Internet of Things Foosball on BlueMix With Social Linkage!
Yes, the students have done it! This is an Internet of Things Foosball Table designed by Fabian Eitel and Marcel Seibold. In this picture, they are the 2 gentlemen playing against me !!
This table with sensors throughout does the following:
- It tweets the scores.
- It rates the probability of the winning team (my team was not rated high -- even though I did score one point!)
- Others can tweet to cheer you on!
Here you can find our final result in Twitter as a little souvenir. https://twitter.com/TischkickerEhn/status/590534529464467456)
It is a very innovative way to showcase the value of the Cloud. Marcel and Fabian are not hard core coders but were able to get this up and coming quickly because of Bluemix.
How does it work?
Sensors capture the "game" and then send the results to the cloud, where the data is analyzed and stored. Then based on the game, Tweets are automatically sent and the probablity of a Winner Calculated!
What fun!
Landmark partnership for Cloud-based analytics! IBM and Twitter!
A partnership has just been announced between IBM and Twitter!
This alliance brings together Twitter data together with IBM cloud-based analytics, customer engagement platforms, and consulting services.
The collaboration will focus on IBM analytics services on the cloud, a new set of applications providing data-intensive capabilities for the enterprise, and specialized enterprise consulting.
Entrepreneurs and software developers will also be able to integrate Twitter data into new cloud services they are building with IBM’s Watson Developer Cloud or IBM Bluemix platform-as-a-service.
Check out Twitter's blog! https://blog.twitter.com/ibm
Join me on Oct 6, 2pm ET for #IBMDigitalNYC Tweetchat!
We launched the Digital.NYC platform on October 1 with City of New York Mayor Bill De Blasio. As he pointed out, we made history that day: bringing the ultimate resource to the city with the fastest growing startup scene in the US!
I will be holding a #IBMDigitalNYC tweetchat on Monday October 6 at 2pm - 3pm ET to discuss questions such as:
Why/how does IBM partner with the startup community?
How will Digital.NYC continue to evolve with New York?
What is the plan to roll this out to other cities?
Come armed with your own questions and comments to this open discussion!
Register now to receive a reminder or add this to your calendar – I look forward to hearing from you on Monday on #IBMDigitalNYC!
Saturday Infographic: Surprising facts on Social Twitter
This infographic is courtesy of Masters in finance and researched by Merrill Cook.
SXSW: Key decision makers around the globe are influenced by social networks: GlobalWebIndex research SXSW session
As part of my SXSW speaking proposal on 'How to Avoid Being a Social Zombie in a Global World', I recently caught up with Tom Smith at GlobalWebIndex who shared some fascinating insights from their unique and far-reaching study of the patterns of key decision makers: a theme we'll be exploring further in our session.
The findings are a must-read for anyone who does business globally!
Take, for instance, the GlobalWebIndex finding that those decision makers who interact most on social networks are from emerging markets such as Thailand, Turkey and Mexico. If you are looking to do business in the emerging markets, don't ignore the local social networks!
Also, when asked what they consider the most influential marketing channel, decision makers overwhelmingly picked 'Conversations with people from the company/organization on a social network'. Your employees are a more trusted source than than your webinars, sales presentations or events. This is in line with our push here at IBM to become a social business: we have a strong emphasis on employee enablement.
Now, another fascinating finding is that these decision makers make heavy use of mobile technologies to access social networks, whether that be a smartphone or a tablet. Business happens around the clock and these folks are always on. Are you?
You'll find more even more insights in this 8 minute webinar I recorded with Tom:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8pKQB1gk0E
We will be diving deeper into this topic during the proposed session http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/23204 at SXSW. Want to hear more? Don't forget to also see my other session: Socialytics Bootcamp! Social + Big Data + Analytic http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/23035
I look forward to seeing you at SXSW 2014!
Social Business Tip of the Day: Twitter Two-Step Verification
Twitter has introduced a new verification feature, after Burger King, Jeep and the Associated Press have all had their Twitter accounts hacked in the last year. Considering Twitter handles are hacked regularly, you should take a few minutes to set up the new verification system:
First off, you’ll have to:
Once that’s out of the way:
1. Go to your
-
account settings
on twitter.com and check the “Require a verification code when I sign in” box.
2. When prompted, click Okay, send me a message.
3. If you receive our verification message, click Yes (Note: you’ll have to enter your password). Once this is set up, when you log in to your account on twitter.com, a six digit code will be sent via SMS to your phone. You’ll have to enter the code when prompted and then you can sign in. Obviously, if you’ve saved your password and don’t log out often, you won’t have to do this. But if you do log out often (or get kicked out because of a browser update), you’ll have to move forward with entering the randomly generated 6-digit code to log-in each time.
For more on this AND to learn about logging into Twitter on other devices and apps (which has an additional few steps).
.
Top 6 Social Business Patterns for ROI!
It's easy to see how the world has adopted social media to help strengthen ties between people all over the world. People like to share and the explosive growth of Facebook and all the other social media platforms out there are surely a testament to the fact that we like to share and discover what our friends are up to. (IBM is, of course, the market leader at applying social techniques to business situations. Our entire Social Business Platform is the best in the market, four years in succession, according to IDC. )
Why these 6 Patterns Matter to Your Company:
While you might see how social could apply in a business setting, and understand that somehow harnessing some of these principles might be beneficial to improving how your organization works, you might not know where to start, or how the common business processes you work with could be transformed with social business. Or you may be looking for the top ROI yields. Or how to embed social without the S word (yes, that's Social that some people view Social as Play!)
