The Promise Of The Internet Of Things Just Got Even A Little Brighter For Everyone

By Harriet Green, IBM

We are quickly moving from a physical world to a digital world, and thanks to the Internet of Things (IoT), data has become the key to business success and new levels of consumer satisfaction.

In the Cognitive Era, the IoT, applied at scale, can potentially decrease traffic and energy use across a city, and increase safety and efficiency across that same region.

Right now, IoT, sensors and devices are generating data at an incredible pace and it’s being put to use in ways that are directly affecting the lives of people. For example:

• Oil rigs have as many as 30,000 sensors that allow businesses to better monitor the health and behavior of critical machinery. As a result, they can avoid unexpected downtimes that could drive a spike in oil prices.

• A facility services firm like ISS can deploy sensors on plate dispensers so kitchen staff can ensure that a company’s employees get their favorite dishes while at the same time avoiding costly wastage.

• With as many as 300 million unique parts on an airplane, airlines can use sensors to obtain detailed information on anything from the status of engines and the landing gear to potential turbulence. With this insight, they can ensure that flights are not only on time, but are also free of turbulence, making for better travel experiences.

This data has tremendous value, but its relevancy has a limited audience. The fact that a person’s flight is on time and “turbulence free,” for example, is extremely important to airlines and their passengers.

But not all data is the same. Some has far greater reach and a more pervasive influence.

Take weather.

No person or thing in the world is not affected by weather. It affects everyone and everything, from a person’s mood, the growth of crops, the production of energy to the flight plan of a plane bound from Japan to London.

With such incredible influence, the more we can understand about weather and its influence the better.

This is why the marriage of IoT and weather is so important. The combination allows us to connect weather with other pieces of data to give us a richer source of information. It puts every piece of data into a new context and allows organizations to learn at an accelerated rate, transform how they run their businesses and benefit the lives of people.

Or take the connected car. Currently a GPS system helps get us from point A to point B in the fastest time possible, taking into account traffic patterns, road closing and other factors.

But what if weather was added to the equation? Now rather than just avoiding bumper-to-bumper traffic, drivers are alerted to approaching rainstorms, reported patches of black ice or sun glare. It’s information like this that helps eliminate potentially costly accidents and possible injury.

What about the smart thermostat?

We’ve all read about them and many of us have them installed in our homes right now. These incredible devices learn about us. They know to turn the heat up when we get home and to cool things down when we head to work.

But the potential is far greater. By connecting in weather data, these devices could turn on the central air system automatically — based on suddenly clearing skies that have hit the area. Now when you get home on a 90-degree day, your house is at an ideal temperature.

And the list goes on and on.

Consider, of all things, elevators. What do elevators have to do with weather?

The Internet Of Things Technology In The Velodrome: Team USA Cycling

By Rod Smith, IBM

Collecting data is not a new phenomenon in the sports world. What has changed is how that data is collected and analyzed.

As technology has advanced and evolved, the process of collecting data for elite athletes has been streamlined — going from hours to seconds — and we have access to new levels of detail not possible before, thanks to the Internet of Things (IoT) and the cloud.

For example, thanks to non-invasive muscle oxygenation sensors, we can better analyze energy consumption and recovery. By connecting multiple sensors and devices to the cloud, we can have instant access to training data. And by taking advantage of cognitive systems, such as the Watson IoT platform on the IBM Cloud, we can take that obscure data and draw meaningful insights.

Team USA Cycling and the IoT

For the past year, IBM has worked with the USA Cycling Women’s Team Pursuit coaches and athletes to use cognitive and cloud technology to take their training data to the next level.

Getting An Assist Shortens Time To Raise Series C Funding

In a new product category, it’s easier to be the first product in than to replace a product that has already carved a niche. Crimson Hexagon was experiencing excellent organic growth, but the competition had larger sales teams and the ability to make more sales calls. To maximize it’s potential, Crimson Hexagon needed to ramp up sales and marketing. It needed to raise venture capital. Crimson Hexagon combines social media posts with sales and media spending levels to provide meaningful insights, not just about the brand but the product category.

Stephanie Newby, CEO Crimson Hexagon, photo courtesy of Crimson Hexagon

Hindsight is 20/20. “It’s never easy to raise money,” said Stephanie Newby, CEO of Crimson Hexagon. The venture capital market was already showing signs of slowing last summer. So it seems particularly insightful that Newby made the decision to raise Crimson Hexagon’s C round with the help of an investment banking firm, Shea & Company, to shorten the length of the process. Due to the cost, most companies at this stage choose to raise the money themselves.

