IoT - Money Is Made In Connectivity As A Service (CAAS)

IoT are tiny little electronic devices that can collect input (sensors, human input, etc) and transmit it to the cloud (for storage, processing, etc).  Here is a depiction :

IoT devices need a way to connect to the cloud via "The First Mile"

Because most IoT devices are inexpensive, how is the IoT ecosystem to make money? The answer is Connectivity As A Service (CAAS). If your IoT uses WiFi, the cost of connectivity should be $0 (unless you are traveling and don't have access to free WiFi).  But for most IoT devices that are not home bound (thereby having free WiFi access), what will "The Last Mile" look like? It will probably be mobile cellular. AT&T already has a plan for this, and it isn't cheap:

AT&T Connectivity As A Service

So that IoT device with a $10 BOM and $30 full retail price looks cheap compared to the CAAS that you will pay to be connected.  Will this hamper IoT growth? Relegate IoT (that require connectivity in all locale) to serious applications such as industrial and commercial?

Solid State Drives / Flash Introduction

Storage technology and associated  protocols, connectors, and process tech

Introduction

Storage of program and data long has been stored on a Hard Disk Drive (HDD). HDD  has been the workhorse for storage for the past two decades. It had the luxury of a long "learning" curve because there were many factors that can be improved : number of platters, spin RPM, form factor, protocol improvement, and connector improvement.

Solid State Drives (SSD) now has taken over the role of HDD and more. SSD  can put into tight small place that HDD never had a chance because of SDD's small form factors and low power. SDD is also experiencing a learning curve. The next bump will be "behind the scenes" : 1) continuing the roll out of NVMe and 2) pushing process technology from TLC to 3D.

But just swapping out a HDD for a SSD won't reap all of the performance benefits of SDD.  Hard Disk Drives (HDD) typically connect to the system via the SATA bus. As SSDs replace HDD, SSDs still use the SATA protocol to allow SSDs to directly replace HDDs. But that SATA protocol was design for a spinning disk such as HDD. It is time for a new protocol. That protocol is NVMe. But NVMe requires a high bandwidth bus. Luckily, PCIe already exists and is already in wide adoption.




Here is a quick top to bottom breakdown of a storage system in a laptop:

1. Storage Protocol: ATA, AHCI, NVMe

Protocol is the way software applications talk to the storage device. ATA was one of the ways for PCs to talk to HDD, CD-ROM, DVD, etc. AHCI was created to speed up transfer of data directly from memory to storage (instead of having data pass through the CPU - so that there is a direct path) for HDD.  NVMe the latest storage protocol geared specifically for SSD storage.


2. Storage Connector : IDE/PATA, SATA, PCIe

How a storage device connects to the system changed over time. IDE/PATA was a wide ribbon interface that connected the mother board to the HDD.  The reason for the wide ribbon connector is that the interface was parallel (Parallel ATA).  SATA improved on the IDE/PATA connector by making the connector run at a much higher frequency and serialize the connected (Serial ATA). PCIe improves upon SATA because PCIe is a more "standard" connector : plug in GPU, Ethernet, etc - whereas SATA is focused only on storage.

3. Storage Tech : HDD, SSD/Flash

Hard Disk Drives are physical spinning platters that take time to spool up, seek the first data, and transfer data. Solid State Flash Drives are purely "electronic" with no spinning platters - so no spool up time, seeks are much faster, and transfers are much faster too. It is debatable if HDD drives


4. Storage Fundamental: SLC, MLC, TLC, 3D

The bits that store data physically resides on a transistor. The original technology (called SLC) stored one bit per cell. But as manufacturing and design techniques improved, each cell can store two bits (called MLC) or three bits per cell (TLC). This allows the same solid state drive to multiple the capacity by two (MLC is 2X more dense than SLC) or by eight (TLC is 8X more dense than SLC). The draw back is that the cells are less reliable and require more circuitry to keep them refreshed.

In additional to packing more cells per area from SLC to MLC to TLC, 3D NAND technology will stack even more flash bits (vertically).

