My wife and I traveled to Utah via Las Vegas this past week. Since I had some business calls to take care of, I asked my wife if she would not mind driving the beautiful route from Vegas to Utah while I make these calls. She of course agreed and with my Latte in one hand, I pulled out my iPhone, connected my Apple bluetooth headset and started to make my calls. No only was I able to be productive and take care of business but in one of the calls I needed to check an email with an attachment and an Internet web site we were working on. I pulled out my Laptop, connected my Verizon wireless card to it and within seconds I was connected to the Internet and my email. And all of this while my wife is driving.

What a great world we live in today.  Especially as our electrical grid is improving almost daily.

Note: I was going to actually post this topic during that ride but decided it was time to enjoy the view and a conversation with a beautiful lady in the car.

Earlier I posted What have you bought for me lately story here on my blog. My good friend, Tom Breur, Principal of XLNT Consulting in the Netherlands was quick to point out the following fascinating facts. Here is what Tom emailed me and I am publishing it here with his permission. Thanks Tom.

That story actually serves multiple purposes, depending on which point I
am making.

World wide, about 100 Million transactions per day, 50 Billion transaction per year are being screeened online
for fraud, using a Neural Network model (in combination with business
rules). The market leader is Falcon, owned by Fair Isaac, formerly HNC.

Learning points:

1 – Because of the huge volume, the learning is remarkably precise.
Conversely, you need sufficient volume to tease out the signal from the
noise.

2 – You need the “feedback recording” of events in order to make such data
capture a sustainable organisatiopnal activity: credit card companies
“know” when they hit a false positive (they call, and then pass the transaction),
the false negatives are claimed (disputed) after the client receives their
statements. These data are fed back in to the application ot make it
“adaptive”

3 – There are costs for false positives (spoiled surpises, like yours – that’s what everybody expects if you tell the story right which makes it
so much better), and false negatives, fraudylent transations that were
accepted. If you put those in the equation, you get “better” models, that
is, better tuned to the business needs. (another example of asymetric mis
classification costs I always use is credit cards: when accepted +$200
profit, when defaulting -$5000 write-off, therefore you cannot afford to
err very often).

We are working on a client project that involves two people in my organization, the client and another business partner. In order to improve communication and make sure all people involved are in the loop, I requested we all hit “reply all” when responding to emails. Doing so is not just common sense but also good business practice. Well, you guessed right. On numerous occasions both the client and the business partner did not choose to “reply all” and hit the “reply” button only, which would then reply only to the sender and not the others involved. There are of course occasions when this is necessary, especially when you want to reply to the sender, keep it confidential and prevent others from seeing it. But this was not the case here.

An oversight? Perhaps. But if you are not paying attention to important requests that affect proper communication and project success, you are increasing the chances of communication breakdowns and failures. I realize we all may suffer from dementia at times but the fact from my experience is that this situation is ubiquitously common.

The exception to this rule is when someone, erroneously or not, decides to include me and other recipients in their distribution list. Unless the content contains an error that needs to be pointed out, or all recipients need to know that I should not be included in future email updates, I simply hit the “reply” (to sender only) and ask the sender to keep me out (opt-out) of their distribution list.

Since I hopefully got you reading this far and since I know you would agree with me that we all get tremendous amount of emails and spam let me also suggest the following:

1. Reduce the number of emails you are sending and replying to.


2. Keep your email pithy.


3. No email jokes please. Let me share with you that I either delete them without reading or reply to sender with a request to stop sending them to me. This is an example where I choose not to hit “reply all” since I want to reduce the chances of others I do not know on the distribution list deciding to become my “friend” and add me to their distribution list.


4. Which brings me to the last point. When sending an email to people who do not know each other and unless previously agreed by all as expected, use the blind copy (bcc) option when sending your email. This way you are not revealing email addresses of people who would rather remain anonymous. I am one of these people.

Did I follow my rule number 2 of being pithy? Well, this is not an email and you decide.

This was my rant for the day and I do feel better now … I think.

(photo by Tim Niland)

Progress of Music and Technology

The picture above pretty much resembles my LP vinyl records collection I had growing up at my parents’ home. Mine contained roughly 4000 LPs that I managed to purchase and collect from the hard-earned money I made playing my music gigs back then. To make sure my records sounded great, I even purchased a Dual model turntable, which served me well for quite a few years. It was 1972, I was sixteen back then and life was good. Then came the digital CDs, my first Sony Walkman player among the many other players I purchased. As technology advanced, I had to re-invest in this digital revolution and replace the old with the new.

Today, it is my iPod that holds thousands of songs, audio books and movies. This one tiny device, that fits in my pocket, replaces my walls covered with vinyl records, cassettes and CDs as well as the various players: turntable, cassette player, reel tape and walkman I used to own.

