GDPR will impact more than privacy

Similar to how GDPR hugely impacted how millions of organizations handle personal data when it was enforced last year, Strong Customer Authentication (or SCA) will have profound implications for how businesses handle online transactions and how we pay for things in our everyday lives when it is enforced on September 14.

SCA will require an extra layer of authentication for online payments. Where a card number and address once sufficed, customers will now be required to include at least two of the following three factors to do anything as simple as ordering a taxi or pay for a music streaming service. Something they know (like a password or PIN), something they own (like a token or smartphone), and something they are (like a fingerprint or biometric facial features).

Without careful preparation, failed transactions and additional friction may have a significant negative impact on conversion rates.

https://thenextweb.com/podium/2019/05/10/your-business-passed-the-gdpr-challenge-but-sca-is-next/amp/

Remote Work - In the future, the norm, not the outlier

Throughout history, control has traditionally been centralized into various structures (governments, information providers, banks, corporations, etc). Certainly, some of this was necessary. Before the telegraphy,  the only way to get information was from newspapers. Depending on where a person lived, they may only have access to “stale” information many days or weeks old. And these information sharing mediums were limited to those who could physically get their hands on a copy, (or have it read to them when literacy rates were only a fraction of what they are today). Telegraphs and telephones increased the speed at which information could travel from point to point. Naturally, the internet changes the landscape for decentralized communication. So why sit in an office?

Clark Valberg, CEO of design software company InvisionApp, has made it his mission to modernize the workplace... by eliminating [the office] altogether. A decentralized workforce enables employers to access "passionate talent anywhere in the world irrespective of any geographic boundary," Valberg says, but implies "a renewed respect for the need for people to have a door that closes."

Today's world is built around instant, worldwide communication. Mediums such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have shown that anyone, anywhere can disseminate information to millions of people, with just an upload. The nature of a team might be distributed -- or scattered. In either case, the actual number of working locations might be the same, but esprit de corps is very different. People on distributed teams arrive in that situation by design -- creating a stronger team by hiring the best people, regardless of location.



Read more here... and check out WeWork's first Dublin operation...

Global Mobil (cellular) Roaming via Satellite - with your current iPhone!

At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Ubiquitilink said, by employing a constellation of satellites in low Earth orbit, that pretty much any phone from the last decade should be able to text and do other low-bandwidth tasks from anywhere, even in the middle of the ocean or deep in the Himalayas.

The way the business would work is because the satellites operate on modified but mostly ordinary off-the-shelf software and connect to phones with no modifications necessary, Ubiquitilink will essentially be a worldwide roaming operator that mobile networks will pay to access.

Read more here...

Use Kanban for Visual Project Management

With kanban boards, there is a visual approach available to manage tasks. With a simple post-it note system, you can see work in progress and understand complex processes, activity relationships, and you/your team’s impediments to completing work on schedule.

We humans are visually oriented — it is easier to process information with a visual aid. A kanban board helps teams to understand all aspects of a project. A visual management tool means your team doesn’t need to sift through email threads to find the piece of information regarding a specific task. You won’t have to decipher a massive spreadsheet to determine whether a task or project has been started or completed.

Of course, the beauty of kanban is simplicity. Get started with a kanban board by writing a sticky note and pasting it to a whiteboard — anyone can use them for just about any purpose. Even just leveraging the visual nature of kanban boards will help you keep track of your daily goals.

Every project manager can appreciate the effectiveness of the kanban board as a collaboration tool. You spend less time communicating status updates because the boards create transparency — it is literally on the wall! Team members working either on-site or remotely can see the status or a project in real time if you go the electronic route. Either way, kanban improves overall team efficiency, and can even be used by individuals to manage their own workload.

Aereo asks: Are we moving towards a permission-based system for technology innovation?

Today the Supreme Court handed down a copyright ruling against internet company Aereo, whose business model was to "rent" small antennae to subscribers so they could watch over-the-air tv via their computer, laptop, smart phone or tablet. The company also provided DVR-type cloud storage for its customers.

The heart of the matter seemed to be, to the justices, that Aereo looks a lot like a cable provider, re-broadcasting content from the TV networks. This author agrees. Getting someone to pay you for someone else' content, without paying a royalty, is copyright infringement. Cable firms pay "re-broadcast" rights to the networks for their content; so should Aereo.

The internet is clearly a medium for content distribution; any ISP (be it COMCAST, AT&T or T-Mobile, or Verizon, here in the U.S.) should be classified as a "common carrier", as content providers such as XFINITY, Aereo, or even your local TV station's web page, are providing you quality (ha, we hope) content via the pipes that are the internet.

However, the founder of Aereo is right in asking, why should entrepreneurs ask permission to innovate? However, if they piggy-back on someone else, they should pay. That was this author's experience with Apple and SAP when we launched Bluedog as an application service provider in 1998 -- license WebObjects and R/3, to produce innovation and value for the customer. If there's money to be mad with an idea, everyone wins.

Did Your Espresso Machine Just Tweet You?

When asked, I like to explain the "Internet of Things" as an ecosystem of technologies monitoring the status of physical objects IRL (in real life, in "meatspace", as opposed to cyberspace), capturing meaningful data, and communicating through the great internet IP network to our software apps. For Bluedog, the Internet of Things means smart objects, machine to machine communication, RF technologies, and a central hub of information.

