News
Be careful about your personal “Internet footprint”!
Written by Rejean Bourgault on Wednesday, 15 July 2009 15:22
So you are an avid internet user. You are born with the Web. You are already on multiple social networking site; you are for instance on Facebook, MySpace or Netlog. You have already a few of your favourite events, parties or clips demonstrating your personal talents on YouTube. You write on blogs and frequently use Twitter to share your thinking. If you are a bit older, you are probably also on LinkedIn and have your resume on-line for anyone in the world to see. If we do Google Image on you, we find one or even multiple pictures of you on the web. Your name is also pretty unique, so you are happy, because your identity is easy to find online.
Then, you should be careful on your image and your identity presence on the Internet. In a recent article in PC World magazine, they explain why an employer, who was quite interested in a candidate, simply rejected him after seeing a YouTube of that person being pretty loud in a party.
What about your picture all over the place in your friend’s Facebook? And your opinions about politics widely available on Twitter?
More and more, employers today, before making an offer to a potential candidate, verify his “Internet footprint”. Your colleagues “Google” and “Bing” your name to see what they can find about you and the same goes for your local competitor. Your parents might even “Google” your new boyfriend as well… you are aware of this right?
Today, if you are 15 years old, you might not think that those things matter much, but when you are 23, and about to graduate and enter the professional market for your first job, your “Internet footprint” might haunt you…
The other day, one of my colleague, was sitting alone at dinner time in a restaurant on a travel trip. She called me, and said: “Rejean you would love to hear this”. The table next to me is composed of ten university students about to graduate to become teachers. For about an hour, the key topic at that table, is what they should do with their Facebook profile and if they should simply close their account… before becoming teachers.
So just be careful, starting today, on your personal footprint and be aware of what can be done with the information that there is online about you!
You can download this article to share with your friends and colleagues [here].
The laptop will be obsolete by 2020 and will be as archaic as a Discman from 1984 is today.
Written by Rejean Bourgault on Saturday, 11 July 2009 20:35
You’re probably wondering, what do we mean by that? Basically we are saying that the form factor of the computer, both laptop and desktop as you know them today will be totally obsolete by 2020. Computers will be as archaic, in many ways, as a Sony Discman that was introduced in 1984 is archaic today. Even today, just look at your laptop (unless you’re using one of those small form factor netbook), it is so big compared to a Smartphone. Why do you need a Laptop?
In the future, you will only need a powerful Smartphone type of device for all your computing needs. You will carry around your iPhone, Blackberry, G1 or Pre wherever you want. Once you arrive at the office or at home, you will simply put down the device on your desk and you’ll have access wirelessly to a keyboard, a mouse and a flat screen, using technologies such as Wireless HDMI or Ultra Wide Band (UWB) for the Flat Screen. Those devices (screen, keyboard and mouse), will be purely “dumb” devices and they will be able to interact with any type of device that you bring close enough. (*)
Think about the beauty of this evolution. The other day, as I do a few times a week, I was biking to the office, a 42 Km ride each way. Normally, I leave on Monday am, with my car and my bike in the trunk, bike back home Monday evening (leaving the car at the office location downtown) and bike back to the office on Tuesday morning. The main reasons to do this, versus biking back and forth the same day is three fold; first, the distance of 84 Km in a day could be sometimes exhausting, second, I might need the car to visit customers who are located outside of the downtown area during the day, but, to be honest, the real reason is that I want to have my laptop with me at the office and I don’t want to carry it on my bike. But... I always carry my Blackberry with me and I suddenly realized last week the power of that little device.
Now, let’s compare my Blackberry’s “bike ride” as just explained today in 2009 with all the tools incorporated in this little device with a similar bike ride that would have been done in 1984. How big my back pack should have been and how heavy would it have been to carry the same quantity of features? Back then, you would need some of the first generation cellular phone weighting close to 1.5Kg. Then, you would have to add a camera, again quite bulky and weighting around 1Kg. Next item is the agenda and notepad, back then I was using a whole size binder with “Timetext” priority management tool… (another kilogram easily). Add to this a Rolodex with all my business cards (one kilogram again), my Sony Discman with one CD and about 15 songs (more than a kilo), then all my preferred CDs, a computer (well… add 10 kilos easily), a calculator, then what about all the reference books, newspapers, dictionaries, encyclopaedia and games… WOW, that would easily be the size of the Pentagon!
Then I realize my back pack could just not hold all of this. Today, my Blackberry gives me all of the features mentioned above in a small compact device and it gives me access, with Internet browsing, to any website, globally. I can Google whatever I want, wherever I want. This is truly powerful.
