I attended FinovateSpring 2013 last week to get a preview of new products from digital technology vendors for financial services. For those of you that have not been to Finovate, it’s a little like innovation speed dating – where 72 vendors have 7 minutes to win the hearts of the audience to secure the “Best of Show” Award.  At last year’s conference, a few new topics emerged: Personal Financial Management, payments, rewards, coupons, and mobile banking services for Pre-Paid Visas customers. This year the focus was still on PFM and payments, but one new topic hit the stage full force: authentication, which is this year’s new black. Sexy, I know!

While there was plenty of interesting and innovative demonstrations, Forrester attended the conference to identify trends and solutions relevant for our retail digital financial services clients. My "Best of Show" picks included innovative solutions that helped our clients either deliver on a customer need or solve a core customer problem in the retail banking realm. At this year’s conference, I noticed that:

• Big data and PFM got married...And,had a little MoneyDesktop. Money Desktop, the best in show winner, debuted their Insight and Target platforms—providing financial institutions the ability to create and send targeted marketing content and product offerings based on customer relevancy.

Now that Yahoo has announced its acquisition of Tumblr for $1.1 billion in cash — about a quarter of its cash reserves — the top three questions I see are:

• How will Yahoo manage to retain, and grow, the Tumblr user base while monetizing it? Today, Tumblr is quite unprofitable, and its lack of advertising is one of the many attributes that have made it popular. Yahoo has a very difficult balancing act ahead: It has to keep Tumblr's current active user base passionately engaged and spending time on the site, while also finding a way to add advertising and other revenue sources. Marissa Mayer, Yahoo’s CEO, stated the ads will be “very light” and “really fit users’ expectations”; however, Ken Goldman, Yahoo’s CFO, added that Tumblr should "materially contribute to revenues" in 2014 and beyond. If users do not stay with the service, they will have bought a ghost town. 
• Can the Tumblr user base be the next influx of loyal Yahoo users? Yahoo still has a massive user base, with at least 200 million users of Mail alone, and a passionate audience on Flickr. However, it is seeking its next core audience, and Tumblr users could fit the bill.  This is a similar challenge to Facebook's motivation for acquiring Instagram, however Facebook has so far held off on adding advertising to the Instagram platform. 
• How will Tumblr fit into Yahoo’s existing product portfolio? Yahoo has announced it plans to keep Tumblr independent, leaving both its brand and management intact. However, over time, there will be pressure to integrate it more and more tightly with other Yahoo properties. Will existing Yahoo products gain some of Tumblr’s social DNA, or will Tumblr lose some of what makes it unique?

There’s a lot of effort exerted by marketing leaders to turn customers into brand advocates. But their customers have a lot of brand choices and a lot of other things on their minds. What these marketers are overlooking is the potential brand advocates in their own backyard. Their employees. Employees are fundamentally connected to, thinking about, and representing your brand every day. They are often your biggest fans.

Indeed, our research shows that one of the biggest shifts of brand building in the 21st century is that — for leading brands — it is now a companywide effort. A unanimous 100% of marketing leaders surveyed by Forrester agreed that brand building requires all employees to be brand ambassadors. But the companies they lead are not yet living up to this aspiration. While many marketers’ eyes light up at the prospect of tapping in to their employees' Twitter networks, just focusing on social is missing the point. Yes, social is a valuable tool to create conversation. But true employee brand advocacy requires chief marketing officers (CMOs) to go deeper. They need to make delivering a superior brand experience part of the enterprise culture. Brand advocacy can’t be another task on someone’s to-do list. Make brand building part of how employees do their job and guide them by the light of a clear brand North Star so that your powerful new army marches to the same drumbeat. Forrester’s three-step framework guides the way:

• Excite with an inspiring brand experience. A PowerPoint presentation at the company meeting just won’t cut it. Bring the brand to life for your employees. Starbucks invested a staggering $35 million to create an interactive brand lab to bring the brand experience to life for its frontline employees. 

One of the best TV comedies in the UK over the last couple of years has been The IT Crowd. It is about a fictional IT department and plays to all the possible IT stereotypes. One of my favorite scenes is from the very first episode in which a ‘user’ is left waiting for their call to be answered for an excruciating amount of time and then another ‘IT professional’ is shown speaking to a ‘user’ in complete technology gobbledygook. Yes, this clip is funny but surely these are all extreme cases and only slim comparisons can be made to Enterprise IT today? 

I have to be honest here and say that during my time as an enterprise management consultant I saw all that happened on this clip, but surely modern day IT organizations don’t suffer from these problems? Well, maybe not to the same extent but how often have you heard, or even whispered, these famous words when working with the IT service desk or help desk:

 “Have-you-logged-a-ticket?”

Background — High Performance Attached Processors Handicapped By Architecture

The application of high-performance accelerators, notably GPUs, GPGPUs (APUs in AMD terminology) to a variety of computing problems has blossomed over the last decade, resulting in ever more affordable compute power for both horizon and mundane problems, along with growing revenue streams for a growing industry ecosystem. Adding heat to an already active mix, Intel’s Xeon Phi accelerators, the most recent addition to the GPU ecosystem, have the potential to speed adoption even further due to hoped-for synergies generated by the immense universe of x86 code that could potentially run on the Xeon Phi cores.

However, despite any potential synergies, GPUs (I will use this term generically to refer to all forms of these attached accelerators as they currently exist in the market) suffer from a fundamental architectural problem — they are very distant, in terms of latency, from the main scalar system memory and are not part of the coherent memory domain. This in turn has major impacts on performance, cost, design of the GPUs, and the structure of the algorithms:

• Performance — The latency for memory accesses generally dictated by PCIe latencies, which while much improved over previous generations, are a factor of 100 or more longer than latency from coherent cache or local scalar CPU memory. While clever design and programming, such as overlapping and buffering multiple transfers can hide the latency in a series of transfers, it is difficult to hide the latency for an initial block of data. Even AMD’s integrated APUs, in which the GPU elements are on a common die, do not share a common memory space, and explicit transfers are made in and out of the APU memory.