Archive for September, 2009

What You Do Matters!

Wednesday, September 30th, 2009

By Dean Whittaker

Recently I had the opportunity to return to the small Midwest farm town in which I grew up. Over the past forty years I have seen the town gradually decline. First the clothing store closed, then the five-and-dime, the furniture store, a restaurant, grocery stores (it has been converted into another bar), car dealers, gas stations, and even the funeral home.

At one time, the town was mostly self-sufficient, but now it depends upon distant merchants to meet its basic needs. Once a thriving town in the middle of some of the richest farm land in the world, with engaged people actively pursuing their dreams, it is now a handful of survivors eking out a living or driving long distances to find work. With six bars, a beauty shop, a barber shop, three churches and a faltering school system, it struggles for a reason to exist. The bank has a new building from the dividends it received from the federal securities into which it invests the farmers’ money. Its tellers claim there are few loans to be made locally. Perhaps they are right. The library, now operating on reduced hours, finds the books on CD to be their most popular item due to long commutes by its patrons.

What happened here, I wonder? The decline began when the major employer, an electric motor manufacturer employing 500 or so, moved production to Mexico. The factory closed its doors in the late 60′s, shutting down a job-generator that filled an economic, social and political role in the community. With its economic engine (aside from farming) missing, the town failed to support the community that had grown up around it. The leadership provided by the talented people who came to work there dispersed along with their involvement in its governance.

Do towns have a lifecycle like the rest of nature? I wonder. Is there birth, growth, maturation and decline, or is it cyclical, like the seasons of the year? Do towns become old and die? Or do they re-invent themselves and find a new purpose in life?

As I drove to the cemetery to visit my parents grave site, I noticed windmills dotting the ridgeline north of town. Could this be the beginning of a new economic engine? Will the town’s Burlington-Northern Santa Fe connection to Chicago someday carry commuters along with the coal coming in from the west? Will small-town America re-invent itself? New Urbanism, walk-able cities, the new town square, neighbors, energy, new life will it come here? Will there be a catalyst for change? Time will tell whether my home town has a lifecycle. I am hopeful, as I also saw the signs of new homes being built and re-investment being made. It will be interesting to see what the next fifty years bring.

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Selecting a Cloud Computing Vendor

Wednesday, September 30th, 2009

By Todd Smithee

Cloud computing is one of today’s hottest IT topics. The benefits of cloud computing are tremendous and include access to Fortune 500 technology regardless of your company’s size; minimal IT infrastructure and personnel requirements; and the ability to focus on core business processes instead of back-office operations. That said, choosing the correct cloud computing vendor is critical. A bad choice could result in your organization being held hostage by your cloud computing supplier. There are some steps you can take, however, to greatly reduce your chances of entering a bad client-vendor relationship.

  1. Document Your Needs “ This step is critical. Before you can even begin to review vendors, you must document your requirements in detail. This can be a miserable, time-consuming process, but it will be well worth the investment. You will undoubtedly find out interesting things about your organization. These could be processes that are manually (or poorly) managed. Without this documentation, however, you will have no way to evaluate potential vendors. Your risk of signing a costly, long-term contract with a vendor unable to meet your needs increases exponentially.
  2. Select a Short List“ Once you have your requirements document completed, you can research potential vendors. Any cloud computing vendor worth its salt will have an extensive Internet presence. Use Google, blogs, and other online resources to identify four to five potential solutions. While you have to be careful about information sources, online research is definitely the place to start.
  3. Contact the Short-List Vendors “ This first contact will give you some idea of a vendor’s ability to meet your needs. Be careful, however, not to judge a provider based solely on your impression of the sales representative alone. There are some excellent vendors that occasionally have a sub-par sales team member. The old axiom of “don’t judge a book by its cover” definitely applies here. Note: You will want to immediately ask the vendor how many clients it has.
  4. The Demonstration “ After providing your vendor with your requirements document (RFP), the vendor will provide you with a demonstration. Be sure that your vendor includes all of the major points you identified in your requirements document. This is critical. You absolutely must proceed with a “trust but verify” mentality. If a vendor cannot demonstrate a feature you need or at least provide multiple references where your required feature has been implemented, eliminate that vendor. If you hear a vendor say “that will come out with our next release,” run like the wind!
  5. Check References “ While this is standard operating procedure with any major investment, you will want to be extra careful when checking references of a cloud computing vendor. Make sure you confirm all of the promises made by the sales representative. Areas of focus should include downtime/reliability, quality of customer service, availability of consulting and implementation partners and services, and frequency of upgrades.

One final step remains after a vendor checks out on the above check points “ financial viability. There are several ways this can be accomplished. First, should a vendor’s client list include Fortune 500 corporations, publicly traded companies, and financial institutions, you can feel fairly certain that the vendor has been vetted by someone with much greater resources than you likely have. If the vendor is publicly traded, review its shareholder reports and SEC filings. If the vendor is private, insist on talking with the CFO or some other person with a fiduciary responsibility. If a company is not profitable, be very careful when considering it as a vendor (remember the term dotcom?).

Cloud computing is a great equalizer among businesses. It can provide you with infrastructure similar to the “big boys” without major capital investment. Following the steps outlined above can help you select the correct vendor and minimize the risks associated with this great new model of acquiring IT infrastructure.
___________________

Todd Smithee
616-897-4325
tsmithee@conrin.com
http://www.conrin.com/

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“You Are Where You Live”

Wednesday, September 30th, 2009

By Jami Miedema

Demographic information is helpful to find out population characteristics for economic and marketing research. But what if you want to look beyond the distribution of certain traits of a community and understand their culture? Would it be useful to know about a community’s opinions, interests, and lifestyle? That’s what psychographics aims to discover “the personality” of an area.

