In a stinky Science development, researchers have discovered that using alternative types of fertilizers can cut back on greenhouse gas emissions, at least in one part of the US. Nitrogen fetilizers are often necessary to yielding sufficient crops, but their use leads to the release of nitrous oxide, a major atmosphere enemy. Fertilizer use is one reason an estimated seventy-eight percent of America’s nitrous oxide emissions come from agriculture. But scientists have compared those emissions with newly developed fertilizers formulated with “controlled release” polymer-coated…
Selected by mcc
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Holy Kaw!
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Why the right fertilizer can cut greenhouse gases
20 Nov 2009 | 4:32 pm -
Capturing water in sloooow mooootion
20 Nov 2009 | 3:12 pmSome things just look cooler in slow motion. Jell-O? Totally better. A punch to the face? Way more awesome. Photographer Martin Waugh spends his day watching single droplets of water, capturing the tiny and beautiful splashes with super slo-mo video. Check out the video from Discovery and you’ll definitely never look at a leaky sink the same way again. Science geekiness galore. Permalink | Leave a comment » -
Netherlands to charge drivers by the kilometer
20 Nov 2009 | 2:31 pmThe Netherlands is proposing charging drivers by the kilometer. Other taxes would be eliminated. Vehicles would be tracked by GPS. Doesn’t this make sense? Get rid of all the other taxes and tolls and simply pay-as-you-go. Or is it even simpler to use only the fuel tax to pay for roads? Think any of this could ever happen in the U.S.? Netherlanders are very practical people. Permalink | Leave a comment » -
Rosetta Project stores 13,000 pages and 1,500 languages on 2.8" analog disk
20 Nov 2009 | 1:50 pmThere’s little doubt that 100’s of languages will disappear in the next hundred years. The loss of these languages is a loss of human history and cultural diversity. That’s where the Rosetta Project comes in. As part of the Long Now Foundation, the Rosetta Project plans to archive thousand’s of languages for millennia. A first step is the creation of a durable storage medium that can easily be deciphered in the future—just like the Rosetta Stone. The prototype Rosetta Disk is a 2.8” (7.1cm) disk made of nickel. The disk is housed in a stainless steel… -
Tech nerds take it all off
20 Nov 2009 | 12:28 pmA techie strip club would probably feature plenty of outlets, free wi-fi and dancers flinging off Geekologie-brand undies to a song of remixed iPhone ringtones. Calm down, pervs, there’s no plans in the works for nekkid techie discotheque (that I know of), but, in the meantime, get your dweeb kicks with the Nude Tech Calendar 2010. London’s top new media entrepreneurs stepped out from behind their computers and stripped down for the 24 picture, limited edition calendar. Proceeds go to Take Heart India, a charity that raises funds for IT education programs for blind and disabled…
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Seth's Blog
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The amateur scientist (that's us)
20 Nov 2009 | 2:41 amMany people buy a car (probably their single biggest discretionary purchase) based on slamming a door, kicking a tire and judging the handshake of a salesperson.We choose a surgeon based on the carpeting in his office and a politician by his hair cut.During the first week of swine flu vaccines in New York, most parents (more than half!) chose to keep their kids out of the program.Interviewed parents said things like, "I'm not sure it's safe," and "I wanted to see if it affected other kids..."No mention of longitudinal studies or long-term side effects. No science at all, really, just rumors… -
Embracing lifetime value
19 Nov 2009 | 2:46 amIf you walk into a company-owned cell phone store to sign up for a contract, what are you worth?Given the huge gross margins at AT&T and Verizon and the standard two-year contract, I think it's easy to figure on more than $2000 in lifetime value.If you ran a business where a customer represented an additional $2,000 in profit, how would you staff? How long would you make someone wait? If staff costs $25 an hour, how long would that extra person take to pay off?Few businesses understand (really understand) just how much a customer is worth. Add to this the additional profit you get from a… -
Some books for November
18 Nov 2009 | 12:00 pmRandom thoughts from all over for those of us hungry for new ways to think. This month's list is here. The previous list was blogged in September. -
The reason they want you to fit in...
