Promote corporate creativity through arts

Creativity, once considered a much desired trait in arts and entertainment industry, is now of the one of the most sought out culture to develop in any industry. Companies spend millions of dollars to promote corporate culture of creativity by hiring external consultants. The importance of creativity in businesses can be judged from the following quotes of business visionaries.

"It's through curiosity and looking at opportunities in new ways that we've always mapped our path at Dell." – Michael Dell

"I've always been an optimist and I suppose that is rooted in my belief that the power of creativity and intelligence can make the world a better place." – Bill Gates

Leaders often place a value on "thinking out of the box." But if creativity is so important why do large and small companies find difficult to promote creativity and intelligence in their organization? One reason being organizational processes are intently designed to be routine chores with very less flexibility to deviate from the standard process. This helps organization to maintain the quality standard of their product or services. However, creativity requires chaotic and flexible environment.

As it is true with any trait, the development of creativity in any business setting should be approached with conscious effort and willingness to promote such environment. You need to create an atmosphere that fosters creativity. Many organizations have enclosed cubicles, bare walls, bland conference rooms, and semi-isolated employees. How can we expect people in this environment to think creatively for our organizations?

So what can companies do to improve this most critical element called creativity? It is amazing how much can be done with a relatively small investment.

Instead of commissioning lot of resources to understand the ways of promoting creativity at workplace, corporates can do much better with far lesser resources. One such example would be to replace standard corporate posters in conference rooms, hallways and offices with beautiful oil paintings. Another good way to create creative environment is to invest in a simple sound system that plays classical music. If this is inappropriate in some work zones, designate break rooms and conference rooms for music.

The ability to think creatively should not be the sole responsibility of the leader or CEO of the business. This function could be shared by all and by doing so increase the productivity of any company. The steps listed above are simple to take and require a relatively small investment. It's vitally important to enjoy this process and let your own creativity dictate the application of these steps.

Arts and Technology

Everyone has its own style of decorating house, but only few people take interest

and put an extra effort to find what are best options available in the market.

People who has unique taste in artwork select the best and pricey canvas

paintings for their walls. Expensive art work not always looks good on the walls.

People who don’t have the inclination or taste in artwork have plenty of options

in terms of where they want to buy their masterpiece. However, it will take much

time to visit the store and sort out available patterns of canvas art, put the

options on desk, and decide on art work to buy.

Often times we dont know how important it is to put suitable wall paintings at

home. It is quite necessary to put the right objects on right walls. The right

painting at the right place not only provide satisfaction and site of relief but

also add to the visual appeal of the walls and the home.

Classic patterns of wall art prints can be better choice if you don’t have time

to choose from large collection. It is my opinion to spare some time at online

art galleries and find best available patterns. There are multiple choices we

have when it comes to selection of wall art; it can be geometric design of wall

art for kid’s room, or iconic or floral print for living room walls. You will

manage to decorate home in style different from others.

When it comes to selection of pattern which will suit your walls, then the mind

shifts again, how can we find what is the perfect combination of colors for home

decoration. This require lot of mix and match of available patterns with the wall

color. At some point it become really difficult to comprehend which art patterns

look good on which color. Make it simple, imagine that your walls are white

painted then perfect combination will be any painting with dark and bold

background. Dark and bold color painting will enhance the art work on the light

background. This is where technology comes to rescue from inherent limitation of

human mind. Without any limitation, technology can help us to visualize how the

art piece will appear when superimposed on different color walls. Match the art

color along with frame and mat designs that suits with the wall color, as it is

determining factor after applying a wall art at your home.

At Perfectbazaar.com we have developed framing module that provides customers

with the option to customize the appearance of their wall art. Customers can

choose from a wide variety of high-quality frames, mats, and finishes. You can

even customize the frames and mats that match the color of home wall. These

services produce beautiful, well-crafted framed art pieces at significant savings

over local frame shops.

Apple effort to build network effects around its products

The other day I was musing about how Apple's recently released FaceTime software will do to Apple's impressive product line. The potential is huge. There's no mystery as to what Apple is up to strategically.

Right now, FaceTime is a closed system: Both parties need an iPhone 4 and WiFi to use it. Apple is encouraging both parties to get iPhone 4s, iPad, iTouch and now Macs that so they can use it. If the pitch works and people like the service, FaceTime will be yet another major asset in Apple's desire to build a closed system that benefits from strong network effects and a huge barrier to entry.

Closed systems with network effects are hard to build because consumers and competitors prefer the convenience of open platforms. When you can successfully build closed systems, however, they make awesome businesses. The more people who use Apple products, the more valuable the product gets, and the harder it is for competitors to break in and offer another viable choice. Thus, as the network effects really kick in, Apple will easily gains more market share by selling more hardware.

