Specialist or Generalist?

From Logic + Emotion Blog

The Art of Innovation (by Guy Kawasaki)

Chief Marketing Officers

The role of the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) continues to be in the spotlight as organisations try to understand their contribution to the business. Why is it that this role has been chosen as the poster child for performance measurement, asks Deborah Eastman. - An interesting article on Marketing Web

Oracle Innovation Award

Oracle today announced the call for nominations for the Oracle Innovation Award. Co-sponsored by the Oracle Applications User Group (OAUG) and Quest International Users Group (Quest), the Oracle Innovation Award is designed to recognize organizations that are extending the business value of their Oracle(R) Applications with Oracle Fusion Middleware as a result of Oracle's "Applications Unlimited" program.

Read More at CNN Money

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao emphasis on Innovation

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao said Thursday that innovation is his biggest expectation for Chinese new champions. Wen made the remark while answering a question from World Economic Forum (WEF) Executive Chairman Klaus Schwab at the Inaugural Annual Meeting of the New Champions hosted by the WEF in China's northeastern coastal city of Dalian.

Innovation means creation in products, technology, management and system, no matter it is a state-owned enterprise or in other forms, said the premier.

China launched the reform of State-owned enterprises years ago with the goal of establishing a modern corporate system while developing a group of enterprises of various ownerships.

Many new champions have risen from those enterprises in such sectors as information and telecommunications, environmental protection and high and new technology, said Wen.

Only through innovation can an enterprise play its due role in economic and social development and resolve its problems in quality and efficiency, the premier said.

Source: China Daily

Google's gPhone

The new operating system, which may be named gPhone, was developed in part with know-how Google acquired with a startup named Android in 2005. The platform is designed to enable lower-priced "smartphones" featuring more robust Web browsing and multimedia applications. Most importantly for Google, it will work hand in glove with the company's mobile search engine and other Google applications that are already popular on personal computers. And it would allow Google to bring new applications to the wireless market faster. Google declined to confirm or deny this information.

Read More at Business Week

Customer experience and Business Performance

A Journal of Marketing article published in 2006 demonstrated an amazing correlation between high levels of customer satisfaction and ultra high market performance. Using both back-tested and real-world portfolios, Claes Fornell, et al. proved that there was a significant relationship between customer satisfaction levels and market performance. Furthermore, their study demonstrated that between 1997 and 2003, a portfolio of companies with high levels of customer satisfaction

- outperformed the Dow Jones Industrial Average (.DJIA) by 93%,
- beat the S&P 500 (.SPX) by 201%, and
- schooled the NASDAQ by 335%!

Source: Claes Fornell et al., "Customer Satisfaction and Stock Prices," Journal of Marketing, January 2006.

Read More

10 Future Web Trends

1. Semantic Web
2. Artificial Intelligence
3. Virtual Worlds
4. Mobile
5. Attention Economy
6. Web Sites as Web Services
7. Online Video / Internet TV
8. Rich Internet Apps
9. International Web
10. Personalization

Read in detail

Reporter's log: British innovation week

BBC Article:
"The UK has a long history of innovation and ideas.

But a quick scan of today's tech titans, such as Google, Microsoft and Apple, reveals few that originate in the UK.

The Growing a Big Gorilla conference in Cambridge is hoping to help redress the balance.

BBC News website technology reporter Jonathan Fildes and BBC technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones are reporting from the meeting as it happens."

Track it here

Expect better Shopping Experience at Muscat City Center

To ensure that customers meet with no inconvenience due to the increased footfall in the mall, Muscat City Centre has implemented renovation and refurbishment project in the mall amounting to more than RO 330,000.

More washrooms
Additional space in the prayer rooms
More vibrant look
Upgrading the lighting
and even refurbishing the store rooms

scheduled for completion by the end of 2007.