It's for these reasons that we have created the Social Business Patterns or Use Cases.
- Identify top ROI cases
- Showcase the value and business outcome with having to use the S word
- Allow you to learn from others
These are a suite of example business processes common to many industries. We show how these processes can be improved using IBM's Platform for Social Business and, most importantly, what return on investment you can expect to realize from implementing the use cases. These are not IT solutions, however. They are examples of business processes which will be very similar to your own. Using and adapting these examples can allow you to improve the communication, collaboration, awareness, knowledge-sharing, morale and efficiency of your organisation in simple but very effective ways.
Over the coming blog posts I will look at each of these in more depth, but let me outline to you the areas IBM's Use Cases fall into:
Finding Expertise
Being able to locate the expertise in your organization is vital in many situations. Almost any service organization relies entirely on the knowledge of its subject matter experts. Manufacturing organizations such as car manufacturers, oil & gas producers and many others need to know how to solve problems quickly and easily without re-inventing the wheel and by accessing the expertise of the right people. Travel and transportation organizations' entire business is built on being safe and reliable. These two facets are based on them being experts in their chosen fields and making the most of their staff's expertise. Finding Expertise focuses on how any organization can make the most of their experts. Whether it's finding the right person in critical situations or unlocking the tacit knowledge in the experts' heads to build the collective expertise of the organization.
Knowledge Sharing & Innovation
Social Business solutions are at the forefront of helping organizations all over the world increase their level of innovation. Social helps to drive the process of innovation by giving ideas and new concepts places to grow and adapt based on the collective knowledge of the participants. Use of social demonstrates how you can create a more nimble and flexible organization with dramatic return on investment opportunities backed by real client examples.
External Customer Insights
Many organizations nowadays have a presence on social media. They now have Facebook and other popular social network accounts, some use these to great effect and are generating real new business. You can boost your selling power by unifying your sales people and distribution chain together with the most important people to your organization - your customers.
There are a set of sub cases around the external focus:
- Customer Service. Since empowered customers with social tools are changing the focus of business from selling to “partnering” , engaged employees lead to…higher service, quality, and productivity, which leads to… higher customer satisfaction, which leads to… increased sales & profit.
- Sales. Using social to better target individuals, not just demographics and segments to better sell to your client.
- Community Building. Using community to target your advocates and drive loyalty into your base or to recruit and learn from a new client set is a powerful ROI case.
Recruiting and On-boarding
Your organization lives and dies by the quality of its people. Attracting and retaining the best people in the market is one sure way to make sure that you are investing for your future. To be able to demonstrates how you can enormously increase the time-to-value of new employees, increase the retention rate of your employees and provide much faster access to experts, highlights the focus on people as an important part of your strategy.
Everyone involved in bringing new people on board, including the new recruit themselves, wants their endeavour to be a success. How do you go about ensuring that happens? More than simply "inducting" a new member of staff, how do you streamline the recruitment, assessment and hiring processes?
Mergers and Acquisitions
Did you know that between fifty and eight three percent of mergers and acquisitions fail? This is an enormous cost for everyone involved, both financially and in terms of morale of the staff and customer and stakeholder confidence. A focus on social in acquisitions can help reduce this failure rate by improving the key business processes involved in mergers and acquisitions. It focuses on the people and the culture associated with the organizations coming together and demonstrates how employee retention, failure rate of acquisition and communication can all be improved.
Safety
Social can assist in helping your organization improve its safety record and have a huge impact on ROI for worker's compensation and injuries. . The social tools within our solution can help you reduce incidents, increase effectiveness for your existing safety programs and accelerate the adoption of a culture of safety amongst everyone concerned. Many industries use simple, but effective and tested approaches to using social collaboration can improve the safety record of your organisation and its reputation.
Join Me
We're going to explore each of these Use Cases in more depth in the coming blog posts here, so I hope you'll join me as we deep-dive into how social business, and IBM's Platform for Social Business in particular can help your organization.
As always, I'd really appreciate your feedback and comments! To get more information, you can get the summary report here!
https://www14.software.ibm.com/webapp/iwm/web/signup.do?source=swg-US_Lotus_WebMerch&S_PKG=ov14017
Social is Personal. My story. It is powerful.
The power of social is everywhere.
But no where as relevant than in personal life.
My dad was placed in the hospital for emergency brain surgery. I got the news while in Vegas, and booked the first flight out. I had to wait for the plane for over 6 hours -- hoping to get home in time.
I was going crazy in the wait -- and really needed to talk to someone.
So I did something I usually don't do -- I posted something very personal on Facebook about my dad. Much to my surprise, within minutes I had response from friends all over the world. The outpouring was overwhelming --- over 500 comments plus dozens of calls.
- I had calls from friends that I had not heard from since High School.
- Prayers poured in
- Comments of encouragement came in texts, comments, tweets
- And I didn't feel alone
No one gave up either --- days and weeks went by ..... and the love flowed in through twitter, facebook and beyond.
I talk about the power of social in business -- and the power there is very strong and real. But this personal impact -- priceless.
Social Tip of the Week! Turn off Retweets!
Do you follow somebody on twitter who publishes great content but also tends to retweet anything (like anyone who thanks them), thus making it really hard for you to spot the interesting pieces in the mass of tweets? Than try this useful function: To turn off a person’s retweets, go on their profile, click on the little person icon next to the following button and select “Turn off retweets”. One exception: This only works for retweets sent by using the retweet button, not for those with RT at the beginning of the tweet.