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Ordering Getting Started with SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio book in Europe
I got some questions about ordering the Getting Started with SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio book. The website I normally refer to – SAP-Press.com – ships the book globally, but if you are not in the U.S. or Canada the shipping costs are pretty high. I you order a single book they may be as high as the price of the book itself!
SAP Press even acknowledges this in its FAQ:
For most international shipments, customers can optimize the shipping cost per book by ordering more than one book at a time. We recommend that you test different quantities in your shopping cart in order to determine the most cost effective way to proceed, or consult with one of our customer service specialists.
Mmkay… Luckily the are also some cheaper options to get the book in Europe:
- The Netherlands & Belgium: Bol.com – €59,99 – free shipping
- Germany & Austria: SAP-Press.de – €69,95 – free shipping
- Luxemburg & Switzerland: Amazon.de – €69,95 – free shipping
- United Kingdom: Amazon.co.uk – £47,99 – free shipping
- Other European countries: Amazon.de – €69,95 plus shipping (€3,25 – €9,50)
The End of Work
So, where did all the jobs go? And where are future jobs coming from? I recently read the 2011 book Race Against The Machine by Brynjolfsson and McAfee and these guys have an interesting view on these questions.
To answer the where did all the jobs go question the authors take another direction than the standard “the economy is not growing fast enough” or “the economy is stagnating and productivity has stopped rising” reactions. They came up with the End of Work argument, which I don’t think I have heard somewhere before as the reason for the current – and constant – high unemployment.
This End of Work idea states that we don’t have too little technological progress, but instead too much! Fewer people are needed to produce the goods and services we require, and all of this is caused by computer automation. But, not only automation of the “dump & easy” repetitive tasks, also more advanced work is evaporating. Think of translating a conversation in real-time or driving a car. 15 years ago this was almost science fiction but today Google is pretty far with these technologies. And once these jobs are gone they just won’t come back anymore.
The big question is who will be effected most by this End of Work. This is actually the interesting part. If we divide the labour market in low, middle and highly skilled workers, surprisingly the workers in the middle category will be effected most, and not the low skilled workers. Why? In an era of more and faster automation it probably is easier to automate the work of a bookkeeper, translator, call-center agent or taxi-driver, than the work of a gardener or hairdresser. For the latter types of jobs you would need very sophisticated and expensive robots, while a translator will be easily substituted by a free Google Translate service. Imagine the impact this will have on our society.
Here in Holland the babyboomers are leaving the workforce since a few years. This would mean more room for younger people on the job market. But I still don’t see any positive effect on the unemployment rate. Two years ago I even did a SAP BI project myself to fully automate the work of two office employees that were about to retire. And they indeed weren’t replaced by new hirees anymore…
Obviously the jobs that require a lot of teamwork and creativity will stay in high demand. I was happy to see that they specifically named jobs in data visualization and analytics as highly valued, so we are probably safe for now. On the other hand, if you are in a traditional type of job where someones tells you exactly what you have to do every day, you will get in real trouble sooner or later…
Race Against The Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee – ISBN: 978-0984725113
WWE Network is the future of TV
Yes! Yes! Yes! WWE announced its upcoming WWE Network last night and I think this is exactly the way to go for television content producers. The deal is that we get all present and historical WWE content, in HD quality, live and on demand, for only $10 per month. Damn! It’s like Spotify for wrestling fans (okay okay of course it has no TNA and indies but who cares). And that’s what TV should be.
Last summer we cancelled our television cable subscription and decided to only watch those shows we really really liked. And only on demand. This meant no more useless zapping around and wasting time watching crap and commercials. I got Hulu Plus to watch the big shows on-demand and also have a subscription to Fox Sports GO to watch the away matches of my football club. We use the Apple TV to stream this to the big screen TV. Also, most television channels in Holland have an app on which you can watch their shows on demand and sometimes even live, so why pay at all for this?
Back to the WWE Network. For the past two or three years WWE has been trying to start a ‘real’ television network, but that didn’t work out with the cable companies. Now they are bypassing the cable guys and creating their own direct platform. Great! That is exactly what the Internet is all about. Just do it yourself.
With a monthly price of $10 for everything WWE this is just a no-brainer for fans. And yes, WrestleMania is included. Just as with the Spotify deal, who is going to pirate anymore? There are only two problems with the network at this moment:
1. There is no channel on Apple TV available yet, but that should be a matter of time since we also have channels for the NBA, MLS and so on. For the mean time we can use the iPad app to stream it or use Playstation.
2. WWE Network only launches in US for now. But, just as with Hulu there will be ‘solutions’ for that.
Yes! Yes! Yes!
Steve Jobs movie – finally watched it
After missing the Steve Jobs movie last summer in the theater run I finally watched it yesterday at home on BR with fellow Apple fan/evangelist @reddrummaster. In the past 15 years I read everything on Apple, Woz and Jobs so I already know all the great stories, but I still like to go through them one more time on screen. This expectation was clearly wrong and therefor the movie kinda sucked.
The story that they tell is extremely incomplete from begin to end. Not mentioning the stories of the blue box, the Xerox Parc visit and the naming of the Lisa is pretty meh, but skipping all his years at Pixar and NeXT?!? Ugh. And the movie finishes with the Steve Jobs return at Apple in 1997. The End.
So, I clearly prefer the 25 hour (!!) audio book of the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson over this Ashton Kutcher movie. The ’99 Pirates of Silicon Valley movie is also a very good pick, but of course this one also only shows you part of the story.
http://vimeo.com/75390564
Design Studio add-ons: Graphomate Charts 2.0
2014 is going to be a big year for SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio, especially since the recent 1.2 version of Design Studio offers an SDK to create custom components. I expect to see a lot of cool new add-ons in the coming year.
One of the first companies that created such an add-on is Graphomate from Germany. For SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards they already created the Visualization Add-on in the past, and now they made the same add-on available for Design Studio, called Graphomate Charts 2.0.
So what does this add-on offer? The Graphomate Charts lets you visualize data quickly according to the SUCCESS concept of Prof. Hichert. This SUCCESS concept is a set of rules for designing reports and presentations. More info can be found here and on Hichert.com.
The charts look very minimalistic and the emphasize is clearly on presenting differences and trends as clearly as possible. In fact, you can edit the looks of each element of a chart (color, filling, shape, width) independently. With the option to activate Deviation Axes you can add extra mini-charts above/besides the chart that display the deviation between two data series (percentage or absolute).
