Category: Comments & opinions

Hello from CES 2015! I’ve joined tens of thousands of brands, geeks, startups, investors, and technology enthusiasts from around the world to see what the future, or this year, holds for consumer electronics. While in Las Vegas, I’m also presenting at Brand Innovators “Mega Trends” event at the Four Seasons. I was asked to share some of the biggest trends that brands and consumers need to know heading into the new year and beyond. This list represents technologies and trends that I’m paying attention to and also high level thoughts around them.…

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Increasingly, ERP is going mobile. Driven by customer demand and new technology, more and more ERP users are discovering the benefits of having their ERP connections instantly available no matter where they are. With broader reach and more flexibility, ERP becomes an even more powerful tool for managing a business proactively. Mobile connectivity offers many advantages in ERP. Some of those advantages are immediately obvious. Others are not-so-obvious but very real. On-site service personnel are obvious beneficiaries. Having your office in your pocket is extremely to repair and maintenance staffers.…

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Today’s CIO faces a broad spectrum of challenges that require business acumen, tech savvy, and strong leadership skills. It’s a tricky balancing act, but knowing about the pitfalls can help.   Image: iStockphoto.com/KatarzynaBialasiewicz CIOs run highly technical disciplines and usually come from technical backgrounds. Their strength is in knowing the details of IT work. This gains them respect in the eyes of their staff and enables them to discuss the details of projects. Nevertheless, IT management responsibilities have changed substantially over the past few years. As more IT processes become automated,…

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To stay competitive, smaller vendors of enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions need to follow the development paths of their larger rivals, whether they like it or not. Here are some of the innovations that are being refurbished this year: Cloud ERP acceptance will continue to grow in all industries, including, finally, manufacturing, although it has a way to go before it reaches the level of on-premise deployment in terms of sale numbers. But the cloud deployment model implies slow profitability growth for vendors, significantly slower than for the traditional on-premise variant.…

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Oracle continues to build its cloud-and-data arsenal, announcing its intention to buy Datalogix, a data marketing specialist that gleans consumer sentiment data via pacts with Facebook and Twitter and other sources. Photo credit: de.wikipedia.org In a statement, Datalogix said it aggregates information based on over “$2 trillion in consumer spending from 1,500 data partners across 110 million households to provide purchase-based targeting and drive more sales.” It also claims that 82 of the top 100 advertisers in the U.S. including Ford Motor Co. and Kraft Foods. In fact the availability of all that data has provoked concern at the consumer watchdog…

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From identifying fonts to monitoring data usage to tracking package deliveries, these apps can simplify the job of keeping up with vital info. One thing that’s boosted the popularity of smartphones and tablets is the way they put information at your fingertips right when you need it. Yes, you can find almost anything you’re looking for by using a Web browser and a little patience. But a number of reference apps can make it easier to track down all sorts types of information. Here are five apps I’ve found to…

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With the A2P (Application-to-Person) SMS market poised for major growth over the coming years, now is the time to educate operators and help them evaluate their profit structures and take action for continued profits and growth. This was the message given at this week’s Wholesale Messaging and SMS World event in London by Perry Offer, CEO of Dialogue Group, the global A2P SMS messaging specialist.  Offer joined the event’s keynote discussion panel, which focussed on wholesale SMS and messaging technologies, services, markets and legislation, and coincides with the 22nd Anniversary since…

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Next to an incompetent or disinterested sales person, the telephone is probably the source of more problems in a customer relationship than anything else. Even if you complete the sale successfully, the phone may have turned the customer off and left him or her unwilling to deal with you again. Of course no one sets out to turn customers off by telephone. But it happens. From telephone manners to voice menus, the telephone is a major source of problems in business relationships. The turn-offs may not seem like big things…

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Vince Cable accuses air traffic control centre Nats of “skimping on large-scale investment” Business Secretary Vince Cable has blamed the technical failure behind last week’s airspace chaos on a lack of IT investment. Airspace above London was closed to all traffic for around an hour on Friday following a major system failure at Nats, the UK’s main air traffic control centre in Swanwick. And Cable told the BBC’s Andrew Marr that Nats’ IT systems were “ancient” and likely to crash because the organisation was “skimping on large-scale investment”. He added: “We have to…

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Ok, that was a totally troll title. A less inflammatory one would be “Work at Winning Companies to Learn Winning Habits.” What I want to share though is a subtle advantage that people who’ve worked at transformative tech companies have over people who haven’t. It’s not that the average employee from Google, Apple, Facebook, etc is necessarily smarter or more capable than any other person. I mean, maybe they are on average, but I’m not making the case that just because they passed a hiring screen that makes them worthwhile.…

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