Internet of things - Demystified

Internet of things is one area, which I have been focusing on last few years

It is predicted that 30 billion devices would be connected by 2023, from the present 15 billion devices. This would create huge opportunity potential for IOT and machine learning experts as well. Moreover, the source data or data set for machine learning are likely to be from IOT system. While machine learning or AI would be is around algorithm, IOT would be combination of electrical, electronic and software programming.

Quite happy to announce that, I was able to create the course passionately and launched it as online digital on demand course in Udemy.

It's one unique covers that, it covers the commonly used IOT devices such as - Arduino UNO, ESP8266 NODE MCU and Raspberry Pi 3. Interestingly, for ESP8266 NODE MCU has extensively used micro python firmware. The course also guides one as how to flash micropython.

Now, offering introductory discount on the list price. Please refer link for more details and about the introductory pricing.

https://www.udemy.com/internet-of-things-iot-demystified/?couponCode=IOT-D01 

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The Grand Mall, Chennai

The list of mall included in Chennai city seems to increase day by day. Till about last year, Chennai had Citi center, Ampa mall, Abirami Mega mall and Express Avenue. All these came into existence post year 2008.

Now, after Pheonix at Velachery, Forum Vijay at Vadapalani which opened early part of this year, the latest addition to Chennai is Grand Mall at Velachery. This is located on Velachery - Tambaram main road very near the Velachery metro rail station.

As of now, Croma, Shopper stop and food court is open. Many others are expected to open in due course of time.

                
                                 

Compared to Pheonix mall, this is comparatively a smaller mall. Its said to be about 3.5 lacs sq feet. Its just about 2KM from Pheonix mall.

One of the attraction seems to be 'food street' as advertised. But, it is yet to be completely open or occupied.

With online shopping site like flipkart, Jubang, Snapdeal,ebay and many others now being increasingly used by technology savvy people of India primarily due to convenience and better discount offered, one needs to see as how these malls keep up its attraction with buyers and thereby break-even, considering quantum of capital investment and recurring investments.

Anyways,consumer would have multiple choices to have a real time look at products. By this consumer can also compare the prices with online web store, when they really decide to buy.

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Shopping : Future predictions.

The shopping methods had evolved over the years. When internet become available globally in 90's I still remember, it was just static website designed and used for product promotion or as in information about availability of products or offering. There was no search engine to look upon to search information. Search engines and then, came commercial transactions through website later in early 2000s.

In later part of 2000's there were independent sites which used to collate products offered by various manufacturers under specific product space, which were like a telephone yellow pages. The yellow pages were common used in 1990’s for business to business requirement. 

As we progressed over time, changes happened, there were more interaction with different device and systems started happening. No more it’s just the website, the website interacts with bank or credit card site and further towards enhancing the security these days we find OTP (one time password code sent to mobile device) for user log in. 

Now, if one looks into the future online shopping system, it’s definitely not going to be standalone application, it will have apps or interface protocol through which it needs to communicate with range of devices and systems, then the business logic needs to analyze, provide a intelligent response to requester though touch of button. By next decade and so, without getting out of once place, one can get the best product and best fit product in matter of few minutes. It’s just being survival of the fittest and necessary intelligence would be built into system to offer the best.

 How is this going to happen?

First and foremost, in about fifteen year are so, we would have ‘WWUI’ in place. 

What’s WWUI?. 

I call it ‘worldwide unique identifier’ for humans. Each one will have a ‘worldwide unique identifier’ in an encoded machine readable form. This WWUI consists of one’s retina and fore finger images impression captured through a high resolution biometric sensor which would be digitally encoded and stored in central worldwide computer server governed by ANUIO (All nations unique identifier organization - global welfare organization supported and funded by participating countries governments federal banks). There would be agreed protocol interface, through which any web application can request for already stored unique identifier linked to a person's retina and finger impression.

If one want to check bank balance, all they need to go is go to bank web page and click on log on button. Once this is done the built in high resolution scan camera or biometric sensor in the computer device switches on, scans the finger and retina impression, then the related web application would send scanned image as request signal to central WWUI server and retrieve unique identification number of this person to bank system. If this person has an account in that specific bank and identity matches with unique identification already in bank database, it would automatically log into the user’s banking transaction page and provide banking page for further action. 

The ‘unique identifier’ would also be used for online credit, debit card transaction and ATM. Further this not would not be just for commercial transactions, it would be also used for social media sites like bodybook (similar to current face book) , whistter (similar to current twitter) and voicer ( a new application by 2030, were user can provide product reviews and user experience online).

