It's @RobTyrie 's Word

Plogger a Playbook Blogger Native Client (Get it?)

2012-01-07T17:38:00.001-05:00

I get questions about getting more uses out of a Playbook. So today one of the things I did was take a spin in the app store to check if there was anything I might add to the Playbook to increase its utility. Beyond a couple of new news apps (the Al Jazeera News browser and a Singapore Newpaper), I also grabbed Plogger, a native Playbook client for Blogger, which I am taking for a spin now.

It is a bare, and I mean bare bones raw html editor so it is not for the feignt of heart. You can type, and highlight with bold or italics. Markup is inserted so, the better you know html, the more use you will get out of the client. You type in a text box and the html is rendered above the box. There is no support to add hyperlinks like automatically making http://www.google.com into a link. There is also no support for inserting images and there is no spell checker.

Pretty basic as I said.

I do appreciate that they have implemented horizontal and vertical modes. It is easier to thumb-type in vertical mode and there is a rendering view of what you are entering to help in editing. Too many developers are not taking advantage of the two form factors afforded by the Playbook's rectangular shape.

You can publish to draft or if you need to, live post it to your blog. The tool arranges access to multiple blogs if you have them. You can also edit existing blog entries that were created in other editors. This is difficult because the online editor adds a lot of mark up tags that get exposed.

When you do publish, the additional markup that is added by Blogger automagically into your local Plogger file so it is a little more difficult to edit. Worse though is that when you re-publish, the markup does not convert so it ends up in your published post. That is an unacceptable bug. I always do multiple, round-trip edits on a post. That has to be fixed.

That leaves a opportunity to create a client like the ones for android and ipad that are more like the Blogger web client. The company should not really be charging a $1 for this, but hopefully they will be encouraged to add more features and move it to WYSIWYG. I would only use this one in a pinch... but it does make the Playbook more useful. If you have a Blogger blog and a Playbook, you should get Plogger.

The Painless Path to Endurance

2011-12-09T19:35:00.000-05:00

I read this article written by an ultra marathoner (Here's the link). At first I thought that it would not be applicable to me, but on reading it a couple of more times, it appealed to me.

Even though it's from Tim Ferriss suggestion blog that is suspicious in it pseudo-laziness, the insert (which he did achieve via copy/paste) resonates with how I train (and how I want to train) for running events. What surprised me is that it's a lot less time and effort than you thing. Little bits. This big trick is to do them everyday.

The trainer's list was a little more hard core than I do, he is an ultra marathoner after all, but I have kept the same elements that he has and reflect how I try to train.

Low mileage. Less than 60k a week. I find if I push harder, I just end up with a strain injury. So I measure my distance and don't exceed it for the week. It's not scientific, but in my case, there are just diminishing returns from longer distances. It's still good to do a long 18-20k run on a regular basis just to check how training is going and to shake out other kinds of kinks that only longer runs can do.

Fueling. Eat. Eat well before the race and during. If I don't eat properly before a race, i get tired and just cant run as fast. On a shorter distance, there is not as much impact, but on a Half Marathon, lack of calories can wipe you out. I like the new energy gels that you can get.

Prior experience. The more you run, and know a race course, the more mentally prepare you are. You can change the way you expend energy and an obstacle like a double hill won't catch you off guard. I find knowing when the race ends, what the finishing kilometer ol helps alot too. I like running regular planned loops so it is easy to focus on the training.

Variety. You get it - cross training. Sit ups. Push ups. Yoga. Stretching. Kata's. Biking and Hiking. All make runs go better. Lately I am taking weights and strength training. This helps with race day and recovery after training.

Thirty Minutes a day and a Long Run. So do these activities, it's seems easy at first, but after a the first few days you will want to stop or skip a day. Just don't. Repetition is the key, which brings me to the last point.

Habits. Do it for thirty days and it will be come a habit so much so that a given day will not occur without you taking care of your body. If you want to have a good quality of life, take care of your body and it will take care of you. And it really is painless.

Or you could just hang out at your local www.runningroom.com ;)

Motivation for Creatives

2011-11-05T14:35:00.001-04:00

Daniel Pink is a failed lawyer who steals other's ideas.

He is also a world class thinker, writer and communicator that is trying to change business behaviour and organizations to create phenomenal success.

He believes the basis of that success is in the motivation of employees through incentives.

Through a study of other scientist's work, he shows that incentives can reduce productivity. He says that the more creative a task, them more intrisic the motivator has to be. Extrinsic motivators, the infamous carrots and sticks of modern management detract from results.

Carrots are bonuses and stock options or a nice office. The sticks are loss of bonus, demotions or loss of authority.

Science shows that extrinsic motivators do not improve performance and productivity in tasks requiring creativity. It's not just about having a good breakfast in the morning.

What does work are intrinsic, or internally focussed motivators. Given fair (but not extreme) market pay, the modern creative class is more motivated by autonomy, provable mastery, and a feeling of purpose in their work.

Autonomy: let staff set goals, work structure, approach and timing to complete work. Eg Google 20% rule or Netflix not set vacation, or casual fridays.
Mastery: enable workers to work and learn with others, take on hard problems, public recognition of mastery with customers and other employees. That means providing resources like training, apprenticeship and time to the individual.
Purpose: the sense that the work undertaken has a result larger than just a person, the results are useful and productive. Setting big hairy audacious goals is a way to clearly communicate purpose. Being the best at something is a purpose in itself.

Here is Pink presenting the ideas at a TED conference , it's worth watching. When do we change the companies we work in?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrkrvAUbU9Y&feature=youtube_gdata_player

Roots. I will explain

2011-09-23T15:55:00.001-04:00

TBD

Published with Blogger-droid v1.7.4

2011-09-22T09:52:00.002-04:00

Head's up product managers.I think this is the real way to introduce features. Google just opened up Google+ to the world. Because they keep such an iron ~~hand~~ fist over their home page, everyone watches it closely and when it changes, it's an instant call to action. Any one who has heard the buzz (pun intended), does not have to ask anyone else how to get to Google+. It's ingenious. A simple, universal crayon arrow... I wonder how many tests they did of the colour of the arrow or if they used different arrows for different populations. I'd love to hear the details of the product management process.

As an aside, even if people only use Google+ once, it will give Google something they have never had before and the Facebook has been exploiting, the identities and profiles of 100's of millions of people and the basis of a huge social recommendation engine they can use to improve search results and ad placement. A classic extension of their ad monopoly. Point and set to Google.

Summer TO

2011-08-27T16:23:00.001-04:00

CNE Midway Princes' Blvd. (at Exhibition Place) httpfif://4sq.com/cPnWqm

The CNE is still relavant today. I went with my 3rd son. We walked, talked and shared. We relfected on the sillyness of the carnival and what he saw and considered inportant. I shared with him how I had experienced the CNE as a kid his age. Bonding at its best.

Balance

2011-08-27T15:04:00.001-04:00

Sometimes things are more about balance than karma. As seen at the Toronto CNE... very zen to watch a master defy gravity.

Active Listening

2011-08-08T22:16:00.001-04:00

Become a Better Listener: Active Listening | Psych Central

In business, especially in groups with a lot of type A's, listening can be a lost art.

Link through to a set of tools to implement active listening in you business activities. You can use them in meetings, interviews, client engagements and reviews. These techniques are especially useful in gathering requirements and helping to understand success criteria for projects and programs.

The blog post from Psych Central is focused on couple's relationships, but I think and I have been trained to know a few things:

1. Business is about relationships.
2. Active listening works to make better relationships.
3. It takes practice and learning to become an active listener.
4. If it does not come naturally to you, find a coach or mentor to help you learn.
5. Practice, practice, practice.

How does that make you feel?

The Sabbatical - a TED Talk +1

2011-08-06T14:16:00.001-04:00

http://www.ted.com/talks/stefan_sagmeister_the_power_of_time_off.html

One designer's take on managing a proper, creative career. Stefan Sagmeister thinks you should take some time off... a year off to be more specific, every seven years. Genius. Simple genius.
49, 56, 63... interesting series.

When does yours start?

Canada Day 2011

2011-07-01T12:40:00.003-04:00

It's Canada Day once again in the great white north. A time when beer is flowing, concerts are revving up, cottage gatherings on the lake gel and editorials in the major news rags consider what makes us Canadian, and, of course, the essential need of the monarchy is debated yet again. We know how that will end.
What I think makes Canada what it is, are the strong, peaceful, liberal, democratic values that have become threaded through our constitions, laws and practices. It is a land of free ideas and prosperity that in this century have proven to be one of the best places in the world to live a comfortable safe life. The high price of oil doesn't hurt either. When we rant, we do do it well... at least Joe does :)

We are the nation who gave the world the electric kettle, the phone, Shania Twain, Jim Carey and Captain Kirk. In a quiet polite way, eh. We

In this open land which embraces peoples from around the world, Canada is maturing into one of the most cosmopolitan countries in the world that can still thrill the most stolid of heart with her rugged, rough beautiful mountains, rivers and lakes so poetically rendered by the Group of Seven.

As we become more confident in our own ways, I believe there is less angsting and uncertainty of what being a Canadian is. We are ready to invite the world to come share in us and become like us with open arms. The next 145 years of our future will be a model for other societies to follow, and for our proud citizens to relish. Simply put, peace, order and good government. Vive le Canada libre!

Art and inspiration

2011-06-18T15:05:00.002-04:00

Some days, when you can't come up with the next thing or what you are doing is a little stale, it's a common approach to stop what you are doing and take a break.

I like the idea of an artistic distraction and this clip from The Atlantic fits the bill. It is an homage to Jackson Pollack and his famous drip paintings. Watch it and concentrate on the moment as you take a break. It will take a bite out of your day, guarenteed. I love this kind of inspiring tale. Enjoy, here's the link: Jackson Pollack's great art.

Carnivals - Party Parties... from MCLEANS Magazine

2011-06-12T09:20:00.000-04:00

In correct parlance, they're known as pre-Lenten celebrations – a blowing off of steam before 40 days of sacrifice. But we know these bacchanalian parties by another name, so if it's February, it's Carnival time!

To reduce temptation during Lent, it became tradition to consume rich food and drink beforehand. Although many Caribbean islands have done away with Lent altogether, celebrating Carnival in the middle of summer or overlapping with Christmas. For most of the hot spots, with Lent beginning on March 9th, Carnival takes place March 7th and 8th.

Here's a look at the Top 10 Pre-Lenten Celebrations, as chosen by National Geographic in its Sacred Places of a Lifetime book.

Mardi Gras, New Orleans
Taking place on Fat, or Shrove, Tuesday, Mardi Gras is the raucous Carnival that really defines New Orleans. Not content with a one-day affair, the party gets started in the Big Easy with a masked ball and ramps up with street parties and live Jazz and Cajan music throughout the French quarter. Bon Temps Rouler!

Carnival, Trinidad and Tobago

Carnival the way it was meant to be: not a slick, commercial stadium show, but a party of the people, complete with flashy costumes, parades, dance shows, food festivals, and battle-of-the-steel-band competitions. Apparently revellers smear oil, mud or chocolate all over themselves. It is considered the one of the biggest and most colourul Caribbean Carnivals.

Carnival, Martinique
Martinique's pre-Lenten celebration is dedicated to all things mischievous. Five days of parties and processions include mass dressing in drag for mock weddings. Carnival culminates with Ash Wednesday's symbolic mourning of the King of the Carnival, whose effigy arrives at a funeral pyre via a parade of floats and dancing she-devils. His death marks the end of the year's merriment.

Fiesta de las Flores y las Frutas, Ecuador
Ecuador's Festival of Flowers and Fruitspays homage to the agricultural bounty of the region with flamboyant costumes, elaborate floats, fireworks, and copious amounts of peach-flavored wine. On the Saturday before Lent, Mass is held outside Ambato's whitewashed cathedral.

Carnival, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
The world's most famous Carnival is a wildly extravagant four-day celebration culminating on Shrove Tuesday. One of the highlights is the lively Rio Samba Parade, taking place at the impressive 70,000-seat Sambódromo stadium.

Patras Carnival, Greece
Patras Carnival draws its inspiration from ancient Greece––in particular, Dionysus, the god of wine. St Anthony's Day on January 17 is the official start of a Carnival season that stretches into early March, finishing with a lavish parade and a kite-flying competition.

Carnevale, Venice, Italy
The event that inspired many others around the world, the flamboyant Venetian Carnevaleoriginated in the 13th century and reached a decadent peak during the Renaissance. Although rooted in Catholicism, the Carnival has always been a secular extravaganza, an excuse for Venetians to act out their fantasies behind the anonymity of disguise.

Fasching, Germany
The six-day Fasching Festival is a joyous affair that takes place all over southern Germany. Each village or district has its own unique costume and the variety is astounding, including spiders and witches, animals and jesters. The high point comes on the Monday before Ash Wednesday, when a rowdy pageant of fools is followed by an all-night Carnival ball.

Karneval, Cologne, Germany
Talk about stretching out the party: in Cologne, the Carnival season begins on November 11 and flows all the way through winter to the eve of Lent. There are more than 500 Carnival events including parades, balls, concerts, and traditional variety shows.

Carnival, Sitges, Spain
For one week each year, Sitgestransforms from a sleepy beach town into a Carnival heaven. Festivities kick off on Fat Thursday with a waterfront ceremony to raise King Carnestoltes from the dead. The festival winds up with a procession of thousands marching through the medieval quarter.

RTyrie@NexJ.com

This is a beautiful piece of design - Architecture

2011-05-12T10:56:00.001-04:00

Skim Milk: House on the Mountainside by Fran Silvestre Arquitectos

Goodness. What a piece of design. Things like this intrigue me. Modernity mixed with simplicity juxtaposed against the sublime ruggedness of a mountain. If Victor Frankenstein were alive, this is where he'd be living after buying it from Steve Jobs.

If you are designing something today, this should inspire you to do a few things:

Cut away extraneous elements

Balance to the environment

Use Nature is your guide

Simplicity is beauty

That is a way to design and a way to live. For a better a explanation of why this home is so beautiful you should dip into Christorpher Alexander's "A Timeless Way of Building".

Why Pick One When You Can Have 52. Topics of Interest in Insurance and Tech.

2011-04-26T14:26:00.004-04:00

I have been thinking a lot about different topics to write about. Rather than spread my thought over a broad range of topics, I am going to focus a bit. Instead of reflecting or thinking about what I just read or a discussion with one of my compatriots, I am going to write some more about Insurance and Technology.

One of the folks at work was wonder if I had an ideas for blog posts that could be written about some of the things we do. So one day after work, I started a list aiming for 5 and before I knew it, I had 52.

Now the fun starts. Here they are.

If I could get these from an analyst or journalist or some other expert, I'd be very, very happy.

