Alleviating World Hunger to Stopping Fake News – Is Blockchain for Real?

5th of June, 2017 / / No Comments

Every day we hear “blockchain” is solving another of the world’s problems.  Here are some highlights from 2017 so far;

Its being claimed that Blockchain will enable the next generation of cars?… [Keep reading] “Alleviating World Hunger to Stopping Fake News – Is Blockchain for Real?”

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”

Are There Sufficient Standards in Cloud Computing Today?

26th of October, 2016 / / No Comments

The hybrid cloud may be a hot topic with adoption growing faster than ever but should we be concerned about a lack of established standards?

What is the Hybrid Cloud?

Private clouds, whether owned or leased, generally consist of closed IT infrastructures accessible only to a business which then makes available resources to it’s own internal customers. Private clouds are often home to core applications where control is essential to the business, they can also offer economies of scales where companies can afford larger, long term investments and have the ability to either run these environments themselves or pay for a managed service.… [Keep reading] “Are There Sufficient Standards in Cloud Computing Today?”

cloudready

Run Chromium OS without having to buy a Chromebook thanks to CloudReady

19th of October, 2016 / / No Comments

Thanks to the good folks at Neverware, you can now run Google’s cloud centric OS on a wider range of hardware than just Chromebooks alone. To enable this, what Neverware have done is repackage Google’s Chromium operating system.  This OS is at the core of it’s range of branded laptops, and is now made available to all.

The differences
Where Google build and maintain open source versions of Android and Chromium, their real value proposition is to add proprietary features onto both before selling them on branded devices.… [Keep reading] “Run Chromium OS without having to buy a Chromebook thanks to CloudReady”

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”

Streaming HoloLens Video to Your Web Browser

1st of September, 2016 / / 15 Comments

I am lucky enough to have a play around HoloLens at my office. One of the interests around HoloLens might be how to share what the user wearing HoloLens is actually viewing. In this post, I am going to briefly describe how to setup streaming video from HoloLens to your web browser.

Activating Developer Mode and Device Portal

First of all, Developer Mode in HoloLens must be activated. This is the actual screen the HoloLens user can see.… [Keep reading] “Streaming HoloLens Video to Your Web Browser”

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”

Implementing Gradient Descent Algorithm in Hadoop for large scale data

27th of August, 2016 / / No Comments

In this post I will be exploring how can we use MapReduce to implement Gradient Descent algorithm in Hadoop for large scale data. As we know Hadoop is capable of handling peta-byte scale/size of the data.

Before starting, first we need to understand what is Gradient Descent and where can we use it. Below is an excerpt from Wikipedia:

Gradient descent is a first-order iterative optimization algorithm. To find a local minimum of a function using gradient descent, one takes steps proportional to the negative of the gradient (or of the approximate gradient) of the function at the current point.… [Keep reading] “Implementing Gradient Descent Algorithm in Hadoop for large scale data”