Kodak Ektra – Too little too late?

23

October

2016

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Many of us would not associate Kodak with current generation smartphones, they recently announced the launch of their second smartphone, the Ektra. It looks nice, handles well and has a good camera. The phone itself is not a revolution for the smartphone industry as it is produced by a company who specializes in making ruggedized phones for the CAT brand, Bullitt.
Even though the main feature of this phone is the camera, it is not one of the best, using a Sony IMX230 sensor, it produces good looking pictures in terms of 2015 smartphone flagship cameras. It is probable that Kodak chose to focus more on the look of the phone by providing a retro aesthetic and including a leather carrying bag that looks like you’re carrying a camera which is also due to the camera hump on the back of the phone.
It is an interesting move, especially since we know it is not the first-time Kodak is launching a smartphone. The IM5 was not a hit, but Kodak continues to maintain its brand image, focusing on a different market instead. It is an interesting partnership as it allows Kodak to outsource a significant part of the phone design process to Bullitt, but it is unknown if Kodak would have managed to implement a better camera if they focused their resources more on the image sensor of the phone.
The nostalgia is there, and a lot will be interested in supporting an old beloved brand, but is this enough for Kodak? Nowadays, when flagship smartphones are becoming more and more affordable, it makes it easy for customers to choose another smartphone which has a better camera for a cheaper price. They may not look as retro and nice as the Kodak Ektra, but for a photographer, the image quality should matter more than nostalgia.

I doubt the disruptive potential of it as I was expecting a phone that focused solely on the quality of the images and videos it takes, having design and cost as secondary priorities. People who enjoyed the brand would be willing to purchase a much better phone as Kodak has always been associated with quality, and should not settle with last year’s performance.

 

Sources:
https://www.engadget.com/2015/01/09/kodak-polaroid-smartphones/
https://www.engadget.com/2016/10/20/kodak-ektra-camera-smartphone/#/
http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/20/13333632/kodak-phone-ektra-bullitt

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Digital Transformation Project – City of Rotterdam: Going Mobile

14

October

2016

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For our Digital Transformation Project we have examined the City of Rotterdam’s ERP system run by the city’s IT branch (around 1,000 employees). The department focuses on serving all 11,000 employees aiming to securely provide them with the best possible IT solutions to help them be most effective and precise at their jobs. Between 2000 and 2005, the CoR introduced the Oracle e-Business Suite as their ERP system on desktop. However, this package of applications and especially its user interface (UI) and accessibility (via VPN) now performs rather poorly on user experience (UX). Consequently, the City of Rotterdam IT has started to search for solutions to enhance usability and accessibility of eBS applications. The most viable appears to be to start offering some of the services on smartphones.

Without the latest mobile technology employees had to launch a VPN client on their laptop, enter a soft token key and then a password in order to connect to the on premise business applications marked in blue. Offering certain services on mobile phones would eliminate most of this trouble and can be realized as seen on the diagram.

Starting on the smartphone, a so-called MDX toolkit enables the City of Rotterdam to wrap any native mobile app so that it can be controlled by a mobile device management installed on an employee’s device. The mobile device management opens a MicroVPN that is invisible to the user and securely sends and receives information via the internet. This traffic is received by XenMobile’s NetScaler which handles load balancing and securely forwards it into the secure zone where it is then received by the actual XenMobile Server for final decryption. As the server is already in the secure zone it can safely forward the information to the Oracle eBS server and therefore finalize the transaction.

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CoR IT has seen a shift as of late, whereby the role of their IT department is changing. Technical knowledge seems to lose importance and focus goes out to successfully extracting knowledge and translating it into supportive advice and design. While its core responsibility is still to deliver stable, secure services, the department is in transition to become more innovative and proactive. Please view our DTP video & report  for details.

All in all, the implementation of mobile technology represents a true transformative shift in the way the IT branch serves its customer, for their customers but also for the branch itself.

Extending their service portfolio by offering agile, mobile working is an entire new service, and will change the future of all the services that the branch provides. Next to the obvious increases in availability and accessibility, the launch of mobile technology is the branch’s first true step towards an information strategy with an implemented Monitoring & Evaluation system to perform process mining. They can start to worry less operationally, and focus more on collecting & analysing data to start reacting proactively towards their customers.

Group 14

Authors: Dan Acristinii, Josine Jin Snoep, Beatrice Testori, Jonathan von Rueden

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TECHNOLOGY OF THE WEEK – SUBSCRIPTION MODELS FOR DOLLAR SHAVE CLUB & BIRCHBOX

10

October

2016

5/5 (2)

Nowadays industries seem to be disrupted all the time, but are often only shaken by technological advances before returning to their original state. For this Tech of the Week we will be discussing how e-commerce based subscription models were used to breathe new life into traditional pay-per-product markets, namely the razor and beauty market.