Worldwide unique identifier system

Eureka !!!….. There would be no need to remember any or multiple passwords or forget, request for password reset or  more critically, there is no cyber crime due to hacking of online system and website.

Now, let’s look at how this is going to be used in online shopping. I would classify the online shopping experience by 2030 like this,

Review sell: If one wants to travel from Chennai to New Delhi. All one need to do is, log into online shopping system which specialize on travel and enter travel location, date of travel and budget available. The portal or application will then crawl through websites and analyze the best fitment travel based on  price, travel mode (check all flights, express buses or trains), tickets available, customer reviews and then, rank the list of all travel options, that can selected by user. It will also analyze the reviews and customer experience and provide a list of ranking fits. Meaning, if there is more negative reviews on various social forum, then site would rank the specific travel option lower.

But, then how do one say reviews are genuinely provided by users?. A valid question indeed.

Well, as I had discussed earlier, even for writing reviews in social web site, the log in process would be through WWUI interface mechanism, so naturally every living individual can have only one account in all the discrete systems and web sites. Hence, naturally reviews would be genuine as it is linked to a specific person. Such review sell process will be applicable for hotel accommodation, certain products as well. Finally, if you wish to purchase, then WWUI interface works with internet banking, credit cards system. So naturally no hacking or password stealing happens. 

Building intelligence  .. for informed purchase decision

Fitment sell: There may be case where, one needs to look for best fit for a person. Say apparels, shoes and other accessories purchase. All these products normally you try or wear before choosing the products. I call this ‘Fitment sell’.

When one is interested in products such as shoes or dress. The biometric sensor in the your system will scan and measure the size of your foot or body according to product need, after which a fitment match is done with shoes or apparels available online for sale and then indicate back not only whether the fitment is right or not, but also it would display on screen as how one would look like wearing the shoes or apparels on screen. This would be the ultimate virtualization. If you feel good to purchase, then it would invoke the WWUI interface for payments.

WWUI, can be extended for retail store outlets sale as well and our wallet could well be free from plastic credit or debit cards.

Well, if one rewinds about decade or two back, very few people knew what internet was all about. From then on, the technology had galloped so very fast that mobile phones, internet has become part and parcel of our life. Hence, in future, I believe we would well have above technology in place particularly to avoid cyber crime and take a well informed decision to purchase a product in matter of few minutes.

** ebay has introduced an ebay application plug in which works with google crome browser. It looks like  business intelligence is built in, to provide a comparable ebay best price for a product even  if you are searching out side ebay. One could explore about the  product by clicking on link  here **

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Gold bounches back

While stock market is taken a beating on Friday, gold seems to bounced back in the last few days and it was trading Rs 2946 per gram (22 carat) on Sat 17th Aug.

Apart from hike in gold prices in world market, following other factor seems to drive prices up,

•  Depreciating INR.
•  Import restriction and higher duty. 
• Condition of world and  Indian economy at this point of time.
•  Last but not the least the start of festive season in India.

Next to petroleum product, gold import is the highest drainer of foreign exchange in India. Added to this India is top consumer for gold. Further, its never going to easy for Indians to move away from attractiveness gold .

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Managing Oracle EBS implementation better.

Over the years, ERP product modules foot prints have grown and so is the complexity associated with product.  In about a decade time with increased complexities, the implementation need to take care business requirement vs module fitment for solution, shorter implementation time frame, and quick turnaround testing the solution, performance issue due to volume of transactions and accessing transaction on wide area network needs to be taken in to account.

If application is available to access though internet, it also increasingly difficult to perform load test or predict volume growth of users. It is increasing common these days, witness certain systems like Banking, Railways getting into performance issues at the peak hours as due importance might not have been given to loading of application during implementation stage. 

Appropriate product fitment to business requirement and product license of modules alone would not make an implementation successful. Implementation needs to be managed effectively right from conceptualization stage to beyond post implementation to be successful. Had earlier written about factors ( part1, part2, part3) which influence success of ERP implementation in a phased approach.

Apart from ERP product & managing implementation project, there are products available to enhance / support & manage the implementation at pre & post implementation stage better.  It’s critical the project stakeholder analyses the feasibility of using these tools. 

Brief overviews about the products, which can support Oracle EBS implementation, are, 

Oracle EBS Business accelerators: Every effort is made these days to reduce implementation time of Oracle EBS without compromising on business requirement. Hence one would find OBA quite useful during the requirement gathering & thereby automate functional set up during CRP stage (iterative process) of the implementation and thereby shorten the discovery start phase of the project.  Additionally, It provides information about flow based functionality of implementation, which is also quite critical in understanding the overall business process end to end, right at start of the project.. 

