Accenture Technology Labs Blog

Steptacular -- Gamification in Wellness

Alarma, John Paul S. — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 22:00:00 GMT

We all know exercising is good for us and we all had our new year resolution, but few of us are able to carry it through. Can we inject a better motivation to help us get in shape? To answer that question, the Labs started the Steptacular pilot, in collaboration with Stanford University and Live Wel ... (More)

Cool startups from Stanford

Alarma, John Paul S. — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 21:45:00 GMT

One of the reasons that we have a Labs location in Silicon Valley is that we want to stay close to the center of innovation and keep abreast of the cool startups coming up. Towards that goal, Accenture sponsored the demo day event by StartX (formerly SSE Labs). I was one of the few Labs folks who ... (More)

My problem with "mobility"

Alarma, John Paul S. — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 01:05:00 GMT

Being the lead of an R&D group called "multichannel interactions" means that people often ask me for my thoughts on mobility. The honest answer is that I have nothing useful to say about "mobility". There, I said it. That feels good. Let me explain... People label t ... (More)

Cloud is the best thing that happened to consultants

Alarma, John Paul S. — Sat, 12 Feb 2011 04:30:00 GMT

It is no question that Cloud is making a big impact in the industry, but how would it impact consulting firms specifically? If you were to believe some analysis on cloud impacts (see reason #3), we, Accenture, will be out of busy very soon, because we cannot adjust to "the smaller projects, a ... (More)

Who Needs Books??

Alarma, John Paul S. — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 20:25:00 GMT

10 years ago, I was researching some of the new capabilities of the Xbox and PS2, which seemed poised to reinvigorate interest in console games, and generally change the way people behaved in their living rooms. At the time, I asked several of our TV-related clients if they were thinking about de ... (More)

Dempski’s Law

Alarma, John Paul S. — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 16:25:00 GMT

I have a tongue-in-cheek observation that I refer to as “Dempski’s Law”, which states that “utility is inversely proportional to hype”. Of the two dimensions, “utility” is fairly straightforward, it is how useful something actually is. “Hype”, by my definition, is the kind of breathless hysteria ... (More)

MapReduce for the enterprises

Alarma, John Paul S. — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 20:00:00 GMT

Although MapReduce has found wide spread usage within the startups and SMBs community, its enterprise adoption is just beginning. We are seeing increasingly more enterprises evaluating the technology and developing PoC (Proof of Concept) to see where the technology may fit in the enterprise landsc ... (More)

Cyber-Ad Attack!

Alarma, John Paul S. — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 19:00:00 GMT

I read a book a year or two ago called “The Digital Plague”, set in the not-too-distant future, in which a character had to distract the guards throughout a facility they needed to wander around. The character did this through an interesting means of ad-personalization-hacking. Basically, they ... (More)

Contact is King

Alarma, John Paul S. — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 23:50:00 GMT

A few years ago, everyone seemed to be interested in talking about “Web 2.0”. I’m usually suspicious of such buzzwords, and I tried to avoid it whenever possible. This was especially true when people started to use it to talk about “whatever new thing I want to promote”, or when they tried to ex ... (More)

The Power of The Shiny New Thing

Alarma, John Paul S. — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 21:25:00 GMT

It’s dangerous to state the obvious. When stating the obvious, you run the risk of looking like you don’t know that your point is obvious, when in fact, your whole point is that the obvious isn’t obvious to everyone. Obviously. A couple of weeks ago, I spoke at a social media conference, foc ... (More)