1. Social Media- Is there ROI for Social Media in Insurance?

2. Moving from policy-centric systems to customer-centric systems In P&C.

3. Using CRM to help transform distribution approaches.

4. Next Generation Aspects of Agency Systems.

5. Connecting to Facebook to Engage with Customers, The New CRM.

6. It's a mobile world, tablets and smart phones - What are the impacts sales and marketing operation.

7. New methods to sales an marketing to Gen Y in insurance.

8. Real-time interfaces and broker connectivity, advantages and challenges.

9. Uses of Geo-location applications in Insurance.

10. Next generation standards in insurance. Has ACORD come of age?

11. Social media data and permission based marketing in Insurance.

12. iPad, Xoom, Slate, Playbook which tablet makes the most sense for Sales?

15. Tablet Based pilots in Life and P&C

16. Disconnected use and CRM, who really cares any more.

17. Security risks in using iPad in financial services.

18. Moving to a buyers market in Insurance, direct selling through the internet.

19.Steps to integrate electronic signatures in mobile apps.

20. CRM on tablets.

21. Features in agents systems that attract and retain staff.

22. Effective Closed Loop marketing across multiple stages.

23. Productivity techniques for sales using new technology.

24. Moving toward better customer experience across all channels.

25. Privacy concerns in the age of SAAS solutions.

26. Managing compliance with Social Medial and Online portals.

27. SOA, Web Services that are evolving across Insurance Companies.

28. Tablets, Internet Everywhere and Electronic Signatures, the perfect storm.

29. Highly scalable application architectures.

30. ROI strategies and approaches plan and build Integrated agent desktops.

31. What is an Integrated Agent Desktop?

32. What is Multi-channel integration?

33. Advantages of using model driven engineering for enterprise applications.

34. New Features in mobile applications for producers.

35. Measuring user adoption with modern, web-based applications.

36. SCRM - Myth, Magic or Must.

37. CRM and Social Software Collaboration or Conflict.

38. 7 Web 2.0 technologies that pay dividends in Insurance.

39. The relationship between social media monitoring, marketing and lead management.

40. Cloud technologies, securing them for the enterprise.

41. Model Driven architecture to support mobile smartphone applications on blackberry, android, apple and windows.

42. Form Factors, the death of one Application for multiple platforms.

43. The death of CRM, long live CRM.

44. What the Next Generation of CRM will not fail like the first generation.

45. Enterprise mash-ups with Portal and Portlet Architectures.

46. 10 Web services that you need to implement at your insurance company.

47. Top 10 Technology Issues for 2012.

48. Using Cloud Technologies Inside your insurance company

49. Why you have to have a Customer hub in your Insurance enterprise architecture.

50. Applications of predictive analytics for sales and marketing in insurance

51. The Front Office. Why its applications are the only solution to data cleansing and data integrity.

52. Unified Communications. What's coming next for Insurance.

53. Selling at the coffee table with a tablet. What changes? Why is it better?

Google goes Social? The Power of Incentives

2011-04-10T11:14:00.003-04:00

Dear Google: You Can’t Threaten People Into Being Social

Mathew Ingram from GigaOm does some interesting analysis on Larry Page's latest strategy to incent Googlers to build and deliver successful social media software by making the success a major part of their bonus.

I agree that social is a pivot for Google and it is urgent they defend their platform. The first moves with gtalk, Maps, Voice , Places, Profile, Buzz and, ugh, Wave were not exactly rocking successes in the Social Media World. They seemed like "me too" science projects born out of the Google Labs rather than full blown integrated, easy to use software.

I am not sure that paying (or not paying as the case may be) individuals will force things to happen. That approach is more likely to continue with the same fractured approach and same fractured results.

It does try to focus the issue, and align his team to his strategy which is o.k., but I think they have to take the next step.

Page has to appoint a single powerful lead product manager and give them strong resources. A CSO... Chief Social Officer to set the unified vision of the features standards and api's need to create a social platform the general public will adopt.

I think that lead is either the lead of the Wave team or the Lead of the Android team. They've both already changed the world.

Give them the reigns Mr. Page.

10 Reasons I like the Motorola Atrix

2011-04-02T08:49:00.002-04:00

I was recently given a Motorola Atrix as part of a promotion in Toronto. A nicely random event that keeps me believing in Karma and the power of living life out loud, but I digress.

This is the third Android device that have tried. The first was a Nexus One, the second was a Motorola Milestone 1. It was a cool and interesting set of trials, but the first Androids could not replace my Blackerry Bold 9700. The Atrix, however, is close. I really like it, and it is clear that the innovation, and improvements over the last 18 months in both the hardware and the Android software have made it an amazing and useful device.

As a modern smart phone, it has a lot going for it, and here are my top 10 in no partiular order:

1. Speed. All operations are super fast, from screen rendering to the keyboard, to switching apps, the device is the fastest phone I have ever used. The dual core 1Ghz chip is a monster.

2. Visual. The screen, using new qHD technology, super high resolution, with millions of colors. This makes reading websites, books and documents easier and modern games like Gamelofts Golf, anf Fruit Ninja stunning.

3. Integration. There is seemless integration between software and hardware. The phone, cameras, operating system as well as all google apps are tightly integrated, in such a way that the features are always available when needed.

4. Video playback. Both the 1080p video camera recordings and movies or tv that are watched are an engaging experience. You can easily watch a two hour movie without fatigue, fine details are clear, a realistic window to reality.

5. Social Media Integration. Using a piece of software called Motoblur, the first operation to registering the phone is with social media accounts like Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare and LinkedIn. This allows you to have a message box that contains upates from all the services.

6. The Lapdock. This is an interesting accessory. It's a full keyboard and a 10 inch screen, that you dock the phone on. It's super slim and well made. This essentially converts the smartphone into a net book. It runs all the apps installed on the phone as well as a native webrowser and a multimedia apps. If you have your information and office applications in the Cloud, the lapdock and phone could replace your laptop. It certainly lets you run a mobile office anywhere, because of the software, wifi and 4g connectivity to the internet.

7. The Camera's. The phone has 5mp camera and a foward facing camera for video calling. It is also a 1080p video camera so you can record your own high quality movies. The cameras are integrated in to Apps as you'd expect. They even have a set up feature to save and share photos across the Internet on services like Flikr and Picasa.

8. Voice Recognition. IT really works on this phone. It's so good and fast its worth using. You can tweet, search and email by voice.

9. Navigation. There's a full featured gps app that gives turn by turn directions just like a full featured Garmin GPS.

10. HDMI dock. This cool feature allow you to connect the Atrix to a widescreen HDMI TV as well as connect a key board and mouse, making it a modern digital entertainment center, the brains of it all fitting in the palm of your hand.

11. Memory. This is an important feature. There is 1G of app memory on the phone which means you can install 100's of Apps. You can also install a 64G SD Card to store a scad of music, photos, videos and movies.

12. WIFI Hot Spot. The Atrix can also act as a wifi hot spot for 5 devices. Lots of good uses for this, including avoiding a new data account for your tablet of choice.

Yeah I know I said 10, but I am pretty enthused. And I am sure I missed a few other uses.

I am sure I will have a few more stories about this device. I think that, with the accessories and integration with software and multimedia, it's the best implementation of Android yet.

Great look at REAL planning in software companies

2011-03-31T08:14:00.001-04:00

TechCrunch has a great article speaking about the reality of building software startups. Every cycle, inexperienced managers and VC's get involved in software companies and they think that they can just throw money at the product development lifecycle to speed the process. This is just not the case, there are too many unknowns and some fixed costs in creating new software. Teams, innovation, experimentation just don't scale linearly. Hence the metaphor that's easier to comprehend than the "Mythical Man Month". Here it is. Study it. One day, given the right audience, you will use it : 9 Women Can’t Make a Baby in a Month http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/8RXFcB0kExk/

Enjoy.

Read this

2011-03-29T21:44:00.001-04:00

Social Media Marketing for Financial Services Group News | LinkedIn

Apple TV

2011-03-25T13:24:00.001-04:00

I just think that products like this are the pinacle of great marketing. Take years and hundreds of millions of dollars of research and development, and package software and hardware to do something specific and perfectly.... connect millions of TVs and TV watchers to the iTunes store. Now will it beat Netflix? That is the question.

The Android Invasion

2011-03-14T23:09:00.006-04:00

Who knew? In a short year Google and the Android operating system have taken the world by storm. I am typing this post on a new Motorola Atrix. This is the third Android in my family. It's turned into the weapon of choice for me and my boys.

Why? Solid phones, tight Google integration, great screen, stable connectivity and lots and lots of free Apps. If its popular on an iPhone it's likely that the software is on Androids, its just economics. If a developer hits it on on platform, their profits will only go up if they can port it.

So, even on Android you can get your Angry Bird on or do some Fruit Ninja slicing. Given the rapid advancement and competition between Samsung, Motorola, HTC and a dozen others, may outstrip the iPhone for features. Time will tell. The cameras, gyroscopes, gps', high end screens, storage and video playback are all comparable now. I don't see any real competitive advantage to Apple other than the wide, first-mover gap they created. The homogenity of their Apps is also an advantage for beginners.

I think we'll see more highly customized Apps on Android, coupled with new open sensors and other hardware, that will allow for corporate development that will exceed what can be done on an iPhone because the will be secure and integrated with back office systems.

Still, I must admit though, I miss my BlackBerry thumboard. But, that's another story. Stat tuned.

The Book is Dead! Long Live the Book!

2011-03-12T19:16:00.004-05:00

I used to buy a lot of books, I even read some of them too.

Now like most of the post-modern geek population, I am slowly switching to ebooks. I have an iPad and Kobo and I have e-reader software on my pc's, ipod, android and blackberry. One of my justifications in switching to e-books is, not only are they more portable and lighter, thanks to Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos, they are cheaper too, $9.99 for a fresh best seller beats the heck out of forty bucks. I figured that just with the cost savings on books, I'll have paid for the iPad and the Kobo, as well as a few dinners a year by spending less on books.

So, on a cold winter's day in Heather Reisman's post-holidayed up Indigo Bookstore, I was browsing, expecting to ultimately see the book I wanted and then buy it electronically, immediately over the free wifi just like she planned it.

The first book was a problem. It was a book by William Gibson, I had been wanting to read it, and as I thumbed through it to finalize my decision, there it was... his signature. To me it meant it was a collectible, so I hung on to it muttering under my breath and headed to the technical section of the Indigo book store.

The next book I looked at was an nice thick tome about enterprise information architecture that was a fresh hard cover, after flipping through it, I decided to get an e-copy of it. I turned it over to record the ISBN, and sure enough there was the offer. This book included an electronic license so I could have the e-book version, and the hard copy for the same price. I held on to the two books, sighing again.

The third book I was looking for was for a project I was doing with my son and one of his work mates. As I thought about the purchase, a e-book was not going to work. First of all, neither lad had an e-reader, and we'd have to share the book. Right now, real books are a lot easier to share. I paid for the three books and carted their atoms home.

For the next decade, I'd don't think less books will be sold, but they will be sold differently. With apologies to Twain, I think rumors of the demise of the book precede themselves. Hang on to your shelves for awhile.

Enhancing Life, Get Rich

2011-03-08T07:52:00.003-05:00

Read this .... I would only add one more thing. Find some one close to you and thank them sincerely. Found on http://www.psychologytoday.com. Worthy read. Worthier if you do them.

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10 More Life-Enhancing Things You Can Do

By Barton Goldsmith, Ph.D.

Created Feb 15 2011 - 1:48pm

There are so many things we can do to enhance our lives, but sometimes when we get caught up in the whirlwind of daily living, it's easy to forget what they are. Here's a list that will give you a head start and put a smile on your face.

1. Watch "Stand By Me-Around the World." See it on YouTube.com. Do it alone or with some friends. It truly is an experience that will make you feel warm from the inside.

2. Frame your favorite picture of yourself. Some may think this is self-indulgent, but being able to see yourself at your best will boost your confidence. This is called healthy narcissism.

3. Cook a wonderful meal. It can be for yourself or to share with those who would enjoy the experience of what you think is the perfect dinner. Get in touch with your inner Julia Child and savor your creation.

4. Organize your sock drawer. You'll get a feeling of accomplishment every time you open it. That is, until you run out of fresh ones. If you want to step it up, do your whole closet.

5. Back in the day, when gas was a buck a gallon, we used to take drives. Jump in your ride, for old time's sake, and take a tour of your neighborhood. Go up streets you have never been on before. Seeing new things around you can take your mind off of yourstress.

6. Go to your local animal shelter or a pet store on adoption day and pet the animals. I'm not suggesting that you take one home but for you to give and get a little love from a creature that needs both, just like you do.

7. Get dressed up to go to the store or run errands. Most people feel better when they know they look their best. You can also go out for a night on the town. The important thing is to help yourself feel good about that person you see in the mirror every day.

8. Read a book from cover to cover. You get to relax, be involved in someone else's story, and have that feeling of accomplishment all while you're being entertained. If you really want to escape fiction is best, but if you're a self-help junkie, that's fine too.

9. Take a moment to forgive yourself. It doesn't matter what the issue was; this is about giving yourself a gift that will lighten your burden and make your life a little sweeter. It's not your fault.

10. Give something to someone who needs your help. It can be time, money, or advice; it doesn't have to be a material object. Knowing that you have the ability to make someone's life better will make yours better as well.

Life has so much to offer. As Auntie Mame said, "Life is a banquet and most poor bastards are starving to death." Finding joy may not happen instantly, but if you put together enough enriching moments, you will have a very rich life.

An Insurance New Aggregator - How To.

2011-01-21T11:00:00.002-05:00

The Insurance Daily Experiment

Back to the Future Part 2

2011-01-04T13:46:00.006-05:00

Generally, at the holiday break I reflect on the year gone by and new trends and changes that might happen in software and enterprise computing. I did last year, but never posted the result.

I think one of the interesting things about being successful in software is not necessarily choosing the right technology trend, it's choosing it at the right time so that your investment is well exceeded handsomely, you know, you make a lot of money. (I specifically mean handsomely because that will allow an entrepreneur to make a lot more mistakes, which is a whole other topic).

Well here's my list from last year and I am glad I did not post it. Not because it was wrong, but because it was way too early.... so here it is at a better time. This are are where I thing there is real value to companies and markets for IT. Call it pretty good places to invest. On inspection, a year later, I would not change one of them. Without further ado, the list:

Value Generation - High Tech Business Trends for 2010, erm I meant 2011....

1. Location Based Services - GeoLocoMondo
2. Realtime is the only time - Splitsecondservice
3. Micro Payment Economy - Brother can you spare .0025 cents.
4. Social Community Consumption - B-C moves to B-Socnet.
5. Mobile - if you can move with it or get it on the run, utility increases
6. Digital Identity Management - whoami really.
7. Visualization - actionalble intelligent outputs, overloaded , easily understood

Infrastructure - Low cost, massively scaled

1. Payments, Loans - ubiquitous dollar transactions
2. Wireless highspeed network access
3. High quality networkbased video streamed everywhere
4. Low cost computers and displays - netbooks, tablets
5. Security
6. Intelligent routing of content - transaction, graphics, text and video

I know... if I keep doing this and keep the list and just increment it for the coming year, I may be right on some of these calls. Call that the Tyrie's Law of Futurists.

