V3 said that Google recently announced that it will join the fight against child pornography with a series of initiatives including an online database that will help identify and remove offensive images. Google will also donate money to the Internet Watch Foundation to help increase the charity’s workforce behind finding objectionable content.

Jacquelline Fuller, director of Google Giving, said in a blog post that Google has been using a “hashing” technology since 2008 to tag known child sexual abuse photos, which allows the company to identify duplicate images that could exist other places online. Each photo gets a unique ID and recently Google started using encrypted “fingerprints” of images in a cross-industry database. This helps charities, law enforcement agencies and companies to collaborate on removing photos and take action against criminals.

Google will share the custom online database with other search engines to create a stronger effort in eliminating child abuse photos from the Internet, according to International Business Times. Google’s engineers are working on a new technology so Web businesses and search engines can share information.

Google told The Telegraph that they expect the database to be up and running within a year.

“We’re in the business of making information widely available, but there’s certain ‘information’ that should never be created or found,” Fuller said in her blog post. “We can do a lot to ensure it’s not available online—and that when people try to share this disgusting content they are caught and prosecuted.”

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According to WJBF, the Richmond County Sheriff’s Office encourages residents to track their valuables through this free system. The sheriff’s office has only employed the custom online database for a few weeks but has already reported success. Officers recovered an Apple iPad, a pistol and six items still pending investigation, explained Lieutenant Jimmy Young.

ReportIt is open to the general public and offers corporate accounts to track supplies, inventory, tools and any other material assets.

Information contained in the database can only be seen when a username and password are entered. Police can’t access the personal information, but if anyone has property stolen they can print the stored data information and bring it to the police.

For potential users wary of database security, ReportIt coordinators stated that they employ the same secure socket layer (SSL) encryption protocol used by government agencies, banks and payment processing services.

WJBF said that ReportIt is part of LeadsOnline, a national system that works with police across the country to return stolen items from jewelry to designer clothing to electronics to their rightful owners. Unlimited serial numbers can be stored on the site as well as pictures, receipts and item descriptions. Users should track anything they consider valuable. This not only comes in handy when returning a stolen item, but also when someone has to fill out an insurance claim.

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Officials have framed the project as a discovery tool centered on the Australian experience. The Trove website said that it also supplements search engines and helps with research needs. For example, if someone is looking for information on Australian Prime Ministers, they can find searches including books, newspaper, articles and people.

The Trove website said that the custom online database was created to provide a single access point, facilitate exposure to a range of sources and offer an avenue for niche searches.

”Newspapers are the eyes and ears of communities and an essential information resource,” Cathy Pilgrim, the National Library’s director of community outreach, told The Canberra Times. “Through Trove, people will be able to search and browse across every page and article of The Canberra Times from 1926 to 1995. By providing online access to the nation’s stories through The Canberra Times we can create a lasting legacy for all Australians.”

Pilgrim added that in May over two million visitors searched the nine million newspaper pages available free of change from the almost 400 newspaper titles stored in Trove. Of the two million visits, 312,000 were from mobile devices, displaying how Trove has extended the influence of its educational information.

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AutoProsUSA.com, whose webpage says “If you can’t find it here, you won’t find it anywhere,” is taking the tedium out of physically searching for car parts with their new online database. The website supplies parts from junkyards across the United States.

First, users can search the site by year, make, model, part, engine size and transmission. Then custom alerts can be delivered through email, text or phone call when a match is found. Finally, deals are compared and the customer proceeds to checkout to confirm delivery.

AutoProsUSA said that what sets their custom online database apart is that buyers don’t have to pay exorbitant surcharges or haggle for the best price.

The Seattle Post Intelligencer said that the internet has created more opportunities for customers to find pre-owned auto parts.

Engines and transmissions are top sellers, according the AutoProsUSA. They feature all performance levels and designs for foreign and domestic cars and trucks. All of the suppliers offer full warranties in almost every case, applicable to the type of engine needed.

