And I thought I would also post another very relevant article for the lunar new year :-) 

(reproduced from Harvard Business Review)
Why Appreciation Matters So Much
by Tony Schwartz

I've just returned from an offsite with our team at The Energy Project. As we concluded, I asked each person to take a few moments to say what he or she felt most proud of accomplishing over the past year.

After each of their brief recountings, I added some observations about what I appreciated in that person. Before long, others were chiming in. The positive energy was contagious, but it's not something we can ever take for granted.

Whatever else each of us derives from our work, there may be nothing more precious than the feeling that we truly matter — that we contribute unique value to the whole, and that we're recognized for it.

The single highest driver of engagement, according to a worldwide study conducted by Towers Watson, is whether or not workers feel their managers are genuinely interested in their wellbeing. Less than 40 percent of workers felt so engaged.

Feeling genuinely appreciated lifts people up. At the most basic level, it makes us feel safe, which is what frees us to do our best work. It's also energizing. When our value feels at risk, as it so often does, that worry becomes preoccupying, which drains and diverts our energy from creating value.

So why is it that openly praising or expressing appreciation to other people at work can so easily seem awkward, contrived, mawkish and even disingenuous?

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For the first blog post of the year, I thought I would post this awesome article. So relevant in Silicon Valley !

[Reproduced from Forbes]
The Seven Habits of Spectacularly Unsuccessful Executives
By Erik Jackson

Sydney Finkelstein, the Steven Roth Professor of Management at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, published “Why Smart Executives Fail” 8 years ago.

In it, he shared some of his research on what over 50 former high-flying companies – like Enron, Tyco, WorldCom, Rubbermaid, and Schwinn – did to become complete failures.  It turns out that the senior executives at the companies all had 7 Habits in common.  Finkelstein calls them the Seven Habits of Spectacularly Unsuccessful Executives.

These traits can be found in the leaders of current failures like Research In Motion (RIMM), but they should be early-warning signs (cautionary tales) to currently unbeatable firms like Apple (AAPL), Google (GOOG), and Amazon.com (AMZN).  Here are the habits, as Finkelstein described in a 2004 article:

Habit # 1:  They see themselves and their companies as dominating their environment
This first habit may be the most insidious, since it appears to be highly desirable.  Shouldn’t a company try to dominate its business environment, shape thefuture of its markets and set the pace within them?  Yes,but there’s a catch.  Unlike successful leaders, failed leaders who never question their dominance fail torealize they are at the mercy of changing circumstances.They vastly overestimate the extent to which they actually control events and vastly underestimate the role of chance and circumstance in their success.

CEOs who fall prey to this belief suffer from the illusion of personal pre-eminence: Like certain film directors, they see themselves as the auteurs of their companies.  As far as they’re concerned, everyone else in the company is there to execute their personal visionfor the company.  Samsung’s CEO Kun-Hee Lee was so successful with electronics that he thought he could repeat this success with automobiles.  He invested $5 billion in an already oversaturated auto market.  Why? There was no business case.  Lee simply loved cars and had dreamed of being in the auto business.

Warning Sign for #1:  A lack of respect
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Food for thought after the Zynga debacle :-) Very good article from Dean Takahashi as usual :-)

(Reproduced from VentureBeat)
by Dean Takahashi 
From the Supreme Court to Anonymous, 2011 was a transformational year for games

Skyrim was the "most played" game of the year, and we voted Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception our Game of the Year. But if you paid attention only to the big games this year, you may have missed some of the most important news ever to hit the game industry. It's no exaggeration to say that 2011 was a transformational year for the game industry. As the game industry's trade group chief, Michael Gallagher, said, “The word ‘historic’ is overused, but as we look back on 2011, it is a perfect fit for our industry’s year." Here's a recap of 13 events that made this such a big year for games.

1. Video game violence case. The U.S. Supreme Court put to rest a decades long legal debate over video game violence and whether game publishers' right to publish violent games without restrictions on who could buy them is protected by the First Amendment. The court struck down a California law as unconstitutional because it banned the sale of violent video games to minors. For the first time, the highest court in the country will give games the same legal protection that books, plays, and movies enjoy, because games “communicate ideas through familiar literary devices and features distinctive to the medium.” The court cited a previous case that held, “the basic principles of freedom of speech do not vary with a new and different communication medium.” With that, a long chapter of legal warfare will end and the video game industry will finally enjoy its own measure of creative freedom.