ZAGG | ZAGGmate | iPad Case | Premium Aluminum iPad Cover with Keyboard

2010-12-19T18:05:00.000-05:00

I love when a company nails a product. It's an iPad cover, it's a keyboard, it's a stand... On the horizontal and the vertical ... Zagg has nailed it. Anyone looking for a stocking stuffer for me or one of your favorite iPad users get one now... Did I mention it's made of Aircraft aluminum... Woot!

http://www.zagg.com/accessories/zaggmate.php?gclid=COHy89Kz-aUCFUVqKgodaHpdnQ

Difference between Agent and Broker

2010-11-08T10:33:00.001-05:00

Insurance Agent or Broker

I get asked this question a lot…. And here a s simple clear answer from Felicia Williams – Thanks for writing it down!!

***

Aug 10, 2007 Felicia A. Williams

The line that separates the difference between an agent and broker is a blurred one. Both an agent and a broker have the ability to solicit insurance quotes that will adequately protect your business, but the way they go about it is a little different.

AGENT

An agent is a person who has entered into an 'agency contract' with an insurance company for the purpose of selling insurance for that company. An agent is not an employee of the insurance company, but rather an independent contractor. The agent, unlike a broker, has the authority to bind coverage (legally obligate the insurance company to provide coverage according to the terms and conditions as bound).

An agent that hires more than one person to service their policyholders is called an agency. An agency consists of two or more people, usually a combination of licensed individuals along with support staff.

Large agencies may have an agency contract with more than one insurance company. However, keep in mind that an agent is a representative of the insurance company, therefore premium payments made to the agent is equivalent to remitting payment to the insurance company.

Agents must successfully pass their state's Property Casualty licensing exam in order to conduct business as an agent.

Types of Agents:

Exclusive Agent: An exclusive agent solicits business for placement with the particular insurance company they have an agreement with.
Non-Exclusive Agent: A non-exclusive agent has agency contracts with more than one insurance company. Realize however, no matter which company they use to insure your business, they still represent the insurance company.

BROKER

A broker is a person or firm that has permission to seek insurance quotations for an insured (client) or prospective client. A broker is not an insurance company employee. As a representative for the insured, brokers will approach several insurance companies in an attempt provide quotations and coverage to adequately insure the client's exposures.

The broker will ascertain the client's needs, gather information and submit the information to several insurance companies. Brokers do not have the authority to bind coverage. They present the information and if the insurance company agrees, the insurance company will bind the coverage.

Once the coverage is bound, the insurance company, not the broker, will issue evidence of coverage in the form of a binder. A binder is an insurance summary that outlines the coverage limits, terms, conditions and premiums that the company agrees to provide.

The broker's fee, or commission is built into the insurance premium. The client is fully aware of how much their broker earns as the broker must disclose their commission to and get written consent from their client.

Large insurance brokerage firms have the ability to secure coverage for every type of risk. They tend to compartmentalize the coverage to provide experts in each field of insurance. For example, larger firms have departments to handle aviation risks while their counterpart can handle workers compensation.

Smaller businesses may not require the level of compartmentalization and specialization that larger brokerage houses offer. To that end a smaller brokerage firm or an individual broker may be adequate for their needs. They also have the ability to offer a more personalized service that a small business might prefer.

To become an insurance broker, an individual must successfully pass their state's Property Casualty licensing exam.

Both agents and brokers must pass the same licensing exam in order solicit or sell insurance, but their point of allegiance differs. One represents the client and the other the insurance company.

Real estate deal to reshape home-selling

2010-10-24T16:47:00.001-04:00

Real estate deal to reshape home-selling

It is about time. It is clear that there has been an unusual monopoly held by MLS back from the days that cataloging and sharing information about house sales was 1,000 times more expensive.

3-6% on a $600,000 home as a realty fee is outrageous, especially with an "agent" acting on two sides of the deal.

It will be interesting to see how this information market changes. People, after all, will always buy and sell homes. I hope the industry continues to deregulate giving more opportunity to information entrepreneurs and better choices to consumers.

Tips from Dale Carnegie

2010-09-22T01:06:00.000-04:00

Reposting from the Posivity Blog.

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Here are 10 of my favourite tips from Dale Carnegie. And as the opening quote says, these tips have been time-tested for the last few hundreds or thousands of years. They are pretty solid.

1. Create your own emotions.

"If you want to be enthusiastic, act enthusiastic."

Emotions work backwards too. You can use that to your advantage. If you are stuck in a negative emotion then you can often shake it off. Change your body – how you move, sit and stand – and act as you would like to feel. Enthusiasm and other positive emotions are much more useful and pleasurable for everyone in an interaction. Because…

2. It's not so much about the logical stuff.

"When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but creatures of emotion."

This is so key. Logic is good but in the end, in interactions and in life, we are emotional creatures. We send and receive emotions from other people. That is one reason why body language and voice tonality is often said be up to 93% of communication. Now, those numbers were for some specific situations but I still believe that these two ways of communication are very, very important.

The body language and the voice tonality is a bit like the rest of the iceberg, the great mass below the tip of the words we use. Those two things communicate how we are feeling and give indication to what we are thinking. And that's why it's important to be able to change how you feel. To be in a positive mood while interacting. Because that will have a great impact on how you say something and how you use your body. And those two things will have a big impact on your results and relationships.

3. Three things you are better off avoiding.

"Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain but it takes character and self control to be understanding and forgiving."

Now these things may not be easy to avoid all together. Much of our interactions and perhaps even bonds are created and maintained through those three negative C's. There is a sort of twisted pleasure in criticising, condemning and complaining. It might make you feel more important and like a better person as you see yourself as a victim or as you condemn other people's behaviour.

But in the end these three C's are negative and limiting to your life. Bringing up negative stuff and wallowing in it will lower your mood, motivation and general levels of wellbeing. And this can trap you in a negative spiral of complaining, complaining with other complainers and always finding faults in your reality.

You will also be broadcasting and receiving negative emotions. And people in general want to feel good. So this can really put an obstacle in the way for your interactions or relationships.

4. What is most important?

"The royal road to a man's heart is to talk to him about the things he treasures most."

Classic advice. Don't talk too much about yourself and your life. Listen to other people instead. However, if they ramble on and on, if they don't reciprocate and show and interest in your life then you don't have to stay.

Some things people may treasure the most include ideas, children, a special hobby and the job. And…

5. Focus outward, not inward.

"You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you."

A lot of people use the second, far less effective way. It is appealing because it's about instant gratification and about ME, ME, ME! The first way – to become interested in people – perhaps works better because it make you a pleasant exception and because the law of reciprocity is strong in people. As you treat people, they will treat you. Be interested in them and they will be interested in you.

I would like to add that one hard thing about this can be to be genuinelyinterested in the other guy/gal. Your genuine interest is projected though your body language and tonality. So, just waiting for the other person to stop talking so you can talk again isn't really genuine interest. And that may shine through. And so your interactions will suffer.

6. Take control of your emotions.

"The person who seeks all their applause from outside has their happiness in another's keeping."

It wrote about this problem a few days ago in 9 Great Ways to Make Yourself Absolutely Miserable. And it basically consist of being too reliant or dependent on external validation from other people. External validation is something someone communicates to you that tells you that you are person of value. That you, for example, are pretty, smart or successful.

This leaves much of your emotions in the hands of other people. It becomes an emotional rollercoaster. One day you feel great. The next day you feel like just staying in bed.

But if you fill that inner cup of validation for yourself instead then you take over the wheel. Now you're driving, now you control how you feel. You can still appreciate compliments of course, but you aren't dependent on them.

This will make you more emotionally stable and enables you to cultivate and build your emotional muscles in a more controlled way. You can for instance help yourself to become more optimistic or enthusiastic more of the time. This stability and growth can be big help in your relationships.

7. No, they are not holding you back.

"Instead of worrying about what people say of you, why not spend time trying to accomplish something they will admire."

Caring too much about what people think will create and feed imaginary monsters within your mind. You may for instance think that people will condemn you if you try something. Maybe they will. But most of the time people are thinking about their own challenges and ups and downs. They just don't care that much about what you do.

This may feel disappointing. It can also be liberating. It helps you remove inner obstacles that are you holding yourself back.

As you, bit by bit or in one big swoop, release those inner brakes you become more of yourself. You become more confident, you have a better chance at success, and you will feel more positive feelings and less negative ones. All these things can give a big boost to your interactions and help you sharpen those social skills.

8. So, what's in it for me?

"There is only one way… to get anybody to do anything. And that is by making the other person want to do it."

If you want someone to do something then will they care about your motivation for getting this thing done? Perhaps. Often they will not have that great of an interest in what you want out of something.

They want to know what they will get out of it. So, for the both of you to get what you want out of something tell that person what's in it for him/her. And try to be genuine and positive about it. A reason for them to do it delivered in a lame, half-assed manner may not be so persuasive. And so you both lose.

9. How to win an argument.

"The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it."

Getting two egos wrapped up in an argument, having two sides defending their positions desperately, will not improve relationships. You are more likely to feel negative feelings towards each other long after the argument is over. And so you both wallow in negativity and you both lose. When possible, just avoiding unnecessary arguments is a win-win situation.

10. It's about more than your words.

"There are four ways, and only four ways, in which we have contact with the world. We are evaluated and classified by these four contacts: what we do, how we look, what we say, and how we say it."

I often feel that there is a bit too much emphasis on the third way of contact (what we say). Don't forget about the rest. Most people stereotype people at their first meeting. They might not want to but it is a way for their – and perhaps your – mind to organize impressions and people. So think about how you look. Think about how you make first impressions. Think aboutyour body language. And how you are saying your sentences.

Notes from Ghandi

2010-09-22T00:59:00.000-04:00

Excellent post from Twitter: reposting. Worth reading:

###

"You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty."

"The difference between what we do and what we are capable of doing would suffice to solve most of the world's problem."

"If I had no sense of humor, I would long ago have committed suicide."

Mahatma Gandhi needs no long introduction. Everyone knows about the man who lead the Indian people to independence from British rule in 1947.

So let's just move on to some of my favourite tips from Mahatma Gandhi.

1. Change yourself.

"You must be the change you want to see in the world."

"As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world – that is the myth of the atomic age – as in being able to remake ourselves."

If you change yourself you will change your world. If you change how you think then you will change how you feel and what actions you take. And so the world around you will change. Not only because you are now viewing your environment through new lenses of thoughts and emotions but also because the change within can allow you to take action in ways you wouldn't have – or maybe even have thought about – while stuck in your old thought patterns.

And the problem with changing your outer world without changing yourself is that you will still be you when you reach that change you have strived for. You will still have your flaws, anger, negativity, self-sabotaging tendencies etc. intact.

And so in this new situation you will still not find what you hoped for since your mind is still seeping with that negative stuff. And if you get more without having some insight into and distance from your ego it may grow more powerful. Since your ego loves to divide things, to find enemies and to create separation it may start to try to create even more problems and conflicts in your life and world.

2. You are in control.

"Nobody can hurt me without my permission."

What you feel and how you react to something is always up to you. There may be a "normal" or a common way to react to different things. But that's mostly just all it is.

You can choose your own thoughts, reactions and emotions to pretty much everything. You don't have to freak out, overreact of even react in a negative way. Perhaps not every time or instantly. Sometimes a knee-jerk reaction just goes off. Or an old thought habit kicks in.

And as you realize that no-one outside of yourself can actually control how you feel you can start to incorporate this thinking into your daily life and develop it as a thought habit. A habit that you can grow stronger and stronger over time. Doing this makes life a whole lot easier and more pleasurable.

3. Forgive and let it go.

"The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong."

"An eye for eye only ends up making the whole world blind."

Fighting evil with evil won't help anyone. And as said in the previous tip, you always choose how to react to something. When you can incorporate such a thought habit more and more into your life then you can react in a way that is more useful to you and others.

You realize that forgiving and letting go of the past will do you and the people in your world a great service. And spending your time in some negative memory won't help you after you have learned the lessons you can learn from that experience. You'll probably just cause yourself more suffering and paralyze yourself from taking action in this present moment.

If you don't forgive then you let the past and another person to control how you feel. By forgiving you release yourself from those bonds. And then you can focus totally on, for instance, the next point.

4. Without action you aren't going anywhere.

"An ounce of practice is worth more than tons of preaching."

Without taking action very little will be done. However, taking action can be hard and difficult. There can be much inner resistance.

And so you may resort to preaching, as Gandhi says. Or reading and studying endlessly. And feeling like you are moving forward. But getting little or no practical results in real life.

So, to really get where you want to go and to really understand yourself and your world you need to practice. Books can mostly just bring you knowledge. You have to take action and translate that knowledge into results and understanding.

You can check out a few effective tips to overcome this problem in How to Take More Action: 9 Powerful Tips. Or you can move on to the next point for more on the best tip for taking more action that I have found so far.

5. Take care of this moment.

"I do not want to foresee the future. I am concerned with taking care of the present. God has given me no control over the moment following."

The best way that I have found to overcome the inner resistance that often stops us from taking action is to stay in the present as much as possible and to be accepting.

Why? Well, when you are in the present moment you don't worry about the next moment that you can't control anyway. And the resistance to action that comes from you imagining negative future consequences – or reflecting on past failures – of your actions loses its power. And so it becomes easier to both take action and to keep your focus on this moment and perform better.

Have a look at 8 Ways to Return to the Present Moment for tips on how quickly step into the now. And remember that reconnecting with and staying in the now is a mental habit – a sort of muscle – that you grow. Over time it becomes more powerful and makes it easier to slip into the present moment.

6. Everyone is human.

"I claim to be a simple individual liable to err like any other fellow mortal. I own, however, that I have humility enough to confess my errors and to retrace my steps."

"It is unwise to be too sure of one's own wisdom. It is healthy to be reminded that the strongest might weaken and the wisest might err."

When you start to make myths out of people – even though they may have produced extraordinary results – you run the risk of becoming disconnected from them. You can start to feel like you could never achieve similar things that they did because they are so very different. So it's important to keep in mind that everyone is just a human being no matter who they are.

And I think it's important to remember that we are all human and prone to make mistakes. Holding people to unreasonable standards will only create more unnecessary conflicts in your world and negativity within you.

It's also important to remember this to avoid falling into the pretty useless habit of beating yourself up over mistakes that you have made. And instead be able to see with clarity where you went wrong and what you can learn from your mistake. And then try again.

7. Persist.

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."

Be persistent. In time the opposition around you will fade and fall away. And your inner resistance and self-sabotaging tendencies that want to hold you back and keep you like you have always been will grow weaker.

