Internet of things...the end of middle man...social media of machines

I know, I promised some concrete excel and other scripting stuff...but this cannot wait...you may have already figured it out, but it just occurred to me, that the Internet of things will be true end of middle man. Thus we will revert back to the industrial age. Where people who created a truly magnificent product will basically control the selling channels...sort of like apple but even apple sells from distributors. With Internet of things, when the product informs you its at end of its life...it may give you retail choices...but in all earnest..if I am the manufacturer why would I even bother at that point to present other choices...I will simply present myself as the viable choice for repurchase.

The Internet of things will benefit the people who are the innovators, with the products that created their own market. Because they no longer will have to depend on an intermediary. Yes, one can argue that post sales process management is a hassle, but compared to the sharing that must accompany a middle man, I might as well hold that relation ship with my customer myself. 

Now imagine the Internet of things combined with the free flow of information and opinion. We have a social media of humans...but the machines can have a social media of their own. Imagine schema.org style of categorization of products. Where certain type of products are talking to each other....Say, I am a machine...I have a status up..that I am old....and I am gray...my battery is end of life...and I need replacement...or a new part...but my owner decides...aaa...I am not going to worry about it...the machine sends messages...and pleas to the owner... to his email..display banners..follow him online...present to him choices to buy the necessary..but the owner ignores....Now...the machine must take the matters in its own hands....and it posts on a "machine" only social forum...."I am in dire need of stuff"...and the other machines...hear it and reach out to their human partners....who reach out to ultimately the human partner of that machine....to help its ...machine partner...AND that will be radically cool...

I will probably not live to see the day...but it will be cool nonetheless....

In the end the product manufacturers can do way with distributors....because they are the ones controlling the "mind" of the machine and they can make it part of the "collective" without having to rely on the middle man....

I think my flight of fancy.....was a nice flight...but I must land now.....

An inch closer than guessing...that's analytics

I have been away some time from writing. If you have had a chance to read any of my previous blogs, I talked a lot about Mobile, some programming stuff for finance and then few random thoughts. Driven by the necessity of the task at hand my interests have changed along the way. But I am starting again, and that is a good thing. A bit scary and a bit work like, but I shall say I have picked few skills along the way which I will share with some practical examples. There is a lot to talk about in world of marketing, data analysis, and business in general.

I am a big fan of open source and forums. While blogging is a nice medium to share ideas and knowledge there is something magical about finding a solution to the problem one is facing. And stack overflow does just that. There is probably a stack over flow for almost all popular software. There are many other sites and forums that give one answers to many a perplexing questions, and I deeply admire the people that lend their subject matter expertise for good of others.

I will not claim such a victory of altruistic ways on my natural self, but I do like the feeling of accomplishment. Achievement is executing on an idea and sharing it. Execution is key here so after much thought I feel compelled to write something that is accompanied by at least some practical snippet. It can be a Google Analytics tip, SPSS modeler recipe, Google Adwords script, R code, SQL based mining, text analytics, practical angle of a theoretical strand, more personal successes and failures with few projects or just plain my feelings about a book I have recently read.

My next blog will be how to use excel for some simple tasks. We will build few simple excel macros and then dive into some more complex stuff like grabbing data from the web and formatting it. In between depending upon my mood we will delve into pivots and slicers, SPSS, R, SQL and mood enhancing customer analytics, cheers!