In the Internet of Things (IoT), more and more data processing done by processors and memory is being moved to distributed, low power nodes, and since we reduce the dynamic power required by these nodes, we will have a role to play in the design of these IoT nodes.
We produce products that enable substantial power reduction and consequent component area, BOM, and operational expense reduction in customer systems at the System, PCB, and IC levels of circuit integration. The CurrentRF products can be added to existing customer designs (no customer re-design needed) or at the time of initial design. The CurrentRF products can and should be used in conjunction with existing, standard power reduction techniques, in that they enhance, not interfere with, the said, existing standard power reduction techniques.

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HP analyzes its own vast data warehouses to derive new insights for its global operations, extensive supply chain, sales organization, global marketing groups, and customers.

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This week I had the good fortune of spending time in Lisbon, Portugal. I met with several hundred business men and women at a mobility event in Microsoft’s auditorium in Lisbon, at banks and with mobile network operators where we discussed digital transformation, enterprise mobility, IoT and mobile strategies. In preparation for these discussions I did some homework. Here is what I learned about Portuguese history and how it relates to digital transformation and enterprise mobility.
The Portuguese developed innovative sailing technologies and navigational skills in the 15th-century that enabled ocean-going ventures, where before most ships stayed within sight of land or took very short excursions. Portugal’s Vasco da Gama (among others), using these innovations and skills, sailed south and east and ultimately reached India in 1498.

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Each of the G20 member countries outlined a Comprehensive Growth Strategy at the recent G20 Summit in Brisbane, Australia. One of the more aggressive plans comes from Brazil, which has pledged to train 12 million young people in technical areas by 2018.

The program is called Pronatec, and is administered by the Ministries of Labor and Education jointly with local councils. The program has actually been in effect since 2011, already reaching 8 million students, according to the report. It targets an additional 4 million students over the next four years. Its cost was listed as more than US$6 billion.

Pronatec is focused on many technical areas, including manufacturing, the chemical industry, and construction. It is designed to complement other job training programs in Brazil, one of which has been in existence since 1991 and is focused on serving tens of millions of rural citizens.

The Overall Challenge
Brazil’s size and population ensure that its development challenges remain formidable. It land area is larger than that of the continental United States — its vast Amazon rain forest covers 40% of that area – and its population of more than 200 million is about two-thirds that of the US.

Our research at the Tau Institute shows the challenge facing Brazil to develop its ICT environment to be in the middle of the pack globally. It is roughly in the same boat with its regional sibling Mexico, and with Thailand a continent away.

Subjectively speaking, this result surprises me. I’ve been critical of Brazil’s standing within our rankings, thinking that given the vast attention its received as a BRIC nation and its foreign direct investment of more than $600 billion annually that it should perform even better.

Go For It
It’s heartening to see its long-running commitment to technical development. But we think the country would benefit further from explicit commitments to building its underlying ICT infrastructure, to improve such key metrics as Internet access rates and average connection speed.

If the country can increase its commitment to ICT more explicitly – and its G20 report listed a commitment to telco only of just $1.27 billion – perhaps the country will, in fact, emerge as a true economic giant some day. As of now, it ranks seventh in the world, slightly ahead of Russia and slightly behind the UK.

An aggressive, explicit commitment to ICT will, we believe, decrease the country’s still-high level of income disparity, and will increase its government transparency will increase, thus also lowering an accompanying perception of corruption.

There is a network effect to improving a nation’s ICT ecosystem, and Brazil could benefit more than any other nation in the Americas from a commitment to ICT that matches its commitment to technical education.

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Infrastructure has provided the path to increase commerce and trade for over 5,000 years. It has created trade routes by overcoming natural obstacles ranging from spanning rivers and gorges, to providing access by land (roads and railroads), sea (docks and ports) and air (airports) to places which we want to do business with.
Today, trade routes have become electronic. Broadband connectivity has created a new layer of infrastructure within the “Platform for Commerce.”
Many educational institutions lag behind offering solutions to what is needed to solve today’s, as well as tomorrow’s, business problems tied to infrastructure. Traditional approaches and curricula at these organizations provide answers that do not satisfy today’s questions. As I say in my book, “21st century problems cannot be solved with 20th century solutions.”

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In her General Session at 15th Cloud Expo, Anne Plese, Senior Consultant, Cloud Product Marketing, at Verizon Enterprise, focused on finding the right mix of renting vs. buying Oracle capacity to scale to meet business demands, and offer validated Oracle database TCO models for Oracle development and testing environments.
Anne Plese is a marketing and technology enthusiast/realist with over 19+ years in high tech. At Verizon Enterprise, she focuses on driving growth for the Verizon Cloud platform globally. Previous to Verizon, Anne spent over 10 years with Cisco. There she was focused on growing Cisco’s global data center and cloud revenue, and boosting market awareness and affinity for Cisco data center solutions within the Enterprise and Commercial market segments.

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There are many important characteristics of great leaders. Team players, good listeners and visionary are clear hallmarks. But being ambidextrous is required now more than ever. Ambidextrous leadership is a balanced approach where flexible leadership behaviors that lead to better business outcomes are the rule.

