Government Shut-Down Got You Down? Apple Could Teach the Feds a Lesson in Branding

In today's global economy, whether a country or a company, you have to be visible and active to maintain your image and to advance -- economically and politically. Citizens are consumers—and citizen-consumers, increasingly, exercise power in today's economy.

In this NatGeo opinion piece

, there are several points on Apple's strategy to be a world-wide success that Uncle Sam could follow.

Apple has topped Coca-Cola as the world's best-known brand. Apple just ended Coca-Cola's 13-year run at the top of a highly regarded annual list put out by Interbrand that has been compiling what it calls the Best Global Brands report since 2000.

Apple ranked high this year because its products are well liked, its services are considered good, and people have come to value the company as practically a cultural icon of America—particularly with young people. Those characteristics are good for a company and good for a country.

But it is hard to deliver high-quality services and a good experience if you are not open for business—whether it is the National Zoo or the Grand Canyon. Both convey American values.

Clearly diplomacy should never be equated with corporate public relations. One is a public good; the other is a bottom-line sell. But that doesn't mean we can't learn from both about the importance of being understood in a crowded global market. Apple, as a company and a symbol, is, well, as American as apple pie. Congress should consider that our interests won't be well-served if the doors are barred here at home to our collective storefront, the federal government.

Poor Architecture Hampers Obamacare Exchanges

A few IT experts question the architecture of the Obamacare website. Government officials blame the persistent glitches on an overwhelming crush of users - 8.6 million unique visitors by Friday - trying to visit the HealthCare.gov website during its launch.

Disappointedly, the U.S. Dept of Health and Human Services did not implement the prototype architecture I developed for them, while on detail to MITRE. Instead, they opted for a Canadian firm's approach. (One wonders, why does the U.S. need to go "off-shore" for IT architecture when we have such talent widely available here?) CGI Group Inc, the Canadian contractor that built HealthCare.gov, is "declining to comment at this time," said spokeswoman Linda Odorisio. According to one analyst,

One possible cause of the problems is that hitting "apply" on HealthCare.gov causes 92 separate files, plug-ins and other mammoth swarms of data to stream between the user's computer and the servers powering the government website, said Matthew Hancock, an independent expert in website design. He was able to track the files being requested through a feature in the Firefox browser.

Of the 92 he found, 56 were JavaScript files, including plug-ins that make it easier for code to work on multiple browsers (such as Microsoft Corp's Internet Explorer and Google Inc's Chrome) and let users upload files to HealthCare.gov. It is not clear why the upload function was included.

Hancock's analysis suggested that the security questions were coming from a separate server and that better system architecture would have cached the questions on the main HealthCare.gov server. In the architecture I developed over a six-month engagement, the front-end web site was streamlined with minimal Javascript, and was served up via a WebObjects application handling the back-end connectivity to various data services.

I had applied my expertise in service oriented architecture — particularly how to apply SOA for cloud efforts — to come up with a prototype that could support 10's of thousands of concurrent users. I leveraged my expertise to demonstrate:
• How SOA 'automatically' improves end-to-end visibility and responsiveness.
• How to massively scale SOA in the cloud for extreme high-traffic, high-bandwidth applications.
• How current on-premises SOA can foster cloud architectures and deployments.
• How WebObjects frameworks will make web services and web-based user interface efforts more productive.
• How 'intelligent ESBs' help the cloud solution react in real-time.
• What SOA 'best practices' today offer the best ways to improve a cloud strategy, at little cost.

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.

Self-Driving Car - the Race gets Electric

From Reuters News Service: Electric car company Tesla Motors is working to produce a car capable of running on "auto-pilot" within the next three years, CEO Elon Musk said, joining tech giant Google and rival carmakers in the race to roll a driverless car into the market. The California-based company's autonomous car would allow the driver to hand 90 percent of the control of the car over to the vehicle's computer system, Musk said in an interview with the Financial Times newspaper.

The electric automaker posted a job opening for an Advanced Driver Assistance Systems Controls Engineer that will help the company develop technology for fully autonomous vehicles. The listing says the engineer "will be responsible for developing vehicle-level decision-making and lateral and longitudinal control strategies for Tesla's effort to pioneer fully automated driving." Tesla wants this engineer to not only develop self-driving features for future electric cars, but also retrofit such systems to its Model S sedan.

Wired first reported the listing, Tesla has plenty of catching up to do when it comes to automation. The Model S lacks features that are commonplace in many other top-tier luxury vehicles such as adaptive cruise control, automated lane changing, and self-parking.

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Tired of the NSA reading your emails? Go quantum

Toshiba has invented a quantum cryptography network that even the NSA can’t decrypt. Quantum cryptography harnesses the baffling world properties of quantum physics to ensure that information sent from point A to point B isn’t intercepted. The laws of physics dictate that no oecan measure a quantum system without disrupting it.

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