Category: News

On Friday, I had the honor of addressing a class of graduates at Navajo Technical College in Crownpoint, New Mexico. The Navajo Tech graduating Class of 2013 earned certificates in 34 fields that will provide the tools they need to serve their community as teachers, nurses, engineers, mechanics, bankers, chefs and countless other opportunities all made possible by their commitment and dedication to improving themselves through the pursuit of a higher education.

Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs) play a key role in President Obama’s educational goal of making the United States home to the best-educated, most competitive workforce in the world. TCUs are critical institutions that build tribal communities, create good jobs across Indian Country, and provide Native Americans with the skills they need to do those jobs.

As a community college teacher, I love seeing what a tremendous difference a community like the one I saw at Navajo Tech can make in the lives of its students.

The impressive class of graduates included veterans like Jerrilene Kenneth, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan as an Army mechanic, before she became the first college graduate in her family with an Associate Degree in Early Childhood Education. It also included Navajo Tech Student of the Year Sherwin Becenti, who dropped out of college more than ten years ago but returned to school in order to build a better life for his family and set a good example for his children. Dwight Carlston, who grew up with no running water or electricity, was also among the graduates. Dwight maintained a 3.8 grade point average, ran cross country, served as Student Senate President and was recently elected as the Student Congress president of all 38 tribal colleges.

read more

Most speakers dread the time slot right after lunch, with good reason. The nodding heads and half-mast eyelids are usually blamed on the energy-sapping process of digestion combined with a satisfied state of relaxation. However, published data indicate that 25% of the audience is losing the battle to stay awake for an additional reason; that’s the percentage of people who suffer, at some level, from sleep-disordered breathing. They’re not just experiencing a post-prandial lull. They are being drawn toward full-blown REM sleep — and have been from the time they got out of bed that morning.

No vending machine energy drink will fix the problem they are living with, and it’s a problem that adds up to an estimated $150 billion in lost productivity annually.

In October, 2004, Harvard Business Review published an article entitled “Presenteeism: At Work — But Out of It.” Its author Paul Hemp argued that, whereas managers tend to be highly aware of worker absenteeism, they should be more attuned to presenteeism, which finds workers at their posts but prevented by various ailments from performing very well. Hemp wrote about the enervating effects of depression, arthritis, back pain, headaches, heartburn, and more. But what he missed was the real 800-lb gorilla of presenteeism: untreated sleep-disordered breathing.

That omission was understandable almost a decade ago. In the nearly ten years since Hemp wrote his article, we have learned a great deal about the legions of workers whose days begin without a good night’s rest, simply because they are unable to breathe normally during sleep due to the spasmodic blockage of their upper airway.

Sleep-disordered breathing includes obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) and central sleep apnea (CSA). OSA occurs when the throat relaxes during sleep and partially or completely blocks the upper airway. OSA sufferers regularly stop breathing for 10 or more seconds, multiple times per night. The oxygen deprivation triggers the brain’s wake-up response and there is often a stentorian gasp for air. This can happen hundreds of times a night, though a sufferer usually won’t remember waking up. CSA, which is many times less common than sleep-disordered breathing, is caused by a failure of the brain to send signals to the muscles that enable breathing, and similar apneic events occur. CSA is analogous to a sigh.

High Prevalence, Low Treatment Rates

The prevalence of mild to severe sleep-disordered breathing is estimated to be nearly one in four adults and these data are based upon studies from several countries including Canada, Israel, and the U.S. Of those affected by sleep-disordered breathing, fewer than 15 percent have been diagnosed and treated. Left untreated, sleep-disordered breathing sufferers are persistently sleep-deprived and they take that condition with them wherever they go. In their morning commutes, at their desks, in meetings, and getting home again, sleep-disordered breathing sufferers fight the body’s irresistible urge to sleep.

The occupational health and safety risks are obvious. Much has been made — and rightfully so — about drowsy truckers and rail operators causing fatalities, but the life-or-death implications extend far beyond these kinds of incidents. And as a public healthcare problem, untreated sleep-disordered breathing is without equal. It has been confirmed as the key driver of hypertension as well as a key participant in heart disease, diabetes, reflux, depression, and more. Given its prevalence, untreated sleep-disordered breathing is driving healthcare costs sky high.

The Good News — Diagnosis and Treatment are Accessible

The most common and effective treatment for sleep-disordered breathing is nasal continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) therapy, which involves a device that generates a continuous flow of air, and a mask that directs that air flow to the patient’s airway through the nares, providing an air splint to maintain healthy breathing.

It used to be that if a person was suspected of having sleep-disordered breathing, they would be directed to a sleep clinic and have to devote a night in a sleep lab for diagnosis and yet another night for calibrating the CPAP device. That is expensive and inefficient. Now patients can conduct a sleep test at home, and be prescribed a therapy that auto-adjusts to their specific breathing patterns and needs. In fact, home sleep testing (HST) coupled with automatic PAP therapy is revolutionizing the sleep-disordered breathing space. HST and APAP are much, much cheaper than attending a sleep clinic and so much more convenient for the patient. And they constitute a solution that is scalable.

