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  • Want to be part of the most meaningful Customer Experience conversation today?

    - by Tony Berk
    v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Today's entry is written by Chris Warner, Director, Product Strategy at Oracle. By now you’ve undoubtedly seen the blogs and announcements about Oracle OpenWorld. And perhaps you’ve also seen the news about OpenWorld’s newest sister event: Oracle Customer Experience (CX) Summit @ OpenWorld. Oracle CX Summit was created to be the most meaningful CX event, to be truly unique, to serve as the place to discover what it takes and what it really means to put the customer at the center of your business success. One long-time Oracle customer, when told about the Oracle CX Summit, put it this way: ‘This makes me rethink how I think about Oracle and Customer Experience’. Listen to what she heard and you be the judge. We believe Customer Experience (‘CX’) is a movement, not just the latest ‘IT’ tech trend. CX isn’t something you can simply ‘install’. CX is one of the most strategic initiatives an organization can undertake. Customer Experience is about connecting with an organization’s most important asset, the customer, and the critical role that connection has to an organization’s success. And there’s never been a bigger gathering of the smartest CX minds, most successful CX companies, and innovative CX examples than Oracle CX Summit. Take Subaru, for example. The company fully embraced the CX opportunity and their CX leadership will be on stage at the Oracle CX Summit to share their CX journey. They radically changed the way they interact with their customers, empower their employees, and differentiate their brand. And this is a story with a phenomenal happy ending: in a stagnant market and shrinking economy, they GREW their business and outpaced their competition. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} At Oracle CX Summit, you will be surrounded by dozens of CX leaders, visionaries and innovators like Subaru. This three-day event brings together the largest collection of thought leaders and practitioners in Customer Experience ever. Notable presenters include: v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Seth Godin - World-renowned blogger and one ‘the World’s Top 21 Speakers’, author of 14 best-selling books like “Permission Marketing”, and founder of dozens of startups such as Squidoo.com (ranked one of the top 125 sites in the US). Kerry Bodine - VP Principal Analyst at Forrester for Customer Experience, author of the just-published book “Outside In - The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business”, and renowned author of “The Customer Experience Ecosystem”. Bruce Temkin - Co-founder and Chair of the Customer Experience Professionals Association, revered blogger of “Customer Experience Matters”, former VP Principal Analyst at Forrester for Customer Experience, Founder and Managing Partner of The Temkin Group, a leading Customer Experience research and consulting firm. George Kembel - Executive Director and Co-founder of the Stanford Design School, an established, recognized thought leader in design thinking and innovation, and a Silicon Valley based-CEO, venture capitalist and educator. Gene Alvarez - VP Research Analyst at Gartner and a recognized authority in the Retail and Consumer Goods industry. Gene has been published, featured and referenced in a variety of trade publications for Customer Experience insights. Senior Executives from innovative Customer Experience brands and agencies like AT&T, Intuit, Southwest Airlines, Marriott, Quiksilver, and Sapient. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} But the CX Summit includes much, much more. There are over 30+ role-driven sessions and rountables as well as one-of-a-kind events including: v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} The Customer Experience Innovation Tent featuring hands-on demonstrations of bleeding-edge customer experiences like the Share Happy Ice Cream Machine A hands-on Customer Journey Mapping Workshop that lets you learn design thinking techniques for innovating differentiated experiences that drive cross-functional alignment Access to the Oracle OpenWorld Exhibition Halls and DEMOgrounds as well as a week-long Live Music Festival and the Oracle Appreciation Event featuring Pearl Jam and Kings of Leon Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} At Oracle, we are quite proud of our award-winning suite of CX products, a suite of solutions that can help an organization greatly accelerate their CX journey. But Oracle CX Summit isn’t about products. It’s about how an organization can succeed in its CX initiative. There’s never been a bigger gathering of the smartest CX minds, most successful CX companies, and innovative CX examples than Oracle CX Summit. Come join the Customer Experience Revolution. Register for Oracle CX Summit @ OpenWorld here. v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} --

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  • Attach a Wordpress.org blog to my BigCommerce Store as a sub-domain

    - by user1323814
    I am stuck in a peculiar situation. I have a store on BigCommerce configured with a domain from GoDaddy (mystore.com). I recently created a custom wordpress blog and hosted it on 1and1 hosting (s418783372.onlinehome.us), since bigcommerce can't host Wordpress. Now, I want to use it from a sub-domain of my main-bigcommerece store (models.mystore.com), but it doesn't seem to be working since BigCommerce is the Domain Manager, but GoDaddy is the Domain-Registrar and 1and1 is the host so it doesn't control the domain. I have tried setting up a CNAME record on BigCommerece and when it didn't work asked BigCommerece about it, but they said they can't do anything about it since they aren't the domain registrar and gave me a message saying: The responsiblity to show the name in the browser on the site is up to the server or site admin. The Cname can only get the browser there UPDATE: I succeeded in setting up a CNAME on BigCommerce poinitng to the site at 1and1, but for some-reason, all it gives me is a 404-Not-Found error. I was thinking this is due to a restriction on 1and1, any idea on how to overcome that? Not Found The requested URL / was not found on this server. Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request. I tried adding a domain on the 1and1 control panel (http://faq.1and1.co.uk/domains/domain_xfers/dns_transfer/4.html), pointing to models.mystore.com, but it isn't letting me add a Sub-Domain, there... UPDATE: I added mystore.com as an external domain and them added models.mystore.com as a sub-domain on the 1and1 hosting Domains panel. And it works :) Thank you all

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  • How advanced are author-recognition methods?

