Global Quality Journal

Management Guru Champy: How to Bring Customers Back

Champy is right -- in a nutshell -- loyalty is a two way street. Show your loyalty and appreciation to your customers, and chances are they will come back.

Jim Champy:

I’ve always admired the optimism of economist Paul Samuelson. When asked about the impact of an impending monetary crisis, Samuelson replied, “The sun will rise tomorrow, and the bridges will continue to bear traffic.”

Despite the current world financial crisis, markets will return and customers will come back. Customers may change their buying habits and demand more value in what they buy, but the challenge for companies will be to keep customers coming back.

In researching my latest book, INSPIRE! Why Customers Come Back (FT Press, 2009), I found many examples of companies that have developed exceptional customer loyalty. Not only will these companies survive the current crisis; they will also grow right through it.

Like most business challenges, there is no single formula for maintaining customer loyalty, but the smart companies I’ve studied engage their customers by displaying a higher sense of purpose and being authentic in all they do.

What makes these companies special is their fidelity to long-expressed beliefs. They consistently uphold their own—and their customers’—values in their products, services and actions. [Read the rest]

posted by: gqpartner

Problems With Web Analytics

eMarketer:

Understanding and integrating data

To prove the success of their campaigns, marketers need analytics. But many report frustration with understanding and using the Web analytics tools necessary to prove their success to management, according to “The Web Analytics War Reader Survey” by Unica.

The biggest challenge for marketers was integrating Web analytics with other marketing solutions, cited by 46% of respondents. Verifying the accuracy of data was a problem for 41% of marketers, while 32% reported trouble with analytics that were not comprehensive and 29% complained of budgets that were too small.

What makes analytics accuracy hard to verify? An inability to drill down into the data bothered 42% of respondents. Marketing attribution issues plagued 32% of those polled, and one-quarter complained of problems with campaign tracking codes.

[link]

posted by: gqpartner

2009 Coverity Scan Open Source Report: 11 Billion Lines Of Open Source Code From 280 Open Source Projects Analyzed

PRNewswire:

Coverity Announces the State of Open Source Software Integrity

Releases 2009 Coverity Scan Open Source Report

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 23 /PRNewswire/ -- Coverity(R), the software integrity leader, today released the 2009 Coverity Scan Open Source Report. This report is the result of the largest public-private sector research project focused on open source software integrity. Originally initiated with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the 2009 Coverity Scan Open Source Report details the findings from analyzing more than 11 billion lines of open source code from 280 open source projects over the last three years.

The Coverity open source integrity report is an objective presentation of open source code quality and defect data collected from the Coverity Scan service. The report findings provide a unique opportunity for the business industry to examine coding and software integrity trends from some of the world's most well-used and popular open source packages, including Firefox, Linux, PHP, Ruby and Samba.

Some highlights of the report findings include:

- Overall integrity, quality and security of open source software are
improving.

The Coverity Scan service measured a 16 percent reduction in static
analysis defect density over the past three years among participating
projects.

- Open source developers are actively improving software.

Since 2006, more than 11,200 defects in open source programs have been
eliminated as a result of using the Coverity Scan service. Total
developer support has increased with more than 180 projects having
active developers scanning and fixing software defects discovered by
Scan.

- Projects continue to advance up Coverity Certified "Integrity Rungs"
from year to year.

In 2009, the number of Rung 1 certified projects increased 32 percent
from 2008 and doubled on Rung 2 in the same time period. OpenPAM, Ruby,
Samba and tor are the first projects to begin Coverity Integrity Rung 3
certification. Rungs are certification levels indicating high-integrity
open source software.

- Most common defect types are holding steady.

The most common defect types across participating open source projects
are still NULL Pointers, resource leaks and unintentional ignored
expressions.

"High-integrity open source software is critical, especially given Gartner's estimate that at least 80 percent of commercial software will contain open source code by 2012,"(1) said David Maxwell, Coverity open source strategist. [link]

posted by: gqpartner

Performance Of Data Virtualization in SOA

Good overview, clear articulation of potential performance problems, and outline of solutions. Read the whole thing.