18 Nov 2009 | 2:03 amis that once you do, then they can ignore you. -
Breakthroughs and drips
17 Nov 2009 | 2:25 amThere are only two ways to win in the market.You can create a breakthrough. A promotion so powerful that people can't help but engage. An innovation so remarkable, people can't help but talk about it. A pricing strategy or ad campaign that breaks the mold and is worthy of attention. This takes huge guts and substantial investment.Or you can win with consistent benefits, delivered over time. You win by incrementally earning share, attention and trust. This might take years.Almost all marketing attempts to do neither of these, and of course, fail. Painless and quick are rarely associated with…
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Smashing Magazine
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The Big Showcase Of Online T-Shirt Stores
20 Nov 2009 | 5:22 amT-shirts, as you’ll surely agree, play a big part in the design world. Sometimes, we designers don’t get the kinds of projects we want, and so we are left to apply our creativity in some other way, many of us opting to submit graphics in t-shirt competitions or printing them ourselves and selling them through shopping cart systems such as BigCartel. In this post, we bring you a showcase of online t-shirt store Web designs, all of which serves as a great source of inspiration for Web designers, graphic designers and even illustrators.You may be interested in the… -
The Death of The Boring Blog Post?
19 Nov 2009 | 6:34 amLet’s face it: the classic blog post is boring. Barring the text and images, each one generally has the exact same layout. We see little originality from one post to the next. Of course, consistency and branding are extremely important to consider when designing a website or blog, but what about individuality? Does a blog post about kittens deserve the same layout as one about CSS hacks?Too Easy?Because installing a WordPress theme is so easy, anyone can have a blog up and running in minutes. While this is great, and we now have a wealth of blogs on countless topics, perhaps… -
Designing CSS Buttons: Techniques and Resources
18 Nov 2009 | 7:23 amButtons, whatever their purpose, are important design elements. They could be the end point of a Web form or a call to action. Designers have many reasons to style buttons, including to make them more attractive and to enhance usability. One of the most important reasons, though, is that standard buttons can easily be missed by users because they often look similar to elements in their operating system. Here, we present you several techniques and tutorials to help you learn how to style buttons using CSS. We’ll also address usability.Links vs. buttonsBefore we explain how… -
Designing Social Interfaces: Overview and Practical Techniques
17 Nov 2009 | 8:20 amThe standard approach to interface design is to craft a channel that allows you to easily and efficiently control hardware or software; it’s all about the interaction between people and computers. But today, the two entities on each side of the user interface are changing: it’s no longer about people interacting with computers, but rather about people interacting with people through computers.This is the nature of the social Web. Social news websites, message boards, social networks, online stores and blogs all have some sort of user interaction going on, whether… -
Brushing Up On Photoshop’s Brush Tool
16 Nov 2009 | 9:54 amWhen laid by a learned hand, brush strokes can convey a sense of energy, tactility and humanness. These qualities speak to your audience’s subconscious, whispering ideas that words alone can’t convey. In the digital realm, a website with beautiful brushwork is a welcome break from the stark precision of most corporate websites.Mastering the digital brush is by no means easy. It carries the same difficulties as the sable brush hidden at the bottom of your art bin. In fact, the difficulty is multiplied by the disconnect between the hand and monitor. Developing Photoshop…
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Church of the Customer Blog
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New company, new history
18 Nov 2009 | 1:14 amWhen Jackie Huba and I decided eight years ago to start a company, we envisioned it as a consulting firm that would help clients create customer evangelists. It was March 2001. We'd both just left the web development company we had worked at for three years. Online advertising was king then, but we wanted to explore why some brands experienced strong word of mouth while others didn't. We wanted to understand what fueled the evangelism, how it happened, and how could we help others do the same. We started with a website and an email newsletter in an era that could only be described as Before… -
Advertising without advertising
12 Nov 2009 | 12:16 pmSometimes a movie quote is the best way to capture what you're all about. -
Kicking out unwanted customers
30 Oct 2009 | 10:35 am"Don't talk during the movie or we will take your ass out." If you've been to an Alamo Drafthouse, the movie theater chain in Austin, Texas, then you've seen that semi-serious warning couched in a fun "public service announcement" before a movie showing. Theater founder Tim League knows that talkers mar the movie-watching experience for everyone else, and he does not tolerate them -- even if they punch the windshield of his car.See, Tim was a customer recently at one of his theaters. A nearby loud-talker was asked by a theater waiter to keep it down. The customer protested, loudly, demanding… -
Twitter: the killer app for customer service
22 Oct 2009 | 10:31 am"Hello, this is Sam Kaufman from the AT&T Internet Executive Office, and I am calling about your tweets."That's what I heard yesterday after posting a few tweets about my less-than-stellar customer service experience with an AT&T DSL technical support rep. The rep was trying to diagnose my DSL problems and after telling me to stay on the line for 10 minutes, he never returned after 30 minutes. I hung up. He never called back.With a few hours of my AT&T tweet, @ATTJohnathon, a customer care rep on Twitter contacted me, asking if he could help. I DM'ed him my account number as he… -
Fees are penalties. Always.
