a.k.a. others, or just plain written whinings.
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Tuesday, 06 May 2008 |
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Interop is in Vegas, so naturally many vendors take advantage of the readily available entertainment resources to deliver an amazing experience that stimulates the memory of participants, long after the shows, jugglers and booth babes are gone. Last year, the cleverest award went to Sendio and their VP of Marketing Tim Lee-Thorp who invited Gary Thuerk, the man who sent the first spam message (actually an email marketing message) in 1978, to pose for photos with show participants. Here's my photo with Gary.
2008 was a bigger show, with more entertaining options than in 2007. Here are a few notes:
BlueCat Networks - which markets DNS servers had showgirls in cute, naughty costumes: thigh-length plaid socks and such. Most exhilarating to walk past let alone pause to let the young woman scan the badge.
Trapeze Networks - the Wi-Fi switching company had a unicyclist (on a 5 foot seat) that needed assistance from the audience and then started juggling plastic bowling pins.
Nokia - had a rock band trivia game that earned participants a T-shirt if they were the first one to get the answer right. The booth theme was something about Hard Rock or Rockin' Hard or something like that.
Foundry - had a lame video - presenter skit that was like a dating service, confessional in between the servers in a data center and insider video (like Blair Witch Project) with overbearing boss. All of the protagonists in the movies were meek and mild-mannered abused network managers so Foundry could offer a way out of the morass.
Cisco - schedule of presentations on IP Video, Branch networks and a few other topics that were pretty serious. It hurt.
Nortel - had a dozen booth pods including the Cisco Energy Tax Calculator, Telepresence, Agile Communications Environment, ICA products, Optical WAN products and others. There was also a presentation booth, but I didn't stay to see the story.
LifeSize - had a half-dozen video pods around the booth where each camera/monitor pair connected the booth to a product manager or sales specialist in headquarters in Austin. The inside sales team (about 8) and marketing professionals were all manning the booth. The large monitors and happy people in Austin was most entertaining, professional and of course it leveraged the product. One station had a clown at a desk in Austin making balloon animals and the like. Way cool. Best use of the product in a booth!
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Tuesday, 06 May 2008 |
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 In a poll conducted in February and March 2008, visitors to Brockmann.com showed that most managers are in the same office as the employee. 16% were CEOs, and only 25% had managers in a different location.
Many times I've heard the mantra that most employees do not work in the head office, which given the shape of US business I would definitely agree. However, most employees also have their boss nearby.
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Wednesday, 23 April 2008 |
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Here's a photo of me (and Flat Stanley, the traveling 3rd grade project) at the MBTA's Westborough station in November 2007. Ah, the early morning commute in Boston is something I've learned to enjoy, but don't get to do very often anymore, but will in about six weeks during the period June 9-12, 2008.
That week, I'll be getting off at South Station and hiking northeast to the Boston Convention Center for the Enterprise 2.0 conference. I met with Steve Wylie, the GM of the show who briefed me on what to expect.
The goal of the conference/exhibit is to help users transform their companies through social computing. Steve's expecting some 1200-1500 participants this year, which is the largest ever in the 4 years of the show's operation. At one time it was the Enterprise Collaboration Conference.
Among the speakers include executives from the CIA, Sony PlayStation, NASA, Lockheed Martin, Google, Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, EMC and Alcatel-Lucent. It should be fun.
My plan is to listen to the speakers, meet the vendors and write about all of it here in this blog.
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Tuesday, 25 March 2008 |
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One of the more interesting notes to come from VoiceCon was my notes on meeting attire. On Tuesday, I wore a shirt with blue stripes and a yellow tie - so did Rick Snyder, President of TANDBERG. I joked with Rick that I did get the memo, while Tony Cooke admitted that he decided at the last minute to wear his blue stripe shirt on Wednesday.
On Wednesday, keynote speaker Mike Rhodin, IBM Lotus General Manager wore a dark green with small black checks jacket - just like the one I was wearing that day.
