Amazon Prime's explosive growth: Amazon's recent move to acquire upscale grocer Whole Foods has turned plenty of heads. One likely reason Amazon bought the chain is to add more physical locations to its supply chain, thereby improving its ability to deliver not only fresh foods but other products, and also take in returns.
A big part of Amazon's business is driven by its Prime membership program. While the company doesn't reveal the number of Prime members, new data from Consumer Intelligence Research Partners says growth is soaring. There are now 85 million Prime members in the U.S., a 35 percent increase from a year ago, and double that of two years ago, as Geekwire reports.
Prime memberships have an annual fee but in return members get two-day shipping on many items as well as access to Amazon's video content service.
POV: To put CIRP's numbers in perspective, about 325 million people live in the U.S., meaning Amazon has more than one-fourth of the country signed up for Prime. Amazon has been an major force in supply chain management and logistics best practices, and as it manages Prime's growth its influence will only continue to rise.
New 3-D chip design advances Moore's law: Researchers at MIT and Stanford have come up with a radical new chip design geared for the next generation of massive-scale data processing, which doesn't even use silicon. Here are the key details from MIT's news service:
Instead of relying on silicon-based devices, the chip uses carbon nanotubes, which are sheets of 2-D graphene formed into nanocylinders, and resistive random-access memory (RRAM) cells, a type of nonvolatile memory that operates by changing the resistance of a solid dielectric material. The researchers integrated over 1 million RRAM cells and 2 million carbon nanotube field-effect transistors, making the most complex nanoelectronic system ever made with emerging nanotechnologies.
The RRAM and carbon nanotubes are built vertically over one another, making a new, dense 3-D computer architecture with interleaving layers of logic and memory. By inserting ultradense wires between these layers, this 3-D architecture promises to address the communication bottleneck.
Researcher Max Shulaker explains that silicon-based chips are two-dimensional by necessity, given the high temperatures involved in manufacturing them. If companies were to layer additional sets of circuits on top of each other, the heat would damage the chip. In contrast, nanotubes and RRAM chips can be made at lower temperatures, he said.
POV: The work was funded by a combination of academic, government and private organizations and it's not clear when commercial versions of the chips will be available. But on the face of it, this is the type of innovation that will be needed to advance next-gen applications, IoT and cloud computing.
Illinois' dramatic digital transformation: The U.S. state of Illinois once had 38 different IT departments. Now it has one, after an ambitious effort led by state CIO Hardik Bhatt. He spoke to the Enterprisers Project about the process:
This brought 1,500 employees together. We organized this new department into seven horizontals, which include cybersecurity, project management, application development, and infrastructure, for example, and seven verticals, like health and human services, public safety, tourism, etc. Each of those seven clusters has a CIO who provides leadership for all of the agencies, and they all report up to me.
Bhatt also talks about Illinois' digital government and "smart state" initiatives in the interview, which is well worth a read.
Legacy Watch: The U.K.'s IT project failure maelstrom: Now for a contrasting item to Illinois. Nearly 40 percent of current IT projects in the U.K. are set to fail unless changes are made, according to data from Axelos, a joint venture between the U.K. government and Capita, as the Register reports:
Asked why IT projects fail, responded blamed: significant changes to the project brief (45 per cent); unrealistic timeframes (41 per cent); an incomplete understanding of the risks (48 per cent); projects not resourced with the right people (42 per cent); lack of a clearly defined goals (49 per cent), and overrun budgets (32 per cent).
Axelos surveyed 182 project managers for its study. The organization was formed in 2014 and its remit is to improve IT project best practices
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