Introduction to module

https://campus.college.ch/video/159323242

Video 1 Digital Business Environment

https://campus.college.ch/video/158314775
"The Petabyte Wave" Seriously?
"Petabytes have to stored in the cloud". Oh Really?
1/3 of SMEs do not have a wesbite
2/3 do not market or sell online
20% savings could be made by digitising proceses/back office

Video2 Digital Business Environment

https://campus.college.ch/video/158314776
IT from Connection (tool, 70-95) to immersion (environment, 91-01) to fusion (fabric, 2004+)
Technology and business previously seemed as separate entitities. Technology is not an enabler, it is the nervous system of the business.
How about: "A Week Without the Internet" https://www.abc.net.au/life/my-week-without-the-internet/10419962

Conceptual Model: Fusion needed for Business Change is nexus between Shifts in Societal Trends, Emerging and Disruptive Technologies, Shifts in Enterprise Practises and Capabilities

Internet of Things
How about: https://thehackernews.com/2018/04/iot-hacking-thermometer.html

Reading: The guilty secret of the digital skills gap in UK 10/09/2014 Salford Business school

"The Federation of Small Businesses recently reported that SMEs accounted for 99.9% of all private
sector business in the UK, employing 14.4 million people, and had a combined turnover of £1.606 billion."

Note the deceptive use of metric changes here; when calculating business names the FSB uses a percentage, but when calculating employment and turnover they use absolute figures. One metric designed to promote the importance of FSB, two which obsfucate the importance of FSBs.

"A recent study by digitalskills.com revealed that one in three SMEs don’t have a website"
Yes, because a Facebook page is significantly cheaper and offers more reach.

"If all UK SMEs marketed and sold online as well as via traditional methods, turnover could be boosted by £18.8 billion."

Note the conditional clause "could". One may have reasonable doubts that turnover for SMEs would increase more than tenfold. Making claims that something will improve by an order of magnitude requires strong evidence. Very strong evidence, indeed.

Tech Futures Report 2014

"By 2017, tablet shipments will rise 300%, transactions through mobile ‘digital wallets’ will rise from $120bn (€86bn, £72bn) to $1.5 trillion (€1.08 trillion, £0.9 trillion) and US sales of location-based technologies and services will hit $1,295m (€930m, £780m). By 2018, sales of augmented reality technology, including digital signage and smartphone apps, will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 132.2%."

"At the same time, other much-hyped tech sectors will take off. By 2018, the global market in wearable devices will rise from $2.7bn (€2bn, £1.6bn) to $8.3bn (€6bn, £5bn), and 9bn connected devices, ranging from refrigerators to billboards, will have hit the market."

"‘Silicon’ is industry shorthand for places where talent, capital and infrastructure come together to create innovation hotspots. We have identified the rivals to California’s original Silicon Valley, ranging from London’s Silicon Roundabout and Berlin’s Silicon Allee to Tel Aviv’s Silicon Wadi, Beijing’s Silicon Dragon and Nairobi’s Silicon Savannah."

Well? How did these predictions go?

The Future of Augmented Reality

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/10/the-world-is-not-...

References https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_Trip_(application)

"But first, let me explain what Field Trip is. Field Trip is a geo-publishing tool that gently pushes information to you that its algorithms think you might be interested in."

Project glass. This is the future that corporate drones want.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9c6W4CCU9M4

"His internal startup at Google is called Niantic Labs, and if you get that reference, you are a very particular kind of San Francisco nerd. The Niantic was a ship that came to California in 1849, got converted into a store, burned in a fire, and was buried in the city. Over the next hundred and twenty-five years, the ship kept getting rediscovered as buildings were built and rebuilt at its burial site."

And what has Niantic done with this supposedly amazing technological future? Ingress and Pokemon Go.

Innovation from Big Data Analysis
CIO Network: Innovation from Big Data Analysis interview with former editor of Wired

"Moore's law has never worked faster than it has now" Oh my.

All machines will be covered in senses.