VirtualBox Hypervising Two Virtualized OSs (Ubuntu, Windows 7) on Windows 8

W7, Ubuntu on W8 via VirtualBox

There is much excitement about Docker Containers - an new form of VM where its footprint  is greatly reduced -  because the Guest OS is now shrunk/removed from the VM. But to support this, the Hypervisor needed by the VMs is now replaced by a Docker Engine.  The disadvantage to Container is that multiple different Host OS's will not be supported anymore. The server community don't care about this limitation and is rejoicing because they can squeeze more linux app into a given hardware. But the development community that relies on virtualization to host multiple target OSs (MacOS, Windows, Linux, etc) will not benefit from the Container trend. Perhaps small businesses will also not make the switch so fast. Here is why.

Here is a screen shot of a Hypervisor (VirtualBox) running on Windows 8. One Virtual Machine is running with Guest OS Windows 7, whilst the other Virtual Machine is running with Guest OS Ubuntu. For those curious as to why I need Windows 7 virtualized on Windows 8, the reason is that  there are critical programs and data that only run on Windows 7 and won't run on Windows 8. Container does nothing for this small business owner.

When the Container takes the IT world by storm, many small users will be clinging on to their little trusty Hypervisor.

Internet of Things Industry Groups

Two IoT Industry Groups - But Several Key Players Did Not Join!

Standardization has allowed technologies to proliferate.  How? If  a few key players in an industry  agreed on how hardware and/or software should work, a standard can be published and everyone can focus on building interoperable products to sell.  IBM PC was an open standard and gained great lead in market share over "closed" Apple Macs. Most standards are open, so what will differentiate one product from another is dictated by the 4Ps : product, price, promotion, placement. Good for the consumer.


IoT has become the next major area of focus for hardware and software companies. So much so that much hype (too much) has been endowed on it. One key draw of IoT devices is that they operate in a heterogeneous environment - a mish mash of devices can talk to any network. The devices, the protocol, the access and gateway points, and how it communicates with the cloud - all can benefit from standardization so the the devices can plug-n-play.

In order to increase the adoption of IoT, devices and gateways need to talk to each other. To do that, hardware is usually under the control of software for data and control. Software have Application Programming Interfaces (API) that allow different blocks of software to talk to each other in a standards, predictable way. In order to establish a standard software API,  key players in this industry need to band together to form standards. Unfortunately, two major camps have formed two competing industry groups:

   1. Allseen Alliance (premier member) : Canon, Eletrolux, Haier, LG, Microsoft, Panasonic, QEO, Qualcomm, Sharp, Silicon Image, Sony

   2. Open Interconnect Consortium (Diamond Members listed): Cisco, GE, Intel, Mediatek,  Samsung

Apple HomeKit

An astute reader will probably notice some of the biggest players in the mobile arena is absent - Apple, Google, and Amazon. Apple is famously closed (aka secretive) about its hardware and software. But it is fairly public about its push into the IoT world with its HomeKit.   Google made its intention for IoT obvious by buying Nest for $3.2B mid 2014. Amazon "snuck" into the IoT fray with its popular and ever increasing in functionality Amazon Echo.




With a battle of the 2 industry IoT open standards looming, plus with the big "close standard" heavy weights not even participating, there appears to be a huge fragmentation of the IoT industry. With the push for Open Source,  will the consortium approach win? Or will the closed standard companies be able to point the product in a laser sharp fashion, making the slow consensus based consortium behind?

Android App Development - App SW Components

Android Apps require a Manifest, Layout, Resources, and Java

Most mobile developer know that Android phones are powered by Java and iOS phones are powered by Swift (was Objective-C).  The Java language was invented by Sun. It was an OOP language like C++, but with some differences such as automatic memory management in Java. The salient feature of Java, though, was Write Once Run Everywhere. This was possible because Java compiler produced machine independent Java bytecode that can run on any Java Virtual Machine (JVM). So your HelloWorld Java bytecode can be compiled once and run on your laptop, mobile device, and even your DVR if it has the JVM built in.

So Java seems ubiquitous - but how does it survive on an Android mobile device? Very well. Because Java is OOP, and  the Android framework treats everything as a class (the main screen is an Activity class, the button is a Button class, etc).

1. Manifest (XML)

The manifest lists the major top level components of an Android app - such as Activities (an Android window), Services (background programs that run silently), etc. The manifest identifies which Activity is the main one that the user sees when the app is first invoked. The manifest is written in XML and is created manually by the user via the Android Studio.

2. Layout (XML)
 
The window inside of an Android application can be laid out via several built in Android layouts (List, Grid, Relative, etc). This is where the designer can point to where buttons should reside, where the image should appear, etc. The process to create an layout is 1. pick a built in Android layout 2. customize the layout using either XML or drag-n-drop GUI in Android Studio. Once the layout is specified, it can be altered programmatically as the app is running.