    - by Nick Rtz
    From a written text by an author if a computer program analyses the text, how much can a computer program tell today about the author of some (long enough to be statistically significant) texts? Can the computer program even tell with "certainty" whether a man or a woman wrote this text based solely on the contents of the text and not an investigation such as ip numbers etc? I'm interested to know if there are algorithms in use for instance to automatically know whether an author was male or female or similar characteristics of an author that a computer program can decide based on analyses of the written text by an author. It could be useful to know before you read a message what a computer analyses says about the author, do you agree? If I for instance get a longer message from my wife that she has had an accident in Nigeria and the computer program says that with 99 % probability the message was written by a male author in his sixties of non-caucasian origin or likewise, or by somebody who is not my wife, then the computer program could help me investigate why a certain message differs in characteristics. There can also be other uses for instance just detecting outliers in a geographically or demographically bounded larger data set. Scam detection is the obvious use I'm thinking of but there could also be other uses. Are there already such programs that analyse a written text to tell something about the author based on word choice, use of pronouns, unusual language usage, or likewise?

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  • Adopting Technologies for the Sake of Technologies

    - by shiju
    Unlike other engineering industries, the software engineering industry is really lacking maturity. The lack of maturity can see in different aspects of entire software development life cycle. I think other engineering industries are well organised and structured with common, proven engineering practices. The software engineering industry is greatly a diverse industry with different operating systems, and variety of development platforms, programming languages, frameworks and tools. Now these days, people are going behind the hypes and intellectual thoughts without understanding their core business problems and adopting technologies and practices for the sake of technologies and practices and simply becoming a “poster child” of technologies and practices. Understanding the core business problem and providing best, solid solution with a platform neutral approach, will give you more business values and ROI, instead of blindly adopting technologies and tailor-made your applications for the sake of technologies and practices. People have been simply migrating their solutions in favour of new technologies and different versions of frameworks without any business need. The “Pepsi Challenge” in the Software Development  Pepsi Challenge marketing campaign of the 1980s was a popular and very interesting marketing promotion in which people taste one cup of Pepsi and another cup with Coca Cola. In the taste test, more than 50% of people were preferred Pepsi  over Coca Cola. The success story behind the Pepsi was more sweetness contains in the Pepsi cola. They have simply added more sugar and more people preferred more sweet flavour. You can’t simply identify the better one after sipping one cup of cola based on the sweetness which contains. These things have been happening in the software industry for choosing development frameworks and technologies. People have been simply choosing frameworks based on the initial sugary feeling without understanding its core strengths and weakness. The sugary framework might be more harmful when you develop real-world systems. There is not any silver bullet for solving all kind of problems and frameworks and tools do have strengths and weakness. So it would be better to understand their strength and weakness. And please keep in mind that you have to develop real apps to understand the real capabilities and weakness of a framework. Evaluating a technology based on few blog posts will harm your projects and these bloggers might be lacking real-world experience with the framework. The Problem with Align a Development Practice with Tools Recently I have observed a discussion in a group where one guy asked suggestions for practicing Continuous Delivery (CD) as part of the agile based application engineering. Then the discussion quickly went to using and choosing a Continuous Integration (CI) tool and different people suggested different Continuous Integration (CI) tools for simply practicing Continuous Delivery. If you have worked with core agile engineering practices, you could clearly know that the real essence of agile is neither choosing a tool nor choosing a process. By simply choosing CI tool from a particular vendor will not ensure that you are delivering an evolving software based on customer feedback. You have to understand the real essence of a engineering practice and choose a right tool for practicing it instead of simply focus on a particular tool for a practicing an development practice. If you want to adopt a practice, you need a solid understanding on it with its real essence where tools are just helping us for better automation. Adopting New Technologies for the Sake of Technologies The another problem is that developers have been a tendency to adopt new technologies and simply migrating their existing apps to new technologies. It is okay if your existing system is having problem  with a technology stack or or maintainability challenge with existing solution, and moving to new technology for solving the current problems. We have been adopting new technologies for solving new challenges like solving the scalability challenges when the application or user bases is growing unpredictably. Please keep in mind that all new technologies will become old after working with it for few years. The below Facebook status update of Janakiraman, expresses the attitude of a typical customer. For an example, Node.js is becoming a hottest buzzword in the software industry and many developers are trying to adopt Node.js for their apps. The important thing is that Node.js is a minimalist framework that does some great