Is it Time for Email to Go Away?
Posted: February 10, 2015 Filed under: Innovation, Technology | Tags: email, Facebook at Work, Slack, Verse 1 Comment
Has email lived its useful life? Recently articles* about new products such as Slack and Facebook at Work highlight the emerging second generation of social business applications and ponder their usefulness. Will they replace old guard products like email, or create a new space? Even IBM is getting into the game. Their offering, Verse, was touted as “a new way to work” in recent TV commercials that aired during the NFL divisional championship football games.
My opinion? Who knows what will happen. I recall writing about this very topic about 10 years ago—clearly, “if” and “when” are difficult questions to answer.
Email’s inherent problems are many:
- It grabs our attention, not necessarily in a good way. With a LIFO approach, each new message pops up on our screen and announces itself. It interrupts our thought process and begs for an immediate response.
- It’s not easy to manage. Questions abound. What do I need to store in folders for future retrieval? What needs to be followed up on? What responses am I waiting on from someone else? In the end, the size of our inbox and the amount of care and feeding it requires creates stress.
- It doesn’t have a memory, making it hard to find/file/recall/share with others after the fact.
- Email isn’t designed for collaboration. Attempting to share back and forth and have a conversation leads to unwieldy, long conversation threads.
- It simple does many things poorly, namely transferring files, generating notifications, knowledge sharing and document management.
The new tools are certainly exciting, but how well they can mitigate and replace the challenges of email is yet to be seen.
*Additional reading:
- Slack is killing email
- Facebook Unveils Facebook At Work, Lets Businesses Create Their Own Social Networks
- IBM Verse: Can It Trump Google Inbox?
The Power of Open Data
Posted: January 28, 2015 Filed under: Demographics, Technology | Tags: Ben Wellington, open data Leave a commentOpen data seems all well and good in theory, but it can be hard to envision practical applications. Essentially, this is making large sets of data open to the public. One New York statistician, Ben Wellington, is making a name for himself by asking questions and finding answers through open data resources. The results are fascinating—and have had a big impact (and he wasn’t even trying).
Wellington is extremely skilled at not only crunching numbers, but also using numbers to tell stories and then using the combination of numbers and stories to affect change. In the article A Data Analyst’s Blog Is Transforming How New Yorkers See Their City, NPR gives one example of what happened when he looked at parking ticket data. Read Wellington’s account in his blog post Success: How NYC Open Data and Reddit Saved New Yorkers Over $55,000 a Year. Other popular posts from his blog I Quant NY include a look at the cleanliness at the city’s fast food restaurants and the prevalence of Starbuck’s in Manhattan. Great stuff for inquisitive minds.
Weekly Download 15.2
Posted: January 26, 2015 Filed under: Technology, Weekly Download Leave a comment
The annual Consumer Electronics Show was held a couple of weeks ago. While individual gadgets are not top priority for me (lots of shine and sizzle, too little substance), I enjoy observing general trends. Two categories stood out, that I confirmed on a recent visit to Best Buy.
#1: The connected home. This includes everything from thermostats, smoke/CO detectors (Nest Protect has caught a friend’s attention), lights, access control, home monitoring and sound/video/entertainment systems.
#2: Home entertainment. There still seems to be a quest for “bigger is better.” Now, there are 4K screens and curved screens, all targeted toward creating an in-home experience for large groups of people. We have a traditional colonial-style house, with no oversized great room to hold a dozen or more viewing guests. Fortunately for us, it also seems like demand is growing for tools to promote “cocooning” in your own home.
- The Intel® Compute Stick is a complete system on an old school USB stick-sized device that can transform any HDMI display into a fully-functioning computer.
- The HP Sprout is a combo PC, scanner and projector with a touch-sensitive projection surface. It’s too soon to tell if it will become the next great thing in home computing.
Here are a couple of other observations:
- 3-D printing continues to evolve to include food, clothing, parts and even entire cars!
- Watches are hot again, particularly when loaded with fitness and wellness capabilities. I’m not sure what to think about this category—I thought we gave watches up long ago.
- WattUp™ is a potential game-changer in the way we keep our myriad devices charged by creating wire-free charging zones.
ZMAB15 