"We've gone from the SQL movement to the noSQL movement".
MongoDB is webscale https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs
"If /dev/null is fast in web scale i will use it.."
"Does /dev/null support sharding?"
http://www.mongodb-is-web-scale.com/

https://www.wsj.com/video/cio-network-innovation-from-big-data-analysis/... (1/15/2013)

Wearable Tech Expands Human Potential | Lauren Constantini | TEDxMileHigh

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FESv2CgyJag

Bodies are radiating data. Collect with wearable senses in real time. "Spire" tracks breath. Fertility tracking; wearable sensors tracked calorie intake. 1/3 people remove sensors in six months due to behavioural modification.

Googlization of Everything

Siva Vaidhyanathan, The Googlization of Everything (and why we should worry), University of California Press, 2011

"This book describes the nature of that devotion as well as a growing apostasy, and it suggests ways we might live better with Google once we see it as a mere company rather than as a force for good and enlightenment in the world."

"I saw my great hopes for an open and free Internet corrupted by the simultaneous pressures of inadequate security (in the form of fraud, spam, viruses, and malware) and the attempts at a corporate lockdown of culture and technology."

Forum Assignment #1 How has technology transformed business over the past 10 years, and how has it changed the way information is created, accessed, and consumed?

There are several sources readily available online of various popular pieces on technological change since 2008 (Paul, 2018., Graham, 2016, Donovon 2018, Hartmans, 2018 et al), and it certainly worth reviewing what was considered the big technological breakthroughs ten years ago (Ganapati, 2008) if only to inject a degree of sobriety to a field that is somewhat prone to rather hyperbolic speculations. A good number of what is described in such articles as a transformative technology for business and consumers is digital-based brokerage services. As Goodwin (2015) observed with both wit and pith on TechCrunch: "Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate. Something interesting is happening."

Goodwin's answer is that the customer interface has priority in these brokerage services; it is convenience, ease-of-use, and providing the goods. However, it must be recognised that firstly that an emphasis on interface is not new. In the early 2000s Google won the search engine war (Aron, 2016), in part, due to the simplicity of the interface and the extensive results it provided. Traditional market advantages also do have a some strengths however; Nobody can claim that Ebay has a simple interface yet its continued success is because of market dominance and a massive barrier of entry to potential competitors. Which does result in the observation that for brokerage services there is a period of initial competition, followed by dominance by a major player which is difficult to dislodge without a different, innovative, approach which bypasses the existing monopolistic advantage; economic authors like Joseph Schumpeter can be contrasted with business authors like Michael Porter in this regard.

Another area of commonality is business and consumer grade devices to aid access to the respective brokerage services, such as of various tablet devices, smartphones (relatively rare ten year's ago), the move from heavier laptops to notebooks and hybrid notebook-tablets. Underlying these form factor components is significant (if incremental rather than revolutionary) improvements in battery technology, disk drives (especially SSDs, Kasavajhala (2011)), wireless networking (especially the Long-Term Evolution standard), and touchscreen technologies (capacitive sensing). Also worth mentioning is the technological improvements in digital cameras, which, along with other sensor systems, have contributed enormously to the development of large datasets. The mass adoption of Graphics Processing Units in small form-factor digital computation devices (smartphones, tablets, notebooks) has allowed for rapid rendering of windows-based interfaces.

Which leads to some underlying technological changes which may not be so obvious, which are not consumer-grade, but which the consumable technolgies rely on. In particular there is the widespread civilian adoption of Navstar GPS, or those of other governments and regions (e.g., Russian GLONASS, China's BeiDou, Europe's Galileo) etc, which of course depends on the density and capability of satellites (e.g., Block IIR-M and Block IIF for Navstar GPS), and the density of mobile phone radio towers and base stations. The innovations in those technologies are very overlooked by popular media! On a more terrestrial level the adoption of fibre-to-the-premises (Elixmann, et al., 2008) replacing copper-wire technologies is astoundingly important, given that fibre-optic nework connections are limited in their data rate by the terminal equipment, rather than the fibre itself. Finally, with cluster and cloud compute services, the "big iron", various parallel processing methods have either increased in importance (MPI, OpenMP) or have been introduced (NoSQL) to deal with large datasets, along with high-speed internal networks (e.g., Infiniband, Remote Direct Memory Access), and finally, the adoption of General Purpose Graphics Processing Units (GPGPUs) which now (along with the Linux operating system) is dominant in the supercomputing world and other cluster computers for parallel computation.

