I watched with mild amusement as our CEO’s heart missed a beat. “How do you measure inventory shrinkage?” I asked innocently. After the palpitation subsided, his return comment was “Ah, we would fire them.” “No, no, not with us. How do our customers measure their shrink. When they provide us with a shrink percentage, is there an industry standard for [...]
Image via Wikipedia I recently had the pleasure of attending the IHOP National Franchise Conference (considering it was in Hawaii, the pleasure was all mine) and sitting in on various sessions celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the brand and addressing concerns of IHOP Franchise owners. No doubt these concerns are not exclusive to IHOP and [...]
Image by julie varnau via Flickr You may have heard that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) just came online yesterday. There are a bunch of nonsensical fears that the LHC could create a black hole that would destroy the Earth. This reminded me of a great, stay up all night and read it book called [...]
We’ve often wrote about how sharing video and data can be a powerful tool, especially when that information can be trusted and is easy to get at. Another instance of using information sharing over the Internet is a work in progress in the IETF. Authored by some folks at Verisign and Entrust, the IETF Internet [...]
Welcome to the newest member of the MVaaS community, www.gotomycamera.com. This service, which has been launched by Eptascape, is entirely web hosted and provides storage of IP camera originated video. A user can log in from anywhere on the Internet and access their video. The system is using Amazon’s cloud storage, so they should be [...]
We recently underwent a re-engineering of our Internet facing infrastructure to increase resilience and redundancy. We utilized a boutique network consulting firm that has designed the infrastructure of such giants as facebook and myspace. Our Internet facing infrastructure is pretty standard: redundant firewalls, load balancers, and network switches. With this new network design, we can [...]
What does “customer-focused” really mean? To me, it is a foundational pillar of a successful business strategy. The challenge is carrying the intention to be customer-focused throughout every aspect of the business. Every member of the organization must have the customer at the center of his or her priorities. Even those who may not see themselves as having [...]
Why is Fall the start of so many things? As if this time of year isn’t busy enough with the start of school, extra-curricular sports and activities, when you add the season premieres of various tv shows, it’s a recipe for sleep deprivation. This Fall has been particularly busy. I’m ordinarily not much of a tv-watcher. [...]
Image via Wikipedia I had a series of posts in June asking the simple question, who’s bigger, Salesforce.com or GM? (I, II, III, IV) The series concludes here, indicating that Salesforce.com’s market capitalization remained slightly behind that of General Motors. At least this was true on June 4th. Well, some things have changed. Most who are interested in [...]
Cognitive dissonance is among my favorite topics in the field of psychology. Why? I think this relates to two things: It is very simple to understand, and it is extremely powerful. Cognitive dissonance describes the stress that develops when we hold two ideas that are inconsistent. The theory of cognitive dissonance purports that we all have a fundamental drive to [...]