Are you a seasoned investor and yet you regret making decisions on certain investments? In other words, have you ever thought about going back in time and "do-over" some of your investment decisions? There was never an investor who didn't want to do this. Yes this is a common trait in most of the investors.  What makes us stick to some of these decisions which turn out to be worthless with the passage of time while other decisions might be the reason you become a billionaire. The answer lies in this article: http://blogs.wsj.com/experts/2015/05/05/in-investing-and-in-business-dont-trust-your-feelings/

We have come across the word "Smart city" frequently in recent times and we will see it more frequently in coming years. What exactly is a Smart City and how is it created?  The idea of smart City is to embed the technologically advanced devices which are making the Internet of things a reality into our surroundings. Once the technology is hard wired with the infrastructure, we can interact with these devices using our smart phones or computers and also devices can interact among themselves. For example, a car will be guided to an empty parking space without any human intervention.

In order to realize these smart cities, software and hardware applications for the internet of things are being encouraged. Some of the applications planned for smart cities are intelligent street lighting systems to conserve energy, mapping energy use around the city to understand demand and mapping how people maximize use of bicycle and foot paths. People are also raising caution over this new technology as it will hurt privacy.Read more at:http://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2015/05/19/how-big-data-and-the-internet-of-things-create-smarter-cities/2/

In the age of Big Data, the data tables are going to grow enormously in size. Millions of rows of data will be obtained. Computational techniques available now will no longer be efficient in analyzing and interpreting the data. Enter this June; MIT researchers will present a new algorithm that will reduce the size of the data tables by leaving out bunch of rows. The data/rows remaining will be the representative ones of the total data. This is called condensed data/matrix of original data/matrix. To know more about how to handle Big Data, follow:https://newsoffice.mit.edu/2015/algorithm-shrinks-big-data-0520

Companies are recognizing the need of contact center analytics to gain more consumer awareness but problems like cost of hiring new staff and procurement of new equipment are holding back contact centers from investing in analytics. Other factors like funding and prioritization are to be blamed as contact centers are now seen as cost centers but terms like customer experience and customer journey are gaining exposure. Read more at: 

http://searchcrm.techtarget.com/news/4500246053/Contact-center-analytics-still-an-uncharted-frontier

Thanks to enhanced campaigns, the role of paid search has been changing. Paid search helps to expand company's footprint on a search engine result pages and increases visibility as consumers often cast their eye towards the largest visual element when we go through a website. With new technology and devices like laptops, tablets and smartphones marketers must plan ads in a way that it reaches the consumers in the search context that the they prefer. Users set ads to appear according to three general events:  

• The time of day when the customer conducts a search       
• The device type on which the consumer is accessing the search     
• The location in which the ad is served 

The benefit is streamlining campaign so that ads that used to require separate campaigns, can now be handled in a single campaign. Marketers can increase campaign bids during the times of day when customers are more likely to search for a product. Enhanced campaigns has not only benefitted marketers but also the customer as their convenience is taken into account. Read more at: 

http://www.cmswire.com/cms/analytics/maximizing-your-enhanced-marketing-campaigns-029244.php 

According to a 2014 study, “88 percent of executives have begun a digital transformation at their company, but only 25 percent say they have completely mapped out the digital customer experience. A big part of the problem is that senior executives don’t know where to start.”

The impact of digital revolution has been huge. But, what all companies want is to embrace this impact and emerge as leaders of their field. They want to easily adapt to these changes like HMV did when the digital era of music challenged its business.

Joerg Niessing, INSEAD Affiliate Professor of Marketing, in his article at knowledge.insead.edu, has listed out three important principles that companies should keep in mind while mapping out digital customer experience. They are:

• Customer Orientation
• Customer Segmentation
• Integrated Branding at every Consumer Touchpoint

Although digitalization has changed the way we live and work. But, the golden rule of marketing still works nevertheless i.e. Be Customer Centric. Keep this mind along with the above mentioned principles; you may get a solution to this changing marketing scenario.

To know more, please visit the following link:

http://knowledge.insead.edu/blog/insead-blog/what-brands-need-to-survive-in-a-digital-world-4050

“Analyzing and streamlining the supply chain is one way to help companies respond more quickly to the fast pace of business today while boosting operational efficiency.”

