BIZTECHBUZZ in the world of social, cognitive, IoT and startups

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By 2019, Most Developers in the World will live in India! IBM Loves India INNOVATION!

Today, the developer ecosystem in India is the second largest in the world, and by 2019, it will be the largest in the world. 

There are about 18.2 million software developers worldwide, a number that is due to rise to 26.4 million by 2019, a 45% increase, says Evans Data Corp. in its latest Global Developer Population and Demographic Study.

Today, the U.S. leads the world in software developers, with about 3.6 million. India has about 2.75 million. But by 2018, India will have 5.2 million developers, a nearly 90% increase, versus 4.5 million in the U.S., a 25% increase though that period, Evans Data projects.

India is ready and Social!   It is the land of Creativity, Bollywood and rich Social Networks!

India is land with rich cultural heritage, creativity and vibrancy. Bollywood is a testimony of that.  Last time I was in India, it was my birthday and we celebrated in style with the great music and people!  The soft power of India is visible on the world map. The nation of young developers has risen to the opportunity that a smarter planet can offer them.

In preparation for a business trip to India, I tweeted about my excitement and energy to spend some time in India as I’ve seen it grow as an emerging and innovative country. I have visited India before, meeting with customers and being the keynote speaker at industry leading events. I arrived in India after a long flight and nightmare experience in baggage claim. The hotel seemed like a reprise and all thoughts were focused on collapsing into sleep.

When I arrived at the hotel around 11 p.m., the hotel general manager told me that he had put the “group” waiting for me in a conference room, because it had become too large for the lobby. I was not expecting any group and made sure I told the IBMers from the region to greet me in the morning as to not take them away from their families so late at night. After completing the check-in process, I turned to the conference room where the hotel had directed me, not realizing that my “tweet” had become a connection point.

Here in Mumbai, thousands of miles away from my home in the United States, was a group of people who knew me only by my blogs, LinkedIn groups, and tweets. They trusted my expertise and were anxiously waiting to greet and talk to me about Social Business. Through that one tweet, some of the most dedicated followers in India had determined which conference I was speaking at, and therefore at which hotel I would be staying. They had also determined the flight by asking the front desk for the “expected time of arrival,” so they gathered and hoped for some time with me, which I gladly gave to my new “friends.”

I was amazed that this tweet had truly been heard across the world, and trusted by thousands of people. My connectedness had engaged this group. While social media’s growth in India will be largely dependent on the penetration of broadband, this “group” was proof that the global connectedness had extended to the Indian people from one person to another and one business to another.

We believe that Developers from this part of the world can change the game for a Global Impact

There is transformation happening the world over. In a smarter planet everything is connected. People and devices. There are millions lines of codes in a fighter aircraft. Software development and deployment is not only impacting human lives but is re writing a whole generation. BlueMix is  a level playing field for enterprise and individual developers

Codename : BlueMix is an enterprise-grade platform that allows you to build Apps as if you are playing in a sandbox! You can now create Apps with the efficiency of a cold-blooded cyborg with a single solution environment with instant services, runtimes, and infrastructure you need to push your future ideas into the present.

IBM Brings the Bluemix days in 10 Indian Cities!!

To tap into the technology skills, the BlueMix days will travel to all top developer populated cites in India.   The vibrant startup ecosystem can jump start through these events and we are seeing that the valley is not anymore confined to valley anymore. Startups with intent to impact global technology are emerging from these cities. For example,  Ideas and prototypes around wearable devices are coming from places like, Startup Village ( a startup incubator) from Cochin, Kerala ( popularly known as God’s own country ).

Generic-Poster-25th April 2014

The Institute of Academic excellence and research can add value to our business – – India has invested in technology leadership and nurturing them from very beginning and world of technology is enjoying the fruits.   Cloud Foundry as an open source platform can be a game changer for Sis looking for the next big idea.

Bluemix makes you cool. – Have you tried bluemix.net ? Trust me hexagons are cool!!!!

Bluemix Hexagons

 

Digital Tip of the Week – Customize the URL of your LinkedIn public profile

A customized URL will make your profile look more professional and easier to share with your contacts. The default LinkedIn URL for personal profiles has a lot of number at the end. You can use your own name and surname (if they have not already been taken) and make it look nicer. To do so, go to the editing options of your profile and click on Customize your public profile URL down on the right-hand side.

My Interview with EyeQ – One of the 5 most promising companies from Dreamit Ventures.

Recently, I had a chance to sit down and dish with eyeQ’s CEO, Michael Garel.  eyeQ has been recognized for its worldclass Retail app!