OpenWeb Developer's Journal:

High-Performance Data Services with Smart Caching

Reduce potential performance bottlenecks and ensure timely delivery of information

By Avtandil Garakanidze

High-Performance Data Services with Smart Caching — One of the main concerns among IT architects planning an implementation of an enterprise data virtualization layer in their service-oriented architecture (SOA) or overall information system is the performance of the participating data services. Performance becomes particularly important in real- or near-real-time environments as well as in environments with highly distributed data sources where network latency cannot be controlled. [link]

posted by: gqpartner

Most Traffic to UK News Sites Is Coming From U.S.

paidContent.org:

[link]

posted by: gqpartner

444.3 Million Broadband Subscribers; 250 Million Wireless Subscriber by The End of 2009

GIGAOM:

“We have entered this new era where essentially everything is on all the time,” Alan Meier, a senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, recently told The New York Times. And increasingly, everything is connected to the Internet. The biggest impact is being felt by the electricity grid. The power consumed by servers alone doubled between 2000 and 2005 to about 123 billion kilowatt-hours. Data center power use is likely to increase another 76 percent by 2010, according to Jonathan Koomey, a researcher at Lawrence Berkeley and Stanford University.

I can’t imagine the energy implications of what’s coming next. There are 444.3 million broadband subscribers in the world, according to the Broadband Forum, and that number is only going to increase over the next few years as emerging telecom economies such as India, Brazil and Russia ramp up their Internet efforts. A whopping 250 million people are going to connect to the Internet wirelessly by the end of 2009. Just imagine the bandwidth and computing horsepower needed if all of them started streaming movies from Netflix, listening to music by visiting Spotify, and sharing videos and photos via Facebook. [Read]

posted by: gqpartner

Web 2.0 Sites: 95% Of User Generated Content Either Spam Or Malicious

ZDNet:

Web 2.0 sites that allow users to create content, are increasingly used to carry out a wide range of attacks, according to a new security study.

Released Tuesday, Websense's State of Internet Security, Q1 - Q2, 2009 report noted that attackers are focusing their attention on interactive Web 2.0 elements. Some 95 percent of user-generated comments on blogs, message boards and in chatrooms are either spam or malicious, the security vendor warned. [Read]

posted by: gqpartner

Due To Open Source Start-Ups Need Less Money

Matt Asay at Cnet News makes a number of important points on the nature of today's start-ups. One key point is that due to open source software start-ups simply need less capital to start and to thrive:

VCs raised billions of dollars during technology's boom, and it's unclear where they can now profitably invest those dollars. IBM, Oracle, Cisco Systems, and Microsoft can buy only so many companies. The industry consolidation that paid big returns to VCs earlier this decade has left far fewer potential buyers, with an anemic IPO market to provide an alternative outlet.

The situation has the potential to get worse. As IBM's Savio Rodrigues writes, Oracle has been hit hard in its middleware business as enterprise IT seeks to minimize the damage from Oracle and SAP price hikes in applications. This could make it harder for the company to afford acquisitions down the road.

In venture investing, small is the new big. Smaller, strategic funds like O'Reilly Alpha Tech Ventures can score big on a "base hit" $20 million exit, given its seed-stage investments of $500,000 to $1 million. Meanwhile, a large firm such as Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers will struggle to break even on such an exit, given that its investments need to be much bigger because its funds are so much bigger.

Venture firms have compensated by throwing money at weaker companies that arguably shouldn't get funded. This isn't sustainable. If exit options are dwindling for good companies, they're nonexistent for bad ones.

Compounding the problem for VCs, not only are exits likely to shrink in the new technology economy, but start-ups need less cash to thrive due to low-cost open-source and cloud infrastructure. This is true for most start-ups, but particularly so for companies that sell open-source software. [link]

posted by: gqpartner

Facebook Cash-Flow Positive

The question on our mind: how does the news about Facebook being cash positive squares with the previous analyst observations on the fact that they are in a capital expenditures heavy business where EBITDA is meaningless?

posted by: gqpartner

Facebook accounts hacked for $100

The Tech Herald:

by Steve Ragan - Sep 18 2009, 17:20

Facebook accounts hacked for $100. New customers get a free toaster!

If you've ever wanted to crack open the Facebook account of an ex, or a boss that you just loathe, then there is a service that will do just that, for as little as $100 USD. Ok, no not really, but it will take your money. That fact is certain, according to Luis Corrons of Panda Security.

Corrons, with some help from another researcher at Panda, Sean-Paul Correll, discovered a Facebook Hacking business that promises, “any Facebook account can be hacked.” The cost for the Facebook compromise is $100 USD, paid by Western Union.

“The service’s real purpose may be hacking Facebook accounts as they say, or profiting from those that want to try the service. In any case, the Web page is very well designed. It is easy to contract the service and become either the victim of an online fraud, or a cyber-criminal and accomplice in identity theft,” Corrons said in a statement.

“Once an intruder hacks into a Facebook account, all personal data published on the site can be stolen. Similarly, those accounts can also be used to send malware, spam or other threats to the victim’s contacts. In the case of celebrities of other well-known entities, they can be used to defame the account holder, spread information in their name, etc. In any event, this is criminal activity.” [Read more]