Glassouse, let your head control mouse or trackpad

The new wearable device, Glassouse, turns your head into a mouse or trackpad. The device is designed for those who can not use hans for any reason. It connects through bluetooth to your computer and move mouse curser with your head movements. Glassouse has a clicker that is placed between your lips or teeth. You click the mouse biting the clicker or pressing it with your lips. Its rechargeable battery can last up to ten days of use with single charge. Glassouse is compatible with various operating systems such as windows, OS X, Linux, Android and Apple handheld devices.

    For more information:  http://glassouse.com/

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How do I set bilingual or multilingual Wordpress?

Here is another way of doing bilingual or multilingual blog using Wordpress (wp). This method is easier compared to the bilingual blogger building, the one I explained years ago in this blog.

Let’s plan our objective as an example. It’s so simple.

We will have a site with Wordpress hosting both in English and Spanish.

First, you must register for your selected domain name. After registration you should have a domain hosting service. I will not explain how to register and get a domain hosting service, which I presume you already have one. If you don’t have a domain name and domain hosting, you will find hundreds of them if you google it.

Select your domain name for English site. Let say your domain is www.myabcdomain.com  

This will be your main domain name. Let’s presume this domain (main domain) will work in English.

Now you should have a subdomain for Spanish site under your main domain name. Your subdomain name for Spanish site will be

esp.mydomain.com

If you want a third language domain for German, you can generate another subdomain that will work in German as

ger.mydomain.com  

Please note that each subdomain must have a separate wordpress instance installed on your hosting service.

Thus here are your domain and subdomains

www.myabcdomain.com  (domain)

esp.myabcdomain.dom     (sub domain)

ger.myabcdomain.com      (sub domain)

Then login to your hosting service.

Prepare your wordpress hosting environment (same template) separately for all your domain and subdomains. You will have three wordpress installation in same template and same picture content but will be in different language texts  accordingly.

After creating your wp site to your domain.

Login as wp admin

Go to Appearance then menu from the left side bar as seen in the picture.

In the coming page, click on the link “create a new menu”

Select a menu name. Let say “Languages”

Now your menu structure is ready which will be shown in the main page of your website upper corner depending on your word press template.

Now we need to add menu items for English, Spanish, German etc.

Select “Custom links”  item

URL  : http://www.myabcdomain.com

Link Text:  English

Click Add to Menu

URL  : http://esp.myabcdomain.com

Link Text:  Espanol

Click Add to Menu

URL  : http://ger.myabcdomain.com

Link Text:  Deutsch

Click Add to Menu

Check “Primary Menu” in the theme locations as seen in the picture on the right hand side.

Finally don’t forget to click Save Manu button when you finish all.

Thus your menu will be ready mostly in up right corner of your site for www.myabcdomain.com 

Now you should do the same for each subdomain. Login as wp admin in your subdomain esp.mydomain.com  and repeat the same steps starting from "Login as wp admin" till here.

At the end you will have 3 wp instances installed on your hosting account. You will pay one domain hosting. Subdomains are free. But you should make 3 instances of your site in 3 different languages or more.

I hope it helps. It is easy way of handling multilingual or bilingual websites with Wordpress.
If you have an intent to do it with blogger instead of Wordpress, Please check my other post How to bilingual or multilingual with blogger.

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How To Identify Big Data

Let me start by describing the amount of daily data generated by human. Every day, 2,5 quintillion (10¹⁸) bytes of data are created. This means 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years [1]. Some estimates for the data growth are as high as 50 times by the year 2020 [1].


The term “Big Data” is widely used about the amount of data by business professionals. Every organization believes that the world is spinning around them. They mostly believe their customer database or data warehouse is “Big data”.  Because the amount of data that is stored in their database is increasing every day, maybe double or triple in a short while. This increase in the amount of customer’s data pushes them to think their data is “Big Data”. Lately there has been popular saying such as “X organization’s Big Data” particularly in Turkish. Even if people presumes “Big Data” as the indicator of size of the data, I recommend them to compare size of an organization’s data, and daily-generated data which is not comparable.

