Interesting facts about M2M

For people who have read about M2M or for who haven’t, this post will give an idea as to what the future holds when it comes to technology. M2M is a simple concept where two machines communicate to each other to achieve a common objective. The communication is done through complicated sensors that are installed in the machines. Here are some interesting user cases of M2m I found;

Entertainment
iLuminate essentially takes a simple M2M concept and turns it into art: dancers wear bodysuit and costumes that light up wirelessly to match the music and choreography. The difference with the iLuminate platform is that performers wear illuminated costumes that can be controlled without having to keep pressing buttons. Based on the sources they further said that, “the software's accuracy means cues can fire every 5 milliseconds, which is 1000 times faster than a human hand clicking a button.”

Home appliances
I think we’ve all seen this part of technology in future oriented movies where the entire household can be controlled by a click of a button. However in reality this kind of technology is coming true bit by bit. The introduction of Smart TV’s is one example. At a recent Consumer Electronics Show, LG has showcased a "Smart Refrigerator" prototype demonstrating various M2M-based "smart home technologies". One unique feature was a food management which allows consumers to check food items stored inside the fridge such as location and expiry dates via their smartphones or its built-in LCD panel. The appliance even recommends dishes that can be cooked using the ingredients that it happens to be storing. How convenient!! 

Big Data and the Telecom Industry

Mobile phones are already well on their way to replacing cameras, cash, tickets, calculators, maps, notepads and many more and they are becoming ubiquitous. Within the next five years smart phones are going to become the center of our world. The smart phone will start the car, make phone calls, check bank account balances, make payments and track locations. Literally people will not have to carry anything else but the smart phone. 

In the mobile network there are more than 6 billion mobile subscriptions in the world, and every day, 10 billion text messages are sent. Thus to facilitate great customer relationships, enterprises will want near real-time information on every kind of data emanating from consumer mobile devices in order to sharpen their understanding of consumer demographics and buying patterns. Not only enterprises, mobile operators can use these real time analytics in delivering a superior customer service. 

Based on a new IBM study on how telcos are using Big Data “85 percent of the respondents indicate that the use of information and analytics is creating a competitive advantage for them – a 124 percent increase in the last two years.” 

For example one of US major mobile operators is combining its customer record data with sentiment analysis where they are able to determine what type of people pass by a billboard at a particular time of day and what products they are interested in. This allows them to precisely target its billboard advertisements to the demographics.

What's so Big in Big Data?

Organizational leaders require analytics to exploit their growing data and computational power to be smart and get innovative in ways they never could before. Consider retailing for example. Physical bookstores could track which books they sold and which did not. They could tie some of those purchases to individual customers if they had a loyalty program. These bookstores had limited information and thus could not make informed decisions. Then the online shopping and e-commerce gained popularity moving transactions to the internet. This transformation resulted in businesses gaining better insights of who their customers are and their behavior. Now online retailers can not only track what they bought, but can gain information about what other items they looked at, how they were influenced by promotions and reviews. 

Every day business and consumer life creates 2.5 quintillion bytes of data so much that 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone. This data comes from everywhere: posts to social media sites, sensors used to gather climate information, purchase transaction records, and cell phone GPS signals to name a few. This data is called big data. 

Big data is more than gathering data; it is about finding useful insights that can be used by organizations in making decisions. Leaders across countries consider big data as a management revolution where enterprises analyze massive amounts of data to identify valuable information. Senior executives now prefer to run businesses on data-driven decisions. They require scenarios and simulations that will provide guidance on the best actions to take. 

Children and Mobile phones

I accidentally came across this research on mobile phones and children carried out by GSMA. The statistics of the research are particularly shocking for a person like me who finally managed to buy a Smartphone at the age of 23 (my current age). I will list down few of the most interesting statistics;

• 65% of all children surveyed currently use a mobile phone; of those, 81% have a new handset.
• 12 is the most common age for children to get their first mobile phone.
• Nearly 24% and 20% of children in Indonesia and India respectively, send over 51 messages a day.
• 70% of all children who use the internet through their phone access it at least once a day.
• 70% of children have met or started to communicate with ‘new friends’ online.
• Over 70% of parents have concerns about children’s mobile phone use, with viewing inappropriate sites and overuse sharing the highest percentage at around 82%.

