The Cloud-Centric Retailer Treats Every Shopper Like A Celebrity

Description:  Imagine walking into a shopping mall on a mission to buy something very specific — the right tie for a job interview, the perfect handbag for a wedding — and knowing immediately where to look. Instead of endless hours wandering from store to store, combing the aisles for the right purchase, you know immediately which shops have exactly what you’re looking for and which has the best price.

Source:  Forbes.com

Date:  Dec 15, 2015

Products are becoming to become intelligent, too, as more items and packaging start to come with low-energy Bluetooth tags that will guide smartphone-equipped shoppers to the exact location of the item they’re looking for. Combine that with customers logging in to good-old fashioned Wi-Fi networks and the retail environment becomes a rich mine of data for retailers who choose to build the supporting infrastructure to capture, analyse and interact with it.  Read the Rest of the Story

Questions:

1.  What is the promise of Cloud Computing for the Retail Industry?

2.. What do you see as the two biggest benefits of cloud computing in the retail industry ?  Why?

Algorithms Need Managers, Too

Description:   Algorithms make predictions more accurate—but they also create risks of their own, especially if we do not understand them.

Source: HBR.org

Date:  Jan 1, 2016

High-profile examples abound. When Netflix ran a million-dollar competition to develop an algorithm that could identify which movies a given user would like, teams of data scientists joined forces and produced a winner. But it was one that applied to DVDs—and as Netflix’s viewers transitioned to streaming movies, their preferences shifted in ways that didn’t match the algorithm’s predictions.

Another example comes from social media. Today many sites deploy algorithms to decide which ads and links to show users. When these algorithms focus too narrowly on maximizing user click-throughs, sites become choked with low-quality “click-bait.   Read the Rest of the Story

Questions:

1.  Discuss the pros and cons of ALGORITHMS in managing a business.

2.  List some examples of algorithm successes in business, education, or government.

 

 

The Most Popular Online Course Teaches You to Learn

Description: The world’s most popular online course is a general introduction to the art of learning, taught jointly by an educator and a neuroscientist.

Source: NYT.com

Date: Dec 29, 2015

The enrollment figures indicate that massively open online courses, or MOOCs, which in 2012 emerged as a potentially disruptive force that some believed might threaten the modern educational system, are continuing to evolve and gaining broad acceptance as part of an increasingly diverse marketplace for online education.

The Achilles heel of the MOOC phenomena has been that while enrollments have been huge, the number of students who actually complete courses for credit has remained low. That has led traditional educators to argue that the new technology would fail because students are generally less motivated to complete coursework online. Read the Rest of the Story

Questions:

1.  What is a MOOC, and why is it a potentially disruptive technology?

2. Do you see this technology as the future of education?  Why or Why not?