But wait a minute, we are in 2009, and I still have to carry with me my laptop if I want to be effective and productive. Why don’t my office, home, Starbucks, and my customers / suppliers site, provide me with devices such as wireless keyboard, mouse and flat screen? So, wherever I would go, I could have all the tools I want with me! Then, the PC as we know it today would really be dead.
Is this feasible? Absolutely. All the technologies needed to make this possible are coming together. Memory chips are getting more powerful; just look at the evolution in capacity of USB memory sticks in the past few years. Look at camera phones that boast 7 megapixels camera and more. Look at the evolution of silicon chips; for instance Intel plans to soon introduce an “80 core PC”, probably around the 2011-2014 timeframe that is 80 times the power of most computers in the market today (20 or 40 times if you have a quad or dual core), as announced in San Francisco at the Gartner Symposium conference in 2007. Wireless keyboard and mouse are already available and widely in use. Wireless HDTVs have already been introduced in late 2007 by Samsung and in 2008 at the CES by Westinghouse (http://ces.cnet.com/8301-13855_1-9839734-67.html).
So for sure, Apple (iPhone), RIM (Blackberry), HTC (Hero/Diamond), Palm (Pre) and the others are coming in force and they are pushing Dell, HP, Lenovo, Toshiba and many other PC manufacturers to rethink their entire strategy. Software companies like Microsoft, Google and IBM will do everything to integrate their software in those devices as well. The “Internet cloud”, also referred to as “cloud computing”, is also getting more and more powerful. Companies like Google are developing powerful applications in the cloud such as Google Docs, which reduces the need of storing information on your device and putting more power to the “net”. We can foresee that in the longer run, more applications and even operating systems could be run from the cloud.
The next 10 years of evolution will be amazing. Soon, I will be able to travel back and forth to the office on my Bike, carrying only my Blackberry… without having to worry about my laptop. My briefcase will be smaller than ever when I have to go to a customer meeting as well… People will have more flexibility as they will not have to carry their heavy laptop. This will imply less back pain, hence, less time in Physiotherapy. This will give more time for family bike rides then… I let you imagine the rest!
(*) Note: Of course, you could also have, as seen in some futuristic view, a virtual keyboard, mouse and screen that are projected on any surface.
You can download this article to share with your friends and colleagues [here].
Generation Y and Cyber are going to hit the market soon, are you ready?
Written by Rejean Bourgault on Wednesday, 01 July 2009 23:39
Are you ready? Does your enterprise realize that the Cyber Generation (15 years old or less; also called Generation internet), is already on the market? They already represent a significant portion of your sales but they have completely different buying behaviors and expectations. They will also, very soon (in the next 5-10 years), become employees in your company. In fact, 15% of the workforce today is already composed of employees that are from Generation Y (29 years old or less) and that generation, especially those in the range of 15 to 20 years old are coming in companies with brand new sets of requirements when it comes to doing work.
They are multitasking and they spend a lot more time on MSN than on e-mail. In a recent survey done in February 2009, out of 420 students that are between the age of 13 and 16 in a private school in Canada; 98% of them had an MSN address. This in itself might not be that surprising anymore. What is surprising though is that most companies in the market today block MSN and Yahoo Messenger on their corporate computers. Are you offering them an alternative? Or you are simply blocking Instant Messaging (IM) to them? Do you realize that when a teenage boy first meet a girl, he does not leave his phone number anymore but he gives her his MSN address instead? At the Gartner conference in San Francisco in April 2007, a speaker related a story where 2 top graduates, during the interview with a very large and prestigious firm, asked if they had a corporate policy to block IM, the response from the potential employer was yes. Their answer to the job offer then became: No thanks then!
Today, in large corporations, the CIO and its IS-IT team are getting a lot of pressure by their telecommunication suppliers and software companies to implement Unified Communications (UC). The premise of UC is to offer collaboration tools to employees, such as Instant Messaging and Presence (the ability to find out if another employee is currently available, busy, on the phone, etc.). The challenge for the CIO in these situations is to determine the ROI (return on investment) for UC. The problem is that we are looking at this the wrong way. First, the right people that we should talk to are in the Human Resources (HR) department. They are the ones responsible to attract new employees and they are the ones, more than anyone else in the corporation, which sees the challenge of attracting employees from the next Generation. But not only they have to attract them, they are also responsible to retain talent and provide adequate tools for their development. Today, we are taking graduates out of University and College and we give them a desk phone, a computer and an e-mail address. Wake up please! This is not what the graduates expect at all. He (or she) already has his laptop that is probably more powerful (and has a nicer design as well) than the computer you’re offering them, a mobile phone (probably a smart phone with calendar, e-mails and web browsing) and uses MSN and SMS all the time to communicate with friends and family. I am sorry, but forget the ROI in a situation like this for UC. The ability to attract and retain talent is priceless and your enterprise must get on this ASAP. Think about it carefully, tomorrow morning someone comes to you and say: for the next 7 days, you have a choice of either e-mails or a phone to do your work. Which one would you choose? If you chose e-mails, then you must start implementing Secure Instant Messaging and Presence for your company. The next Generation is already demanding it. Do you need an ROI to justify e-mail or internet access today? The same goes for UC.