“Using an investment banker brought a sense of urgency to the raise,” said Newby. “They corralled investors and managed the entire process.” The due diligence process is particularly intense. Using an investment banker ensures every ‘i’ is dotted and ‘t’ is crossed.

On March 8, 2016, Crimson Hexagon announced it raised $20 million in growth equity financing in a round let by Sageview Capital. The company had previously raised $17.5 million in funding.

The company’s growth has been phenomenal. No longer do business-to-consumers companies need to conduct focus groups. Entertainment, consumer packaged goods, automobiles, financial services and technology companies are using big data social media analytics to take the pulse of the market. Even companies that manage investments are using Crimson Hexagon to make buy, sell and hold decisions.  

Banking On Beauty: How Toni Ko Built NYX Cosmetics Into A $500 Million Brand

This story appears in the June 2016 issue of Forbes Asia. Subscribe

Toni Ko founded NYX Cosmetics in 1999, at age 25. In 2014, at 41, she sold the cult makeup company to L’Oreal for $500 million.

Growing up in Los Angeles, Toni Ko spent hours at department store cosmetics counters, testing out creamy foundations and prettily packaged blushes. Then she’d head to the nearest drugstore to try and replicate a high-end look on a teenager’s budget. “I loved beautiful makeup but couldn’t afford it,” she says. Ko bought “cheap, terrible” brands and improvised: “I remember having to burn the tip of my Maybelline eyeliner.”

Luckily for Ko, her formative years were also spent learning the ins and outs of the beauty supply chain. Her family moved to California from South Korea’s southeastern province of Daegu in 1986, when Ko was 13. They’d been in the fabric business but fell into perfume and cosmetics in L.A., first at retail, then as wholesalers. She worked for her parents after school and on weekends, then full-time after dropping out of Glendale Community College.

At age 25, armed with industry know-how and $250,000 in seed money from her parents, Ko set out to close what she saw as a potentially lucrative gap in the market: department store beauty at drugstore prices.

CEO Succession: Where Are The Women?

Women, in the U.S. at least, are currently riding the crest of a historically significant change. “Outsiders” are slowly replacing “insiders” in leadership, visible positions. To wit, Harriet Tubman, African-American former slave, abolitionist and Civil War Union spy, will replace former slave owner Andrew Jackson on the face of the $20 bill. Other women such as Eleanor Roosevelt and Susan B. Anthony will be featured on the obverse sides of other bills. It’s being called the biggest change in U.S. currency since Martha Washington graced the $1 silver certificate more than a century ago.

This outsider trend is not confined to U.S. Dollars. The latest CEO Findingson Women CEOs in the 2015 CEO Success Study by PwC/Strategy& shows that in planned CEO successions in which outsiders were chosen, women were more often hired than men – 32% vs. 23% of the total between 2004-2015. (Access the full report here.)

Fewer Women CEOs

But despite this trend, the study of 2500 global publicly-listed companies showed that only 10 women were among the 359 incoming CEOs at the world’s largest companies last year – 2.8%, the lowest share since 2011.

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25 Most Powerful Women

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Overall, the study shows CEO turnover last year at a record high of 16.6%, compared to 14.3% in 2014. “Outsiders” accounted for more than a fifth of those CEOs hired in planned turnovers between 2012-2015 – nearly double the rate for the previous four-year period (2004-2007). However, the study also shows these outsider CEOs were more likely to be forced out than insiders, though the gap is narrowing: 21% of CEOs forced out between 2012-2015 were outsiders compared to 16% of insiders, while during  the period 2004-2011 the ratio was 32% to 21%, respectively.

Not surprisingly, industries in some distress — those whose financial results had been less than spectacular or whose business had been “disrupted” (i.e., financials, telecoms, utilities, healthcare, energy) – sought outsiders as CEOs. The study shows that outsider CEOs were more likely to have had international experience (28%) and be of a different nationality than the company’s headquarters’ makeup.

What Happened When A 'Proud Quitter' Asked For Time Off To Backpack The World

This is Mentoring Moments (#42), a series of WOW-you-need-to-know-these stories from successful women of multiple generations. Mentoring Moments is now a podcast. 

