Ways 3D printing is making the world a better place

A new generation of prosthetics

“Turning disabilities into superpowers” is the defining vision of UK-based Open Bionics. Their mission is to create “affordable, assistive devices that enhance the human body.”

Their first product was  the Hero Arm, which they describe as “the world's first medically certified 3D-printed bionic arm, with multi-grip functionality and empowering aesthetics.”  It is “a lightweight and affordable myoelectric prosthesis.” 

The company now offers a selection of themed covers for the Hero Arm, including Star Wars BB-8, Marvel Iron Man, Disney Frozen and Deus Ex.  They are “custom-made using innovative 3D-printing and 3D-scanning techniques.” 

Dedication to helping children by providing them with 3D printed hands is also the driving passion behind a group of volunteers who formed e-NABLE. Its members now number in the thousands, and they have made it possible for thousands of children around the world to regain hand function. See the video below:

  

Quick and economical home construction

Another way 3D printing is being used to make the world a better place is by reducing the cost of home construction enough to make new houses accessible to those whose income puts adequate shelter beyond their reach.

One company that has made this its mission is ICON. Its tagline is “We’re changing the way people live.” It set out to apply 3D printing to houses and envisions whole communities set up that way in a kind of 21st-century version of Levitton.

Last year ICON built the Chicon house, described as “the first permitted 3D-printed home built in the United States” in Austin, Texas in 2018. It took a few weeks to print “and sparked the imagination of customers, investors, press, and the SXSW conference community.”

Now it has advanced the technology to the point where it can get a house up in just  a day and at a cost of just $4000 as you can see in this video:

ICON believes that its 3D printing applied to concrete is the solution to low-income housing, both in the USA and abroad. To that end, it has partnered with a charity called New Story that has provided funding for homes in Mexico, Haiti, El Salvador, and Bolivia and for needy households.

“By partnering with ICON in select regions, New Story will be able to see out their vision more efficiently and deliver the promise of a life beyond survival to thousands more,” it reports.

4. Homes on Mars 

Applying 3D printing to home construction also has ramifications for the space program. In planning a mission to Mars, NASA has to deal with the challenge of setting up shelter for the people who will be living on the red planet. To that end, it launched  the 3D-Printed Habitat Challenge

 See the video below:

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10 Surprising Ways 3D Printing Is Being Used Now

Tip for Women in Tech

Takeaway: Women are vastly outnumbered by men in technological fields, which is why networking, mentoring and advice from other women in the field can be invaluable tools.

The gender gap that persists in tech career paths remains an obstacle to overcome for women who want to break into the field. But it can be done, and women who have made it have some valuable insight to share with those aspire to follow in their path or blaze their own. It all comes down to overcoming self-doubt and moving fearlessly forward. A number recommend connecting with others for support, but sometimes the motivation has to come from within.

Fortune Favors the Bold

Sophie Knowles, Founder & CEO of PDF Pro goes this far: “Do not be afraid to start your own business. A lot of people are scared by the prospect of going out on their own, but there is so much opportunity.” Her recommendation is to follow your passion because “you will have a much greater sense of purpose and see that you are capable of so much more than you ever thought you were.” That doesn’t mean just following your heart, though. She adds on the necessity of persistence, as well as doing the requisite research and asking for help when needed.

Likewise, Nancy Wang, Founder and CEO of Advancing Women in Product (AWIP) tells women, “If you see an opportunity you think is a fit, take the risk. Changing careers or taking on a new job can be scary, but never be afraid to take that job that you’re really excited about.” 

Read more in Top Career Tips for Women Working in Technology

The Why and How of B2B Rebranding

What’s in a name? Quite a lot for brands. Many invest a great deal in building up their name recognition. So when a company makes the move to rebrand: the question is, what justifies changing that name, which can cost the company the goodwill it has cultivated over years of conducting business? Also what particular challenges do B2B companies have over B2C ones when taking on rebranding? 

This was the topic of discussion I had with Paul Pellman, a former Google executive and new CEO of Kazoo, an HR tech company that brought together two different companies  — YouEarnedIt and HighGround  — under a single entity this April. With rebranding at the top of a newly named company, we talked about which situations necessitate making such a change.

Read more in 

How to Rebrand a B2B

Mom's the word for May Marketing

Pic source: https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRuUW09Tho0j2ZFo27uFHes5yUJikfP6DLY7NcSkjH4KaZLhYqc8w

A mother’s love is indeed priceless, but Mother’s Day spending can be measured. Marketers who take note of trends can achieve a significant lift in May sales.