Ask a dozen CIOs to define big data, and you'll likely get a dozen different responses, Gartner analyst Mark Beyer says.

According to a study done by IBM and Oxford University [2] has proved that, much of the confusion about big data begins with the definition itself. Respondents were asked to choose up to two descriptions about how their organizations view big data from the choices in Figure below. No single characteristics dominating among the choices.

Considering the chaos in the definition of “Big Data” by people, I wanted to give some scientifically accepted definitions and bust the myths about Big Data.

“Big Data” is not about the amount of data. Stop looking for a standard size of Big Data, because there is not one standard data size. Even if there had been a standard size to define “big data”, then it would change rapidly. Hence standard data size is not an identifier for Big Data neither today nor tomorrow.

Big Data is a term applied to “data sets” whose size is beyond the capability of commonly used software tools to capture, manage, and process [3]. I’m sure most of the enterprises are using off the shelf, common software tools to capture, manage and process their data. Considering just size parameter, if this is the case, then they are not dealing with big data.

As far back 2001, there's the classic definition of Big Data with 3V model -- high volume, high variety and high velocity as shown in Figure.



Volume: The amount of data. Perhaps the characteristic most associated with big data, volume refers to the mass quantities of data that organizations are trying to harness to improve decision-making across the enterprise. Data volumes continue to increase at an unprecedented rate. There is no standard data volume. If the volume of data you’re looking at is an order of magnitude or larger than anything previously encountered in your industry, then you’re probably dealing with Big Data. However, “high” volume is not smaller than the Petabytes (10¹⁵ bytes) and Zetabytes (10²¹ bytes) often referenced today.

Variety: Different types of data and data sources. Variety is about managing the complexity of multiple data types, including structured, semi-structured and unstructured data. Organizations need to integrate and analyze data from within and outside the enterprise. With the explosion of sensors, smart devices and social collaboration technologies, data is being generated in countless forms, including: text, web data, tweets, sensor data, geographic location, audio, video, click streams, log files and more.

Velocity: Data in motion. The speed at which data is created, processed and analyzed continues to accelerate. Higher velocity is the real-time nature of data creation, as well as incorporates streaming data into business processes and decision-making. Velocity impacts latency – the lag time between when data is created or captured, and when it is accessible. Today, data is continually being generated at a pace that is impossible for traditional systems to capture, store and analyze. For time-sensitive processes such as real-time fraud detection or multi-channel “instant” marketing, certain types of data must be analyzed in real time to be of value to the business. An example of instant marketing, some kind of discount offer to a customer based on their location is less likely to be successful if they have already walked some distance past the store.

This figure shows the changes in dimensions with the time in big data. As years pass, Data volume goes from GB to PB, Data velocity from batch processing to Real time processing, data variety from text tables to video or social data. 








Today, “Big Data” is increasingly being defined by the 4 Vs.  

Veracity (4th V) that refers Data uncertainty. Veracity refers to the level of reliability associated with certain types of data. Some data is inherently uncertain, for example: sentiment and truthfulness in humans; weather conditions; economic factors; and the future. Despite uncertainty, the data still contains valuable information. Just ignoring it, can create even more problems than the uncertainty itself. In the era of big data, executives will need to approach the dimension of uncertainty differently.

Let me conclude my words with the following summary. I believe this will guide for those who has the tendency to use the term “Big Data” in their sentences to refer high sized database incorrectly.

• Big Data is not all about the data size. Data size is just one parameter to identify Big Data. 
• In addition to Volume parameter, Variety, Velocity and Veracity (uncertainty) must be in the nature of “Big Data”.
• There is no standard data size for Big Data. But one should consider the volume of data to be larger than anything previously encountered in your industry such as around petabytes (10¹⁵ bytes) to zetabytes (10²¹ bytes) today.
• Big Data needs to be processed to support decision-making.
• Big Data should include data sets such as text, web data, tweets, sensor data, geographic location, audio, video, click streams (such as likes), log files and more.
• Big Data cannot be captured, managed, and processed by commonly used software tools.

