Meaning of Heuristics and why it is important today

Heuristics is the big word, yet a lovely word that you and I should care about. It is synonymous to a "rule of thumb". It can be as simple as Pareto Principle or as complicated as adaptive algorithms. We, the humans love our rules of thumb.

We make decisions using rules of thumb. Everyday as you and I use the web, heuristics get built and decisions you make get captured as data. This is certainly one of the premises for PAKRA's existence.

As Frank Schirrmacher discusses in his HuffingtonPost post The Age of the Informavore
: "This is a very good beginning."

Game theorists, economists, psychologists are promoting the value of Bounded Rationality
principles to model decision-making. The main questions they ask are (a) how do you and I make decisions using heuristics? (b) are these decisions optimal, i.e. the best?

From models to computational algorithms to daily web searches to pattern-recognizing analytics that feed our consciousness from places such as Amazon.com (e.g. "Those who have bought PAKRA Games, also bought ... " --> all these are making us learn and make decisions faster.


Frank Schirrmacher writes, "Gerd Gigerenzer, to whom I talked and who I find a fascinating thinker, put it in such a way that thinking itself somehow leaves the brain and uses a platform outside of the human body. And that's the Internet and it's the cloud. And very soon we will have the brain in the cloud. And this raises the question of the importance of thoughts. For centuries, what was important for me was decided in my brain. But now, apparently, it will be decided somewhere else."

The rule of thumb algorithms that were developed on your and my data, in turn learn/retrain our brain. Moreover, as a society, as we all participate, in this reality/digital existence, we redistribute this wealth of learning.

This makes us (PAKRA), believe that "Real Human Learning" is the ultimate monetization of digital bits.

All that is left for you and I to do is answer the following:
(a) how much do we value "Learning" and
(b) how much are we willing to invest/pay in it?

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What did you just say? "You can pack your data and go!"

Recently I read the following article about you -the user- packing your data and leaving. This is the best idea that I have come across in recent times.

For those of us involved with customer-driven competition, this makes perfect business sense. If you -the provider- (a) cannot figure out cheaper ways to acquire consumers and (b) cannot keep your consumers by remaining fresh in your consumers eyes, then why should your products and services be a marketplace success?

Unfortunately VCs and Financing communities do not typically want easy ways for consumers to leave your company. However, at the end of the day the product and service must stand on its own merit.

Let our incredible interface and the experience you have and the "ease-of-use" keep you -Our User- with us and not the contract terms and conditions (T&Cs.) Excellent barriers to exit can only be created when one has a great product and gives the user a great experience. It cannot be done with great terms and conditions (T&C). Exercising T&C related business practices to keep you only makes it a further aggravating experience for you.

Some examples of T&C based exits:
1. I remember few years ago how AOL would keep users: If you called them to cancel your subscription, they would harass you for hours and hours and make it impossible to delete your userid. Finally, few State Attorney Generals (includes Elliot Spitzer) had to enforce a new rule -- "If I -- the user -- wants to leave AOL -- I really get to leave." .. without my data of course.

2. Today, the first thing that comes to my mind is Linkedin. They impose a 30 day to get out of their Premium subscription. After you realize that their Premium subscription is still expensive and there are no good applications, making you decide to cancel the subscription -- Guess what? Yes! you cannot leave for 30 days. No way for you to take your data and leave - ever. Even, the payment takes 30 days. Linkedin is waiting to be defeated by the next "connections" imitator coming into play. So! be it.

Read this ... Pack Up Your Data and Leave Whenever You Want, It’s the New Rule of the Cloud

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Cloud computing key characteristics

Cloud Computing has become a hot topic for business applications. This paradigm has taken strength in the last year as many developers (especially those working on open-source platforms) are using the principles to build applications for business.

When I first heard about Cloud Computing, I learned more about it from the links cited below.

"Cloud computing is an emerging computing technology that uses the internet and central remote servers to maintain infrastructure, data and applications. Cloud computing allows consumers and businesses to use applications without installation and access their personal files at any computer with internet access."

"Cloud computing is a paradigm of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet. Users need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure in the "cloud" that supports them."

This technology allows for much more efficient computing by centralizing storage, memory, processing and bandwidth.

The Cloud computing concept generally incorporates combinations of the following:

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is the "delivery of computer infrastructure as a service. Rather than purchasing servers, software, data center space or network equipment, clients instead buy those resources as a fully outsourced service."

Platform as a service (PaaS) is the "delivery of a computing platform and solution stack as a service. PaaS offerings include workflow facilities for application design, application development, testing, deployment and hosting as well as application services such as team collaboration, web service integration and marshalling, database integration, security, scalability, storage, persistence, state management, application versioning, application instrumentation and developer community facilitation."

Software as a service (SaaS) is a "model of software deployment whereby a provider licenses an application to customers for use as a service on demand. SaaS software vendors will host the application on their own servers or download the application to the consumer device, disabling it after use or after the on-demand contract expires. Much like any other software, Software as a Service can also take advantage of Service Oriented Architecture to enable software applications to communicate with each other. "

Key characteristics

Cloud computing customers do not generally own the physical infrastructure serving as host to the software platform in question. Instead, they avoid capital expenditure by renting usage from a third-party provider. They consume resources as a service and pay only for resources that they use.

(a) Cost is claimed to be greatly reduced and capital expenditure is converted to operational expenditure. This ostensibly lowers barriers to entry, as infrastructure is typically provided by a third-party and does not need to be purchased for one-time or infrequent intensive computing tasks. Pricing on a utility computing basis is fine-grained with usage-based options and fewer IT skills are required for implementation (in-house).

(b) Device and location independence enable users to access systems using a web browser regardless of their location or what device they are using (e.g., PC, mobile). As infrastructure is off-site (typically provided by a third-party) and accessed via the Internet, users can connect from anywhere.

(c) Reliability improves through the use of multiple redundant sites, which makes cloud computing suitable for business continuity and disaster recovery.

(d) Scalability via dynamic ("on-demand") provisioning of resources on a fine-grained, self-service basis near real-time, without users having to engineer for peak loads. Performance is monitored and consistent and loosely-coupled architectures are constructed using web services as the system interface.

(e) Security typically improves due to centralization of data, increased security-focused resources, etc., but concerns can persist about loss of control over certain sensitive data, and the lack of security for stored kernels. Security is often as good as or better than under traditional systems, in part because providers are able to devote resources to solving security issues that many customers cannot afford. Providers typically log accesses, but accessing the audit logs themselves can be difficult or impossible.

We at PAKRA, follow the principles of Cloud Computing in design and deployment of our applications.

References:

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing

2. http://www.wikinvest.com/concept/Cloud_Computing

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