I came across this interview that was done by McKinsey with Coop Centrale CEO, Massimo Bongiovanni, as he explained IT’s role in the future of retailing. Cooperative Consumers Coop, better known as Coop, was Italy’s first retailer to embrace hypermarkets, in the 1980s, and then began opening even bigger superstore venues while expanding its offerings to include insurance and banking services, electricity, and prescription drugs. Throughout this expansion, Coop sought innovative ways to support its strategy with technology. The original interview can be found at Mckinsey Quarterly website.
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Doing business in today’s rapid change and globalized environment, we no longer can just depend on ordinary business principles. We need to constantly innovate to change the way we do business or face rivals who do so to offer superior value to their customers. Technology is an enabler for business innovation, and it’s probably the most accessible strategy to innovate the way how your business works. It’s a common myth that only large corporations and businesses that sell technologies need to innovate. In fact, in today’s marketplace, whether you are selling printers or flowers, you need to leverage on technology for honing your competitive edge, even more so for small businesses. But the question is: What technology is applicable to you? Which one is the best? Will they create more work and headaches for me?
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Most people when they think of starting their own business, earning a lot of money is probably their primary goal. Soon, they will realize that life is more than just money. In fact, the desire of earning big money no longer seems like an effective motivation to push them through their entrepreneurship journey. We often heard a lot of rosy stories from the newspaper or other media that some school dropout youngsters earned their first million dollar after two years of doing some online businesses or other fancy ideas. To be blunt, I think all these are sensational news. Though it does happened in reality, but it probably requires lots of luck. Statistically speaking, the success rate of startups is one out of ten.
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After months of hard work, Coconect.com was unveiled on 28 May 2011, launching their premier online services for helping their customers in building thriving customer relationships beyond the business transaction. Their vision was articulated clearly in their tagline, Putting the :) back in business. They had devised an innovative process to help their clients in nurturing sustainable customer relationship. Unlike those CRM software in the market, Coconect’s process was meticulously crafted to focus on the heart of customer relationship management, making sure that their services are smart yet simple, systemized yet flexible; and delivered with a lot of heart and fun!
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The construction industry has substantial socio-economic impact, both nationally and internationally. Yet, given the obvious importance of the industry, it is surprising that the general view of the industry is one that is resistant to change, inefficient and lagging behind most industries in terms of technology implementation. This is largely due to the nature of how the industry operates, and the relatively low awareness of technology capability among industry players. With globalization happening at such an immense pace, operational costs on the rise, and increasing demand for more quality and sophisticated buildings, we need better ways of doing business now. As already proven in other industries, technology can help small companies to act “big”, and help big companies to act “small”. Small construction firms can leverage on technologies to acquire some of the capabilities and market access of larger organizations, while large construction firms can use technologies to achieve some of the agility and responsiveness of small organizations.
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Due to the factor such as time, manpower and to meet the evolving requirement in software development, it is often not possible to include all the features users might need during the initial release of software. As an extensive software platform, it is imperative to provide a robust infrastructure where the services are always up-to-date and up-to-demand so that user requirements will be met as time goes. Software plug-in is a good mechanism to provide frequent update and encourage user contribution to improve the software. In order to ease the end-users of enhancing the software, a plug-in must be able to implement easily without extensive coding. The small plug-in file can then be downloaded by the users and ‘plug’ into the program to provide extended functionality to the software.
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The importance of software and technology in the course of business operations can never be put aside today. Technologies can make tasks easier and done more efficiently if implemented properly. However, hiring a software consultant can be a daunting task for many small and medium business owners, especially if they are not very familiar with technology or for those who do not have technical background.
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It has been exciting time for engineers and technologist, where we have been witnessing mushrooming numbers of young potential technology companies that are founded by engineers in these recent decades. Equipped with cutting edge technical know‐how, they are preparing to create the next big innovation with the dream of turning them into “Entrepreneur of the Year” or “Most Promising Start-Up of the Year” featured in BusinessWeek in the next 6 months. Little that they realize some personalities or “traits” that they possessed or are trained over the years as good engineers might put their business at stake.
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In this article, we present a simple approach for implementing a pulse analyzer for devices with limited computational power, such as mobile and wearable computers. The main purpose of this system is to continuously monitor the ECG of a person and detect any possible heart abnormalities. The idea is to break the required computation in two parts. The learning and model building part that requires high computation is done on a desktop computer. Once the model for a person is built, it uses a low computational cost signal analysis approach to analyze the signals in real-time. The system has been implemented on an IBM WatchPad, a wearable Linux computer designed as a watch. The experiments conducted show that the system produces reliable results. This approach can benefit the embedded systems in the medical domain, such as the personal health monitoring devices, etc.
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We begin the article by presenting a brief historical perspective on software development. We present the view of several software practitioners, who express different views on how software should be developed. Two major schools of thought in this context are presented: Software engineering and software craftsmanship. We will then see how agile and iterative development learns from the mistake of the flaw of the traditional Waterfall model in software development. We incorporate some of the best practices based on our experience and beliefs, inspired by a few famous agile and iterative development methods, in an attempt to formulate a well-rounded method. The article is concluded by presenting some interesting yet controversial views in agile and iterative development, such as the right team size, good estimation technique, and the debate on high tech or high touch approach. We also give some advice for a successful adoption and implementation of agile and iterative development.
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