The National Retail Foundation (NRF) anticipates that Mother’s Day 2019 will be the biggest to date. According to the figures based on the survey, Americans will be spending a record $25 billion on Mother’s Day gifts and outings. 

The total amount isn’t divided over the entire population of the United States but by about 86 percent who identify themselves as celebrating the day, according the NRF. That breaks down to an average of $196 per person, though those in the age bracket of 35 to 44 spend even more, averaging $248. 

What is most significant for those in marketing is that the overwhelming majority — 81 percent — seek guidance for gifts from the seller end. What that means is that Mother’s Day offers a great opportunity to direct millions of people who want to be directed toward that perfect gift for mom. 

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Mother's Day Gift for Marketers

How to win customers in cybersecurity marketing

Those who work in the cybersecurity business know that they have to keep up to date on points of vulnerability in technology to maintain their edge. What the ones who successfully market their products also know is that they have to adapt to evolving customer expectations in the highly competitive B2B market.

What goes into successful cybersecurity marketing? The answer to that was offered by Ken Rutsky, author of Launching to Leading: How B2B Market Leaders Create Flashmobs, Marshal Parades, and Ignite Movements in a recent interview about the paradigm shift that has occurred in B2B messaging and positioning.....

It’s all about “how to make value conversations relate to the buyer -- not the seller,” he says. 

Read more in How to put the customer at the center of cybersecurity marketing

Banking on Data

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Very few people seem to express warm, fuzzy feelings about banks. In fact, they are more  20 point drop in public trust in 2018. 

likely to have cold, prickly feelings about them. Financial services institutions suffered a

So what can banks do to try to attract and retain loyalty? Aside from asking banking customers directly, how would banks find out what people really think of what they’re doing? They could tap into social data. That’s what Crimson Hexagon did with in a report that compares two bank brands: BNP Paribas and Santander. 

The report is based on an exploration of five years’ worth of online conversations related to these two large bank brands.  Data was culled from “Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, blogs and forums – a wide range of locations where consumers gather to discuss various topics.” 

Read more in 

Data You Can Bank On

When two screens are better than one

In the last century, people who would plan what to watch on TV would turn to printed guides. Thanks to the proliferation of channels and the rise of streaming services, they have a lot more options to choose from. But this brave new world also opens up new ways for marketers to reach the audiences that will lift viewership. 

A  leader in global TV analytics, Samba TV, connects data on viewership with cross-screen ad exposure to helps programmers measure and optimize tune-in campaign performance. Toward that end it draws on partnerships for insight into what viewers are tuning into on their second screen. 

TV and digital are better together, says cross-screen analytics leader Samba TV.

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Second Screen Synergy for TV Marketing

Sustainability marketing for Earth Day

Getty Images

Earth Day is April 22, and some brands have taken a cue from the event to raise awareness about the environment and to show how they contribute to the health of the planet. It’s a more obvious fit for some brands than others. 

The online discount retailer, BLINQ, normally appeals to consumers looking for low prices. But come April, which it identifies as “earth month,” it stresses that it is not just about saving money but saving the planet. 

 The BLINQ blog says, “Most items on our website are overstock or returned goods that would have otherwise been tossed — regardless of the condition they are in! That means every time you shop on BLINQ, you’re doing your part to help reduce waste.” 

Still that applies all year round, so for this month, the retailer announced that it partnered with Trees.org to donate a tree for every BLINQ order. In case the pricing is not enticing enough, they also offer customers a bonus of feeling good about the impact of their purchase: “Every order supports sustainability.” 

That’s a real value proposition for some customers, according to a recent Nielsen report. "Sustainability sells," is what it found. 

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Go Green: Sustainablility Marketing

Women in Tech: the glass is about a quarter full

Takeaway: Although women currently hold only about 25% of tech positions in the U.S., numbers are growing and many women are working to reduce this gender gap.

Assessing the state of women in tech does present a kind of half-full – or, more precisely, quarter-full – glass perspective. There is definitely still a marked gap in terms of representation in the field and even pay. However, there are also signs of movement in the right direction. So while we do mind the gap, we should also look at what works to narrow it down. 

Read more in Minding the Gender Gap: 10 Facts about Women in Tech

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Keeping it real in telling your marketing story

Just like in the realm of B2C, effective storytelling is fundamental to marketing in B2B. The key differentiator for brands is to make the stories not about how amazing they are but about the amazing results the businesses that use their solutions are able to achieve. That’s the key to a subtle shift in messaging at Dell Technologies. 

