[Wed Dec 24 15:53:03 CST 2014]

ComputerWorld published sometime ago an article on the Internet of Things (IoT) that I found interesting. Explaining the main thesis of a paper published by Michael Porter, an economist at the Harvard Business School, the article states:

In the past 50 years, IT has delivered two major transformations or "waves," as the authors describe it. The first came in the 1960s and 1970s, with IT-enabled process automation, computer-aided design and manufacturing resource planning. The second was the Internet and everything it delivered. The third is IoT.

What is this Internet of Things? It basically refers to the interconnection of computing devices using the Internet. So, for example, a smart thermostat and other home appliances (e.g., a fridge or a dryer) could be connected to allow remote monitoring by their owner. Likewise, it'd be just as easy to put together an application that will automate the monitoring and, once a given threshold is passed, notify the owner. It's difficult to tell whether or not this will truly be the next wave in IT, but it sure shouldn't surprise us. It definitely sounds like it is the most logical next step. I'd go a step further, and state that, once we manage to interconnect all these devices and components, the use of applications to manage big data could bring about big returns in efficiency. What I have in mind is something quite similar to the science fiction scenarios that we have seen here and there in the past few decades. Anything from self-regulated temperature at home to intelligent traffic lights or learning systems that realize whether or not the student is struggling with a particular concept. {link to this entry}

[Wed Dec 24 15:38:44 CST 2014]

Sometime ago, I came across an article published on ComputerWorld that included an analysis on how iOS users buy more using their mobile devices than Android users:

According to IBM, iOS-derived online sales accounted for 22% of the total online sales for Thanksgiving and Black Friday in the U.S., nearly four times that of Android's 6%.

Adobe's numbers were of a different cast: Of the 29% of sales tagged to online on Thanksgiving and 27% on Black Friday, iOS users drove 79% of mobile sales revenue while Android users generated 21% -- an almost-four-fold edge to the former.

The dominance of iOS on mobile sales generation was in contrast to its second-place status in ownership share among U.S. consumers. By comScore's latest data, Android powers 52% of all smartphones, iOS 42%.

As the author of the article says, it's hardly surprising. Yes, Android has a larger market share, but it's no secret that iOS users tend to be more affluent, and therefore have more disposable income to buy things. As a matter of fact, the reason why quite a few people prefer to buy Android products is precisely because they are cheaper, offering a comparable set of features and capabilities at a lower price. Additionally, I'd say a good part of those who buy Apple products are more willing to pay a premium price for a sense of belonging to a particular user community that they identify with a given style. Or, to put it a different way, they are more willing to pay more in order to be identified with certain values (creativity, innovation, the coolness factor...) that they appreciate. My guess is that this is a correlation without causation. Chances are we'd see a similar correlation between online purchases and the consumption of certain cultural products and other lifestyle choices that are also linked to a higher income bracket. {link to this entry}

[Wed Dec 24 12:19:34 CST 2014]

Difficult as it may be to believe, I had not heard of IE Tab until quite recently. It's an extension to the Firefox and Chrome browsers that will allow you to view pages using the Microsoft Internet Explorer layout engine. Not only does the extension allow those other browsers to display as if they had been opened with MSIE, but the pages that are viewed using it are also recorded in the usual MSIE history and cache files. It's quite useful when one has no choice but to visit certain websites that were designed only with MSIE in mind, even though one's preferred browser is something else. {link to this entry}