Free chapter from '2 Pixels - A Philosophy of the future of IT'

With the carbon argument for in person sales calls becoming more difficult by the year I see online virtual sales calls a solid solution for future business and trade. I think that some in person meetings are still viable and valuable and when used in proportions are valid now and in the future. To strengthen my argument for online virtual sales calls I'd like to use an example. Imagine a sales manager who wants to make one hundred calls, across 10 different countries usually most people would say to this guy, get ready for flying thousands of miles and staying in many hotels, lets take a look at what is happening using an application like MS Teams.

With virtual meeting capabilities like MS Teams sales professionals can touch their prospects with extreme speed and efficiency. According to an authoritative source relationship building using virtual meeting systems is the same as in person although it takes slightly longer to develop the relationship using virtual techniques. I would put this extra time at between 5-10% so a fifty minute in-person meeting is the equivalent to a one hour virtual, I'm sure this ratio will be refined as the meeting software evolves. 

Some of the big wins here are the ability to hop around the world connecting with others, using the example we can have the prospects from ten different countries attend a virtual meeting together easily and I think business owners looking to leverage MS Teams ought to take a look at this edge closely. I think the philosophy of the business users ought to be to use video calling to substitute the travel option, saving carbon and also increasing responsiveness. I think the skill will be in integrating video calling into the sales process in a way to leverage the reach of the internet as well as the responsiveness video calling provides.

One of the more interesting aspects of tech sales is the role of tech itself in the sales process. 

App container systems and the business user

I've been recently re-tooling to include Azure and also some Kubernetes, having the ability to transfer your enterprise application from one hosting solution to another quickly and seamlessly is a great value proposition for businesses. Using container technology on Azure can enable quick re-deployment of the enterprise applications, giving great flexibility and adaptability easily accommodating change within the enterprise.

One point that is worth focusing on is the idea of re-writing enterprise apps to have ground up support for Kubernetes leveraging the idea of quickly moving hosts for example data centers, or maybe a stand alone server for smaller business. When might a business do this? It could be a new sales team in another country, a call centre that is the other side of the planet. 

What type of functionality might we see in a well written app? The ability to be swappable whilst maintaining uptime and availability, being able to switch hardware easily depending on the business requirements. Having a flexible and adaptable container app, could help with growth of the business freeing the IT architecture to permit rapid redeployment into new (and maybe bigger) premises. Kubernetes on Azure seems like an optimistic technology, enabling business growth.

The creation of a complex meta data query language.

Personal area networks (again).

I think there is something pleasing about the idea of a short range personal area network, why is it so appealing? Humans often think in terms of personal space and having a number of personal, (including wearable) PAN aware devices could reveal some very interesting possibilities. Another great reason for a personal space aware network around the individual is that you can specify the people you are happy to enter the special space, kind of like a like on Facebook.

An examination of the extensible(ness) of the smart phone architecture.

Doing new stuff with a smart phone is often exciting and interesting, installing a new app and enjoying the advantages of using it can be rewarding and enjoyable too, we can see different apps in the ecosystem within different domains or subject areas being created.

So with the Android and iOS operating systems we get a good amount of extensibility, to make some observational type remarks, we are not seeing draggable functionality inside many apps, I think this is interesting particularly with larger screen sizes on current mobile devices. I think the ability for apps to collaborate snd share data (although good) is not optimal at the moment.

I think that users and even some developers were initially a little dazzled by some of the newer pinch and swipe gestures inside of the mobile OS  and it might be that the simpler dragging metaphor has been forgotten about or considered to be less useful.

One of the most important parts of the extensible(ness) of the device is the ability for apps to share data whilst simultaneously executing and to pass data into the OS, also seamless transition from one app to another, we what our apps to be aware that we have another app running in the background and we want the context to reflect the current state of the apps and device.

Finally, in terms of untapped potential I think the mobile device and games console together are currently very under exploited, the ability for the mobile device to be a second screen for the games console is one interesting possibility, also taking part of the game with you on your mobile device whilst away from your console is a neat idea.

Blue print/Outline for a Parental Social Media Management app

The parent wants to know when certain subjects or search phrases have been used across social media. The user of the app will probably use it every day adding their children and relatives as users to the app.

Number of hours of social media usage displayed in a clear and easy to understand view

Gallery of images uploaded and viewed.

Alerts if certain activity is detected.

I think the philosophy of a minor using the internet is important and there ought to be some detailed digitisation of philosophy, it the same way politician will tell you they want a cleaner internet, it is computer philosophy that will implement these ideas, I also recommend you check out Microsofts current AI for good philosophy if you want a good example or a well thought out set of values.

Searchable audio books using Cortana or similar

You can meet lots of people in a day that enjoy listening to audio books particularly those that consciously favour auditory learning methods, I am among the people who like this format and use it often, I think there are a few parts of this format that can be improved. 

Firstly, I notice that search is very limited and device dependant too, I think a keyword type of search would improve things enormously. For example using Cortana the user can describe what they are looking for in the audio book and then a search can be performed, skipping ahead the search results, these look interesting, a list of chunks of sound.. thinking further how about the keywords followed by the remainder of the chapter, or the user can specify the number of minutes either side of the search match. 

What happens if there is a huge number of search results? Can we filter the results like text? How about the UI, easier on an iPod touch or a device with a good display...

How about if no match is found in this audio book, extending the search into the entire library or online store? Give me every book in your online store that contains my search terms..