The Cyber Generation is also hyper connected already, with on average at home of 1.4 video game console (XBOX 360, Wii, PlayStation 3, etc.) and 1.1 portable video console (PSP, Nintendo DS, etc.). They connect and interact with others of their age with many different mediums. A surprising statistic, 23% of the Cyber Generation already has an avatar and, for those who responded yes as having an avatar, they have in fact over 3 avatars on average. (Note: an avatar is a virtual representation (character) of you in a virtual world). A few of them even sold virtual items and their virtual characters on online marketplace websites. On average, 65% of the surveyed students (from 13 to 16 years old) had a cell phone since the age of 13 and we can easily expect this number to reach 100% in just a few years. A large majority of the phones have a camera built in as well.
As a customer, the Generation Cyber expects to have multiple ways to communicate with your company and some of the key tools they expect are Instant Messaging, SMS (text messaging on their cell phone) and e-mails. See the other article “Disconnect with Generation Y” to get more information about this.
73% of the Generation Cyber has a profile on FaceBook and, on average, students in this category have 1 social networking profile on sites like Facebook, MySpace, NetLog and others (i.e. some have none, but some have more than one profile). By the way, while we’re talking about social networking sites, do you realize that many of your employees are on LinkedIn, especially if you are operating in the high tech or telecommunication industry? On their LinkedIn profile, they have hundreds of contacts; the younger they are, the more contacts they typically have. As an example, I am 44 years old and I have about 135 contacts on that particular site, my business partner who is 29 has over 400 contacts. Do you know also, that in their contacts they have multiple customers and competitors as direct and indirect contacts? Do you know that headhunters use that site to find and get in touch with your best employees? There is nothing you can do to prevent this, as employees gladly put their complete profile up there for everyone to see and to keep and stay in touch with professional contacts but being aware of this tool is key.
Those social networking site for professionals can be very powerful if they are used properly. Here is an interesting story on the power of those sites and the expectations of the Generation Y. I was doing the annual review of my employees earlier in 2009, one by one. At the end of a particular session with one of my top talent, I showed him the final comments I made about him on our online HR database, the comments were very positive. His reply to me was: “Well, thank you boss! I appreciate all those great comments; would you mind putting them on my LinkedIn profile as well?” Think about it for a minute. For a 40+ year old manager, this is kind of weird, but when you think about it carefully, the value of my comments on his online internet profile is much more powerful for the employee than inside the corporate HR database that only 3 persons are aware of: the employee, the manager and HR. Let’s face it, for the employee, if the comments are very positive, you increase much more his marketability if your comments end up openly on the web instead of a “drawer”. Are you ready, as an employer for this type of request?
Note: we are not suggesting, by the example above, that this should become a best practice (to put evaluations online for everyone to see) as in reality, employees would only want them published if they are good and they would refuse if it was to show any type of constructive comment about how the employee can improve. We simply mention this story to demonstrate how some of the employees in the Generation Y think and to help prepare your mind.
You can download this article to share with your friends and colleagues [here].
Disconnect with Generation Y
Written by Rejean Bourgault on Wednesday, 24 June 2009 21:46
Retail Market
The world is changing rapidly and so are customer demands. In today’s retail market, young consumers (Generation Y, 29 years-old and younger) are demanding new ways of interacting and communicating in everyday life. The other day, one of our 5Deka fans described to us a simple interaction he witnessed between two 15 year-old girls and a cashier sales rep in a Montreal retail store (the name of the store is not important – suffice it to say, it was a boutique chain store catering to teenage girls). As you will see, this example is an illustration of the disconnect between generations in the retail market. Some companies get it, some don’t.The two young girls saw a nice item at the cash register counter, and the sales rep explains to the ladies that this item will be in special in a couple of weeks:
- Great, the girl responded, can you send us an email when it comes in special, and we will come back?
- Huh? No… We do not offer this type of service.
- Oh, well then, can I give you my cell phone number, and you’ll send us a text message (SMS)?
- Huh? No… We do not offer this service either.
- How come? We are members of Tristan (another chain of clothing) and we regularly receive their price specials by email. They even are on Facebook now!
- Well… Sorry, but you can call us in a few weeks and will let you know if the item is on special.
- Sorry, but why should we be calling you? This makes no sense.
In this particular example above, a retail store could use e-mail, instant messaging or text messaging to not only inform customers of the specials of the week but to also let them know about new stock arrival, new colors available for their favorite products, etc.
