Internet of Everything

The Internet of Everything is a $19 trillion global opportunity over the next decade: Private-sector firms can create as much as $14.4 trillion of value while cities, governments and other public-sector organizations can create $4.6 trillion.
Around the world, city, state and federal governments, as well as other public-sector organizations, are leading the way in bringing the Internet of Everything to life. Cisco identified and profiled dozens of the best global public-sector examples of how the Internet of Everything is improving the lives of citizens everywhere.

http://internetofeverything.cisco.com/

Cisco defines the Internet of Everything (IoE) as bringing together people, process, data, and things to make networked connections more relevant and valuable than ever before-turning information into actions that create new capabilities, richer experiences, and unprecedented economic opportunity for businesses, individuals, and countries.

http://www.cisco.com/web/about/ac79/innov/IoE.html#~tl

Summary/Key Stats
http://www.cisco.com/…/…/docs/innov/IoE_Economy_Insights.pdf

An overview of Moxtra

There are many apps out there that aim to improve group projects and collaboration, it is a much needed service in academia and business. But still no single app had nailed this whole process, this is the reason why daily millions of texts and emails are sent to swap documents, or to set up conference calls.

Moxtra is a new app that tackles this problem through a service it calls power messaging. Power messaging is combination of sharing documents within a group, audio and text chats that all contribute to enhance collaboration in projects. For example a study group can use Moxtra to prepare a report or take lessons from a tutor, a sales team can use it to collaborate on presentations, and a group of friends can use it to plan an event or a trip. Any user can add audio and text comments, they can make mini presentations to show why and how they have annotated documents.

Moxtra is an app from a company of the same name and it is available free on both Android and iOS, it can also be accessed from the browser. One great thing about the app is that people can participate in a chat from any mix of devices. For added security the service is strongly encrypted.

This product is old but previously it revolved around “binders” which were collections of documents. But now this app has been innovated to include chat features that greatly help in group collaboration.

Right now, Moxtra has not imposed any limits to the amount of stuff you store in “binders”, or how long you conduct meet sessions, or how many participants you include. But eventually Moxtra plans to impose limits on will start charging premiums from user that exceed the limits. It also plans to add paid new features.

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The advent of Long Scrolling pages

Over the past there has been a visible change in trend in website design towards long scrolling pages. These pages often have a great visual design that engages visitors and leads to better conversion rates.

The way long scrolling pages work is that they tell narrative about a company or a product using techniques that are visually stimulating. And now they have become even more successful in engaging visitors with richer graphics, neat design, anchored navigation, moving widgets and parallax effects. This has enabled marketers to narrative stories in a whole new way and persuades visitors to scroll further.

This trend of long scrolling pages was not always considered good, in the early 2000s most websites were focusing on making pages that did not require visitors to scroll. They focused on finding where the “fold” is in a webpage so that they can stuff all the data in a way that did not require scrolling, and all the content that did not fit above the fold had to be put on a different page. At that time marketers focused on getting visitors to click on links on a website and go deeper.

But why did this trend change? In the last two years Web analytics has produced numerous reports emphasizing on the engagement level of visitors, the findings were that in every case higher visitor engagement level led to higher conversion rates. And the measure of engagement is that the website entices the visitor to scroll down a page a read the story.

To check how successful a long scrolling page is website owners track mouse movement and scrolling, this gives them an idea about the level of user engagement on individual pages. They implement mouse/activity tracking and scroll tracking on long scrolling pages to check whether visitors are scrolling down the page or not.

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Transition from BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) to BYOS (Bring Your Own Software)

After BYOD or “bring your own device” – the concept that people bring their own devices like laptops, IPad and smartphones to work, IT experts have now thought up of a new phrase “bring your own software” or BYOS.

In the last few years employers have accepted the idea to let employees use their own devices at work, to give them the freedom to choose their favorite devices. Although at first employers were concerned about security risks but BYOD let to increased employee satisfaction. After BYOD employers are now considering if they should let their employees use the same software they use at their homes.

“Bring your own software” is quickly gaining support from employers and it has already started in workplaces. Many office employees have started forgoing MS Word and are switching to Google Docs. And instead of using FTP company servers they are using Dropbox.

A few years back employees used to ask the IT department of the company whenever they wanted a software. But this trend has changed now as people can get so many applications online for free, so instead of going to the IT department employees just download what they like. Furthermore, developers are constantly releasing communication and productivity tools that are helpful to people in both their professional as well as personal lives and this trend will give a boost to the BYOS culture.