PRIZM, a psychographics tool from Nielsen Claritas, defines the behaviors of U.S. households to ultimately group them into 66 unique segments. Although products that offer psychographic analysis can be expensive, Claritas offers a free scaled-down version of PRIZM, called You Are Where You Live. It uses the same premise of PRIZM that “birds of a feather flock together,” and by entering a zip-code of your choice, you can learn about the behaviors and preferences of a certain area.

I profiled the town I live in, and here are most common segments found in my neighborhood:

Boomtown Singles
Affordable housing, abundant entry-level jobs, and a thriving singles scene–all have given rise to the Boomtown Singles segment in fast-growing satellite cities. Younger, single, and working-class, these residents pursue active lifestyles amid sprawling apartment complexes, bars, convenience stores, and laundromats.

Family Thrifts
The small-city cousins of inner-city districts, Family Thrifts contain young, ethnically diverse parents who have lots of children and work entry-level service jobs. In these apartment-filled neighborhoods, visitors find the streets jam-packed with babies and toddlers, tricycles and basketball hoops, Suzukis and Kias.

Mobility Blues
Mobility Blues is a segment of middle-age singles in working-class neighborhoods in America’s satellite cities. Ethnically diverse, these transient Americans tend to have modest lifestyles due to their lower-income jobs. Surveys show they excel in going to movies, playing basketball, and shooting pool.

New Homesteaders
Young, upper-middle-class families seeking to escape suburban sprawl find refuge in New Homesteaders, a collection of small rustic townships filled with new ranches and Cape Cods. With decent-paying jobs in blue-collar industries, these dual-income couples have fashioned comfortable, child-centered lifestyles; their driveways are filled with campers and powerboats, their family rooms with PlayStations and Game Boys.

Sunset City Blues
Scattered throughout the older neighborhoods of small cities, Sunset City Blues is a segment of lower-middle-class singles and couples who have retired or are getting close to it. These empty-nesters tend to own their homes but have modest educations and incomes. They maintain a low-key lifestyle filled with newspapers and television by day and family-style restaurants at night.

While I can’t say I fit into any of these segments, I certainly see their prevalence in the town that I live. But as I mentioned above, You Are Where You Live is an abbreviated variation of all PRIZM has to offer. Full PRIZM profiles may contain up to 20 clusters and more in-depth information regarding lifestyle traits, social groups, and demographics. These profiles help companies decide where to market their goods and services by revealing where to reach consumers and how to reach them.

To profile your neighborhood, go to: http://www.claritas.com/MyBestSegments/Default.jsp (case sensitive), and click on the “ZIP Code Look-Up” tab. Enter your zip code and the security code to discover your town’s most common clusters. To view all 66 segments, click on the “Segment Look-Up” tab.

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Wireless Electricity: Have you heard of it?

Wednesday, September 30th, 2009

By Vidhan Rana

This technology is surely going to revolutionize the way we live, or at least take away the clutter of wires behind television sets and computers. Wireless electricity is a technology that transmits power from an electrical source to an electrical load without wires. This is not really a new technology, as it has been around since the 1800′s. Most agree that Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla, who went on to father many of the inventions that define the modern electronic era, was the first person to transmit electricity over the air in 1890. But there has been some renewed interest and recent developments in this technology that we can begin to anticipate what is going to come next.

Simply put, this technology will enable us to power electronic equipment, like a TV or a cell phone, from a nearby socket without wires. Electricity is converted into a magnetic field, then using a frequency, sent to whatever device needs to be powered. If you use chargeable electric toothbrushes, you may have already used this technology without realizing it. If you look carefully, when you charge your toothbrush on the dock, there is no direct connection between the brush and the dock. Power is being transmitted to the brush through a magnetic field created around the dock.

In December 2008, eight leading electronics companies, including major names like Logitech, Sanyo, Phillips, and Texas Instruments, created the Wireless Power Consortium to create standards that will drive the growth of the technology. The consortium has added more high-profile names like Olympus, Samsung, and Duracell to its rosters recently.

Some companies are already making products using this technology. WiTricity Corporation, based in Watertown, MA, was founded in 2007 to commercialize an exciting new technology for wireless electricity invented two years earlier at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Eric Giler, CEO of WiTricity, says that within one year, phones and laptops will no longer need an electrical cord, as they can be powered by wireless electricity.

Powercast, based in Pittsburgh, PA, has developed wireless-charging products that can do useful things while still operating at safe power levels. Over distances of less than 1.5 meters, its technology can be used to run low-power lighting systems; at a range of up to three meters, the radio waves can provide useful power for trickle-charging rechargeable batteries; and up to approximately 7.5 meters, they can be used to power wireless sensor networks.

Fulton Innovations of Ada, MI is marketing a technology called eCoupled. eCoupled uses a wireless powering technique called “close proximity coupling,” which uses circuit boards and coils to communicate and transmit energy using magnetic fields. The technology is efficient but only works at close ranges. Using this technique, an industrial van parked outside the Fulton booth at CES charged a set of power tools from within its carrying case. The van was equipped by Leggett & Platt–a diversified manufacturing company based in Carthage, Mo., and an eCoupled licensee–and is designed to solve its customers’ biggest headache – arriving at the job site with a dead set of tools.

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