Find what you really like to do. Then you'll find the inner motivation to keep going, going and going. You can also find a lot of useful tips on how keep your motivation up in How to Get Out of a Motivational Slump and 25 Simple Ways to Motivate Yourself.

One reason Gandhi was so successful with his method of non-violence was because he and his followers were so persistent. They just didn't give up.

Success or victory will seldom come as quickly as you would have liked it to. I think one of the reasons people don't get what they want is simply because they give up too soon. The time they think an achievement will require isn't the same amount of time it usually takes to achieve that goal. This faulty belief partly comes from the world we live in. A world full of magic pill solutions where advertising continually promises us that we can lose a lot of weight or earn a ton of money in just 30 days. You can read more about this in One Big Mistake a Whole Lot of People Make.

Finally, one useful tip to keep your persistence going is to listen to Gandhi's third quote in this article and keep a sense of humor. It can lighten things up at the toughest of times.

8. See the good in people and help them.

"I look only to the good qualities of men. Not being faultless myself, I won't presume to probe into the faults of others."

"Man becomes great exactly in the degree in which he works for the welfare of his fellow-men."

"I suppose leadership at one time meant muscles; but today it means getting along with people."

There is pretty much always something good in people. And things that may not be so good. But you can choose what things to focus on. And if you want improvement then focusing on the good in people is a useful choice. It also makes life easier for you as your world and relationships become more pleasant and positive.

And when you see the good in people it becomes easier to motivate yourself to be of service to them. By being of service to other people, by giving them value you not only make their lives better. Over time you tend to get what you give. And the people you help may feel more inclined to help other people. And so you, together, create an upward spiral of positive change that grows and becomes stronger.

By strengthening your social skills you can become a more influential person and make this upward spiral even stronger. A few articles that may provide you with useful advice in that department are Do You Make These 10 Mistakes in a Conversation? and Dale Carnegie's Top 10 Tips for Improving Your Social Skills. Or you can just move on to the next tip.

9. Be congruent, be authentic, be your true self.

"Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony."

"Always aim at complete harmony of thought and word and deed. Always aim at purifying your thoughts and everything will be well."

I think that one of the best tips for improving your social skills is to behave in a congruent manner and communicate in an authentic way. People seem to really like authentic communication. And there is much inner enjoyment to be found when your thoughts, words and actions are aligned. You feel powerful and good about yourself.

When words and thoughts are aligned then that shows through in your communication. Because now you have your voice tonality and body language – some say they are over 90 percent of communication – in alignment with your words.

With these channels in alignment people tend to really listen to what you're saying. You are communicating without incongruency, mixed messages or perhaps a sort of phoniness.

Also, if your actions aren't in alignment with what you're communicating then you start to hurt your own belief in what you can do. And other people's belief in you too.

10. Continue to grow and evolve.

"Constant development is the law of life, and a man who always tries to maintain his dogmas in order to appear consistent drives himself into a false position."

You can pretty much always improve your skills, habits or re-evaluate your evaluations. You can gain deeper understanding of yourself and the world.

Sure, you may look inconsistent or like you don't know what you are doing from time to time. You may have trouble to act congruently or to communicate authentically. But if you don't then you will, as Gandhi says, drive yourself into a false position. A place where you try to uphold or cling to your old views to appear consistent while you realise within that something is wrong. It's not a fun place to be. To choose to grow and evolve is a happier and more useful path to take.

GENTOUCH - The tablets are coming, the tablets are coming....

2010-07-28T14:48:00.000-04:00

Dreams from almost 20 years ago are coming true. Tablets, the small, thin devices are powerful computers, have long lasting batteries, and fast, colorful screens. These connected tools change the way one consumes information and entertainment. Fast on the heels of the iPad, the Android tablets are now starting to ship. Augen is shipping a small tablet installed with Google's Android OS, and access to 10's of thousands of apps from the Android App store. The small color screen will bear out interest as a portable web viewer not only because of the slick os, wifi, and useful apps (multiple tasking apps that is), but also because it is being sold in Kmarts. Oh, and did I mention that they cost $149? Betcha cant just buy one;) disclaimer: I wrote this post on my iPad. Click through to see the cute Gentouches. http://www.augenus.com/indexhome.html/GENTOUCH.html

Twitter and the art of making money from 24 Billion Searches a month.

2010-07-17T13:04:00.004-04:00

It's curious to me.

There are 800 million searches a day on Twitter, about 24 Billion a month compared to Yahoo's 9 Billion searches and Bing's 4.1 Billion.

That means hundred of millions of people a day are looking for something via Twitter. That means Twitter has those people's attention, it has them in a state such that they are waiting with some tension for a result, "will I find what I am looking for?"

This is the perfect moment in time to give a Twitter user a response that helps them with a result of their search. Yes, I am talking about ad words for Twitter, twords so to speak. I think its a better approach than promoted tweets or geo-located @earlybird offers.

I expect to see ad words integrated in the stream or on the major Twitter clients soon in the normal subtle fashion that is the culture at Twitter. There are two likely reasons that they are not in place now:

1. Ad words are hard to implement and the twitter team hasn't got the technical chops to do it. The smooth mechanism that Google has put in place is incredibly efficient and low cost with a real-time micro-transaction basis that nobody, not even Microsoft, Amazon and Yahoo have been able to come close to.

2. @Ev and @Biz are positioning for a partnership and eventual acquisition by Google as the create a common ad framework. The faster Twitter grows on its own steam, the more Google will have to pay to be partners or to acquire Twitter because the landing page and attention always wins in ad wars. I am amazed that one of the sovereign funds from China or Abu Dhabi doesn't swoop in now to drive up the stakes by betting on Twitter.

I am thinking door #2 is the winner. We shall see.

RBC Canadian Woman Entrepreneur Awards | Award Categories

2010-06-16T22:35:00.001-04:00

It's about time.

http://www.theawards.ca/cwea/award-categories.cfm

Geo-Location and Clip Mobile, Coupons go local.

2010-01-26T08:19:00.015-05:00

I have been watching the growth of geo-located services. I agree with Mary Meeker's analysis that this year's top investment bets will flow in to software companies that are developing cloud-based services that take advantage of three critical features of rapid proliferation of smartphones - gps, broadband, real-time and cameras.

While there been excitement around the futuristic applications related to augmented reality like the software from http://www.layar.com/, some simpler ideas are rolling out now. There is a Canadian company called Clip Mobile that has created a platform that mixes the familiar with new technology. They have built an iPhone/iPod application that allows the delivery of coupons to a customer based on their location. If you are in a mall or on street corner, the app will sense your location, and show your offers, like 10% off dry cleaning or 2-for-1 specials that are close to you. Clip Mobile has arrangements with over 10,000 retail stores to deliver coupons to people in real-time.

Clip Mobile Coupon Application from Clip Mobile on Vimeo.

This has to be more efficient than blasting coupons to consumers in newspapers, magazines and flyers that are destined for the garbage and forcing the consumer to clip and organize shopping adventures. An added bonus is that with a bit more automation that allows the sharing over the air of information as the coupon is redeemed, a retailer can capture point of sale information that can support CRM information, loyalty programs and consumer research, in a continuous and cost effective manner.

Increased efficiencies in advertising will lower costs and increase margins for retailers. Look to the large consumer packaging goods companies and entertainment businesses adopt these type of technologies rapidly as they compete for the attention of consumers in the future.

A smart wireless platforms in Canada, like, say Wind, or Enstream should snap up Clip Mobile tomorrow, and crank up the operation to cover 100,000 retailers, selling these small, virtual micro, geo-located ads to augment their revenue streams. Then they could sell to one of monopolies. Just sayin.

Google Plans to Upgrade Old Billboards in Street View

2010-01-12T06:46:00.009-05:00

In case you were wondering if Google will make any less money than they already do. According to http://www.readwriteweb.com, Google has patented a technique to update billboards in "Streetview" that will automatically render new virtual ad as users look at street level in cities through their browsers and smart phones. Not a big deal when you think of a stray billboard on highway 101, but when you thing of the views that will happen on Time Square through Streetview, I can see large amounts of revenue that could be generated.

Larry keeps inventing transactions with no competition, much to Steve Balmer's chagrin.

This will bear watching. Look for them to try the same technology in Youtube videos. It would just take adding some green screens in a standard way. It wouldn't be easy, but Google does hard things.

What if there were virtual billboards that one could add to all TV series, and every time someone streamed it, the "billboard" could be updated with relevant ads? When you think about how much money they do generate at quarter at $1.6B, you have to respect the different viewpoint they have on generating ad revenue from micro transactions.

You'd make a google load of money, that's what. (That's a lot of zeroes)

The Real Low Down on Toronto Travel to the US - YYZ-LGA

2010-01-05T08:40:00.001-05:00

One of my business associates just travelled to the US and is on a plane to New York as I write this. She's a road warrior and this info is useful. As I suspected, it looks like travel has changed with the extra security, but things are settling down. Here are her notes on going from Toronto's Pearson Airport (YYZ) to New York's LeGuardia (LGA).

***

1) for an 8.15am flight, get to YYZ by 6.15

2) the line up to hand in your checked luggage with Air Canada was long this morning - between 15-30 minutes. 20 minutes in the Elite line. Super-elite: 1-2 minutes max...

3) customs line up is regular; Nexus continues to be available, normal

4) a single bag can be taken as carry-on - laptop bags (shoulder or backpacks) are ok. Bags on wheels are not accepted.

5) the regular security screening remains the same: shoes off, laptop in plastic bin etc. ; line ups were a bit longer than normal. Would recommend putting all liquids in your checked luggage although not sure if mandatory now.

6) a secondary security screening takes place as you head to your gate. Men and women line up separately. Bags are searched and people are "patted down". Laptops and cell phones must be turned on in front of the screeners.

7) books, magazines are fine. I also took headphones, no problem. I did not try to take my kindle so not sure if that would go through.

8) this secondary screening took the longest - the line was 20 minutes long. Make sure you head to your gate at least 50 minutes before departure time.

9) the less you have in your one bag for this secondary screening the better.

It's not all as terrible as it's been described, but do plan on extra time, extra patience, and take as little as you can on the plane to minimize aggravation.

5 Tips in Managing Facebook Privacy

2010-01-04T07:44:00.001-05:00

I just read a very interesting article at the Globeandmail.com that I thought you might find interesting. It is called Five tips to manage Facebook's new privacy settings.

The service reccently changed it privacy settings. The good news is that there us a lot more control. The bad news is that it is so complicated, most casual non-technal users will not fathom how to secure their information. Worse news is that the defaults err to openess with people you don't know. the very worst offfense is the default on search which allows all your information to be indexed and searchable by strangers and companies.

The simple message is that if you do use Facebook, learn how to use security and be careful what you post and share. Assume your mother is reading and seeing everything.

What is your sentence?

2010-01-02T18:22:00.004-05:00

Daniel Pink asks us 2 questions that can change our lives forever.

I love the simplicity of this. Remember them every day. Ping me on Twitter @robtyrie and I'll tell you my answers.

Two questions that can change your life from Daniel Pink on Vimeo.

Cities The Real Drivers of World Innovation and Change

2010-01-02T12:50:00.007-05:00

This graphic from www.192021.org shows the cities of the world, by population in 2005. By comparison, before 1800, no one lived in cities. In 2009, Tokyo will have a population of over 35 million people. I think that all world governments should adjust to learn from the cities. the C-20 (The leaders of the worlds 20 largest cities) is more important the G-8.

The growth an success of cities, as elucidated in Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Cities need more study and understanding by our policy makers. Things like sustainability, mixed housing, mass transit, agriculture, and commerce will be solved in cities first. Governments that wrap their policies in the growth and vibrancy of cities will be the most successful in the future. This is no secret to Shang Hai, Hong Kong or Copenhagen.

In the mean time, choose to live in a large city, they are the future.

My Top Technologies for 2009 or something like that.

2009-12-28T23:18:00.023-05:00

I thought over the holiday break that I'd put together a list of technologies that made the serious impact on my working and social life. To have an impact on me, the technology has to be useful and novel and I like to identify neat, surprising things that one might miss if you have your nose to close to the screen or some other hard surface. It includes hardware, software, media and entertainment mostly because its hard to tell these things apart anymore. In Letterman order of course, here goes:

10. List of lists.
Interesting pile from Charlie B - Not exactly a time-waster, but darn close. Everyday there's a set of novel lists built to intrigue and entertain. It's where you can find the 10 most surprising moments in Christmas movies, the 100 Geekiest Bento Boxes or the 11 Best Simpson's episodes in the last decade. Time well wasted.

9. Ted Talks. www.ted.com is the opposite of wasting time. It, in a large part, has replaced time that I used to spend on mindless television. The site is a collection of great speakers giving short presentation over the history of the conference on topics they are passionate about. Medicine, art, architecture, environment, history, neuro-science and a broad series of interesting topics. Richard Saul Wurman's Technology Entertainment and Design conference changes the world everyday. Awesome, inspiring, motivating. Watch some world class stories today.

8. Facebook.com - enough already, isn't everyone already on Facebook? I think the interesting part now is what they will do with 400 million people's attention. Anything that big on the Internet is important. It has over 1 Billion photos, which is the largest store of digital photos in history. Look to see dozens of important studies on group dynamics as this closed, simplified version of the Internet continues to grow and evolve. The most likely change that they have to add is effective search, a shocking change to the users of all that private information. If they can't achieve search prowess, their value will remain marginal to Google's. I also heard a good rumor that Facebook might introduce it's own currency. This is silly of course. They already have. They've made 10's of millions of dollars on virtual goods like birthday cards and electronic cocktails, why bother with the SEC and the Fed when you can barter your way through to profit.

7. The Kindle from www.amazon.com
- and all ebook readers. There's a brand new market waiting on a fast, cheap reading device. It's been 20 years coming. Give it another 10 years and it will be the most common way of consuming the written word (for those of us who still read). The latest numbers have shown that for the first time in Amazon's 10 year history, sales of ebooks exceed paper books in December. I feel like a late adopter because I haven't gotten a Kindle yet, but I know that either a Kindle DX or an iSlate from Apple is in my future.

6. Layar - the emergence of augmented reality is a stunning step into the future. Using a video camera as input, image analysis, geo location and relevant search algorithms, broadband wireless and powerful hand held computers, the folks at www.Layar.com are delivering a new way of looking at the world in real-time. Point your Android or iPhone at a street or a building, information relevant to travel, history or commerce information is presented on the screen of your mobile phone. It's immersive computing that will provide an array of benefits to business, education and entertainment uses. I can't wait for this technology to unfold.

