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We’ve seen 3D printed clothes, 3D printed car parts, and 3D printed organs. Even small establishments have been made using this technique. But erecting an entire building, complete with the furniture inside it, using a 3D printer isn’t something you see every day.
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The death of fixed phones is near. But there’s one place on the planet where this is more obvious than anywhere else: Africa. Landlines are almost nowhere to be found south of the Sahara desert, while cell phones are anything but scarce, according to the results of a Pew Research Center survey of seven African nations. But despite the cell phone’s increased popularity in Africa, far less people own a smartphone there than in the United States.
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According to the “Enterprise Unified Communications and Voice Equipment” report by IHS Infonetics, global enterprise PBX revenue fell 6 percent in the first quarter of 2015 (year-over-year), as more and more businesses are said to have discovered the cloud.
The cloud is on the rise. Just shy of 80% of organizations are seriously considering adoption in one form or another, and almost 40% have already implemented cloud products and services in their operations. But according to research carried out by International Data Corporation (IDC) on 19,080 worldwide IT and LOB (line of business) respondents, mature Cloud-centric organizations are hard to come by.
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What is social networking if not a giant fulcrum of communication? Even when we claim to be posting photos just to chronicle your trips, we all light up with joy when we see those virtual thumbs pointing upwards.
Posts and pokes, likes and dislikes, comments and replies, instant messaging, group messaging, forums, communities – all these mediums have one big thing in common: sharing information.
Remember the 90s, when cell phones were no longer a product of science-fiction? Brick-sized, with black & white screens and pixels the size of a walnut, these devices were state-of-the-art back then. They were also scarce.
Even in the late 90s, people could hardly afford one, let alone multiple units. But fast forward to 2015, mobile phones are not just hundreds of times faster and more versatile, they’re also vastly more affordable. And they’re so popular that one simply isn’t enough anymore.
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Businesses sell products, services and information to other businesses much in the same way they sell to individual customers. There are more similarities between B2B (business-to-business) and B2C (business-to-consumer) than you would care to imagine. For example, fruitful B2B commerce relies on emotion. Just like you appreciate good design or a catchy ad, so do companies like to be touched deep down inside before spending on services, or products in bulk.
Driving adoption of anything within an organization is difficult enough, because people tend to resist change. Even more so when it comes to all-new collaboration tools. So how do you ensure their buy-in and ongoing support for the tech? Easy. With some good old fashioned education.
It’s crucial not to take deployment lightly. We say this from experience. If you hand the management department a flimsy brochure or a demo video that just scratches the surface of the product, it might do more harm than good. Sometimes higher-ups may be even more resilient in the face of change than the workforce on the ground floor. When it comes to communication & collaboration tools, knowing the numerous benefits of each feature in part lets you align those features perfectly with your business.
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Quick: what are your staffers doing at this very second? If you’re like most organizations, there’s a good chance many of your staffers are attending to personal matters. But who says it’s acceptable just because it happens in other offices too?
According to a recent survey of 2,000 office workers conducted by AtTask and Harris Interactive – experts in management and market research – employees at various firms said they only dedicate 45 percent of their time to getting stuff done. The remainder (55%) of the time gets spent sifting through emails, or in meetings that could easily be replaced by conference calls. Also on the list of common pastime activities was “miscellaneous interruptions.”
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When you hear contact center agent, the first thing that pops to mind is an employee confined to a cubicle with a PC and a headset. However, these days, that same job can be practiced out in the open with a cell phone. And starting this year, the practice is gaining some well deserved traction.
It’s not just the contact center staff that needs newer, more versatile tools to get their job done. The same goes for knowledge workers, roaming experts, back-office personnel, part-time or overflow agents, and even account managers. Everyone must collaborate to tackle customer issues, or to take full advantage of opportunities as they arise. However, for customer-facing employees it’s critical to have the flexibility to take calls anywhere, anytime, and on any device.