I still remember the days when going to the music store and listening to the new records while having to signal to the store clerk, controlling the music, to skip the selection to the next song. Today, at my leisure, I visit my favorite iTunes online store. There, I can instantly listen to and watch excerpts of songs, movies and audio books and immediately purchase, download and listen to the ones I want.

Life is great.

Let me illustrate this progress through pictures:

I still remember this radio at my grandparents home when growing up

Then my first Reel-to-reel tape recorder

And my turntable

With my cassette player

With the thousands of cassettes

And thousands of music CDs

And thousands of vinyl LPs

Replaced with this awesome iPod

And my iTunes where I purchase, download and organize my music

And listen to it all using this outstanding Bose headset

While visiting one of my clients today and walking by their computer room, I noticed that their backup tapes were neatly stacked on the desk next to their server. When taking a closer look I also noticed that they had two tape sizes, the larger to backup their main legacy system and the smaller size to backup their windows server. Interestingly enough, there were only four tapes in each stack and the ones labeled Thursday were missing from each stack. Since today is Friday, I knew exactly what they were doing wrong. I walked into the CEO’s office and here is the conversation that took place:

Me: who is in charge of the backup system?
CEO: That’s Bob.

Me: I noticed only four tapes in the computer room and I was wondering were the missing Thursday tape was?
CEO: (proud and boasting): You see Chad, we have implemented this great backup procedure several years ago. When Bob came in this morning, he brought back with him the nightly backup tapes from Wednesday, that he took home with him last night. He then put last night’s server tape backups in his brief case so he can take them off site. This way we always guarantee that we have one off site set of tapes. (At this point the CEO had a big smile on his face probably waiting for me to acknowledge their great backup procedure.)

Me: May I ask you several questions?
CEO: Sure, go a head.

Me: How important is your backup system?
CEO: If disaster strikes, we would be dead in the water without them with possible terrible consequences to our business.

Me: Does Bob ever take a lunch break?
CEO: Sure every day.

Me: Does he always carry his brief case with him when he leaves for lunch?
CEO: Rarely.

Me: So I guess if a major disaster took place when Bob is out to lunch, such as; fire, water or earthquake, wouldn’t you agree that you would be dead in the water when he returns?
CEO: (speechless, no sound)

Me: Or if a major disaster strikes your business when Bob is at home and for some reason the tapes he has at home are damaged. Wouldn’t you agree this terrible scenario is the same?
CEO: (starting to make a sound)

Me: Would you like to know what Bob needs to change?
CEO: Absolutely.

Me: Keep all tapes off site and have Bob bring with him the tapes with the appropriate label for the day. When he gets into the office, have him put these tapes in the server and pull out the previous night server backup tapes and place them in his brief case to take home with him. This way you still have three days backup tapes off site if disaster strikes.
CEO: THANK YOU! We shall implement immediately.

Final and additional notes:

1. There are remote backup services available that will enable you to backup your system to a remote server eliminating the need for tapes.


2. Most reliable services are superior to backing up to your own tapes but are much more expensive.


3. If disaster strikes, recovery of software and data from these remote systems could take significantly more time than from your own tapes.

Our latest December newsletter for 2007 contains a couple of articles that you may find to be of interest. Blogging in the New Year is an article I recently wrote after attending the Blog World Expo last month in Las Vegas and after getting tremendous amount of questions about leveraging blogs in ones business. I also decided to publish Additional Lessons Leaned From Running My Business article after releasing the first Lessons Learned article and getting many emails requesting I share more such idea.
To also see how successfully some of our clients use their blogs, please visit www.AvivShahar.com and www.ContrarianConsulting.com for such examples.

I would like to wish you a fabulous and safe New Year and may this coming year be an amazing one for you, your family and your business.

Best Regards,

Chad

In my previous post, I talked about the world becoming one big HiFi spot. Well, American Airlines announced their plan to offer high-speed Internet service connection on their flights next year. What a great world we live in and it’s becoming better all the time.

After over 20 years of using and recommending PCs and laptops running Microsoft and Windows, I decided it is time for a change. I am glad to report that I am the proud owner of my new MacBook Pro laptop from Apple and it is absolutely awesome. It came with a beautiful 17” display, 2.33Ghz Intel Core 2 Due processor, 2GB of memory and 160GB of disk drive. All my PC files smoothly transferred over and I did purchase the Microsoft office suite for ease of compatibility. With my new Verizon wireless card, anywhere accessing the Internet seems to be working flawlessly and easier then before and even my wireless networks at home and the office are instantaneously connected to. Although rarely needed, I may even bring up, side by side, my Windows environment when necessary.

So I guess it is true: “An apple a day … keeps a new believer away”

To learn the key differences between integrated and not integrated web solutions and why it may be critical for your distribution business, read my article published this month “”Where is my order? How to avoid disappointing your customers.”