Successful tech entrepreneur Erika Trautman shares four excellent steps for female startup success

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Nintendo is freaking a few fans out this morning with a note in their newest quarterly financial report that lists The Legend of Zelda’s expected release as “TBD” instead of “2016,” even though other games have the exact year pinned on them.

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Companies today are grappling with the Internet of Things (IoT), a large network of physical devices that extends beyond the typical computer networks, encompassing devices, industrial equipment, sensors, and extended products. For some manufacturers everything they build could feed into IoT, from cars to buildings or even consumer products. While vendors like Cisco Systems, Dell, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, and Microsoft are all part of the IoT land grab, it is important for end customers not to focus their strategy on the products, technology, or pieces. Instead of focusing on the how of IoT, customers need to be focused on the what of IoT—namely the data. All of the strategy and shiny objects in the world won’t help if the data isn’t accurate, secure, and actionable. The data should always drive the strategy; the implementation tail should not be wagging the data dog. This strategy needs to start at the business level based on identifiable business needs and then filter down to the products.
Accurately Measure the Right Things
A very metrics-driven former employer of mine had the motto “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”. While this was a very true statement, if you can’t measure it accurately then there is probably no point because bad data leads to bad decisions, especially when one doesn’t realize the data is wrong. A great example was the Air France flight 447 crash where pilots apparently pulled back in the middle of a stall because their sensor data told them that they were going too fast. Ultimately this bad data may have caused them to make the situation worse. Just having everything instrumented and feeding data back does not guarantee accuracy. Data is only as accurate as the system and sensor, combined with some sort of actual business knowledge that can help separate the signal from the noise. As an experiment on data accuracy, I used the calorie data of 3 different sensor / systems to track the calories on 5 different bike rides. Using a Fitbit (with heart rate monitor), a Garmin (with heart rate monitor), and Strava (which takes the Garmin’s data feed), I ended up with 3 different sets of data for each ride. Even the two that shared data couldn’t agree on the same outcome:

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Remember flip phones? Of course you do, because it wasn’t long ago that a flip phone individualized with your favorite song as a ring tone was considered a major technological advancement. But then, flip phones quickly morphed into smartphones, and now smartphones are becoming genius phones, more and more adept of providing products, services and content tailored to specific users.

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Forbes Insights surveyed 410 executives worldwide to learn more about the role of analytics in organizations today. View the infographic below to learn about what we found.

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