3. Resources

Android apps usually have icons, built in pictures and sound that part of the app. These are all located in a central place called resources. The labels on your buttons, such as "Submit", are found in the central resource. One of the benefits of this is that if the app needs to be translated into another language, all of the English text is found in one place and the translation can be done in the resource - as opposed to searching through every file to replace. Some discipline is needed to adopt resource while developing an app.


4. Activity Java

The app's main control logic and the heart of the program is located here. "Activity" is another name for the main window in Android. Because it is written in Java, the developer have access to all Android objects from here can can read, calculate, output to Java Views such as buttons, text, etc.

Conclusion

Android apps are written in standard Java. But knowing the Java language is not enough. You will need to also understand the other components : the Manifest, the Resource, and Layout.

Internet of Things (IoT) - From Device To AWS Cloud

A AWS centric IoT architecture - device (blue & green), gateway (orange) , and cloud (red)

Introduction

Internet of Things (IoT) will allow humans and machines to make better decision and live better lives. How? With more data and more insight. But how does one go about creating an IoT? An IoT is comprised of three parts : 1. Device 2. Gateway 3. Cloud


Device

A device can sense information on its environment, collect the data, then send it to the gateway. Looking at the picture above, a device is comprised of input sensors (yellow), software (blue), hardware (green), and output (gray). Input sensors convert analog information such as temperature, humidity, switches, velocity into digital values.

Gateway

Most devices at home or the office will connect to the gateway via WiFi. Outside of home or the office, the gateway will mostly be cellular/2G/3G/4G LTE. For areas without WiFi, a personal area network (PAN) such at Bluetooth or Zigbee can be used to pass data from the device to the gateway. NFC is another option, but it is mostly relegated to close distance payment systems.


Cloud

The cloud is the end point of data that was collected by the device and delivered by the gateway. There are many companies vying to be in this market - from bare bone compute provider like Rackspace to traditional enterprise providers like HP & Dell joining the fray. Amazon AWS has a slick end to end solution : starting with AWS IAM to ensure the the right person and device can only access proper data. AWS Kinesis enables devices to stream data to the gateway and eventually into the AWS Kinesis as streams via JSON data objects. AWS Lambda Function is code that wakes up instantly to data in the Kinesis  - so that the data can be processed and shipped to AWS S3 Bucket for storage or AWS Dynamo NoSQL DB for analysis. Amazon AWS provides a complete suite of API to enable this entire flow.

Conclusion

IoT system is comprised of a device, a gateway, and the cloud.  IoT will allow humans and machines to operate more intelligently with data and insights.

Extending The Life of Hardware and Software Via Windows XP Virtualization

Windows XP system on left. XP virtualized on Windows 7 on the right.

Virtualization has been a hot topic - for good reasons. It turns compute/storage/networking hardware into "software". In the "software' form, compute/storage/networking resources can be consolidated, copied, killed, or started via management software- thereby saving energy, space, and maintenance. But if you are not a data warehouse provider, why should you care about virtualization? How can average consumers benefit from virtualization?

Perfectly good working hardware rendered obsolete due to Windows 7 not supporting these hardware.

Let's take a consumer who has made major investment in electronic products. In a real life case, the products are a slick thin Canon scanner,  an easy to use Panasonic  digital voice recorder, a unique power saving and beautiful OLED Sony MP3 player, as well as non electronic investment in prosumer level authoring software. With the switch to Windows 7, all of this investment has been flushed down the toilet.  Even if one simply spent the money to buy the new version of these products, some are no longer available. For instance, the slim Canon scanner is no longer in production. Same goes for the Sony OLED MP3 player. These were bought about 5 years ago and have worked flawlessly. A great testament to excellent engineering, manufacturing, and design.

With virtualization, the investment in hardware, software, and knowledge can all be propagated to Windows 7 from XP.  With several virtualization technologies such as VMWare, VirtualBox, and even Microsoft built in XP virtualization on 7,  old software and hardware works! After installation, my dead dust-collecting devices came to life!

