Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Simon Cooper, CIO of ServicePower (Part 1)

The field service industry is heavily impacted by cloud computing. Here’s a short conversation with one of the players.

Sramana Mitra: Simon, let’s introduce our audience to you as well as to ServicePower.

Simon Cooper: My name is Simon Cooper. I’m the CIO of ServicePower. ServicePower has been in the field service management space since the early ‘90s. Originally, we were funded from a research project in Europe as part of ICL Fujitsu to develop artificial intelligence-based algorithms to solve complex scheduling problems. From there, we’ve evolved into a field service management leader. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Yaacov Cohen, Co-Founder and CEO of Harmon.ie (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: There’s one article called “Innovation’s Next Decade” which you will find interesting. That article will probably address the kind of things that you’re talking about.

Yaacov Cohen: I believe also in the convergence of ethics and technology. Spirituality and technology needs to be better converged. Technology won’t free humanity.

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Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Yaacov Cohen, Co-Founder and CEO of Harmon.ie (Part 5)

Yaacov Cohen: The enterprise is a lot more heterogeneous. It used to be controlled by three to five vendors. It’s a lot more diverse, because I can have a cloud service for pretty much anything in the enterprise. I think the mega trend here is enterprise mobility and it includes cloud services, BYOD, devices, and security. I think that’s the landscape. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Yaacov Cohen, Co-Founder and CEO of Harmon.ie (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Is this a cloud services business model?

Yaacov Cohen: We are running as a mobile application on iOs, Androids, Blackberries, as well as desktops and laptops. We have multiple delivery models on mobile, cloud, and desktop. We’re trying to deliver this business consumer experience across all platforms. One of the big things is that we are delivering this one-screen experience across all devices.

Sramana Mitra: You have some sort of consolidated composite application layer that you have configured that you feed into multiple device form factors from that composite front-end?

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Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Yaacov Cohen, Co-Founder and CEO of Harmon.ie (Part 3)

Yaacov Cohen: Let’s say, if I want to look for a specific life insurance policy. I want to see who among my colleagues have been able to tailor an insurance portfolio to a specific scenario. I want to be able to use tags which are describing the specific scenario to search across a million documents and to retrieve the five documents which are relevant to me for this particular insurance situation. That’s the type of scenario that we see where you need to build a knowledge center rather than simply store a document.

Sramana Mitra: What does your competitive landscape look like? Whom do you consider as direct and indirect competitors?

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Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Yaacov Cohen, Co-Founder and CEO of Harmon.ie (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Can you talk to me a bit about the other different use cases that you’re seeing for the solution you’re offering. You took off through the investment banking use case. Are we talking more of a sales kind of scenario? Do you want people who are in sales situations to have access to their colleagues and information to interact with clients?

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Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Yaacov Cohen, Co-Founder and CEO of Harmon.ie (Part 1)

This interview explores how enterprises are using composite mobile apps that bring various cloud and mobile services together on a device.

Sramana Mitra: Yaacov, let’s introduce our audience to yourself as well as to Harmon.ie.

Yaacov Cohen: Thank you for having me, Sramana. My name is Yaacov Cohen and I’m the co-founder and CEO of Harmon.ie. I am a global entrepreneur. I grew up in France but I lived 25 years in Israel and 5 years in Silicon Valley. Harmon.ie is an enterprise mobile vendor and our mission is to define the business consumer experience in the mobile enterprise. >>>

A Tablet App from Invention Labs Helps Kids with Speech Disabilities

The field of educational technologies is going through an exciting period. From massively open online courses (MOOCs) like MIT’s OCW or edX and Khan Academy to a range of tablet and smartphone applications, the field is rife with exciting innovations that have dramatically changed the face of education. There is a higher degree of self-learning and from a ‘sage on the stage’ model, education has evolved to a ‘guide on the side’ model. And in niche areas of education like special education where the ‘guide on the side’ models are the norm, there is a revolution happening, aided by the tablet and the various applications.

In the 1M/1M program, I came across one such innovative company, India-based Invention Labs, in the field of special education. With its latest innovation, called FreeSpeech, it addresses a growing problem encountered by children with special needs. For every 88 children in the US, one child is diagnosed with autism. The incidence of dyslexia is 15 percent of children in the US educational system. There are about 6 million kids with special needs in the US and a total of 24 million in the US, Canada, Europe, Japan, Korea, and West Asia. There is a growing need to help kids with speech disabilities develop communication and language.
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