In the cases where the indicators above are not taking place, it is misuse of “Big Data” term to identify the data set.

Regerences:

1. Performance and Capacity Implications for Big Data, IBM Red Paper,  January 2014.
2. Analytics: The real-world use of big data, IBM Institute for business value-Said Business School, Oxford University, 2012.
3. Information Management and Big Data A Reference Architecture, Oracle white paper, February 2013.

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What are the implications of Employee Engagement and how it drives growth in Organizations?

Gallup Inc. reviewed more than 25 million responses in a survey for the employee engagement between 2010-2012. This survey took place in 189 different countries, 69 languages. The questionnaire based on famous 12 questions for measuring employee engagement.

Gallup’s research showed that only 30% of employees are engaged. Engaged employees work with passion and feel a profound connection to their company. They drive innovation and move the organization forward.

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Are Bluetooth headsets harmful?

As the number of mobile phone users grows, cell phones' impact on human life and health is ever more of a concern. On the other hand, cell phones provide us with the most convenient form of daily distance communication in human history. Growing usage of mobile phones let us direct contact to the device, for long time. There is no possible way of leaving cellular phones or drop them in modern life. We have moved to a new era of wearing mobile and particularly Smart Phones and to use it not only voice but also for internet too.

Mobile phones and, Bluetooth headsets that use radio waves as transceivers. Radio frequencies that carry the energy, give rise to changes in cell structure of human body. Cancer is also a disease result of changes in the structure of body cells. The report released by the World Health Organization (WHO)/ International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) in year 2011 had revealed that radiation transmitted by mobile phone is potentially carcinogenic to human. It indicates that malignant type of brain cancer associated with wireless mobile phone use. The report also indicates a solution to decrease the potential risk by using the Bluetooth hands free devices to lower the radiation exposure.

SAR (Specific Absorption Rate) is an indication of the amount of radiation that is absorbed by a unit of mass of tissue of a person. In other words, SAR is the value of amount of radiation absorbed into a head whilst using cellular phone. Bigger SAR values are more harmful to the body.

Bluetooth headset's effect to human body is very small compared with the rate of cellular phones. Bluetooth transmitter and receiver run efficiently at distances of less than 10 meters. Cell phone base station antenna communicates with cellular phone hundreds of meters away. Comparing the distances of both wireless communications can make, mobile phones need more powerful radio waves to reach the base station antenna in longer distance. That means Bluetooth headsets need less powered radio wave energy to reach the base within 10 meters.

The Blackberry 9700's SAR value is 1.36 W/kg, while a Bluetooth headset, depending on brand and model, ranged from 0.001 W/kg to 0.01 W/kg. So Bluetooth headsets are 100 to 1000 times less harmful compared to cellular phones. According to a study from Jabra Bluetooth headsets is 800 times lesser radiation than mobile phones. As the report from WHO indicated to use the Bluetooth hands free devices are essential to cut the risk of cancer.

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Number of Users in Social Media increase the necessary storage capacity

Last decade has been the booming of Social Media Applications such as Facebook and Twitter that are two most well-known. But more than hundred different local or global social applications are available. Some have 1 million users or less while the other have more than 1 billion users. User numbers depend on the popularity of application.

Here are the figures from 2013 for some well known applications[1].

