Appvisor Blog

Hi, I'm the appvisor at appfast! As an appvisor my goal is to give you the best appvises for the web. As a serial entrepreneur I focus on business, technology and art. And, not to ever forget; simplicity!

[creativeintelligencebook]

At the HarvardXDesign conference — a great event for the B-School— I was on a panel that did a crit on two teams from across Harvard that were the best of 9 teams competing in the challenge of How Would You Redesign Education in America. Kickstarter’s Charles Adler, IIt Institute of Design’s...

[thinkvr]

 Michael Schrage of MIT: Successful innovation is more of an act of empathy than an act of imposition. If you look at sustainable innovation cultures, what you are seeing are people who really try to align innovation with individual and institutional transformation. It’s not enough to create new value in your products and your services. You have to create new value in your customers and your clients. Via Fast Company

[appvisor-blog]

A portrait of a smartphone user

It's interesting to notice that sms and voice (using the smartphone as a phone!) are not even on the list. Smartphones are definitely changing how mobile users interact with each other and Internet-based services through apps. You can read the whole report here.

[futuramb]

[appvisor-blog]

By Ken Dilanian, latimes.com

NATION

Might large groups be better predictors of wars and terrorism than analysts in government spy services?

WASH­ING­TON — Nine years ago, Con­gress blocked a Pen­ta­gon agency from set­ting up a web­site that would have allowed any­one wit…

[appvisor-blog]

The woman who follows the crowd will usually go no further than the crowd. The woman who walks alone is likely to find herself in places no one has ever been before.

- Albert Einstein

[stoweboyd]

This is the talk I gave at Startup Fest, Montreal, 13 July 2012, more or less. Advice to a new crop of developers, entrepreneurs and start-up junkies, where I am basically saying ‘Hey! Take a look over here! You don’t have to build yet-another task list app, or another check in tool, or another...

[fixxly-blog]

The “Big Five” IT trends of the next half decade: Mobile, social, cloud, consumerization, and big data

Summary: In today’s ever more technology-centric world, the stodgy IT department isn’t considered the home of innovation and business leadership. Yet that might have to change as some of the biggest advances in the history of technology make their way into the front lines of service delivery. Here’s an exploration of the top five IT trends in the next half decade, including some of the latest industry data, and what the major opportunities and challenges are.

“Much or most of these topics are in back burner mode in many companies just now seeing the glimmerings of recovery from the downturn. Much has been written lately about the speed at which technology is reshaping the business landscape today. Except that’s not quite phrasing it correctly. It’s more like it’s leaving the traditional business world behind. There are a number of root causes: The blistering pace of external innovation, the divergent path the consumer world has taken from enterprise IT, and the throughput limitations of top-down adoption.

As a result, there’s a rapidly expanding gap between what the technology world is executing on and what the enterprise can deliver. Many now think this gap may actually become untenable, and they may be right. Yet recent large surveys of CIOs continues to show an almost exclusively evolutionary and internal focus. Many feel that a technology emphasis is wrong right now, and they’re certainly right, if it’s not integrated with top priority business objectives. However, these days it’s technology advancements and new digital markets that are often the key to an organization’s future.

At the end of the day, businesses must be able to effectively serve the markets they cater to, and doing so means using the same channels and techniques as their trading partners and customers. Organizations must adapt to the evolving marketplace to succeed. Fortunately, I do believe there are approaches that can yet be adopted to address this increasingly significant challenge.

Read the whole article by Dion Hinchcliffe

[visualoop]

Via

[infoneer-pulse]

Google Inc, Amazon.com Inc, eBay Inc, Facebook Inc and other big Internet companies are starting a trade association to handle political and regulatory issues in Washington, a person close to the group said on Wednesday.

The Internet Association, which will open its doors in September, will act as a unified voice for major Internet companies, said President Michael Beckerman, a former advisor to the chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives’ Energy and Commerce Committee.

Beckerman would not identify the association’s members or discuss which issues the group will focus on. But the source confirmed that leading members were Google, Amazon, eBay and Facebook.

