Archive for the ‘Columbia’ tag
Maak plaats voor de Chief Digital Officer!
Columbia University meldde vorige week dat het zijn eerste Chief Digital Officer (CDO) heeft aangesteld. Sree Sreenivasan wordt verantwoordelijk voor de online onderwijsinitiatieven. De…
Schmitt on Happiness and the Customer Experience
If you are as intrigued as I am with the notion of ‘happy customers’, you’ll enjoy this interview with Columbia Business School professor and customer experience expert Bernd Schmitt:
Happiness and Customer Experience: Interview with Bernd Schmitt
[If you are in NYC on 5/2/12, you can learn more by attending the One Happy Book Launch Columbia Business School Alumni Club of New York event.]
Best,
C.B.
Video of the day: Finding Portland
Portland is my home now, and I love living here. So no wonder why I like this video so much. But regardless of my personal relationship with the city, trust me when I say this is a #mustwatch. Presented last weekend at TEDx Portland, this time-lapse video filmed in Portland, OR and the Columbia Gorge offers a new perspective to the City of Roses.
The 300,000 photos taken from 50 different locations are incredibly beautiful, and the aerial shots are magic. Kudos to Uncage the Soul Productions for this masterpiece.
Portland is a lovely city and the quality of life here is amazing. But if you want to get the full picture, make sure to watch Portlandia as well. You will discover the amusing hipster side that makes PDX so unique and beautiful.
How the Columbia School of Journalism gets Social
I had an opportunity to grab lunch with Sree Sreenivasan, Columbia School of Journalism’s digital media professor and Dean of Students, over a week ago when he was in town for a conference.
Keeping in mind my recent resolution, I feel it’s apropos to share a quick little video interview I filmed while I chatted up Sree at San Francisco’s picturesque and historic Fairmont Hotel.
Journalism is in the throes of a severe recession. That topic by itself is worthy of a post but this post is about institutions like the Columbia School of Journalism that continue to evolve and train the next generation of journalists. Sree, not only epitomizes what the school stands for but also practices the social media he preaches.
Here’s our brief 3 minute chat.
I’ll continue to bring you snippets of my conversations with interesting social media voices in this segment. Stay tuned.
If you found this interesting you may want to follow:
- Sree on Twitter
- Sree’s LinkedIn Profile
- Sree’s new CNET Column
- Columbia School of Journalism on Twitter
Filed under: Social Voices 
Marketers’ Desire for Big Data Often Leads to Big Disappointment
Hunters like to hunt big game. Sports enthusiasts love the big game. Journalists look for the big story. Marketers? Well, more and more marketers are going after something big as well, big data, and, more often than not they are coming away disappointed.
Why? It’s because big data is elusive. It’s massive and it is swirling around us everywhere much like the pollen does everywhere this time of year (in some parts of the US that is). Much like that pollen it seems to land everywhere but it get washed away or pushed aside just as quickly as it falls. A recent study from the Columbia Business School’s Center on Global Brand Leadership and the New York American Marketing Association (as reported by eMarketer) shows these challenges.
No wonder marketers are disappointed. These are not exactly small issues they are talking about here. When half of the respondents can’t even get to the data they need because of sharing issues from their data sources you have something bigger than an issue. It’s a real problem.
Why do you think the sharing problem exists? One of my theories is laziness. Most people don’t want to go above and beyond their required workload and if there needs to be tweaks in how information is gathered and dispersed there could be push-back from those who are not interested in rocking their own boat.
If this kind of culture is allowed to exist then another likely reason is that the further up the food chain you go the less strategic this data can be. Of course, that makes no logical sense since executives should want to find ways to sell more of what they do but that’s not always the case. Some might suggest that the further you climb up the corporate ladder the less informed you are of what is really needed at street level. As a result, the urgency to push for some cultural change is not even felt until it is too late.
So what can marketers do to minimize this disappointment? I would say that they need to start fighting. Not in a mixed martial arts kind of way but they need to raise a fuss in their organizations to show the importance of this data and the need to corral it to make a difference to the bottom line. I am not sure that most marketers like to create too many waves for fear of looking like a “trouble maker”. Seems to me that it would be better to create trouble and risking your position in an attempt to do it better rather than just going with the flow which could lead to end of job based on non-performance.
This does put marketers in somewhat of a rock and a hard place. They are tasked with helping sell products and services to the customers and prospects of the world but the real selling may have to occur around meeting room tables in their own backyard.
I don’t remember being taught this in business school (although may have just forgotten) but it appears as if a valuable skill that any young marketer could learn is the need to be sell ideas internally to get the resources they need. Just settling on budget numbers or limitations passed along by others isn’t going to cut it in an area of such innovation and movement as marketing.
You’ve gotta fight for your right to market, right?