5. Google gets semantic
Google is an easy one to keep picking, but I am not just talking about the search engine and page ranked results that have become a household verb. The results that you get from typing some searches now anticipate the search and deliver more structured data to provide you with an expected result. The so-call beginnings of the semantic web. For instance if you search for "Movies Toronto" instead of getting a list of web sites with the term Movies in it, you get a structured list of movies playing, with , theaters, show times, and rating. It gets you where you want to go faster. The same thing happens is you search for a restaurant in a large city. If you search for "Five Doors North Toronto" you get a map, a rating of the resto, the phone number and a link to the menu. This makes searching incredibly efficient. Other players like Bing are playing catch up, and Google will keep making more information available to Internet users, and ad word clickers.

4. NFB.ca
Canada's National Film Board has decided to publish and make all its films available online for free. This is simply a national treasure that is well shared as it should be. The iPhone/iTouch application also makes it easy to explore and find such gems as the Cat Came Back, the seminal FLQ documentary called Action: The October Crisis in 1970 and Bill Mason's Waterwalker about the philosophy and art of canoeing, the ultimate in Canadiana.

3. Wolfram Alpha

A new kind of search engine. Stephen Wolfram, the genius behind Mathematica, has a new approach to searching and structuring information based on over 50,000 complicated algorithms, that predict a desired answer and structures a tabular result. It's more of a reference book and calculator than a search engine. The typical vanity search on your own name will not produce the usual results. I'm my case it does show the statistical info on the name Rob for US births (less than 1 in 12500 in 2008), but it won't show a link to my twitter page. Early reviews were a little flat, but the power in the engine is clear when you ask more specified questions like "swine Flu in Canada" it parses the information and provides results from logical sources. Entering two city names like "Toronto and New York" assumes the user wants to compare two cities and provides comparisons of population, distance and a relative map. A more topical comparison of the US, Canada and Nigeria yields interesting information given current events. The content is useful for inclusion in an undergrad paper or a News report. Look for this information service to grow and be embedded in other content sources. Its degree of importance is underlined by the recent licensing of the calculation and reference engine by Microsoft to support Bing's anemic result sets.

2. Twitter is....

well, the micro-blogging service Twitter has been called just about everything and now that it has licensed it's real-time data stream to Microsoft and Google its being called something that many people couldn't imagine - profitable! I'll call out what I think is its highest and best use, a breaking news service on a global and hyper-local level. David Carr from the New York Times sain "the real value of the service is listening to a wired collective voice". It will continue to change the face of news and will bear watching as it evolves.

And finally:

#1. Ipod Touch, Itunes and the App Store

The combination of hardware, software of the platform and, entertainment content from games to news to movies and simple, friction-free commerce, make the iTouch the most delightful consumer appliance ever. Period. Steve Jobs wins. I am goin' to the Appstore.

Google equips self for 'real-time' search • /vial The Register

2009-12-11T08:30:00.003-05:00

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/12/07/google_real_time_search/

This is a new feature that changes the value of search and the valuation of Twitter... It's only a matter of time before Twitter is subsumed. It will either be bought or made irrelevant by what Google (or Microsoft).

"When you key in a search term, Google's results page may include a new sub-category dubbed "latest results," akin to existing sub-categories for news, videos, and music. You can also select a "latest" link on the left hand side of the page to view a full page of so-called real-time results"

Check it out... http://www.google.com/

IBM's Master Data Management Strategy

2009-12-07T10:09:00.011-05:00

Everyone in CRM industry should know about MDM.

Master Data Management. IBM continues to drive the idea of consolidating customer data and company product data in one logical location so that all business process can have access to single version of the truth. It's not just one big data base, an approach that is still popular but becoming outmoded. It is complicated and not for the faint of heart, when you start digging into what the technology really means. It's a complicated mix of data models, application servers, ETL, security, identity frameworks and tools.

Even IBM says it is really a potential that must be customized rather than commercial off-the-shelf software.

From Wikipedia - A definition of Master Data Management:

"At a basic level, MDM seeks to ensure that an organization does not use multiple (potentially inconsistent) versions of the same master data in different parts of its operations, which can occur in large organizations. A common example of poor MDM is the scenario of a bank at which a customer has taken out a mortgage and the bank begins to send mortgage solicitations to that customer, ignoring the fact that the person already has a mortgage account relationship with the bank. This happens because the customer information used by the marketing section within the bank lacks integration with the customer information used by the customer services section of the bank. Thus the two groups remain unaware that an existing customer is also considered a sales lead."

Here is a link to an IBM white paper that describes their offering. It is a good discussion of of a massive solution that any organization with millions of customers have to get their arms around.

ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/common/ssi/sa/wh/n/imw14048usen/IMW14048USEN.PDF

More to come, I am still considering the implications of the failure of this idea and what the real alternatives are.

The Art of the Impulse Buy - Of Gadgets and Vending Machines

2009-11-29T16:07:00.011-05:00

I am a self professed gadget guy. Portable computing has been in my life since the first Sharp Wizard I bought in 1986 (I still have it, and it still works, commandeered as a calculator by the kids).

So it was with excitement and glee when I realized I'd soon have a new Apple Ipod Touch in my multi-touching, pinching, twitching fingers. But, the iTouch and the "next level of fun" is another story.

This post is about impulse buys and point of sale. I was returning to Toronto after a business trip to New York and was trundling off to my flight in Terminal A. It was a Friday and I figured that I would by a pocket book for the ride home. Just before the book concession, there it was, a huge Best Buy branded vending machine, my kind of robot, a veritable gadget Valhalla.

The machine was brightly lit and all the branded products we clearly displayed in a stacked set of carousels. Kensington memory cards, Monster head phones, Ipod skins and cases, Bose external speakers and the mother load, the full line of Apple entertainment devices. In about 15 seconds the Best Buy Bot had separated me from 3 of my hard-earned Benjamins.

It's a great idea and here are 3 reasons why:

1. The traveler has time to shop, even more so as security has increased the time spent in airports.

2. Consumer electronics for entertainment have exploded, there is an eco-system of products that has proliferated around digital players. There's a range of accessories that range from $5 to $500.

3. There's is a plane ride in your future, and the product selection is designed to help you use that travel time in a productive or entertaining way.

The implications are interesting. I think the placement of a device like this is brilliant marketing and distribution planning. The focus of a full electronics store for the traveler with accessories and high end product. What caps the strategy is that the combination of Best Buy and having products from trusted brands like Logitech, Skull Candy and Apple. I had no problem swiping my Amex to give me the goods. That's a far cry from scanning in 2 bucks for a big Coke.

With the high cost of labour in the US and Canada, I am expecting to see more and more specialized vending machines like they have in Japan.

And yes, the new 32G Ipod touch is just about the coolest toy I've ever consumed, but I'll save that for another post.

[photo credit:: WWW.Gizmodo.com]

Twitter Clippings

2009-09-20T22:50:00.011-04:00

What are you reading these days? One of the reasons I use Twitter is that it is fantastic for gleaning information that is new and interesting to me as a professional. I use it as my own personal, real-time, clipping service.

I don't think it's straight forward for most people, but once you get used to the stream of information, detailed news sources start bubbling up. Now this doesn't happen when you first start using Twitter. It is essential that you follow people that are of interest to you. A lot of people. In my case, I am in the CRM Software business, so I follow people who tweet about CRM and Software Analysts that cover CRM and Social Media software. I found people by searching their profiles and by using search.twitter.com. Also, I always have a Tweetdeck column with a search on CRM and I use a couple of others I use to monitor competitors.

Once you get a good size group to follow, and I mean a size of 200-300 people, those tweets with links start to indicate new resources that I read to observe and analyze new trends in software. Mixed with the real-time nature of Twitter, I am confident that I am going to see and read breaking news as it happens.

When Google Wave came out this summer, the tweet and trending topics gave early indication that it was an important piece of news and the key articles and blogs to read all about it were clearly linked in Twitter.

Using this method, here are some websites and blogs that I've added to my reading that I use to stay on top of software industry trends. I go through the current articles at least once each week.

1. http://www.mashable.com/ - Pete Cashmore's blog is on top of all things Web 2.0 and social media. The bloggers here write fast pieces on industry issues and new trends.

2. http://www.readwriteweb.com/ - A meatier and geekier analysis blog about software and emerging standards.

3. http://www.gigaom.com/ - a small band of analysts providing research on modern Technology trends. I especially like the work they do on Telecom topics.

4. http://www.businessinsider.com/ - Henry Blodgett's rag. The inside scoop and dirt going on with M&A, financing and business explosions as well as abject failures.

5. http://www.destinationcrm.com/. - an old faithful Vendor PR driven industry site. Not a lot of analysis, but it shows the movements and big deals for the major players in CRM.

6. http://www.techcrunch.com/ - the Arrington trade sheet. It focuses on quick news and pr. It's self fancied analysis leaves a lot to be desired, but it picks up leaks and other information that make it required tech reading. You just don't want to be featured by them.

7. http://www.techmeme/ - An aggregator that analyzes the real-time web and lists popular articles that are being tweeted and retweeted. If some thing is big in software, it will show up on their top 10.

These are 7 of mine, but for each twitterstream, there will be a different list of relevant resources that emerge. What I do know, is that is if you are careful to concentrate on who you follow, and your follow hundreds of users, you will get a rich, useful set of news sources that will enhance your understanding of your chosen business or area of interest.

40 Psychology Blogs, if you do mind thinking about you mind.

2009-07-21T23:21:00.008-04:00

About forty of some of the best psychology blogs, chosen to give you a broad sweep of the most interesting content being produced online right now. www.Psyblog.org - was the originator and the source of the annotations. For convenience, we've added the links.

The list is split into three sections: first are more general psychological blogs, followed by those with an academic slant, followed by condition specific and patient perspective blogs. Other than that the blogs are presented in no particular order:

General:

MindHacks: links to psychological goodness from all around the web.
Cognitive Daily: in-depth coverage of cognitive psychology research.
The Last Psychiatrist: thoughtful, iconoclastic perspective from a practising psychiatrist.
Channel N: brain and behaviour videos.
BPS Research Digest: accessibly covers new psychological research.
Neurophilosophy: about molecules, minds and everything inbetween.
Neuromarketing: brain science in marketing and sales.
PsychCentral Blog: team blog, focusing more on clinical topics: depression, anxiety etc..
The Situationist: links to articles on social psychology.
We're Only Human: journalist Wray Herbert writes about the quirks of human nature.
Psychology Today Blogs: 'essential reads' from Psychology Today's stable of bloggers.
The Frontal Cortex: by author and journalist Jonah Lehrer (who writes often for Wired).
All In The Mind Blog: companion to good Australian radio show covering mind matters.
Frontier Psychiatrist: anonymous London-based psychiatrist critical of the profession.
Neuronarrative: psychology with a public health slant. Jena Pincott: science of love, sex and attraction.
Research Blogging: posts collected from variety of blogs but all peer-reviewed research.
In the News: forensic psychologist Karen Franklin on the intersection between psychology and law.
The Mouse Trap: musings on cognitive and developmental psychology.
The Trouble with Spikol: mental health policy issues discussed by writer Liz Spikol.
Bad Science: Covers more than psychology but Dr Ben Goldacre is such good value we'll let him off.
PsyBlog: A good collection of stories and resources related to psychology. (And the originator of this list - rt)

More academic:

Dr Petra Boynton: sex educator and academic exposes media misrepresentations of science.
Babel's Dawn: exploring the origins of language.
The Neurocritic: anonymous, critical, mischievous.
Advances in the History of Psychology: it's all in the title.
Deric Bownd's MindBlog: biological view of the brain from an Emeritus Professor.
Brain Stimulant: neuro-technology methods of brain stimulation.
Social Psychology Eye: written by contributors to the journal Social and Personality Psychology Compass.

Condition specific/patient perspective blogs:

Panic!: writer who's been dealing with panic disorder for 20 years.
The Tangled Neuron: layperson reports on memory loss, Alzheimer's & dementia.
Furious Seasons: journalist with bipolar disorder who rattles the cage of Big Pharma.
Beyond Blue: author provides guidance on how to get through depression.
Walking the Black Dog: one person's battle with 'the black dog'.
The Secret Life of a Manic Depressive: Seaneen is a twenty-three year old Irish girl writing about her life.
Autism Blog: autism research described by Lisa Jo Rudy, who has first-hand experience of the condition.
The Reality of Anxiety: Aimee, who suffers from social anxiety, promoting understanding of the condition.

The Retweet Deconstructed - Twitter Mastery

2009-07-21T22:18:00.013-04:00

The retweet is one of the interesting ideas in the evolution of communications on Twitter. Basically a retweet happens when you copy someone else's message and send it out as a copy of the tweet to all the people you follow and the public stream. It is sort of like forwarding an email. It is common practice to not change the tweet in this case (unless you need to shorten it). It is considered unnaccepible twitter use to copy a tweet and post it without attribution, T

So if @billyboy sends a message like - "I love it when Toronto people realize they are not so smart!"

My retweet would look like this - robtyrie Rt @billyboy "I love it when Toronto people realize they are not so smart!"

This method gives attribution the person (@billyboy) who wrote the original message and all my followers will see it in their viewers.

But what meaning does it hold? Why did it evolve on twitter, since it was not part of the original design and has no support in the Twitter API, but it is supported in a number of clients like Twitterberry and Tweetdeck.

I think that retweeting is an important part of the conversation has been essential to Twitter's growth as a media. Generally, it means you want to share a message with an audience, but there are some subtleties and as I observe my and other's style of using retweets, there are some basic patterns that emerge.

Here are 5 reasons why I retweet a message:

1. Because I like or agree with the idea and I think the people who follow me will like it too. This is a way of drawing attention to messages for your followers.

2. As a sign of respect to the originator. If tweeting is micro-writing , being retweeted is like being micro-published. It feels pretty good when something you mean to be read is supported by others. I know this because people thank other people who retweet them. It's been identified as a method of ranking the twitter "authority" of a user based on how much their messages are retweeted.

3. To support or show agreement with an idea in public. There are services that track the most retweeted messages, the RT's serve to rank trending or interesting messages. For example Tweetmeme.com and RetweetRadar.com both list the top messages of the day that have been retweeted.

4. To support a Twitterer with few followers, the retweet adds your followers to broadcast a message to a wider audience and maybe get the originator some more followers. Which in torn supports the growth of Twitter and it usefulness. I have seen this idea is users asking for their messages ("Please RT") to be broadcast via retweets.

5. To help out the people who follow me. I have an area of expertise, and I think the reason that some people follow me is that I help focus information for them. So because I am an expert on enterprise CRM, when I retweet something I am indicating that the item has been vetted and I have judged it with my expertise to be important.

There are probably more patterns, and if you know one send me a comment, and I'd be happy to extend the list.

Now get out there and support the conversation and medium and RT some folks the next time you are on Twitter!

In fact, you should follow me, @robtyrie, and retweet me to practice ;)

Going to a Customer Meeting? Come Prepared!