things for some problems, but it’s not a silver bullet. I have been also working with Node.js which is good for some problems, but really bad for choosing it for all kind of problems. By adopting new technologies for new projects is good if we could get real business values from it because newer framework would solve some existing well known problems and provide better solutions where it can incorporate good solutions for the latest challenges . But adopting a new technology for the sake of new technology is really bad idea. Another example is JavaScript is getting lot of attention so that lot of developers are developing heavy JavaScript centric web apps. First, they will adopt a client-side JavaScript MV* framework from AngularJS, Ember, Backbone etc, and develop a Single Page App(SPA) where they are repeating the mistakes we did in the past with server-side. The mistakes we did in the server-side is transforming to client-side. The problem is that people are just adopting new technologies, but not improving their solutions. I predict that many Single Page App will suck in the future. We need a hybrid approach where we should be able to leverage both server-side and client-side for developing next-generation web apps. The another problem is that if you like a particular framework, use it for all kind of apps. In the past, I know some Silverlight passionate guys were tried to use that framework for all kind of apps including larger line of business apps. And these days developers are migrating their existing Silverlight apps in favour of HTML5 buzzword. So the real question is, what is the business values we are getting from these apps when we are developing it for the sake of a particular technology instead of business need. The another problem is that our solutions consultants are trying to provide unnecessary solutions for the sake of a particular technology or for a hype. For an example, Big Data solutions are great for solving the problem of three Vs : volume, velocity and variety. But trying to put this for every application will make problems. Let’s say, there is a small web site running with limited budget and saying that we need a recommendation engine for the web site with a Hadoop based solution with a 16 node cluster, would be really horrible. If we really need a Hadoop based solution, got for it, but trying to put this for all application would be a big disaster. It would be great if could understand the core business problems first, and later choose a right framework for providing solutions for the actual business problem, instead of trying to provide so many solutions. The Problem with Tied Up to a Platform Vendor Some organizations and teams are tied up with a particular platform vendor where they don’t want to use any product other than their preferred or existing platform vendor. They will accept any product provided by the vendor regardless of its capability. This will lets you some benefits regards with integration and collaboration of different products provided by the same vendor, but it will loose your opportunity to provide better solution for your business problems. For a real world sample scenario, lot of companies have been using SAP for their ERP solutions. When they are thinking about mobility or thinking about developing hybrid mobile apps, they can easily find out a framework from SAP. SAP provides a framework for HTML 5 based UI development named SAPUI5. If you are simply adopting that framework only based for the preference of existing platform vendor, you might be loose different opportunities for providing better solution. Initially you might enjoy the sugary feeling provided by the platform vendor, but you have to think about developing apps which should be capable for solving future challenges. I am not saying that any framework is not good and I believe that all frameworks are good over another one for solving at least one problem. My point is that we should not tied up with any specific platform vendor unless your organization is having resource availability problems. Being Polyglot for Providing Right Solutions The modern software engineering industry is greatly diverse with different tools and platforms. Lot of open source frameworks and new programming languages have been releasing to the developer community, where choosing the right platform without any biased opinion, is really a difficult task. But it would really great if we could develop an attitude with platform neutral mindset and being a polyglot developer for providing better solutions based on the actual business problems. IMHO, we should learn a new programming language and a new framework every year. This will improve the quality of our developer capabilities and also improve the quality of our primary programming language skills. Being polyglot for individual developers and organizational teams will give you greater opportunity to your developer experience and also for your applications. Organizations can analyse their business problem without tied with any technology and later they can provide solutions by choosing different platform and tools. Summary    In this blog post, what I was trying to say that we should not tied up or biased with any development platform, technology, vendor or programming language and we should not adopt technologies and practices for the sake of technologies. If we are adopting a technology or a practice for the sake of it, we are simply becoming a “poster child” of the technology and practice. We should not become a poster child of other people’s intellectual thoughts and theories, instead of it we should become solutions developers and solutions consultants where we should be able to provide better solutions for the business problems. Being a polyglot developer is a good idea for improving your developer skills which lets you provide better solutions for the business problems. The most important thing is that we should become platform neutral developers where our passion should be for providing brilliant solutions. It would be great if we could provide minimalist, pragmatic business solutions. You can follow me on Twitter @shijucv

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  • Warnings When Undo Isn't Possible