Equipment quality can be an issue that buyers face with some sellers using stock photos and descriptions, according to The Seattle Post Intelligencer. The parts of AutoProsUSA’s database are checked for both interior and exterior condition before a listing is created.

Online databases like this one take the time and tedium out of physical exploration and allow users to do the work of multiple searches in just one place.

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With cloud operations, businesses have three options: private, public or hybrid clouds.

Analysts at the Independent Data Corporation (IDC) found companies must consider application life-cycle management (ALM), the complexities of custom app development and the need for a quick turn around. The report showed that a hybrid cloud strategy seems best suited to serve these needs.

Linux Insider explained that the hybrid cloud structure is a combination of two or more clouds, both public and private, that interact to create a flexible, unified infrastructure. But it’s not just hype. It is the most sensible option to have a system in place that effectively and efficiently allows a business to manage and organize applications across a range of cloud environments.

Melinda Ballou, program director for IDC’s application life-cycle management research said, “Applications that demand flexible infrastructure and high performance are a clear choice for deployment in a hybrid cloud.”

Hybrid cloud systems allow businesses greater flexibility for cost, performance and functionality optimization of each application. For some companies, hybrid clouds could be considered the “holy grail” of cloud computing, according to ZDNet.

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A report by MarketsandMarkets recently declared that CRM is no longer limited to use in sales and marketing scenarios. There’s now also a focus on customer service using social platforms to facilitate the exchange of ideas in real time.

The ways in which customers want to engage is constantly changing with the times, according to CIO. Investing in a social CRM application allows businesses to create strong brands and stay visible to their customers.

According to CIO, customers today are more likely to voice a complaint or give praise via a social media site. Therefore it’s in the best interest of the business to invest in a social CRM application to stay current with customer communications and provide timely feedback.

One perk of social CRM, according to ERP Cloud News, is that customers deliver important information into your database. Through more developed customer relationships, businesses can discover useful  information to better serve individual customers.

MarketstoMarkets said that by integrating traditional CRM functions with social media, there are new opportunities to create the most effective brand presence and customer engagement.

MarketsandMarkets predicts the social CRM market will grow from $1.9 billion in 2013 to $9.1 billion in 2018, representing a compound annual growth rate of 36.5 percent. North America is expected to be the fastest growing segment during this period.

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1. People can’t keep running their businesses the same way; and
2. People can’t keep designing and building technology the same way.

Sure, these are both “no duh” observations. Never the less, these two points were driven home in almost every presentations or panel discussion I heard. Whether I was listening to Dropbox talk about their solutions for business users, or hearing Gary Hamel, a consultant and management professor at the London School of business, talk about a new corporate revolution during his opening keynote address, it all boiled down to these two points — at least for me.

Let me expand.

1. People Can’t Keep Running Businesses the Same Way

In his compelling opening keynote to a packed crowd of almost 500, Hamel talked about the next big business revolution won’t just be technical, but social too where companies will be forced to change or risk being left in the dust by faster, more nimble businesses.

He pointed to the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend as just the tip of the sword, where front-line workers are given more latitude to be creative and exercise their own decision making authority and judgement. Hamel cited several examples of companies breaking the traditional top-down management paradigm, including Morning Star, a Northern California-based tomato distributor. With 500 employees, they have zero VPs, directors or managers. Sans a single President for, “legal purposes”, all 500 employees answer to no one but themselves and their peers. Each new employee outlines a mission statement and agreement with their peers, spelling out precisely what value they plan to contribute. If the employee falls short of their promise, fellow employees can Donald Trump them (i.e., “Your Fired!”). Carry your own weight or get out. It’s as simple as that. And it’s working. Morning Star is dominating their market and growing like crazy.