2009-07-20T18:33:00.015-04:00

You know, when you are prepping to meet a new contact or person to sell into a business, it's wonderful to work with a great sales professional that's able to get a lot out of a conversation. The kind of conversation that flows, and is interactive and rewarding for all parties. In most cases those people have been trained, or have learned how to "listen actively". Active Listening involves asking a series of open ended questions that help you learn about your potential customer's business. One of the hardest parts of listening actively is actually coming up with open ended questions that will help guide a conversion to see the kind of needs that your future client has.

Too often, we get intent on our own pitch or try to fill every second of a meeting with our messages and ideal that we forget to listen. I think everyone should take a look at the this example on youtube of the old "Spray and Pray" technique that comes naturally to way too many folks. I think it comes from too much late night Television... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnF6i0b9Ux8

What I like to do to prepare for meeting is to try and come up with 15 or 20 questions that I am interested in asking. I may not ask them all, but I know it will be a better conversation if I do. Here's a good approach to think of as you plan your meeting and messages.

Mike Schulz from the Wellesely Hill Group has put together a nice set of 15 open ended questions to help guide a customer discussion, use them wisely.

________________________________________________________________

15 Powerful Open-Ended Sales Questions That Win

The questions are broken down into three groupings within the RAIN Selling Framework:

Rapport
Aspirations and Afflictions
Impact
Need to Solve

Generation Questions: Ask these open-ended sales questions to help you get to know your current or potential clients and establish an understanding of their current reality.

1. What's going on in your business these days?

2. If the Wall Street Journal were to write about what was going on in your industry (or your business) in the last few months, what would they say?

3. How has your business changed in the last few years?

4. What's it like doing your job these days?

5. Can you help me to understand what's happening in your world these days?

Questions to Uncover Aspiration and Afflictions: Ask these open-ended sales questions to help you understand what afflictions (challenges) your client is facing, and what aspirations (goals) they have for their business.

1. What keeps you up at night? (An oldie, but goodie.)

2.In the best of all possible worlds, what do you think you could do with your business?

3. What's holding you back from reaching your revenue (or profit, or other) goals?

4. If there were no restrictions on you, what business difficulties would you erase? Can you tell me why you say that?

5. What does success look like for you and your business?

Questions to Uncover the Impact of Solving (or Not Solving) Aspirations and Afflictions: Ask these open-ended sales questions to help put a monetary value on solving your clients' afflictions or achieving their aspirations.

1. If you could overcome these challenges, what would happen to your company's financial situation?

2. If you were to make this happen, what would it mean to your career?

3. How would implementing these changes affect your ability to compete?

4. How do you think senior management would evaluate the success of this initiative?

5. If you don't solve (insert the particular challenge here), what kind of difficulties will you face going forward?

One other tip: if your client answers a question but you want them to expand a bit more, ask them, “how so,” or “can you tell me a little more about that?” You'll be surprised at just how much you can learn, and the difference it will make in your ability to help your clients succeed.

Mike Schultz is a Principal of the Wellesley Hills Group, a consulting firm that specializes in improving the sales, marketing, and profit performance of high-end and professional service companies. Over the past decade, Mike has held positions as a general manager, marketing and sales performance consultant, major account representative, and marketing and sales director. Mike holds an MBA from the F.W. Olin Graduate School of Business at Babson College, and a BA from Brandeis University. He is also an avid fly fisherman and golfer, and actively studies and teaches traditional Karate and Jujitsu, holding the ranks of black belt and Sensei in each. For more information contact: mschultz@whillsgroup.com

Great Presentation on Social Media - Uses Trends and Stats

2009-07-17T13:49:00.004-04:00

Marta Kagen's "What the F**K is Social Media: One Year Later" - A must Read - great content, clear message - and a world class deck to boot!! - You should read it and do it!.

View more documents from Marta Kagan.

Ready Aim Fire... The Battle Between Google And Microsoft Enters a New Phase - Google Chrome OS

2009-07-12T21:49:00.009-04:00

The excitement continues as Google grows up. All in one week, new fonts in the making icons, the dropping of term "beta" from site names, a version of Android for Netbooks released now and a nuclear bomb - the announcement of an Open Source OS aimed at the new Netbooks.

These are all clearly signs of the growth in their maturity. It's been clear that there is a battle going on between Microsoft and Google from the advent of Search and Google's successful monetization of ad words. After Search, Google entered email, office productivity, and now browser markets, each time offering free software in return for attention and behavioral information.

It's been a steady march into Microsoft's businesses. With each entrant, marketshare shifts a bit. Now the Microsoft analysts all have the same response, "The software is not very feature rich", "It's buggy", or "It's not enterprise ready". Well over the last three years, the improvements in quality of all of Google software has increased and power combined utility across storage, organization and search are starting to yield productivity that is hard to ignore, especially when the software is free.

And now they’re offering an OS. This initiative started cell phones, a splintered market with no apparent leader and a place where Microsoft has limited success after almost killing Palm and making HP irrelevant in the Smartphone market. The challenge of taking a constrained environment with respect to CPU speed and memory is successful and it is creating phenomenal results that they are taking to other platforms now. They will be the most commercial of platforms for cell phones that will be tuned for modern, network oriented, and highly interactive applications.

Chrome was the browser for smart phones that they ported to Intel chips. And now, they are going to take Android and move it to the Atom processor and their Netbooks, a market that Microsoft has been swinging a lot of fists to win. HP and Toshiba are still smarting over the strong arm tactics Microsoft has been using to force them ship XP and Vista on the smaller platforms after the initial choice of Linux Distros. Not that I'll count Microsoft out. They are shipping XP and Vista on most Netbooks. Vista NB is being mystically made available for free... that must have been a hard pill for Balmer to swallow. So the battle is on. Microsoft vs. Google.

Here are 5 reasons I think that Google entering this space is important:

1. Netbooks are the only new growing PC segment in the market place where there is room for a disruptive player in the space, not even Microsoft. If they can make the OS simpler and faster than Microsoft, it's an opportunity to grow their footprint - the more people who use their software them more valuable a company they become.

2. It’s a new audience for applications. Because of the portability and connectivity embedded in Netbooks, their value increases with internet connectivity, Google applications, especially Search, enhance Internet usage. Google has an audience that they can capture attention and behavior with a tuned OS for Netbooks. That attention, generates advertising markets and by extension, dollars.

3. Being at the OS level opens up more opportunities to mine people’s behaviors. It’s about advertising and coming up with new features and applications to support people’s needs within all applications. Google will be able to lock people into those apps by making them available and easy to use.

4. Netbook architecture will become desktop architecture. If Google becomes the best, cheapest, feature-rich Netbook OS, consumers will want the same OS on their desktops and laptops. This will open up a gateway into Microsoft’s (and Apple's) main market, home and enterprise.

5. Google just loves to poke Microsoft in the eye. Now in the past this was a bad strategy for little companies like Corel and Netscape who were decimated by Microsoft, but Google is no small company. They generate a lot of cash and are hugely profitable. They are in a position to make markets and they continue to do so.

In Honour of Canada Day

2009-07-01T10:07:00.008-04:00

Sometimes you just have to rant (even though ranting is somewhat un-Canadian).

So rant with me and Joe:

"Hey, I'm not a lumberjack, or a fur trader....
I don't live in an igloo or eat blubber, or own a dogsled....

and I don't know Jimmy, Sally or Suzy from Canada, although I'm certain they're really really nice.

I have a Prime Minister, not a president.
I speak English and French, not American.
And I pronounce it 'about', not 'a boot'.

I can proudly sew my country's flag on my backpack.

I believe in peace keeping, not policing,
diversity, not assimilation,
and that the beaver is a truly proud and noble animal.

A toque is a hat, a chesterfield is a couch,
and it is pronounced 'zed' not 'zee', 'zed' !!!!

Canada is the second largest land mass!
The first nation of hockey!
and the best part of North America

My name is Joe!!
And I am Canadian!!! "

We are all the best part of Canada.

(Special thanks to Molsons for the ad copy :)

Cheers.

Lou Reed - Dirty Boulevard and Blip.fm - A new way to listen to 45's

2009-06-08T23:46:00.003-04:00

I thought I'd try an audio post from Blip.FM 0 - a very cool social media site designed for folks to share and rate music. It has a large searchable library of music. You can create a personal play list or use other's lists to listen to music. You can also make a "blip" - a recommendation message that is sent to twitter, both to the public stream and to all of the people following you. In effect it allows you to be a DJ for your social network. They also has it set so that you can create a network of favourite DJ's so you can see the music the group is blipping in a single stream of music.

One other thing, it also allows you to give props to other dj's which allow some reputation management for popular DJ's, which enhances the social network.

Over all. It's a new form of entertainment based on an old idea, the sharing of music amongst aficianados and friends. http://www.blp.fm - Enjoy it.

Lou Reed - Dirty Boulevard

Shared via AddThis

Waved on Wave - Google Wave -- Watch this... Important!

2009-05-30T16:13:00.008-04:00

This is so very important.

A small set of of 5 engineers in a skunk works in the Google Australia Offices, are seeking to change the software world. As simple as other Google ideas are, this one is too - they want to build a future generation email system based on all the technology that is available today. And they call it Google Wave.

Here's the video from the Google I/O conference.

If you are in CRM or Social Media, or use the Internet, you have to start tracking this new software from Google - Google Wave. And yes, it will be beta :)

Why is it important?

1. It's from google.

2. Realtime, realtime, realtime. It's the most real time approach to web updates and collaboration that I have ever seen. Even more than twitter or BBerry Messenger.

3. It focuses on the conversation as it's central entity. That is something no company has done since email was invented 40 years ago.

4. It encompasses email, instant messaging, wiki collaboration, shared documents, search, and social networking.

5. It can and will be monetized with ads and attention.

6. It is tuned to run on all browsers, netbooks and smart phones.

7. It has the potential to displace MS Outlook, Word and Exchange.

Over at Techcrunch they are suitably and surprisingly impressed (they are not easy to impress). They said:

Official Google Blog: Went Walkabout. Brought back Google Wave.

Twitter and a Bucket of Money

2009-04-21T17:21:00.008-04:00

Sometimes ideas are pretty simple. Twitter is a simple idea that has gained a lot of attention for lots of reasons by users and business people alike.

The attention that business places on it is because of its rapid adoption, people like the product, they use it every day and they squawk really loud when it breaks. All signs of a product that people or advertisers would pay for, but they don't.

So, barring the obvious strategy of selling banner ads or adding a Google adsense column on search.twitter, there seems to be no clear business model for Twitter to generate scads of cash for its investors.

Here's another simple idea. There are a number of sites or apps that drive searches to Google, Firefox and Opera come to mind. Each time there is a Google search done from one of those browsers, Google pays the originator a micro-fee which for both software maker generate millions dollars.

Mozilla was paid almost $70Milion in 2007 by Google and MySpace is paid over $900 million a year for its relationship to Google.

So, while you can't search from a tweet, there is another avenue. Twitter could set it up such that all links that are Twittered, are shortened with a controlled URL service that lands people who click on the link on a Google property, or where appropriate, a Google adsense link. Google Short Links exists to do this and it would be fast to integrate with Twitter.

Twitter would win because revenue would grow exponentially and Google would win because of the eyeballs it would garner, which will lead to more delivery of sponsored links for Google's ad customers. Now would the users like it? I suspect they would, if the service remained free and any landing pages were carefully engineered not to slow the time it takes to get to desired information and were not too intrusive.

There you have it : Twitter+Google Short Links+Adsense = Twitter Revenue.

Twitter could even go a step further and automatically create branded links so that if a user tweeted "my dad let me drive his Porsche" the term "Porsche" would be rendered as a link that would take the reader to the Porsche site if clicked. This idea is more obtrusive and would cause twitter users to balk, still it’s worth thinking about. Twitter could sell the Tweetsense links to brand companies.

Business models are about revenue.

Anything stopping this? Am I dreaming? Go @ev @biz!

Disinformation, Datinformation

2009-04-15T23:25:00.005-04:00

Just saw an article in the New York Times On-line on April 15. Yet another "let's dis Twitter because we can" article that is becoming popular. The Times should really test it's writing by replacing the term Twitter with the term "the NYTimes" If the story still reads well, they should drop the story because it's not news. Here's the lead idea:

"Pretty quickly the claims were reverberating through the Twittersphere, where plenty of people, though by no means all, took the claims at face value."

This is a misleading article. The news broke on Twitter on Sunday after rumors and corrections, it was clarified pre-news cycle on Monday. Newspapers can’t develop stories, fact, activist response and delivery this fast. It is a mistake to analyze twitter based on a single message, it is the stream that knowlegeable users read. Just like the news, there are many articles that one reads to form an opinion and each article can have information or disinformation.

Claiming that a media can be spread information or disinformation is not news just because the media happens to be Twitter. The Times should be careful of the tiny stones it throws about publishing disinformation, it does its fare share.

It should be participating more in Social Media. A better story would have been the The Times investigating with Amazon, and publishing the facts first, on Twitter! Then publish the details online at NYTimes and finally paper.

The fact that NYTimes is wasting space on non news show the editor are loosing touch with the speed of media.

Please catch up Mr. Editor, your business need you to.

Get going faster PrestoMyPC - and enter the Linux World

2009-04-05T15:08:00.017-04:00

Initially I learned about PrestoMyPc on Twitter, it was being promoted as a PC utility that allowed you boot your PC faster. I have been following this feature meme for a few months because I couldn't believe that the PC industry was going wage a battle over how fast a PC boots. I was guessing that lot of market research was showing that start-up times on PC's (especially Windows XP and Vista) at 1 or 2 minutes was just too long for the the modern always on consumer.

So I was curious and surfed over to the link. Lo and behold, this "PC utility" is a full blown version of Xandros Linux, that purports to be easy to install, and claims to boot in about 8 seconds. Knowing the value of a minute, I decide to check it out. I am confident the Linux will work because Asus uses Xandros on the EEE PC that I have, but I was skeptical that it would be easy to take care of having run various flavors of Linux on my household network and at work for the last 8 years.

The team who put this together are geniuses. This is software packaging art. Not only is the claim true, it does boot fast, it also uses less power which extends my laptop battery and it screams bloody fast on my Dell Latitude E64000. On top of that, it is very good at handling the the screen , disk , sound, video, network and wifi drivers for my laptop. I was on the Internet, listening to Last.FM and video-conferencing with Skype in 10 minutes without having to configure anything manually.

That's the secret sauce for them, an easy to install Linux. It handles the install by automatically setting up Linux on your C: drive and setting it so that you can choose to run your home operating system, XP in my case, or Xandros Linux when you boot-up your machine using windows boot manager. (correction: I had orginally assumed it automatically partitioned a drive, but it does not).

The distribution comes pre-installed with a set of useful net applications like Firefox, Skype and and IM Client that covers MSN, GoogleTalk, Yahoo IM and others. There is also an application store that is a website that handles free and paid software like ITUNES does music. This is also magic. You don't have to have unix admin skills to install applications, it's all point-and-click. I had adobe reader, open office, picassa and realplayer all installed with nary a "gnu c", SU or make. I think they are really onto something. The desktop and apps are very familiar to PC users and the time and cost savings are huge, this software really is showing the maturity of Linux and how it will be come a realistic alternative to Windows.