FaceTime not only adds to the many features that makes Apple's current product offering the strongest in its history. But it also has the potential to increase the stickiness of the platform exponentially. The jury is still out on whether Apple's new FaceTime iPhone video chat will be the next big thing or just another cool feature that no one use. Only time will tell.

Hot jobs for next decade

What if I say that next big career opportunities lies in the field of Predictive Analytics. (Part of data mining) Sound strange! isn't it.

Some facts that I think will help to shape my argument.

This decade have witnessed a huge investment by corporates in building dataware houses to collect different types of enterprise data, most importantly customer data. These corporates are now sitting on huge pile of data without knowing what to do with this. Companies are now coming to realization that they can use this data to understand the needs of its customer and tailor their product offering based on users needs. In lack of thorough understanding of customer needs, most companies target the customer segment that is big enough to keep their manufacturing plants running at full capacity. However with advancement in technology and manufacturing capabilities it is possible to customize the products to the unique needs of individual customer without substantially increasing the cost. Nike with its NIKEiD is already giving an option to customers to customize their shoes. Similarly computers companies such as Dell, HP are giving an option to their online customers to customize the computers based on individual requirements. This micro-segmentation require knowledge about the customer requirement that can be mined from the data stored in enterprise databases. This is where predictive modeling tools using statistics comes into picture. These tools will help companies to identify the new market trends from the data. Based on these trends companies can change or develop new products to capture the unmet market demand, thus maintaining the competitive advantage over its rivals.

Predictive analytics is an emerging field. People who have advanced mathematics and statistics degrees will be at forefront of this revolution. Even better, mathematicians and statistician with domain knowledge in industry such as retailing, banking etc will sell like hot cakes in next decade.

Helping Businesses with Web 2.0

Over the last few years, using a combination of technology investments and process re-engineering, companies have substantially raised the productivity of transactional processes. Companies today are sitting on vast and unexplored surplus of intellectual capital of its workforce. This surplus can be tapped and exploited from the use of innovative participatory tools such as Web 2.0. Corporate leaders who are eager to find new ways to constantly innovate the business model in dynamic environment might find the use of such technologies quite useful. Web 2.0 promises further gains, although the capabilities differ from those of past technologies.

Issues surrounding business implementation of web 2.0

Top down organizational culture – Most of the companies in today’s world follow the top down approach in implementing a business process. Upper management sometimes believes the technologies will be adopted without management intervention. This approach might not work in the organizations where decisions making responsibilities fall with the top management. Participatory technologies such as Web 2.0 are founded upon bottom-up involvement from frontline workers.

Perceive value from web 2.0 - Earlier IT campaigns, focusing on identifying and prioritizing the applications that would generate the greatest business value, was relatively easy. These applications focused primarily on improving the effectiveness and efficiency of known business processes within functional divisions (for example, supply-chain management software to improve coordination across the network). By contrast, the value generated from web 2.0 tools cannot be perceived immediately, thus placing a bottleneck in its successful implementation.

Disconnection from regular work – Most of the time in an organization, Web 2.0 often considered separate from mainstream work. Thus, using Web 2.0 and participating in online work communities often becomes just another task on an already busy list of tasks. Participatory technologies have the highest chance of success when incorporated into a user's daily workflow.

Performance incentives - Traditional management incentives such as variable allowance, promotion etc aren't particularly useful in encouraging participation from the workers. In traditional technological platforms, the failure of employees to use particular application may affect its performance appraisal. The same evaluation criteria if imposed with participatory technologies often results in low quality outputs from employees. One of the more active approaches to unlock participation of good quality is to recognize the user desire to recognition. This can be done by bolstering the reputation of participants in relevant communities, rewarding enthusiasm, or acknowledging the quality and usefulness of contributions.

Identify the right participants – Another important issue to increase the quality of participation is identifying the right persons. Targeting users who can create a critical mass for participation as well as add value is key to success. Without the right base, efforts are often ineffective. To select users who will help drive a self-sustaining effort, the companies can target technology-savvy and respected opinion leaders within the organization.

The successful implementation of web 2.0 tools in the organization depends how successfully companies can overcome above issues and develop strategies that enhances user participation. Encouraging participation calls for new approaches that break with the methods used in the past by companies.

Google secret sauce

There is lot of argument about enormous power that Google has in organizing and displaying the information on its website. It enjoys tremendous power to make and break online businesses. Through its proprietary algorithm that determines which web pages show up in top spot in its search result, Google can drive lot of traffic to other websites. On other side a slight change in its secret recipe will send entire website into oblivion.