    - by ultan o'broin
    Enjoyed this post Never Use a Warning When you Mean Undo by Aza Raskin. It makes sense never to warn users if an undo option is possible. The examples given are from the web space. Here's the conclusion: Warnings cause us to lose our work, to mistrust our computers, and to blame ourselves. A simple but foolproof design methodology solves the problem: "Never use a warning when you mean undo." And when a user is deleting their work, you always mean undo. However, in enterprise apps you may find that an undo option isn't technically possible or desirable. Objects may be shared, part of a flow elsewhere, or undoing something committed to the database (a rollback I guess) may not be feasible if it becomes locked by another process. Plus, what constitutes user ownership of objects isn't always clear to users. The implications of delete (and other) actions need to be clearly communicated out in advance. Really, warnings are important in the enterprise space. Data has a very high value, and users can perform a wide variety of actions that may risk that data, not always within the application itself (at browser level, for example). That said, throwing warnings all over the place when an undo option is possible is annoying. Instead, treat warnings with respect. When there is no undo option possible, use warning messages to communicate potentially dangerous or irrecoverable actions or the downstream consequences of user actions on the process or task flow. Force the user to respond to a warning message by using a modal dialog with clearly labeled action buttons. Here's a couple of examples. A great article that got me thinking. Let's see more like that. Let's not forget there's more types of messages than just error messages. User assistance and user experience professionals need to understand when best to use confirmation, information, and warning types too!

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  • How would I implement this application idea?

    - by Mike Wills
    I am a D&D gamer and a developer that has mostly worked with ASP.NET applications professionally. I have written some chat bots in Node.js and I have only played a little with PHP but wrote nothing serious. I have had inspiration to create a site that allows a person to keep track of characters (aka the character sheet). I am thinking of using this as a learning opportunity to learn noSQL and to write a full javascript front-end. I want this application to save the value as I change it. So if I edit the armor class, it is saved immediately instead of waiting until I hit the submit button. I think that will make it easier to use while gaming and not losing anything because I forgot to save the change. I have never done anything like this. How do you implement this style of application? Is there a tutorial or howto to get me on the right path? While I would really like to use ASP.NET but I don't have a Windows server to publish on (and I really can't afford to pay for a service). What language that runs on Linux would work well for this type of application? Note: I feel noSQL would work in this case because of the sheer number of tables required to create something like this in SQL.

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  • Learning to code first game, few questions on basic game development and 3D

    - by ProgrammerByDay
    I've been programming for a while, and I'm concurrently learning how to make a basic game and slimdx, and wanted to talk to someone to hopefully get a few pointers. I've read that Tetris is the "Hello, world" of game programming, which made sense to me, so I decided to give it a shot. I've been able to code up a basic version in a few hours, which I'm quite happy with, but I had a few questions about 3D programming. Right now I'm using Direct3D to do display the blocks without any textures (just colored squares). I have a data structure (2d array of bytes, where each byte denotes the presence of a block and its color) which is the "game board," and on every render() call I create a new vertex buffer of the existing squares in the game board, and draw those primitives. This feels very inefficient, and I wondering what would be the idiomatic way of doing this in a 3D world, with matrix/rotations/translation operations. I know 3D is overkill for such a project, but I want to learn any 3d concepts that I can while I'm doing it. I understand that what you'd usually want to do is keep the same vertices/vertex buffers but manipulate them with matrices to achieve rotations/translations, etc. To do so, I assume what would happen is I'd have one vertex buffer for the "active" piece, since that'll be constantly rotated and moved, and have one vertex buffer for the frozen pieces on the bottom of the board, which is pretty much stationary, but will need to be changed/recreated when the active piece becomes frozen. Right now I'm just clearing and redrawing on every render call, which seems like the easiest way to do things, although I wonder if there's a more efficient way to deal with changes. Obviously there are a lot of questions I'm asking here, but if you can even just point me a step or two ahead in terms of how I should be thinking, it'd be great. Thanks

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  • Webcast: Leveraging Mobile And Social Commerce To Deliver A Complete Customer Experience

    - by Michael Hylton
      Mobile and social media are emerging as new channels for customers to interact and transact with brands. Mobile users demand experiences that are relevant and engaging and are designed with the capabilities and constraints of devices in mind. Just having a mobile app or mobile-specific website is not a long-term strategy. Brands must invest in an optimized experience, especially as mobile becomes critical to an overall digital commerce strategy.Debating the merits of using Facebook or not is missing the point when it comes to social media. True innovators are thinking beyond the social channel and are building programs that leverage Facebook data to drive conversions and engagement both on and off Facebook.  Learn how to be more strategic about mobile and social commerce in this informative editorial webcast.Attend this webcast and you will learn: How to leverage mobile and social touchpoints in digital commerce Why having a Facebook page or a mobile app is not enough The benefits of a consistent, personalized and relevant customer experience Strategies for integrating mobile and social into an overall digital commerce strategy Featured Speakers: Peter Sheldon, Senior Analyst, eBusiness & Channel Strategy Professionals, Forrester Research Brenna Johnson, Product Manager, Oracle Commerce Click here to register.