19 Oct 2009 | 1:24 pmIt's a wonder why some businesses can't grasp this. Consider the U.S. airlines last month: Southwest reported an 8.8% increase in revenue passenger miles. Its load factor, the percentage of seats that were filled, increased 11% from a year ago, to 74.7% — a big increase for a month in which schools reopen and summer vacation travels stop. JetBlue saw a 9.8% jump in passenger miles. Its load factor rose about 1% from the prior year, to 77.6%. Compare those numbers to other airlines. Delta: Down 5% on its mainline operation. It also cut capacity by 5%. American: Down 2.6% domestically. It cut…
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Service Untitled
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You’re Closer to Reward Travel Than You Think?
17 Nov 2009 | 11:28 amI have two frequent flier accounts with Continental Airlines. One is an account that my parents opened for me when I was maybe five or six years old and another is one that I opened myself a few years ago when I started traveling pretty regularly. About two years ago, I found the account my parents had opened for me and transferred all of my frequent flier miles to that account. However, the newer account (which now has no miles) is still open and active. As such, Continental emails me about it. The screenshot to the left is from an email they sent me yesterday. I haven’t use this… -
Customer Escalations and You
6 Nov 2009 | 12:13 pmMany customer service managers (especially in small to mid-size businesses) spend quite a bit of time handling something I always refer to as “escalations”. Escalations are usually from angry/vocal/important customers who are having a problem and are going “up the chain”. The escalations might come down from the CEO or the President, across from PR or the Internet, or up from floor supervisors and regular agents. Where exactly escalations originate from depends a lot on the particular company and how its customer service organization is setup. The question is: is it… -
Exam Room Flags for Customer Service
28 Oct 2009 | 10:53 amIf you’ve been to a doctor’s office in the past, you’ve probably noticed those colorful things outside of each exam room. I recently learned these are called exam room signal flags. I have no idea what each color means (and I imagine they vary from office to office), but the idea of them is interesting and appliciable to other industries as well. The flags do just what their names imply – provide signals to doctors and other personnel about what needs to be done or what’s going on. If a patient is in the room waiting for a doctor, I imagine they have a flag color… -
Call Abandonment Basics
21 Oct 2009 | 10:57 amPhone systems (also called IVRs or PBXes) usually measure something referred to as a call abandonment rate. How exactly the call abandonment rate is defined varies from company to company and from phone system to phone system, but in general, the inbound call abandonment rate tracks the number of people who hang up before they start talking to an employee. (There are call abandonment rates for outbound calls that telemarketing companies track, but that’s a different thing entirely.) Some companies actually strive for high call abandonment rates (a higher proportion of people who hang… -
Customer Service: Better or Worse?
15 Oct 2009 | 6:45 pmThe ‘50’s version of Dilbert was a very popular comic strip called Mutt and Jeff. The clever “tongue in cheek” style made many a reader chuckle over their eggs and bacon before rushing off to the office. One strip had Mutt and Jeff enjoying a bit of verbal sparring. “If everyone saw like I did,” boasted Jeff, “Everyone would want my wife.” “If everyone saw like I did,” quipped Mutt, “No one would want your wife.” It provided a humorous lesson on the “eye of the beholder” side of understanding relationships and experiences. When someone asks us, “Why has…
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Profitability Through Human Capital
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How Does HR Add to Profits?
