Every summer, people head to the grocery store in droves to pick up cartons of cold, creamy ice cream. It's a great way to stay cool. But shoppers will go elsewhere if the frozen dairy treat is crusted with yucky ice crystals--the result of freezing, thawing and refreezing.
The road to Contently Summit is lined with the homeless who live in the shadow of City Hall's towering dome. Along Market Street, the sour stench of urine and feces and unwashed bodies closes in. I turn west on Mission Street making sure to avoid eye contact with the forsaken outliers cursing at the world. Two giant, yellow construction cranes stain the skyline, and I feel a sense of dread at tech gentrification's Second Coming. Skirting iron-barred liquor stores and smoke shops, I finally arrive at Contently Summit, which I recognize by the "private party" sign out front. It is like an island resort serving free drinks and selling timeshares in the midst of a polluted, roiling sea of poverty.
When Nima Asrar Haghighi, director of digital marketing and analytics at MuleSoft, looked around for a predictive lead scoring, he reached back to his technical roots.
The word "innovation" gets bandied about at virtually every tech event. It's the magic key to unlocking great competitive advantage and disrupting entire markets. CIOs are supposed to be masters of innovation.
The marketing tech landscape has been expanding at an impressive clip over the last three years. It now boasts more than 3,000 vendors, including giants such as Adobe and Oracle. It's an ecosystem buzzing with activity -- big fish gobbling up smaller ones, startups trying to survive -- and marketers can easily get disoriented.
Marketers are getting the message that serving the consumer at the mobile moment should be their top priority. So are they investing mightily in mobile marketing tech? Not as much as you might expect.
With startups pouring into the emerging marketing technology market, the simple fact is that not everyone -- not every category -- is going to be a winner. Now Forrester has come up with a startling finding that one of the first marketing technologies to come along and help define this segment is failing to deliver results.
Stipends, reimbursements, credits - there's nothing like money to ignite emotions. Employees want to be paid for using their personal phones and tablets for work, yet companies don't want to subsidize personal use. The question of who pays has made Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) so divisive.
Screen after screen, folder after folder, app after app, the iPhone has become the new enabler for the mobile hoarder. For the New Year, though, many iPhone addicts have vowed to break or at least temper this fixation. If you’re looking for a fresh start, you can begin by deleting these 10 apps.
During a roundtable discussion on the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend, a tech leader candidly offered this bit of real-world insight: "My wife is a nurse. There is no BYOD policy at the hospital. But all of the nurses communicate with each other via SMS, because that's the most efficient way to do their job."
At a New York banking firm, a couple of executives lost their jobs because they didn't report lost phones within 24 hours, in violation of a draconian BYOD policy. At a California law firm, the CIO knew every time one of its lawyers slipped away to play golf, exposed by watchful BYOD management software.
Bill Clinton's run for presidency nearly derailed when rumors surfaced that he had smoked marijuana during his time in England. In an effort to control the damage, Clinton admitted that he indeed experimented with the illegal drug but "didn't inhale." Imagine how history might have changed if a video of a glassy-eyed Clinton with a joint between his lips had shown up on Youtube (which, of course, didn't exist at the time).
There's a reason why marketers keep IT in the dark about marketing tech purchases. The geeks will put the tech vendor through an obscene, jargon-filled laundry list of requirements and testing that will drag the sales cycle for months. Marketers won't be able to get their hands on the technology until it's too late - that is, after competitors beat them to the punch.
In New York City, venerable companies give luxurious corporate cars to power brokers dressed in Armani suits driving down Wall Street. But across the country in San Francisco, you're more likely to see blue jeans-clad execs driving shared Zipcars to their wacky digs in SoMa, or south of Market.
CIOs face unrelenting change as part of the job description. Today they must deal with change coming at them from all fronts. More than ever before, CIOs now have to knock down walls, connect corporate silos, keep customers in their sights, be willing to fail fast and pivot to a more successful strategy -- one that usually involves wielding the power of data analytics.