As a normal consumer, virtualization saved me by:

1.  $100 : Sony OLED cigar shaped mp3 player
2.   $80  : Canon Lide scanner
3.   $50   : PDA (don't laugh)
4.  $350  : Authoring software
5.   $20   : Time and frustration of porting old data and music (Sony had a ATARC format)

Simulation Using Hybrid SAAS & PAAS Cloud Compute

High level architecture of a hybrid on-premise and off-premise/cloud SAAS/PAAS solution.

Simulation of very large IC designs can take weeks of compute time to complete. In order to speed up simulations, the IT department usually have to invest in either newer machines, increase RAM on existing machines, try to utilize multi-core processing (on software that supports multi-threading), faster storage, or faster networking I/O. But once the project is over, the IT investment will sit idle until the next phase of the project, or until the next project. With the advent of cloud computing, simulation of IC designs can be sped up greatly without the upfront IT cost. Instead of investing in IT equipment that will be only used during burst modes, cloud computing allows compute/storage/networking to be rented as needed. 

To protect IP in a cloud/SAAS environment, the simulation binaries can be designed to obfuscate the original design. Measures are incorporated to ensure that a break during the simulation run does not reveal design source. The output of the simulation run such as waveform, db, and log are obfuscated as well and are passed back to on-premise for debug and analysis.

This hybrid on-premise/off-premise approach can leverage cloud/SAAS for great simulation speed-up while enabling sensitive debug and analysis on on-premise.

A Map of Mobile & Web & IOT Technologies

A map of mobile, web, and IoT technologies

Web, Mobile, and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies drive all modern personal and commerce interactions.  Web, mobile, and IoT technologies each have two halves - 1) the client half and 2) the server half. The client is the user facing device such as your phone or web browser. The server is the machination running in the background that the user does not see. The client-server combined offers compute, storage, or networking to its end user.  This architecture has been in use for decades.

The client side is user facing, and user view can be broken down basically into three viewing models: 1) web 2) mobile 3) internet of things. Web is essentially a web browser such as Firefox/Chrome/Safari running on your laptop with the help of HTML5/CSS3/JaveScript/AJAX.  Mobile is a smartphone such as an Apple iPhone or Samsung Galaxy  that can run apps natively in Android (Java) or iOS (Objective-C or Swift). IoT  are electronic gadgets that don't require rich user interaction, but instead have dedicated displays, buttons, and sensors. IoT devices usually run on a small Real Time Operating System (RTOS) or Linux running with a JavaScript environment called Node.JS. 

The server side is the compute/storage/networking machine that is not user facing and solely serves the client. Servers can be 1) on-premise or 2) cloud/off-premise. On-premise servers are simply compute/storage/networking machines that sit in the company property. On-premise is a term that was coined with the advent of CLOUD compute/storage/networking.  For those who have been computer users for the past 20 years,  on-premise server is not a foreign concept. Cloud/off-premise are compute/storage/networking servers that located outside of the company - in an etheral place affectionately called the "cloud".  For most consumers, the cloud offers software without the need to install it on your device. For example, if you have been using Facebook, LinkedIn, or Gmail, you have been using the cloud.  Cloud/off-premise servers are built on a hardware and software template. One popular template is called Linux Apache MySQL Python (LAMP).  can offer Software As A Service (SAAS), Platform As A Service (PAAS), or Infrastructure As A Service (IAAS).  Amazon AWS has been a leader in this field.

Usually bound by the hip but not exactly the same as cloud is the same is the term virtualization.  Virtualization basically allows physical servers (compute/storage/networking) to be converted into software. Once in the software form, these compute/storage/networking servers can be controlled via management software so that the servers can be started, stopped, moved around, and copied. The ability to do this make cloud compute/storage/networking possible.

Mobile Vertical Eco-Systems - Around In 5 Years?

The two dominant mobile platforms  -Apple iOS & Google Android - make up over 90% of the mobile market (http://www.idc.com/prodserv/smartphone-os-market-share.jsp). An examination of the two ecosystems reveals some interesting facts. 1) ARM dominates the CPUs supplied into mobile devices 2) Android has over 80% of the mobile OS market share 3) there is a large HW fragmentation of Android devices (Samsung, HTC, LG, etc). Just a few mere years ago, 

Blackberry was the dominate enterprise mobile device just a mere few years ago (remember President Obama being addicted to it)? 

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/12/05/obama_s_blackberry_president_not_allowed_to_use_iphone_for_security_reasons.html

What will the landscape look like next year? Will Samsung's Tizen rise from small devices to full mobile? Will China's home developed OS be sufficient to sell to the biggest market in the world? Will India refocus its software expertise into consumer electronics?