• Facebook: 1.11 Billion users. (June 01, 2013)
• Twitter: 500 Million users but more than 200 Millions active users. (Mar 21, 2013)
• Google+ : 343 Million users. (Jan 26, 2013)
• Dropbox: Over 100 Million users. 1 billion files uploaded daily. (Nov 13, 2012)
• Instagram: 130 Million users. Total 16 billion photos and 40 million photo uploads daily. (Jun 23, 2013)
• LinkedIn: 252 Million users. (May 06, 2013)
• Flicker: 87 Million users. Currently number of photos stored in Flicker is about 8 billion (Mar 20, 2013)
• Youtube: 1 Billion users. (Mar 20, 2013)
• WhatsApp: 200 Million users. (Apr 16, 2013)

The most popular application seems Facebook. During the first years, Facebook users were limited to 60 photos per album. As of May 2009 this limit has been increased to 200 photos per album. But now Facebook allows users to upload an unlimited number of photos. Other image hosting services such as Flicker are still apply limits to the number of photos that a user is allowed to upload [2].

Let me elaborate some more statistics about Facebook[1].

Daily active Facebook users: 665 million

Total number of mobile Facebook users: 751 million

Total number of Facebook Apps: 10 million

Total number of Facebook friend connections: 150 billion.

Average number of friends per Facebook users: 141,5 (by simple math)

Total number of Facebook “Like” since launch: 1,13 trillion

Average daily Facebook “Like”: 4,5 billion

Total number of location-tagged Facebook posts: 17 billion

Total number of uploaded photos: 240 billion

Average daily uploaded photos: 350 million

Average number of users playing Facebook games per month: 250 million

Facebook is definitely beyond the other application with the infographic above. If you want to name some application as BIG DATA, maybe you should first start from Facebook. Variety, Velocity and Volume parameters can be predicted out of this infographic about Facebook. The amount of data that is required today is giant. And it increases every day and more and more volume, and velocity is required. Thanks for the enabling technology.

Let me share the user increase ratio for Facebook for past 6 years. It stands for bi-yearly [3].

2013-2011   27,3 %

2011-2009   56 %

2009-2007   85,7 %

It seems that the growth ratio is not as much as the early years. That is normal case. It's going through the saturation and early years growth can not be expected. But it will have a steady growth from now on.

Which other parameters can be interesting for Facebook?

Total number of languages available on Facebook: 70

Number of Facebook employees: 4619

Total 2012 Facebook revenue: US $ 5,09 billion

As a result, growth of social media users and dependently storage need will increase in years. Analysis on the big data becomes more complicated as the network size increases.

References

1. http://www.expandedramblings.com/
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook
3. http://www.cemspot.com/2011/12/sosyal-medya-yeni-bilisim-modeli.html

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Will IT Departments be useless in future?

When I first see the article from Peter Hinssen [1], I said once again that, this article supports my idea of new era in the IT management. The article [1] emphasize that CIO (Chief Information Officers) in most organizations are not performing their role as dealing with information. They rather deal with technology as the Chief Technology Officer (CTO). IT departments stuck in their roles as technology supplier of mobile devices, laptops and windows. Many CIO limit themselves to supply employees with the laptops of MS windows, MS offices, Blackberries, I-phones, email and file sharing platforms with full technical support. Those technical support is sometimes reflected as "Satisfying of internal customers" by IT people and, even placed in the performance targets of those employees.


Very few are dealing with information. Those technology oriented so-called CIO are difficultly find a seat at the executive management tables. So they report more powerful executives such as CFO.

Recently we see rise of a new breed of CDO (Chief Digital Officer) This is the next generation of IT lead.

Gartner predicts that by 2015, as much as 25% of all organizations will have a Chief Digital Officer (CDO) in their executive staff[2]. CDO will help organizations in driving the growth. They will expand the digital strategies of the organizations using web, mobile, social and local innovations [3]. Briefly CDO will not carry out technology but will carry out technology enabled innovation.They will be responsible of implementing "digital business strategy".This is not comparable what CIO is doing today.

Enabling technologies such as cloud computing will shape up this transformation in the organizations. Presumably, Cloud providers will offer and run the necessary technologies for any organization. Cloud provider's focus is to run the show in the following interest;

• Application or Software as a Service (SaaS) 
• Platform as a Service (PaaS)
• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

The leftover to CDO is to shape up the future of the company with the correct digital strategy for growth and efficiency.