When sleep-disordered breathing patients are successfully treated — meaning they adhere to therapy — a ripple effect of positive things happens:

• First, the sleep-disordered breathing patient reaps the benefits of healthy sleep, being alert and more productive during the day. Overall quality of life improves dramatically.
• Second, the progression of any associated co-morbidity, such as hypertension or heart disease, reflux, depression, and so on, are invariably ameliorated and often completely reversed.
• And, finally, the overall cost of healthcare decreases, saving both patient and employer, as well as the healthcare system, money.

Some companies have embraced the ROI of having formal sleep care management programs, which include diagnosis and treatment of sleep-disordered breathing. Those who have not are missing out, not just on reduced healthcare costs, but on the benefit of having workers who are not only present at their posts but doing a job of which they can be proud.

It’s easy to see how a motion-tracking, iPhone-compatible camera dock could appeal to any gadget hound or videography geek. But since the first Swivl launched in early 2012, its biggest fans haven’t been in the consumer or even corporate markets: they’ve been in education.

To build on that base, the company on Wednesday said it had raised $500,000 from Grishin Robotics, an investment company focused on supporting personal robotics. Previously, Swivl raised about $175,000 from Indiegogo and Kickstarter campaigns and less than $1 million in angel funding.

Since the device’s debut, Swivl co-founder and CEO Brian Lamb said the company has shipped about 10,000 units, with uses ranging from pet monitoring to corporate videoconferencing.  But he added that 75 to 80 percent of its customers are coming from education.

“There’s a very powerful ongoing discussion about using video for [several] use cases [in education] that this plugged right into,” said Lamb. “It’s a tool to open the doors of the classroom and get people participating online.”

For teachers aiming to “flip” their classrooms with videos students can watch online or get feedback on their teaching styles from peers, the Swivl provides an easy way to self-record lectures and classes. The $199 device, which the company likens to a robotic “personal cameraman,” includes a sensor that tracks the subject’s movements, panning and turning the camera as necessary. (For more details on how it works, you can check out my colleague Kevin Tofel’s review of the first-generation Swivl.)

Already, it’s being used in 1,000 K-12 schools and 250 universities, Lamb said. With the new funding, the company plans to accelerate the production and distribution of the company’s second version of the Swivl, which includes more classroom-friendly features like iPad compatibility and a feature for attaching additional microphones to capture audio from students.

Even though it may have been unintended, Swivl’s rise in education makes sense given the surging interest in using technology to enhance and extend the classroom. In addition to the “flipped classroom” trend and growing calls for better teacher feedback systems, teachers are increasingly turning to video technology to support distance education programs and capture lectures for students to review or watch later on.

For example, companies like Torsh and Edthena provide tools for teacher observation and evaluation, while McGraw-Hill’s Tegrity and Echo360 are among those offering schools lecture-capture services.  But given its focus on developing hardware and eventually offering connected cloud services (although Lamb wouldn’t elaborate too much on that), Swivl is more of a complementary rather than competitive startup.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Crowdfunding’s rapid growth and future opportunity
• GigaOM Research highs and lows from CES 2013
• Examining the rise of crowd labor platforms in 2012

On Tuesday VMware (VMW) unveiled vCloud Hybrid Service, an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud built and operated by VMware. The virtualization pioneer’s entry into the public cloud arena prompted lots of analysis and commentary from around the web. Here’s a look at some of the most notable posts:

Gartner – Lydia Leong comments on her CloudPundit blog: “VMware has previously had a strategy of being an arms dealer to service providers who wanted to offer cloud IaaS. In addition to the substantial ecosystem of providers who use VMware virtualization as part of various types of IT outsourcing offerings, VMware also signed up a lot of vCloud Powered partners, each of which offered what was essentially vCloud Director (vCD) as a service. … In theory, this was a sound channel strategy. In practice, it didn’t work.”

The Register – From Timothy Prickett Morgan: “the vCloud Hybrid Service is not so much about competing against AWS, Rackspace Cloud, and other public clouds as it is about giving the now 500,000 customers using the ESXi hypervisor to virtualize their servers a place where they can burst their workloads and a reason to buy vCloud Director and other tools in the VMware box.”

Ars Technica – Here’s the “where” question answered:”VMware’s US-based services will be available to early access customers in June and will be generally available in the third quarter of this year from data centers in Santa Clara, CA; Dallas, TX; Las Vegas, NV; and Sterling, VA. Services will be offered from data centers in Asia and the EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa) sometime in 2014. Customers outside the US aren’t prohibited from using the US-based services, but they would have to handle some latency.”

