Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Josh Koppel, Founder of ScrollMotion (Part 1)

Sales empowerment tools are getting richer by the day. This discussion explores the trends.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with introducing our audience to yourself and ScrollMotion.

Josh Koppel: I’m the Founder and Chief Creative Officer of ScrollMotion. ScrollMotion is a platform that lets any company create highly interactive content on an iPad for things like sales, training, and communications.

Sramana Mitra: What’s special about the platform?

Josh Koppel: In the past, it’s been very hard for companies to take advantage of the power of the iPad for sales in a truly revolutionary way. People have been able to move around flat content and maybe open up some PDFs and PowerPoint but have never really able to delve into the experience of touch. That, to us, is truly transformative and truly revolutionary in terms of talking and having a conversation with somebody. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Bharat Anand, Faculty Chair, HBX at Harvard Business School (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: All right. I’m going to switch to my last question. Based on the trends you see on online learning, where do you see opportunities for entrepreneurs to start new companies?

Bharat Anand: Let me step back a bit. Technology is allowing us to create all sorts of new and interesting offerings. I wanted to focus a little bit on learners and their behaviours. What we’re seeing is that there are, at least, three kinds of things that individuals look for in online experiences. The first I’d probably describe as a question of relevance. It’s one thing to offer content. The content might be of terrific quality, but as a learner, I want to know why it’s relevant or important for me. That’s a question that I think is becoming increasingly important. It’s a trend that’s caused by the confluence of many things such as scarce time and greater competition. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Bharat Anand, Faculty Chair, HBX at Harvard Business School (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: I don’t buy that this is going to scale necessarily.

Bharat Anand: Yes, go ahead.

Sramana Mitra: What you’re saying, it works to a point. I don’t think it’s going to, necessarily, scale to millions of numbers – the kind of numbers with which edX is working with right now. I don’t think the model you’re talking about is going to scale at those levels because for all the factors with which you are trying to preserve quality – the price, grade, and expectation of the interaction level. I think that works like an elite conversation mode. That does not work in a mass crowd mode.

Bharat Anand: I think i disagree with that. When we think about peer conversation, obviously, you can’t have ten thousand people on the same platform asking each others questions. We’ve experimented with the right size of the cohort. Where we’ve converged to is somewhere between 300 to 500 people. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Mike Ryan, CTO of Mobile Labs (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the question that I want to explore, which is about open problems. You’ve already talked about the hyperscaling of mobile devices and apps in the next few years. If you were to start a company today, what kind of things would you work on?

Mike Ryan: I would look at how these revolutions have gone in the past, just for a little hint. Again, we look at this through the enterprise. If you go back to the days of PC, we had IT, mainframes, and customer databases. Along come personal computers, and along comes database three. All of a sudden, the company has 50 customer databases because departments went off and did things on their own. It’s the empowerment of departments in the enterprise that we think is most interesting in terms of growth. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Mike Ryan, CTO of Mobile Labs (Part 2)

Mike Ryan: The delivery infrastructure is almost infinitely very dated. There are 97 manufacturers of mobile devices and hundreds and thousands of combinations. You have the challenge of supporting old technologies as well as new technologies. If you need to support a mobile phone that is three or four years old, you’ve severe disparity. That’s one segment of the challenge. The second thing is that app stores have empowered users in ways we have never seen before. When users post reviews with low ratings, you can get into some hot water.

The activity in the marketplace is astoundingly large now and it’s going to get larger. It’s expected that in 2017, we’ll see 268 billion downloads, which would represent $77 billion worth of revenue. You’ve this challenge with the environment and then with the users. Finally, you’ve the challenge of how to adopt mobility to your engineering practices. We think there is a need for a device cloud for infrastructure support for those activities. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Mike Ryan, CTO of Mobile Labs (Part 1)

Mobile devices, especially smartphones, are growing their footprints at an unprecedented scale. Alongside, the mobile app proliferation is gaining tremendous adoption. Mike discusses testing challenges against the backdrop.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as the company.

Mike Ryan: I’m the CTO at Mobile Labs. Mobile Labs is an aspirational name because we wanted to think about all aspects of mobile application development and testing. We started in 2011. I’ve been here for about three and a half years now. Prior to this, I worked for a software emulation company in California for about nine years. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Qstream CEO Duncan Lennox (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: At the core, your innovation and what you’re doing with your company is around how the human brain learns. It’s not about mobile. It’s not about social. It’s not about sales. It’s really an innovation on how the human brain works. You’re applying it using mobile and social user interfaces on a specific business problem which is sales training and on-boarding.

Duncan Lennox: That’s absolutely correct. We talk about what we do as science-based and data-driven. That’s fundamentally our approach. It’s quite different from the classic approach to learning or education. You’re right that our technology and our methodology could be applied to anything. We’ve chosen to apply it in the area of sales but I think an important point is it’s true we don’t need mobile to do what we do. It’s also true that mobile turns out to be the perfect form factor to deliver our methodology. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Qstream CEO Duncan Lennox (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Where are the open problems in your space? If you were starting out a company today, where would you look?

Duncan Lennox: Are you defining the space as enterprise or mobile?

Sramana Mitra: You can define it in whatever way that feels comfortable to you. Just listening to you, I’m curious about what you see in sales empowerment.

Duncan Lennox: There’s a fascinating number of areas. The reality is when you look at the impact of mobile, we’re still barely scratching the surface. We’re bringing together the mobile component. We’re leveraging gamification, which we’ve talked about already. We’re also leveraging Big Data. When you bring those three together, I think you’ll get a very powerful set of tools that allows you to approach problems in a very different way. The really interesting components that comes in on top of that is looking at the brain science aspect of things. >>>