This will let the organizations to meet their customers in virtual world. It is clear that CDO profiles will be difficult to find. That is the challenge for the digital acumen and leaders to shape up the figure to meet the requirements of role and then to shape up the digital strategy of the organizations for growth.

For further details:
1- IT Departments Have Become Completely Useless
2- Chief Digital Officer' is the next hot executive title
3- The Rise of the Chief Digital Officer

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Should I move to cloud computing?

Cloud computing has been extremely popular for couple of years. IT vendors started to promote "cloud computing" among decision makers of pioneer enterprises. Simple question of "Should I go for Cloud Computing?" is always in the minds. Some of the trailing questions such as "which service?", "How to select vendor?", "Planning", etc comes furthermore.

How do people perceive Cloud Computing?
Simply mobile device users know about cloud computing as "Ability to remotely access files, and various software applications" All can be run without using any local storage but with the internet.

Before Cloud Computing
Actually Cloud Computing applications did exist much before it got recognized. Web based or Intranet based applications, Citrix, Vmware, Google Docs were existed for quite sometime. We used to name them either with their brand names or with generic names. "Cloud Computing" has been re-naming for them all in total.

The Cloud Services
Cloud computing can refer several different types of services such as;

• Application or Software as a Service (SaaS) 
• Platform as a Service (PaaS)
• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

Most common and significant advantages can be listed as "Cost saving" and "Reducing Complexity"
The cloud reduces IT costs by shifting these costs to the enterprise's cloud service provider. It also enables to set up new technologies faster than if you had to buy and deploy the equipment yourself. As the result of 2012 in USA, Cloud Computing has reached the following numbers and facts:

• Cloud is changing software. SaaS has been the mostly used service. 
• 55% of CIOs increased spending on SaaS in 2012.
• SaaS spending growth is 6 times of other software services.
• First three big cloud drives have been as Scalability, Business agility and cost respectively.
• 67% of the respondent have already deployed SaaS, while 14% have a plan on deploying SaaS within 12 months and only 19% have no plans to implement SaaS in USA. 
• On the developer side, 84% of the new software will be SaaS.
• 75% of building software with PaaS by 2017.
• Cloud makes IT manageability less complex. It was 39%less complex in 2011 and 53% less complex in 2012. Complexity decreases with cloud computing. 
• Cloud lowers Total Cost of Ownership too. TCO was 57% in 2011 and was 53% in 2012.
• Finally Gartner says Worldwide Cloud Service market to surpass $ 109 Billion in 2012.

Special care must be taken for the following issues before start to cloud computing.

• Secure access to the cloud.
• Regulatory compliance
• Privacy of your enterprise data or your customer's data. Find a way to safeguard the data in the cloud.
• Let the cloud enable the third party auditors to access or audit the place and data. Consider supporting security standards such as ISO 27002.
• Clarify end of data life cycle. Some industries require that data to be destroyed including the hard drives during a decommissioning.
• Interoperability may come up as a problem for some times later or during set up.
• Network bandwidth might be a problem too. Cloud provider's servers will be accessed by user with a limited bandwidth. It can not be as fast as accessing to a server in your LAN.
• Vendor Lock-In or Vendor dependencies might be a problem too as it is in the outsourcing domain.
• Regulations for some industries such as health, finance, Insurance, government, must be met in the cloud plan.
• There may be sensitive information in some applications such as Education, IT Infrastructure, Banking and Finance, Customer services, call centers, Retail, Pharmaceutical and Insurance. 

Cloud Computing issue must be considered together with the issues of outsourcing. Same benefits and same problems are available in both domains. Both services shows analogy. For the small organizations and personal use, lots of benefits are available in the cloud. But for those industries and applications stated above must be taken care in terms of sensitive information. It seems that cloud computing as enabling technology, is going to change the way of doing business in IT departments of the organizations in short to medium period of time.

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