martes, 14 de julio de 2015

Bogotá in the sweet spot



Is Bogotá in an advantageous position to overcome a collision between two or more megatrends? This idea came to my mind while reading “When Megatrends Collide”1 and thought about when Bogotá was founded. The place was located between the mountains deep inside in the country2, way different to any other major city in the world which were founded at the seashore or at major rivers. This created several issues while building a competitive infrastructure. But, what'd happen in a world where the climate is changing, the economic power is shifting and a rapid urbanization is surging? Bogotá may be in a leading position of the opportunities ahead. It’s become a huge hub for air transportation, and a big metropolis with undeniable growth potential, it's located on a place not affected by floods nor near the shores, a global warming may not be as several as in other regions, it has a great and growing tourism infrastructure and it's a destination of choice for retirement. Bogotá may be an opportunity when megatrends collide.

martes, 7 de julio de 2015

Computer Industry and Trends


This is just a trial with some random thoughts.  I felt I needed to share it, just in case.


I must say that any of the different trends in the Computer Industry are directly related to new business development opportunities. 

However the greatest opportunities at all are related to the trends that has the most impact on the human life as we know it. Let me give some examples. 

The work paradigm is changing; you no longer need to be an employee in order to make a living. 

You can teach English on your spare time to people across the world and make some money of it (Open English). 

You can connect with people who need transportation and use your car to that purpose (Uber). 

You can buy groceries at the stores on behalf of someone else (Instacart). 

This is a trend where technology is the hub changing that work paradigm. 

Interacting with the Computer is moving fast almost without noticing. In fact a Computer is way different of what we used to think it was. A Tablet, a watch, our cellphone are the new Computers.

We don't want to move a mouse or use a keyboard in order to write our document or browse the web.

That's another trend that's intimate close to the wearable explosion. We want the computers to support and enhance our life experience so we want them with us without being intrusive. Watches, Glasses, Health Monitors, Shoes, Clothes, even sub cutaneous chips are coming or are already here.

We want to capture our life, to leave something valuable to the posterity, to just remember everything we lived when we are too old to live it again. And that means loads and loads of data and information, we need to store all of that. Silicon won't be enough. 

Probably something biological intertwined with electronics in a microscopic factor would be up to the challenge.

In the meantime we'd need to find some other ways using current and always improving technology. And that's another trend, the compute capacity needed to process all that information, to analyze all that data. We're talking about analytics, big data. Is not by chance that a new gig called Data Scientist has the best salary available in the IT Industry. 

To summarize, the human being wants the Computer Industry to bring quality of life and that implies that a computer should be able to understand what a human wants (UX, AI), to help fulfill that request (Wearables, Robots), to access all the information needed whenever is needed (IoT, Big Data, Analytics).