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  • Webcast: Leveraging Mobile And Social Commerce To Deliver A Complete Customer Experience

    - by Michael Hylton
      Mobile and social media are emerging as new channels for customers to interact and transact with brands. Mobile users demand experiences that are relevant and engaging and are designed with the capabilities and constraints of devices in mind. Just having a mobile app or mobile-specific website is not a long-term strategy. Brands must invest in an optimized experience, especially as mobile becomes critical to an overall digital commerce strategy.Debating the merits of using Facebook or not is missing the point when it comes to social media. True innovators are thinking beyond the social channel and are building programs that leverage Facebook data to drive conversions and engagement both on and off Facebook.  Learn how to be more strategic about mobile and social commerce in this informative editorial webcast.Attend this webcast and you will learn: How to leverage mobile and social touchpoints in digital commerce Why having a Facebook page or a mobile app is not enough The benefits of a consistent, personalized and relevant customer experience Strategies for integrating mobile and social into an overall digital commerce strategy Featured Speakers: Peter Sheldon, Senior Analyst, eBusiness & Channel Strategy Professionals, Forrester Research Brenna Johnson, Product Manager, Oracle Commerce Click here to register.

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  • Pricing: Meet or Beat?

    - by charles.knapp
    My home dishwasher started making some really interesting noises. I heard radio advertisements from two retailers who promised to meet any competitor's price. Then, I heard another retailer promising that their everyday prices beat their competitors. That got me to thinking about the power of pricing and promotions in the marketing mix (product, price, placement, promotions, and people). What is more powerful to say in a competitive market: your company will meet a similar offer, or your company will beat the others? Will you sell more if you meet or if you beat? I found that the retailer who promised to beat the others really had the best everyday pricing. Even better for me, another retailer had an exclusive promotional sale for long-term customers. Their loyalty promotion beat the best everyday discounter. So, I got the quality and performance I wanted at a tremendous price. So, I have two challenges for marketers. First, where you really have to compete on price as a dominant factor, give people strong reasons to do business with you. If you try to meet other's prices, make the leap to actually beat and not merely meet. Second, upgrade your firm's capabilities where needed. Oracle offers a complete range of great CRM software for loyalty management, marketing promotions, and pricing management that will help you to grow your business.

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  • Pricing: Meet or Beat?

    - by charles.knapp
    My home dishwasher started making some really interesting noises. It was time to shop. I heard radio advertisements from two retailers who promised to meet any competitor's price. Then, another retailer promised that their everyday prices beat their competitors. That got me to thinking about the power of pricing and promotions in the marketing mix (product, price, placement, promotions, and people). What is more powerful to say in a competitive market: your company will meet a similar offer, or your company will beat the others? Will you sell more if you meet or if you beat? I found that the retailer who promised to beat the others really had the best everyday pricing. I was close to making a purchase. Then, another retailer had an exclusive promotional sale for long-term customers. Their loyalty promotion beat the best everyday discounter. So, I got the quality and performance I wanted at a tremendous price. So, I have two challenges for marketers. First, where you really have to compete on price as a dominant factor, give people strong reasons to do business with you. If you try to meet other's prices, make the leap to actually beat and not merely meet competitor prices. Second, upgrade your firm's capabilities where needed. Oracle offers a complete range of great CRM capabilities for loyalty management, marketing promotions, and pricing management that will help you to grow your business.

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  • Using XML as data storage

    - by Kian Mayne
    I was thinking about the XML format and the following quote: “XML is not a database. It was never meant to be a database. It is never going to be a database. Relational databases are proven technology with more than 20 years of implementation experience. They are solid, stable, useful products. They are not going away. XML is a very useful technology for moving data between different databases or between databases and other programs. However, it is not itself a database. Don't use it like one.“ -Effective XML: 50 Specific Ways to Improve Your XML by Elliotte Rusty Harold (page 230, Part 4, Item 41, 2nd paragraph) This seems to really stress that XML should not be used for data storage and should only be used for program to program interoperability. Personally, I disagree and .NET's app.config file that's used to store a program's settings is an example of data storage in an XML file. However for databases rather than configurations etc XML should not be used. To develop my point, I will use two examples: A) Data about customers with fields that are all on one level i.e. there are a number of fields all relating to one customer with no children B) Data about configuration of an application where nested fields and properties make a lot of sense So my question is, Is this still a valid statement and is it now acceptable to store data using XML? EDIT: I've sent an email to the author of that quote to ask for his input/extra context.

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  • single for-loop runtime explanation problem

    - by owwyess
    I am analyzing some running times of different for-loops, and as I'm getting more knowledge, I'm curious to understand this problem which I have still yet to find out. I have this exercise called "How many stars are printed": for (int i = N; i > 1; i = i/2) System.out.println("*"); The answers to pick from is A: ~log N B: ~N C: ~N log N D: ~0.5N^2 So the answer should be A and I agree to that, but on the other side.. Let's say N = 500 what would Log N then be? It would be 2.7. So what if we say that N=500 on our exercise above? That would most definitely print more han 2.7 stars? How is that related? Because it makes sense to say that if the for-loop looked like this: for (int i = 0; i < N; i++) it would print N stars. I hope to find an explanation for this here, maybe I'm interpreting all these things wrong and thinking about it in a bad way. Thanks in advance.