The way I see it, if you have a PC with 400 Megs of space these are the key advantages to using PrestoMyPC and Linux.

1. Ease of installing and maintaining Linux and Linux applications.

2. A faster alternative to XP and Vista that will rejuvenate older gear, or allow you to buy low cost PC ($200-$400) and not sacrifice performance.

3. Gives and backup and recovery option for you if for some reason your XP systems is wrecked or suffers a vicious virus attack.

4. Your battery time will last longer... it does in my case.

5. Yeah, and it boots frickin' fast... If it takes you 2minutes to boot your PC, and you do that over 5 years, 3 times a day over 5 years.... the time add up :)... What really will happen, is that you'll start turning off your PC's and saving power, a good thing for all.

Get access to the beta at www.PrestoMyPC.com - it comes out of beta on April 11th, 2009.

Excellent Breakdown of Business Use of Twitter

2009-03-29T13:08:00.000-04:00

Focusing on Scams - Talk to the Computer Folks, They Know

2009-03-22T19:29:00.003-04:00

In the review of Madoff's Scam, Mark Cuban nailed it on Jan 18 in his blog posts called "Breaking Down Bernie Madoff" where he says:

"I'm taking a flyer here, but if they were to put me on the case, the first people I would talk to are the software developers. Somewhere along the line there was a software program written or modified that allowed Madoff to enter the numbers he made up, who they were paying out cash to and would print the checks and statements. Its very unlikely that it was off the shelf software because it would be impossible for all the numbers to balance, or he would need to use suspense type of accounts that would raise red flags for even the smallest of accounting firms."

Well in the three month investigation, and then a leak from a former analyst, it's become abundantly clear that that is the first place regulators should look in reviewing operations and reporting on financial service firms.

In the Daily Beast March 19 story, Madoff Employee Breaks Silence , Lucinda Franks reported that:

"The employee, who did not want to be identified because of possible lawsuits or threats by victims, was a member of an elite group that designed sophisticated computer-trading programs. His identity was verified by consulting the Madoff employment roster, where he was listed. He also has an employment confirmation letter and a letter of reference from the Madoff firm."

The piece goes on to decribe the operation and the systems that were used to perpetrate the fraud. Old systems with no linkage to actual trading systems were use to create false statements that were used to perpetuate the fraud.

It will be interesting to see how the regualtors will change their system audit practices to help protect investors. Like Sarbanes Oxley, there will be demands made of investment firm to track and report on losses gains and distrubutions related to their fund actvities.

Financial Institutions have to provides auditable transparency that shows the results of their investments in funds. Technology is available, it just has to be done to help restore confidence in financial services.

Kudos to Mr. Cuban for doing the early lef work and the jouranistic analysis to help shed light on this fraud.

New Features From Gmail - The Mail must go through!

2009-03-22T16:52:00.009-04:00

Google labs has always kicked butt, all those PHD's and their day a week projects churn out beta features faster than tweets from PR Flacks on #followfridays. So, over the last few months there have been a slew of new small features, including the expansion of the platform as a serious mobile mail client, lots of storage and a holy grail of online software, disconnected mode. This week the mail labs announced a series of new features worth looking at:

1. YouTube, Picasa, Flickr, and Yelp previews - Instead of just links, see previews of photos, videos, and reviews right in your email. This is in line with Outlook, but more related to social networking where in line placement of rich content aids and abets closer relationships and other social shenanigans.

2. Undo send. This is a grace period of a few seconds to cancel sending, then edit your message before sending again. For those of us who have missed sent a message or copied a few too many people on a late Friday tweet, this is pure genius. I'd pay a monthly fee for Twitter if they added this feature. This will help intemperate souls mend their networks. Can you say lifesaver and I don't mean the peppermint kind.

3. Tasks mobile. Take your to-do list everywhere you go. Just go to gmail.com/tasks from your mobile browser. Task management is best when it is ubiquitously available for entry of new task. As you use other application or clients, even your mobile phone, your task list will be available to you. Smart, for those who have found the one ring, now you can have the one list.

4. Offline use. You're on the road, you finally hop on the flight and you're 15,000 feet up. All you need it that quote from your email to finish your opus. Until now, you'd have to wait for a signal to get into you're mail, now it's accessible offline. Yup, you can now use Gmail without being connected to a network. The operations are simple, it basically allows you to write drafts of email messages and to see some cached messages. Still useful if you get stuck with nothing to do on an airplane, or down in the bunker, when the wireless repeater goes down. There's even a cool video for the TV people out there to take a look a how this will operate.

These new announcements went along with over 40 other features and a framework allowing users to enable the feature or not and for getting feedback as the audience keeps trying features. Non-stop innovation from Google... the good part of being a monster.

If I were the product manager for Outlook or Exchange at MSFT, I'd be very very very afraid.

Email Marketing Trends

2009-01-15T11:46:00.007-05:00

Some times it's hard to pick off trends, others times it's pretty easy. There has been a great set of innovation around email marketing (the stuff that's not spam), that's been brewing and it's definitely mainstream.

I just was looking at a link to a conference on Marketing Sherpa, a blog focused on all things new in marketing and they were promoting an Email Marketing Conference, yes there is a conference

A quick look at the conference case studies reveals some interesting applications of technology and automation for the enterprise. It just warms my heart when I see web based analytics, artificial intelligence, user generated content and personalization as key elements to be discussed. Combining Email, SMS and IM is a juicy technical problem that just begs to be solved.

Seems like a good guide for a software company to look at when considering adding features to marketing automation platforms. I'd be using this to check the product road map and release schedules, or on the good side of things to tune my sales message.

Here's the list of the sessions at the conference from the site.
---

24 Case Studies

The breakout sessions on Monday and Tuesday feature 24 Case Studies - practical and proven tactics to help you improve your Email marketing results. Be sure to read the full agenda.

Apply artificial intelligence to email optimization
Gain strategies for effective post-slick personalization
Integrate email and web analytics data to boost conversion rates
Leverage your database by combining list and trigger-based campaigns
Use multichannel marketing to recover email addresses
Revamp Email Design to Improve Results
Find out how to get reliable results from multivariate testing
Increase revenue through segmentation strategies based on recency, frequency and monetary value
Overcome legal and compliance obstacles
Follow best practices in email marketing on a low budget
Address consumer privacy and security concerns
Utilize email marketing in branding initiatives
Increase the effectiveness of your email and landing pages
Enhance engagement of email newsletter through user generated content
Create an email control group to justify initiatives and expenditures
Implement customized email alerts to boost revenue and lower costs
Walk away with top tips for running an email RFP
Create innovative content and design that resonates in business marketing
Manage an email marketing program through dynamic times
Maximize the effectiveness of mobile email marketing
Launch and manage international email marketing initiatives
Combine email with SMS and instant messaging to optimize customer contact
Take advantage of email and word of mouth marketing
Make Email enable the Continued Success of Web 2.0 Marketing

This Dude Can Dance

2008-12-29T19:56:00.001-05:00

The Top (Music Video) from Francis and the Lights on Vimeo.

Ten Things you just should think about buying in Q1 with your year-end bonus for 2008. It's all about the list.

2008-12-28T22:17:00.007-05:00

1. The IPod Touch - It's the right gesture, touch interface , the nextgen ipod, with wifi and web surfing to boot. Now if only they let Skype work on it... www.apple.com

2. The Flip Ultra - OMG, cute, simple, cheap, beautiful piece of engineering. New wave of small micro video devices that will grow along side video on the Youtube. www.theflip.com

3. A Netbook - Come on already, just pick one. If you dont like it, your kids will - EEE, Dell, HP, Sony, Acer, Wind... Get it now - you'll always have it with you. eeepc.asus.com/global/index.html

4. A Micro projector - They are small, cool and sexy. Can you imagine a package the size of an old cell phone generates a 50" screen. http://www.aboutprojectors.com

5. An extra Game Plaform - Get the one you don't have - psp, nintendo ds, playstation 3, xbox , Wii - all a have some kind of utility, they are not the same, so get the other one. www.sony.com

6. A smart phone - The one with email, txt messaging, chat, twitter, internet, GPS, Mapping, music... These new devices deliver choices - Blackberry, Iphone, Palm Treo, Samsung, Nokia, Mortorola. Do it. And get the data plan. www.blackberry.com

7. A second screen - For your home pc. The folks at Dell will send you a good one. This is the only trend that corporate has given to the home in the past year. Bloomberg knew it a long time ago. Get the video card and the extra screen - you'll love your home set-up even more. Even if you just get a spare screen, you can hook up to your laptop. It's about productivity and believe it or not saving paper. www.dell.com

8. Some kind of stereo speaker/amp Hi Fi device for your Ipod or music device. The simplest thing is a wire that connects to the headphone port on your player and the aux device on your stereo, gives you a way to share the music with friends or just play it louder for yourself. Worst case, over-spend on a device that is a set of speakers for your IPOD with a kick-ass docking station. Get the big one. The Geneve Lab unit comes to mind - http://www.genevalab.com/v/vspfiles/default.asp

9. A Terabyte drive. Because safe computing includes backups (did you do yours this week?) and they cost less than $200. http://www.tigerdirect.com

10. The Kindle... because it's not available in Canada. http://www.amazon.com/kindle. Don't panic, the alternative is the sony - but it's not the Kindle. Carrying around a couple of hundred books will be the norm. And cool.

Twas the Night Before Twitmas

2008-12-17T00:13:00.007-05:00

This was inspired by the HohoTO party for the Tech community

Some times you just have to geek out. So, if you will, picture 620 people in a night club belting out this song to the Tune of "The Twelve Days of Christmas". Yikes, it could have happened, anything could have happened... All together now, sing! (which btw was an enormous charity success, raising $25k for the Toronto Daily Food Bank- kudos to all)
---
On the first day of Twitmas, my twue love gave to me

A password and a twitter id

On the second day of Twitmas, my true love gave to me
Two Avatars
And a password and a twitter id

On the third day of Twitmas, my true love gave to me
Three flirty tweets
Two Avatars
And a password and a twitter ID

On the fourth day of Twitmas, my true love gave to me
Four celebrity handles
Three flirty tweets
Two Avatars
And a password and a twitter ID

On the fifth day of Twitmas, my true love gave to me
Fiiiive golden @guy retweets
Four celebrity handles
Three flirty tweets
Two Avatars
And a password and a twitter ID

******

Six links worth reading
Seven clever backgrounds
Eight spammers spamming
Nine qwitters qwitting
Ten journo's freaking
Eleven blogger blog-loving
Twelve dozen followers following

Apologies to @guykawasaki and whoever wrote the original song. Happy Holidays Twitterers every where.

I am @robtyrie on twitter.

A Way of Looking at What My Company Says it Does

2008-12-14T22:49:00.006-05:00

This is an interesting way of visualizing things. It's basically a tag cloud generated from our Web site content. But like a good visualization it's good and a fair representation of what we do.

The Canadian Kerfuffle, Prorogued and Explained to America

2008-12-07T10:36:00.004-05:00

In this letter to America, CBC writer, Neil MacDonald (Brother to the more famous comedian Norm Macdonald, no relation to Ronald MacDonald) makes fun and writes a letter to America goofing on everyone and every silly institution that's been in the news in the last week. A classic example of fierce Canuck, self-deprecating humour that lightly hides the fierce barbs poked at our American neighbors. Great Swiftean satire that Canadian excel in. Canadians will like it because on a passive aggressive scale of 1 to 10 it's a clear 22.

It starts...

"My dear American neighbours, I see the political crisis in Canada has finally made it into the Washington Post's Foreign Briefs column. So, anticipating a flood of interest from all of you at the dog run in the morning, let me try to give you some idea of what's happening up there. A few weeks ago, we had an election in Canada, a couple of weeks before yours, actually. A political party known as the Conservatives won. Well, sort of. They didn't win in the sense that most of you understand winning. I'll get to that in a second..."

Hilarious, unless you are a politician, or an idiot of course.

Social CRM - Why is it Important?

2008-11-30T18:17:00.003-05:00

This is an interesting slide deck that covers the emergence of Social CRM. From Fabio Cipriano from Brazil, is the author of Blog-Corporativo.

The ideas that worth keeping an eye on. I think the key question to ask is: What will be the impact of Social Media (Facebook, MySpace, Wiki's, Blogs, Twitter, Linked in, IM) on traditional CRM software. Cool area to look at and de-construct. I particularly like the strategy slide at the end of the deck.

Why wouldn't a company's CRM strategy extend with a Social Media Strategy? Seriously. (p.s. I found this slide show based on a Tweet from PGreenbe on Twitter).

The 10 Commandments of Twitter

2008-11-23T13:30:00.004-05:00

I just love this list. It's from a great blogger, Breanne Potter - who normally focuses on MBTI but like many of us, has strayed into the land of Twitter.

In additon to the commandments, I think that there are some twitter laws too that should be formed, liked the famed Asimov robot laws of robotics (apologies to Isaac's estsate):

Twitter may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
Twitter must obey tweets given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law
Twitter must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Her commandments are worth reading. I published the list in entirety, but here's the link to the site. It also serves as a guide to new users, if you are using twitter, you should try to understand each of the references in the commandments. My favorite is number 10.

Thou shalt not welcome each new follower with an @ reply. (It's unnecessary and wicked annoying).
Thou shalt not set up auto-DM's that tell people to go to your website when they follow you.
Thou shalt not diss the Alltop tweets. You're only cool if you Twitterfeed.
Thou shalt not beg for followers. Earn them...be interesting, be funny- be anything but a beggar.
Thou shalt not secure celebrity's names on Twitter in hopes of selling them like domain names. Not cool.
Thou shalt not answer the question "what are you doing?" with "Twittering." Yeah, we get it- and it's neither original nor funny.
Thou shalt not tweet more than 10 times in a minute. Breathe!!!
Thou shalt share interesting sites and stories via TwitThat, etc.
Thou shalt not be mean to followers. There is an unfollow button, use it.
Thou shalt use Twitter for good (sharing, communicating, customer service, etc) not for evil (anger, hate, racism, sexism, etc).

And as my friend @joegerstandt says every night- Be good to each other.

The Pong Clock

2008-11-23T11:04:00.006-05:00

This is a very cool clock that could grace any retro wall. There's probably a whole series possible. This is Pong, but I have dibs on the clocks for Joust (tm), Robatron(tm) and Galaga(tm).

Thinking a bit about it. Someone should be able to put together a set of Flash simulations that will play on one of those digital picture frames - you could ship a clock that has 100 game "skins" - nice new product. You heard it here first. Clocks meet Machinima. Clock radio transformed with pop game culture references.

