Bob's Byte

Tipping Point for Wearables?

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Calling Google's Project Glass "just a  start," Forrester analyst Sarah Rotman Epps argues "like mobile and tablets today, in three years, wearable computing devices will matter to every product strategist."

WIMMWearables have enormous potential for uses in health and fitness, navigation, social networking, commerce, and media. "Imagine," asks Epps, ".. video games that happen in real space. Or glasses that remind you of your colleague’s name that you really should know. Or paying for a coffee at Starbucks with your watch instead of your phone. Wearables will transform our lives in numerous ways, trivial and substantial, that we are just starting to imagine."

Wearables will "enter the mainstream by exploiting the relative strengths of the big five platforms" (Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft) says Epps in her blog post.

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Five Millennial Myths

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Jennifer J. Deal’s Five Millennial Myths is subtitled: Forget what you think you know about your Gen Y employees.

That part was easy: I didn’t know much.

The conventional wisdom, apparently, is that “…everyone under the age of 30 is needy and narcissistic. They want the corner office and a company car, but they aren’t truly committed to their organization. They don’t take kindly to criticism, but can be easily won over with the next hot gadget.”

Deal asks: “Can companies afford to put their trust in these types of characterizations?”

For the past 12 years, she studied the so-called generation gap through empirical research, and found the stereotypes of millennials in the workplace asinconsistent at best and destructive at worst. With data collected from more than 13,000 participants in for-profit, nonprofit, and government organizations, Deal dentifies five key myths that companies believe about their younger employees.

Millennials

Myth #1: Millennials don’t want to be told what to do.

The reality: Wrong! Their research shows (unexpectedly, she admits) that millennials currently in the workforce are more willing to defer to authority than either baby boomers or Gen Xers.

Millennials are more likely to thrive if they know the ingredients for success in the workplace, starting with the basics. For example, although it may seem obvious to an older manager, millennials may appreciate being told what time they are expected to arrive at the office, and precisely how quickly they should turn around a project (beyond just “ASAP”).

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Barcelona Crowned Capital of Mobile

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After an 18-month search, the GSMA decides...a drum roll, please...Barcelona as the Mobile World Capital.

Mobile World CapitalAnd-- surprise! surprise!-- as the Mobile World Capital winner, Barcelona gets to be the home of the GSMA Mobile World Congress.

The other finalist cities – Milan, Munich and Paris – probably never had much of a chance. The rule in the exhibition business (for obvious reasons) is when it ain't broke, don't move it. But how did you scare the beejus out of the extent venue and extract additional concessions?

You announce a contest. You very publicly announce the candidates have to be willing to put up $10 million. And you dangle the opportunity of a Big Event Coming to Town in front of big cities that can pay and that can fancy themselves as worth it.

Fira de BarcelonaIt's over now...can Barcelona now feel secure? For a while. The capital designation is more a rental than a purchase deal: for $10 million the deal lasts for only 2012-2018. When GSMA built a dedicated web site for Mobile World Capital they very cleverly already emphasise in their graphic "THE FIRST" Mobile World Capital.

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The Way to Femtocell

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The industry may be consumer-driven these days: but we're still stumbling towards consumers in an engineer-facing manner. Don't get me started on how bad the word "cloud" is for the next revolution in ITC. We might have done even worse and tried to sell it as "fog" but cloud is bad enough.

MicrocellOne of my pet peeves is the choice of "femtocell," a product that almost every telco service provider wants to put into the hands of as many consumers as possible. For a couple years now, I have-- in industry speeches-- asked manufacturers to re-consider their terminology if they really wanted to sell this product.

In fact, it would pay most telcos to give away this product to consumers but by labeling it "femtocell," we've crippled ourselves. You have telecom executives pondering why Apple can come in and dominate mobile phones...and on the one hand, you have a company selling "Apples, Macs, iPhones, MacBookAir..." and on the other hand you have stodgy wirepullers offering their "femtocell" to the public. Really, it sounds like something you mind find in a pharmacy...

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The Short, Happy Life of Chrome OS

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Born 2010. Died 2012.

Life is so fragile, even for those born to rich parents.

The creator of Gmail (and founder of FriendFeed) says Chrome OS will perish or be merged with Android next year. The fact he now works for Facebook makes this look like sour apples (a New York way of saying he is motivated to make negative comments).Chrome OS

But Sergey Brin, Google co-founder, actually says Chrome and Android will merge over time. We're thinking Chrome OS will live through 2011, but not much longer...

Wickedly Brin told this to reporters immediately after the big Chrome OS roll-out. "Wickedly" because Google is not giving baby Chrome OS a fair chance at living long enough to enjoy its teen-age years. Wickedly because it was not part of the formal presentation, but an informal remark, made off-stage...you sense some snideness in his action.

It's hard to understand Google's thinking here, unless you ascribe this to their subconscious actions, to their own untapped corporate feelings, to an awkwardness about having two OS.

And oddly enough, Android is the adopted one. Google bought Android in 2005. It was opened up to a consortium of 78 mobile companies to develop a standard mobile OS.  Whereas Chrome was home-grown from computing roots. It was a "How to Make a Better Browser" experiment, even before they realized the cloud could make the browser a legitimate OS.

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