Winning New Business

This book by Richard Denny provides good insights for people wanting to understand sales and the selling process.  Denny provides good summaries and illuminating “wise words” at the end of each chapter.  Some chapters are very applicable to those looking for employment.  Best “wise words”:
If you want to increase your successes, double your failure rate.  [...]

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Prediction Methods

In SMR Winter 2009, Thomas Davenport and Jeanne Harris outlined the following prediction methods with strengths and weaknesses:

Biological Responsese Analysis
Cluster Analysis
Attributed Bayesian Analysis
Content-based Filtering/Decision Trees
Neural Network Analysis
Collaborative Filtering
Prediction (opinion) Markets
Regression Analysis
Social Network-based Recommendations
Textual Analytics

These methods might only be applicable to specific areas and tend to require lots of data.  Like regression analysis, these methods predict [...]

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Search Ad Growth Slowing

According to eMarketer, US search advertising spending growth is slowing, especially due to the recession.

IDC indicates that rich media ads are well positioned to compete against search ads and display ads for ad revenue.  According to IDC, the overall internet ad revenue is going to double from 2008 to 2011.  By that time, IDC projects that [...]

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User’s Feeling of Being in Control

Mark Elgan wrote a good article in Computerworld on useability and design requirements that differentiates a product that’s loved by users vs one that’s frustrating to use.
His key point is that products (hardware or software) that support the user’s feeling of being in control tend to be loved by the users:

what comes next is what’s [...]

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101th Blog Entry: Woot!

As of yesterday, I’ve logged 100 entries since mid September, 2008.  So far, I’ve been able to keep to the target of 1 blog a day.  To maintain this pace, more planning will be required, as I spent on average 4% a day to do this blog and the goal is less than 1% a day.
In [...]

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First Steps at Web Analytics

Started to learn about web analytics; first book is Actionable Web Analytics, by Jason Burby and Shane Atchison.  The key elements to web analystics from the book are summarized below:

Web analytics is collecting data about activities on a web site and analyze the statistics and conduct hypothesis testing
Data collection:

Define website goals:  awareness, interest, consideration, purchase
Construct Key [...]

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Marketing with Groundswell

With flattening of the world, rapid technology changes, and social relationship changes between companies and society, Dr. Yoram Wind called for the marketing discipline to adjust to today’s realities and he suggested strategies to increase rigor and relevance to marketing [ SMR, Summer 2008 ].
Marketing leveraging the groundswell of customers in blogs, social networking sites has emerged as an [...]

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Windows Azure Messaging

I reviewed the PDC 2008 presentations and some webpages on Windows Azure.  The messages are:

internet scale cloud platform hosted at Microsoft data centers
reduce up-front server infrastructure purchase, reduce expertise needed to setup and maintain server data center
quick application deployment in the cloud for developers
if you know how to program in .NET and Microsoft tools, you can [...]

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Which Mobile Client OS for the Cloud?

As we consider the premise that the cloud becomes the keeper of data and applications for consumers, PC and smartphones are the likely dominant clients to access the cloud.  The question is which OS for smartphones?
Let’s simplify the market analysis by only looking at the clients and their OS and avoid the complications from mobile carriers, dumb [...]

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Free Customers and Two-Sided Market

Until reading this article in HBR, Nov 2008, I understood the sources of revenue and profit for free software or free web accounts were advertising, conversion to paying customers, or services.  Then Sunil Gupta and Carl Mela explain the means to model the network effect of free (non-paying) customers, and the lifetime value of these free customers.  This paper and associated articles present a more general [...]

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“Shaping Strategy” and Disruptions

Very interesting article in the Oct 2008 HBR (free online):
Hagel, Brown, Davison described the concept of shaping strategies, which are initiatives that mobilize ecosystems to reshape industries — usually occur in a world of constant disruptions, like now…  Such a strategy includes 3 elements:

view, more than a vision, that provides focus and directions for participants to help [...]

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