ITworld – Another reason the Vmware cloud isn’t an Amazon killer: “Individual developers won’t be able to sign up quickly and easily to start using compute services from VMware. The vCloud Hybrid Services are sold either on an annual or monthly basis. I’m not exactly sure yet but that sounds like services will be sold the same way that VMware products are sold today – through sales people or partners. There won’t be any chance to visit a web site, plop down a credit card and get to work.”

GigaOm – Jordan Novet has details on pricing: “The vCloud Hybrid Service actually has two flavors: a Dedicated Cloud mode has “physically isolated and reserved compute resources” for predictable workloads and a Virtual Private Cloud for seasonal workloads that require greater elasticity but are multitenant in nature. The former service will start at 13 cents an hour for a 1 GB virtual machine with a single processor on an annual basis, while the latter will start at 4.5 cents an hour on a monthly basis.”

Swivl said it raised $500,000 from Grishin Robotics. Swivl ran a Kickstarter campaign earlier this year. The money will go toward developing a second generation Swivl video device.

PRESS RELEASE

Grishin Robotics Invests $500K in Swivl to Expand the Reach Of Robotic Video Solutions

San Carlos, CA – May 22nd, 2013 – Grishin Robotics, a global investment company dedicated to supporting personal robotics, has made an investment of $500K in Swivl, the makers of the award winning personal cameraman robotic video device.

The funds will be used accelerate the development of the second generation Swivl, as well as assist with the launch of Swivl’s yet-to-be-announced connected video services. Both the device and services will be launched later this year.

The original Swivl is one of the first products ever successfully crowd funded and delivered to market. It has sold over 10,000 units around the world since launch. While there have been a wide variety of applications found ranging from enterprise telepresence to pet monitoring, it has been the biggest hit with educators. It has already been deployed in over 1,000 schools and 250 universities.  Professors, teachers and even corporate trainers are finding it to be the most convenient and inexpensive way to add video to any learning environment. It’s plugging directly into applications like professional development, lesson and lecture capture, flipped classroom, and distance learning.

“The global educational industry is undergoing huge transforming changes, and robotics plays an increasingly significant role in that process. Swivl represents a rare combination of strong technologies, beautiful design, and affordable price-point – exactly the type of product we are looking for.” said Dmitry Grishin, founder of Grishin Robotics, co-founder & CEO of Mail.Ru Group. “Swivl is very well positioned for disruptive penetration of mass-market educational technologies, taking online-education to a new level by dramatically increasing the amount of published, high-quality video content.”

Unveiled earlier this year in a Kickstarter campaign with over 1000 backers, the new Swivl will introduce iOS/Android tablet support as well as support for DSLR cameras. Tablet support presents a unique capability for customers, as well as SDK partners. The larger display is not only ideal for HD video conferencing interface but as a canvas for real-time data and content interaction.

“We’re really excited to be working with Dmitry and Grishin Robotics.” said Brian Lamb, CEO of Swivl. “He shares our vision for enabling, cost effective robotic solutions and also sees the huge services opportunity they create for multiple applications.  He also has a passion for education, which aligns perfectly with our current focus. ”

About Swivl
Swivl aims to make video more natural, useful and engaging for everyone. We do this with a robotic accessory platform with connected services and robust SDK’s. Swivl believes in the power of video for sharing and archiving information, instruction and collaboration. Swivl is located in San Carlos, CA and was founded in 2010. For more information, visit http://www.swivl.com

About Grishin Robotics
Grishin Robotics is a global investment company that is dedicated to supporting personal robotics around the world. With an initial $25 million to invest in various projects and initiatives, Grishin Robotics is focused on raising the profile of the robotics industry and helping robotics entrepreneurs advance their products and ideas. For more information, visit http://www.grishinrobotics.com

The post Swivl Raises $500K From Grishin Robotics appeared first on peHUB.

Chris Brown is in the news again, but this time it’s for a car crash.

TMZ reports that Chris Brown was involved in a car crash on Tuesday after rear ending a Mercedes in his Range Rover. The accident occurred in Los Angeles near Toluca Lake.

Brown proceeded to exchange insurance information with the woman behind the wheel of the Mercedes. She will probably be able to fix what little damage was done to her car and then some.

This isn’t the first car crash that Brown has been involved in this year. ANI says that Brown crashed his Porsche into a wall back in February. Fortunately, this crash doesn’t appear to be anywhere near as bad.

Of course, there’s more to this than just the car crash though. TMZ is also reporting that Brown was driving with Karrueche Tran – a fling from his past. Brown just recently broke up with Rihanna in April for what seems like the ninth time. It wouldn’t be too surprising to learn that he was with an old flame again.

Google announced all the way back in November of 2011 that it would be shutting down Google Checkout in favor of a transition to Google Wallet.

This week, Google announced that in six months, Google Checkout will officially be dead to merchants. They will no longer be able to accept payments using Google Checkout starting November 20th.