- Glenn Johnson

Efficiency in supply chain management provides an extra edge to any organization as it helps in reducing costs, speeding time to market, better customer experiences as well as flexible operations. Glenn Johnson, in his article at smartdatacollective.com has shared 5 tips for streamlining supply chain that will result in more profitable operations. They are:

1. Review and optimize supply chain processes
2. Integrate your supply chain
3. Leverage existing systems
4. Abolish duplicate data
5. Understand the big picture

To understand them in detail, please visit the following link:

http://smartdatacollective.com/magicsoftware/312051/5-tips-streamlining-supply-chain

Banking and finance are an indispensable part of our lives.  Though the world today is divided into rich and poor, but the common fact amongst these two groups is that they need funds to invest and grow. To meet this common need of these two different groups, we have two different institutions:

• Investment Banks
• Microfinance Institutions

Matthew Johnston, in his article at Investopedia.com, has compared these two financial institutions in terms of their history, use, recent trends as well as examples.

To know more, please visit the following link:

http://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/052215/how-microfinance-and-investment-banking-compare.asp

In this competitive world, advertising is very important for getting customer’s attention. But, a small industry has limited budget and they need to develop a successful marketing campaign, which creates revenue for them without expending too much. Here are some tips to grow business with limited budget:
• Make an interesting and short elevator pitch.
• Try to think locally because it can really pay off.
• Collaborate with local business.
• Networking is the best way to grow your business.
• Presenting speeches full of information about the product and benefits, in conference and events can be helpful.
• Try to build relationships with customers.
• Offer incentives and coupons to customers.
To know more tips and benefits of all these tips, please follow this link: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/246528

According to Nitin Mehta (CIO of IT Enterprise Transforming India), Indian industries are going through technology transformation phase. Social, mobility, analytics and cloud (SMAC) are changing the way the organizations run. According to the Enterprise IT trends and investments 2015 survey report:

• 64% of the Indian CIO plan to increase their IT spending over 2014.
• Three in ten CIOs are planning to increase their IT spending by 10%.
• 25% of the IT budget is allocated to SMAC technologies.
• 50% of the respondents believe that social media is very effective in engaging customers.
• 57% of the respondents believe that cloud is being every significant.

Some observations are found, they are:

• CIO’s, IT agenda is mainly driven by internal factors, such as maturity and organization size.
• Companies IT spending is increasing.
• Social media is becoming an integral part of marketing strategy.
• Social media is transforming the relationship between stakeholders.
• Increasing usage of smartphones and internet, helping organizations in creating digital data.
• Prescriptive analytics is helping organizations in understanding the need of the customers.
Read more at: http://www.moneycontrol.com/news/technology/indian-companies-to-spend-moredisruptive-technology-ey_1391213.html?utm_source=ref_article

Digitalization revolution is forcing organizations to change or review their organization processes and strategies. Jay Scanlan (Strategy leader of McKinsey Digital) in his Mckinsey article talks about some questions which an organization should ask at the time of introducing digitalization into their organizations:
• Whether your current business model is viable, or do you need to fundamentally change the nature of how you compete in the marketplace?
• Do you need to transform your core business-as-usual organization rapidly, or you can afford to build new businesses and the new capabilities required to compete and win over the next 10 to 15 years?
• How many new functional capabilities do you need to grow and develop, and how much do you need to change your existing supply chains, your existing operational capabilities, and your existing channel architecture to be more effective?
And to introduce digitalization, you need to rethink on your resource allocation and budgeting strategies. To know more about the benefits of digitalization and how digitalizing is changing strategy, please follow this link: http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/strategy/how_digital_is_changing_strategy

According to successful CEOs and marketing experts, the survival of any business in the near future will rely on maintaining close relationships with customers. In this competitive and dynamic world, the ability to predict, adapt and change are the basic necessity for organization’s survival. According to Shawn Casemore (President and Founder of Casemore and Co Inc.), there are three fundamental areas of business that affect the profitability of any organization are:
• Customers
• Market
• Employees

 But for the growth and long-term survival of an organization, they need a close relationship with their customers. Three steps to create a close relationship with your customers are:

• Shift away from a functional mentality.
• Build offerings that deliver value.
• Tune into customer feedback.
To know more about these steps and professional view regarding marketing, please follow this link: http://www.industryweek.com/customer-relationships/increase-profits-creating-closer-customer-connections

According to IT research firm IDC report, IoT market will grow by 19% in 2015. The increasing importance of the IoT in manufacturing and operations market, leads to the growth of the IoT by $56.6billion. Digital Signage market, which is used in the retail sector, will be the major driver for growth and IoT retail market will grow from $6billion to $35.7billion by 2018 in this market. The main reason for increasing demand for IoT is decreasing prices and technology advancement. Read more at: http://www.informationweek.com/it-life/iot-market-will-grow-19-percent-in-2015-idc-predicts/d/d-id/1320500

