Archive for Uncategorized

Joost

Here’s a really cool development Joost (pronounced juice). It allows you to watch TV on your PC for free. But it appears to use P2P technology. The don’t say that in big words up front. When you sign up they tell you that you are agreeing to have the program use some of your bandwidth and it will run in the background unless you completely shut the software down. Very cool idea.

But you need an invitation too….a quick web search revealed this page where you can get an invite.

You can learn more from USA Today.

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14 June, 2007 | No comments

Why tech leaders think Second Life could be a gold mine

Why tech leaders think Second Life could be a gold mine. - Jan. 22, 2007

The company’s backers include some of the world’s smartest, richest, and most successful tech entrepreneurs. The chairman and first big outside investor is Mitch Kapor, creator of Lotus 1-2-3, the spreadsheet application that helped begin the PC software revolution. Other investors include eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, Amazon (Charts) CEO Jeff Bezos, and Microsoft chief technology architect (and inventor of Lotus Notes) Ray Ozzie - each credited with a seminal networked product of our age.

Well yesterday I posted that I wanted more in-depth posts and less links to articles. But when I saw this one I just could not resist. The ability to create 3D worlds and combine multiple aspects of online socialization with real-world organizations creates opportunities that are amazing. Clearly technology leaders are seeing this as well. If you can leverage this with consoles (Xbox, Wii, PS3) the possibilities are endless. Xbox alone has a huge following of gamers who interact online. With corporations stepping up we are sure to see huge impacts on stakeholder relations.

22 January, 2007 | No comments

Digital Stakeholders 2.0

Over the past few months I have been rethinking Digital Stakeholders. It takes time to keep a blog running and continuing to post. Most of the recent posts have been links to interesting articles and a quick comment or two. But that is not why I created DS in the first place. My primary interest was to help focus my research on the area that is most interesting to me. That is the ways in which technology is changing the relationship between organizations and stakeholders.

So while there will be fewer posts in 2007, it is my hope that the quality of the post will be taken to a higher level. As I said I have been thinking about this for quite some time, but after reading Terry Byrd’s blog it really hit me that this is closer to what DS should be in the future. I do not pretend to be as smart or as articulate as Terry, but it is my hope that DS will improve in the coming year.

The new look is just the beginning. Let’s see what happens.

19 January, 2007 | No comments

Chaos Theory Invades CRM

Chaos Theory Invades CRM

If your sales reps are forced to spend some part of their day inputting information about their prospects into a CRM system, but without gaining any value from the process, they are going to resist, get demotivated, and wind up selling less. Too many vice presidents of sales ask me what the trick is for getting their salespeople to cooperate and use their CRM system. I ask them a simple question: “Do they understand precisely how using the CRM system will help them sell more?” The lack of a response is quite revealing.

Great article that exams how to bring value to a CRM system. Sure there is value from a management perspective, but how do you make it valuable to those who must use the system? That is a key part to the process. You would think that we would learn by now, the key stakeholders can’t be ignored or neglected.

14 November, 2006 | No comments

How I Work: Bill Gates

How I Work: Bill Gates - Apr. 7, 2006

The screen on the left has my list of e-mails. On the center screen is usually the specific e-mail I’m reading and responding to. And my browser is on the right-hand screen. This setup gives me the ability to glance and see what new has come in while I’m working on something, and to bring up a link that’s related to an e-mail and look at it while the e-mail is still in front of me.

While I am not a big gates fan, it is interesting to see how MS has changed the way we work and who else would be on the cutting edge, but Bill.

I’m not big on to-do lists. Instead, I use e-mail and desktop folders and my online calendar. So when I walk up to my desk, I can focus on the e-mails I’ve flagged and check the folders that are monitoring particular projects and particular blogs.