“If you don’t have your own payment processing, you will need to transition to a different solution within six months,” says Google Wallet senior product manager Justin Lawyer. “To make things easier, we’ve partnered with Braintree, Shopify and Freshbooks to offer you discounted migration options.”

“If you are a U.S. merchant that does have payment processing, you can apply for Google Wallet Instant Buy, which offers a fast buying experience to Google Wallet shoppers,” adds Lawyer.

Developers for Google Play the Chrome Web Store and Offers Marketplace will continue to be supported, and will automatically transition to the Google Wallet Merchant Center in the coming weeks. Shoppers will simply be able to use Google Wallet to make purchases on merchant apps and sites, as well as on Google properties.

For HTC, when it rains, it pours. Over the last 18 months, the company has watched its smartphone sales slow and profits wither. Now there reports that key personnel have left the company, the most recent being Chief Product Officer Kouji Kodera, according to The Verge. At a time when the HTC One flagship is on the market and the company should be looking ahead to the next big product line, that doesn’t bode well for the company’s future.

Kodera isn’t the only recent departure, however, which makes the situation a little more bleak. Here are a few more joining the exodus, per The Verge:

“It’s not just Kodera. In the past three-odd months, HTC has lost a number of employees in rapid succession — most recently Jason Gordon, the company’s vice president of global communications. Other fresh departures include global retail marketing manager Rebecca Rowland, director of digital marketing John Starkweather, and product strategy manager Eric Lin.”

I knew that Lin had left: He moved recently to become a Product Marketing Manager for Skype after five years with HTC. The others are news to me, but in hindsight, perhaps not surprising given the company’s rough ride of late: delays for the HTC One flagship phone due to supply issues and the lack of buzz around the HTC First, a phone that highlights the Facebook experience.

With HTC’s fall from prominence in the U.S., it’s possible — likely even — that the Tawian-based company consolidates operations back to its home country. With Apple and Samsung dominating U.S. phone sales, it may make sense for HTC to concentrate more effort on the bigger opportunities in Asia. To do so really doesn’t require much of a U.S. presence, sadly.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• What the Google-Motorola deal means for Android, Microsoft and the mobile industry
• Mobile 2012 and beyond
• Research In Motion: future scenarios for its fate

Dick Benton, a principal consultant for GlassHouse Technologies, has worked with numerous Fortune 1000 clients in a wide range of industries to develop and execute business-aligned strategies for technology governance, cloud computing and disaster recovery.

Last August, I outlined seven key tips IT departments should follow to build a better service strategy for their internal users. Since then, I’ve taken a deeper dive into each of these steps on the way to becoming an Internal Cloud Provider (ICP), an essential transformation if IT wants to align with company goals and user expectations. My last post addressed the sixth step, proving what you delivered; in other words, it’s important to show management and service consumers that you’ve met the established service level agreements (SLAs) and key performance indicators (KPIs) for your IT services.

Now, we’ve come to the seventh and final step in this process: capture client satisfaction.

So you now have your nascent cloud service offerings out there in consumer land. Your service offerings are being selected by the end user from your Web-based service catalog. They are intelligently choosing the service they really need, because you have provided service attributes in terms the consumer can understand, and you have also identified the cost of each service offering to assist in their selection.

You have provided a mechanism not only for auto selection, but also for auto deployment. Services selected are now provisioned automatically under appropriate policies agreed by management. Mean time to provision is now a matter of minutes or hours instead of days and weeks. Each month, you produce your score card showing which groups, departments or divisions have consumed which service offerings and at what costs, and you have confirmed in formal reporting that all SLAs have been either met or exceeded.

Determine Satisfaction and Look to Tomorrow

What more can IT do? To lock in your new understanding of consumer needs and to stay abreast of trends in these needs, it is essential to include a survey into your processes. This is not just a satisfaction survey vainly seeking confirmation that IT has indeed “done well”. Rather, it’s critical to use this opportunity to ask probing questions to get a handle on how needs are changing and how future offerings might be driven.

The satisfaction survey process provides an opportunity to capture consumer needs, consumer consumption behaviors and service offering usage as well as satisfaction levels with your services. It is a tool you can use to better understand individual and overall service requirements. This is what we mean by aligning IT with business needs. Your metrics reporting should have already allowed you to identify frequent consumers from the occasional. You should also have a good handle on who is consuming what and be able to classify small, medium and large consumers. If you have offered services that lend themselves to being turned off as easily as they are turned on, you can also get a handle on the mean time-to-live of the various service offerings.

Survey Can Help Set Your Roadmap for the Future

The above information allows you to craft an intelligent survey that seeks information to assist you in planning new services to meet changing needs, changes to existing services as business drivers change, and even end-of-life decisions for some services that are no longer in demand. This knowledge is critical to retaining your relevancy to the consumer for your service offerings, and to remain competitive with outside public operations. It’s always a good idea to formally review what your competition is up to. Just because you think your consumers are captive doesn’t mean they see themselves as captive. Review the competition’s service offerings at least monthly, and follow their PR news feeds for service offering announcements. These new service offerings may well be suitable grist for your survey, to identify if there is a need for these within your organization.