Question for you: What kind of communications tools do you use to interact with your customers? Have you taken the time to train your employees properly? As a matter of fact, the unnamed store chain mentioned in the story above also offers their privileged or club members a similar service of sending specials and sales to them in advance. The two girls, with good reason, were asking for personalized service, as if they were dealing with a small specialized boutique, and we believe each retail chain or store should be in position to interact via email, chat (Instant Messaging) and SMS with their client to stay competitive. By the way, offering all these types of customer interactions is not unique to the retail industry; it can be applied to other industries, such as Finance, Insurance, Government, etc…
A good example of different communication methods offered to students is the Student Price Card (www.spccard.ca) that my 14 year-old daughter showed me the other day. In the member profile section, the Web site offers students, four choices of communication interactions: E-mail, phone, text message (SMS on Cell phone) and Instant Message (like MSN messaging).
Question: Are you already offering or planning to offer all these type of communications? If not, you have to catch the wave right now as you are already late. The new cyber generation (15 years old and less) will soon expect companies to interact with them in the Virtual world.
Contact Center
Each year, suppliers of Contact Center technology introduce new features and functionality in order to improve on efficiency and adapt to new customer demands. One such feature introduced in 2009, is multimedia interaction, via phone, fax, email or chat, allowing an agent to treat multiple type of customer interactions in real time. In a recent training session on this new version of software, there was a clear disconnect between Generation X & Baby Boomers and Generation Y attendees. The Generation Y-ers, were embracing this new capability, while the other two “student generations” in the room (those 29 to 60 years old) could not grasp how a contact Center agent could concentrate and process more than one task / transaction at a time. The reason is simple; the mindset of the ‘older’ generation is still focused on what they have been used to seeing for the past 20 years, in other words, an agent only answers telephone calls. This is yet another wake up call and a clear disconnect between generations. For example, just watch a 15 year old kid manage five concurrent MSN chat sessions in real-time, all the while listening to their iPOD and doing homework at the same time.
Car industry
Finally, my last example for this week is pertains to the car automotive industry. While visiting a car dealership last week, the Sales Rep told me how busy and how successful his counterpart was by handling 100% of e-mails and on-line Web requests for quotes and information for that particular car dealer.
I told the Sales Rep how much I appreciated corresponding with him via e-mail after our first face-to-face meeting and encouraged him to be diligent and disciplined with his e-mails, from first contact to the final closing of the deal, as Generation Y will be very demanding of e-mail correspondence as well as SMS chat. He agreed that he needs to recognize the importance of being proficient when using his keyboard, having been recently advised by some customers not to call them on the phone, rather, that they prefer corresponding with greater frequency via e-mail instead.
Another thing comes to mind - if I were a sales manager at a car dealership today, I would not want all on-line requests only going to the one rep that has become proficient in e-mailing. I would fight for equal distribution to the entire sales force, not only to benefit from advances in multimedia communications, but to survive in the future as well.
You can download this article to share with friends and colleagues [here].
Upcoming Trends: Gesture and Full Body Remote Control
Written by Rejean Bourgault on Saturday, 20 June 2009 11:47
For the past year, we have been predicting that Gesture Remote Control will become a big innovation in both gaming and everybody’s life. Earlier in 2009, at the Electronic show in Asia, Gesture Based remote control started to get some attention; with as an example of an application being a remote control for your television set. Where your open hands mean, “turn on the TV”, your closed hands mean “turn off the TV”, thumbs up means change the channel, etc.
In Video Games, the Wii from Nintendo is a form of Gesture remote control, but it is still in its infancy state. A few weeks ago, Microsoft announced its Project Natal for the Xbox 360 video game console; using cameras and full skeletal mapping to track user movements. You could imagine playing tennis in a Virtual world, without any remote control, just by doing the movement of playing tennis, same for any sports or even driving a car. There isn’t a need anymore for having a device in your hands.
We strongly believe, that after the era of gesture and skeletal mapping, the next move in the industry will be full immersion, where in addition to the movement track, bio sensor will monitor your body, including temperature, heart rate, etc. One way to reach full immersion will be to wear a full body immersion suit.
Gesture remote control, Skeletal mapping, Full immersion are all kind of tools used to augment the reality; basically the zone where pure reality as we know today and Virtual Reality overlap.
As we describe in “a year in 2050”, you could imagine, in the future, doing a Walt Disney Monster ride sitting in your living room in a full body immersion suit, and where at the other end, another person or a Robot transmit over the network all the sensations you would be getting if you were physically there. Transmitting the view, the heart rate, sensations, etc. Think about people who are sitting in a wheel chair or in an hospital who might never have the chance to visit a Walt Disney Theme Park in person. The Walt Disney experience will come to them instead...
Page 4 of 8