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Today we have a special guest post by Andrew vonNagy, CCIE #28298 (Wireless), author of the blog Revolution Wi-Fi, Twitter @revolutionwifi and a Cisco customer. Huge thanks to Andrew for taking the time to share his Cisco Live experience!
Last week Cisco Live! 2011 took place in Las Vegas, NV. This year was my first time attending the conference, and I am a bit amazed at my experiences looking back on the event now that it is over. In addition to the deep technical content the conference is best known for, I found more valuable benefits are afforded to attendees willing to take a more active role in the technical community.
Arguably, the most valuable aspect of the conference is the opportunity for professional development through interaction with influential members of the industry, both internal and external to Cisco. Professional networking provides a foundation for growth and success by drawing on the energy of a collective group of friends and associates who share similar ambitions and have a drive to be successful, enabling the group to move forward as a whole. Building communities within the industry is when the magic starts to happen. Joining these communities can provide access to shared knowledge, creation of new and exciting opportunities, leveraging of broader connections throughout the community, and promotion of valuable content, products, or services created by trusted members within the community.
Many of these communities begin as virtual communities, built on social media platforms such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and the rapidly growing Google+. These platforms enable greater access to members within the community, but must be used appropriately to be effective. Individuals trying to join the community must provide value to the larger collective and interaction must be genuine. A quote from a widely successful writer and blogger comes to mind…
Networking is always important when it’s real, and it’s always a useless distraction when it’s fake. – Seth Godin
Industry events, such as the Cisco Live! conference, bring the virtual community together allowing attendees to build on existing relations formed online and expand on them by providing more personal interaction, helping to form more meaningful relationships.
Just when we feel we are drowning in information, along comes Big Data to save the day. Big Data refers to a dataset so large it is beyond the capability of a typical database to manage and make use of the information. But a set of advances in hardware and software now allows us to rapidly capture, organize, and make sense of vast oceans of data, enabling us to apply the results to make better business decisions.
Big Data can give us a strategic advantage. For example, investors could see global trends in trading across sectors in near-real time; they could respond much earlier to a downturn in prices in a given sector, avoiding the steep losses incurred by taking later action.
Big Data can also create a richer experience for customers. Bloomberg.com gathers more than 100 data points from every page an individual reader views, processing the data with 15 algorithms to personalize recommendations. Algorithms that understand natural language and rich media and can reason make Big Data technology even more useful in decision making. Novel visualization paradigms, 3D, and gesture interfaces make Big Data understandable and accessible to everyone.
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Have you ever explored one of the first rockets to launch into space? You haven’t? Then what are you waiting for? Go to the New York Hall of Science!
Oh, you don’t live in New York. No problem, the museum will come to you through one of its Telepresence virtual tours.
With Cisco TelePresence, the Hall of Science takes remote visitors all around its museum floor. People in places like Sacramento, California; Seattle, Washington; St. Joseph, Michigan; Ontario, Canada; and Mexico City, Mexico have gone to the Hall of Science to dissect cows’ eyes, learn about the phases of matter, and study the science of sports—and they haven’t set foot on an airplane.
Yesterday Google announced a change in their executive leadership. There is much speculation about why it happened, but the immediate consensus is that it was focused on driving change faster within the company. That may be right or it may be wrong. Every company goes through some executive changes over time, but the more interesting area to explore is how this fit into a broader “industry timeline” perspective.
For the first 5 years of the past decade, Google was the belle of the ball. It became a verb. It changed the way we find, use and look at information. It didn’t invent search, but it built a better mousetrap and changed the world in amazing ways. People predicted that it would replace the Internet!! And then the “social Internet” happened and people started finding more interesting information from Facebook and Twitter instead of Search and RSS. The business of information changed, just as many other industries go through change. Nobody truly saw it coming, but the last 5 years of the decade were much different from the first 5 years. And while Google is still “it” in Internet search, they aren’t really “it” in social Internet. People can speculate all they want about if this is a strategy issue or execution issue, it doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that people are legitimately talking about Google as a “maybe they missed it” in this decade. And that’s an interesting discussion because of the pace at which it happened. About 5 years. [NOTE: I'm not predicting, assuming or implying anybody's demise. I'm a huge Google fanboy. It's the pace of change that's interesting to me.]
So what does all of this mean for companies that aren’t Google, or aren’t one of the core pillars of the Internet? What if you make cars, or pharmaceuticals, or widgets? Maybe you’re a brick and mortal retailer. What if your business isn’t in the hyper-competitive information business? Read More »
I was traveling last week. I decided to order a shuttle service for the one-hour trip from San Jose to the San Francisco International Airport. Last week, however, the trip took 2 hours. Our super helpful driver tried his best to speed up our travel time by taking a different route and changing freeways -- but with not much success.
As I was looking out the window admiring the long parking lot on the freeway (insert sarcasm here), my mind started wondering: “I wonder what’s going on out there while I’m sitting in here”. Fueled by curiosity, I later jumped on the Internet to do some research and got my calculator out. Here is some fascinating information on what 2 hours means in the world of social media and web 2.0. Read More »
