Google approach for understanding customer needs

C.K. Prahalad's new book "The New Age of Innovation: Driving Cocreated Value Through Global Networks"  is must read for companies envisioning leadership with sustainable business advantage in twenty first century. With worldwide fundamental transformations underway with YouTube, Facebook generation of consumers, it is expected to radically alter the very nature of an enterprise and how it creates value.

N=1 and R= G will be two basic pillars for this transformation:
1. Value is based on unique, personalized experiences of consumers. The focus is on the centrality of the individual. i.e. Sample size of 1(N=1), with one consumer at a time

2. No firm is big enough in scope and size to satisfy the experiences of one consumer at a time. The focus is on access to resources, not ownership of resources. i.e. Access to global resources for meeting demands of N=1

For achieving N=1 and R=G goals, organizations need to invest in micro business process innovations by leveraging technology. They suggest component based IT architectures utilizing next generation open-platform technologies for achieving this. N=1 and R=G world will require technology and management infrastructure which can help in

Interesting  post from Gordon Ritter founder of Emergence Capital Partners on future of Software as a Service(SaaS) on Venturebeat.   

ReadWriteWeb today published post on Top 10 traits of Rockstar software engineers highlighting following required skill-set with relevant reference books for acquiring those skills for software engineers 

1. Loves To Code
2. Gets Things Done
3. Continuously Refactors Code
4. Uses Design Patterns
5. Writes Tests
6. Leverages Existing Code
7. Focuses on Usability
8. Writes Maintainable Code
9. Can Code in Any Language
10. Knows Basic Computer Science

It was great to see that most of the highlighted skill-set is already part of e-Zest team culture.

At e-Zest we strongly believe that apart from highlighted technical skills,which are must haves for building scalable & high-performance solutions, supporting agile enterprises,customer & business facing skills of software engineers with commitment to customer success are essential requirements for becoming "Rockstar Software Engineer @e-Zest"       

Increasing popularity of Amazons elastic computing cloud, recent launch of Google Docs offline platform developed on Google Gears and leveraging cloud computing is generating lot of interest in this space.

Cloud computing is a subset of grid computing that includes utility computing and other approaches to the use of shared computing resources. Cloud computing is an alternative to having local servers or personal devices handling users' applications.

Once cloud computing approach start maturing, we can see lot of opportunities coming up in offline data access and Rich Internet applications (RIA) platforms. Adobe AIR, Google Gears, Gears based Dojo Toolkit ,  Virtualization along with Platform as a services(PaaS) are the technologies worth watching.   

Swedish startup Xcerion providing Operating System as a Service( Internet OS) platform based on cloud computing is generating lot of buzz in this area.