References

Mohit Aron. 2016. Why Google beat Yahoo in the war for the Internet.
https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/22/why-google-beat-yahoo-in-the-war-for-t...

John Donovon. 2018. 10 Things That Didn't Exist 10 Years Ago That We Now Can't Live Without.
Retrieved from https://electronics.howstuffworks.com/everyday-tech/10-things-that-didnt...

Dieter Elixmann, et al., 2008. The Economics of Next Generation Access-Final Report: Study for the European Competitive Telecommunication Association (ECTA).
http://ppp.worldbank.org/public-private-partnership/sites/ppp.worldbank....

Priya Ganapati. 2008. Top Technology Breakthroughs of 2008.
Retrieved from https://www.wired.com/2008/12/top-technology-breakthroughs-of-2008/

Tom Goodwin. 2015. The Battle Is For The Customer Interface
Retrieved from https://techcrunch.com/2015/03/03/in-the-age-of-disintermediation-the-ba...

Jefferson Graham. 2016. USA Today. 5 top ways tech has changed since 2008.
Retrieved from https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2016/11/13/5-top-ways-tech-has-chang...

Avery Hartmans. 2018. These 18 incredible products didn't exist 10 years ago.
Retrieved from https://electronics.howstuffworks.com/everyday-tech/10-things-that-didnt...

Vamsee Kasavajhala 2011. SSD vs HDD Price and Performance Study, a Dell technical white paper.
http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/pvaul/en/ssd_vs_hdd_price_...

Fredric Paul. 2018. How Technology Has Changed Since New Relic Was Born.
Retrieved from https://blog.newrelic.com/culture/technology-changes-since-2008/

From Matthew Webber
During the past 10 years, technological development of smartphones, larger and faster processors, enabling technologies for the Internet of things (IoT) and the creation of innovative methods of sourcing, accessing, storing, and analyzing data has truly transformed business. However, specify the most noticeable transformations on business can be seen in almost all day-to-day operations. Due to new technologies daily operations across all departments have become more effective, precise, informed and cheaper to maintain. (Smallbusiness.chron.com, 2018).

However, the business advancements stated above come with contingencies, and these contingencies are shaping how we create, access and consume information. According to Ohchr.org., the same technologies which help a business succeed are also potential risks (2017). For instance, one of the biggest topics of discussion at the moment, since the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal is online privacy policies and online consumer protection laws. Today, it is becoming more apparent that organizations such as the United Nations Human Rights Office and local governments are shaping how business(es) and people create, access and consume information.

Smallbusiness.chron.com. (2018). The Impact of Technological Change on Business Activity. Retrieved 5 November, 2018, from https://smallbusiness.chron.com/impact-technological-change-business-act...

Ohchr.org. (2017). OHCHR. The Special Rapporteur’s 2017 report to the United Nations Human Rights Council. Retrieved 5 November, 2018, from https://www.ohchr.org/en/issues/freedomopinion/pages/sr2017reporttohrc.aspx

From: Damodaran Ramakrishnan

We stand on the brink of a technological revolution that has changed our lives in the past 10 years. Journeying from the steam industry revolution to current Industry 4.0 (2018) we have been constantly bombarded with technology innovations and disruptions which have enhanced our lives with the way our information has been created, accessed and consumed. Information is not only limited to humans, but machines as well which generate data daily in huge volumes. Taking a tour, we find the following technology disruptions/innovations which have revolutionized various facets of business and human life. Some of the technology areas to look at are.