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  • Did Microsoft designers got their butts kicked 3 years ago?

    - by John Conwell
    This is something I've been wondering about for about a year now.  Microsoft has a history of creating very useful products, with lots of useful features.  But useful does not mean usable.  A lot of stuff coming out of Redmond the past 10 years don't really seem to have been well thought out from a user design point of view.  Lots of extra steps, lots of popup windows...very little innovative thinking going on about the user experience of these products.But about a year ago I started seeing changes in the new products coming out of Microsoft.  Windows 7 is a good example of a big change.  They really got their asses handed to them on Vista, so they had to make a change.  But it looks like this change in philosophy has bled over to other areas.  The new Office (2010) lineup has a lot of changes in it to make it way more usable. Given that big changes like this take about 3 years to go from start to actually shipping product, I'm curious what happened internally at Microsoft that really drove this change in product design.  I think that Microsoft got so focused on just adding new functionality for so long, they forgot about the little things that can really make or break a product.  Office 2010 is full of these little things that make it much nicer to use.  I just hope its not too late for them.

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  • Policy Administration is the Top 2011 IT Priority for Insurers

    - by helen.pitts(at)oracle.com
    The current issue of Insurance Networking News includes an interesting column by Novarica's Matt Josefowicz.  Recent research by the firm revealed that policy administration replacement or extension is the most common strategic IT project for insurers this year.  The article goes on to note that insurers are keenly focused on the business capabilities that can be delivered once the system is in production as well as the ability to leverage agile development methodologies and true business/IT collaboration during implementation. The results are not too surprising given that policy administration is a mission-critical system for life and annuity insurers.  As Josefowicz notes, "Core systems are called core for a reason--they are at the heart of the insurer's ability to function.  Replacing them is not to be done lightly, but failing to replace them can mean diminishing the ability to compete or function effectively as a company." Insurers can no longer rely on inflexible policy administration systems that impede their ability to rapidly configure and bring to innovative new products, add riders, support changing business processes and take advantage of market opportunities.  The ability to leverage the policy administration systems to better service customers and distribution channels by providing real-time access to policy information throughout the policy lifecycle is also critical to sustain loyalty and further fuel growth.Insurers can benefit from a modern, adaptive policy administration system, like Oracle Insurance Policy Administration for Life and Annuity.  You can learn more about the industry's most highly advanced, rules-based system, which is unmatched for its highly flexible, rules-based configurability, performance and extensibility, as well as global market industry trends by viewing a complimentary, on-demand Webcast, Adapt, Transform and Grow:  Accelerate Speed to Market with Adaptive Insurance Policy Administration.Data conversions can be a daunting process for many insurers when deciding to modernize, in particular when consolidating from multiple, disparate legacy policy administration systems to a single new platform.  Migrating from a legacy system requires a well-thought out approach that builds on the industry's best thinking from previous modernization efforts and takes data migration off the critical path by leveraging proven methodology and tools to capitalize on the new system's capabilities.  We'll discuss more about this approach in a future Oracle Insurance blog.Helen Pitts is senior product marketing manager for Oracle Insurance's life and annuities solutions.

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  • Correct level of abstraction for a 3d rendering component?

    - by JohnB
    I've seen lots of questions around this area but not this exact question so apologies if this is a duplicate. I'm making a small 3d game. Well to be honest, it's just a little hobby project and likely won't turn out to be an actual game, I'll be happy to make a nice graphics demo and learn about 3d rendering and c++ design. My intent is to use direct3d9 for rendering as I have some little experience of it, and it seems to meet my requirements. However if I've learned one thing as a programmer it's to ask "is there any conceivable reason that this component might be replaced by a different implmentation" and if the answer is yes then I need to design a proper abstraction and interface to that component. So even though I intend to implment d3d9 I need to design a 3d interface that could be implemented for d3d11, opengl... My question then is what level is it best to do this at? I'm thinking that an interface capable of creating and later drawing Vertex buffers and index buffers Textures Vertex and Pixel "shaders" Some representation of drawing state (blending modes etc...) In other words a fairly low level interface where my code to draw for example an animated model would use the interface to obtain abstract vertex buffers etc. I worry though that it's too low level to abstract out all the functionallity I need efficiently. The alternative is to do this at a higher level where the interface can draw objects, animations, landscapes etc, and implement them for each system. This seems like more work, but it more flexible I guess. So that's my question really, when abstracting out the drawing system, what level of interface works best?

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  • Is it wise to ask about design decisions made on a product during an interview?