Well, these were only the few stats I selected as interesting for me. To discuss more about the parental concern over mobile phone usage of children, it states that parents allow their kids to use mobile phones is for the purpose of staying in daily contact. As mentioned before 70% of the parents are concerned about their kids’ phone usage. Well, the first question that comes to my mind is “why do they give a phone to a 12 year old kid first of all”. Maybe I live in a culture of closely knit families where parents are constantly looking out for us, but I still don’t get it. 

As always there’s an upside and a downside to any situation. But in my opinion the downside of kids using mobile phones is far greater than the upside. Ok, I agree in a case of an emergency you can call your parents and let them know that everything’s alright but what about the negatives? When I go a friend’s house I tend to go out and play or do whatever. But the latest generation of kids has almost forgotten how to play. They go for a play date and end up playing games on their phone or iPad. They do not get any physical exercise and fall into the category of “children with diabetes or obesity”. 

How will it be in another 5 years time? Will kids come out of a mother’s womb holding a phone? or will they be so mobile phone literate that at the age of one they will know how to use their dad’s iPad?

Here is the link for the research I found. 

http://www.gsma.com/publicpolicy/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/GSMA_ChildrensMobilePhones2012WEB.pdf 

Benefits of using loyalty as a service

The benefits of using loyalty-as-a-service will not only be in financial terms but they will also be in the form of non financial long term benefits such as improved customer loyalty and satisfaction, strong referral market and excellent reputation.
Strategic and tactical benefits of Loyalty-as-a-service are;

Greater productivity
The business can benefit from superior productivity because the level of investment is inferior when compared to the output of the program. The output far outweighs the monthly payment or fee when adopting a loyalty-as-a-service platform. The capital expenditure and operating expenses will be significantly lower since the company will not be purchasing any dedicated hardware components for the program.

Differentiation
The organization can differentiate its loyalty program because it can address and reward customer needs real time with unlimited amount of flexibility to test and implement far more superior campaigns than its competitors. This is done because of the use of Cloud technology.

Integration with third parties
Loyalty-as-a-service has the capability to integrate with third parties when offering a loyalty program. For example in a points system the members can redeem points with selected merchants and this service can be used to integrate with such merchants and communicate with them. Moreover the amount of third parties can be extended based on the company’s requirement.

Loyalty as a service continued...

The loyalty program can be viewed as a service to the firm and this enables organizations to gain competitive advantage because the loyalty program will grow to be more robust, more creative, and more intuitive. Cloud services provide infinite amount of flexibility and this gives the businesses the capability to be more creative by testing different types of campaigns that appeal to its customers. Further, with the popularity of the program and growth, the firm can extend the capacity of its package without much effort. It also has the capability to connect to businesses’ backend systems and deliver real time campaigns. Real time campaign creation facilitates companies to identify a sudden change in consumer demand and modify its loyalty program to address such changes.

For example Virgin America provides just one example of how Cloud services can be used to create competitive differentiation through their frequent flyer program. Its frequent-flyer population of 1.8 million is the industry’s fastest growing at over 40 percent a year and they are also the most engaged.

Loyalty as a service

Businesses can use Cloud services to deliver new capabilities and experiences. The potential of Cloud based solutions is unlimited. Thus, IT savvy organizations seek to gain a competitive advantage by improving their efficiency and overall profitability. Cloud services can be used in numerous ways to improve customer care, information sharing, and sales transactions. Companies turn to loyalty program service providers for support across the loyalty value chain from program strategy, technology, and program management.


One way of delivering new experiences for both the customer and the business through the use of Cloud services is to adapt loyalty programs that are hosted in the Cloud. These are called as “loyalty-as-a-service”. Organizations can implement loyalty programs without the need for heavy infrastructure. All necessary hardware and software components will be hosted in the Cloud. Any business irrespective of the size can execute customer loyalty programs with the benefit of Cloud computing.
All features that are available under traditional rewards programs will be available under this Cloud based service. Firms which offer loyalty-as-a-service have different packages, and businesses can select the package most suitable for them. This will require the business to pay a small upfront payment together with a monthly fee for the continuation of the service.

More information in my next post.