is for a connected living in a network society.

Disclaimer: The Opinions are my own.

Digital Front Office: The Enterprise Social Bus for Digital Economy !

Watch your thoughts; they become words.

Watch your words; they become actions.

Watch your actions; they become habits

Watch your habits; they become character.

Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.’

(From the famous quote of Lao-Tze)

If we have a time machine that can watch every customer 24× 7 like the above words, it will be one of the most resourceful devices for the social business and digital consumer! How does Customer Experience Lab realize Digital Front Office innovations? What is digital front office for you: A social business hub or customer experience laboratory? … Either ways, you are right! Digital front office is a multi dimensional platform for your business needs. 

We strive to analyze, predict, and transform customer experience through a deeper understanding of customer’s thoughts, words and action. ‘Digital front office’ is the convergence of all the techno social efforts in this perspective. The synergy of social, mobile, cloud and big data innovations is realizing this perennial dream of world markets and business leaders a real social business story. The ubiquitous smart phones, spontaneity of analytics, pervasive social media and the cost effective cloud solutions have made today’s consumer truly digital. Thus the new age digital consumer expects a digital front office in the transactions and experiences. 

Realizing a digital front office requires the right mix of business and technical innovations to the life of customer. At the IBM Customer Experience lab, researches and business innovators work in tandem to envision the world class customer experiences. Located at the T.J. Watson Research Center, with additional virtual collaborators around the world, the IBM Customer Experience Lab is a partnership between IBM Research and IBM Global Business Services. 

When digital front office is a significant business value accelerator (BVA) and primary innovation hub for better digital consumer experience, at the same time it is a virtual window to the world of social business. Social Business thrives on the mobilization of social capital and new social identities. Thus a digital front office can watch the real time trends in social fragments and social identities through various modes of analytics. Innovations like ‘transformative analytics’ are progressing in this trajectory. From media and entertainment industry to micro finance institutions, we can see vivid and variant models of social business. 

A digital front office strategy with an evolutionary and adaptive approach to customer experience analytics(CEA) can realize social business platforms with global market reach and solid growth potentials. This is where IBM Customer Experience Lab meets next generation market dynamics.

Transparency and Measurability :: The twin towers of Digital Economy

People and Technology: How they enrich a social network?

#Facebook, as the name goes, became this ubiquitous a social media only with a human face and a treasure chest of information. These two constitute the twin towers to build a powerful social media. These two ends should enrich each other in a social media platform. More people means more information, more information means more attractive to people. 

Without people, read & write web ( web 2.0 paradigm ) will just be a pipe dream. Social Media as a source of data opens up anew opportunities for collaboration, new insights, further more modes of communication and so on.

Yet making relevant decisions from social media remains a daunting task for many information management systems. We evolve complex algorithms and decision systems for this. We traverse the path of natural language and cognitive networks for this aim. Why?

The data formats and the metadata about people varies significantly across social media. This diversity often inspires the evolution of various ecosystems around each social networks. When #Pinterest gains momentum, the network society around it various substantially with #Twitter communes or #Google Plus hangouts.

Social Media Observatory: A step towards Digital Front Office

Beyond this multiplicity of modes of communication, a unified strategy for web intelligence from social media has a lot of challenges even today. The data exchange across social media need to be more transparent and measurable for this. Social Media Observatory concept is a landmark concept in this direction. An observatory is a platform which can access and plot the patterns and constellation of ideas and aspirations in social media.

This transformation is an imperative in making social media a viable channel for Smarter commerce, further leading to a comprehensive digital front office. This envisions the need for a front office digitization  (#FOD) strategy incorporating social media evolution as well. That will take us near the goal for a fully digitized globally integrated enterprise. A Digital enterprise cannot exist without a digitally segmented market and a digitized channel for network society. And that means the synergy of social media, big data, cloud and mobile platforms as a prelude and a stage setter.