    - by Desolate Planet
    I've been thinking about interview questions lately and I've been reflecting on bad interview experiences I've had in the past. One of particular note is where I had asked the interviewer why the team chose to use Spring over EJB3 in their product. The interviewer pretty much tore my face off, yelling "Because Spring is not the be all and end all of Java software development, do you want this job or not?". In response to this, I told him that this probably wasn't the job for me and I walked out the interview. He told me at the start of the interview that they had high stuff turnover, the product had gone from Modula 3 to Perl to Java then after asking him a technical question, he went in flames. It seemed obvious to me that he was toxic to the company with that kind of attitude. Question: Is it a good idea to probe on architectural choices taken in an interview? If not, why? From my own point of view, an interview is a two-way process. If the interviewers are testing me on my technical skills, I've got every right to ask them the same questions to 1) Figure out what their mindset and attitudes towards developing software solutions are and 2) To figure out if there are in line with how I would approach problems of that kind. It's very possible that the interviewer who got angry was a bad interviewer and forgot that an interview is a two-way process. If I was asked this, I would have simply said something along the lines of wanting to leverage the container more, but I certainly wouldn't have tried to put him in a state of meek capitulation. The interviewer in question was the lead developer in the team.

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  • Entity Framework with large systems - how to divide models?

    - by jkohlhepp
    I'm working with a SQL Server database with 1000+ tables, another few hundred views, and several thousand stored procedures. We are looking to start using Entity Framework for our newer projects, and we are working on our strategy for doing so. The thing I'm hung up on is how best to split the tables into different models (EDMX or DbContext if we go code first). I can think of a few strategies right off the bat: Split by schema We have our tables split across probably a dozen schemas. We could do one model per schema. This isn't perfect, though, because dbo still ends up being very large, with 500+ tables / views. Another problem is that certain units of work will end up having to do transactions that span multiple models, which adds to complexity, although I assume EF makes this fairly straightforward. Split by intent Instead of worrying about schemas, split the models by intent. So we'll have different models for each application, or project, or module, or screen, depending on how granular we want to get. The problem I see with this is that there are certain tables that inevitably have to be used in every case, such as User or AuditHistory. Do we add those to every model (violates DRY I think), or are those in a separate model that is used by every project? Don't split at all - one giant model This is obviously simple from a development perspective but from my research and my intuition this seems like it could perform terribly, both at design time, compile time, and possibly run time. What is the best practice for using EF against such a large database? Specifically what strategies do people use in designing models against this volume of DB objects? Are there options that I'm not thinking of that work better than what I have above? Also, is this a problem in other ORMs such as NHibernate? If so have they come up with any better solutions than EF?

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  • Dual LAN Printing

    - by Christopher
    I want to use Ubuntu 10.10 Server in a classroom, a computer lab whose bandwidth is provided by a local cable ISP. That's no problem, though the school network has an IP printer that I want to use. I cannot reach the printer through the cable Internet. But, I have two network cards. How is it possible to use both networks at once? eth0 (static 192.168.1.254) is plugged into a four-port router, 192.168.1.1. On the public side of the four-port router is Internet provided by the cable company. I also have the classroom workstations plugged into a switch. The switch is plugged into the four-port router. The whole classroom is wired into the cable Internet. The other NIC, eth1, could it be plugged into an Ethernet jack in the wall? It uses the school network, and I might receive by DHCP an IP address like 10.140.10.100, with the printer on maybe 10.120.50.10. I was thinking about installing the printer on the server so that it could be shared with the workstations. But how does this work? Can I just plug eth1 into the school network and access both LANs? Thanks for any insight, Chris

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  • How to build MVC Views that work with polymorphic domain model design?

    - by Johann de Swardt
    This is more of a "how would you do it" type of question. The application I'm working on is an ASP.NET MVC4 app using Razor syntax. I've got a nice domain model which has a few polymorphic classes, awesome to work with in the code, but I have a few questions regarding the MVC front-end. Views are easy to build for normal classes, but when it comes to the polymorphic ones I'm stuck on deciding how to implement them. The one (ugly) option is to build a page which handles the base type (eg. IContract) and has a bunch of if statements to check if we passed in a IServiceContract or ISupplyContract instance. Not pretty and very nasty to maintain. The other option is to build a view for each of these IContract child classes, breaking DRY principles completely. Don't like doing this for obvious reasons. Another option (also not great) is to split the view into chunks with partials and build partial views for each of the child types that are loaded into the main view for the base type, then deciding to show or hide the partial in a single if statement in the partial. Also messy. I've also been thinking about building a master page with sections for the fields that only occur in subclasses and to build views for each subclass referencing the master page. This looks like the least problematic solution? It will allow for fairly simple maintenance and it doesn't involve code duplication. What are your thoughts? Am I missing something obvious that will make our lives easier? Suggestions?

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  • Architecture advice for converting biz app from old school to new school?