Oracle application testing suite: Oracle Application testing suite can used automate functional regression testing, Oracle Load testing. Process of manual testing can be a time consuming and hence OATS place a critical role in faster testing process and enhance productivity.

Oracle application management suite: The task of managing Applications is complex, time-consuming, and costly.   The Application Management Suites for E-Business Suite can reduce this complexity, and dramatically improve the availability, reliability, and predictability for E-Business Suite. The Suite leverages Oracle Enterprise Manager to provide enhanced system and user monitoring, configuration monitoring and change management capabilities.

Oracle Enterprise manager: Enterprise manager is quite useful to manage the entire technology stack of Database, middleware application. OEM is useful right from start to post implementation support.

Oracle Infrastructure: During implementation or post implementation, the infrastructure plays a crucial role in success of implementation. There could be a situation where, the ERP implementation from business solution perspective is said to be very effective. However, infrastructure challenges might prevent the effective implementation.  For example, tasks might take a long time to be executed, this issue may be related to network bandwidth, multiple time I/O operation, resources busy due to peak hour or resource intensive. Its critical, infrastructure is given right focus at right point of time.  Exadata machine, RAC, Data guard can be thought about and explored to overcome the infrastructure issues. Also, Saas (software-as-service) concept related to cloud computing is catching up. One of the characteristic of cloud service is Rapid elastic scalability, which means the ability to add computing capacity on demand. This feature would be useful to allocate resource for computing during peak time. 

With positioning of global single instance for multi-org operation, the application needs to be available for access 24x7 towards global operation. An application scalability suiting ever evolving business requirement is one part of it. Cost optimization in form of shorter implementation, effective testing, managing application post implementation, reliability and scalability of hardware infrastructure also plays critical part in success of implementation. Hence, naturally, one needs to look at various software tools which would enhance productivity of Oracle ERP implementation.

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Spicy air travel

Was on short vacation to Goa few weeks back , while on my return I did have enough turbulence before we reached Chennai safely. Well, it was not turbulence due to weather, but due to cancellation of flight from Goa to Chennai. One would think, so what, flight cancellations are common, but I felt mine of unique.

Our return flight was at 4:40 PM, since we had visited scenic beaches the previous day, we did not have any plan to visit place the day of our return journey. Our initial plan was to check out at Hotel around 1:00 PM have lunch and proceed to airport, which is about 35 KM from our hotel. However, the previous day our cab driver suggested to start an hour early and he can take us to couple of beach in south Goa near airport before dropping us at airport for flight. This seemed fine and we agreed.

The next day, the driver picked us up at hotel post check out at 11:30 AM and we went to restaurant for lunch. Post lunch as the driver was taking us to a beach, it was 12:20 PM and a got a recorded phone call from airline stating the flight is cancelled for the evening and asking me bluntly to reach out to call center.

While on the way to a beach, I called up airline call center at 12:30 PM and gave my ticket PNR number and waited for a moment. The rest of it,

Call center: Yes, Sir how may I assist you.

Myself: What does your system say about my booking

Call center: Sorry sir, we really apologize for inconvenience caused, you flight is cancelled for the day.
(This was after I asked about the booking).

Myself: Why?.

Call center: Technical problem in flight,sir.

Myself: That's you problem to fix, so what are the options?

Call center: We have a flight tomorrow at 1:00 PM and you can travel with same ticket with no extra cost.

Myself: What??.... Will you provide for accommodation for stay, as I am not native of Goa and checked out of hotel? It will cost me a fortune for a night stay with family.

Call center: Sorry sir, we can’t provide accommodation (same reply came again and again).

****I was asking myself whether I have taken air ticket or a bus ticket to get such response? ****.

Myself: Come on, if you are not providing accommodation, is there alternative flight to other location like Bangalore, Hyderabad or Mumbai from where I can take flight to Chennai.

Call center: No sir, it already 12:45 PM, we have a flight to Bangalore at 1:55PM and to Hyderabad 2:15PM (then onward to Chennai at 19:25). From call center system allows for changes only upto 2 hours prior flight. Hence, unable to make change.

** I got some solace, immediately asked the cab driver to how long it takes to reach airport from that spot as he was driving towards beach location. He told me 30 minutes, immediately instructed him to drive to airport. ***

 Myself: Please get your supervisor, online. I will be in position to reach airport in another 40 minutes should be in time to reach in time Goa to Hyderabad flight. Hence put me on Hyderabad flight and had to shout" *********** and finally"

Call center: Hold on sir……….. Finally call center person confirms flight changes are done.

