Tag: tech

So what is big data? This is what companies know about us. Aggregated from numerous sources and analyzed for patterns. Big data is what helps banks predict and flag credit card frauds. Little data on the other hand is what we know about ourselves. “What we buy. Who we know. Where we go. How we spend our time. We’ve always had a sense for these things — after all, it’s our lives. But thanks to the combination of mobile, social, and cloud technologies, it’s easier than ever to gain insight into our own behavior” writes Mark Bonchek in this HBR article. 

Jordan Valencia, Programs and Partnership Manager at Grab Ventures, in her latest article in Harvard Business Review talks about the need to focus on culture when companies are in the Hyper Growth phase. Defined by Alexander V. Izosimov in HBR in 2008, “Hypergrowth refers to the steep part of the S-curve”. The rapid growth comes with steep rise in employee count. This is where the challenges set in. 

It is clear. Everything legacy, every business, every process will be disrupted. So the choice is yours if you will be the one to be disrupted or you will be the disruptor. The disproportionate value that the disruptor harnesses is clear (Uber, AirBnB, Dropbox, Zappos). What makes someone to become the disruptor? Sometimes it is by accident, but more often than not it is because the disruptor decides it was enough of the status quo and acts.

The story of Visicalc as written by Tim Harford in bbc.com in a very recent article is indeed eye-opening. Not only because it tells the story of the first sensation in business software but because he shows how it showed the earliest signs of destruction of jobs by technology. And then creation of new ones. 

Hugh Durkin, Director of Platform Partner Success Hubspot, has been following mobile habits and writing on shifts that he sees in the space. Way back in 2016, when he was a Senior Product Manager at Intercom, he wrote about how browsers are the future of mobile. Data in support – “ most US smartphone owners ( read 65%+) download zero apps in a typical month,” according to Comscore’s then report on mobile apps ( how many new apps did you download last quarter?) and it goes on to show that the top App takes 50% of use time while the top 3 are responsible for 80% of the mobile usage.