As we saw in "B2B Marketing: Who’s Your Hero?" this is exactly what brands should be doing in drawing on the stories of heroic journeys, in which a magical object can be brought back into the hero’s world to solve what appeared to be an insurmountable labor. Accordingly,  Dell Technologies is now showcasing its “Let’s Make it Real" effort, in the context of the real world where heroic businesses are applying the magic of its technology. 

Dell Technologies launched the “Let’s Make it Real” brand campaign on March 27. While the tagline dates back three years, the brand decided to take a new direction, in shifting away from the stage setting that puts the spotlight on digital transformation as magic to real-world scenarios in which digital transformation can have a magical effect. 

The following video represents the brand message Dell Technologies used in the commercial that aired last year.

Actor Jeffrey Wright presents the special effects, in a theater, that go with the defining message: “‘Magic can’t make digital transformation happen. But we can. Let’s make it real.’”  

Read more in: 

B2B Storytelling That Keeps it Real

Related post: https://writewaypro.blogspot.com/2019/03/casting-hero-of-your-story.html

A dozen women high up in tech

Ada Lovelace, credited with writing the first computer algorithm.

Takeaway: While men still dominate the top positions in tech, there are women who have worked hard to attain top positions, driving innovative technology and directing successful businesses. Often, they not only step into an existing business, but create or co-found a new commercial concept.

Look at any list of the top names in tech, and you will invariably notice that women are very much outnumbered, often representing only a third at best. To find the women who have risen through the ranks, you may have to look at the lists that are devoted to women specifically. There are a number of them, and this list cannot take them all into account. Instead, it presents a dozen. Some of the names are very well known, and some are less so.

Whether they have worked their way up the ranks of a well-established business, have developed a completely innovative concept that forms the basis of a new one, or have the vision to realize which new tech company they should be investing in, they all are highly accomplished in their field. So as not to appear to rank them in order of importance, they are simply presented in alphabetical order. 

Read more in 

12 Top Women in Tech Right Now

Casting the hero of your story

Recently I spoke with Ken Rutsky, author of Launching to Leading: How B2B Market Leaders Create Flashmobs, Marshal Parades, and Ignite Movements, about what what goes into successful B2B marketing. One of the biggest misconceptions people have, he said, is that all they need is the right tech. 

While tech does indeed play a role in data-driven marketing, Rutsky considers it only one third of the story. And getting the story right is actually the key thing in effectively connecting with B2B customers, just as it is for B2C customers. 

Who’s the hero in your marketing story? 

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From the tales of Homer to comic books and films like Star Wars,  and even Disney’s Moana, stories of a hero’s journey remain persistently popular. Rutsky credits Joseph Campbell’s 1949 book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, for breaking down the steps involved in such stories. 

Rutsky quotes Campbell's summary of the journey story on p. 95 of his own book: “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.” 

In his own words, Rutsky described it as the hero’s perilous journey far from home to bring “a magical gift” to improve his own world. Such stories are a great way for marketers to present a product or service that will solve a persistent problem for the business customer. And they often do so, but what they tend to get wrong is the casting of the hero. 

Read more in B2B Marketing: Who’s Your Hero?

Voice for Marketing

Voice is set to become a necessity for driving site traffic and a ticket to increased conversion

Businesses that want to drive traffic to their site have had to learn how to optimize for search and then how to optimize for mobile. Now they are going to have another medium to consider: optimizing for voice search.

“Voice tech is on the rise and will continue to grow,” said Dan Drapeau, Head of Technology at Blue Fountain Media, in a phone interview. He compared its transition to mainstream connection to that of social media and mobile.

Read more in 

Why Marketers Should Be Thinking About Voice

Tips for Aspiring Data Scientists

Kaggle graph

Data scientist ranks as the best job for 2019 in America on Glassdoor. With a median base salary of $108,000 and a job satisfaction rank of 4.3 out of 5, plus a fair number of openings predicted, that is not surprising. The question is: What does one have to do to get on track to qualify for this job?

To find out, we looked for the advice given to those who seek to get on this career track. Much comes down to the hard skills in coding and math. But that strong computation alone doesn’t cut it. Successful data scientists also need to be able to speak to business people on their own terms, which calls for the capabilities associated with soft skills and leadership.