Finally, there is room for the classic component of the satisfaction survey. How well did you do? A scale of one to five is usually sufficient. Further levels of granularity add little. One through five provides a high, medium and low score with something in between for those who want to be picky. Start by asking consumers to assess the service offerings themselves. Are the service offerings meeting their needs? Would more offerings be helpful?  Be sure to allow for written feedback as well. Then move to questions around ease of use. Can they find the service offerings they are looking for? How easy is it to find the service offering they seek? How easy is it to select the service offering and place an order? Are the terms and conditions of the service offering clear? Do they think the costs of the service offerings are reasonable and competitive?

Next, move on to the deployment process. The key question here is to ask how they feel about the mean time to provision the service they ordered (self-selected). Did they get the service they asked for? Were there any additional clerical steps required for approval? (This allows you to count such instances). Was the service delivered as promised? Were SLAs met on each occasion? Was the monthly/weekly reporting adequate? Did they need to escalate any issue? (Capture, count and classify). How do they feel about IT’s ability to respond to their issues? How do they feel about IT’s ability to resolve their issues? How do they rate the internal IT cloud against the competition (Amazon)?

The creative mind can conjure a number of other questions to include in the survey; however, there is a risk of driving boredom or even dissatisfaction once a survey gets beyond a certain size. Perhaps 10 to 15 questions should be sufficient to capture key information about the services you offer, your ability to respond to consumer demands, and trends and future service offering needs. There are quite a few Web-based survey tools, and many are free like Survey Monkey.

By running regular surveys, and even embedding mini surveys in your selection, approval or quote process and the provisioning and deployment process, a wealth of information becomes available to the IT organization dedicated to improving consumer satisfaction and continuous improvement. In summary, here’s the top tips to keep in mind:

• Build surveys into your service order and service fulfillment procedures;
• Run a quarterly satisfaction survey on your clients;
• Differentiate between large clients and most frequent users, and small clients and least frequent users; and
• Use the information to ensure you are delivering the service offerings your consumers need, with attributes they value, at prices they can afford.

Industry Perspectives is a content channel at Data Center Knowledge highlighting thought leadership in the data center arena. See our guidelines and submission process for information on participating. View previously published Industry Perspectives in our Knowledge Library.

Pauly D of “Jersey Shore” fame debuted a new look on Instagram this week, and it fairly screams Gatsby.

The 32-year old reality star and DJ threw on a suit and tie and slicked his hair down, and the result was like someone from another era. Pauly–whose real name is Paul Delvecchio–even compared himself to the subject of the new movie.

“The Great DJGatsby!” he wrote on Instagram.

Pauly D has been known for his spiky ‘do for years now, and says lots of people have tried to imitate it and just can’t make it.

“A lot of people try to do the same hair style, but they can’t really do it right,” he said. “Mine definitely stands out.

He does look dapper with it slicked back, but no doubt he’ll have it spiked again before long; it’s his signature look.

The extent of the surge to Japan by equity investors is written in sparkly 50-foot-high neon letters by the latest flows data out from Lipper.

We all know that Abenomics has, thus far, cast a spell over markets; the Nikkei is up about 80 percent since the middle of November, when Shinzo Abe first started looking like a bona fide challenger to win power. But it is still startling to see how flows into Japan have dominated investment behaviour.

In April alone, Japan equity funds and ETFs accounted for $9.1 billion of net inflows in a month when total net inflows across all sectors was just $9.9 billion. The money pouring into the Tokyo markets was also more than three times greater than the net inflows at the next best sector. Add the Japan Small and Midcaps sector as well as Asia Pacific funds (heavily weighted to Japan) and April net inflows inspired by the BOJs aggressive monetary policy easing reach $11.2 billion.

On a three month view, the figures show a similar trend, with Japan equity fund net inflows at $17.9 billion, much more than double the inflows enjoyed by the next best sector.

We’ve published our latest bouncy interactive graphic to let you explore the data yourself. It includes flows and performance data from all of Lipper’s equity and bond sectors across the last 12 months. Click on the image below to launch, or just click here if that seems too exhausting.

A man who was shot and killed early this morning in Orlando has reportedly been identified as Ibragim Todashev, who was one of the men questioned in connection to the Boston bombings.

Khusn Taramiv, who was friends with Todashev, says the two of them were taken in for questioning at an apartment building and that he was released after three hours, but the FBI agents allegedly told him they needed to speak with Todashev further. He never saw his friend again, he says.

“(The FBI) took me and my friend, the suspect that got killed. They were talking to us, both of us, right? And they said they need him for a little more, for a couple more hours, and I left, and they told me they’re going to bring him back. They never brought him back,” Taramiv said. “He felt inside he was going to get shot. I told him, ‘Everything is going to be fine, don’t worry about it.’ He said, ‘I have a really bad feeling.’”

