Amazon

Even more Digital Transformation Must-Read Books

As I have mentioned before in the preface to a similar collection of books, I remain embarrassed by the “Digital Transformation” title of this little series of book reviews, as it really conjures images of management consultants selling snake oil. Nevertheless, having started with this moniker, I will stick with it, and hope that the title doesn’t put you off too much. Here is a collection of titles I have read over the past year or so. It is somewhat … Read more…

When the tech is more valuable than the product

When Amazon opened its first Amazon Fresh grocery store in Ealing last month, much was written about how it offers a ’till-less experience’ where customers can simply pick up the items that they’ll like to buy and walk out when ready. All purchases will then be charged to their Amazon accounts when they leave the store. This experience is enabled through a combination of shelf sensors and powered by a multitude of cameras and AI-based people tracking to determine ‘who … Read more…

Finding the best Digital Business Model for IoT. A Quick Guide.

This is the first of a three-part series on how consumer products companies can extend from providing connected products to truly smart products, considering the impact on business models and organisational capabilities.  The past five years have seen an explosion in the growth of connected consumer products. This was first noticeable in the smart home space where start-ups in the US like Nest, Ring and Canary brought in a wave of app-controlled devices. These were stylish, design-led products, intended to appeal to … Read more…

How Google, Amazon and Spotify set up their teams for success

When leading a tech organisation, how do you determine what makes the difference between success and failure in a market that is rapidly changing? Determining where to focus in shaping an organisation and creating the right culture is clearly one of the key challenges of being a leader. In this post, I will look at how some of the leading tech companies set up their development organisations to deliver innovation and keep on top of a fast-moving world. Never has the adage that you … Read more…

Happenings in the World of Artificial Intelligence

While much of the tech media have been focusing on the goings on at the Mobile World Congress, some of the more interesting stories of the week are to be found elsewhere. While the differences between this year’s smartphones and last year’s models are becoming increasingly difficult to discern, the same is not true for the goings on in the world of Artificial Intelligence. Already a topic of a blog post of mine a short time ago, there have been some particularly … Read more…

Amazon Dash – this genuinely deserves the ‘Internet of Things’ tag

The Internet of Things hype continues unabated, with companies allegedly hiring Chief IoT officers, though a quick search on the Indeed website failed to throw up any ads. However, today I came across a news item that genuinely deserves a bit of hype. While all sorts of technologies and products get pitched as an IoT play, Amazon’s Dash service is a genuine internet of things application. In a nutshell this service allows companies to use Amazon as a fulfilment service … Read more…

Talk to me – The role of Voice Control in the Smart Home

A recent Smart Home report on what features are most desired by users showed that in addition to self-adjusting thermostats, remote locking of burglar alarms and other such staples, one of the features that users really want is a master remote for all services. This is an expression of the frustration with the morass of incompatibility between smart devices.  Very few systems talk to each other in a meaningful way and it is clear that the fragmentation of standards and systems continues to cause … Read more…

Comparing the Cloud giants – Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure

Last month saw a number of number of the tech giants provide their most recent quarterly earnings. For both Amazon and Microsoft, their cloud activities gained a lot of headlines and column-inches in both the technical and business press. Although adopting different growth and technology strategy, their cloud computing offerings represent a significant engine of growth going forward, and is becoming an area of ever-more intense competition. Here we take a brief look at how they compare and what the … Read more…

Amazon still king of the Cloud, though Microsoft is catching up

You can’t go far in reading the tech press before coming across the term ‘cloud’, a term that causes no end of confusion. In the enterprise IT world, the public cloud refers to the setup where IT applications and capabilities are provided to a company by an external provider via Internet connections on a shared infrastructure. This means that the company can benefit from shared economies of scale as other customers use the same infrastructure, and the same scale also provides the … Read more…

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