How Smart Technologies Are Transforming Life & Business Now!

Will artificial intelligence, the blockchain, and robots change the world? Or, is it all just hype? Are
we expecting/hoping for too much?

Alternatively, should we be worried about the impact and effect of disruptive new technologies?
Will they take over the world and (potentially) destroy humanity?

There is considerable interest in these questions about technology: “Hope, Hype or Fear?”

The most popular stories that popped up in my Medium feed recently seem to suggest that
interest in the new technologies is greatly exaggerated. These accounts convincingly argue that
the “4th Industrial Revolution” hasn’t happened yet.

These stories are probably correct. There are still plenty of usability, scalability and resources
issues with most new technologies. We shouldn’t expect “singularity” anytime soon. Bitcoin — or
any other cryptocurrency, for that matter — will not be a widely-accepted currency tomorrow.

But this doesn’t mean that there is no sense of urgency.

We should always remember that it isn’t only about what the future will bring. It is about
understanding the extent that technology has already changed the world.

Something is happening between the hope, hype and fear. And that is why we need to take
immediate action.

We Are Already “Living in the Future”

Digital technologies have already reshaped the world in which we live and work. This is already
our new shared reality.

Here are five fast trends that we cannot ignore anymore:

New Consumers Drive Fast Change
Consumers have always demanded products and services to deliver efficient performance. What
has changed is the pace of technology adoption and changes in consumer expectations. Both are
speeding up.

Consumers love their smartphones and their applications. They love the speed, connectivity, and
convenience that is offered by digital technologies. The consumers of today — and not just
Millennials, but everyone- demand constant innovation and disruption in functionality.

The result? Much faster innovation cycles and development of new products and services.

For instance, consumers now expect all their devices to be connected. They need to be
connected in a technical sense to the Cloud or other devices (the Internet of Things).

But there is more. Products and services need to facilitate connections to a community of users
that “matters” to them. Community building takes on new importance in an age of social media.

Businesses Adapt (or Die)

The “winning companies” of today understand and adapt to these consumer trends (and those
that don’t will die.) The best firms tap into the most fundamental “needs” of new consumers:
Think marketplace (Amazon), information (Google), identity/authenticity (Apple) and
relationships (Facebook).

These companies also understand that data we generate is the “new oil,” and data-analytics and
intelligent information is the “new currency.” After all, data volumes are exploding and
leveraging this data is vital.

As tech- and data-driven companies continue to invest in new and refreshing technologies, such
as autonomous cars and drones, these two trends will continue to feed off each other.

Of course, there’s also a downside to this. Tech companies are becoming so powerful that they
tend to behave as centralized monopolies. They have found a meaningful way to run our lives,
control the choices that we make, and dominate the way we work. Talk of breaking up Amazon
or Facebook, for instance, is everywhere recently.

https://hackernoon.com/how-smart-technologies-are-transforming-life-business-now-
e31641496d9b
 The Internet as a Marketing Medium
by Frank Ingari

The Internet offers a startling set of advantages as a marketing medium. Technology

advances, consumer familiarity and vendor innovation will inevitably drive both
marketing programs and customer interaction to center on the Internet. Marketers need
to begin now an active exploration of their key initiatives in light of where and how to
apply the Internet's power.
The Internet is already an important, and perhaps transformational, marketing medium
for business-to-business and business-to-consumer markets. Executives and
entrepreneurs must understand how and why this is so by answering these questions:  

 How does the Web compare to traditional marketing vehicles?

 What relationship will emerge between the Web as marketing medium and
traditional vehicles?

 How will advances in technology and increased usage affect the Internet's
capability for marketing?

There are criteria that characterize the applicability and power of any marketing
medium, whether we define marketing abstractly as the "conception, creation and
sustenance" of customers, or more pragmatically as a "purposeful system of activities
intended to promote the market exchange of goods or services."

REACH
The marketer's first task is to communicate key messages to the full set of targeted
prospects, customers and influencers. As a medium, the Web has quickly achieved very
broad reach, and will soon pass broadcast and cable television as the medium with the
broadest consistent reach.
ABILITY TO TARGET
For optimal results, the marketer wants to be able to select the precise group with whom
to communicate. Both the Web and the closely associated technology of e-mail will
eventually provide extraordinary ability to target in both business-to-business and
business-to-customer markets. Already the Internet provides more ability to target than
many media, such as broadcast, cable or print; only direct mail, telemarketing and
direct sales provide more.