Full Article

Jiffy Lube adds Customer Experience Executives to Sr Management Team

In a continuing effort to advance operational excellence and improve the customer experience, Jiffy Lube International (JLI), has named two new integral senior managers to its team. Rick Altizer recently joined the company as General Manager, Global Operations from Midas International, while Craig Linington arrived earlier this year from McDonald's Corporation to serve as Customer Experience Manager.

read more

Undersea WiFi can be made faster

The same acoustic waves that dolphins and whales use to communicate when they are thousands of miles apart can be used by humans to transmit information wirelessly, says Dr. Rosa Zheng, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at UMR (University of Missouri-Rolla )

Read More

And Now a credict card in seond life

Checkout MetaCard

Where the Biggies of today's world started

Ever wanted to see where Google, Craigslist, Second Life and others started.. here it is

have fun!

Customer Experience heirarchy

True? form your own opinion.

ICSID World Design Congress coming to the USA

ICSID World Design Congress coming to the USA

"We are planning the design event of a lifetime, I promise you a program that will be lively and fun, as well as make your head hurt some of the time. " writes Bill Moggridge, Congress Chair and Cofounder of IDEO, on the IDSA website.

High-Performance Contact Center

Frost & Sullivan notes three criteria that distinguish top-performing contact centers from the average performers:

• The contact center and the enterprise work in tandem to balance cost controls with efforts to realistically measure service quality. It is not enough to simply declare a policy of valuing the customer experience. In a high-performing center, specific goals and objectives must be set for achieving realistic customer experience benchmarks within the context of an efficient allocation of resources;

• Individual front-line workers are set clear performance goals, and those goals are constructed to reflect actual business objectives. These can be expressed in traditional call center telephony metrics (hold time, calls handled, etc.), but they must originate in or be aligned with organizational goals (profits, revenue, customer retention and churn, etc.); and

• The flow of information into and out of the center is controlled and channeled so that appropriate managers and analysts can interpret the raw data and use it to create specific prescriptions for change that improve performance. This can include an emphasis on root-cause analysis, scenario simulation, and the proactive creation of responses before deep problems can fester.

Source: DestinationCRM.com

Equifax Showcase Innovation Around Data, Analytics and Technology Solutions

Equifax Inc. announced today that it will host Inform Enrich Empower 2007, the company's first-ever event that will join customers from across all industries to learn, share and to explore new and innovative ways for companies to grow and compete in today's economy.

Source: CNN Money

Communication!

A geat pic uploaded on flickr:


Notes say:
Taken at Pitzer College in Claremont, California 9/07. Students are encouraged to use their campus as a canvas. This powerful piece is especially appropriate as it is painted on a wall of the soon to be destroyed Sanborn dorms.

iPhone Outsells all other smartphones in Jul

Whether you were expecting or not, Read more at: Reuters

Another Dell in Flames

Hope this is not a new feature from dellideastorm (pun intended)

Some brilliant animation

Homes from Shipping Containers

parental controls on the phone near you

AT&T Inc., the nation's largest wireless carrier, will launch a service Tuesday giving parents that kind of wide-ranging control on almost all of its 63.7 million subscriber lines.

We were certainly hearing from parents who were dismayed at overuse of text or phones," said Carlton Hill, vice president of voice products for AT&T's wireless unit and the mother of two teenagers. "We want to find a way for kids to use phones without having to take the phone away."

Full Article

Interesting Writeup: A tale of two phones

Comes from CXO Brand Experience Lab
about Nokia 9500 and iPhone

A tale of two phones

BMW gets a makeover

According to The Independent

The chassis has been transformed into a 17ft-long space-age fantasy made from an immense ice block, in which a futuristic driver buckles in to glide across galaxies.

The technology to confound the laws of time and space may not have been invented yet, but Olafur Eliasson has created his own postmodern fantasy for the future of motoring.

Full Article

Lowrance Improves Design Time of Marine Electronic Products by 50 Percent

“Planning for component reuse gives us the ability to simultaneously design and test across all three new products,” said Steve Swisher, senior design engineer, Lowrance. “Using the old system it would have taken one year to design, test and deliver to the market these products versus the six months that it took with the PTC Product Development System. We were also able to reduce our costs typically associated with multiple physical prototype development and multiple quality control cycles. We look forward to continuing our work with PTC as we develop more innovative products for our market.”