2. Zynga and Nexon went public. They each raised $1 billion or more in the biggest initial public offerings ever to happen in the 40-year history of the industry. The offerings were somewhat rocky, but after the dust settled, Nexon was worth around $7 billion and Zynga was worth more than $8 billion -- valuations that made them more valuable than Electronic Arts, which was founded in 1982. Nexon was the Asian company that pioneered the free-to-play, virtual goods business model, which, has proven an effective way for game makers to make money despite rampant piracy. That model made it OK to buy virtual goods in games in micro-transactions. Zynga took that model and ran with it on Facebook, growing at an incredible rate from nothing in 2007 to more than $1 billion in sales now. We wrote an in-depth story (now an eBook) about Zynga's journey to the IPO. The bears say that the Gold Rush of social gaming won't last. But with mobile gaming coming on fast, it's not so easy to bet against the upstarts of gaming. This story has just begun, and it will be interesting to see what Zynga will do with an extra billion dollars in cash.
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I think I am buying the augmented reality story, I have long been a fan (see my post in July 2010) as well as micro-payments and social/digital exhaustion. Not sure about the ultra book though - copying the macbook air is the same as for the tablet: for as long as there is not a good alternative to macOS and the iStores, even the greatest hardware in the world won't sell. Android is still very clunky and super slow.

(reproduced from Mashable)
5 Tech Trends to Watch in 2012
by Lance Ulanoff

2012 promises to be a very busy year in all things digital, but, as with any annum, there will be just a handful of big, memorable trends. Here, I’ve collected five such movements that are likely to make a big impact in our technologically-enhanced lives.

Augmented Reality

It’s now in games, location apps, business cards and coffee shops and could start showing up in cars and even eyeglasses. Augmented Reality, which puts a virtual view on top of your real world, is really just a cool way of saying, “Reality with Style.” Instead of simply viewing your apartment through your phone, you’re playing Star Wars Arcade Falcon Gunner on top of it. Instead looking up a restaurant in your neighborhood, you’re using Yelp to see its location and reviews for it and other restaurants right on top of your on-screen view of the street. 2012 will mark the beginning of exponential growth for Mobile Augmented Reality (MAR).

According to a report from Visiongain, 25% of all app downloads will feature some sort of augmented reality. Though adoption hinges on more powerful, high-speed and camera-ready mobile devices, it’s clear to me that the majority of smartphones and tablets in end-users’ hands next year will be 3G-to-4G-ready, high-def, large-screen devices with not one, but two multi-megapixel cameras. Trust me, by 2013, you’ll be hard-pressed to find anyone who hasn’t at least tried augmented reality.


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Last week of the year. Time for every talking head to make predictions for the next year. So this week, let's see what we've got in store for high tech in 2012 !!!
First, video. 

[This article reproduced from seeking alpha]
5 Predictions For Online Video In 2012 
By Peter Csathy

Editor’s note: Guest author Peter Csathy is President and CEO of Sorenson Media, a leading provider of encoding solutions. Peter was interviewed by TechCrunch TV earlier this year about how Hollywood is moving to the cloud. He blogs at Digital Media Update.

In 2011, the long-promised ubiquity of video—on-demand anytime, anywhere—started to become a reality, driven by mobile (smart phones, tablets). While this may seem obvious, remember, it was not so long ago (a couple years, really) that most doubted that consumers would ever watch anything other than short-form YouTube-like video clips on the small screen. Consumers are now beginning to watch premium long-form video (TV, motion picture content) on their most important screen on a massive scale, despite the frequent paucity of compelling content offered by service providers. Yet, we are still in the early innings of this video revolution—so, we truly haven’t seen anything yet. With this in mind, here are my predicted “big stories” for video in the coming year:

(1) TV Re-imagined. I have always expected Apple (AAPL) to release an all-in-one flat screen TV—think of a large-screen beautiful iPad on your wall—that will be called “iTV” in order to distance itself from Apple’s current Apple TV “hobby.” Apple’s goal will be to re-think the living room experience to be, well, more of an “experience” (rather than simply a “dumb” TV). That means that, yes, it will be a beautiful and aesthetically appealing piece of hardware. But, it will be much more than that. It will aim to seamlessly marry that beautiful hardware with underlying services (including linear TV—more on that below), much as Apple was uniquely able to effectively do originally with the iPod/iTunes to transform the music business and the overall consumer music experience. Apple’s ultimate goal is to sell more hardware of course—using software and services as the Trojan Horse. And, Apple will be able to command higher prices—and significantly higher margins. There is no doubt on this one. If Apple builds it, the Apple faithful most certainly will come.
(2) Tablets on Fire. Not surprisingly, Apple’s iPad will continue to be the No. 1 tablet, but Amazon’s Kindle Fire will be closing in … fast, fast, fast (remember, it was recently reported that it already outsells the iPad at Best Buy). Sure, version 1.0 of the Kindle Fire has some performance issues, but Amazon (AMZN) will knock those down fast. And, “Amazon Prime” will begin to significantly challenge Netflix, as more and more of us are introduced to Prime via Amazon’s brilliant Kindle Fire maneuver. Amazon’s strategy is completely the reverse from Apple’s. Amazon will use its hardware (the Kindle Fire) as the Trojan Horse to sell more services (especially premium video)—and, of course (and most importantly) to enable mobile shopping. Anytime. Anywhere. That’s Amazon’s huge advantage over virtually every CE company—Amazon is willing to take a significant loss on its hardware sales, because it is gunning for long-term continuous purchases of goods and services (including digital media). Brilliant Amazon.
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My prediction for the next five years is finally an awesome natural language user interface that works. Then the possibilities are endless. IBM, Apple and Google know it. 