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In late August, voke, Inc. debuted its “Market Snapshot Report: Virtual and Cloud-Based Labs,” about how companies of all sizes and levels of testing sophistication view, use and benefit from virtual and cloud-based development and testing technologies. The results were pretty amazing―even we were surprised!

Among the many benefits the 503 participant companies (50% of which were U.S. based) cited, 53% saw reduced CAPEX (capital expenditures) from the use of virtual and cloud-based labs. Thirty-nine percent said they help eliminate defects prior to production, and 33% said they improve audits and compliance. Of course, the biggest benefit (58%) was on-demand access to environments, which we see as a primary reason why many organizations adopt virtual and/or cloud-based testing, either alone or in combination with on-premise, physical testing.

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The annual G20 summit, held this year in Brisbane, Australia, has concluded. It follows by a week the conclusion of the 15th Cloud Expo and 3rd @ThingsExpo in Santa Clara, CA.

I could argue that the latter events are more significant than the G20 summit.

To be sure, there is nothing of more importance in the short term than a meeting of the top leaders of the world’s largest nations. Imagine being able to namedrop Obama, Putin, Xi, Merkel, Cameron and others from your recent Australian holiday. Imagine further that your little conclave included the heads of other very large nations from Asia Pacific, South America, and Africa.

It’s In Our Hands
But the longer term is to a large degree in the hands of technologists. There are 3 trillion dollars spent worldwide on information technology and telecommunications, representing about 4 percent of the global economy and driving most of the other 96 percent.

It is technology, particularly the cloud computing, Big Data & analytics, and IoT things that will underpin any great gains in energy use, healthcare and food, transportation, and government improvements over the coming decades. Politicians come and go, but technology is steadfast.

This G20 summit was noted for various public scoldings given to Russian President Vladimir Putin by Western leaders. A little bit of that apparently went a long way for him, as he decided to leave for home before the summit officially concluded so that he could catch up on his sleep and put a full day in the office after the wild week-end.

Significant as the contretemps may prove to be, there are thousands upon thousands of people among the G20 governments who will be working on implementing the thousands upon thousands of words in the official documents that have emanated from the summit.

But…
Here’s the problem: technology isn’t mentioned in those documents.

Each of the G20 members has published a Comprehensive Growth Strategy document and an Employment Plan document. The goal is to add an additional 2 percentage points to the global GDP – about $1.5 trillion – over the next few years. The G20 members further believe their activities will create positive “spillover” effects to the rest of the world.

The efforts are focused on macroeconomic levers – mostly setting interest rates – and generally accepted worthy goals such as increasing trade, reducing bureaucratic impediments, bringing more women into the workforce, educating young people, and improving basic infrastructure. Private-public partnerships, the holy grail of government planning today, is mentioned. Ritual commitments to bolstering small and medium businesses are proferred.

The lack of specific commitment to information technology reflects a reality that almost four decades after the PC revolution was launched, there is a disconnect between technology and government, and a lack of technological understanding by politicians worldwide.

We Must Understand
The technology industry at all levels must appreciate that what often appear to them as obtuse, strutting buffoons are in fact the people who are running the world. They have power.

If the Russians want to station some fierce naval warships off the coast of Australia to accompany their leader’s arrival, they can. If the House of Saudi tires of a plunging oil price and wants to manipulate it, it can. If the leader of Canada wants to get into the face of one of the two most powerful people in the world and tell him to bug out of Ukraine, he can.

Steve Jobs’s un-ironic goal of denting the universe carries no weight among a G20 crowd that dent almost anything it wants to here on Planet Earth.

Our Research
Our research at the Tau Institute over the past few years has created a unique look at the nations of the world and how they have committed to information technology on a relative basis. We show which countries are doing the most with what they have, and which countries lead among their peers by region and income tier.

Among the G20, South Korea is the clear leader. South Korea leads the world, in fact. New Zealand is not an official G20 country but was represented in Brisbane as part of an informal ANZAC hosting of the summit. New Zealand finishes number two in our global rankings.

Other countries that do very well in our rankings among the G20 include the UK, Germany, Canada, Japan, and Australia. The US could do better on a relative basis, as could the rest of the G20 nations. There is promise and potential for all in this group, as well as among all the 103 nations that we survey.

Act
With luck, the world geopolitical situation won’t become more tense after the tense week-end in Brisbane. Government staffs will go back to work, lip service will be paid to many of the Brisbane commitments, but real change will be effected as well. In particular, the Brisbane documents cite energy efficiency and distribution as a key goal, and much of the wording reads like a blueprint for IoT implementation.

I’ll report more on specific country plans over the next few weeks. Meanwhile, the technology industry ignores politicians at our mutual peril, and we must be clear about how serious, explicit commitments to information technology will be the key to the G20 approaching and reaching its ambitious economic development goals.

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Life is difficult. Business life is sometimes argued to be even more difficult. If nothing else, business life is as socially complex as life itself.
This truism obviously means that there are different business types – but different in regard to what? Separating the old and the new is good way to look at how the family tree breaks down.
At one end of the spectrum we find the old languid non-transformative company (or user) who fails to grasp new digital information empowerment – and at the other end we find the true digital native. But the space in between is populated by a degree of other behavioural types.

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