The men were being questioned regarding their knowledge of the bombings and how they knew Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who died in a gunfight with police shortly after the bombings that killed three people and wounded more than 250. Taramiv has spoken to several media outlets about the death of his friend, but officials aren’t releasing details at this time.

“The agent encountered the suspect while conducting official duties,” said Dave Couvertier, FBI spokesman. “We are still gathering facts involving the shooting incident.”

The NTSB has recommended that the nationwide, the blood-alcohol legal limit should be lowered. As a hard-working truck owner, what is your take on this? Should it be changed?

(more…)

If your company is already well established and has smart management, it is likely that it will become a hybrid in the next ten years, blending its legacy business with a new business model that is rising to threaten it. Take Walmart, for example. After suffering several years of Amazon’s online hegemony, Walmart responded with a hybrid approach. Merchandise ordered online can now be drop-shipped for same-day pickup at local stores. This and other creative solutions have driven over $9 billion of online sales to Walmart. (It’s no surprise that Amazon — which has no physical stores — has mirrored the move from the other direction, installing lockers in neighborhood stores to allow for direct pickup.)

Entertainment and medicine are other industries where hybrid models are beginning to emerge as resilient success stories. Netflix, formerly a media distributor increasingly threatened by the very entertainment companies whose programming it sells, has begun producing its own original programming (such as the recently released series House of Cards.) According to Netflix, offering popular original programming has attracted its customers to order more items from the rest of its media catalog — a hybrid win-win. The Veterans Administration hospital system has formed an alliance with Bosch Healthcare to offer a more efficient means to monitor and diagnose the elderly or infirm remotely, from their homes.

To understand how strategic logic leads readily to such hybrids, consider the results of a recent war game I helped to stage, in which participants sought winning strategies in one fast-changing sector: the US higher education market. Teams playing the roles of traditional large state and non-profit colleges confronted other teams representing the new Massively Open Online Course (MOOCs) and distance learning enterprises, such as Coursera and The University of Phoenix. At first the teams circled each other in the plenary session, each declaring its position and revealing strengths and weaknesses. It soon became clear to the teams and to the observers in the room that neither the online nor the traditional college “education delivery” model alone could prevail. Traditional brick-and-mortar schools suffer from a high cost base that has resulted in tuitions reaching stratospheric heights. Meanwhile, the alluring proposition of the online offerings — courses you can take anywhere, anytime, at a lower price point — is tainted by high drop-out rates and the somewhat lower credibility of their certificates and degrees.

As the war game evolved, so did the teams’ strategic positions. The teams representing traditional schools knew they needed a strong — not just a token — distance learning component. In contrast, the online technology-driven entities sought the revenue stream and prestige the brick and mortar schools enjoyed. Each side appreciated that it needed the other model to grow, and that partnering was the most expeditious way forward, but the combinations had to figure out how they would build revenues and student bases without cannibalizing each other’s position. Forced to deal with gathering change in the market and perceiving a need to catch a fast-moving wave before it crested, these teams began arriving at solutions that screamed hybrid, all of them combinations of the two worlds.

One, for example, featured the MOOCs of the world, such as Coursera and the Harvard-MIT joint venture EdX, playing the Netflix courses-on-demand card. At the same time, this solution called for the MOOC to serve as a student lead generator and revenue producer for brick-and-mortar university partners. The MOOC would receive funds from all its partner universities when students who had taken and completed the free online courses actually applied and were accepted into the four-year institutions. At the point of acceptance and enrollment, the universities would pay the MOOC a fee for each MOOC student enrolled. Thus a hybrid concept yielded a win-win for all participants.

Hybrids are not necessarily mergers. Often, one company is grafting on a piece of another’s competency to solve a business challenge, without having to buy the entity outright. Both entities can remain intact and both can win in the marketplace. One way or the other, the hybrid approach allows an incumbent to address market shifts without losing the essence of what made it successful in the first place. It turns the threat of disruption and disaster into an opportunity. Instead of the outsider disrupting and destroying the legacy firm, it can pave the way to the incumbent’s next strategic position.

Not every company can find or benefit from a hybrid solution. For an indication of whether one is in your company’s future, ask yourself a few basic questions. Are there market pressures that we cannot respond to on our own, drawing on our existing model? Are the proposed solutions too far out of our competency range? Is the disruptive offering missing a piece of the strategic puzzle? Is the disruptive firm unable to make its own market soon enough or show a profit? Finally, can we find a combination — through partnership or merger — that will create a whole greater than the sum of the parts each company brings to the table? If at least some of the answers are coming up “yes,” then the hybrid approach should be a strategic solution you start working toward — ideally, before your competition beats you to it.

San Francisco-based PracticeFusion may bill itself as an electronic medical records company, but that’s definitely not all it is.