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Tuesday, 11 March 2008 |
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Michael Osterman writes about integrating voice with email , and I couldn't help but respond in a comment.
Michael: voice is real-time. IM is real-time. Email is not real-time. UC is most often about integrating the real-time services together: voice, IM, conferencing. This is how productivity will be improved.
Integrating the store-and-forward messaging services - email and voicemail for example - is useful but often not as big a productivity impact as integrating the real-time services. That's because when the real-time services fail to connect users, they generate a message (usually the voicemail) that often contains no useful information other than that you want something from me. Eliminating these real-time communications failures through cultural etiquette like IM first and ask if call is doable helps a great deal.
Of course, some work styles will benefit from having all the messaging - voicemail and email - store-and-forward applications integrated into one UI. There are of course, legal and economic implications (storage and archival services may be a big pain) that the messaging specialist will have to think through to align with the company priorities and policies and of course, government regulations.
Integrating voice and email is not all that practical. Although, some vendors are emerging with transcribing voicemail and then emailing it to you, it is fraught with poor translations of most words except for numbers. Chuck is both a person's name, a grade of ground beef and verb, for example. The software struggles with context, just as spam filtering software misses out in understanding the context of human communications.
For organizations that don't use IM - get on the bandwagon. It's a necessity in the social lives of today's college graduates and will be for you too, if you can overcome your nagging doubts about your own employees and their respect for policies, rules and good corporate practices. IM accelerates work.
The bigger issue is expanding the real-time services integration to include mobile employees. That's where the market really struggles to implement solutions that deliver corporate citizenship for the mobile.
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Wednesday, 27 February 2008 |
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Earlier this week I implemented a flat panel HD monitor for my office setup. For the past 15 years, I have been a laptop addict and only splurged on the monitor since it will also double as my HD video conferencing monitor. As I reflect on the past few days of service from having two monitors, I remembered a suggestion that I had received a year ago from David Levy, the CEO of the Ottawa-area company, Objectworld.
David said:
The best way to improve software developer productivity - give them a dual monitor.
That's because the larger screen footprint is larger workspace and fewer instances of application search (find the right application).
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Thursday, 21 February 2008 |
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Well, the war's over.
The HD-DVD vs Blu-ray war, I mean.
Toshiba, in a Wall Street Journal article (sub. required) ceded the market for next generation DVD players to Sony and its allies. The CEO, Atsutoshi Nshida delivered this news in a press conference in Tokyo:
- Cease production of the HD DVD players immediately
- End the business by the end of March
- Invest $15.7 billion in next generation flash-memory
That last bullet - investing big in another market is key to taking the sting out of the news. The HD DVD format wars, reminiscent of the VHS-Beta wars of the 1980s, was slowing consumer purchases by causing confusion and incompatibilities. The final straw came when the last holdout studio told Toshiba that there weren't going to release HD DVDs in that format anymore. Retailers such as Best Buy and WalMart supported Blu-ray from the get-go hoping to get to the end of the wars sooner.
As hard as it is to concede defeat, the announcement to invest so much in an emerging market is huge and the news was well received by investors who moved the stock 5% higher.
So, the lesson is, if you are losing a battle and see no chance of victory, announce decisive departure and massive investment in an emerging market simultaneously.
Of course, this doesn't really apply to all markets - so far just consumer markets. Enterprise markets are a lot more sensitive to complete departures (see 3Com and 'Catapult'). But, I bet it would make a lot more sense to do this kind of strategic, obvious and disciplined retreat from time to time. Limping along, ignoring the realities would only cost lots of people time, credibility and money. Good for Toshiba.
One day later, I see that Sony and Toshiba announced a plan to jointly develop and manufacture chips for consumer products. I bet this was part of the way Sony helped Toshiba make their exit quickly.
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Stimulating Alternatives to Business Travel