Read more in 12 Key Tips for Learning Data Science

Gearing up for digital transformation

It’s the time of year when we’re gearing up for the spring forward (March 10). As we get set to advance our clocks, we should also be thinking about how we can advance our businesses on the road of digital transformation. That calls for making the necessary shifts in a technology portfolio to embrace the game changers, especially the ones that deliver on customer analytics.

Read more in Time to rebalance your technology portfolio for digital transformation

11 Takes on AI

Takeaway: The advance of AI is inevitable, and what that translates into for humanity is not altogether clear. Some believe we can look forward to a great future, while others think it means we are on the path to being supplanted by our robotic overlords. The third perspective is one that is aware of risks but considers them to be manageable.

We hear a lot about AI and its transformative potential. What that means for the future of humanity, however, is not altogether clear. Some futurists believe life will be improved, while others think it is under serious threat. There’s also a spectrum of positions in the middle. Here’s a range of takes from 11 experts.

Here's the first 

That is the first sentence in Yudkowsy’s 2002 report entitled “Artificial Intelligence as a Positive and Negative Factor in Global Risk” for the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI). While the term AI wasn’t bandied about nearly as much then as it is now, there still remains a problem of a lack of understanding on the capabilities and limits of the technology. In fact, in the past couple of years, there’s been more of a push to make AI not just understandable, but explainable.

And we'll jump to the last one: “There is no reason and no way that a human mind can keep up with an artificial Intelligent machine by 2035.” – Gray Scott

This quote is not mistyped, though it deviates from the way you will see it anywhere else online because it always appears as “There is no reason and no way that a human mind can keep up with an artificial intelligence machine by 2035.” Here’s the story. Based on how far back it appears in digital sources, it was likely said in 2015. However, I could not pin it down to any particular context even after hours of search through texts and videos from that period. So I contacted Scott himself to ask for the source. He admitted, “I do not recall when the first time was that I said this or where it was.” But he did recall his wording: “The quote has always been wrong. It should read ‘artificial Intelligent.’”

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To read the other nine, click on 11 Quotes About AI That'll Make You Think

eBook on AutoML

 AI can enable marketers to deliver on those expectations because it can anticipate not just what customers would want to hear about but when and how they’d want to receive that communication. “With AI, such personalization can now be achieved with previously unimaginable precision and at vast scale,” insists H. James Wilson and Paul R. Daugherty. The company that does that for music is Pandora. Delivering personalized music selections involves “billions of data points that are tracked across dozens of systems, including media servers, device clients, and ad servers.” To keep all that running smoothly, it needs to detect and address anomalies as they occur. It’s a tall order that is answered with an ML system with the capability to do just that in near real-time, something Pandora will also draw on in assuring its ads are performing as expected.

Read more in my eBook: 2019: the year AutoML takes off

The essential partnership: CIO and CMO

As Henry David Thoreau said, "If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.” The partnership allows the CMO to plan the castles in the air and work with the CIO to set up their foundations.

Read more in The CIO and CMO are natural partners: here's why

Related post: https://www.zylotech.com/blog/who-controls-the-marketing-stack-in-2019-the-cio-or-the-cmo

Wearables Pose Security Risks

Takeaway: Thanks to the advance of IoT, the market for wearables keeps expanding to the point that it should hit 50 billion devices by 2020. While these devices offer hands-free convenience for specific functions, they also introduce new points of vulnerability that can be opportunities for hackers.

Cisco predicted that by the year 2020, 50 billion new wearable devices will be connected through the IoT. This increases points of connection exponentially, and that translates into a huge opportunity for hackers.

Demonstrated Hacks

That wearable devices like Fitbits can be be manipulated through acoustic interference was demonstrated by a number of research experiments. It’s true that there are no immediate ramifications of a nefarious nature other than possibly gaming the count of one’s steps, but the researchers do warn of this: “For instance, should one trust the step count from a Fitbit as evidence for an alibi?” How can it be relied upon if it’s possible to inflate the number of steps through a hack?

This is a question of reliable accuracy, but sometimes it is the accuracy itself that poses a problem. Wearables might be picking up accurate information that is traced directly to the individual and so reveal quite a lot.

Read more in Hacking Wearable Tech: The Potential Danger of Advancing Wearable Technology

Riding the rails with social media

So many brands have jumped on the bandwagon of influencer marketing that it may be losing all association with originality and authenticity. So when Amtrak decided on an angle for reach through social media, it went about it differently. Its goal was to work off people whose social reach run deep rather than merely wide. 

