Say “Bye Bye” To My Fear of Technology – Cascading Style Sheets

After nine weeks of blogging, here comes the final post giving you a last insight on information technology in a business world. At this time I am going to talk technological, more than ever. You might wonder about the incentives I as a female have by wanting to write about such dry, male- dominant field of study. It has a simple answer: The actual aim of this blog post is to overcome my personal fear of technology or as they say: “Don’t fear technology. It can be turned OFF!”

So why not simply jump into the pool full of data, commands, and web complexity. The first information I came across while cyber diving was the WebWork PowerPoint provided by my professor Dr. Bruce. It basically was an introduction to various topics such as databases, templates, and plug- inns. If having to write about something complicated, I was more than happy to have the possibility to choose. And if so, why not choosing something I feel quite comfortable with – Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)! In general, CSS is a powerful web tool used to describe the formatting of a document written in a markup language (HTML, XML), or as Philipp Lenssen in a Quick Guide to Web Development summarizes: “CSS are the way to layout a page“!

For some of you, it is already clear what is meant by it. For those who do not: this is my attempt of breaking it down into simple terms.

Let’s communicate economically!

Facebook, Instant Messenger, Skype, and Outlook – those are communication tools we are quite aware of nowadays since communication, respectively social communication, has turned out to be a centre element of our generation and the current Web 2.0. What I would like to do in this post today is to move the discussion on communication up to a business level.

The Sphere of Unified Communication Systems

Respectively I have to mention that over the past few years, a social technology called Unified Communications (UC) has evolved to provide powerful and affordable business communication capabilities. How does a Unified Communication system work?

It collects various real-time communication services such as telephony, instant messaging, and video conferencing with non real-time communication services such as e-mail, SMS and Fax.  In other words, UC transforms them into a unified communication interface. Just imagine you are in a business meeting: If a Fax is coming in at your office, you are not only able to receive the notification on your Smartphone or Laptop. You can also directly see what is written in the document. At the same time, you can rely on presence information to see who of your business partners currently is online. If necessary, a videoconference can be convened after the meeting.

Back to the roots of customer integrity

The topic I am writing about today will be all about a place we students know best – IKEA. More specifically, I am going to report about the self-checkout systems that can recently be found in stores. It must have been around March this year that I was having my first self-checkout experience. Just lovely!

So how does the system work? What you do is to collect all the items you want to buy, locate the self-checkout lane, pass the scanner over the bar code of the chosen item and wait for the on-screen prompts for payment method. It is actually quite simple to handle. Apparently, IKEA is not the only company believing in the service of self-checkout systems. Aura Sabadus, writing for the Financial Times, states that especially supermarkets increase self-checkouts.

“Supermarkets are aiming to double self-checkout tills within three years, spurred by improvements in technology and recession-induced cost cuts. About 15,000 will be in operation across UK stores in 2011, up from 7,000 last year.“

Now I started wondering why firms like IKEA decide to implement something that could be quite harmful in security matters. I will now try to find an answer to this by working through articles of the Retailer Magazine, founder and CEO of Trusted Advisor Associates Charles H. Green, and finally hobby blogger Roshan and Utpalja.

Let’s add some virtual spice to the real meal!

Over the past few weeks, I have been enjoying a fascinating travel throughout the world of information technologies. I met the green giant, tickled the green cloud, admired the magical 3D printer and refused to shoot the Tipp- Ex bear. I was more than enchanted by the plethora on revolutionary business ideas. It is for now that I want to explore something less materialistic but more visualized – Augmented Reality, or in short AR!

All that the service does is to enhance real world experience with digital information. At this, a physical real-world environment is perceived via a camera of a digital device. The device detects a visual code in order to translate and then layer information in forms of graphics, description fields or animations onto those real world objects.

Through the lens, the new trend of Video hiring!

Imagine this: Every now and then, CEO Baker needs to screen potential applicants for vacant job positions in his company. On his desk rests a huge pile of promising applications and he is more than eager about getting to know each one of them in personal. Still, he might not be able to interview those among the group of potential employees that are located elsewhere – may it be the near-by city or across the pond. What will he do?