» via Reuters

[futuramb]

Christopher Steiner, technologyreview.com

In 2004, New Zealan­der Ben Novak was just a guy with a cou­ple of gui­tars and dis­tant dreams of becom­ing a pop star. A year later one of Novak’s songs, Turn Your Car Around, had invad­ed Europe’s radio sta­tions, becom­ing a top-10…

The machine capabilities are steadily increasing - under the radar of the antropocentric man who still thinks it is about copying human capabilities… It is a new machine logic that is emerging - a machine logic which serves the evolutionary “needs” of machines and where comparisons to human capabilities are completely irrelevant.

[stoweboyd]

Kurt Eichenwald, Microsoft’s Lost Decade

Once upon a time, Microsoft dominated the tech industry; indeed, it was the wealthiest corporation in the world. But since 2000, as Apple, Google, and Facebook whizzed by, it has fallen flat in every arena it entered: e-books, music, search, social networking, etc., etc. Talking to former and current Microsoft executives, Kurt Eichenwald finds the fingers pointing at C.E.O. Steve Ballmer, Bill Gates’s successor, as the man who led them astray.

[…]

The story of Microsoft’s lost decade could serve as a business-school case study on the pitfalls of success. For what began as a lean competition machine led by young visionaries of unparalleled talent has mutated into something bloated and bureaucracy-laden, with an internal culture that unintentionally rewards managers who strangle innovative ideas that might threaten the established order of things.

By the dawn of the millennium, the hallways at Microsoft were no longer home to barefoot programmers in Hawaiian shirts working through nights and weekends toward a common goal of excellence; instead, life behind the thick corporate walls had become staid and brutish. Fiefdoms had taken root, and a mastery of internal politics emerged as key to career success.

In those years Microsoft had stepped up its efforts to cripple competitors, but—because of a series of astonishingly foolish management decisions—the competitors being crippled were often co-workers at Microsoft, instead of other companies. Staffers were rewarded not just for doing well but for making sure that their colleagues failed. As a result, the company was consumed by an endless series of internal knife fights. Potential market-busting businesses—such as e-book and smartphone technology—were killed, derailed, or delayed amid bickering and power plays.

That is the portrait of Microsoft depicted in interviews with dozens of current and former executives, as well as in thousands of pages of internal documents and legal records.

“They used to point their finger at IBM and laugh,” said Bill Hill, a former Microsoft manager. “Now they’ve become the thing they despised.”

If we need proof that someone can make a billion dollars and still be an idiot, look no farther than Steve Ballmer. Why is he still running Microsoft, by the way? Will Gates come back and retool for 21C?

Does anyone really believe that Microsoft can compete against Apple, Samsung, and Google on smartphones, at this point?

Maybe a corporate raider should buy them, and spin out the divisions that might be able to fly on their own, like PS2, sell the enterprise software side to IBM, and shut down the rest. Of course $MSFT market cap is still $246B, so it would take a lot of money to buy.

[explore-blog]

Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.

Happy 156th birthday, George Bernard Shaw. Celebrate his timeless insight with a read on how to find your purpose and create what you love. (via explore-blog)

[thenextweb]

Maybe a pinch of salt is required when one of the more successful brands for casual and mobile gaming says that half of UK and US mobile gamers prefer their mobile devices as a primary platform, but let’s not forget that Popcap is also a division of EA, which has some of the best-selling console games in its arsenal.

(via Mobile Gamers Prefer the Couch to Gaming on the Go)

[futuresagency]

Found on Only Dead Fish: “I’ve lost count of the number of articles I’ve read over the years declaring the death of online advertising. The reasons cited usually touch at some point on banner blindness, falling click-through-rates (the average CTR having dropped to less than a tenth...

[thenextweb]

Only 32.7% of the world population is estimated to have internet access as of December 31, 2011

Summing Up Our Digital Divide (via thenextweb)

[visualoop]

Via

[thinkvr]

The last few years have seen a substantial change in consumer behavior and a shift in buying patterns, channels, and methods. The average attention span and loyalty of online/mobile customers is smaller and much more difficult to sustain. To succeed in volatile markets, capitalize on emerging demand trends, and engage non-sticky customers, organizations must make decisions faster, while still applying the same degree of rigor and research behind every decision.Targeted at these scenarios, IBM’s Decision Management solution integrates a host of products, including social network analysis, on one platform. Via Ovum