[From the New York Times]
Behind I.B.M.’s Big Predictions
By QUENTIN HARDY | December 19, 2011, 4:52 PM

I.B.M. just issued its annual list of five predictions of developments in technology that it thinks will come true in the next five years. Like lots of predictive lists, particularly those that come around New Year’s, this is something of a pseudo-event that serves as an advertisement for the predictor’s own product or service. I.B.M.’s is no different in that regard, but it is worth looking at, both for the pedigree of who is doing the predicting, and what I.B.M.’s choices say about itself.

“To predict the next five years, you have to have a deep understanding of the last 50,” said Bernie Meyerson, vice president of innovation at I.B.M., and a highly regarded researcher in advanced microprocessor design and computer systems who oversees the list’s creation.


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Zynga Raises $1b 12/16/2011
 
I really wanted to post this on the day of ZNGA's IPO on Nasdaq and reflect on it about 24 months from now. [article reproduced from Bloomberg]

Zynga Raises $1 Billion, Pricing IPO at Top of Planned Range
December 16, 2011, 8:30 AM EST

By Lee Spears and Douglas MacMillan

Dec. 16 (Bloomberg) -- Zynga Inc., the largest maker of games for Facebook Inc.’s website, raised $1 billion in its initial public offering, pricing the shares at the top of the marketed range.

The developer of games such as “CityVille,” “FarmVille” and “Mafia Wars” sold 100 million shares for $10 each, Zynga said in a statement. The company had offered the stock for $8.50 to $10 apiece. It will start trading today on the Nasdaq Stock Market under the symbol ZNGA.

The offering is the biggest by a U.S. Internet company since Google Inc. raised $1.9 billion in its 2004 IPO, data compiled by Bloomberg show. The game maker’s increasing ubiquity and expansion prospects appeal to investors, according to Colin Sebastian, an analyst at Robert W. Baird & Co. in San Francisco.

“Zynga and its games are becoming consumer brands and there is a lot of recognition for growth potential,” he said. “My guess is that the shares will be well-received.”

Founded by Chief Executive Officer Mark Pincus in 2007, Zynga doubled sales to $829 million in the first nine months of 2011. The IPO values Zynga at as much as $7 billion, or 6.8 times revenue in the year through Sept. 30. That’s more than three times rival Electronic Arts Inc.’s price relative to sales over the same period.
Electronic Arts, based in Redwood City, California, bolstered its own online services by purchasing PopCap Games this year. EA, the maker of “The Sims” and “Scrabble” for mobile devices had a market value of $6.9 billion, or about 1.8 times trailing 12-month sales.




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I was reflecting on Siri over the week-end after reading the headlines in the European press "No iPhone 5 Apple missed the 4G revolution" - who really cares about hardware anymore ? That's so 1990s. Siri is revolutionary. See, we have in our bodies 2 awesome user interfaces: our hands, and our voice. Apple nailed the finger input, and they are about to do the same with voice interfacing - now obvious on iPhone 4S, further thinking about the digital home and the TV, which has the same user interface since the 1950 and my thoughts are ... bye bye remote .... finally .......

(reproduced from Forbes.com)
Siri: Apple's Key for Future Growth in Your iHome

Brian Solomon
Forbes Staff

During the day, I'm a Forbes Wealth reporter, tracking down billionaires around America for our Forbes 400 list. By night, I analyze statistics and the NFL for NBC Philadelphia and on my blog, "McNabb or Kolb". Prior to joining the New York city business media world, I wrote for The Dartmouth, way up in cold New Hampshire.

Your desk is to a keyboard as your pocket is to a touchscreen as your home is to…

One of Steve Jobs’ greatest strengths was realizing what form factors work best for various new devices. The original iMac and its successors showed that the traditional computer tower is extraneous for most consumers. The MacBook Air is the most successful laptop sold today because it focuses on a lightweight body and great battery life above all else. The iPod’s legendary click wheel bested its rivals by leaps and bounds, and the touchscreen iPhone and iPad lines took handheld and pocket devices to a whole new level.
Jobs and the rest of Apple concentrated on finding the perfect form factor for those hit products, and so far they’ve succeeded on the first try… with one exception: the Apple TV. Apple’s “hobby” $99 living room set-top box has been successful, but not of the runaway variety that has become almost commonplace for the company. Why not? Because it hasn’t found a successful form factor that differentiates it from regular cable boxes.

