Backblog

Why do people use mobile devices? Which ones do they use and is their use growing? Yes it is - tablet use, for one, is growing rapidly - and this offers opportunities explains Nick Jones.

Backblog will be taking a break just after Christmas and we'll be back with fresh news and information in the New Year. We wish all of you a good end to this year and a prosperous and happy start to 2012!

How many physicians are using social media for a variety of communication needs? While the number of physicians with Facebook accounts is likely to be significant, I am quite sure that the majority of use is personal. Some interesting questions are begining to surface regarding the ethics of using social media tools in clinical practice.

After another couple of month’s silence precipitated by some minor surgery, the holiday season and, quite frankly, too much “same old – same old” news, a couple of articles have caused me to, once again, put my fingers to the keyboard. The first, a blog – unfortunately his last with CIO.com, by Thomas Wailgum, IT in 2020: Will it Even Exist?, and the second by Marilyn Weinstein, again in CIO.com, The Power of IT Drives Businesses Forward. While the two titles might appear contradictory, I felt they were both saying the same thing in somewhat different ways, and that what they were saying is important – although not new.

Email marketing plays a fundamental role in today’s marketing efforts. Whether it’s attracting new customers, nurturing leads, developing loyalty or transactional messaging, there are standard best practices for email content. Marqui’s email content best practices can be applied to all emails including promotions, e-newsletters, triggered campaigns, drip campaigns, win-back or client education programs.

One of the bigger changes a company will experience during its lifetime is the adoption and implementation of a company wide Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. An ERP system cuts across functional boundaries and departments, and touches every aspect of the operations creating more of a horizontal organizational structure, causing changes in work/business processes. These changes can also have a big impact on how stakeholder groups both inside and outside the business work with each other.

I was invited to attend an update here in Toronto yesterday [December 6, 2011] on Avaya's IP Office, which inluded a preview for Release 8.0, scheduled to launch on December 12. Lots of Avaya folks on hand, along with the sponsors, Smart IP. They're one of Avaya's top 10 Canadian reseller partners, and having started out as a Nortel shop, they know the territory pretty well.

Discussions around cloud security tend to be framed in terms of lonely ships sailing into uncharted waters: “You don’t know what you’re getting into,” we’re routinely warned. Actually, we do.

I had an opportunity to spend some time wandering around Vancouver last weekend and the one store that caught my eye was HMV at the corner of Burrard and Robson. Initially a flagship store for this retailer in Vancouver, HMV has tried to reinvent itself adding electronics and a variety of other mechandise to stave off the hemorrhaging from loss of sales of its traditional business — music. For that it can thank the revolution started by Napster with the final nail in the coffin being the launch of Apple’s iTunes store and a new model for purchasing music in which users were able to personalize their selection and disaggregate the individual tracks from the album.

The CRTC yesterday issued a ruling involving a Telus complaint over Bell's exclusive rights over NFL and NHL content for its wireless services and its inability to negotiate similar rights for mobile carriage. The Commission found that Bell gave itself an undue preference contrary to its 2009 new media decision and ordered Bell to take steps to ensure that Telus can access the programming on reasonable terms. While there are dangers of undue preferences in the mobile environment and of unfair behaviour arising from the vertical integration, it is hard to see how this case qualifies.

It has been established that a team leader's ability to create a high level of trust within their team plays a critical role in team effectiveness and sustained levels of team performance. A leader's ability to develop a culture of trust over time within their team is central to enhancing or impeding the teams ability to work effectively together. Behaviour that supports higher levels of trust should be included as an important factor within the performance review process.

The advent of mobile devices is gaining significant momentum in the consumer space, as evidenced by statistics showing that shoppers are using iPhones, tablets, and other mobile devices to conduct their holiday shopping at a rapid accelerating pace. However, the business world is also beginning to show some signs of early adoption of mobile capabilities in their evaluation, selection, and implementation of enterprise software systems.

Over the past few months, I’ve been exploring how location-based services and geotargetted information affect our relationship to the places we encounter. More people are using these mobile applications, including Foursquare, Gowalla, Google Places, SCVNGR, Layar, and a seeming endless array of apps to help us locate and learn more about everything from where we parked our car to the nearest restaurant.

Can a business that appears to be healthy acutally be dead? Why do we do the same things and expect different results?

The importance of great content cannot be overstated. Without content, there is no marketing. Period. So what is content marketing? To make things simple, let's start with what it's not:

Question: Does it make a difference what Data centre your host uses? Short answer? Yes! But let’s discuss the longer answer to that question.

I don't often write about tech based on what I come across via mass media, but this one caught my attention and has triggered a whole bunch of thoughts around innovation. I'll just speak to the kernal idea here, but this sure could spawn a blog of its own - hmmm....

For most of the past hundred years, the Supreme Court of Canada heard the occasional copyright case with significant cases popping up once every ten or twenty years. That started to change in 2001 with a big case reaching Canada's top court every year or two. While that seemed like a busy schedule, it is nothing compared to the coming week, where the court will hear an unprecedented five copyright cases over the course of two packed days.

With all of the recent marketing hype surrounding SaaS ERP, you might be surprised to learn that it only commands 7% of the 2011 global ERP market share by software sales. According to a July, 2011 report by Gartner Research, this translates to a roughly $1.7 billion (U.S.) slice of the $24.3 billion ERP software pie.

Glen Farrelly did a great job compiling a list of the 15 Canadians who contributed the most to digital media for our November cover story, but I bet many people read the article and said “But what about...?” and “How could you miss...?”