My wife and daughter, watching this, made a remark that they way, I was handling the situation was as thrilling like a movie scene..:).

In fact, there also a call few minutes later from airline spokesperson, stating my flight was cancelled, I shouted and asked her to check my reservation update in the system, she took few minutes and confirmed back...Hmmm....
 
Finally, we reached airport for flight by 1:10 PM and where in time for the flight check in and reached Chennai via Hyderabad.

Though, I was able to reach my home and flight cancellation is part and parcel of this industry, I had to manage the crisis on my own initiative for the fault on airline part.

Few question, for which I do not have answers,.

1. Airline being part of travel and hospitality industry, is it not the airline, who should have called me and informed about the flight option as from their internal computer system as they would know that, I am traveling with family and base location is different?.

2. In worst case, if airline cannot provide alternative on same day, should they not provide with appropriate accommodation?.

3. Being a no frill airline, compensation or accommodation are not applicable ?. If this is true, then passengers can be taken for a ride, particularly for small aircraft, when there are no adequate bookings and they can cite this point, if really needed.


Interestingly, the in flight crew circulated the feedback forms and collected it back, though I did mention few points in feedback. Not sure, whether these would be addressed OR is their a guideline/rule of law for passengers in event of cancellation by airline regulatory body for domestic flights in India?.

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Indibloggers - A force to reckon with.

This is my 5th year in blogging and had been associated with indiblogger since 2009~10.However, had never attended an indiblogger meet, each time had been pre-occupied with some engagement which was either personal or professional.

This time, when I received the email about the 'Ambi pur' blog meet, I immediately registered for the same and wanted to attend it, though it was on Sunday afternoon which would require me to sacrifice my Sunday afternoon nap.

Based on indiblogger email, being a blogger, writing on mainly business and review topics, some thoughts kept flashing in my minds. The meet is organized at Hotel Hayat and lunch is to be provided to close to 250 bloggers plus incurring other expenses. Oh.. so much......., does it mean blogging community have really become a force to reckon with? Similar to product launch press meet, which are normally done by corporates!!??!. Hmm… happy to be part of this journey.

Finally the D - day arrived : Sunday - May 26th noon.

Started from home around 12:40, due to metro rail constructions, the Annasalai now has so many deviations. Thank god, being a Sunday was able to drive through quite easily and reached hotel around 1:10PM and had the valet parking slip provided by security.

As I entered hall, was pleasantly surprised to note arrangement and ambiance made in professional way. The seating logistics was nice and the registration process was seamless as we moved in. I scanned around the packed hall, it was interesting to note, majority of them present should be in the age group of 20~30 year. This is a clear indication, that blogging is still young man's forte and growing in India. In developed economies, the newspaper industry is in doldrums the reason attributed was information available in web and blogging. Will this, percolate to Indian market as well?. May be yes, as years pass by when bloggers become more mature and readers gets interested in quality of information presented, blogging will naturally grow and mature. Looks like, we are already having the indication of blogging growing with each passing year.

Coming to the blogger meet, we did have some interactive session and got to know more about some of the bloggers through "30 secs of fame” on which I did have an opportunity to present myself. This was followed by Lunch, which was sumptuous with very good spread.

Post lunch had a presentation by sponsor - Ambi pur, some part of presentation was technical with chemical structure. However, I got to know that Ambi pur neutralizes the bad odor and thereby eliminates odor completely, where as normal perfumes does not neutralize bad odor and hence, as long as perfume is strong (few minutes), the perfumes smell just overrules bad odor and after some time bad odor wins again.

The first thing, I did post the meeting is test up Ambi pur car fragrance. In last 10 days or or so, my every drive in the car had been refreshing and pleasant. Further, compared to regular or old model Ambi pur the new one easily fixes A/C vent grill and able to remove it if not required, particularly if you are leaving the car for service or any other time, when you wish to have the Ambi pur removed. Also, unlike the earlier once, the liquid comes is sealed pack, so that it does not spill over easily – full marks from design improvement perspective compared to earlier one.

Another 2~ 3 weeks is still left to finally certify the product as a blogger :-), as Ambipur had claimed that the fragrance will last for about 30 days and so far it has been performing well.
At the end of the meet, happy to note, the blogging community is becoming a force to reckon with, as product companies are now are ready to sponsor such event for bloggers.

Thanks to Indiblogger team for all your efforts towards the blogging community and happy to be part of it. Need to have such meet more frequently.....Good-luck and hope we find more sponsors for such meets......

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