"While this game of Pong © randomly plays, the so called 'players' score the time. The left player scores the hours, and the right player scores the minutes, creating an unusual timepiece, ideal for those Friday afternoon moments."

OBAMA - Historic Change, a moment in time to be respected.

2008-11-05T08:21:00.003-05:00

I love the idea that we can live in history. Too often, people, societies do no recognize when change is happening or has happened. Only through the lens of time can we look back to identify why and what was important.

This is not one of those times. I think this is the most important world change in this decade.

10 years from now, the election of this President and this government will be the reason that for the way things will be.

This is the speech.

Remarks of President-Elect Barack Obama—as prepared for delivery
Election Night
Tuesday, November 4th, 2008
Chicago, Illinois

If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.

It’s the answer told by lines that stretched around schools and churches in numbers this nation has never seen; by people who waited three hours and four hours, many for the very first time in their lives, because they believed that this time must be different; that their voice could be that difference.

It’s the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Latino, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled – Americans who sent a message to the world that we have never been a collection of Red States and Blue States: we are, and always will be, the United States of America.

It’s the answer that led those who have been told for so long by so many to be cynical, and fearful, and doubtful of what we can achieve to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day.

It’s been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America.

I just received a very gracious call from Senator McCain. He fought long and hard in this campaign, and he’s fought even longer and harder for the country he loves. He has endured sacrifices for America that most of us cannot begin to imagine, and we are better off for the service rendered by this brave and selfless leader. I congratulate him and Governor Palin for all they have achieved, and I look forward to working with them to renew this nation’s promise in the months ahead.

I want to thank my partner in this journey, a man who campaigned from his heart and spoke for the men and women he grew up with on the streets of Scranton and rode with on that train home to Delaware, the Vice President-elect of the United States, Joe Biden.

I would not be standing here tonight without the unyielding support of my best friend for the last sixteen years, the rock of our family and the love of my life, our nation’s next First Lady, Michelle Obama. Sasha and Malia, I love you both so much, and you have earned the new puppy that’s coming with us to the White House. And while she’s no longer with us, I know my grandmother is watching, along with the family that made me who I am. I miss them tonight, and know that my debt to them is beyond measure.

To my campaign manager David Plouffe, my chief strategist David Axelrod, and the best campaign team ever assembled in the history of politics – you made this happen, and I am forever grateful for what you’ve sacrificed to get it done.

But above all, I will never forget who this victory truly belongs to – it belongs to you.

I was never the likeliest candidate for this office. We didn’t start with much money or many endorsements. Our campaign was not hatched in the halls of Washington – it began in the backyards of Des Moines and the living rooms of Concord and the front porches of Charleston.

It was built by working men and women who dug into what little savings they had to give five dollars and ten dollars and twenty dollars to this cause. It grew strength from the young people who rejected the myth of their generation’s apathy; who left their homes and their families for jobs that offered little pay and less sleep; from the not-so-young people who braved the bitter cold and scorching heat to knock on the doors of perfect strangers; from the millions of Americans who volunteered, and organized, and proved that more than two centuries later, a government of the people, by the people and for the people has not perished from this Earth. This is your victory.

I know you didn’t do this just to win an election and I know you didn’t do it for me. You did it because you understand the enormity of the task that lies ahead. For even as we celebrate tonight, we know the challenges that tomorrow will bring are the greatest of our lifetime – two wars, a planet in peril, the worst financial crisis in a century. Even as we stand here tonight, we know there are brave Americans waking up in the deserts of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan to risk their lives for us. There are mothers and fathers who will lie awake after their children fall asleep and wonder how they’ll make the mortgage, or pay their doctor’s bills, or save enough for college. There is new energy to harness and new jobs to be created; new schools to build and threats to meet and alliances to repair.

The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even one term, but America – I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there. I promise you – we as a people will get there.

There will be setbacks and false starts. There are many who won’t agree with every decision or policy I make as President, and we know that government can’t solve every problem. But I will always be honest with you about the challenges we face. I will listen to you, especially when we disagree. And above all, I will ask you join in the work of remaking this nation the only way it’s been done in America for two-hundred and twenty-one years – block by block, brick by brick, calloused hand by calloused hand.

What began twenty-one months ago in the depths of winter must not end on this autumn night. This victory alone is not the change we seek – it is only the chance for us to make that change. And that cannot happen if we go back to the way things were. It cannot happen without you.

So let us summon a new spirit of patriotism; of service and responsibility where each of us resolves to pitch in and work harder and look after not only ourselves, but each other. Let us remember that if this financial crisis taught us anything, it’s that we cannot have a thriving Wall Street while Main Street suffers – in this country, we rise or fall as one nation; as one people.

Let us resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics for so long. Let us remember that it was a man from this state who first carried the banner of the Republican Party to the White House – a party founded on the values of self-reliance, individual liberty, and national unity. Those are values we all share, and while the Democratic Party has won a great victory tonight, we do so with a measure of humility and determination to heal the divides that have held back our progress. As Lincoln said to a nation far more divided than ours, “We are not enemies, but friends…though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection.” And to those Americans whose support I have yet to earn – I may not have won your vote, but I hear your voices, I need your help, and I will be your President too.

And to all those watching tonight from beyond our shores, from parliaments and palaces to those who are huddled around radios in the forgotten corners of our world – our stories are singular, but our destiny is shared, and a new dawn of American leadership is at hand. To those who would tear this world down – we will defeat you. To those who seek peace and security – we support you. And to all those who have wondered if America’s beacon still burns as bright – tonight we proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes not from our the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity, and unyielding hope.

For that is the true genius of America – that America can change. Our union can be perfected. And what we have already achieved gives us hope for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

This election had many firsts and many stories that will be told for generations. But one that’s on my mind tonight is about a woman who cast her ballot in Atlanta. She’s a lot like the millions of others who stood in line to make their voice heard in this election except for one thing – Ann Nixon Cooper is 106 years old.

She was born just a generation past slavery; a time when there were no cars on the road or planes in the sky; when someone like her couldn’t vote for two reasons – because she was a woman and because of the color of her skin.

And tonight, I think about all that she’s seen throughout her century in America – the heartache and the hope; the struggle and the progress; the times we were told that we can’t, and the people who pressed on with that American creed: Yes we can.

At a time when women’s voices were silenced and their hopes dismissed, she lived to see them stand up and speak out and reach for the ballot. Yes we can.

When there was despair in the dust bowl and depression across the land, she saw a nation conquer fear itself with a New Deal, new jobs and a new sense of common purpose. Yes we can.

When the bombs fell on our harbor and tyranny threatened the world, she was there to witness a generation rise to greatness and a democracy was saved. Yes we can.

She was there for the buses in Montgomery, the hoses in Birmingham, a bridge in Selma, and a preacher from Atlanta who told a people that “We Shall Overcome.” Yes we can.

A man touched down on the moon, a wall came down in Berlin, a world was connected by our own science and imagination. And this year, in this election, she touched her finger to a screen, and cast her vote, because after 106 years in America, through the best of times and the darkest of hours, she knows how America can change. Yes we can.

America, we have come so far. We have seen so much. But there is so much more to do. So tonight, let us ask ourselves – if our children should live to see the next century; if my daughters should be so lucky to live as long as Ann Nixon Cooper, what change will they see? What progress will we have made?

This is our chance to answer that call. This is our moment. This is our time – to put our people back to work and open doors of opportunity for our kids; to restore prosperity and promote the cause of peace; to reclaim the American Dream and reaffirm that fundamental truth – that out of many, we are one; that while we breathe, we hope, and where we are met with cynicism, and doubt, and those who tell us that we can’t, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people:

Yes We Can. Thank you, God bless you, and may God Bless the United States of America.

Twitter - Subscribers don't always need to pay the freight

2008-10-19T11:12:00.005-04:00

There was yet another article in the major media, this time the New York Times last week decrying the lack of a revenue model at Twitter.

Claire Cain Miller says, "But the company has no real source of revenue, and venture capitalists are starting to squeeze Silicon Valley start-ups to cut costs and prepare for tough times. Twitter is backed by Union Square Ventures, Digita l Garage, Spark Capital and Bezos Expeditions, a venture capital company led by Jeffrey P. Bezos, the chief executive of Amazon."

This analysis is weak and general. Yes these are tough times, but Twitter is well capitalized and Union Square and Bezos Expeditions are not panic laden, backward looking, greedy Sequoi a Partners in there doom and gloom position. Gigaom lays out a good description of their direction.

Twitter will not need to charge end-users and subscribers to use their service. They will charge companies for advertising, carriers for generating SMS traffic and for the sale of valuable traffic analysis. As with Facebook, the general public (or the newspaper) don't understand the revenue that Twitter will generate. Another promising area is the verticalization of Twitter based applications like http://Stocktwits.com and http://election.twitter.com/ and which will tailor the use of Twitter for certain audiences and can be ad driven. I guarantee that Stocktwits can sell banner ad's to retail stock traders like eTrade and TDWaterhouse tomorrow. I expect a number of these TwitterChannels will emerge, modeled after money makers on the internet that focus communities like travel sites, dating sites and retail sites.

Here's a simple start to a future meeting with Biz Stone and ATT. "Mr. ATT, we generated $7M last month for you in SMS traffic. On the first of next month, we are not sending any more messages to ATT. We would like 5% of that revenue".

Or better yet... a carrier just buys Twitter for >$1B. I expect, just like Facebook and MSFT, a cash rich, savvy market-player will value Twitter by making a private placement like maybe Google. That's the next stage for Twitter.

3 years ago the media were focusing on Facebook's lack of business model and this year the estimated for Facebook revenue are between $250M and $400M depending who you follow. Here's an estimate that is reasonable from Lightspeed Venture Partners. It is based on the revenue from ad revenue and digital gifts, that's right, digital gifts... not ads. Be honest, did you know that Facebook was on track for revenue that size and on track to become a billion dollar company?

I think that the revenue model for Twitter will emerge and for Biz Stone and co., they will have the funding and subscribers to shape it.

Oh Those Slippery Returns! - ROI machination and Enterprise Software

2008-10-18T18:28:00.006-04:00

In today’s business environment capital planning is essential, especially in tight economies. Over-spend without positive results and you run the risk of running into cash flow problems, under-spend and you run the risk of not growing revenues and executing on the opportunities presented to you by the market. When it comes to buildings, machinery, inventory and other parts of the physical plant, companies have mature approaches to planning budgets.

However, when it comes to buying business software, some of the techniques for budgeting and determining benefits aren’t as clear. The trade magazines are full of stories of software deployments that fail because of cost overruns and other surprises and there’s another kind of project failure that is not as well communicated and that is under spending on technology. Imagine if you’ve been given a budget of $20,000 and your company expects you to win a formula 1 race in Monaco. In either case, the wrong amount of capital investment has been made.

If you’ve been asked to run a program to buy an enterprise system or to replace and older system, here are 8 great, quick tips to help you set up your budget, justify the purchase and measure the results of your program. Let’s set the stage. As a program manager you’ve been asked to justify and provide a ROI for the replacement of a CRM system for your sales force of 800 insurance advisers. They have been using a set of information systems that are as old as 7 years and maintaining and expanding the systems has had increasing costs. How do you start the assessing the budget?

1. Know your company’s business goals and the ranked importance of those goals. It is essential to link the selection of software that suits the direction your executive has chosen. These may be the measures in your ROI planning. There no point in identifying that your solution can support 200 more users if your business is not expanding.
• Revenue growth plans? e.g. growing revenue by 20% per year.
• Employee plans? e.g. reducing staff by 10%.
• Expenditure plans? e.g cut costs by 15%
• New products? e.g. introduce 3 new product each year
• New marketing? e.g. enter the market in China.

2. Be reasonable about the payback period. When you are buying a robot or a plant, it has an expected lifetime over a period time. Software is like that too. Because of the nature of software, some comptrollers want to have payback periods within a year. While the kind of accounting bravado is tempting, remember that under spending on an IT system can lead to not receiving all the benefits and can risk failure and the loss of an initial investment. I do think the payback period should be short, I suggest that short in this case is 2 or 3 years.

3. Think about the hard and soft benefits of the system you are buying. The hard ones can be easy to spot such as revenue generation, speed to market or cost savings, but some the softer ones are more difficult to assess. New systems allow for the consolidation of data and the distributions of process across the world that can significantly change business practices and the quality of working life. All though it’s still tempting, try not to put the reduction of paper in your business case; software rarely reduces the use of paper. On the other hand, I once rolled out at new system that’s core justification was employee retention. These benefits are more difficult to quantify, but can paint a compelling picture in moving to a new software systems. Here some soft benefits that can come with software systems

• Centralization of data
• Uniform business processes
• Flexibility to change processes
• Improved monitoring and notification of exceptions
• Employee satisfaction
• Customer satisfaction
• Ease of training
• Corporate knowledge retention
• Support telework
• Mobile access to business information
• Employee retention, recruiting

4. Understand all the cost related to the new system. The direct costs are easy to see on the purchase order, but watch carefully for hidden or dependent indirect costs:
• Technology training for your IT and sales staff
• Specialized documentation
• Upgrades or changes to hardware or supporting software
• Security changes
• New operations or maintenance procedures
• 3rd party software required to complete solution
• Contracted increases or ability to change license, services and maintenance costs
• Employee training
• Interfaces to other systems
• System testing and deployment
• Backup systems, Security and Redundant hardware for disaster recovery
• Facility changes
• Data storage and Data conversion
• Operating systems in parallel
• Report conversion

5. Sun-setting systems. Understand all the systems that will and may be replaced by the new software system you plan to deploy. Their elimination will reduce hard costs from your company. Understand all the costs of decommissioning those systems which may include,
• Development
• Maintenance
• Outsource support, computer leasing
• Telecommunications
• Security
• Storage and dedicated staff.

6. Business Processes. List the key business processes that will be affected. Assess how those processes will be changes and adjust them to the target solution. Determine the cycle time from each of the common business process. The advantage of a new enterprise system can reduced time to complete processes by half or eliminate some all together. In a workforce of 1,000 people even a process that save brokers 2 hours a week can have an impact of millions of dollars a year of salary costs alone.

7. Tap in to the vendors and consultants. Although not always the most objective of sources, there is still plentiful information to be had to help in the creation of business cases. It may also be a way to test the relationship with a vendor early in the sales cycle as you begin your planning. Larger companies will have methods, templates and spreadsheets to help calculating ROI and ROE of software systems. Warning though, be sure you understand them thoroughly before using. If you misuse the calculations, or can’t explain them to senior management, the template is of no use to you.

8. Do some networking with your partners and industry connections. Yes, it’s probably true that some of your current suppliers or competitors are going through what you are going through. They will have experiences, tips and pointers that they can share with you, just remember to pay it forward.

Good capital planning is important, and the approaches are a mix of old and new techniques. It’s a necessary approach in enterprise software deployments, as it is in any other part of the business. Get out your spreadsheet and investigative skills, it’s worth it.