This might be interesting for all of you IBMAN students. Have you ever imagined how YOUR job interview may look like? Would you be willing to pay 300 bugs for a flight ticket as author Ninja had to consider once (read more at Would you pay for a job interview?). Honestly, I would not. Respectively, CEO Baker would not want to pay either. What a twist, but here comes the answer: Skype!

Want new shoes? – I print you some.

We can almost call it Bergfest as we are working on our 5^th post of the current semester. Accordingly, I can resume that my field of interest has taken on an interesting form: Having been convinced about sticking to anything that is green (this might have been an act of coloring any possible, negative effect of information technologies), I suddenly found myself in the middle of a new discussion: Viral marketing. Let me tell you, this truly meant a lot considering marketing not really being of any interest to me. Even better, I actually had fun writing this blog post.

So there I was, stuck between the nostalgic and the experimental student which meant staying green or moving on. For this, I thank the news for the headline Trade Fair: LASER World of Photonics 2011 and the so- called 3D printer for having caught my attention. Let’s step into something innovative and futuristic!

How Tipp-Ex BEARs its teeth!

If it wasn’t for my colleague Irisng13 and her article about viral marketing, I might still be wandering in the greenish, cloudy nature of the Blogosphere. It is not that the muddle of futuristic IT inventions would have been too overwhelming (I surely will try to untangle them!) but today, I take the long way and have a digression into something less scientific but more fun – the tippexperience!

That is probably the moment you are simply not interested in facing once again an absurd campaign revealing nothing but thin air. Indeed, I am only presenting another viral campaign on YouTube, launched by Tipp- Ex last year. Still and strictly speaking, this campaign is anything else but thin air – you can actually touch and interact. Even better, you as the customer have the power to white out and change the future. This seems to be a near – miracle!

Shoot the bear or decide better

In this clip the hunter is asked to shoot a bear. He refuses and reaches out for the Tipp- Ex Pocket Mouse next to the YouTube player, literally crossing borders of visualization. Next he whitens out the word shoot (here we have the typical feature of a Tipp- Ex; a pretty smart link). The viewer is then asked to participate by substituting the word shoot by anything that sounds fancy. Soon we witness bear and hunter hugging, dancing, loving, and doing lots of less attractive things (room for imagination). If you haven’t seen it yet, you should go and “Shoot the Bear”.

“greenwashing” – A fairy tale of the green giant!

Once upon a time, there was a huge giant covered in a cloak of trees, playing with the clouds, roaming the woods and valleys, and listening to the harmonies of willows blowing softly in the wind; he surely beamed with joy and sereneness. He was kind, the green giant: He cropped little wind generators, played the strings of overhead power lines and arranged tidal power plants in the infinite vastness of the ocean.

It can be so easy to make big things happen. When you’re a giant!

 

New advertising campaign “RWE – the energy to lead”

This slogan belongs to the imagefilm production of the advertising agency Jung von Matt as part of RWE’s big budget advertising campaign in Europe. Indeed, I was more than astonished to hear about the big news: The energy giant intends to conquer the eco- friendly market, truly in the spirit of “RWE – the energy to lead”.

The Green Cloud – a clear vision or a dense fog?

After my recent post about Google’s attempt to eat Apple, I have been digging more and more into the sphere of the battle of IT giants, realizing that this topic is far more complex and intricate than expected. I soon was caught in the network and encountered ever more often following facts I need to portray first for elaborating purpose:

At first and this is well- known, (1) demand for energy- efficiency in future information and communication technologies ICT is constantly increasing. Since IT firms face higher energy costs as well as the need to reduce green house gas emissions, they now fight over the best energy- efficient technologies that decrease the overall energy consumption of computation, storage and communications.

Respectively, (2) Amazon has just launched the first cloud music service in March 2011.  Cloud computing has been a central element to IT geeks for a long time. Now breaking it down for the ordinary citizen: How does cloud computing work?

Before the era of cloud computing, music was usually saved on a computer’s storage system and processor. Now, music data is transferred to a remote data centre – the “cloud”, leaving users with an unlimited access to their data (compare this with the service of Dropbox). “Having access to your music on all your devices has to be the starting point of any next-generation music service and product,” says Mark Mulligan, an analyst at Forrester Research, ensuring Amazon a comparative advantage on the IT market.