Machine Learning used for predictive maintenance of Aero engines at Rolls Royce UK after it was fined heavily due to its flag ship Trent engine failure rate before its next maintenance cycle on the A380 (eg: Microsoft Machine Learning and advanced predictive maintenance project with TCS ), Artificial Intelligence(AI) is used to smartly and efficient manage Google's U.S global datacentres, Smart cities- an initiative to use energy efficient cities that manage resources effectively ,Virtual reality assisted training stations for Train(Network Rail UK)/Flight simulation. Drones to collect aerial survey (Eg:Network Rail UK) of tracks in remote areas and also to deliver packages in the neighborhood(under trial by Amazon). AI to aid in pre-blindness scan at NHS UK hospital on trial using Google's Deepmind AI technology. Autonomous electric car evolution with cloud connected car experience (Eg:Tesla, Google Car,Uber). Wearables is another evolution which has changed everyone’s mindset to be very consciousness on health and this has opened doors to all that the body's signals are not heard only by doctors who can diagnose, but by wearables that give a head start on the warning and pre-emptive medicine front. This has helped people to keep themselves fit and also monitor their family fitness over the internet. Smart voice assistants like Amazons Alex and Google mini have changed the way people order their online grocery, control their home & entertainment systems ,book hotels/flights/appointments, check ,climate, commute etc. 3D Printing has brought a whole new dimension of printing parts which needed to manufactured at far of location and transported back (eg:Aribus uses 3D Printing to print non critical smaller parts for the A380 Super Jumbo). This gives Airbus the just in time manufacture, which is a lean production method and smart inventory management. The designs are readily downloaded on to the 3DPrinting station from the Manufacturer. Smart phones have evolved to no longer a need to carry a wallet with NFC(Near Field communication) for contact less payments(eg: Transport For London Underground), secure OTP(One time password token) for mobile banking with multifactor authentication systems, in built voice assistant, GPS navigator, controlling your smart home and anything to watching a full hd movie on the go with 4G. Industry 4.0 (2018) (Today's Smart Factory ie: Fully automated via IOT Platform. Each machine talks to another in a coordinated movement to achieve seamless production process with almost zero touch). This way some leading distilleries/factories in Germany run their day to day operations(eg:Bosch Germany).

Sources: websites: Rolls Royce,Google,Amazon,Airbus , BBC Click & Network Rail.

Industry Summits : 2018 BigData London,IOT London and AI London Summit.

Industry 4.0 Automation:

NHS UK Case Study : https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jul/05/google-deepmind-nhs-m...

Hi Mauro Rodrigues

Building IT systems in a developing country is difficult with the precarious supply of electricity, low bandwidth, and high latency. I worked in Timor Leste in IT in the year that they regained independence, so I have a modicum of experience in this.

As you say, a very important component is building a computer culture to aid productivity. One thing I found was useful in such a situation was to deeply introduce people to the importance of data size. In advanced economies, unfortunately, we often treat very fast data transfer speeds as a given. Not all places have this luxury, and issues like file formats etc matter a great deal.

As a trivial example, I recall about twenty years ago a staff member at a local MPs office sent an invitation to an event to some 1500 local supporters of the MP, and embedded all the information in a graphic in a MS-Word document. The resulting document was around 10 megabytes in size. For some people on dail-up connections there would be time-outs simply trying to download the document.

The total content of useful information the document was about four lines of text. What was on, where it was, what time the event was etc.

I took some grim pleasure informing the staffer of the importance of bandwidth and latency and pointing out that they had just mailed the equivalent of the works of Shakespeare to some fifteen hundred people.

As Grace Hopper used to say (look her up, it will make your day): "Mind your nanoseconds!". Which is why I hand out a 30cm piece of string to every one of my students in my introduction to supercomputers class.

Reading: The guilty secret of the digital skills gap in UK 10/09/2014 Salford Business school

"The Federation of Small Businesses recently reported that SMEs accounted for 99.9% of all private sector business in the UK, employing 14.4 million people, and had a combined turnover of £1.606 billion."

Note the metric changes here; when calculating business names the FSB uses a percentage, but when calculating employment and turnover they use absolute figures. One metric designed to promote the importance of FSB, two which alter the perceived importance of FSBs.

"A recent study by digitalskills.com revealed that one in three SMEs don’t have a website"

A website requires purchasing a domain (unless you get a subdomain or directory through someone else), a web-developer, and maintenance. Perhaps one in three SMEs don't *need* a website. Does the local milk bar need one? A newsagent? Even for a restaurant, a Facebook page (or other social media) is significantly cheaper and usually offers more reach simply through convenience.

