In this blog I have been commenting on the battle among the personal digital assistants, specifically, Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri, and Samsung Viv. Up until recently, Alexa only spoke English, but its polyglot abilities have improved. It now speaks German and Japanese too. It is catching up with Google Assistant but still far behind Siri. Amazon Echo and Alexa had a strong international marketing push for the holidays, in over 80 countries. An unofficial number of devices sold in 2017 is 22 million, albeit the majority of them being the low-end Dot device. How do you think buyers in non-English speaking countries, and not in Germany or Japan, are using the speaker if they cannot speak to it? In its aggressive push to earn the trust of 3rd parties, Amazon in 2017 has pursued hardware manufactures to embed Alexa in their devices. Most notably BMW have announced a new skill for Alexa so you can use Alexa at home and in the car, if you own a recent BMW. That was last year. At this week CES show in Las Vegas, Amazon was in full force. Several hardware manufacturers announced Alexa-enabled speakers, alarm clocks, projectors, cameras, and appliances. Corbin Davenport reported the list here. And earlier this year, Amazon opened up Alexa’s voice recognition and NLP services by launching Amazon Lex, to allow 3rd parties build chatbots based on the same technology used by Alexa. The conversational aspects of chatbots built on the Lex platform, and their ability to retain context, only seem to surface in the context of which ‘slot’ a chatbot require. For example, a hotel booking chatbot must have an arrival date, checkout date, category, city, and price range. The conversation between the user and hotel booking chatbot built on Lex will only occur in the context of these slots. In their quest for fast market dominance, Amazon should not discount the reservations on user experience. While app reviews are not conclusive, they are indicative of user sentiment. In comparing the 2017 reviews, Google Assistant App reviews are 4.2 and 4.1 out of 5 stars, for Android and iOS, respectively. Alexa App reviews are 3.5 on Android and a mere 2.6 rating for the iOS version. We should expect Amazon to redirect some of their investments into making Alexa smarter and improve the user experience in 2018. Agile, Waterfall, or Hybrid?
If you happen to browse job ads and positions nowadays, you will come to realize that the most if not all companies use Agile development methodology. I have always wondered why make it such a prominent factor in the job requirements. It’s just a methodology and it's not like learning a new language. I’m not disputing the benefits of using Agile development but wondering if companies have become slave to a methodology. Agile development lets you build and see products coming to life gradually, instead of working heads down for months fearful that you may not ever see the finished product. It’s also easier with Agile development to take detours, make corrections, ask for feedback, adjust your aim along the way. But some companies still use the Waterfall methodology, and there are good reasons why Waterfall may still make sense today. Most common scenario: a program manager needs to provide and commit to a delivery date for a new product because the CFO, Marketing, or customers, need it to budget expenses, plan the launch, or fund the deployment. For a product or a new major release, how would the PM go by estimating a delivery date of something that is going to take 9, 12 months or longer, by executing the project in 2-week sprints and milestones? If they did commit, they would be just providing an informed guess with no plans to support it, and with a high risk of delivering something different than they had committed to. The Waterfall methodology has been used for years for this reason and forced the program managers to think through at the outset about product design, architecture, frameworks, resources, critical paths, and so forth. These are issues that one cannot think through one sprint at a time and then hope that it will all come together. But there is Waterfall and, what I call, Hybrid Waterfall. The Hybrid Waterfall is what I have used in these exact situations when confronted with a new product, or a major new release that replaced an existing architecture. Presentation or slideshow software allows anyone to illustrate concepts and topic overviews very quickly and simply. Microsoft® PowerPoint, Apple® Keynote, and Google® Slides are some of these popular software apps, with PowerPoint being the most common data format supported by all.
What if you want to engage your audience in virtual whiteboard sessions or want to poll them on particular topics or take their pulse on how well they are grasping your presentation? For example, trainers, instructors, and teachers need just that, and while they use presentation software to deliver learning content, its effectiveness is limited for its inability to engage the audience with interactive canvas slides or polls. These users have to resort to separate applications causing a non-ideal user experience for both trainers and trainees. The good news is that Microsoft and Google have opened up their presentation software, online version, to developers to create integrated systems that improve enormously that user experience. We created such a system at LiberCloud, where users could not just use Microsoft PowerPoint Online to author their presentation, we allowed them to integrate polls, surveys, and tests, as well as virtual whiteboards, in their online presentation. Please see this page for an overview of what and how we did it. In the age where many talent managers, educators, philosophers, and trainers have been advocating the adoption of flipped classroom training, blended learning techniques to improve assimilation of content. The main obstacles in these efforts are two-fold:
After an overview on how assessments policies have evolved, the white paper describes the facets of a new cohesive learning and assessment system to help educators implement differentiated instruction with assessments for learning, not just for grading, ultimately to achieve the goal of making sure trainees actually learn what is being taught. I introduced these concepts as guest speaker at the Assessment Tomorrow conference in London City in March 2016. A few years back I wrote a white paper documenting the effort and thoughts that went into building a first generation SaaS platform and subsequent upgrade. While new technologies have been introduced, SaaS is now widely accepted by most companies to deliver their services, and building a SaaS-based application has become increasingly easier, there are some aspects of our original effort that were unique. We developed our first SaaS platform because the traditional web application architecture was inadequate to meet our business objectives. We were in uncharted territory, and customers demanded that we would not mingle their data with other customers' data. So, a common thread in our releases was the isolation of customer data. Many customers today may require the same, for regulatory or privacy concerns, and I thought that by sharing the thoughts that went into designing the first generation SaaS platform and subsequent upgrade would benefit your efforts as well. Our first generation SaaS platform needed some basic components to improve the provisioning and configurability of the application. We needed:
After we launched the first generation platform, over the course of several months we had other important issues to tackle to ensure scalability of platform and scalability of the business processes revolving the operation of the entire SaaS platform. The most significant improvement being the decentralization of the database and ability to use Machine Learning:
Collaboration platforms have existed for years in two primary areas: to collaborate on content and to share presentations. The first is primarily used in content management systems, general purpose ones and those specific to learning, while the second is a function of web conferencing services. The two services serve the same audiences but rarely have intersected from a functional standpoint.
Here we want to make the case that the two could and should intersect, in particular in a modern working and learning environment where content is created by brainstorming, discussions, and assessments. The proposed integrated environment is a lightweight, cloud platform, based on the concepts of real-time collaboration on content and the “Virtual Whiteboard” that provides more flexibility, unleashes the attachment to any particular physical device, and is easy for anyone to use. This white paper provides an overview of its features. Today, we are showcasing LiberCloud at Bett London and announcing its official launch. I have been thinking of starting a blog detailing thoughts and events on technologies that have or will have an impact on our business and lives. This first post is about the ideas behind LiberCloud and the problems we are trying to solve.
The demands for reducing workforce skills gap and improve content assimilation are increasing and companies are faced with outdated processes and technologies to meet this challenge. Talent managers, trainers, and content developers have had to settle for narrow and outdated solutions to improve workforce skills, or for onboarding programs. For instance, instructor-led programs that did not scale, or self-paced programs that were not engaging. A new content platform is needed that combine the best of both methods. |
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