Three likely changes could make the Internet the medium with the greatest ability to
target. Societal norms for acceptable privacy policy will develop as consumers
demonstrate by their actions which targeting information and techniques they see as
"net positive." Databases of Internet users' demographic, psychographic, purchase,
"anonymous profile" and other behavioral information will grow and be augmented with
the enormous existing information available in the non-digital domain. Interactive
profiling and mass customization technologies will mature from their currently raw
state to deliver consumer experiences that will seem more personal than most other
marketing media or sales contacts.

INTERACTIVITY
The ideal marketing medium allows the targeted prospects or customers to talk back
right now - to identify themselves, to declare interest and readiness to purchase and
even to criticize or complain. Internet and e-mail offer outstanding interactivity,
comparable to direct sales at a fraction of the cost per contact. Today only telesales can
compete. It is likely that increased ease of use and consumer familiarity will make the
Internet the most interactive of marketing media.

AIDA COMPLETENESS
Marketing media have traditionally served only one or two steps of the Awareness-
Interest-Desire-Action cycle (A.I.D.A.). For example, advertising can lead a consumer to
action, but cannot generally consummate it. Many marketers believe that this inability
to span the complete A.I.D.A. cycle is the major cause of "wasted" marketing effort.
Consumers who have been motivated to continue in the purchase process are "lost"
when they fail to navigate to the next step, which requires engagement in a new medium
("pick up your phone now and call").

The Internet offers unique power here. A customer can move easily from initial
awareness through purchase. Only the beer vendor at the ballpark has as powerful an
ability to raise awareness and execute the sale in one fluid motion!

Maintaining an accessible recollection of these interactions actually allows an exchange

between the user and a Web site to continue for some time, spanning the time delays of
the physical world. For example, the Amazon site has a better ability to pick up a
"conversation" about a problem with the book ordered last week than do most humans
working at a chain bookstore.

CONTRIBUTION TO LEARNING
Ideally, the marketing process should function as a learning system. Database
marketers, for example, have made a science of the "closed loop," in which programs are
conceived and executed against a database that has been segmented using analytical
profiling and predictive applications. The database and even the applications are then
updated to reflect the actual performance of the particular marketing program.

Today, only the expensive direct marketing methods - direct mail, telesales and direct
sales - can serve easily as a foundation for quantitative marketing learning. Measuring
traditional advertising and public relations, for example, relies on subjective assessment
and sampling techniques such as Nielsen ratings, which are both expensive and of
doubtful usefulness in the smaller segments that characterize so many markets.

In contrast, the Internet already enables unprecedented learning in its ability to capture
site navigation information; information retrieval and purchase behavior, and user-
supplied preference and profiling information. It is also proving to be an excellent
vehicle for conventional market and customer research.

IMMEDIACY AND RELEVANCY

Responsiveness to marketing messages is closely correlated with the "freshness" and
applicability of the information conveyed to the recipient. While direct sales and
telesales offer the ability to present a timely message, the Internet is vastly superior to
all other media in the capacity to deliver messages that are not only timely, but
immediately relevant to the recently displayed interests or actions of the customer.

PERMISSION
Seth Godin, founder of Yoyodyne and author of marketing books, argues persuasively
that the volume of marketing information aimed at customers has necessitated that we
no longer market "to" the customer; instead, we need to market "with" the customer.
Practically, this means seeking the customer's permission to begin and then continue a
dialogue that will extend beyond one sales transaction.

While direct sales and telesales provide these options, the Internet enables the
"permission" decision to be made at lower cost to the vendor and with less
inconvenience to the customer.

MULTIPLE PROGRAM TYPES

The Internet has a unique ability to function as a platform or vehicle for a variety of
program types. Using the Web and e-mail, we can run awareness advertising, send
targeted mail, fulfill collateral requests, conduct a seminar, drive a public relations
campaign and offer a premium for an immediate action.