Cynthia Johnson, Photo credit Blake Jamieson

With 874,000 Twitter followers and 10,000 tweets, 29-year-old Cynthia Johnson knows what works and what doesn’t work on social media – for herself and her clients. Johnson has been involved in social media and viral campaigns for small tech startups and major brands including Levi’s, Vans, Chevy, Susan G. Komen, Peta2 and Maker Studios. She was Managing Partner and Director of Marketing for RankLab, a digital marketing agency that was acquired by American Addictions Centers (AAC) in 2015. Johnson is now Director of Brand Development for AAC. She’s also a member of the Young Entrepreneurs Council, a speaker (digital marketing, personal branding, leadership in crisis and female empowerment) and she shares her insights on gaining work life balance on the one-on-one messaging app TipTalk. This is Johnson’s Mentoring Moment, in her words:

My thinking since I was very young was that if I was unhappy or if I had reached the peak of what I could accomplish somewhere, then the only clear option was to move on. I had this belief that I had to choose one thing or the other. I believed that people had to choose between opportunities instead of being able to embrace them all. I was a proud quitter.

The $30,000-A-Night Jet that Flies Empty

Andrew Cave ,  

 CONTRIBUTOR

I interview chief executives about business, life & leadership.  

Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

Density of operations: FedEx’s hub in Memphis, Tennessee is the largest in its network. (Photo: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg)

Every night in the US, an Airbus A300 aircraft takes off from Denver, Colorado bound for Memphis, Tennessee.

Nobody is on board except for the pilots and often the flight starts and completes its route with an empty hold.

Eagle-eyed planespotters have also wondered in internet posts why it sometimes heads the wrong way for 200 miles. The cost of this exercise comes in at some $30,000 a night.

Sounds crazy? Maybe. But this is how FedEx Express , the world’s largest cargo airline, aims to cover most eventualities across this stretch of the USA as part of the quest of its parent company FedEx FDX +0.13% to deliver parcels worldwide within one to two business days.

“Flight 1311 departs every night of the year, though the number varies by the month,” says Marcus Martinez, managing director of the company’s global operations control at FedEx’s sprawling 880-acre airfield at MemphisInternational Airport.

“It’s our flying spare, attempting to sweep up anything that our other aircraft don’t pick up.

“It costs $30,000 a night to fly that plane empty. But if it flies empty, it means that we don’t have to recover volume from elsewhere in the network.”

Forbes Releases Sixth Annual List Of The World's Most Innovative Companies

Cover Story Features Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and an Exclusive Reveal of

Salesforce’s Latest Innovation in Artificial Intelligence

**We ask that you please include a link back towww.forbes.com/innovative-companies in any online coverage.

NEW YORK (August 24, 2016) – Tesla Motors tops Forbes’ sixth annual list of The World’s Most Innovative Companies (p.96) (in the September 13, 2016 issue of Forbes magazine), for the second consecutive year.  Salesforce retains the No. 2 spot for the second year in a row. Prior to last year, Salesforce held the top spot since the list’s inception in 2011.Regeneron Pharmaceuticals follows at No. 3. Rounding out the top five is Incyte at No. 4 and Alexion Pharmaceuticals at No. 5.  Life science and biotechnology companies occupy half of the top ten spots on the list. Investors have seen major innovations in biotechnology and expect big things for the industry.

The World’s Most Innovative Companies list demonstrates creative disruption and how new players come in, innovate and garner the attention of investors.  Innovation upstarts Under Armour Inc. (No.6) andMonster Beverage Corp. (No. 7) are dethroning former innovation leaders in their field like Nike and Coca Cola (No. 93).  The same could be said for Amazon (No. 11) outdistancing Walmart. Nine of the top ten companies on the list are U.S based.  Investors are expecting a surge in innovation from U.S. companies.

The World’s Most Innovative Companies list consists of firms that investors feel are most likely to come up with the next big innovation.  Companies are ranked by their innovation premium: the difference between their market capitalization and the net present value of cash flows from existing businesses (based on a proprietary algorithm from Credit Suisse HOLT). The difference between them is the bonus given by equity investors on the educated hunch that the company will continue to come up with profitable new growth. To be included on the list, firms need seven years of financial data and $10 billion in market cap.

The Top Ten Most Innovative Companies:

Rank	Name	Country	Industry
1	TESLA MOTORS INC.	USA	Automobile Manufacturers
2	SALESFORCE.COM INC.	USA	Application Software
3	REGENERON PHARMACEUTICALS	USA	Biotechnology
4	INCYTE CORP	USA	Biotechnology
5	ALEXION PHARMACEUTICALS INC.	USA	Biotechnology
6	UNDER ARMOUR INC.	USA	Apparel, Accessories & Luxury Goods
7	MONSTER BEVERAGE CORP	USA	Soft Drinks
8	UNILEVER INDONESIA TBK PT	IDN	Household Products
9	VERTEX PHARMACEUTICALS INC.	USA	Biotechnology
10	BIOMARIN PHARMACEUTICAL INC.	USA	Biotechnology

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