As a proponent of service oriented architecture, I find the idea of the Internet of Things to be compelling. With devices of all kinds reporting data in real-time, people have the ability to make quicker, more accurate decisions. In the supply chain, managers could monitor the status of shipments like a crate filled with expiring pharmaceuticals or spoiling veggies. With sensors, RFID tags, and RFID readers, supply chain participants view in real-time the exact location of the cargo inside the warehouse, its point of origin, time until expiration, and factors in the environment like temperature that might impact the process.

This transparent process improves efficiency, reduces waste, and allows traceability. If a shipment is determined to be unsuitable for consumption due to spoilage or other unforeseen circumstance, the root cause will quickly be discovered from the plethora of information available.

Kevin Ashton likely first coined the phrase in 1999, but the idea has evolved in the intervening time. Initially, it was used to describe the limitations in the relationship between the internet, computers, and the physical world. Ashton was describing how nearly all the data available on the internet originates from a human. With available and emerging technologies, Ashton believed information about things need not be dependent on a manual interaction; it could be an automated process.

At Bluedog, we see the adoption of such supporting technologies as a means of spurring innovation. IP networks are commonplace throughout homes, offices, warehouses, even city streets. Industry need and government mandates are regulating technologies leading to accepted standards across boundaries, allowing for interoperability among devices. The cost and size of devices continues decreasing which allows companies to embed smaller, common items with GPS, Q-codes or bar codes, RFID, and low-cost sensors.

Contemplate the future, on this, the close of 2013. Drones and other autonomous vehicles, more mobile computing, the Cloud, the frontiers of space being pushed back, new genetics, physics, materials science and other advancements! The future is so bright, I've gotta wear shades.

Last week - magazine suck on tablets. This week: tablets can save the newspaper business

If you believe Google, the newspaper industry has been in decline since 1972 and that online journalism as a threat to newspapers is only a continuation of broadcast journalism’s inexorable encroachment, but that newspapers have a new opportunity to profit from old-school long-form journalism by paying special attention to tablets. So says Google Chief Economist Hal Varian in this speech.

Although printing and distribution costs are decimated by the shift to online news, competition is exponentially fiercer. To fight the advance of bloggers, citizen journalists, and other competition, newspapers have resorted to publishing shorter, shallower pieces to cater to the traditionally attention span-stunted Internet public. This has largely compromised the “analytic depth” the printed word affords. Varian suggests that it doesn’t have to be this way -- by focusing on tablets and other innovative ways to keep eyeballs glued to the news, online journalism can step up profits even while rescuing the Fourth Estate from irrelevance.

Roger Fidler was one of the original proponents of these portable "electronic tablets" when he ran the Knight Ridder Information Design Lab in the early 1990s. These devices, known as 'flat panels' or 'tablets,' will combine the readability and convenience of paper with the technological abilities of video and sound. In the same way that ink-on-paper printing has defined the present era, it now appears certain that electronic 'presses' and multimedia publishing will define the new one," Fidler wrote in an October 1992 AJR article called "What Are We So Afraid Of?" In October, the Society for News Design presented Fidler, a founding member of SND, with its Lifetime Achievement Award for his groundbreaking and innovative work.
Fidler started his journalism career in 1962 writing and illustrating a science column for Oregon's Eugene Register-Guard. The following year, he also began writing feature stories and creating maps for the paper while attending the University of Oregon. Fidler had originally planned to become an astronomer, but a chronic illness that he developed in high school forced him to switch his major to journalism. In 1990 he produced an animated video of a tablet newspaper scenario in collaboration with RayChem, a company that was developing an electronic paper display technology. A year later, Fidler became a Freedom Forum Media Studies Fellow at Columbia University. There he created an operational prototype of a digital newspaper optimized for his media tablet. He frequently demonstrated the prototype on Macintosh computers.


Read the full article here on SlashGear. And check out the forward-looking video here.

Why hasn't the Tablet made Magazines Huge?

With the multimedia capabilities, "push" data to refresh content, and a known display platform, you would think tablets such as the iPad would have made magazine apps a win.

In this article, there are several areas that impact magazine apps. One important data point:

Magazines need dedicated readers. But, Nielsen estimated the average mobile user has 41 apps on his or her smartphone. In April, a Flurry study showed the average smartphone user opens only eight apps a day, with the most popular being Facebook, YouTube and game apps. And according to a 2012 report from Localytics, 22 percent of all apps are only opened once.

To overcome this, a magazine app needs to be compelling.

Finding magazine content is not helped by the very nature of mobile apps. Unlike web-based content, magazine articles can neither be indexed or searched on the web when they are locked up in an app. Following a link from Google at best takes readers to an app store, not to the article itself — cutting the magazine out of this important referral service.

Magazine publishers should consider a consolidated content management system to mirror content in both locations -- the web and in their dedicated app.

Subscription models for magazine apps is a tough sell. People are troubled by pay-walls on newspaper web sites. They apparently dislike a similar approach to magazine apps. Think about any successful standalone iPad magazines -- the most assertive attempts, News Corp’s “The Daily” iPad app, closed after two years of operation. The Daily only cost $0.99 a week, but with just a little over 100,000 subscribers, it couldn’t break even.

Perhaps just going with the advert-driven model, with paid ad-opt-out, might solve this? While the future of producing quality content for niches is bright, such content should be presented openly (think social, such as via Facebook and Twitter). The age-old model hasn't really changed: eyeballs, after all, translate into advert revenue.

Read Jon Lun's assessment here.