Interesting weekend read at the Wall Street Journal on a bond-trading specialist from Cantor Fitzgerald that wants to treat casinos like the stock market.
WSJ: Whether Bonds or Touchdowns, They’re Still a Gamble
Great read on customer service over @ Inc. Great way to improve product and process simultaneously. Would your organization obsess like this? Maybe you should.
They say, “Why would you pay an engineer $150,000 to answer phones when you could pay someone in Arizona $8 an hour?” If you make the engineers answer e-mails and phone calls from the customers, the second or third time they get the same question, they’ll actually stop what they’re doing and fix the code. Then we don’t have those questions anymore.
Inc. The Way I Work: Paul English of Kayak
Lots of chatter about iPad as the Kindle killer. The chatter is bunk. Kindle has a specific target audience, a niche. That niche loves the Kindle. Niche is the new critical mass.
Look at some of the advantages Kindle has:
The iPad is a very slick device, but it will not be the only one to change the tablet game. Apple App Store developers will start to run into some of the issues that cross-platform mobile developers are dealing with. Namely screen size and incompatible devices. Apple has been very smart with their device hardware and software release cycles. This will become more difficult as different devices begin to proliferate. The iPad will face way more competition than the iPod. Repeating success is, in fact, harder than initial success. Other players and other platforms (HP, Asus, Dell, Everyone on Microsoft or Android) are ready this time. My take is that the biggest losers will be the publishers. Their pricing models will now be more fully exposed to the buying public. That new knowledge will suppress their margins.
On of the better reads on the “Kindle killer” iPad at TechFlash: 5 reasons why the iPad is not a Kindle killer
Disclosure: The wife is employed by Amazon, does not work on Kindle, and does not read my blog.
With the latest of the steroid revelations, I was glad to see Fisk blast McGwire, Clemens and other PED users. Fisk was a household name in my house even before he joined the White Sox (the parents are from Boston). PEDs are a real problem with the sport and will continue to dog the MLB until there is real transparency. As I stated in a previous post, the PED issue has impacted the best in the game. I hope that more Hall of Famers like Fisk come forward and denounce the frauds and cheaters.
Chicago Tribune Carlton Fisk blasts Mark McGwire
With all the talk of an Apple tablet, it is worth taking the time to understand that this is far from a new idea. Jerry Kaplan’s
is not only a great read on the Silicon Valley start up life but on the origins and game of tablet computing. Notable characters in this tale include Jobs and Gates. Worth picking up a copy – to read on your Kindle!
For many years I have found the notion of price controls interesting mainly because there is vast amounts of historical evidence that state they do not work. Time after time, price controls are put forward as a solution, most recently in Venezuela. Interesting read at Forbes that tracts price controls back to Diocletian, which came as a surprise to this Catholic school boy who only knew about his Christian persecutions.
Forbes: The Futility Of Price Controls
All the incredible and horrible stories from the Haiti earthquake made me think of an article I awhile back in Forbes. Digicel CEO Denis O’Brien has brought mobile telecommunications to the world’s poorest countries. Digicel has been a large part of the surviving communications infrastructure in Haiti and has offered €3.5m in charitable funding. It would be frightening to think what Haiti would look like right now without Digicel.
In time, Haiti will begin the rebuilding process, it will need more people with vision and guts like Denis O’Brien.
Forbes: Denis O’Brien Cover Story, July 2008
What it’s not willing to compromise is the security of the cloud, on which its entire business rests.
~ Nicholas Carr
Carr is spot on, again.
Check the full article here: Nicholas Carr: Rough Type
UPDATE 1/17
Another fine read on the topic from Forbes. Different take. Google has been beat by Baidu. This incident put the issue over the top.
Article here Forbes: Why Google Is Quitting China
One of my rules is to always consider the front office and the back office needs and desires of any CRM project.
I recently came across a service process that generate a large volume of automated tickets. The process was over-engineered. Nearly all of these automated tickets were not true customer service issues. These were more like information notices. The sheer volume of these tickets obscured true customer service issues. The development team did not believe that it was an issue, but they did not have to live with the tickets. Compliance by customer service faltered. Agents took to their own ways of dealing with these tickets. Metrics were called into question. Standard stuff. Remember the usage and compliance needs to work the way that the users do — not the other way around.
Taking a look back on Cloud Service Level Agreements (SLA) from approximately a year ago and seeing what has changed for the enterprise. The SLA is nothing new and have existed in information technology for many, many years. I can tell you firsthand that SLA remains critical to the selling proposition. The questions on uptime, outages and compensation do not have easy answers. It would be nice to see an industry standard on what 99.999% actually means.
The SLA is now out in the open to all users of a cloud utility. There is still an lingering question of uptime. Two significant changes in the past year have been the introduction of new cloud services, like Windows Azure, and the mass adoption of Twitter to report uptime experience in real time.You still do not have a meter or gauge detailing realtime usage or uptime. Concerns still remain around what actually constitutes an outage? A period of time? As a client, how would you prove it? If there was an outage and the client could prove it, how does the client receive compensation? These questions can be answered in as many ways as there are cloud or cloud application providers. It will be interesting to see how improvements to the cloud improve SLAs in 2010.