    - by Aaron Anodide
    I've got a WinForms business application that evolved over the past few years. It's forms over data with a number custom UI experiences taylored to the business, so I don't think it's a candidate to port to something like SharePoint or re-write in LightSwitch (at least not without significant investment). When I started it in 2009 I was new to this type of development (coming from more low level programming and my RDBMS knowledge was just slightly greater than what I got from school). Thus, when I was confronted with a business model that operates on a strict monthly accounting cycle, I made the unfortunate decision to create a separate database for each accounting period. Also, when I started I knew DataSets, then I learned Linq2Sql, then I learned EntityFramework. The screens are a mix and match of those. Now, after a few years developing this thing by myself I've finally got a small team. Ultimately, I want a web front end (for remote access to more straight up screens with grids of data) and a thick client (for the highly customized interfaces). My question is: can you offer me some broad strokes architecture advice that will help me formulate a battle plan to convert over to a single database and lay the foundations for my future goals at the same time? Here's a screen shot showing how an older screen uses DataSets and a newer screen uses EF (I'm thinking this might make it more real for someone reading the question - I'm willing to add any amount of detail if someone is willing to help).

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  • How to refactor while keeping accuracy and redundancy?

    - by jluzwick
    Before I ask this question I will preface it with our environment. My team consists of 3 programmers working on multiple different projects. Due to this, our use of testing is mostly limited to very general black box testing. Take the following assumptions also: Unit Tests will eventually be written but I'm under strict orders to refactor first Ignore common Test-Driven Development techniques when given this environment, my time is limited. I understand that if this were done correctly, our team would actually save money in the long-term by building Unit-Tests before hand. I'm about to refactor a fairly large portion of the code that is critical. While I believe my code will accurately work when done and after our black box testing, I realize that there will be new data that the new code might not be able to handle. What I wanted to know is how to keep old code that functions 98% of the time so that we can call those subroutines in case the new code doesn't work properly. Right now I'm thinking of separating the old code in a separate class file and adding a variable to our config that will tell the program which code to use. Is there a better way to handle this? NOTE: We do use revision control and we have archived builds so the client could always revert to a previous build, but I would like to see if there is a decent way of doing this besides reverting. I want this so they can use the other new functionality delivered in the new build. Edit: While I agree I will need to write Unit Tests for this, I don't believe I will capture everything with them. I'm looking for ways to easily be able to revert to the old, functional code should anything happen. While I know this is a poor practice, I'm planning on removing this code after our team can guarantee that the new code works to the same standards as the old.

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  • Meaningful concise method naming guidelines

    - by Sam
    Recently I started releasing an open source project, while I was the only user of the library I did not care about the names, but know I want to assign clever names to each methods to make it easier to learn, but I also need to use concise names so they are easy to write as well. I was thinking about some guidelines about the naming, I am aware of lots of guidelines that only care about letters casing or some simple notes. Here, I am looking after guidelines for meaningful concise naming. For example, this could be part of the guidelines I am looking after: Use Add when an existing item is going to be added to a target, Use Create when a new item is being created and added to a target. Use Remove when an existing item is going to be removed from a target, Use delete when an item is going to be removed permanently. Pair AddXXX methods with RemoveXXX and Pair CreateXXX methods with DeleteXXX methods, but do not mix them. The above guidance may be intuitive for native English speakers, but for me that English is my second language I need to be told about things like this.

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  • Working with data and meta data that are separated on different servers

    - by afuzzyllama
    While developing a product, I've come across a situation where my group wants to store meta data for data entry forms (questions, layout, etc) in a different database then the database where the collected data is stored. This is mostly for security because we want to be able to have our meta data public facing, while keeping collected data as secure as possible. I was thinking about writing a web service that provides the meta information that the data collection program could access. The only issue I see with this approach is the front end is going to have to match the meta data with the collected data, which would be more efficient as a join on the back end. Currently, this system is slated to run on .NET and MSSQL. I haven't played around with .NET libraries running in SQL, but I'm considering trying to create logic that would pull from the web service, convert the meta data into a table that SQL can join on, and return the combined data and meta data that way. Is this solution the wrong way to approach the problem? Is there a pattern or "industry standard" way of bringing together two datasets that don't live in the same database?

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  • Bot strategy in an arena

    - by joulesm
    I am writing the player's behavior for an arena game, and I'm wondering if you could offer some strategies. I'm writing it in Python, but I'm just interested in the high level game play. Here are the game aspects: Arena is a circle of a given size. The arena's size shrinks every round to help break any ties. Players are much smaller circles, and can be on teams of 1 or 2 players. Players attack by colliding with other players, and based on the physics of the collision (speed of both players, angle), one could force another player out of the arena. Once a player is out of the arena, they are out of the game (for that round). The goal is to be on the only team with players left in the arena. All other players have been pushed (through collisions or mistakes) out of the arena. It is possible for there to be no winner if the last two players exit the arena at the same time. Once the player has been programmed, the game just runs. There is no human intervention in the game. I'm thinking it's easiest to implement a few simple programmatic rules for my player to follow. For example, stay close to center of the arena, attack opponents from the inner side of the arena, etc. Are there any good simple game strategies? Would adding a random aspect to the game help? For example, to avoid predictability by the other team or something. Thanks in advance.

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