Ideatrotter

Making Energy Matter | Ben Foster

Ben Foster manages the creation, design, and delivery of Opower’s products, ensuring the company continues to build the industry’s leading suite of energy information services. He is responsible for the company’s products from a variety of perspectives, including features, functionality, user experience, and roadmap. Prior to Opower, Ben was VP of Product Management for Adchemy, a leader in digital advertising technology. While there, he was responsible for the company’s entire product suite supporting lead generation and Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings.

Before joining Adchemy, Ben led dozens of consumer-oriented product management efforts spanning the disciplines of marketing, merchandising, search, structured data, and technology integration at companies such as eBay, Webvan, ThoughtWorks, and Barra. He maintains a blog about best practices in product management and design, PMRant. Ben holds a BA in Statistics from the University of California at Berkeley.

Why Smart Gamification Matters | Badgeville

Havy Nguyen of Badgeville talks about how social loyalty techniques increase lifetime user value. The current problem with businesses is that they look at transactions and social loyalty separately. Using tools like status, reputation and privileges, gaming mechanics enhance a brand’s sticky factor, ensuring its longevity.

Start-up brings ‘adventure’ to lunch in Japan

A web app called Social Lunch is gaining popularity for bringing people together in their lunch hour in Japan. The app uses a social networking site to pair people with common interests in the same location for lunch with one another in hopes of expanding their business networks.

In its first six months, Social Lunch has gained over 35,000 members and organised 2,500 social lunches throughout Japan. Their plan is to eventually expand out into other parts of Asia in the forseeable future.

How Big Data Can Fuel Bigger Growth

In the right hands and handled strategically, the massive amounts of information companies collect today can become a valuable new asset. Players seeking additional organic revenue streams should consider tapping their data trove to power a new information services growth engine. In this Accenture High Performance Business Podcast, hear how big data – the massive amounts of analytics data companies collect – can power a new information services growth engine.

Cloud Computing To Reach $150 Billion by 2013

Estimated at the same value of the Greek Bailout and 10x the 2012 Olympics budget, the cloud computing industry is scheduled to grow twice as big as the coffee industry. By 2015, a quarter of all business software purchases will be service enabled software with SaaS delivery accounting and 80% of all apps deployed will be on the cloud. The cloud allows you to deploy apps faster, increase efficiency and flexibility, improve customer service and reduce cost.

However, it comes with its own set of challenges such as security threats, adaptability, overhaul of legacy products and lack of budget. With information being deployed to foreign servers, not only is cloud computing being perceived as an area of growth, but cloud security as well.