8 April, 2006 | No comments

The Changing Face of Customer Relationship Management

Intelligent Enterprise Magazine: The Changing Face of Customer Relationship Management

Customer relationship management (CRM) has been a topic of conversation dating back to early discussions about why and how companies should become customer-centric. Preaching that in a highly competitive market “the customer is king,” analysts and consultants called on companies to realign both their organizations and their processes from being internally focused to being focused on the customer. Furthermore, they said, companies should establish better relationships with their customers by building better profiles of them, getting a clearer picture of the business each customer transacts and a better understanding of how customer and company interact. The result would be a more proactive approach and more personal interactions.

While this article probably does not present anything new to the readers of DS, it does provide a nice summary of what CRM is, why it is important, and where is it heading. In my opinon a good CRM strategy is necessary for all organizations. Companies that just concentrate on the initial sale will soon lose out to those that see sale as simply a part of a broader relationship. Numerous studies have shown that it is much more cost effective to maintain relationship as opposed to starting new ones. So in today’s competitive environment where every penny counts, it just makes “cents” to leverage relationships.

14 March, 2006 | No comments

Online learning lawsuit

Lawsuit forces Web2 learning strategies: Hardly surprising news, but very significant in my view. The FLOSSE blog in Finland points to a student from Capella University filing a lawsuit against the university for its use of an LMS (WebCT) that the student believes to be inaccessible and therefore discriminatory…

I read this over at Trey Martindale’s Blog at Teachable.org and had to investigate further…

As I read it I had to laugh. The student who is filing the lawsuit wants to get a degree in Information Technology Systems Design! If the student can not figure out WebCT how is he going to make it in the real world?

But then as I read the original post that Trey linked to and the lawyer for the student says he is representing a disability (read the comments), which opens up a whole bunch of questions. Online learning can be a good thing for some with disabilities, but as with anything, it can’t please everyone. Where do we draw the line? Can online learning be everything to everyone? Should it?

I am a big supporter of online learning, but this is clearly evidence that it doesn’t always work for all situations.

In my opinion (this in just my opinion at this point in time) a college education has become a right, not a priviledge. Right now the best schools are immuned to some of the “problems.” But there is a mentality that any student should be able to get any degree they want. I remember clearly a conversation with one student who was failing 2 business classess. The student was in tears. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of mentioning that there were other things to study besides business. The student became indignant and said “but I work hard!” The story ends well as I suggested the student take an F in one class so they can make a C in one and then retake the one with the F over the summer. This worked and the student finished the program. But this attitude speaks to a bigger issue. I want to be a football star, but a almost 40, I am not physically capable. Had I made different decisions in my youth perhaps those options would be available to me, but they are not - becasue of my choices and my actual abilities. Personally, I think letting students study whatever they want, but not necessarily are good at, actual can put the student at great risk down the road. Sure they get an education, but if they have to struggle with the subject matter the rest of their life or if they change disciplines, did education really occur?

Now I am not saying that we should assign people to carrer tracks, but what I am saying is we need to get back to realizing the a college eduction is still a priviledge and not a right. Again this is just my current opinion, which can change

However all that said, I am glad there are blogs like teachable.org and people like Trey out there who struggle with these issues and examine emerging technologies to see how they can better be used in educational settings.

18 October, 2005 | No comments

Google vs. Yahoo: Whom to Trust?

OhmyNews International

Ironically, with all the talk about how unobtrusive using Google is (with the text-based ads and all), I find Google to be the most insidiously intrusive net company there is. If tuberculosis hadn’t gotten George Orwell, Google in 2005 surely would have. It’s frightening how much information they hold or have access to now. From the storage of every email message you ever send through Gmail, to everything on your personal computer with its desktop search, Google has its fingers dug in very deeply into your personal life.

It seems like Douglas gets the picture and understands the inherent danger in Google. Actually, from a web content publisher’s perspective I think there are superior products out there…especially for blogs. For instance Crisp Ads allows you to set your own key words. That way should I decide to type something out of the norm, the normal readers will still get ads based in what my sites are based on.

10 October, 2005 | No comments