What’s your thoughts?
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Virtualization Startup Virtustream Raises $15M From Intel Capital And Others
Virtualization startup Virtustream has raised $15 million in funding from Intel Capital, Columbia Capital, Noro-Moseley Partners, TDF and QuestMark Capital. This brings Virtustream’s total funding raised to $75 million.
Virtustream provides strategy, integration and managed services utilizing virtualization technologies, and xStream, the company’s cloud provisioning platform. xStream platform was built to address the exacting requirements of enterprise customers as they move their IT and applications to the cloud.
xStream basically allows enterprise customer to access highly elastic cloud computing resources at a consumption-based pricing model, similar to Amazon EC2. The company aims to help enterprises manage private, virtual private, public and hybrid clouds.
The startup says the additional funding will for product development of xStream as well as to expand Virtustream geographic coverage. Virtustream plans to enhance xStream with cloud federation and cloud exchange capabilities combining private clouds, virtual private clouds and public clouds.
Google Apps provider Cloud Sherpas raises $20M, merges with GlobalOne
Salesforce partner GlobalOne and Google enterprise partner Cloud Sherpas are merging together to form a new cloud consulting firm.
GlobalOne will take Cloud Sherpas’ name in this marriage, and the newly merged company will offer the same services for both cloud platforms. Cloud Sherpas also announced a new $20 million round of funding from venture capital firm Columbia Capital that it will use to fuel its rapid growth.
Cloud Sherpas helps enterprise businesses move over to Google Apps, the search engine’s enterprise offering for cloud-based services such as Gmail and Calendar. GlobalOne is a Salesforce partner that helps businesses use Salesforce’s customer relationship management service. Both companies acts as consultants, helping businesses choose and implement the right cloud services.
In mid 2011, Cloud Sherpas acquired Omnetic, a west coast cloud consulting competitor. Last fall the company also acquired two Asian-Pacific Google App resellers, WaveAdept and Devnet.
The cloud industry is huge these days, with Amazon and Oracle in on the action as well. Cloud Sherpas faces competition from Cloud Technology Partners, which also helps companies move into the cloud.
The new round of funding adds to the more than $5 million in angel and venture capital investments Cloud Sherpas has racked up since its founding in 2008. All 261 combined employees from both companies will continue with the new company, which will be based in Atlanta. David Northington, GlobalOne’s chief executive will take the reigns of Cloud Sherpas.
Businessman with cloud apps image via Shutterstock
At Canadian university, a student-owned microbrewery
We’ve seen plenty of brewery related innovations over the years on Springwise, but recently we came across another notable example. The University of British Columbia’s alma mater society is in the process of creating what it says is the world’s first student-owned campus microbrewery.
The UBC Alma Mater Society (AMS) already sells about CAD 1 million a year in alcohol and food at two Vancouver campus outlets, and now there are plans for the University to brew its own beer in a new student union building set to be finished in 2014, according to a report in The Province. Plans call for the new microbrewery to occupy the 1,000-square-foot basement of the new building, groundbreaking for which will take place at the end of February. The brewery is reportedly expected to add between CAD 500,000 and CAD 1 million to the new building’s CAD 103 million building budget. “We hope to pay it off relatively quickly. We go through a lot of beer,” commented the AMS president Jeremy McElroy.
Is there any match more natural than college students and a microbrewery? Campuses and student organizations around the globe, there’s plenty for inspiration here.
Website: www.ams.ubc.ca
Contact: president@ams.ubc.ca
Twitter Analytics Tools, Boxing out Third-party Apps
As first reported by ReadWriteWeb, Twitter plans to launch sophisticated analytics tools in the future. During last week’s social media conference at Columbia University in New York, Manager for News and Journalism Erica Anderson made a comment that the tools will help publishers track the reach of their tweets across the network. In that case, [...]
Who is your customer?
Rule one: You can build a business on the foundation of great customer service.
Rule two: The only way to do great customer service is to treat different customers differently.
The question: Who is your customer?
It’s not obvious.
Zappo’s is a classic customer service company, and their customer is the person who buys the shoes.
Nike, on the other hand, doesn’t care very much at all about the people who buy the shoes, or even the retailers. They care about the athletes (often famous) that wear the shoes, sometimes for money. They name buildings after these athletes, court them, erect statues…
Columbia Records has no idea who buys their music and never has. On the other hand, they understand that their customer is the musician, and they have an entire department devoted to keeping that ‘customer’ happy. (Their other customer was the program director at the radio station, but we know where that’s going…)
Many manufacturers have retailers as their customer. If Wal-Mart is happy, they’re happy.
Apple had just one customer. He passed away last year.
And some companies and politicians choose the media as their customer.
If you can only build one statue, who is it going to be a statue of?