It seems every week there is a new use case for Cisco TelePresence, and this week is no different.

Europe’s leading home improvement retailer, Kingfisher is using Cisco TelePresence to help the company adopt more agile ways of working. As a company that makes do-it-yourself projects easier and more affordable, Kingfisher was facing increasingly difficult logistical challenges with key partners and offices spread out across the globe. Not only is Cisco allowing the company to speed time-to-market and increase overall revenue, but it’s also enabling better communication and more productivity.

Read more on this innovative case study and watch their video in the latest Cisco Video blog post “How Retail Giant Kingfisher Is Improving Efficiency with a Video-Enabled Supply Chain.”

Tags: collaboration, future of retailing, kingfisher, TelePresence

One of the most engaging customer visits undertaken during Cisco Live in Melbourne was the visit to the brand new, purpose built offices of global engineering and management company, Aurecon Group.

Aurecon’s Melbourne office is based in the growing Docklands area of Melbourne and is a showcase for the use of information technology to enable business innovation, growth and productivity. 

During the visit, Barry Honey, Auercon Group IS Strategy and Architecture Manager outlined the company’s strategic initiative to create innovative new client-facing technology services that will further differentiate its client experiences.  With operational projects taking place all over the world, Aurecon’s vision is grounded in an intelligent network that is entirely scalable and flexible for the future, while nimble enough to respond to immediate business opportunities being working on by the company.

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Cisco’s Virtual Forum for Education Leaders is this Tuesday 3/19. It will be an exciting virtual Forum with information about important trends that are happening for both K-12 and Higher Ed. Of particular interest for both Academic and IT leaders is how technology is supporting and increasing learning outcomes.

Great applications like on-line learning, flipped classrooms, BYOD, and lecture capture are all being implemented by our schools and universities and delivering great success. They are helping us execute pedagogical changes that provide for individualized learning, classroom collaboration and helping us reach new markets in Higher Ed. These new technologies are even positively impacting the business and administrative areas at our schools and universities.

Read More »

Tags: BYOD in Education, education, mobility

Now is the time to seize these opportunities. To expand education beyond classroom walls.  To help teachers and learners collaborate more effectively. To create new teaching experiences that engage learners and improve outcomes. So tomorrow’s students will be prepared to take on the challenges of a rapidly changing world.

But first, schools of all levels must prepare by arming themselves with a solid network, strong policies, and seamless management.

Cisco’s Virtual Forum for Education can link you with educators and innovation leaders from around the world to talk about best practices and practical strategies to overcome the challenges of mobility and technology in the classroom. You will have the opportunity to interact live with education thought leaders and Cisco experts on trends and technologies that are shaping the future of education.

The virtual event is March 19th, 2013 in the Americas & Europe and March 20^th for Asia Pacific.

Register before it’s too late!

Read more on the education blog

For more on Cisco Education solutions, visit Cisco K-12 Education BYOD Solutions.

Since Cisco began discussing the Internet of Everything (IoE) last year, two questions have arisen consistently:

1) What is the difference between IoE and the Internet of Things (IoT)?
According to Cisco, IoE brings together people (humans), process (manages the way people, data, and things work together), data (rich information), and things (inanimate objects and devices) to make networked connections more relevant and valuable than ever before—turning information into actions that create new capabilities, richer experiences, and unprecedented economic opportunity for businesses, individuals, and countries.

To better understand this definition, it is helpful to take a quick look at the evolution of the Internet. In the early 1990s, devices connected to the Internet were essentially “fixed.” For example, you went to your desk to use your PC, dumb terminal, or other device. At its peak, this first wave reached about 200 million devices by the late 1990s.

Around the year 2000, devices started to come with you. Remember lugging around your first “brick” mobile phone? As the number of both fixed and mobile devices (including machines) ballooned, the number of things connected to the Internet increased, reaching about 10 billion this year. This wave of Internet growth ushered in IoT, or as I sometimes call it, the “Age of the Device.”

Cisco believes the third wave of Internet growth has already begun. As the things connected to the Internet are joined by people and more intelligent data (as Cisco’s definition describes), IoE could potentially connect 50 billion people, data, and things by 2020.

So, what is the difference between IoT and IoE? Read More »

Tags: Internet of Everything, internet of things, IoE, IoT, personal data stores, privacy, privacy bill of rights, security