Cloud Analytics is one application that is growing very fast and will accelerate in the coming decade. According to Ashutosh Kulkarni (Sr. Vice President and General Manager, Informatica Cloud), scalability, affordable price, simplicity to offer domain specific and user-specific capabilities make cloud analytics unbeatable. The scalability of Hadoop, and the emergence of highly elastic cloud analytic services like AWS, EMR and Redshift, Microsoft Azure, and Salesforce Wave Analytics, has helped in moving IT infrastructure to the cloud and cloud integration Platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) is designed to support the scalability, reliability and security of cloud analytics. Read more at: http://www.computerworld.com/article/2924846/data-analytics/the-future-of-cloud-analytics-is-now.html

Healthcare analytics, estimated to be over 20 billion, is growing very fast. The main reasons for the growth are: improved population health, reduced healthcare cost and patient safety. Thus, a vast majority of healthcare decision-makers have made analytics their priority. However, there are four main factors that could impact the adoption rate of analytics in healthcare. Data integration: It is the most important challenge because of the absence of unified datasets and inoperability between technologies.

Data breaches and security: This needs to be taken care off when data needs to be transferred to cloud in view of the recent healthcare data hacks.

Data sciences talent: There is likely to be stiff competition for talented data scientists with experience in healthcare and analytics.

Low current levels of analytics investment: The order of magnitude of investment in analytics may be the biggest challenge for the growth of analytics in healthcare.

Read more at:http://www.cio.com/article/2904270/healthcare/healthcare-analytics-4-things-impacting-the-adoption-rate.html

High speed internet network connecting villages across India; that's the dream PM Narendra Modi has been nurturing. A ministry appointed committee raised allocation for the National Optical Fiber Network. Estimated time is 3 years for laying down the fibers. It will help in linking 250,000 village clusters to the Internet which is an essential part to digitalize India. Higher spending potentially will expand opportunities for fiber suppliers and telecommunication vendors. Read more at:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-18/modi-mulls-11-billion-outlay-to-bring-rural-india-online

Instincts, intuition and creativity are invaluable when it comes to customers, but they cannot paint the whole picture. A solid grasp of data and analytics is required along with them to make a mark in the market. For example, logic does not come out as a winner when deciding loyalty but data and applied analytics tells us a different story. Results though counter intuition sometimes provide important insight which helps develop the marketing strategies. Advanced analytics ventures into the field of correlation and converts guesswork into evidence-based decisions. Advanced analytics also improves customer experience.  Sometimes it does not completely rely on intuitive results, deviates from it but helps to validate targeted campaigns.  To know more please follow the link:http://www.cmswire.com/cms/digital-marketing/they-love-me-they-love-me-not-data-analytics-can-tell-you-029247.php

It was predicted that faster job creation and cheaper gasoline prices would drive the strongest growth rate in America but it is far from expectation. The reason is thought to be the start-and- stop spending by American households that represent almost 70% of the economic activity. It can be seen that there is a trend among the consumers not to spend freely. It is baffling as to why US consumers are being cautious. Interest rates are low; stock market is at an all-time high, home values are recovering, unemployment rate decreased to 5.4% yet things are not turning around. Savings rate went up to 5.7%. Though gasoline prices have fallen expenses on energy bills, food, housing, medical care, education has kept on rising. Wages though being adjusted for inflation cannot benefit the workers. Economists believe that US economy will turn around and the consumers will regain their confidence. Read more at:http://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-consumers-are-so-cautious-2015-05-19?page=1

Web-Connected devices that can talk to each other, transfer data, and carry out tasks without human interaction, are what make up the Internet of Things (IoT). These devices/ things are becoming popular among any firm looking for an edge. Generally IoT refers to devices in Consumer products such as Smart Phones, Smart cars etc. In Industrial sector these devices are used to build smart factories by integrating sensors and software to complex machinery. Growth of these devices will be very high as suggested by a report from Deloitte and there are only few firms working in IoT/Industrial Internet implying that there will be enormous opportunities for entrepreneurs in this sector.

As is the case with any budding technology, this area also faces challenges. Some of which are data security, addressing potential customers’ concerns about privacy, the lack of common standards between companies developing software for these devices; and the need to build physical infrastructure to support the collection and analysis of the data.Read more at: 

http://www.wamda.com/memakersge/2015/05/5-minute-guide-internet-of-things

Corporate profit margins may be narrowing down with the S&P 500 index declining more than 20%. The stock market being overly dependent on wide profit margins is vulnerable. Statistics and various calculative methods show us that the six-decade average profit margin of corporate America is 6.3%. If corporate profitability reverted back to its average, it is likely that S&P 500 would be on its way down.  The stock market would have single digit growth. Way out could be P/E expansion and widening of corporate profit-margins. Opinions differ; many proponents believe the stock market will be affected no matter what the level of corporate profit margins. To know more, follow the link: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/investors-need-to-face-the-possibility-of-a-great-reset-2015-05-20