Full Article

United, other airlines try to improve customer service in effort to restore trust in industry

United's test run at SFO Airport:

In recent weeks, United has been busy sprucing up its reservations stations, doubling the number of automatic check-in kiosks at SFO's Terminal 1 from eight to 16, and pushing more real-time flight information to passengers. The airline is working especially hard to court high-paying travelers, who are whisked to the front of security lines and boarded separately. High-fliers walk down a real red carpet at the airport gateway, where a United worker lifts a red rope to allow them to board at their leisure.


"We treat all of our customers with courtesy - that's our baseline for everyone," said Jewell Dagenais, United's customer service manager at SFO. "We are providing differentiated experiences for premium customers."

Full Article

Customer Service Outweighs Marketing

according to the J.D. Power and Associates 2007 National Auto Insurance Study, based on responses from 16,012 auto insurance policyholders who were surveyed in March and April 2007.

The study shows that satisfaction with the overall insurance experience accounts for 45% of the customer commitment model, which specifically measures a customer's propensity to remain loyal to an insurer. Among customers who indicate high levels of satisfaction with a carrier overall, 88% said they definitely would renew their policies with their auto insurance providers. Conversely, only 16% of customers who report low levels of satisfaction said they would definitely renew their policies.

full article

Google Wiki

from tech crunch - Google Wiki Prepares To Launch

MediaGuardian Innovation Awards

"With the Megas, we hope to identify the innovations with staying power, and to pick out which ideas have the capacity to inspire yet more creativity in the future."

http://media.guardian.co.uk/mediaguardian/story/0,,2160981,00.html

UK's biggest pubco launches fourth national Shine awards

Nominations are now being invited for the outstanding businesses among Punch’s 7,300-strong leasehold pubs over four award categories: Best Food Experience, Drinks Experience, Community Experience and Customer Experience.

http://www.thepublican.com/story.asp?sectioncode=7&storycode=56796&c=1

Ten Industrial Design Trends You Can't Ignore

1. Design For A Cause
   
2. Simplexity
3. Personalization
4. Globalization
5. Ornamentation
6. Polarization Of Design
7. Pink Design
8. Mass Imperfection
9. Craft
10. Focus On The Other 90%

Comes from Forbes Magazine

Apple working with Jaguar ?

Apple is bringing an interesting business strategy where theya re providing design as a service but own the design of the product

"Step inside and the starter button starts to pulsate like a heartbeat. Press it and the car comes to life. The air vents rise up and the JaguarDrive Selector pops up. We took so much comment on the old J-gate change and felt it was time for a change. The dial takes up less space, too. We have been working with Apple on control interfaces." - Ian Callum

http://www.carmagazine.co.uk/first_official_picture.php?sid=964&page=5

ROI on Innovation - BCG Study

The 2007 Boston Consulting Group’s innovation survey of 2,468 senior executives worldwide found that although companies are spending more on innovation, many are dissatisfied with the return on those investments.

In the survey, only 46 percent said they were satisfied with the return.

Innovation 2007
Measuring Innovation 2007

Expectations for Outstanding Customer Service is Rising

The second annual Customer Experience Impact Report, a Harris Interactive study sponsored by RightNow(R) Technologies was conducted recently.

It found that consumers continue to feel sick and become outraged after a bad customer service experience with companies. For example:

-- 74% registered a complaint or told others;
-- 47% swore and/or shouted;
-- 13% posted a negative online review or blog entry; and
-- 29% got a headache, felt their chest tighten and/or cried.

The report also uncovered regional differences in how consumers engage with companies and react to various customer experiences. For example, compared to their counterparts across the United States:

-- Midwesterners are more likely to swear, feel their chest tighten or
get a headache after a bad customer experience.
-- Westerners are more likely to never return to a company or post a
negative blog entry/online review after a bad customer experience.
-- Southerners are more likely to register a complaint or tell others
about their bad customer experience and are least likely to swear.
-- North-easterners are least likely to register a complaint, tell others
or post a blog entry or online review after a bad customer experience.


http://www.rightnow.com/resource/research/experience07.php for more details on each region and to download the 2007 Customer Experience Impact Report.