Since launching in 2005, the company has attracted 150,000 physicians with its free, cloud-based software for managing patient health information, scheduling, billing and other tasks. But last month, it rolled out its first consumer-facing service, a ZocDoc-like doctor appointment booking site that positions it to manage additional data about patient conditions, medications and treatment outcomes. And on Wednesday, it plans to expand its footprint even further with consumer-oriented tools that help patients track and manage their health expenses.

The electronic health record may have been its foot in the door — as founder and CEO Ryan Howard recently told VentureBeat, it’s “somewhat of a Trojan Horse.” But that’s enabling the company to build an enviable online community for physicians and patients, all with an eye on bringing some light and efficiency to the health system while amassing a valuable treasure trove of patient data. To date, the company says it manages health information for more than 62 million patients.

“Every part of health care is obfuscated,” Howard told me in a recent interview. “But we’ve just opened it up – from the administration to scheduling to the clinical data to now health spending.”

With its new health cost tracking tools, which are similar to products offered by startups like Simplee and CakeHealth, for example, PracticeFusion connects to patients’ healthcare accounts to help them better understand and manage their health finances. For example, it lets patients easily visualize their out-of-pocket expenses, costs covered by insurance and the remaining balance of their deductible.

For now, the health tracking tools can only be used by patients whose doctors use PracticeFusion, but Howard said the service will expand to other patients in the next quarter.

Considering that the average family spends more than $3,000 on out-of-pocket medical expenses and that medical debt has been cited as a leading cause of bankruptcy, it’s no wonder that PracticeFusion is zeroing in on health spending. For many patients, medical expenses are a big black hole and, as healthcare costs climb and employers continue to shift to high-deductible health plans, the need for more transparency and guidance around price is becoming even more needed.

Offering more tools to consumers gives PracticeFusion more opportunities to build its growing advertising business (the company, which advertises to doctors, doesn’t yet market to patients, but has indicated that it will). But, over time, the health-tracking tools could also give the company an interesting and comprehensive window on to the varying prices consumers pay for different providers and treatments.

Companies like Castlight Health and ClearCostHealth already work through employers to help patients get health care pricing information and encourage “healthcare consumerism.” But in the context of PracticeFusion’s community and appointment booking platform, pricing information could play an even bigger role in helping patients choose doctors.

Recognizing the potential sensitivity for physicians, the company doesn’t have immediate plans to display pricing information for patients. But given the need to bring more price transparency to patients, it seems to be something the company is carefully weighing.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• GigaOM Research highs and lows from CES 2013
• What’s driving the next phase of the e-commerce evolution
• How HR can make the case for workforce analytics

There is an evolution happening within the modern data center. Huge data center operators like Google and Amazon are quietly redefining the future of the data center. This includes the integration of robotics to create a lights-out, fully automated data center environment.

Let’s draw some parallels. There’s a lot of similarity between the modern warehouse center and a state-of-the-art data center. There is an organized structure, a lot of automation, and the entire floor plan is built to be as efficient as possible. Large organizations like Amazon are already using highly advanced control technologies – which include robotics – to automate and control their warehouses.

So, doesn’t it make sense to logically carry over this technology to the data center?

Robotics in the Data Center

As the reliance on the data center continues to grow, full software and hardware robotics automation is no longer a question of if, but a matter of when, technologists predict. Robotics organizations, like Chicago-based DevLinks LTD are already having conversations and creating initial designs for data center robotics automation.

Scott Jackson, Senior Robotics Programmer at DevLinks, says it’s becoming quite feasible to have a robot fetch a drive, blade or even a chassis and deliver it to a central bay for replacement.

“Simple RFID tags, laser and barcode identifiers can create true data center automation,” Jackson explains. “For example, you can tag drives with RFIDs and assign them to be wiped, destroyed and reused as needed.” Conveyor systems are able to run in parallel to robotics within the data center environment.

There are already working examples of robotics in the data center. Tape archives seen at Google and high-performance computing data centers use robotic arms to locate and retrieve backup storage tapes.  (For an example, see this video of a system in action at the NCAR data center).

What Will Be Different?

What might a robot-driven “lights-out” data center look like? There would be rail-based robotics capable of scaling the entire data center. Here’s an interesting wrinkle: the modern data center would no longer be limited by horizontal expansion space. When using robotics, data centers can literally scale upwards. Utilizing space in the best possible manner is always a challenge for data center providers, so having the ability to scale both horizontally and vertically becomes a huge advantage.

“These robotics can scale the entire rack, which can now be much taller because of these intelligent robots can reach higher,” said Jackson. “Once a part is removed, a conveyer at the bottom can move the part to the appropriate floor space. Furthermore, detailed vision technology has progressed a long way as well. Solutions like Cognex are able to allow machines to take pictures of a device, barcode and many other variables to help identify the part’s destination or origin.”