"If all UK SMEs marketed and sold online as well as via traditional methods, turnover could be boosted by £18.8 billion."

Note the conditional clause "could". One may have reasonable doubts that turnover for SMEs would increase more than tenfold (from £1.606 billion to £18.8 billion). Making claims that something will improve by an order of magnitude requires strong evidence. Very strong evidence, indeed.

Whilst one is certainly favour of using digital technology is a 'smart' way, to really throw the cat among the pigeons is over-use of Internet-enabled technologies always the smartest thing to do? In my own workplace (which deals with the provision of high-end compute clusters and research software to postgraduates), this is not so much an issue. But we're a pretty niche workplace.

(To take it a step to the extreme, I have been informed of one medium-sized business in Sydney, Australia, which doesn't use electronic communication or information technologies for anything - they don't even have a 'phone number. They're a Mmanchester company, they have very fixed supply and demand lines and no desire to expand. All their accounting is done on paper, and all their payments are by checque.)

From: Damodaran Ramakrishnan

Googlization of Everything --thoughts on this growing power and presence of Google.

Google is perhaps the only leading search engine next to Microsoft's Bing.It started to provide search since its inception and was carried forward by word of mouth over past many years through its battle with Yahoo and Netscape. Thus it started be the default search engine in everyone's mind when it came to the internet. This had become a culture and that’s what is termed as Googlization by Siva Vaidhyanathan.

Googlization affects 3 large areas of our personal information these are our habits,opinions, and judgments. These are all captured from us in the way we interact with the internet behind the scenes and from various websites ,databases etc.

Google had entered into an era when no other authority was bold enough to bring e-goverance to make the web stable, usable, and trustworthy. Big countries like Peoples republic of China monitor and governs the internet and thus the impact on the content provided to Google. So are other countries such as France,Italy,Brazil and Germany. However Russia has been liberal in its policy.

Google had no longer limited itself to be a search engine. But increased its product line to the following online services.

Timeline On Services Launched

----------------------- -------------------------

2002 Google -Email free

2003 Orkut- Social networking site(Brazil and India)

2004 Google Books

2005 Google Maps, Street View and Google Earth

2006 Youtube

2007 Mobile Operating system

2008 Chrome Web browser

2009 Chrome OS Cloud OS.

In today's world, Youtube video is the most popular platform because it attracts more contributors and viewers than any other service on the planet and also the reach ability of its channels.

Google’s core business is not just internet search but selling advertising space through its AdWords program where advertisers bid for the top advertising slot available. Ads are target to relevant customer searches across Googles online services .

Google maps is perhaps the most widely used application next to Youtube for Geo- navigational. This has been the de-facto standard among taxi drivers and commuters across the globe today. Though Google search is versatile, the author fears on our over dependence on the service in-terms of privacy and trusting daily information in the wake of mass communication and fake news in today's world,hoping it provides sufficiently governed information with equal responsibility from Google in preserving the privacy and security of peoples personal information.

Finally to conclude considering peoples experiences with the growing power of Google's services seems to converge into their mind that any other services being introduced by Google will certainly be trustworthy, taking priority on privacy and security of its users and not left to chance.

From: Oreste Parlatano

Looking at Global mobile OS market share from statista.com, Android became a dominant player. Combining the observation with stats at DI Unit2 (a mobile business) where smartphones and tablets users have far exceeded PCs users, I am tempted to conclude that Open Source software is the favourite choice for the majority of consumers.

According to [Bohn, 2018] Android operating system is installed on more computers, laptops, tablet computers, and smartphones than any other operating system in the world.
[Eastman, 2018] explains that “The soaring popularity of Android is due in large part to its main platform: the smartphone. The number of smartphones sold today outnumbers sales of computers running Windows, Macintosh, and Linux. In fact, many young consumers and also people in third world countries never purchase a desktop or laptop computer; they simply use a smartphone or tablet for all their needs.

And Android is installed on about 85% of all the smartphones in the world.”

My understanding of the phenomenon is related to the number of people that became consumers, smartphones gave access to computing for a huge number of people. The presence of more people in the market caused the need for more Open Source software.
I come to the conclusion that Open Source is the personification of “Vox populi”.