Nintendo Wii - Extending Product Life Cycle Via Shrunk/Price Reduced - Too Late?

Nintendo is struggle to find a way to survive. Their latest generation gaming machine - Wii U - has not sold well. Only 9 million units sold since its launch in mid 2013. (https://fortune.com/2015/06/23/shigeru-miyamoto-wii-u/)

Nintendo previous gaming machine - Wii - was a wild success. In fact, towards the end of 2013, the older Wii was OUTSELLING the new Wii U.

A product has a product life cycle : Development, Growth, Maturity, Decline. (https://hbr.org/1965/11/exploit-the-product-life-cycle).   The Wii is supposedly in the decline phase. But it has to be extended to shore up the disappointing sales in the new Wii U.  How do you extend the life of a product that is already in the Decline phase? Nintendo has shrunk (cost reduce) the original Wii and bundled it with its star software title "Mario Kart".

Extending the life of a aged product reminds me of the B-52 bomber. It is old, new replacements had arrived, but it was so well designed, it will outlive its original product life cycle (http://articles.latimes.com/2013/aug/19/business/la-fi-ageless-b52-bomber-20130819)

Big Bang, Intel, Amazon and 4P

In the 4P marketing mix, the new ad from Intel features :

1. Product : Intel M-Core processors powering  a "laptop and tablet" combo called "2 in 1"
2. Promotion : Who better than the Big Bang actor Jim Parsons
3. Placement : amazon.com 
4. Price : The only element of the mix not addressed here

AWS - Quick Chart

Branding - Using Geography

Apple imprints "Designed by Apple in California"  on the back of their products:

DoubleDutch, a producer of apps that help event giver/organizer to give out information to the event
attendees, and more importantly, track them. They now tout " MADE IN SAN FRANCISCO"

Galaxy Dumping : Galaxy 4 7", Galaxy 4 8", Galaxy Tab 4", All $50 Price Drop

(l) Galaxy 4 Tablet, 7", $140  (c) Galaxy 4 Tablet 8", 1280x800, $190  (r) Galaxy Tab 4 10.1",  1280x800.     iPad Mini 2, 7.9 " 2048x1536 $300, iPad Air 1, 9.7", 2048x1536 $400

 

 

Tab4 : 1280x800; TabS : 2560x1600

Product Positioning - With Respect To A Well Known Product

Serendipitous Trigger To Relearn

Many new office buildings now have small personal working area and large common collaboration areas.  (https://hbr.org/2014/10/workspaces-that-move-people). One of the purported value proposition of smaller personal spaces is that it motivates you to rise from your chair, which can help you to think/create/perform better.  From the same article : "Chance encounters and interactions between knowledge workers improve performance".

This type of serendipitous energy can also happen without getting up from your small working space. An event triggered an unexpected on a laptop can also cause one to deviate from ones normal "virtual" path (as opposed to get-up-and-walk physical path) and think serendipitously.

A laptop reboot caused Microsoft security software (Windows Firewall) to block Firefox

The above unexpected warning from my laptop about security caused me to clicked on "port" to read more about it. That led me to write this little blurb on basic browser networking flow. I have been meaning to write a simple data flow on networking, but never had the inclination until this unplanned event.

Simple view of the 5 OSI networking layers on a web browser

Let’s examine how the network layers works from your browser to the internet. Pretend that you want to browse cnn.com on Firefox browser.  You are on a PC that we can call a client. The uses uses an (1) APPLICATION such as Mozilla Firefox to visit the Universal Resource Locator (URL) http://www.cnn.com. Firefox knows that you are using Hypertext Transport Protocol (HTTP), not other application protocol such as FTP, SMTP, …   Hypertext Transport Protocol Secure (HTTPS) is HTTP that uses Transport Layer Security (TLS) or the older  Secure Socket Layer (SSL) to encrypt transmission using session keys (keys expire after browsing is done)*. The encryption uses X.509 Public Key Infrastructure (PKI).  Either case, the  browser is a client and makes a request to a web server. (reuse stuff from example #1 / email)...