18 Nov 2009 | 6:17 amSometimes, I get asked a question that really makes me stop and think. I have had the pleasure of teaching and speaking at least 25-30 times per year. A few weeks ago, I was teaching an HR Essentials class. We were discussing how HR adds value to the organization when a very smart young lady asked me, "Well how does HR add to profits?" I believe she cut to the chase...adding value really means adding dollars to the bottom line. So, of course I threw the question out to the class and asked for their input. Here is what they said: 1) HR prevents lawsuits 2) HR… -
Say "Goodbye" to Engagement Programs and "Hello" to Engaged Companies
10 Nov 2009 | 5:48 pmLast week we discussed why "Good Programs Fail." Thank you for the your comments on the subject. This week, I would like to discuss why engagement is not a program, but a key organizarional outcome.Employee engagement has been getting a lot of press lately. Companies are in uncharted territory with this economy so some are being reactive and trying anything to survive. (program of the month).I would argue that your employees are where your revenues are made and lost. Specifically, where employees interact with the customer and then the customer decides whether to buy, re-buy, refer or seek… -
Why Do Good Programs Fail?
2 Nov 2009 | 12:35 pmWe have so many programs at work. The list is long and varied... 1) Change Management Programs 2) Employee Engagement Programs 3) Team Building Programs 4) Customer Service Programs 5) Six Sigma Programs 6) Pay for Performance Programs 7) Putting Customers First Programs 8) Going Green Programs 9) Casual Day Friday Programs (attempt at humor, not serious about this one) 10) Wellness Programs 12) Process Improvement Programs And so on.....and so on. I have to ask myself, why do well intentioned programs like the ones above fail to deliver on their original promises? In case there… -
Is it Change Management or Strategy Implementation?
27 Oct 2009 | 8:50 amSo many times we are asked to address a change issue with a client. Every time when we as consultants do our homework we find that yes a change is occurring but a program is not the answer. As an HR professional now for more years that I would like to admit, I have had a fundamental issue with change management. It’s not an event that we can express on a coffee mug or a t-shirt, it is about a new desired business result. Either we are looking to increase revenue, increase profit, or to be more efficient. To be able to SUSTAIN any of these results, doesn’t change have to be continuous? And… -
What Are You Doing to Engage Your Employees, Today?
20 Oct 2009 | 6:29 pmWe had the pleasure of attending the SHRM-Atlanta Fall Conference this week. At the conference, we had the opportunity to ask HR practitioners what they were doing inside their companies to engage their employees. Check out the YouTube videos below:The HR professionals we interviewed discussed a common theme of "making connections" regarding employee engagement. The examples are summarized below:1) Make sure employees know they are valued. (Connect with employees on an emotional level)2) Take care of your employees, so they take care of your customers. (Happy employee-happy customer…
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Great Demo!
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Mikogo – New Web Collaboration Tool
16 Nov 2009 | 3:40 pmMikogo (www.mikogo.com) is providing a free web collaboration tool, for sessions with up to 10 users. My understanding is that they currently support Windows and have Mac support in beta testing.Free? Yes – they are offering Mikogo free, in the hope and expectation that customers will move up to their for-sale BeamYourScreen offerings.Mikogo appears to offer many of the “standard” capabilities you’d expect for Remote Demos – including, I believe, the ability to annotate over the live application being demonstrated. This appears to be part of their “Whiteboard” functionality –… -
DimDim NOT Recommended for Remote Demos
11 Nov 2009 | 12:05 pmAnother new player to the web collaboration tools space is DimDim (www.dimdim.com), who offer a range of web presentation and webinar tools. While part of their positioning is as a low-cost provider, which can be attractive, they do not offer the ability to annotate over a live application (e.g., the product you want to demo). This is an important limitation which prevents me from recommending it for use with Remote Demos.They do offer a free version of their tool, but I’ve yet to see it in use. Interestingly, I was unable to find out if they support annotations over live apps from… -
Great Demo! Implementation Tactic - Weekly
9 Nov 2009 | 2:10 pmFor Presales Managers:Hold weekly progress calls with the presales team to encourage and uncover success stories, Illustrations, tips, etc. and to reinforce the key ideas. Teams that do this (or similar) report excellent success with the method for individuals and appear to achieve high implementation rates for their teams as a whole.This shouldn’t be a surprise… Management support (particularly first-line management) is typically very important for achieving substantive change with personal skills and processes. Management support, however, can be passive or active. Passive support is… -
Manager “Chaperone” for Demo Prep Calls
6 Nov 2009 | 7:39 amHere’s a terrific implementation tactic, suggested by a Great Demo! Workshop manager: Join pre-demo discussions (via phone, for example) between sales people and their presales counterparts as a “chaperone”. The idea is to both facilitate the conversation between the sales and presales participants, and to guide the discussion as necessary or appropriate.Additionally, this approach can help identify those sales people who need more “encouragement” to gather discovery and qualification information that might be needed before a delivering a demo. Similarly, this tactic helps to train… -
Public Great Demo! Workshop – San Francisco Bay Area – November 19
5 Nov 2009 | 9:05 am[Warning: Shameless self-promotion alert!]In conjunction with the 280 Group, we are offering an Open (public) 1-Day Great Demo! Workshop in San Jose, California on November 19th.You can find more information including an overview, agenda, location and pricing at the 280 Group website. Registration for the event is available here.This is a terrific opportunity for individuals or small groups.[And this should be the last posting for this event on this blog...]
