BMW will launch a new Genius Everywhere program, an Apple-like Genius Bar in time for the launch of their i3 electric vehicle which is expected in 2014. Clearly BMW sees Apple’s massive success in retail as a proven solution to support the launch of a new series of electric cars in North America. BMW will also rely upon Apple mobile technologies to arm their sales staff.
The Genius BMW Genius Everywhere program announced in AdvertisingAge will have pre-sale employees armed with iPads helping educate potential customs about this new electric line. The major difference as this point is Apple’s Genius Bar is for post sales while BMW will focus on education and pre sales. This is not the first time BMW has adopted Apple products, design and user experiences. BMW and Apple collaborated to bring iPod support to BMWs early in the car controls your digital device world and today they are also working to integrating Siri technology into more BMW models.
Tag: change
The Pentagon Papers Volume IV.c.9(b) is labeled “Direct Action: The Johnson Commitments, 1964-1968 and tells how difficult the relationship between Washington D.C. and Saigon was leading up to the Tet Offensive. After 40 years as a classified document, the only clarification in this volume was our investment in men and money didn’t mean a damn in the war against the north.
This volume was written right on the heels of Diem and Kennedy’s assassinations. It was a telling story: The war was not going to get any easier for either the US or the South Vietnamese against their determined enemy:
There seemed to be no compelling requirement to be tough with Saigon; it would only prematurely rock the boat. To press for efficiency would be likely, it was reasoned, to generate instability. Our objective became simple: if we could not expect more GVN efficiency, we could at least get a more stable and legitimate GVN. Nation-building was the key phrase. This required a constitution and free elections. Moreover, if we could not have the reality, we would start with appearances. U.S. influence was successfully directed at developing a democratic GVN in form. Beginning in September 1906, a series of free elections were held, first for a Constituent Assembly and later for village officials, the Presidency, House and Senate. U.S.-GVN relations from June of 1965 to 1968, then, have to be understood in terms of the new parameters of the liar. Before this date, our overriding objective had to be and was governmental stability, After the Diem coup, the GVN underwent six changes in leadership in the space of one and a half years. From June 1965 on, there was relative stability.
At the same time:
We never won in Vietnam. Over the weekend I found a November 2009 Newsweek issue about how the could have won in Vietnam. The headline addressed historical lessons regarding current US military goals in Afghanistan.
The lead was an attempt at revisionism regarding the war. It may be a trend to boast we could have won fighting the NVA and VietCong. To be honest the Pentagon Papers are now proving to be the ultimate trump card against revisionist history.
So far I have pushed through about half of the Pentagon Papers 7,300 pages. The early volumes alone provide clear evidence we NEVER could have won in Vietnam.
As the crowded cloud space continues to rapidly change today’s business landscape an emerging service is finally just arriving: Data Warehouse as a Service or WaaS, is joining SaaS, PaaS, IaaS and the still late-in-arriving SuperComputer as a Service or SCaaS.
Is it remarkable to see this type of new service that offers data warehousing as a service? This big data service can be consumed rapidly across companies and still keep the hardware layer in the background. While Amazon’s RedShift (still in limited preview) will capture a lot of attention, BitYota is just coming out of private funding. BitYota is moving their solution around SaaS:
Clearly we are moving into a dynamic change in network enhanced services for a new cloud empowered internet. BitYota’s initial focus is mobile, advertising and educational applications.
Did you hear about the university professor signed up for a cloud service and unknowingly left his department on the hook for two years of service beyond his grant….or the university who had more than 500,000 student records (social security, addresses and grades) hacked? Cloud computing poses special demands upon Universities who can no longer employ the same procurement process used to acquire computers and software since the 1980s.
Are you aware that today many Universities (and K12 School districts) use a popular email marketing program that sells contact information of students to vertical marketing firms who in turn re-sell them to other marketing and product companies?
Today’s aggressive marketplace and the business of cloud services has radically changed the procurement process. Many of us have a fiduciary duty to protect data of our students, research and institutions. Regardless of how students freely give away their data on Facebook, our institution will still be held responsible to protect all of our institution’s data.
My views on the impact of Cloud Computing in Higher Education have been slowly evolving. This past May I was given an incredible opportunity to further my learning by participating in an Engineering & Technology Short Course with the UCLA Extension.
Remember those “must-take classes” in college? UCLA’s Contracting for Cloud Computing Services is one on my list of those opportunities you cannot afford to ignore. My advice: Find your way to UCLA.
Again, I hope this can help as many people as possible understand the lessons taught in class. Due to the nature of the beast they are in no specific order. They are all top level concerns:
BACKGROUND
For over a generation traditional desktop PC vendors focused on features and price. Since the late 1980s schools established trust in vendor’s products to conduct business, educate students and store student data. From floppy disks to magnetic tape all data was stored locally on campus.
Today’s globalized internet marketplace is radically different when compared to the modem era of computing. The cloud computing model represents a number of fundamental shifts including Software as a Service(SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) are well established.
And although it’s a bit ahead on the radar we should not overlook the quickly emerging SuperComputer as a Service. While there is no standard acronym, there are established vendors like SGI’s Cyclone, Amazon’s Cluster Compute, IBM’s Watson, and with forthcoming merge between PiCloud and D-Wave‘s quantum computing….more options for High Performance Computing will be available to many smaller, lean and aggressive institutions.
These new services are directly tied to the “consumerization” of technology: advanced technologies at affordable price points. As a result the new focus is around access. The shift to mobile computing via netbooks, smartphones and tablets is well underway, yet many school’s do not have a sufficient wireless infrastructure. Students, faculty and administrators are today carrying a laptop, smartphone and probably an iPad. Schools are struggling to to handle bandwidth demands of so many devices in concentrated areas around campus, from the Student Union to the ResHalls.
IMHO the tipping point with Cloud computing and digital devices is the convenience of access. Today many diverse schools have a campus community that simply demands anytime/anywhere access to data. And it’s no longer just email and web. Its BIG data from data base research to the delivery of HD media. For better (or for worse) society has become trained to demand mobile solutions that easily integrate into the app economy and their mobile lifestyles.