Piehole

Fashionistas around the globe are celebrating their very own high holy holiday as New York Fashion Week is in full swing. Throughout the week, the biggest names in fashion will gather in New York to showcase their Fall and Winter 2013 collections. After months of painstaking work – finalizing their collections, investing ungodly amounts of money into renting space, hiring show producers, casting models – there comes the final wave of anxiety: Will the right people show up?

The stress of reaching key players in fashion is especially prominent among smaller designers, who have not built their reputation enough to attract the buyers, editors and agents with the power to launch their designs from the runway to the forefront of fashion design. For those who can’t afford to snag the best locations, models and staging, this year marks the first merger of fashion and technology that could potentially revolutionize the way careers are launched.  New digital platforms like KCD Worldwide’s Digital Fashion Week and Style.com’s Video Fash­ion Week are not aimed at reaching a mass consumer base, like the live video feeds and real-time posts on Facebook and Twitter. Instead, these digital methods are seeking to reach the key drivers within the fashion industry who are physically unable to make it to every show throughout the week.

But some remain skeptical. According to New York model booker Kristen Bolt, a digital show will never replace the runway show. “Fashion Week really allows the audience to absorb the detailing and quality of the clothing that will never translate through a digital platform. But, more importantly, it’s a rare opportunity to actually interact with people within the industry. Fashion Week is not just about fashion – it’s about making connections, face-to-face.”

What will digital platforms mean for fashion? Stay tuned…

The average professional is constantly linked in, turned on, and connected. We rely on e-mail to collaborate on projects, make contacts, communicate with clients, arrange carpools, make dinner plans and connect with friends and family. E-mail celebrated its 40^th birthday in 2011, and since the early ‘90s it has played a key role in professional and personal communication. However, as collaborative technologies continue to evolve, a host of new platforms and technologies have become commonplace.

Recently, Atos Origin announced that they will become an “e-mail free” organization within the next three years. The European IT services giant will steadily phase e-mail out of their internal operations because of the spam-like “information pollution that is bogging down management,” according to a report in Giga Om.  In place of e-mail, organizations like Atos are turning to real-time communication in the name of greater organizational efficiency. If e-mail is on its way out, what will our primary business communication be in 2020?

Some of the emerging tools we’re keeping our eye on, and most seem to focus on both efficiency and collaboration- two areas where e-mail is inherently flawed:

◦       Process automation tools: Business process management (BPM) tools have allowed companies like Oracle and IBM to automate responses and actions via automated emails, instant messages, etc., that prompt actionable messages (i.e., a “yes/no” button). This can eliminate the tedious back-and-forth associated with corporate functions like employee on-boarding/off-boarding, invoicing and employee requests.

◦       Enterprise portals: Although enterprise portals are certainly not new, they’ve recently begun integrating more social features to increase collaboration between employees — often via real-time, streaming feeds with more accessible user interfaces.

◦       Semantic web technologies: Keep your eye on this one, as it is still evolving. These tools, like Apple’s Siri, automatically sort and analyze that massive volume of data created by internal communication that otherwise remain unmanaged and highly irritating.