Large organizations that invest heavily in their data center infrastructure are actively exploring robotics solutions to help them better control their data centers. IT shops such as Amazon and Google are looking at ways to create a fully automated, lights out data center. AOL has taken a first in that direction with an unmanned data center facility.

The Cost Equation

As with any technology, costs for custom data center robotics will start high and come down as time progresses and platforms become smarter. Smaller robotics are already becoming less expensive. Manufacturers like FANUC develop large machines; but they also create smaller, more agile robotics. Models like the LR and the Mate M-1iA are paving the way for super-agile, fast, robotics capable of granular part identification and distribution.

Both data center, automation, and robotics technologies have come a very long way over the past decade. From the warehousing perspective, robotics already know where everything is located, how to put things in order and are able to directly interact with the human-created automation scenarios. Because of robotics, something very interesting has happened: Instead of the human going to the warehouse, the warehouse comes to the human.

Soon it will be possible to do this at the data center level.

This would enable entirely new approaches to operations. Your data center will be able to run at a different temperature level, you won’t need any lights, and you can directly integrate your new robotics platform into a modern-day automation and orchestration platform. From a central command center, the human operator can maintain visibility into their data center environment, the robotics infrastructure and the workloads that are being managed. This can all be done without the need of a single person on the data center floor.

Citizen volunteers are making significant additions to the U.S. Geological Survey’s ability to provide accurate information to the public. Using crowd sourcing techniques, the USGS project known as The National Map Corps (TNMC) encourages citizen volunteers to collect manmade structure data in an effort to provide accurate and authoritative spatial map data for the National Geospatial Program’s web-based The National Map.

These structures can include schools, hospitals, post offices, police stations and other important public places along with data from other sources, the data currently being collected by volunteers become part of TNM Structures dataset which is made available to users free of charge.

In an effort to recognize the important work being done by volunteers, TNMC has created a recognition program based on the number of points a volunteer contributes. Levels of recognition are displayed in the form of icons or badges of antique catalog drawings of different and increasingly sophisticated pieces of surveying equipment. Each badge comes with a description of the item and encouragement to achieve the next level. As a volunteer attains each level, a congratulations email is sent, and the accomplishments are recognized via The National Map Twitter site (#TNMCorps) and the USGS Facebook page. 

Recognition Categories:

Recognition Category	Number of points
Order of the Surveyor’s Chain	25 – 49
Society of the Steel Tape	50 – 99
Pedometer Posse	100 – 199
Circle of the Surveyor’s Compass	200 – 499
Stadia Board Society	500 – 999
Alidade Alliance	1000 – 1999
Theodolite Assemblage	2000+

 

Order of the Surveyor’s Chain award. (Larger image)	Theodolite Assemblage award. (Larger image)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Becoming a volunteer for TNMC is easy; go to The National Map Corps project site to learn more and to sign up as a volunteer. If you have access to the Internet and are willing to dedicate some time editing map data, we hope you will consider participating.

While some familiarity with the area that a volunteer chooses is helpful, you do not have to live near a particular place to contribute. The tools on TNMC website, along with ancillary information available on the Internet, are generally sufficient to edit a distant area. There are presently nineteen states available for volunteers to choose to update structures in.

See for yourself how much fun participating can be. Go to The National Map Corps home page, give it a try and before you know it you’ll be hanging out with the Pedometer Posse!

The lack of an official Instagram app for Windows Phone opened the door to many third-party offerings looking to make their mark on the ecosystem. Itsdagram, released little under a week ago with a comprehensive feature set, seized the opportunity and climbed to the number one spot in the top paid category in the US Windows Phone Store.

Daniel Gary, the developer behind the app, decided to further build on Itsdagram’s success by releasing a free, ad-supported, version which comes with unlimited photo uploads and the same feature set as its paid counterpart. Previously, the trial variant only allowed users to post a single photo to Instagram.

The developer also released an update for Itsdagram, meant to bring new feature and iron out a couple of bugs. The app now boasts a tweaked UI (User Interface), a counter for followers, following and photos on the user’s profile page and a refreshed live tile design which reflects its new icon.

Users have the ability to approve and deny follow requests, enable private profiles and save photos on the device. The app no longer allows to send feedback directly to the developer as the corresponding page is now removed.

The latest version of the app also comes with bug fixes and improvements for the finding friends feature, repeating notifications and the registration process.

Itsdagram (paid version) is available to download from the Windows Phone Store.

Itsdagram (free version) is available to download from the Windows Phone Store.

As Pandora struggles to fight off a new wave of competition from the likes of industry giants like Google and Apple, the company recently announced a new feature that could definitely boost interest in its services. Dubbed “Pandora Premieres,” the new feature allows users to stream new albums in their entirety a week before they are released to the public. Upcoming albums can be streamed on-demand from start to finish for one week until they are released, and then they will be mixed in with Pandora’s standard streaming radio offering. Pandora Premieres is available to Pandora subscribers at pandora.com/premieres, and the company’s full press release follows below.

Continue reading…