DELIVER APPROPRIATE INFORMATION

The Internet has another unique ability: to provide virtually unlimited information to
the seriously interested user, without cluttering simpler messages to a wider audience.
The end user can easily navigate his or her way to more and more detailed information
and toward a closer relationship with the supplier. It is as though an advertiser could
enable a print reader to touch the page of a wordless "branding" ad and instantly receive
a mail packet of the appropriate product brochures, specifications, competitive
comparisons and local dealer contact.

But the Internet has weak points as well that must be considered.

PRODUCTION IMPACT CAPACITY

It sometimes takes sizzle to engage a sated consumer, and that can mean high-quality
graphics, motion and sound. The weaknesses of the personal computer as a multimedia
vehicle, combined with inadequate access bandwidth, mean that the production values
achievable in Web marketing lag other media significantly. While broadband access, PC
improvements, and Internet appliances will inevitably address this issue, it will be at
least three years before a mass market emerges that can experience TV- or magazine-
quality communications over the Web with reasonable performance.

CUSTOMER ATTENTIVENESS
While an Internet "opt-in" session can be wonderfully compelling for vendor and
customer alike, Internet broadcast vehicles - principally conventional banner ads - are
far weaker than broadcast advertising in commanding the prospect's attention. It is
more difficult to tune out a well- executed TV or radio spot than to ignore a good banner
ad.

CONTROL OF USER EXPERIENCE

While the Internet offers great capability for the marketer to be responsive during a
customer interaction, it also puts new control of the experience into the hands of the
customer.
Traditionally, marketing operated under the assumption that the prospect could be led
through a progressive process of information disclosure and purchase commitment. On
the Web, this illusion is destroyed - the customer is in control. He or she can dig deeper,
or leap to a competitor's site, in a single click.

Thus, we must design our marketing communications for access under customer
control. More importantly, a new urgency is created - at every moment, the prospect is
free to abandon the process. For example, the inconvenience associated with walking
out of a store at the moment of purchase, "upsetting" the sales clerk, is completely
absent.

MARKETING FUTURE
Clearly, the strengths of the Internet as a marketing medium far outweigh the negatives.
Companies grappling with the issue of whether to market via the Internet are already
behind. Companies attempting to build a coherent Internet marketing strategy must
begin to believe that the Web is likely to be the center of their marketing future, not
simply an adjunct to traditional marketing methods.

https://www.strategy-business.com/article/13669?gko=931fd
 The Future of IT For the Small and Medium Business

In our practice, we consult with clients on how they can leverage technology
to be most successful. We meet regularly in an hour-long meeting called a
STAMP (Strategic Team Action Meeting and Planning). Key is understanding
the client’s culture, workflow and applications – knowing where we are in
order to plan where we are going.

For today’s discussion, we will look at 3 key trends that will the Small and Medium
Business (SMB) over the next several years:
Security – SMB’s are more reliant on technology to leverage their businesses than ever
before, and the requirements to secure and protect data and access are becoming more
complex with a lot of choices. Data today resides everywhere – on-premise, mobile
devices, the cloud, or a combination. According to the 2015 SMB Routes to Market
Study, small businesses rank security as their #1 challenge, and medium businesses
rank it as their second most pressing technology challenge. These challenges now
require an integrated approach to security threats, including combinations of hardware,
software and end-user education. masterIT routinely conducts end-user training to our
client base for them to be aware of what pitfalls exist and how to mitigate risk from
them.

Mobility – The computer has escaped the box, and it is not coming back. According to
the 2014 SMB Mobile Solutions Study, 59% of SMB’s view mobile solutions and
services as “critical” to their business. 85% see mobile apps as complementing
traditional business apps; 70% believe that mobile apps will replace some of their
current business applications; and 48% say their employees are doing significantly
more work on mobile devices.
In our practice, Mobile Device Management and Mobile Application Management tools
allow us to connect to our clients devices and apps no matter where they are, insuring
greater uptime and throughput.

Cloud – still a foggy picture, but getting clearer all the time. Today, most of our clients
are utilizing one or more point solutions in the cloud like email. If they utilize
collaboration, file-sharing or marketing automation, chances are they are in the cloud.
Not all applications play well in the cloud. That is why we consult with our clients to
choose the right migration path and timing. Legacy applications built for on-premise in
some cases are cumbersome in the cloud. Internet speed and reliability also become
critical factors when choosing a cloud application.