Like “Bring your own device”, “Bring your own software” can save employers a lot of time and money. Previously employers had to spend huge amounts of money to buy software programs and then more money to train employees to use the software. But with the BYOS employers don’t have to spend money to buy software programs as employees bring their own software and they have been using them in their personal lives so don’t require any training.

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How Marketing and Sales Can Work Together to Close More Leads in an online world?

When it comes to marketing management and generating sales from different platforms than one can easily say that they dynamics of an online world are different as compared to real world scenarios. In an online world, people of related departments can coordinate on real time basis to attain viable results in both the short and the long run. In an online environment where business sells through different online platforms like websites, email marketing, applications, and social media pages etc., such an environment would endorse the collaboration of two departments. Marketing and sales possess the credibility to coordinate with each other and ultimately to end up giving more sales to the organization.

The marketing department would attract and influence the customer by several scenarios like promotional material, attractive content, etc. Similarly, the sales individuals can follow the same leads and coordinate with them through platforms like live chat support and real time visitor management software. This would benefit both the departments and close more leads in an online world. However, individuals should make sure that people should coordinate with each to generate best possible results.

Customers prefer this model of operations too because they believe that things get synchronized in a proactive way and they would attain the ultimate benefit through this scenario. However, marketing and sales department should also realize the fact that they are closing the leads in a proactive way and they should focus on after sales support too so that customers remain motivated for a long-term period. Customers would return in such scenarios if they face motivational trends from the organization they are dealing with. However, it solely depends on the fact that how well things are implemented and what impact would it made on the organization.

Uzair Hamid has been working as a Sales & Marketing Data Analyst for 2 years now. He is open for discussion on the topics related to Lead Funnel Management, Attribution Analysis, Progression of leads, Reverse Engineering, Lead Scoring and Lead Journey Path.

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“Inbox”, a Next-Generation Email Platform by MIT and Dropbox Alums

MIT and dropbox alums have launched a new startup called Inbox, it hopes to be the next generation of e-mail platform. It is similar to the recently released Gmail API. Inbox facilitates users to build apps in a more modern way, these apps can then access user’s inboxes. Gmail API is only limited to Gmail but Inbox can be used to with Microsoft exchange, Yahoo and several others.

Inbox offers a wide range of features that can be used by those who wish to create complete email clients with lots of features, to those who want simple features.

Inbox was founded by MIT alums Christine Spang, who worked at Ksplice as a Linux kernel engineer, and Michael Grinich, who worked as an engineer at designer nest and Dropbox. The team of Inbox includes several MIT alums, two graduates from Distributed Operating Systems group and Parallel at MIT CSAIL. It also has people with experience from Firebase and Google.

Michael Grinich remarked that he wrote his thesis on email tools, and he found out how difficult it was for developers to add features to their email clients. The main issue he found was the underlying work required – Character encoding, MIME, IMAP etc. This is the issue Inbox fixes. But the main goal of Inbox is not just to provide a set of developer tools for email clients, it plans to set a new e-mail standard.

Inbox is currently offering an open source sync engine for free that works with Yahoo mail and Gmail, but they plan to expand to all other IMAP providers. Microsoft Exchange enterprise users can also request access to the developer program of Inbox that supports ActiveSync.

Inbox is based in San Francisco and is backed by SV angel, Fuel Capital, CrunchFund, Betaworks, Data Collective, and others. Details about funding have not been disclosed.

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What are the benefits of following Ted Videos

TED, which stands for technology, entertainment and design, is an interesting platform for individuals and organizations for going through different talks and videos of people. There are numerous ideas through which people can attain valuable information and they can spread these ideas too. It revolves around the ideology that if you have an idea then you have around 18 minutes to stand and deliver the best talk of your life. If the idea is prolific enough to attract individuals then people should be scared enough to share their ideology with the masses.

Most of the TED talks are taped at different TED events or at the annual TED conference. Different social media websites foster these videos so that people can review them and share them with their respective followers. The talks at TED focus on different, interesting and attractive ideas through which people gets fascinated. Usually, talks at TED revolve around technology-based issues and they revolve aspects that focus on innovation. Several individuals advertise their respective brand through this ideology and they believe that it is a viable platform to easily spread the word in the masses.

There are numerous benefits when it comes to following Ted Videos. One of the biggest benefits is that by following the videos individuals would learn interesting new facts about different innovative techniques. Following Ted videos would allow people to attain an in depth knowledge of these videos. They can learn new and modernized techniques through this scenario and this would benefit them in both the short and the long run. Strategists believe that they should try their level best to focus on these videos and they would follow them to attain beneficial results. It all depends on the scenario that how these videos would affect the general trends of individuals.

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