Andrew Tauskey

There has been a lot of speculation over Beats acquisition by Apple. Apple paid almost $3 billion to acquire Beats and according to a recent interview with Apple’s CEO Tim Cook it was the human curation feature of Beats that sold Beats to him. But this seems like a stretch. Market leaders in music streaming such as Spotify and Songza offer the same experience as Beats. Also, Apple has not been promoting Beats streaming service in its upcoming products. So one has to ask if Apple bought beats for the charisma of its founders, Dr. Dre and Iovine, and their strategy behind selling Beats headphones. Beats has been successful in selling grossly overpriced, mediocre headphones as a fashion statement and it seems like Apple needed that to promote its upcoming flagship products like the Apple watch.

Do you think that apple needed a marketing strategy similar to Beats to sell technologically modest but inexplicably attractive “Apple Watch”?

Article

It has been a long fought battle, but the FCC has finally made Internet a utility that falls under their jurisdiction. The fallout of this is the support of net neutrality. For those that are unaware, Net […]

An article like this clearly demonstrates the power of social media. From a poorly composed product shot, and a post on Tumblr to a massive reaction by multiple forms and even news organizations, “The dress” […]

Upstream testing is the latest testing methodology which is being widely adopted by large software companies to achieve better quality of product developed by them. It is a need-based and result oriented implementation of test techniques. Upstream testing requires quick testing to prevent feature delays for further testing by downstream teams. Functional testing before code check-in, whitebox testing using internal frameworks, API testing are some of the innovative testing techniques implemented by testing experts. Upstream testing is intended to cater to the business challenges in product development such as limited unit testing, insufficient time for testing teams, avoid regression issues and lack of automated techniques for repetitive functional testing. Upstream testing techniques are generally implemented using tools such as JUnit, TestNG, Selenium and In-house developed frameworks.

Do you think investing in implementation of Upstream Testing techniques within product development cycle really provides the return on investment by offering better quality of end product?

http://www.mindtree.com/sites/default/files/mindtree-brochures-upstream-testing.pdf

Most of our class discussions till now have focused on IT structures, architecture and organization. This article relates to our course work and discusses about how many companies are missing the opportunities for leveraging new IT technologies to be more competitive. Most businesses today are caught in daily operational functions and not spending enough on planning for the future. The article explains how companies can compete today and prepare their business for tomorrow by focusing on the following:

IT assets
IT complexity
Innovation
IT organization

http://www.atkearney.com/research-studies/it-innovation-study/past-report/-/asset_publisher/FtZVu3T94L5V/content/why-todays-it-organization-wont-work-tomorrow/10192?_101_INSTANCE_FtZVu3T94L5V_redirect=%2Fresearch-studies%2Fit-innovation-study

All hail Netflix, king of online streaming and consumer of internet bandwidth.  Over the past year Netflix has officially become a big media company. It is now worth more than Viacom (MTV, Nickelodeon) and is […]

Behold the tech startup, the land of entrepreneurs and hipsters.  As we learned in class, startups fall into the Gartner structure of “Everyone’s IT”.  They are companies where multitasking is a lifestyle and […]

Zach Ceheslsky-DeAngelo, Allen Dowling, Jada Goodwin, Simranjit Kaur and Andrew Tauskey make up Team 5.

Have you ever wanted to go out to eat with friends but couldn’t decide where to go?  Tired of asking your wife, husband or significant other where they want to eat just to hear, “It doesn’t matter to me, where do you want to go?”  Introducing a revolutionary new culinary app called Indecisive!  Upon launching the app, the user is confronted with a short questionnaire used to establish some base search parameters.  Each question helps Indecisive to narrow down your search just a little bit more.  Questions vary from “how many people are you eating with?” to “is this a romantic date with your significant other?”  After completing the questionnaire, the user is redirected to the customized search results.  From there, the user can chose a “Yes”, “No”, or “Maybe” to narrow the list down.  Indecisive also lists deals offered by restaurants in your area, as well as allowing users to comment on said restaurants and leave positive/negative feedback.

Indecisive is also a potentially lucrative app!  Once Indecisive takes off and has a strong fan base, certain restaurants will be allowed to pay Indecisive to be the top of the search results.

This week we was the last week of our project. The BAs put together their presentation and finalized their prototype. The presentation was Wednesday and our team did amazing.

To prepare this week we held three […]

This week was a pretty normal week. I continued work on deliverables for our project. I worked on the quality report and a little bit on our budget. Over the weekend our team held a meeting with all of our BAs, […]

This week I worked with the BAs on our Justinmind prototype. The current prototype idea is an app that can transfer customer photos to the company intranet for future use. Although this is a very creative idea, I […]

This week I met both with the BAs and PMs. In the BA meeting we talked about the prototype, and they showed me one of their early designs. Overall I think it is a good idea, but I am having trouble figuring out […]

This week my team and I worked on creating a budget for our project. We were able to create a projected budget but we ran into a roadblock creating our actual. It turns out the BAs are not completely filling out […]

This week I worked on creating a RACI chart/matrix for our group. It was surprisingly harder than expected to create since many of our team members fell under multiple sections. In the end I ended up merging my […]