In the razor blade industry the Dollar Shave Club is best known for its viral marketing campaigns, where it focuses on the fact that people don’t like going to the supermarket to buy  overpriced razor blades. They sell cheap quality razor blades that are delivered frequently to the consumers via a so-called replenishment subscription. This has proven to be a significant success as Dollar Shave Club currently sells about 10% of all razors in the US and owns >50% online razor market.

Birchbox offers a discovery type of subscription. By creating a market where a personalized selection of beauty related samples is sent to customers for payment, Birchbox has been able to infiltrate both the online and offline beauty industry. The company has grown quickly since 2010 and is active in six countries with over a million subscribers.

Birchbox’s initial success comes from its smart use of customer information for increasing partner and customer value. Its online platform with reviews, a webshop, a loyalty system and user-generated social media created an interconnected value chain with a rich community for subscribers and a means to target potential customers more specifically for partners.

So, why do such businesses prosper? Well, their social media and viral video campaigns jump-started their businesses. Afterwards, each of them chose a different route, Dollar Shave Club internalized all the IT backbone and created their own product range, while Birchbox focused on securing partnerships with more and more beauty product brands and locking in their customers with a loyalty point scheme. For Birchbox, that didn’t end up going well as they couldn’t properly use the data collected from the loyalty program and distributed unsuitable products to consumers. While the Dollar Shave Club still is not profitable, even after so many years of functioning, it is growing still strongly and Unilever recently acquired it for a billion USD.

Dollar Shave Club and Birchbox demonstrate how disruptive innovations can be mapped according to the two attributes – entering a market through the low-end foothold or creating an entirely new market (based on CM Christensen of HBS theory). The former company started by selling quality razors for only a dollar per month to get into a traditional pay-per-product industry, and has recently extended its line with more luxurious razors and care products. Birchbox has found a way to successfully capitalise a market for bundling samples and increasing brand visibility which did not exist before.

Here are some recommendations applying to subscription-based business models:

  • Focus on the collection of information about customer to target both the short tail and the long tail segments;
  • Expand the value proposition to increase customer’s satisfaction;
  • Create a community of consumers and make the subscription model a two-sided relationship.

REFERENCES:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kimberlywhitler/2016/01/17/a-new-business-trend-shifting-from-a-service-model-to-a-subscription-based-model/2/#1e9e5fbd75e9

Authors: Dan Acristinii, Josine Jin Snoep, Beatrice Testori, Jonathan von Rueden

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#madebygoogle

9

October

2016

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Google and Apple have been rivals in the mobile operating system market since the inception of superphones. Partnering with manufacturers and allowing them to customize their version of Android seemed to be the prevailing strategy for Google with the exception of the Nexus program. In order to set a benchmark on how Google sees the future of Android, it used to be that once a year Google would partner with a manufacturer to release a phone which was running “Vanilla Android”. No customizations nor bloatware, just a clean build of Android. Partnering manufacturers would change, some even releasing phones in several consecutive years, but the they would be solely responsible for the hardware, while Google would provide the software.

Things started to change in 2015 though. Google released the Pixel C, a unique tablet that was made entirely by Google. No known hardware manufacturer was advertised and it seemed to show that Google had a different plan for the Nexus program. As this device was made entirely by Google, the company took an approach similar to Apple, where they designed and developed the hardware and the software to run together for the best possible user experience.

This year, Google launched their own phone, Wi-Fi router, virtual reality headset and home assistant. All of these devices are #madebygoogle incorporating both software and hardware in order to provide a seamless experience for end users. Suddenly, they became a hardware company.

This causes a significant disruption for all their partners who are currently selling mobile devices that run on Android. Pixel, Pixel XL and Pixel C represent the Google vision of Android, hardware and software. They are no longer solely partnering with manufacturers; they are also actively competing with them.

As the #madebygoogle products are priced at a premium, there should be less competition in terms of the majority of the Android market, but this does not mean that users who used to favor other high-end handsets will rely on the offerings of partners. There will be Android purists who will purchase hardware made only by Google as relying on partners means, slower updates, limited feature sets, and sometimes even restricted access to bleeding edge features, such as Google Assistant which is currently exclusive to the Pixel and the Allo app.

References:

https://madeby.google.com/

http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/5/13167230/walt-mossberg-google-pixel-phone-industry-shake-up

http://www.theverge.com/a/google-pixel-phone-new-hardware-interview-2016

http://mashable.com/2016/10/06/google-assistant-not-in-android-nougat-7-1/

Google’s new smartphones are about Google, not Android

 

 

Google Pixel Sounds Like the Android Phone of Our Dreams

 

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