All work and no play makes us dull guys and gals. Here to help is AFWD, or Action Figure Work Day, a newly-spawned Internet tradition that hopes to make life in the office less tedious.
Geeks don’t have a hall of fame like Hollywood stars do, but if they did, Randal Ham would probably top that list. Ham, who is based in Odessa, Texas, unintentionally created Action Figure Work Day when he decided to bring his White Raven action figure to the office one day.
You’d think that a simple enunciation like “Unified Communications” is pretty straightforward, right? After taking my first plunge into the subject, my answer was “I beg to differ.” While UC is certainly alive and kicking, it strikes me as still in its early fledging stages. Strictly from a technical standpoint, it was doable a decade ago. So why is it so fragmented?
It started with a tweet…
Most people try to sell to anyone with a pulse. Big mistake. Selling to no-targets costs a lot & is usually non-repetitive. Focus!
This made me think of something all companies, big or small, older or younger face every day. The combination of finding the right customers and creating replicable selling scenarios makes all the difference.
There is a lot of debate regarding crypto currency – some think it is the future of money, others strongly disagree, and the debate does not seem to come to an end. I personally have a fundamental problem with them. I was tempted a couple of times to try to solve the problem myself, but I doubt that I will have the time and focus to do it. Maybe someone can pick it up from here.
This is a video we’ve shot two weeks ago about VoipNow Mobile. Please excuse my performance 🙂 VoipNow Mobile is at the beginning of its life, there is still much to do and we know it. But at the end of the day, we want our partners to be able to deploy their infrastructure on over 90% BYOD.
Why? Traditionally, BYOD is associated with high risks, poor compliance and so on. Considering the problems our customers face with business desktop IP phones, we believe that properly done BYOD can provide a better experience not only for end-users, but also for specialized IT personnel. While we do not know precisely how many support cases are associated with client issues on the service provider’s end, we know that about 20% of our support tickets contain various phone client problems, starting with provisioning and ending with illegal equipment usage. It’s a big opportunity to hunt these down.
Apparently a lot of software engineers fail to understand the importance of product management and most product managers are well aware about this. Unfortunately, most of the time, they blame the engineers’ education for the lack of vision, while in fact there is a much simpler explanation – engineers have witnessed product management failures once too many times. Truth be told, relatively few businesses value product management, even if they hire one product manager for every three engineers.
In a previous article, we told you about our monthly meetups called Labors of Hercules. Last December, our guest was top tennis player Raluca Olaru and our questions to her, limitless 🙂
Raluca Olaru is a Romanian tennis player, currently ranked #54 by WTA (Women’s Tennis Association). She is one of the first tennis players sprouting from the ’90s generation to make headlines world-wide. Raluca holds 9 singles titles and 6 doubles titles won in various ITF (International Tennis Federation) circuits. She further holds 4 doubles titles at the WTA circuits.
Recently, a friend asked me to talk to his son who will soon be a fresh IT graduate. His son received tempting job offers from three companies and he was kind of puzzled as to what company to choose at the start of his career.
After discussing with the young man for about ten minutes, I was a little puzzled myself, because he was not actually looking for advice, but for valid reasons not to join any of those companies.
Workers today have more communication tools to choose from than ever. That includes Unified Communications, which integrates voice, video, instant messaging, conferencing, faxing, and more – all on one platform. However, employees often receive little or no training to reap the benefits of using these innovative tools. Many organizations end up removing training from their budgets when making such large technology shifts – believing that people should inherently know how to use and why they should use these tools. But this decision to remove training and consulting can be a costly choice for enterprises, as the technology won’t be used to its fullest potential. This could increase the total implementation cost ten folds.
Now that 2015 has just started, it’s the perfect time to reflect on how Unified Communications evolved in 2014. And, as our co-founder put it, there are a lot of things to look back and even more to look for in the new year.
Photo by Harpal Singh on Unsplash