When asked about the television space in 2008, Jobs said, “I don’t think anybody has succeeded at it and actually the experimentation has slowed down.”
But Apple itself hasn’t done much experimenting in radically changing its TV platform. Until now, I expect.

This week’s iOS 5 release brings with it the much-hyped Siri voice recognition and personal assistant software. Siri can understand and respond to normal human language, accessing many of your phone’s capabilities without your fingers ever swiping across the screen. It can text your friends, find a restaurant, give you reminders, and more.

Voice. That’s the missing link in technology for the living room and the rest of the house.  People hate adding remote controls to their increasingly cluttered television set ups. And they don’t have free hands for keyboards or touchscreens in the kitchen. That’s where Siri comes in. If Apple can leverage Siri for use in its Apple TV, that’s a game changer in the set-top box space. Suddenly the device becomes both more functional and infinitely cooler.

And there’s no reason to stop in the living room. Media and organization devices in the kitchen or the bedroom are ripe for innovation. A voice-activated wireless router that controls other major appliances in your house would be intriguing.

Jobs talked for years about making Apple the center of your digital life. iCloud will be the back-end, but devices on your desktop, in your pocket, and throughout your home are the front-facing aspect of that relationship. Where lightweight builds and touchscreens were the perfect form factors for the MacBook and iPhone respectively, voice will undoubtedly guide Apple’s vision for a future where everyone’s house becomes an iHome.
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#thankyousteve 10/06/2011
 
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Hello Siri. 10/05/2011
 
The talking heads and the industry obviously have totally missed the point - the really new stuff has nothing to do with hardware (who cares about bigger screen and 20MP pictures and that it does laundry) but I am particularly amazed by the new voice assistant called Siri. It's an enormous game changer IMHO.

(reproduced from venturebeat
)iOS 5 available for all iPhone users October 12 with over 200 new featuresOctober 4, 2011 | Meghan Kelly2 CommentsinShareApple announced today it’s iOS 5 update will be available for download on October 12th.

Today’s Apple event had little by way of new features available on the iOS 5, but did recap what we can expect next Wednesday when we all plug into our iTunes.

According to Scott Forstall, Apple’s  senior vice president of iOS Software, who took the stage to talk iOS, the new release has over 200 new features to offer. Here are the top ten touted so far:

Better Notifications: These will be stored in the notification center, which can be accessed by swiping your figure downward on the iPhone screen. The point is to make notifications less like the interrupting cow in your knock knock joke.

iMessage: The new messaging feature allows iOS users to communicate over 3G and Wi-Fi with any iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad. You will be able to send photos, video, receive message delivery and read receipts, and see when others are typing. iMessages are synced to all of your devices, so you can pick up your conversation where you left off. Apple also promises your messages will be encrypted end-to-end for security.

Reminders: For the forgetful person in your life, reminders will alert people to the simple things such as, “Pick up your dry cleaning,” or, “Your mother-in-law has been at the airport for an hour, prepare to sleep on the couch.” You can also set up a geofence around an area, that will set off a reminder once you leave that space.

Twitter Integration: Forstall said, ““We have integrated Twitter deeply into the OS. We have integrated Twitter into many of the built-in apps.” You only have to log in to Twitter once for you to use it across the built-in iOS 5 apps. You can share websites from the Safari browser, YouTube videos, photos and more.

Newsstand: All of your favorite news subscriptions, such as the New York Times, the New Yorker, and Allure are aggregated into your own news stand. It can be found on the you home screen. While you’re going about your business, Newsstand continues to download new content from your subscriptions.

Camera: When you need to whip out your camera and grab that fleeting shot of the seagull in front of the setting sun, you don’t want to wait to unlock your phone and access the camera. Apple’s answer to that is a shortcut in iOS 5 that doesn’t require you to enter a lock code. iOS 5 will also support auto focusing and exposure, all you have to do is put your figure on your focal point. And we finally receive editing options on the camera including red eye removal.

Game Center: We’re all about content discovery lately, and gaming won’t escape. iOS 5 will put in place game and friend discovery for its over 67 million people using the feature. A sequel to Infinity Blade by Epic Games is also coming out, made specifically for the announced iPhone 4S, which will come preloaded with iOS 5.

New Safari: Forstall says, “”This next feature is one of my favorite: Tab browsing.” Tabbed browsing is just as it sounds, a way to switch between pages you’re reading simultaneously. If you don’t have time to read a page, you can now “save” that page for later in the Reader section.

Mail: The mail app becomes more like a functioning e-mail inbox! iOS 5 allows you to flag messages, search your whole inbox and write e-mail with rich text.

PC Free: Cast off the chains tying you to your computer! The update will allow for wireless updating.

Look out for the update next week.

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