* Transport Layer Security TSL, aka SSL, allows the client (your browser) and the server (the web browswer at BankOfBits) to talk to each other securely. Using X.509 Public Key Infrastructure, the client connencts to the server first, and the server provides a certificate. The client checks that the server certification is authentic by checking on its own trusted roots (sources that can look at the server certificate and give the ok that it is BankOfBits). Once the client knows that the server is safe, the client creates a SESSION KEY (?), encrypt it using the server’s public key, then sends the encrypted session key to the server. The server will use its private key to decode the encrypted session key. The client will start sending encrypted data using the session key, which the server will decrypt with the same session key.

Perhaps in addition to small spaces, more random events triggered on the laptop can spur thinking?

Epson Printer Sabotages Non-Epson Ink Cartridges?

A very common business model studied in MBA is the Gillette "sell razor at a discount and make money on the blades." (https://hbr.org/2010/09/gillettes-strange-history-with).

EPSON also duplicate that business model on their printers - sell the printer at a low price first in order to secure a life long customer buying HP cartridges.


What happens if third party (non EPSON) manufactures of ink cartridges enters and starts selling a competing ink cartridge?

One clever way is to

    1) motivate the printer owner to update their printer firmware
    2) in the firmware, EPSON can check to see if an original EPSON ink cartridge is installed
    3) if not, send a code to the ink cartridge to exploit a HW weakness (pressure, fit, etc)
    4) the third party ink cartridge will leak, explode, print poorly
    5) causing the owner to buy a real EPSON ink cartridge instead


Here is proof:

http://www.amazon.com/Epson-Expression-Wireless-Printer-C11CC48201/dp/B0080SG86Y/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1425141081&sr=8-2&keywords=epson+xp-200#customerReviews

New firmware is evil - firmware checks to see if the ink cartridge is EPSON (original & expensive)

http://www.amazon.com/E-Z-Ink-Remanufactured-Replacement-Compatible/product-reviews/B00ENNJFPG/ref=cm_cr_pr_hist_5?ie=UTF8&filterBy=addFiveStar&showViewpoints=0&sortBy=byRankDescending

Mac OSX "Yosemite" Has Mid Rating On Apple Apps Store

Apple OS X "Yosemite" - the operating system on the Apple iMacs and MacBooks - have a record breaking number of downloads within days of release. One should not be shocked because the price is ... $0 (for those with Mac OS later than Snow Leopard). If you browsed the Apple App Store, you will see that the latest Mac OS - the OS  that will bind the desktop iMacs to the mobile iPhones & iPads - has average ratings (3/5). Very un-Apple like!

As an old time Mac OS user, I am not shocked at the 3/5 review. The flat look. The focus on making my desktop act and look like my iPad. All are unwelcomed changes.

But new time Mac OS users probably are mobile first, iMac second, users.

It would be interesting to see the demographics of the feedback. I bet low ratings are from old time MacOS users. High ratings from new comer to the MacOS ecosystem.

Placement - One of the 4Ps - Make Selling iPhones Easier

GreatPlaceToWork.com is not a great place to work

See something ironic about this? The employee rating of GreatPlaceToWork.com (on GlassDoor.com) is only 3/5. Ironic, isn't it?

Finally - Projects That Support HDMI and VGA

HDMI & VGA plugs for projector. BUT, my laptop only has Mini DisplayPort. Need a Mini Displayport to HDMI adapter.

As a product manager, we are faced with making decision about which external interfaces to support. For hardware, it is the bus and memory interfaces. For software, which Application Programming Interface (API) to support. 

Sitting in a conference room with my laptop, I was pleasantly surprised to find an HDMI port to connect my laptop to the projector. Most of the projector connectors are 20 year old VGA. But alas, my joy was quickly subsided when I realized my laptop has Mini DisplayPort, NOT HDMI. 

Product Differentiation - All Look The Same, Need To Go Down Deep To Custom ARM Processors

Leading edge smartphone (Apple, Samsung, HTC, Xiaomi) try to differentiate their products by hardware, software, and ecosystem. Competition has become so fierce that it is no longer enough to differentiate by these three factors. The differentiator now has moved down to the PROCESSOR. Instead of just licensing the processor (ARM), system development companies now want to only license the processor ARCHITECTURE (ARM), which is one level lower than just the processor. Apple has already gone down the path with its custom and market first ARM 64-bit processor. Qualcomm poopooed it, but now is quietly trying to catch up.

