Psychodynamics: Are We Smarter Than The Device?

29th of November, 2017 / / No Comments

PhonePeople

How did you know about this blog post?

It’s likely that you were notified by your smartphone or device, the notification itself as a part of trundle that you’re figuratively swiping left in-between email reminders about upcoming events and direct messages from your favourite social media. Or you were trawling your usual network feeds for updates to catch your attention.
Now if you were to time the window in which you check your smart device again for notifications, new messages or general updates, I’d bet that this window would be within a minute or just outside of it, and would require no prompting whatsoever… much like, say, breathing?… [Keep reading] “Psychodynamics: Are We Smarter Than The Device?”

A quick start guide for Deploying and Configuring Node-RED as an Azure WebApp

7th of November, 2017 / / No Comments

Introduction

I’ve been experimenting and messing around with IoT devices for well over 10 years. Back then it wasn’t called IoT, and it was very much a build it and write it yourself approach.
Fast forward to 2017 and you can buy a microprocessor for a couple of dollars that includes WiFi. Environmental sensors are available for another couple of dollars and we can start to publish environmental telemetry without having to build circuitry and develop code.… [Keep reading] “A quick start guide for Deploying and Configuring Node-RED as an Azure WebApp”

How to use a Powershell Azure Function to Tweet IoT environment data

29th of November, 2016 / / No Comments

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/76015/BlogImages/FunctionIOTWeather/Azure%20Function%20Twitter.png

Overview

This blog post details how to use a Powershell Azure Function App to get information from a RestAPI and send a social media update.
The data can come from anywhere, and in the case of this example I’m getting the data from WioLink IoT Sensors. This builds upon my previous post here that details using Powershell to get environmental information and put it in Power BI.  Essentially the difference in this post is outputting the manipulated data to social media (Twitter) whilst still using a TimerTrigger Powershell Azure Function App to perform the work and leverage the “serverless” Azure Functions model.… [Keep reading] “How to use a Powershell Azure Function to Tweet IoT environment data”

How to use a Powershell Azure Function App to get RestAPI IoT data into Power BI for Visualization

29th of November, 2016 / / No Comments

Overview

This blog post details using a Powershell Azure Function App to get IoT data from a RestAPI and update a table in Power BI with that data for visualization.
The data can come from anywhere, however in the case of this post I’m getting the data from WioLink IoT Sensors. This builds upon my previous post here that details using Powershell to get environmental information and put it in Power BI.  Essentially the major change is to use a TimerTrigger Azure Function to perform the work and leverage the “serverless” Azure Functions model.… [Keep reading] “How to use a Powershell Azure Function App to get RestAPI IoT data into Power BI for Visualization”

Why user experience matters

15th of September, 2016 / / No Comments

User Experience is a means to drive product innovation and differentiation. When implemented successfully, UX contributes to a number of critical business key performance indicators including customer engagement, retention, and loyalty.

Over the last two decades, most of the fortune 500 companies have come to the realisation that UX is an integral part of their business success. In his 2016 Design In Tech report, John Maeda suggests:

A good User Experience matters a lot, because we experience digital products a lot

Furthermore, the report (illustration below) uncovers that:

  • 89% of companies believe that customer experience will be their primary basis for competition —Gartner
  • 81% of executives surveyed place the personalised experience in their top three priorities for their organisation — Accenture
  • 90% of executives surveyed agreed that customer experience and engagement are objectives of their corporation’s digital strategy — MIT Sloan/Deloitte
  • Customers are 6 times more likely to buy with a positive emotional experience, 12 times more likely to recommend the company, and 5 times more likely to forgive a mistake — Temkin Group
 tech-report

UX improves the overall customer experience

UX is a critical part of CX.

… [Keep reading] “Why user experience matters”

Customer Experience Vs. User Experience

13th of September, 2016 / / 3 Comments

I was in a design meet-up a couple of weeks ago where I heard someone saying this – CX is the same as UX. And to my surprise, there were about a dozen of people who nodded (in agreement) to this statement. Now, this is where I lose my fuse!

As design professionals, it’s imperative for us to learn the difference between Customer Experience and User Experience.

User Experience is everything that affects a user’s behaviour and interaction with a product or service.

… [Keep reading] “Customer Experience Vs. User Experience”

Leveraging the PowerBI Beta API for creating PowerBI Tables with Relationships via PowerShell

31st of August, 2016 / / No Comments

If anyone actually reads my posts you will have noticed that I’ve been on a bit of a deep dive into PowerBI and how I can use it to provide visualisation of data from Microsoft Identity Manager (here via CSV, and here via API). One point I noticed going direct to PowerBI via the API (v1.0) though was how it is not possible to provide relationships (joins) between tables within datasets (you can via PowerBI Desktop).… [Keep reading] “Leveraging the PowerBI Beta API for creating PowerBI Tables with Relationships via PowerShell”

Using Microsoft Azure Table Service REST API to collect data samples

9th of June, 2016 / / No Comments

Sometimes we need a simple solution that requires collecting data from multiple sources. The sources of data can be IoT devices or systems working on different platforms and in different places. Traditionally, integrators start thinking about implementation of a custom centralised REST API with some database repository. This solution can take days to implement and test, it is very expensive and requires hosting, maintenance, and support. However, in many cases, it is not needed at all.… [Keep reading] “Using Microsoft Azure Table Service REST API to collect data samples”

Windows 10 – First Look: Scaling on the Surface Pro 3

10th of June, 2015 / / 2 Comments

As a fellow Surface user, I love my device.

The surface is a great device, which packs plenty of performance for heavy duty workloads such as running guest virtual machines or 3d rendering. It’s also extremely light which is great for work meetings and note taking on the go. You could say the Surface is great for any task that you can throw at it, almost…

Remember the first time you plugged your brand spanking new Surface into an external display to enable a little more desktop real estate in the office?… [Keep reading] “Windows 10 – First Look: Scaling on the Surface Pro 3”

Microsoft Windows IoT and the Intel Galileo

4th of December, 2014 / / 4 Comments

You might have seen one of these headlines a while back: ‘Microsoft Windows now running on Intel Galileo development board’, ‘Microsoft giving away free Windows 8.1 for IoT developers’. Now before we all get too excited, let’s have a closer look beyond these headlines and see what we’re actually getting!

Intel Galileo

With a zillion devices being connected to the Internet by the year 2020 a lot of hardware manufacturers want to have a piece of this big pie, and Intel got into the game by releasing two different development boards / processors: the Intel Galileo and more recently the Intel Edison.… [Keep reading] “Microsoft Windows IoT and the Intel Galileo”