Bibliography

Bohn, 2018: Dieter Bohn, Android at 10: the world’s most dominant technology, 2018,
https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/26/17903788/google-android-history-domin...

Eastman, 2018: Dick Eastman, What is the Most Popular Operating System in the World?, 2018,
https://blog.eogn.com/2018/09/28/what-is-the-most-computer-popular-opera...

Those are very good references Oreste, concerning the relative market share of Android on mobile phones and other devices.

It is worth mentioning that Android is only partially free and open source software. The low-level kernel (the software that provides the interface between the hardware and the application environment) is Linux. On top of that Google have provided their own additions and alterations because that's what the the General Public License (GPL) provides.

Often what we call "Linux" is usually the Linux kernel plus a suite of applications that are also under the GPL, including the utilities that come with GNU (a backronym for GNU's not UNIX). Some (e.g., Richard Stallman) argue that such environments should be called GNU Linux, and they're probably right.

Linux in this form makes up a surprising portion of of our infrastructure, from the most powerful devices to embedded software. All of the Top 500 supercomputers in the world now run Linux (c.f., http://top500.org), and most home or SOHO routers will do so as well (exceptions include some Cisco devices, which have CiscoIOS, and Juniper routers which have a FreeBSD-based operating system, JUNOS).

You are quite right to observe that open source is the "vox populi". People like free stuff :) Also developers like free and open source software because it means that they can optimize it for their environment, change it, fix it, build on it.

Both of these are a direct result of the relative scarcity of reproducing information goods, i.e., a marginal cost of close to zero. Further there is costs, and increasing cost to producing and developing software in the first place, so having something that is pre-made and then altering it to a bespoke design is also a cost-saver. You may have recently seen that IBM is purchasing Red Hat, the world's biggest Linux company for $34 billion USD. This will make Red Hat about 1/3 of the IBMs overall size.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/28/ibm-is-reportedly-nearing-deal-to-acquir...

A few years back Mark Shuttleworth, the person behind Canonical and distributor of Ubuntu Linux, closed "Bug #1" which said that Microsoft has majority market share. This remained open for nine years. But during that time what constituted a computer changed. The world adopted mobile 'phones and tablets, as you say, to a much larger extent than desktop devices. Shuttleworth noted that whilst Android might not be his preferred version of Linux, it did satisfy the requirements for closure of the bug.

https://www.pcworld.com/article/2040342/ubuntus-bug-1-report-closed-afte...

All the best,

Lev
(sent via Firefox 60.3.0esr (64-bit), on CentOS Linux, 3.10.0 kernel

Damodaran, that's a handy "at a glance" time line. I would probably add the following to the early days:

1996: Google begins as a search engine at Stanford University.
1997: Google establishes it own domain for use of Google Search.
2001: New search categories added, Deja USENET archive purchased

Regarding the 2006 reference Youtube of course already existed; in 2006 Google purchased Youtube.

All of which can feed into the key proposition of Siva Vaidhyanathan's book, The Googlization of Everything.

"This book describes the nature of that devotion as well as a growing apostasy, and it suggests ways we might live better with Google once we see it as a mere company rather than as a force for good and enlightenment in the world."

Viewed in this manner, the conversion of Google to from a "do no evil" entity of engineers and technologists to a corporate organization dedicated to monopolistic information acquisition and tracking is challenging to any who hold more utopian views of the company. As a trivial example, Google does not feed into OpenStreet Maps - it is an active competitor.

As a related subject there is the article about Google Field Trip, and the spin-off company, Niantec. The 2012 Atlantic article (https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/10/the-world-is-not-...) is fascinating because the reality of Niantec now is so different to what we being explored six years ago:

Here is what was said:

"But first, let me explain what Field Trip is. Field Trip is a geo-publishing tool that gently pushes information to you that its algorithms think you might be interested in."

Instead Niantic has become famous for two Augmented Reality games; Ingress and Pokemon Go, and plans for a Harry Potter game. And whilst they go include a little bit of geo-interest components (e.g., Ingress portals or Pokemon gyms marking sites of public and historical interest), it is a very long way from their original intentions, and I'm not even sure whether they're heading in that direction anymore.