Microsoft Band Is $200 - Despite Cloud Focus, HW Is Still In Its DNA

Marketing Budget - Spend It On Marketing Or Sales

Does your company make and sale an excellent ENTERPRISE SOFTWARE? Do you have #1 market share? Not seen appreciable growth for the past few years. What to do?  One of the jobs of product marketing is to justify a marketing budget (or more hopefully, a budget was already allocated for your product). Using the traditional 4P marketing framework (product, price, placement, promotion), let's see how we should spend our marketing dollars:



   1. Improve the PRODUCT
   2. PRICE adjustment
   3. Make the product more available through better PLACEMENT
   4. Increase incentives to buy via PROMOTION


1. Improve the PRODUCT

This requires looking to perform a GAP ANALYSIS see if our product has any deficiencies against our competitor's and against our target customers needs. After performing a SWOT analysis, we discovered that our product sometimes had inferior performance, but other times we had superior performance. In order to tweak our products to make it perform as well as our competition, the customer had to do additional work to the product.

If the engineering team has the right sights but has not delivered, perhaps your marketing dollar can be used to motivate the developers, hire more developers, adopt new process (AGILE), deploy the latest tracking software such as Jira. But who wants to spend marketing dollars on product development?

2.  PRICE adjustment

The original title of this was "PRICE reduction". But GMs cringe at this.  The basic premise behind dropping the price our our product is to increase sales (lower ASP per product, but made up with volume). A  PRICING ELASTICITY graph will help to predict if we can sell more products should we drop the price. We have trained our sales teams to VALUE SELL. That is, we ought to price our product by the pain it saves. This thinking is a must, especially in our circumstance where our customers are usually hardware manufacturers and think mainly in terms of OPERATING, GROSS, or PROFIT MARGINS. It is a paradigm shift that all software vendors needs to hold steadfastly.


3. Make the product more available through better PLACEMENT (distribution)

The basic premise behind placement is that the more TOUCH POINTS your product has with your customer, the high chances they will buy. Coke made the a primary strategy in reaching their customers globally, poor or rich.

Software placement has seen a major shift. Up until about 2000, software were sold and installed ON PREMISE. On premise software has two basic licensing model : PERPETUAL or SUBSCRIPTION. With perpetual licensing, you pay once, install the software on your own computer hardware (PC, Mac, ...) and own it forever. Common examples of this are PC games. With subscription licensing, although you still install the software on your own computer hardware (Linux/Sun/HP workstation servers), you can only the use the software for a fixed amount of time (1 week, 1 month, 1 year, in rare circumstances you can use the software 99 years or forever).  The payment involves two portions : the upfront fee and the maintenance (or royalty) fee. After 2000, with the advent of CLOUD, Software-As-A-Service (SAAS), the software you buy is NOT installed on your local computer/workstation/server. The software now runs in a big DATA CENTER (aka cloud), located somewhere naturally cool with a much lower cooling utility bill.

What does this have anything to do with placement? With SAAS, anyone with a web browser (PC, Mac, iPad tablet, iPhone smartphone) or application (APP) can use SAAS. This is technology is  possible thanks to a concept called MULTI-TENANT. Salesforce (stock CRM) is a pure SAAS example.  With SAAS / cloud, selling software via subscription to any device is possible.


4. Increase incentives to buy via PROMOTION

What if you have the perfect product, ideal pricing, and global placement, but the product does not sell? Perhaps it is time to creative an INCENTIVE via promotion. There are two types of PROMOTION : PUSH and PULL. Pull promotion is adopted heavily in the B2C (business 2 consumer) sales which involves traditional coupons and 15%-off-sales. JCPenny tried to break away from that model and failed. Push promotion is normally deployed in B2B (business 2 business) enterprise software in addition to B2C.  The promotions usually are at motivating your SALES TEAM. One common way to do this is to create a Sales Performance Incentive Fund (SPIFF) that will create an incentive for your sales team to sell your product. Sales people often have multiple products to sell from the same company, so there is competition amongst product lines within the same company.