Late in 2018, Amtrak launched its #AmtrakTakeMeThere Social Media Residency Program. It’s intended to showcase the diversity of the trains’ riders by following the stories of individuals who offer a unique perspective on travel. Applicants will be assessed on the basis of their writing skills, photography and videography skills, social community engagement' and online personality.    

Those selected to represent the Amtrak brand get a free round-trip as Sleeper Service passengers. That means they get the kind of amenities one does in a full-service hotel, like meals, bottled water, linens, and a travel allowance up to a thousand dollars.   

Olivia Irvin, Amtrak’s public relations manager shared some insight into what prompted this direction for the brand. She explained, “Today’s market has become saturated with 'influencers' who seem more like ad units than actual people. We don’t want that disconnect — we want stories that resonate.” 

Read more in 

All Aboard for a New Amtrak Platform

Women speak

photo from
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/25/Podcast_hosted_by_women.jpg

Podcasts, which are becoming increasingly important as a journalistic medium,  have generally been male-dominated. But the medium is getting more diverse, thanks in part to a new podcasting studio dedicated to giving women a voice.

Raina Penchansky, founder and CEO of Digital Brand Architects, (DBA), a digital talent management and social media marketing firm, spoke to me about her company’s latest endeavor, the recently launched  Dear Media (DM). Located in West Hollywood, this new podcasting studio focuses on leading female voices and narratives that can now be heard on Apple iTunes and Spotify. .

They reach a “highly engaged listener,” through this medium Penchansky explained.  “It’s a targeted millenial audience, and in a lot of ways,” which makes it “very much the right medium” for this demographic that has been “cord-cutting and consuming content differently” than the previous generation. 

The business model for  Dear Media follows the pattern set by DBA back in 2010. It  helps individuals conceptualize, develop, and produce customized communication through new media. The difference is that it puts the emphasis on female hosts and voices, placing women and their stories at the forefront of conversation.

Read more in Giving Women a Voice

Extracting marketing value from data

As businesses strive to become more data-driven, the challenge lies not amassing data for
data's sale, but in getting the right data.

According to research from Harvard Business Review, data records are so prone to critical errors that less than three percent of data meets basic quality standards. Accuracy matters, and banking on the wrong data can translate into serious business losses. In 2016 IBM estimated that losses due to poor data quality cost the US economy $3.1 trillion annually

Gary Read, CEO of Import.io, a web data integration solution provider, spoke about how his business gathers data from publicly available websites and puts it into a common format to enable organizations to gain insights that can inform their marketing strategy.  What Import.io does is take care of the data so that businesses can focus on the insights.

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Tapping Data for Marketing Insights

LinkedIn Hops On the Story Bandwagon with Student Voices

Story Time at LinkedIn

LinkedIn has rolled out its own stories feature. Here's how college students are using it

ARIELLA BROWN

 DECEMBER 27, 2018

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We all have our own stories to tell, and some of us choose to share them with the world on social media in video format. That’s why a person’s “story” on Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook refers to a video post.  Now LinkedIn is going to try to be a platform of stories, too, rolling it out first for American college students.

 As TechCrunch recently reported, LinkedIn will allow student to post short videos on their Campus Playlist. They can then be viewed there for one week, though they will remain accessible for as long as the student wishes under the the individual profile’s “Recent Activity.”

If you’re a regular LinkedIn user you might have noticed that it now encourages people who post to add in hashtags, generating several suggestions you can just click. It also does this for Student Stories, according to the TechCrunch report, which is why there will likely be more instances of the hashtag #OnCampus appearing on the videos linked to the school’s Campus Playlist.

To get deeper into this story, I reached out to students on LinkedIn. Cammy Okmin, a student at California Polytechnic who holds the title of LinkedIn Campus Video Editor, graciously answered my questions via email.

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Story Time at LinkedIn

Planning for 2019: B2B Marketing

CIOs at successful B2B companies are planning for a 2019 marketing stack roadmap with a focus on #CustomerTech. That means not just collecting data but using it to address the business needs of their customers to achieve an unprecedented lift in KPIs defined around understanding customer behavior.

Next year is set to be one for businesses to fully optimize their customer data quality and insights by setting up the right technology platform for marketing to business customers. As you plan your 2019 budgets, the essential thing to think about is the customer aspect of #CustomerTech. Approaching tech from that perspective results in better customer data and analytics -- the prerequisites for account based marketing (ABM).

Thanks to the rise of digital transformation, marketing models have evolved. The same demand for personalization that has arisen in the B2C realm now applies to the world of B2B marketing.

Read more in Gearing up for B2B marketing in 2019