2. People Can’t Keep Designing & Building Technology the Same Way

Similarly, companies in the business of making technology solutions can no longer build things for “consumers” (aka – B2c) or “business users (aka – B2B). The line between the two is all but gone. Several keynote and breakout speakers touched on this idea, each with their own unique perspective. But at the end of the day, the common theme I heard was that people are people and buyers are buyers, whether they’re wearing a button down shirt and khakis or soccer shorts and a T-shirt. For technology companies focused on building business solutions, they need to build their products with the same eye to design and simplicity as consumer-oriented company would. To put it simply, if your business software isn’t as easy to look at, easy to buy or easy to use as a consumer app downloaded from the iStore, business people simply won’t use it no matter how powerful or beneficial.

Of course, maybe I only heard what I wanted to hear at CITE 2013. After all, these are things deeply engrained into TrackVia as we build a great place to work and look for ways to empower non-technical business users to solve their own problems by building their own software solutions. Regardless, it’s quite clear that the Consumerization of IT movement is more than a trend. It’s a fundamental shift that cuts across everything we do in the business world. How we think. How we communicate. How we make decisions. How we work. How we buy.

Personally, I think it’s all pretty exciting.

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The impetus for the enterprise stemmed from an urban redevelopment project in Oakland, CA, reported Bacon’s Rebellion. Schewel noticed that although some locations had a bad reputation, they were actually frequented by many young professionals, who passed through the areas every day on their way to work or to enjoy nightlife. Data showed that these locations could actually be retail boons.

The online database utilizes a variety of sourced information, reported Bacon’s Rebellion, including wireless data, GPS navigation data and Census data, to make insights about mobility patterns. Planners and retailers can benefit from smarter data insights to make decisions about store locations and transportation infrastructure investments.

Streetlight wrote that their data, which is not taken in real time in order to protect people’s privacy, is aggregated into statistically relevant groups according to travel destinations and visit frequency.

Schewel stated that the online database can provide more resources to transportation developers, who can visualize the results of their decisions like never before, according to Bacon’s Rebellion.

“[State governments] really don’t know what happens after they institute a new policy,” said Schewel. “They can’t measure the before and after very clearly. We can.”

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“Most enterprise software followed this trend: functionally sufficient, but poorly designed and often times difficult to use,” he wrote.

Lackluster software often meant that employees would have to work at less than optimal capacity, as negotiating convoluted controls and having to correct their intuitive motions restricted their use. The last few years have seen a rise in employee demand for better designed enterprise software, reported Shirazi, but in his estimation the consumerization of IT is still in its inchoate stage. Citizen developers and independent designers for startups have instigated the barrage of premium enterprise software, and established businesses have taken note. More organizations will utilize custom applications if they want to keep up with the pack.

CITEworld’s Ron Miller went even further. He wrote that the term ‘user’ is outdated, and ‘business consumer‘ would be a more appropriate description for people engaged with IT consumerization. People are consumers when they’re not working, so enforcing a distinction could disconnect them from their work. Startups and other businesses are seeing the benefits of letting employees really think like the consumers they are. Smart companies should be utilizing the approaches – custom applications, database software, analytics – that citizen developers are using to make improvements.

“The days of command and control and racking and stacking are fading fast,” Miller said.

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Custom CRM is becoming more prominent as consumers show increased respect and loyalty to firms that place priority on personalization and proactive communication. Gartner analyst Michael Moaz wrote that this paradigm shift is being felt at the respected research firm, which altered their CRM focus from “customer service contact” to “customer engagement.”

“It will take most organizations a long time to relinquish the idea that the Digital Marketing group does the listening, but no one does responding – at least not systematically,” Moaz wrote.

When enterprises do, however, acknowledge that social media interaction and active response to current and potential customers are instrumental to business growth, Moaz concluded, they will become CRM leaders.

Social business expert Sameer Patel discussed the high priority that custom CRM should have in business plans with SiliconAngle. The old CRM model, he stated, was developed in and for a static analog market. It was a technology that not only didn’t connect businesses to customers directly, but acted as an automatic, impersonal barrier to meaningful engagement. As the distinction between businesses and consumers becomes less fixed, custom CRM can offer benefits for B2C and B2B sectors. Immediate notifications, tailored responses and consistent updates are all ways that CRM can effectively stress the relationship.

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