If you had a marketing budget, how would you spend it?

i5 veruss i3 : More Powerful Processor -> Heat -> Slower (ironically)

http://tabtec.com/windows/surface-pro-3-intel-core-i3-vs-core-i5-performance-battery-life/

Snapchat Pricing Model - Charge $750K For An One Day Ad Targetted At Coveted Teens

http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/snapchat-asks-brands-750000-advertise-and-wont-budge-162359

What Good Is Dual Core 64-bit Processor on an iPhone 5S? It Provides Powerful Editing Tools

iPhone5S has desktop PC class processing power:

• A7 64-bit ARM processor,  dual core, 1.4GHZ, (L1$ : I64K+D64K/Core,  L2$ : 1M, L3$ : 64M)
• PowerVR G6430 GPU (quad core)
• 1G LP-DDR3 RAM
• 16G/32G/64 Flash 
• A5 motion processor

1. Audio editing (trim out areas of silence)

2. Picture enhancement/cropping (I would not have been able to read the writing on the grease board)

3. Video processing (add audio, add text, adjust color)

My Prediction for 2015

Here is my prediction of what will be big (or begin to be big) in 2015

1. Haptic Feedback

What: Feedback from devices to the human. Common example right now is the little vibration you feel when you type on your phone screen. Another example is a video game control with vibration feedback. A recent experience with my Nintendo Wii remote vibrating every time the cursor passes a character as I am typing.

Why: Feedback from device to human encourages interaction and make it much more user friendly.

Current State: Currently in video games, phones, watches.

What to Expect in 2015: Improve the feedback feeling (smaller, more types of feelings) and on applications (messaging, ...)

2. Virtual Reality Goggles

http://www.virtualrealityreviewer.com/experience-paul-mccartney-live-concert-vr/

What: Ocular virtual reality goggles and others

Why: Teleport people to places they never can be. Make existing media (movie) more interesting and entice people to buy & watch again. A win for the studios (entire existing library can be monetized), device maker, and consumer.

Current State:

What to Expect in 2015: Creation of more content (need equipment to record at 4K, 360), licensing the right to record (sporting events, music events), streaming technology (instaneously stream a live event to millions of people).

3. 3-D Printing

http://www.3ders.org/articles/20130524-high-school-student-designs-3d-printable-finger-splints-for-developing-countries.html

What: Create an object in 3-D and manufacture it at home on a 3-D printer.

Why: Anything that you need to custom make that is not sold in stores - a custom medical cast for your jammed finger, a custom plastic leg for your sound bar (broke or need custom height), a new toy for your bored kids.

Current State: Currently available and can print simple structures but cannot withstand 1.2KPI of static pressure.

What to Expect in 2015: More intricate, stronger, cheaper, & faster 3-D printers.

4. Laptops (Ultra) Will See A Re-Birth With Touch

Bezel on Apple Mac Air is big & ugly! Needs to support touch screen, too.

What: Tablets (and Netbooks) have been growing at the expense of laptops... tablets have touch screens, are easy to carry around, is a fun and novel way of performing tasks that was done on the heavier/bulkier/touch-screen-less laptops

Why: Tablets are great OUTPUT devices and occasional INPUT devices.  Booming social media only needs occasional INPUT. Hence tablet boom.

Current State: We are at the inflection point where touch-thin-ultra-books take the best of laptops (easy to use keyboard, local storage) and combine with the best of tablet (light, touchscreen, long battery life)

What to Expect in 2015: More intricate, stronger, cheaper, & faster 3-D printers.

IoT - The Next Cloud/SAAS?

Internet of Things (IoT) 

IoT has been the new drum beat that everyone is beating to. Businesses need a new drum beat once every decade or so to energize producers and excite consumers. The last drum beat was Cloud/SAAS/Virtualization, which is near the point of the curve where the 2nd derivative is negative (transition from early to mature).

With IoT being crowned by all (cloud infrastructure provider, device producer,  data analytics/big data producer), let's examine why this is so universal.

IoT will enable anything to:

   1. connect - communicate & control
   2. measure - input from sensors

   3. collect -from existing sensors or sensorless sources
   4. analyze - measurements are collected, transmitted, analyzed, then driven out
   5. drive - output & feedback



Everyone will benefit. Semiconductors, analytics, cloud infrastructure. But do consumers want everything to be connected? Is there only limited application for IoT (machine 2 machine, industrial, medical, ...)? Or will this be a quiet revolution (despite the noise)?

Placement - One Of The 4Ps - Helps For Yahoo Search

Amazon Product Teams : 1 for ideation, 2 for productization

http://www.fastcompany.com/3040383/following-fire-phone-flop-big-changes-at-amazons-lab126?utm_source=mailchimp&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=fast-company-daily-manual-newsletter&position=anjali&partner=newsletter&campaign_date=01052014