Tag: IBM

  • Real Virtuality

    Much has been written about 2016 being the year of Virtual Reality, (or not) but at CES and beyond, one theme that I’ve been noticing is Real Virtuality. The phrase – I meant it as innocent wordplay to describe the thought I had, but the irony is that it is actually the name of a game! Irony, because my thoughts were around ‘real’ businesses (with obvious physical manifestations) entering relatively more virtual environments. ‘Virtuality‘ in philosophy is what is not real, but displays the full qualities of the real. 

    While it had been floating around in my head, this post on GigaOm, on car manufacturers and their self-renewing straddle attempt in the future of the car economy, is what lent it a bit more solidity. The post mentions a few partnerships – Ford with Amazon for a virtual assistant service, GM and Lyft potentially for driverless cars. Ford is also well into its own autonomous vehicles agenda, has a partnership with DJI for drone-to-vehicle communications, (via) and has launched a wearables lab to test smartwatch integration with its cars. The car manufacturers are also developing their own systems, and are thereby in frenemy zone with the OS folks – Apple & Android.  (more…)

  • Weekly Top 5

    [scribd id=75525493 key=key-3vlreebuwi21bp6lt1e mode=list]

  • So, who else wants to be social?

    A few weeks back, I’d read about the New York Times launching the public beta of its social network. Its called Times People, but is not a Facebook kind of social network. It allows you to discover, read, share and comment on interesting things on NYTimes.com. The account is directly linked to the NYTimes.com account, so a user is logged in to the service as soon as he logs in to NYTimes. The activities the user does is stored on a personal page, and there’s even a Facebook application, which allows the activities to be displayed in the Fb mini feeds. Given WSJ’s foray into social networking, its interesting to see NYTimes becoming social , but i personally think a service like Social Median, which allows multiple sources of news, subscribing to different channels that one is interested in, and a tool bar plugin which allows sharing of content as you browse, is much more community friendly and useful.

    Meanwhile, I read today that the latest player to enter the world of social networking is none other than IBM. It has launched a service called Bluehouse,  and is an online collaboration network. It allows users to host meetings, network wih partners, share files, start surveys and so on. There are several sites which allow many of these services in isolation, do you know a service which allows all of the above? (via Inquisitr)

    We are not far behind. I read an article about India Konnects, (about whom I had written about earlier) which is creating communities exclusively for industries and companies in India. It is also planning to launch city-specific and business-specific communities, and is starting with an online networking portal exclusively for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Gujarat.

    So, three different entities from three different categories working on three diverse social/business networking models.

    until next time, man is after all, a social animal