Week in review: Big Data's impact on the world - Enterprise Apps gold rush to the cloud

Big Data is pursuing to bubble up as the topic of choice for the beginning of 2012, even during Davos. Not surprising when one can attest that the cloud computing model is making significant progress all over the planet and even in my home country, France, where skepticism used to be the attitude regarding it. In turn, leveraging the cloud leads to Big Data, in a business context as well, to try to extract from all sorts of data streams meaningful business insights.

Big Data’s Impact in the World
Steve Lohr, in the New York Times, develops some examples in various areas and highlights some interesting numbers.

• Big Data, Big Impact: New Possibilities for International Development - World Economic Report 
• Cloud Computing to reach $270B in 2020 CAGR 30%: Kleiner Perkins said to eye “cloud” fund
• Big data: The next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity - McKinsey Global Institute Report

I won't come back on Facebook IPO as the entire planet just twitted and blogged about it. But let's step back 5 years ago and remember how people where viewing Facebook back then. It changed big time, Facebook is no longer a youngster phenomena but a business eye opener. Amazing 180° view of the world for a company supposedly going to be valued more than $100B now. Don't you think? We're already in a new world. Social Media is now a reality to most businesses, Marketing cannot ignore it anymore and mobile devices are becoming rapidly the #1 entry point to it. By the way, what is the revenue Facebook is making on mobiles ;-)? (None for now, but stay tuned).

• The Web vs. Mobile Apps: How iOS and Android Are Disrupting The Open Internet 
• Google testing 'next-gen personal communication device'
• Interesting stats: Content Marketing Tactics Now Critical to All Businesses [INFOGRAPHIC] 
• $267B enter­prise tech­nol­o­gy mar­ket: The 3 secrets behind the enterprise tech gold rush 

By the way, recently SAP acquired Successfactors for $3.4B, Salesforce.com did the same with Rypple and Oracle with Taleo for $1.9B and RightNow, check this out. The enterprise apps gold rush seems to be on the cloud.

As Larry Ellison said about cloud computing in 2008: "What is it? It's complete gibberish. It's insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?" Not there yet apparently ;-)

So are you ready for Big Data, cloud computing, social networks and mobile internet?

Week in review: Social Networking Bubble - Value of User Experience - Winston Churchill leadership lessons

Are We in a Social Networking Bubble? 
Coming back from the Bay Area, I can attest IT is on a roll again. The front stage vendors have changed and the topics making a lot of buzz are Big Data with Hadoop, Cloud Computing and PaaS with a heating battle accelerating, Mobility with a head to head competition between Apple and Google Android and of course social networking with a search for talents and executives move (100k+ job posts in the Bay Area).

All of this could make one think that we are living through a new bubble, thus I found this analysis pretty thoughtful and interesting.
Additionally, here are some recent data about VC's investment in the US: Venture capital investing hits 10-year peak, sparking bubble talk.

Volume is not enough, User Experience is key: Android's Market Share Collapses As Apple Surges Thanks To The iPhone 4S
I am a big believer in the importance of UI for user adoption and as the main User Experience differentiator. User Experience, as I did state many times, is nowadays critical to stand out in crowded world. Any business not giving some thoughts on this is exposing itself to tough competition. Apple vs. Android is a very good example of how User Experience makes a difference in a very competitive market that saw key leaders like RIM Blackberry and Nokia decline, attesting to it.

Winston Churchill's Leadership Lessons
Let's close with some lessons learned from Winston Churchill leadership, though this ebook is not that great ;-)

• Seize the day,
• Never hesitate to occupy the limelight
• Do the necessary
• Learn to be eloquent - but don’t get carried away by your own words
• Stick to your guns - but know when to compromise

Have a great week.

Happy New Year, Heart and Intuition

Happy New Year to you all, may it bring you courage to follow your heart and intuition
Emmanuel

Best Internet Trends Presentation - Web 2.0 Summit

KPCB Internet Trends 2011

View more presentations from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers

As usual, Mary Meeker delivered this presentation during Web 2.0 summit and summarizes important trends in our industry with a lot of meaningful data.

Internet Trends 

1. Globality – We Aren’t In Kansas Anymore… 
2. Mobile – Early Innings Growth, Still… 
3. User Interface – Text -> Graphical -> Touch / Sound / Move 
4. Commerce – Fast / Easy / Fun / Savings = More Important Than Ever… 
5. Advertising – Lookin’ Good… 
6. Content Creation – Changed Forever 
7. Technology / Mobile Leadership – Americans Should Be Proud 
8. Mega-Trend of 21st Century = Empowerment of People via Connected Mobile Devices 
9. Authentic Identity – The Good / Bad / Ugly. But Mostly Good? 
10. Economy – Lots of Uncertainty 
11. USA Inc. – Pay Attention!

Productivity Future Vision: do you like this future world?

You should take the time to review this video -- produced by Microsoft -- and immerse you in this future world we are presented here.  In the beginning I was attracted but after a while I felt a bit oppressed and I guess the absence of true emotions is the reason why. You never hear anyone speak truly and the visuals are very clean, so cold.

Some ideas are very interesting but companies putting together such tentatively inspirational videos should pay attention to emotions as this is fully part of the customer experience... more, it is center stage.

Reactions?

You can see more of videos I've noticed about the future ergonomics in my future playlist on youtube.

Managing Customer Experience: the next big thing?

I am a big believer in management guru Peter Drucker saying "What gets measured gets managed". When it gets down to tracking a company's success, too many businesses tend to rely on market share, profitability, EPS growth or repeat purchases only. Don't take me wrong, you still need to track these down, but as one brilliant Berkeley Marketing guru asked: "Do you think your partner is loyal only because he's having diner every night at home? So, does the number of repeat sales indicates that your customer is loyal?" At least for the first one you must admit he's got a point.

Nowadays, customer experience is one if not the main ingredient of customer loyalty which translates into market share -- as loyal customers are the best brand advocates, profitability and EPS growth i.e. the way most businesses would define success. Then what are you doing about it?

If you're still in doubt, take the coffee business as an example. Who has been insanely successful in this business? Starbucks and Nespresso success stories -- follow the links for more -- can attest about it.

As Shaun Smith, author of Managing Customer Experience, details in his post, there are 10 best practices to create real business value:

1. Successful deployment requires the active and continuing involvement of leadership
2. Ensuring cross-functional ownership is vital
3. Focusing on your most strategically important customers
4. Finding out what these customers truly value
5. Being clear about what you stand for
6. Delivering the promise at every touch point
7. Providing branded training to ensure that employees understand the brand story
8. Designing CEM before installing CRM systems
9. Measuring the customer experience
10. Aligning KPIs with the customer experience

This is heavy duty, but social media -- as you can see in the Starbucks video in the link above -- is becoming instrumental in that regard.

I'll leave you with the five barriers to measuring customer experience, from mycustomer.com:

"Customer experience isn’t just about giving customers a good time. It’s about understanding just how good a time (or not) you are giving – and making adjustments"

1. We rely on magic numbers
2. We don’t really listen
3. Measuring word of mouth is hard
4. We have too much functional data – too little insight
5. We don’t look beyond the obvious and the superficial

Tribute to Steve Jobs

With its latest achievements, this is a lesson for all of us that passion and determination are leading to achievement. We all will connect the dots later ....
Farewell Steve and thanks for everything.