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Sometimes less really is more. This blogger removed the words and images of Garfield the cat from the Garfield comic strips. The result? A disconcerting examination of "schizophrenia, bipolor disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life."
We're happy to announce that Gearheads, the semi-official weblog of Sterling Communications, is now live on the Web. We've been posting for a while behind the scenes. Now it's time to turn the Inside Agency inside out. Please enjoy responsibly.
Last night, after our discussion with Denise Shiffman yesterday about "The Age of Engage" and tools like Twitter in the workplace, I updated my feeds and discovered this 16-min. podcast where NWW columnist/blogger Mark Gibbs introduces this social networking tool and describes why “this hot stream-of-presence social networking service is all the rage--and why enterprise users should take notice.” It’s part of NWW’s Best Products 2008 coverage and I thought provided a good introduction.
Here in the Seattle office, we recently started working with local e-discovery company EED. The company—which provides full-service legal
discovery solutions and services, including e-discovery process consulting services, document collection
and technology-enabled review solutions—is in what analysts are predicting to be a very hot space: According to Forrester Research, spending on e-discovery technology
will increase from $1.4 billion in 2006 to more than $4.8 billion in
2011. And here's why...
In today’s digital world, it’s required by law that companies be able to easily produce electronic documents (including e-mail, instant messaging chats, Microsoft Office files, accounting databases, CAD/CAM files, Web sites, and any other electronically-stored information which could be relevant) if needed. And recent legislation has significantly increased the number of cases and the amount of data subject to analysis and review. Because of the HUGE volumes of electronic information that companies today posses (more than 90 percent of business records are created electronically, and 40 percent of them are never converted to paper), this process—called the review process in the legal industry—can be very lengthy and expensive: On average, it costs $1,800 to process and prepare data for analysis, and $250 per hour to analyze and review it. And of the data analyzed, only 10-20 percent of that ends up being relevant while 80-90 percent is irrelevant to the case.
This article from Investor's Business Daily highlights some interesting statistics about the e-discovery market, as well as some real-life examples of the benefits (ROI, time savings, etc.) that these types of solutions and services, such as those offered by EED, can provide.
Today on PR 2.0, Brian Solis blogged about...well, blogging. More specifically, he raises the question of whether or not PR agencies should blog about their clients. In his post, he references a company that asked its PR firm to blog about the work they're doing together, and the PR firm declined.
Since talking about the specific work you're doing with a client has the potential to get kind of sticky, Solis suggests that the agency ask itself the following questions before beginning to blog:
Here on Sterling's blog, we talk frequently about news and trends in our clients' industries but not yet about the tactics we use on each account.
The NYT's Steve Lohr talks with Forrester about the cycles of tech spending. Approximately every 8 years, tech spending outpaces GDP growth.
In 2009, according to Forrester’s model, another eight-year swing should begin. What will get it going? A big part of the next wave, Mr. Bartels predicts, will be the move beyond using technology to automate business operations like financial reporting, marketing and procurement. “The next phase is using technology, especially analytics software, to optimize business results instead of just automating business processes,” Mr. Bartels said.
This smarter software, in the industry, is called business intelligence software.
While Lohr gives big play to SAS, one of our clients, Tableau Software, might be a beneficiary of this trend. Tableau's data visualization software provides many of the benefits of products like SAS at a fraction of the cost, which should appeal to companies that are tightening their belts when it comes to tech spending.
Microsoft recently announced that it's buying Danger Research, a mobile phone platform and service provider that's mostly known for its popular T-Mobile Sidekick device. While some pundits see the acquisition as the harbinger of the often rumored ZunePhone, Windows Mobile licensees might be wondering if Microsoft plans to compete directly with them the way it did with mp3 device makers who bought into Microsoft's Plays for Sure program. If so, they should be worried.
Launched with much fanfare, Plays for Sure was supposed to be Microsoft's answer to the iPod and iTunes juggernaut. But over time Microsoft grew increasingly frustrated with the inability of Plays for Sure licensees to dislodge Apple's iPod/iTunes tandem from its perch atop the digital media market. In response, Microsoft launched the Zune and Zune Marketplace to compete directly and, hopefully, more effectively with Apple. But in doing so, Microsoft also left its licensees out to dry. By most accounts, the Zune has done little to diminish Apple's media player marketshare while decimating the sales of Plays for Sure devices.
Now, with the iPhone, Apple is making another foray into a market that Microsoft wants to own. And despite Steve Ballmer's famously dismissive prediction of Apple's chances for success ("There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance."), Apple is making serious inroads in the smartphone market, and is even gaining traction among Microsoft's core business customers. Despite its widely noted shortcomings, the iPhone is a game changer and clearly has Microsoft worried.
Now comes the Danger acquisition. While Windows Mobile has a large installed base, it is primarily considered a business platform and its interface is considered by many to be overly complex and particularly consumer-unfriendly. In fact, over the past year or so, several device makers launched consumer-oriented WinMo-based phones but went to the trouble of reskinning the interface to make it more usable. This poses a challenge for Microsoft. If the iPhone continues to gain marketshare, will Ballmer and company decide to build "the whole widget" the way they did with Zune/Zune Marketplace? Will Windows Mobile licensees suffer the same fate as Plays for Sure licensees? Only time will tell. But those are questions Windows Mobile licensees might want to be asking themselves right now...
Now is the time to start salivating over the prospect of deploying wireless access points that promise 300Mbps of throughput. Why now? In part because Aruba Networks, second only to Cisco in the WLAN market, recently released access points that comply with Draft 2 of the 802.11n standard. The finalized draft of this standard is expected by 2009.
Microsoft. Amazon. RealNetworks. The University of Washington.
The New York Times' John Markoff thinks Seattle will become the next Silicon Valley. Comparing UW to Stanford and noting the "Valley vibe" in the city's Fremont neighborhood (home to Sterling client Tableau Software), he writes: "Many communities dream of becoming the next Silicon Valley. This one is actually doing it."
Tableau Software won an Industry Achievement Award from the Washington Technology Industry Association (formerly the Washington Software Association or WSA) this past Thursday. Tableau's new Server product was named Business Product of the Year. The WTIA is Washington's largest technology trade association. Congrats to Tableau...
