Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Brent Lang, President of Vocera (Part 1)

Effective communication is vital for the success of any business, but for hospitals and other health care facilities, it’s an absolute must. Vocera helps by providing mobile communication solutions that address the most serious communication challenges that health care workers face every day. More than 750 health care organizations use Vocera solutions to function more efficiently.

Sramana Mitra: Hi, Brent. Let’s start with a bit of context. What do you do? What’s unique about the work you do? What are the scope and scale of your company? >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Mike Afergan, Senior VP & GM of Web Experience Business Unit, Akamai (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What exactly are some of those decisions? Would you give us examples of some of the more complex decisions that happen at the edges?

Mike Afergan: Sure, take image manipulation, adapting an image. To be clear, it’s simple from a conceptual perspective. It’s easy to understand. Doing that at scale across a number of images is an interesting and complicated set of technology work. But to build upon that, there are other, more sophisticated examples. A simple concept to understand is that these devices have different browsers, and the browsers that run on the Android stack are different from the browsers that run on the iOS stack, which are different from the browsers that run on your PC. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Mike Afergan, Senior VP & GM of Web Experience Business Unit, Akamai (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: There are a variety of user experiences and architecture designs that are being stored and based on what device a request is coming in from, the right one is being served. You’re saying that the decision of which of those designs is going to be served and what performance level is being done by companies like Akamai. Did I get that right? >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Mike Afergan, Senior VP & GM of Web Experience Business Unit, Akamai (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s take the situational complexity and performance topics. Could you talk about at what point is each of these problems being solved? Who is solving what part of this diversity? Is it the Web experience owner? What part of the problem is he solving? What part of the problem is an infrastructure vendor like Akamai solving? >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Mike Afergan, Senior VP & GM of Web Experience Business Unit, Akamai (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: On those two trends, from where you sit at Akamai, how does that affect what you offer and what your customers are looking for from you to support those trends?

Mike Afergan: There are a lot of things that come from those trends, a lot of exciting things. I’d focus on three trends that come out of those devices and cellular connectivity. These three trends would be a concept of situational performance, a concept of complexity, and a concept of new applications. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Mike Afergan, Senior VP & GM of Web Experience Business Unit, Akamai (Part 1)

Those who read my blog regularly will recognize the company Akamai. I have featured it in several Technology Stocks posts as well as in an interview with Willie Tejada for my Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing series and an interview with Tom Leighton for Entrepreneur Journeys. Since being founded in 1998, Akamai has been a company that  accelerates and delivers content and value-added services to an international collection of customers.

Sramana Mitra: Hi, Mike. Let’s start with a bit of context about Akamai’s presence in the mobile and social domain. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: David Aronchick, Co-Founder and CEO of Hark (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: If I were an app developer, and I wanted to mash up some Dark Knight content and use Dark Knight characters to build an app or game, today, I have to go through a proper licensing process, correct?

David Aronchick: Yes. There are variety of things you would need to do. The unfortunate part is that in the iTunes store, you’re always going to struggle a little because even if you have a contract with the studio in hand, it’s still going to be a pain in the neck. There’s no way around that. Apple is just too harsh when it comes to a lot of this stuff. That being said, there are many things you can do in the Android store where it’s more open, or in the Windows store or on the Web, that are still incredibly powerful experiences that sit on top of the existing data. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: David Aronchick, Co-Founder and CEO of Hark (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: In which direction do you think the business is going to go? Is it going to be that movie executives would want to chop up their content and distribute through your website or YouTube for marketing purposes? Or do you think this is going to be the kind of monetization opportunity you were talking about, video-on-demand and so forth? Is this going to be another way that they’ll want to monetize by selling certain clips for licensed usage? >>>