The psychology of pricing IT

I've just started reading a book about the Psychology of Pricing (The Psychology of Price: How to use price to increase demand, profit and customer satisfaction - a review to follow when I'm finished). It's opening gambits are quite pertinant to a conversation I had yesterday about how IT now finds itself in an open market. … Continue reading The psychology of pricing IT

Consumer meets enterprise; enterprise wins

As is so often the case it started with me being a smart-arse... This morning I presented to a select group of CIOs on the topic of consumerized innovation in the enterprise. How, in short words, do IT departments become the go-to people when others in their organisation want to try something new that either relies … Continue reading Consumer meets enterprise; enterprise wins

The value of followers

  A few days ago the legend of tech investing Fred Wilson blogged about an observation of how followers on the SoundCloud service might be able to turn into a rough and ready basis for classifying artists on the service: ... for emerging artists, follower counts on the platform of choice for their media type might … Continue reading The value of followers

What’s going on with modern web design?

For some time now I've been arguing that modern trends in digital design seem to be putting aesthetics  ahead of usability, with designers in a madcap dash to become flatter and more modernist than their peers. A couple of times in the past few days I've seen evidence of this on major media sites. The … Continue reading What’s going on with modern web design?

Book review: The Everything Store

Brad Stone's The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon is a fascinating, kind of authorised, insight into the man behind today's biggest online retail brand. Reading it has taught me a few things: ***** from a one-time Amazon interviewee I never, ever want to work for Amazon (and from my fleeting experience with their … Continue reading Book review: The Everything Store

Polychannel

I wrote recently about how I had been relieved to find out that I'm not alone in understanding the meaning of "omnichannel" when it comes to either customer engagement or marketing. What has been becoming increasingly clear to me, though, is that most of the discussions about how companies should deal with multiple channels of … Continue reading Polychannel

Customer engagement bypass

The world of customer engagement is a funny, almost bi-polar place. On the one hand it should be totally people-centric, as it's the place where companies converse with their customers. Except it's in many cases completely industrial - a world of de-skilled white collar work where the production line, six-sigma approaches of manufacturing have been deployed … Continue reading Customer engagement bypass

Languages and empathy

My second language experiences were somewhat trying, to say the least. At age 11, at the start of secondary school, I started to learn French. Instruction was incredibly grammar-based and either I wasn't pay attention, or I had gone through primary education at a time when English grammar wasn't being taught. I had not the … Continue reading Languages and empathy

Diversity in tech

After my recent ramblings about the lack of diversity of thought within the tech industry, co-incidentally my former Microsoft colleague Ben Nunney is just in the process of launching a new campaigning body called ethicalco.de. The, particularly internetty, world of tech is a bit of a dichotomous mess. On the one hand you have Edward … Continue reading Diversity in tech