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TechCrunch
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RealTime CrunchUp: The Rise Of Geo Streams
20 Nov 2009 | 4:36 pmToday at the RealTime CrunchUp, representatives from some of the top companies involved in location based services came together to talk about the current state and future of geo-based services. I’ll be taking some notes about the top themes to come up during the panel, and we’ll have a full transcript available a few minutes after the panel concludes. Participating in the panel were: Matt Galligan, co-Founder of SimpleGeo Ryan Sarver, Director of Platform at Twitter Tristan Walker, VP of Business Development at Foursquare Steve Lee, Group Product Manager Google Maps for Mobile… -
Rippol’s Video Discovery Engine Launches To The Public
20 Nov 2009 | 3:22 pmRippol, the video discovery site that combines both complex algorithms with user suggestions to surface interesting content, has launched to the public at today’s RealTime CrunchUp. We recently took an in-depth look at the service, but for those who haven’t seen it yet, here’s a recap: Rippol looks at your video watching activity on the site, as well as that of your friends and people in your demographic. It then looks at meta data from video content ingested from sites like YouTube and Hulu, and uses machine learning to identify videos it thinks you’ll like. From… -
RealTime CrunchUp: Media Streams As The Ultimate Marketing Vehicle
20 Nov 2009 | 3:13 pmAt our Real-Time CrunchUp today in San Francisco, we are hosting a panel titles “Media Streams: Are These The Utlimate Marketing Vehicle?” Panelists include Sean Rad, CEO of Ad.ly; Ryan Amos, co-founder of DailyBooth; Jesse Engle, CEO of CoTweet; Robin Bechtel, a celebrity agent and Philip Nelson, SVP of strategic development for NewTek. Below find my live notes (paraphrased): ES: What are celebrities doing to leverage the social streams? RB: I oversee Britney Spears’ digital properties and we are using Twitter to build up buzz around her concerts. Using Twitter, we were… -
VideoLobby Wants To Help You Create Your Own Custom-Branded Live Webcasts
20 Nov 2009 | 3:03 pmToday at the RealTime CrunchUp we saw the launch of VideoLobby, a new service founded by Peter Urban that’s looking to make it easier to create professional-looking webcasts, complete with custom branding. The service is an extension of Urban’s “sales software for real people” service Smibs. Urban says that while some other services offer embeds, you’re generally responsible for building your own branded site to insert those in. That’s where VideoLobby comes in: the site helps you build your own custom video portal, and then allows you to include streams… -
FlixUp Is Rotten Tomatoes For Twitter Movie Talk
20 Nov 2009 | 2:56 pmRotten Tomatoes is a great site because it takes all the movie reviews from around the web and condenses them into an easy-to-understand aggregate score. But let’s be honest: Most movie reviewers suck. Why not instead rely on people in your social circle to recommend movies to you? That’s the idea behind FlixUp. This new iPhone app unveiled at our Realtime CrunchUp event in San Francisco today essentially scans Twitter for what people are saying about a movie and shows you a rating based on that. It can return a general score from across Twitter, or the tweets about the movie from…