Google considerable power also stirs resentment and doubt over the way it is exploiting its monopolistic power. It has massive control over so many companies that rely on internet for driving sales. Moreover, thinkers have started to worry that Google will directly compete with some of it businesses that it helped to become part of mainstream economy during internet boom such as online shopping sites. Google move into specialized services such as travel are stirring wider concern from online travel websites such as Expedia, Priceline. These services are a part of new approach that company adopted in 2007 known as Universal Search. Online retailers are concerned that Google will favor some of its services over their businesses thus driving away traffic from their websites. So much are the concern that thinkers have coined the term "search neutral" on similar lines as "net neutrality" that is applicable to telecommunication and cable companies. The frustration of the businesses arises mostly due to the fact they have not completely mastered the technique to nail the search technology that drive their sales. In this respect Google search technology is not completely transparent to its users.

I think of the above issues more from different prospective. Google (or other competitors) will loose its relevance in this competitive world if they have to reveal the nitty gritty of their search algorithms. The competitors in this situation will quickly replicate Google technology, reducing the competitive advantage that made its technology command leading position in search. Abuse would be another problem that comes if the search engines disclose their algorithms or if they have to use standardized algorithms. Spammer would use that knowledge to game the system.

As always companies have plenty of arguments to defend its activities and business models. Google argues that its search results are the product of objectives rules for filtering web pages. The further argument is that the main aim of Google search using its own services is that it is quick and provides a more relevant answer to users questions. I can buy the argument as long as I am getting the most relevant results of my search queries and there are no other more relevant results on internet. But this argument is flawed because how can one be sure that there are more relevant results on internet if they keep seeing the results from Google own services.

Furthermore, in my opinion constant changes in search technology are required as long those changes are transparent and don’t cause the complete shift in traffic pattern. The web is more complex than it was ten years ago. New media types such as social networks, tweets, audio streams, and pictures have added to the complexity of the search. In this changed scenario it is important to experiment with the new technology and changes in the search algorithm are warranted to make the search relevant with current times. Another strong argument is that it is these small changes that make Google search different from Bing or Yahoo search. Without these innovations, search will become the commodity creating a disincentive for companies to find new and innovative ways to seek out the best answers on an increasingly complex web.

In summary, businesses need to adjust their expectation of what they expect from Google. Static search technology is not in the interest of business because of dynamic nature web. Moreover, businesses cannot expect Google to open its core technologies for public scrutiny because those technologies are an essence of its survival. Google on the other hand has to walk a fine line in deciding on what services they can offer so that they do not directly compete with businesses that provided the advertising revenues in the past. Moreover, they should actively engage online businesses in teaching how the Google technology works and how to optimize their websites with the new changes. This is essential if Google wants to grow its platform. It remains to be seen if two sides can maintain harmonious relationship.

Content moderation: A necessary evil for publishers

People everywhere are getting together via the Internet in unprecedented ways. Millions create content, inform each other about global issues, and build new communications channels in a connected, always-on society. The rise of user-generated journalism is generally attributed to blogs. Users and readers want to be heard. They want to influence what they are reading. Unfortunately this revolution in user generated content means that not all information on the Internet is suitable for all of its users. While many companies maintain high standards of decency and refuse to allow any indecent material on their computer network, not all companies have the capabilities to do so. Internet malcontents have turned too many of the “group sites” into cyber‐graffiti walls, filled with offensive comments. Malcontent on the websites threaten to spoil the members’ experience on the websites.

Publishers and blog owners are looking for ways to effectively monitor the content on their websites. Effective monitoring not only maintains the editorial standard of the publishing house but also positively engages users on the website. As the market for user-generated content set to rocket over the next few years, the important question for publishers and advertisers remains: how best to monetize the rapid growth and demand in user generated content whilst ensuring a brand-safe environment?

The importance of this market, in comparison to the traditional advertising market is clear. As budgets tighten due to global financial uncertainties, brand marketers are looking to maximize the ROI potential of social media ahead of other digital media channels. Rich media such as user-generated content that is uploaded and viewed from social media communities is going to be a major global trend for brands to adopt and commercialize, and for advertisers to take advantage of in terms of reaching new audiences. Indeed, for any user generated content to be of significant value to the advertising community it is absolutely critical that the environment is moderated and therefore, brand safe. Moving forward, the owners/publishers of social media and social networking sites should be compelled to take responsibility for the content that is displayed on their sites, especially if effective monetization is a business aim.

Major enterprise publishers will look to harness this potentially, highly lucrative revenue opportunity. Every major brand will create and manage its own digital community where every consumer will be able to share their voice. However, the potential of this demand will only be realized if advertisers can be assured that their brand is safe within the user generated content market.