The two stories seem to be chosen arbitrarily, but by combining them I suddenly arrived at a completely new matter of discussion – the Green Cloud computing!

Can a cloud ever be green?

Johannes Baumgarter, Managing Director Austria of Fujitsu Technology Solutions, revealed last week that companies embracing cloud computing can manage to cut maintenance costs by 60% and energy costs by 30%.

This must be true for any device with limited capacity for data storage. The only thing necessary is a browser. Any further information is provided by the cloud. It is generally called a user’s service as David Carerra, one of the directors of the Cloud Computing (CC) team, explains: “It (cloud computing) is a system of selling software as a service. It is not the same as what we do now – for example, download from Microsoft, pay the license and own the software.” If the application is finished, its data will be brought back into the cloud and the app will be removed from the user’s device. As Rod Tucker, leader of the University of Melbourne research team concludes: “In this way, the user device is kept simple, energy- efficient and cheap.”

Respectively, many firms try to optimize their data centre operations by reducing their servers, relying on data sets from the cloud and therefore making their organization truly energy efficient. Still, we should not confuse efficiency with eco friendliness!

Efficiency against eco friendliness

This means that when comparing the energy consumption of cloud- based services, one has to always take into account the energy used for any data transportation from the user into the cloud and back. As the US Environmental Protection Agency estimated, power consumption of data centres is expected to double up to 1 % of US greenhouse gas production by 2020. Environmentalists also criticize organizations such as Facebook that tries to optimize its data centres by generating energy via coal- burning power plants. Their argumentation of green computing is therefore rather paradox.

The struggle out of the fog

I think that an evolution of sustainability is irreversible and the trend towards cloud computing does provide a basis for future developments. Still and I agree with Jordi Torres, coordinator of the CC research team, “the problem is that the increase in energy requirements is exponential, and there are no signs of a change in this trend”. Therefore firms, as cloud computing becomes more widespread, should improve their energy extraction by focussing on natural resources as Google already does by its Atlantic Wind Connection. If research and development is continuously upgraded, Green IT might soon be seen as anything else than a dense fog.

A feast on the operating system market – Google eats Apple!

Are you familiar with those situations in which you are incredibly convinced that certain things must happen in near future?

Well, I do. And excited by the new insight, I floated my opinion at one of those convivial evenings. Although considering myself being a proud owner of a MacPro, I assured my friends that Apple will not hold its market leading position within the next, let us say, 15 years. Without a doubt, everyone thought it would be completely absurd. The more astonished I was when hearing about this rumor spreading around: Google eats Apple!

The battle of the top in a numerical way

Of course, we are not considering Apple’s well running music program iTunes or those diverse Apps available at the Apple Store. The focus here lies on the mobile operating systems. Respectively,statistics as seen below have proven that Google Android’s Web usage  market share is constantly increasing whereas leading giant Apple iOS lost almost 12% from April’09 to July’10. Without question, Apple and RIM Blackberry remain the Top smartphone manufacturers in the United States. Still, the two companies are constantly losing customers to Android phones, which gained momentum from 12% in April’10 to 17% in July’10.

From zero to hero – but how?

Main reason for success is the fact that Android is available, with the exception of brief update periods, under a free software/ open software license. Its OS is obtainable on various mid- range to top- class smartphones. Through its open approach to mobile computing, manufactures maximize the OS version fragmentation up to the point where they can meet different sizes and capabilities of devices.

Even the extensive offer on applications at Android’s market is facilitated by the open- source ideology. In contrast to the strictly regulated App Market of Apple, users are likely to download apps they are interested in. They have the possibility to chose.

Still, I have to admit that any deregulated free software market should claim some quality standards. Google reacted by introducing the Compatibility Definition Document, limiting users to use Google’s trademark unless being certified.

After all, I am convinced that Apple’s extensive control will eventually leave them left behind. Customers prefer the choice – on hardware, carrier, apps, content or experience.  It will only take a little time for them to realize how important choice and control can be. Therefore, if Apple does not react to the challenge and opens up to public, it will soon be left with a bitter after- taste … and I will win my bet!