Also, you will notice I have been making some notes about a metadata server, metadata inside of audio books, yes this can be a nice way of helping the search code locate the right part of the audio book.

Content creation development environment.

As a content creator I need to understand the quality of the content I am creating as well as how it is likely to be received by my (often paying) audience, there are a number of questions that I would like to have answered before I post my content online. One of these questions is: How well is the content targeted at my chosen audience demographic, for example if I am creating content aimed to entertaining seniors, does my content contain stuff that is going to accomplish this and is the same content suitable/marketable to other demographics? 

Thinking about a new content creation development environment for a moment, it would likely be combined with an AI/ML application that assesses content and delivers a report about it's characteristics aimed at advising the content creator during editing and before publishing. So in the case of a YouTube video it would quickly process the video (in the cloud) and assess it for characteristics like humour, excitement, maturity and many other trained (ML) values of interest. The user receives a report with advice on what type of audience would benefit most from viewing the content, combine this with big data taken from sources like social media user data to enrich the AI application and we can see that we have a useful tool for content creators.

Human to processor (CPU) ratios in the retail of tech (and other) products. Simply stated how much tech should a retail store have and how many humans to optimise sales volume.

The desire for the human to human social experience in the retail space.

Given that customers can obtain most products by using online services, it is interesting to consider what is motivating regular in-person sales, why are people still going into stores to speak with and interact with other humans? I think the answer partly lies in the value of human interaction in a social sense, humans are still social creatures and we enjoy having other humans around us.

How many humans are desirable?

It would be easy for us to consider the role of the human becoming less significant in retail with evidence of diminishing numbers of humans. The reality is that the role of the humans is changing with more emphasis on meet and greet and personalisation.

A solution involving no humans

A number of networked computers with richly featured software including voice recognition, iris scanning or similar for customer recognition could easily manage the entire sales process from greeting through to product demonstration, closing the sale and after care.

Analysing human sentiment from textual sources

Finding out how your customers are feeling from their social media posts can be of value and also how the particular (social media) profile fits inside the online community as a whole is interesting information too. For example, an individual social media profile could be significantly more positive than the other participants inside the community.

There are a number of approaches to analysing text for emotional bias and sentiment, emoticons can be useful if they are present and so are emotive words. Some metrics that are useful are: how many emotive words with an instance percentage inside the text as a whole, and the number of instances of each strongly emotive word.

We can take a number of different approaches to deriving the sentiment in text, and we could be interested in the number of emoticons too, the type (of emoticon) or the combination. We might be interested in the number of instances of emotive words, how many and the order that they appear in the text. The emotional words themselves, some with stronger weighting (more or less emotive) than others. For example we could say the word 'smile' is emotive and positive and the word ecstatic is even more positive and emotive than 'smile'.

Serving the customer after a period of uncertainty.

After a period away from interacting there are a number of ideas that are applicable to the existing circumstances, ideas like collaboration, commitment, a time to reflect and re-enforcing the idea that the business is now open again to trade and serve it's customers.

I will start with my thoughts on collaboration including some psychology. When a client or customer wants to either continue or resume some collaboration with a supplier of computers they are often feeling slightly lonely and interested in the possibilities that might lie ahead with any potential involvement in future business. There will be an element of reassurance that future interaction will be successful and that the pause has not damaged the situation in any significant way.

Next commitment, the customer will be looking to reaffirm commitment to the business partnership and relationship, they might feel that they want to show some evidence that they have remain loyal to the brand or that their action during the pause can change according to the requirements of the relationship.

A time to reflect, this means that the client has a life whilst the business in on pause, the client will has to satisfy their buying retirements in other ways, mainly online at the moment. It is likely that the client will have juxtaposed the idea of online sales and in-person sales.

Re-enforcing the idea that the business is now open again to trade and serve it's customer will usually create some excitement in the customer, they will feel that they are more involved in the computer community and will show their support for the business by investing in the products. The amount of products they buy will also relate to their online activities and there will be some curiosity in the client about how much is know (about their online persona) by the retailer.

Leveraging the 60,000 thoughts we have each day by connecting to a Thought as a Service (TaaS)

The idea of TaaS presupposes that the brain receives information through human sub-systems like the eye and ears and then does some processing updating the consciousness with some type of conclusion or result (including the option that further thoughts or processing is required).

The objective of TaaS is to help the human think complex and advanced thought(s) more easily by offloading the processing into something like the cloud compute or quantum computing.

One part of TaaS that I like in the way we solve our problems, in our brains we can imagine a large problem that we want to solve without actually knowing all the details of how to actually solve the problem. This is where TaaS can potentially receive a simple description of a large and complex problem together with the requirement of a simple result as the answer to this problem.

An example of this service is to answer to the question: How do I apologise to my wife for forgetting her birthday? So the complex problem can be simply described and I think this is the key to this type of service. The human brain thinks the simply described problems, sends it to TaaS to solve using massive computational power. The TaaS probably realises at this point it needs to understand some details about who the wife is and how she handles bad news and also some information about the state of the relationship. The TaaS draws on expert knowledge of relationships from a store of expert information, probably similar to the kind of result we see in search at the moment.

Personal Area Networks and social engagement

Thinking about society in the western world we see a lot of different cultures mixing together each day, this produces some interesting social interactions, most of them good and sometimes we see people hinting that they would prefer a little more control on who is in their personal space and I think this is perfectly reasonable. The idea of the personal area network has existed for some time now and we see technologies like bluetooth (probably the best known by the end user).