New MacBook air

When cell phones first came out, they were larger than home phones.  These devices evolved so much, that when I first saw the razor I laughed.  I thought to myself, "who would ever buy this tiny breakable thing"?  Little did I know it would be huge in the market. 

We have also come from 25" tube computer monitors on desktops, to plasma/lcd 1 inch thick monitors and now the ultra slim Mac Book air.  This laptop is so thin that you can fit it in a yellow packaging slip.  I now think to myself, "who will ever buy this"?  And yet again, I'm sure it will be an even bigger hit.  This specific laptop has no CD/DVD player, no Ethernet cord, and no hard drive.  Unbelievable in my eyes. 

Social Marketing

Over the past few years, the social media and networking arenas have been expanding exponentially.  There is an article we are able to read for Dr. Karam's class that mentions marketing through word of mouth and paying customers to solicit their friends or people they believe are good candidates for the companies services.  What I wonder about, is if social networking sites would work for friends to solicit for others without posting advertisements through pop ups or whatever can be used.  basically saying, does word of mouth marketing or (pull-marketing) work by using peoples statuses.  Does a person mentioning "this place is great" or "just had the best experience of my life" really sell a product or service?  Its not even face-to-face contact anymore that makes this world work, and if thats true we can relate this back to the beginning of the semester with regards to the disconnect of people.  I'm starting to wonder if we could operate the world with no face-to-face contact.  What do you think?

Oracle

Talking about IT and how it is continuously growing, makes me go back and think about the Caregroup case and their systems crash.  We talked about how there was an overload of information between the servers and this was caused by 1 person as well as an outdated system.  I was thinking about how big Caregroup was and how much bigger and more complex companies are now, and while doing so I saw that Oracle released a new line of products and services that allow much more information and technology to to be connected and managed through only a single system with much more reliability and less complexity.  Its crazy to think that this is even possible.


http://whitepapers.techrepublic.com.com/abstract.aspx?docid=2214787&promo=100503

Rural Outsourcing

These days we all hear about the largest companies in the US consistently outsourcing throughout the world.  Throughout the past, much of the smaller companies tend to outsource to smaller less populated US areas.  They also tend to outsource worldwide, but to much less metropolitan like areas.  By doing so, they are able to reduce the overall cost of their respected projects by about 30%.  Recently, some much larger companies have started or thought  about beginning the process to outsource to rural areas around the united states and to less dense areas of India.  A company from Canada, CGI, is looking to outsource 20% of its total outsourcing projects to areas of less than 50,000 people.  CGI is the company who has helped this rural area outsourcing trend along.  They currently employ over 31,000 employees, far from a start up company.  Along with the cost reduction of the rural outsourcing, this may also increase the support from local citizens. 

Outsourceing CRM

Today in class and apparently over the next few weeks we talked and will talk about Outsourcing.  While outsourcing is a way to help run compainies more efficiently and expand their own market share, we need to realize that there is more to it then just calling a contractor and giving them a job.  I feel the most important link to outsourcing, especially if it will interfere with the customer, is succeeding in customer relationship management (CRM).  In the Carnival Cruise Line case, they explained that third party companies were not collecting the right amount or sufficient data from customers as they called in.  They stated that these outsourced companies did not care as much as they did about the information provided and could not rely on the data to be accurate. 
The article above explained that companies are becoming more reliant on CRM, but are outsourcing it to other vendors.  There are several companies that have grown tremendously just focusing on CRM for other firms.  Their main focus is to understand that CRM is so important that they must provide the best customer service at every level.

IT: A life of opportunity

This weeks blog isn’t about anything specific I have read or anything I heard about.  There was something that grabbed my attention this week and it was something that Mr. Tony Ravani mentioned during our DSS on Friday.  Like I have mentioned several times throughout this semester, I am not the most tech savvy and potentially the most out dated grad student around.  I guess sometimes drastic change isn’t welcome to me, but I do like challenges.  Anyway, Mr. Ravani showed a cluster of wires around a small town in most likely a 3^rd world country.  When he asked us what this meant to us we mentioned several different things, but not what he mentioned.  He said opportunity.  Until then, I did not see the significance in me learning everything about the IT world.  I figured I would get the most out of whatever is taught to me and would get by with that.  Now I realize how much opportunity and change is yet to come after Mr. Ravani’s comment and Dr. Schwarz’s remark about how this is just the beginning.  I can see the resistance I will face if I don’t overcome my fear of learning new and whats seems like foreign technological advances ahead of me.  After Friday, I realized that technology is now my future.

Big $ Change

This past week we talked about change as Dr. Schwarz mentioned in his post.  After following many companies and their ticker symbol over the years, there are quite a few that have went from nothing to everything.  One of these is Netflix.  They are the epitome of change. Using a new and innovative way, they took over the movie/video game rental industry without utilizing the traditional brick and mortar strategy.  They took advantage of todays ever changing technology and ran with it.  Now utilizing streaming movies and Internet rentals, their stock has sored or $45 per share this month and almost $24 the past 5 days.  They have caused the industries giant, Blockbuster, to file for bankruptcy this week and are now the new giant. On top of utilizing the worlds new technology they have added an iPhone and iTouch app that allows the consumer the opportunity to watch movies and TV shows anywhere.  This is a complete and dominant way to use IT and become the face of the industry through change. http://blog.netflix.com/2010/08/netflix-now-available-on-your-iphone.html