Michael, you have been around the country talking about your application running on Bluemix.  Can you tell me what your App does?

eyeQ is the in-store shopping app shoppers don’t have to download  Let me explain: there’s a lot of development and effort  in the market going into building shopping apps that promise to bring some of the online shopping capabilities into they physical store –both for the shopper and the retailer or brand. An in-store shopping app can give shoppers a different experience based on where you have browsed in the physical store.  It can customize offerings based on who you are, and learn about your interests by what you click.  The problem is that – try as they might – retailers are lucky if they can get 5% of their shoppers to download even the most compelling app, and even fewer open it up in the store.  So we think about the store app a different way. We turn the whole store into an app.  Instead of remembering to open an app on their phone, shoppers actually walk into our app when they walk into the store.

We use a combination of three technologies to give shoppers an extremely helpful, personalized shopping experience – like they get from eCommerce – and to give the retailer or brand shopper intelligence, behavior data, and marketing responsiveness that they get from eCommerce, but we do it all in the physical store.  The three technologies are touch screen displays, visual analytics, and location. The touch-screen displays give information to shoppers that they prefer to have before they buy – ratings, reviews, and information about related and recommended products. Our screens give the retailer the click-through patterns that help them create an even better shopping experience.  Think IBM Coremetrics, but in the physical store. The visual analytics helps to instantly customize content to the age, gender, and even mood of the shopper.  Think online-profiles, but derived from physical information.Finally, we determine position and browsing patterns in the various store departments using location sensing. Think of this capability as a physical cookie.

When we combine all these sources of information and engagement we can give shoppers the type of highly personalized shopping experience they are used to online, but with all the instant gratification benefits of shopping in a brick-and-mortar store. And they physical store – where 93% of all retail sales still occur – transforms from a data blind spot into a rich and meaningful source of actionable information for both retailers and brands.

Being a lean startup, some of our challenges are time and resources.  BlueMix assists us in solving these challenges.  Using BlueMix we have been able to re-allocate time spent on server deployment and maintenance to product development.  This allows us to accelerate our time to market and iterate our offering.  Additionally, BlueMix makes it really easy for us to scale our cloud infrastructure as our deployments continue to grow.
2.  Recently you were named one of the top 5 most promising companies from Dreamit Ventures.   Tell us about that.

Dreamit Ventures is a global startup accelerator that takes early stage companies with exceptional leaders from around the world and provides a small amount of capital, mentorship and guidance to help us grow exponentially in a very short amount of time.  When we joined Dreamit, we had been working on eyeQ full time for 8 months – further along than most of our classmates.  Our goal was to leverage the resources available through the accelerator and their network to help build our pipeline and get us ready to raise funding.  Additionally, one of the founders of DreamIt is also a founder of Monetate, who has been very successful in enabling websites to deliver personalized experiences – so it’s been great to work with him with the vision of creating a seamless personalized shopping experience both online and in-store.

Our class had 9 companies – all stellar and all will be very successful.  Our class has companies from as far away as Bangalore, India.  Others are from Spain, Sweden, New York, Boston, DC, Seattle, Houston, Chicago, and Dallas.  We were the only Austin company.  All are companies that will disrupt the markets they are going into. Here’s a list of companies:(http://www.dreamitventures.com/dreamit_classes/austin-14/)

At the end of an accelerator program there is a demo day – where all companies pitch their companies to a room full of investors, influencers, stakeholders, and media.  Tom Cheredar from VentureBeat was covering our demo day and wrote an article highlighting his top 5, and we were very excited that eyeQ was included.
3.  What are some of the critical trends you’d like to leave folks with in Retail?

  1. eCommerce has taken 20 years and a lot of innovation and investment to up to 7% of all retail sales. It did that by creating new ways to be more responsive, engaging, and personalized. New technologies have finally enabled physical stores to emulate those capabilities, and the growth of these technologies will be dramatically faster than online was.  Soon physical stores will begin to re-balance the sales growth by employing theses techniques.
  2. As eCommerce and “pCommerce” develop the same capabilities, there is an opportunity to close the loop on the customer experience – for example, browsing online leading to better recommendations in-store, in-store browsing leading to better recommendations online. People will be able to opt-in to an amazing, continuous shopping experience.
  3. As shopping behavior data from the 93% of sales in-store is married to the 7% from online, the value of the combined data will increase exponentially.

Congrats to IBM! Per NAFE, top company for female executives(15 years in a row!!) Proud to be an IBMer!

I was truly honored to accept the NAFE award today on behalf of IBM and its women executives worldwide, recognizing that IBM as a top company for female executives for 15 years in a row!

I would personally like to thank Ginni Rometty for her leadership of IBM.  We have been improving the % of female executives for a while, but 2013 was the largest increase in our history.

IBM’s view of diversity is that having a diverse executive base ignites innovation!

On behalf of IBM and women everywhere, thank you for the NAFE focus on women’s leadership and on this honor!

the team with NAFE

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