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It's Less About Fixing and More About Experiencing

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 16:15:18 +0100

An amazing revelation occured to me yesterday. After three weeks away in a secret ninja-style training camp and two days of back-to-work happiness, it suddenly dawned on me that for a service leader, it's less about the broken technology and more about the customer experience. At one point on the job Monday, one customer's husband was telling me over the telephone, 'it's A----, sir. You're supposed to.... ." Amazing. That's something that we all need from time to time. A kick in the pants to re...

Where Have I Been Since Halloween 2011?

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 03:19:30 +0100

Where have I been? I've been working in retail, at one of the most valued companies in America and around the world. Getting my mojo back as it were, as a technology enthusiast and as a marketer working on consumer expectations one client at a time. As you'd expect my legacy of working and using communications and information technology, the stories about how I had integrated the brand into my personal life (that sounds really marketeer-ish but was a couple of stories about how my 3-year old dau...

iOS Developer and Search

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 02:46:17 +0100

I went to bed one Wednesday night in September 2011 and as a final note of frustration before my eyelids really sagged that evening, I did a search on Monster.com (the jobs board) on my iPad. The search was "iOS developer." Wow! The results floored me. There were half a dozen gigs in Boston alone, and they were all fresh opportunities too. I went to sleep committed to revisit this result and to take positive action on career. Waiting for a shoe to drop just seemed a little unproductive. On the...

I'm a Runner

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 12:20:07 +0100

In concert with the time for self-improvement career-wise, I took the steps and effort to improve my body. As my business was growing in early 2008, I took it upon myself to walk to our local gym and ride their stationary bicycles while watching TV. This was I combined the practice of news-entertainment and self-information with the monotony of riding. I'm not sure if I lot a lot of weight this way, but I sure did build up my stamina for exercise. After a year and just as the recession began, I...

What Did You Do During The Great Recession?

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 02:25:48 +0100

Late in 2009, I woke up in a panic. I dreamt that one of my grandkids (I have no grandkids) asked me, "Hey Opa, what did you do during the Great Recession?" I didn't like the answer I had in my mind, which is why the dream impacted me so profoundly. I decided that I was responsible for my life and decided that consulting and market research in my area of expertise was dead. I was going to have to learn some new skills and technologies or die (figuratively of coure). I wanted to write iPhone apps...

Career Restarted

Sun, 13 Nov 2011 21:20:44 +0100

This blog post recounts an amazing story that I hope helps someone else in responding to the nasty economic conditions we find ourselves in. Since 2006, Brockmann & Company has been a market research publisher, industry analyst and IT consultant. 2008 was our best year. I decided that the business was to be a highly personalized service business where I was the product, and therefore definitely not a 'scalable' enterprise. In order to deliver the highest quality service, I would have to purposef...

Applying Email Marketing Features to Personal Email

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 12:00:00 +0100

A standardized element of modern email marketing services provides statistical results of the campaign - what % of messages were opened, what % were forwarded. These large campaign services struggled with being able to scale their service to the point where they could enable or justify this functionality for the casual or individual emailer who might value knowing that the one addressee of the message had in fact just opened the email in question. No doubt, competition for the high volume email...

NFL Season Predictions

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 15:43:04 +0100

Entering the NFL season tonight I have finally decided to halt my blogging boycott. I’ve taken much time into my decisions (some of them anyways) for how teams will finish in their divisions and what teams will make the playoffs. I’ll provide the standings for each division and provide a paragraph for each division explaining my results. Without further ado, here they are...^ = best record in Conference, * = Wildcard teams AFC East:1. ^New England Patriots2. *New York Jets3. Miami Dolp...

Labor Day Reflections

Tue, 06 Sep 2011 00:51:23 +0100

This Labor Day has been a great late summer capstone. Although mostly quiet and somewhat humid, the day's been an awesome platform for writing more and better code for two of our soon-to-be-updated iPhone apps. (Learn more about our apps on the website www.digitalhermosa.com). One feature set involves the infrequent request to kindly rate the app, and the other to enable a number of advanced services for sharing app results. Encouraging users to rate our apps is something we've been avoiding up ...

KnittingQueen v1.1 Now Available in the App Store

Thu, 01 Sep 2011 00:33:12 +0100

Apple approved the latest release of Digital Hermosa's KnittingQueen, v1.1 for sale in the App Store. The app brings several productivity aids to knitters of all ages and all levels. Key features include: a pattern viewer for browsing online and offline patterns a guide bar that keeps the knitters place in the pattern while they continue to knit a popup ruler measuring inches and mm a series of needle sizing charts covering US, UK•Canadian, Japanese and Metric needle sizes in-app sto...

Why Register?

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 16:46:01 +0100

*** Registration for new accounts is currently disabled. Contact us for more info. *** Registering provides access to our content. Content like: The full research library - hundreds of reports on mobile UC, audio, web, video conferencing, collaboration, email, unified communications, first communications, hardware-as-a-service, mobility, being green Buyer's guides on web conferencing, mobile UC and other Weekly email summaries of the latest reports, blog posts, popular downloads Regist...

Android Users Suffer Security Problems

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 17:52:20 +0100

CNet reported this morning research from a security company called Lookout, that Android users are more than twice as likely to see malware now than they were only six months ago. Mobile users also have a 30 percent chance of clicking on a malicious link. Malicious mobile attacks come in several varieties including OS-specific software and phishing attacks. Phishing attacks, where the villans send emails claiming to be from trusted sources like your bank, eBay or PayPal warning of some problem r...

KnittingQueen iPad App Released

Tue, 02 Aug 2011 18:14:08 +0100

My latest venture, Digital Hermosa, is earning traction in the market. We've developed and released both our first and our second iPad apps in the past week. The first app, KnittingQueen is designed for the Apple iPad and incorporates several features and tools that improve the productivity and enjoyment of the knitting experience. The rev 1.0 app includes a ruler in inches or mm that gets longer in landscape versus the usual portrait mode, a pattern viewer for displaying your favorite online pa...

DR_M iPad App Released

Tue, 02 Aug 2011 18:14:08 +0100

My latest venture, Digital Hermosa, is earning traction in the market. We've developed and released both our first and our second iPad apps in the past week. The second app, DR_M The Drummer's Metronome is designed for the Apple iPhone/iPod/iPhone and incorporates several features designed for drummers and drumming students. Mechanical metronomes go to the user-defined frequency, tick, tock, tick tock. The problem that drummer's have is hearing a tick and tock is not so easily done once they sta...

App Idea Evaluation Process

Tue, 26 Jul 2011 21:17:17 +0100

Once we have an idea, it is prudent to analyze the potential and the feasibility of the idea. Some (the actual details of the process are retained for proprietary analysis only) of the fundamental questions that need to be answered are: Is it simple to define the functionality required? What's the User Experience goal? Are there competitors in the category yet? How will this app and its experience compare? Is there an addictive element to its use? Is the app core technology extendible in...

What Happened To You in The Great Recession?

Tue, 26 Jul 2011 20:13:50 +0100

We've all watched businesses crumble around us over the past three years. Dozens of startups evaporate. Proud icon of the Canadian high tech industry, Nortel, in chapter 11. Hundreds more organizations downsize in a struggle to survive and prosper at new, lower levels of customer demand. Well, one of the things I've been doing is teaching myself how to write iPad and iPhone software. I've bought and completed a half-dozen 'how to' books, 'dummy' books and even watched hours of the CS193p Stanfor...

Automated Tagging Coming Soon?

Thu, 30 Jun 2011 15:25:24 +0100

Tagging, the drudgery of identifying each of the persons in the photo and coming up with a cute caption so you can remember or better share the context that the photo was taken, is soon going to be automated or at least computer-assisted, according to several computer scientists at Duke University. Using the extensive sensors already on the mobile device such as the accelerometer to indicate movement such as dancing, the GPS chip to present location, the light sensor to indicate indoor or outdoo...

One Term President

Fri, 17 Jun 2011 14:19:36 +0100

As Bill Clinton so famously said, "It's the economy stupid." Barack Obama is seriously in danger of becoming a one-term president, by simply ignoring this simple and powerful warning from the past. Dennis Gartman, a financial pundit and publisher of The Gartman Letter, summed up the latest conspiracy theory (the small business community is ganging up to make sure Obama loses in 2012) quite succinctly: "We are more and more convinced that the unemployment rate is going to remain hard above 9% th...

Taxes and Telecommuting

Fri, 17 Jun 2011 13:37:49 +0100

Surprise! Some states may claim that simply having an employee telecommuting from that state qualifies your business as 'doing business in that state.' in the past, a business had to have offices in the state to qualify, but in the Internet age that's all getting blurred, and in the slow economy, economically weak states are getting more aggressive and creative in discovering new revenues. According to this WSJ post, the only appropriate answer is to have the telecommuter resign and form a consul...

Breaking News - Avaya to IPO

Thu, 09 Jun 2011 21:19:30 +0100

For the third* time in 16 years, Avaya will be going public to sell $1 billion worth of the company (how much of the company that represents is not clear) as announced in a press release earlier this afternoon. Avaya is not the same company you might recall in recent times. It is the combined entity of Avaya and Nortel Enterprise with a much larger sales footprint in North America channels, managed services including telepresence professional services and the recently announced discontinued BCM (...