Schlagwort: HatsOff

Bringing an app that rewards kindness to life

This is the second part in a series about a group of competitors in the Connect to Cognitive Build contest. Read the first part to find out how the team developed the idea for the #HatsOff app.
The hard decisions started almost immediately after we hit the submit button.
After getting through that first level of “what if,” we submitted a proposal for an app designed to reward kindness called HatsOff to the Connect to Cloud Cognitive Build contest. That was the easy part. Who wouldn’t support an app that encouraged kindness?
Our team didn’t wait until we received the “you have been accepted” notification to begin our next round of brainstorming. We were confident that our HatsOff app was a great idea. We believed in it and had the passion to drive it forward. We had already gone through these design thinking exercises:

Divergent thinking to generate a list of industries in which the app would be appropriate, as well as the problems it solved
Convergent thinking to narrow possibilities by building out personas
Empathy maps to better understand customers

Our idea was applicable to many industries, but we needed to focus on just a few: retail, hospitality, insurance and transportation. We further narrowed in on insurance to scope the problem being solved. We chose the two personas of the driver and the insurance agent, which gave the team enough information to begin the next phase of prototyping.
What we didn’t expect was the time it would take to develop the business case and market our idea internally to receive group resource funding. We knew that we had to get both the business case and the technology to be compelling enough to convince our voting colleagues that it was worthy enough for them to vote with their dollars.
Competition was stiff. We started with our management chain, gaining support and input, and expanded our circle to communities we were active in and our network of contacts, actively telling our story like a startup. Our storytelling skills paid off, and we achieved the largest amount of funding, supporters and enthusiasm in the group of candidate submissions.
The next phase was the prototype. Luckily, we had a visual designer and two user-experience designers volunteer to join our team. With low-fidelity, paper-and-pencil prototypes, we started the layout of the app. Then we iterated many times. That’s how we came to a decision on the logo that would represent in a single visual what the app was all about. We did the same for the color selection that would be appealing to the targeted buyer and users. Details mattered.

Our next critical tasks were setting up our development environment, refining our architecture and designing the important API services layer. By this time, our initial thinking that HatsOff would be a single solution with a user interface and a backend services component to it had evolved.
As we went through the design thinking process and hashed ideas, it became evident that we could provide value to other apps and industries through APIs such as an app for an automobile insurer.
The first draft of our architectural diagram had a lot of lines and boxes with question marks. These corresponded with the technical choices we had to make from a wide variety of runtimes, along with cognitive, analytic and data service options that Bluemix offered for our solution.
We realized that we were not experts in some of these. Blockchain was an example of something that we needed to learn more about to determine if it was something that could add value or not.
The HatsOff app core team and several incredible volunteers are fast at work putting together a working prototype in which all the details come together. We are confident that we are asking the right questions, open to learning, and have our focus on the customer that will take our app to the next level. Stay tuned.
Learn more about IBM is helping clients take advantage of the digital economy.
HatsOff team members Ron Lynn, Padma Chukka and Soad Abu El-Naga contributed to this story.
 
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Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud

6 short sentences that sparked the creation of a cognitive app

It started on a busy morning expressway in an unfamiliar city. Three of us were on our way to a meeting that was a little further away than we thought.
While watching the driving app, we suddenly realized that we were in the wrong lane to make a sudden turn. Waiting precariously in the wrong lane, with the turn signal on, we were expecting the worst.
What happened next was something that took us all by surprise: a random act of kindness. A large, black pickup truck was letting us over. From the front seat, I heard, “That would have never happened where I live.”
The discussion continued, with no one quite ready to give up that positive feeling just yet. Someone asked, “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could give him a tip?”
Just then, an idea was born out of six short sentences:
Hey Team,
Driving into the lab today, we were in the wrong lane and Prasad had to cut in line. A nice person allowed us in, and Simon commented that this would never have happened in my city. In fact, everyone would be trying to cut in and everyone else would be trying to keep them from cutting in. I commented that we need a way of tipping the nice person for being courteous. Which got me to thinking, why don’t we have a way to do this?  Maybe people would be encouraged to be more helpful — seems like it&8217;s something that wouldn&8217;t be too hard to do with the Internet of Things, cell phones, and PayPal or Bitcoin.
As part of a newly formed team, we felt the need to have a regularly scheduled informal meeting to bring everyone together to talk about ideas.  It didn’t have to be related to the work, just a creative time to toss ideas around, and in the process, learn more about the members of our team.
Then, by serendipity, we received notice about a Connect to Cloud Cognitive Build initiative kicking off. Four of us took on the challenge, and the wheels started turning. What if we created an app that would reward random acts of kindness? What would that look like? How could we be part of creating a gratitude network?
The idea quickly took off. It wasn’t a hard sell to create something pretty cool that could also make the world a better place. Everyone seemed to have an emotional response to the idea of a new way to express gratitude. But to be able to submit it into the Connect to Cloud Cognitive Build initiative, we quickly needed to move from “what if?” to “how would?”
The ideas started to flow as we asked more focused questions. What industry did it make the most sense to hook into to understand pain points that this app might solve? What would be a value add to customers and provide a interactive experience right at that point of random kindness?
The answer was the insurance industry. After all, a considerate driver is a safer driver.
With technology industry tools at hand, we had a head start for understanding what might be possible. We knew pretty quickly how we could create a prototype. But there needed to be a Cognitive component, which opened a new window of possibility regarding what services we could provide to customers.
We brainstormed about all the cognitive APIs we had at our fingertips.  What components would help us? Which were must haves? An architecture began to evolve as we solved each small problem.
The #HatsOff app is starting to take shape as our team begins to design and compile the component pieces. Our core team of Padma Chukka, Soad Abuelnaga, Neil Delima and myself, plus several incredible volunteers, are excited about the opportunities we’re discovering on this journey. The energy that it has brought to the team is a huge side benefit. Most of all, we never lose sight of those six quick sentences and the chance to make the world a tiny bit more courteous.
Learn more about how IBM is helping clients take advantage of the digital economy.
Padma Chukka, Soad Abu El-Naga and Neil Delima contributed to this article.
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Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud

Meet 3 contenders in the Connect to Cloud Cognitive Build initiative

Thomas J. Watson said, “I believe the real difference between success and failure in a corporation can be very often traced to the question of how well the organization brings out the great energies and talents of its people.”
When you look at companies today — big or small, anywhere in the world — one consistent tenet they all have is the drive to innovate. Innovation is required for success, and more than that, survival.
If you walk around any IBM office today — whether at Astor Place in New York City, the office in Hursley, England, or the one in Cairo, Egypt — you will see signs reminding teams to “Treasure wild ducks” and “Become essential to our customers.” Maybe the simplest and most profound is “Think.” The rationale is to remind people daily what truly makes an IBMer and makes IBM different.
That is why IBM continues to institutionalize the practice of innovation, empowering teams to not only think, but also to act and make their ideas reality. One way IBM is doing that is with the Connect to Cloud Cognitive Build initiative.
Over the past four months, IBMers from around the world have been forming teams with the goal of making use of IBM technology solutions, combining them with Watson APIs, and creating solutions that may change customer experiences, markets or even the world.
I would like to invite you to follow their journey. Nearly 50 submissions have been narrowed down to 13 semifinalists who are now in the prototyping phase, and the three finalists will be invited to IBM InterConnect on 19 March, when the winner will be announced.
Between now and then, we are following three project teams as they create their prototypes leading up to the judging. You will get a chance to meet the teams, understand why they decided to undertake their specific project, and watch their successes and struggles as they try to make them work.
Here is a sneak peek of what they are doing:
Cognitive Water Information System (CoW-IS) is an automated, real-time monitoring system for the prevention of flood and drought-related disasters. It shares predicted and preemptive information with concerned stakeholders so they can take action to prevent loss of life and property.
#HatsOff is a mobile application built on a cognitive hybrid cloud solution and Samaritan network. It facilitates and rewards random acts of kindness by enabling users to give others thumbs-ups, pats on the back and virtual high-fives.
Cognibot is a ChatBot-driven conversational experience with which DevOps users solve complex middleware problems using natural language questions. Users get only the data they need, not the full, data heavy-dashboard. This way, they can dig into the institutional knowledge of the organization and reduce downtime.
So join us on 12 January for the first set of videos to meet the people who make IBM the innovative company it is.
Learn more about how IBM helps users take advantage of the digital economy.
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Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud