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  • MIX 2010 recap podcast

    - by Chris Williams
    from www.slickthought.net: Spaghetti Code Podcast: Recapping the MIX Conference 4/2/2010 11:06:10 AM Spaghetti Code (Jeff Brand) is joined by Mike Hodnic, Jason Bock, Adam Grocholski and Chris Williams to share their thoughts and impressions from the Microsoft MIX Conference and their thoughts on Windows Phone, Silverlight 4, and more. Direct Download - click here Subscribe - click here iTunes - click here

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  • eMachines EZ1601 Review

    With a slim and stylish all-in-one design and an 18.5-inch widescreen monitor, Acer's brand-new desktop looks like it should cost more than $400. We put the elegant little nettop to the test and wind up just one DIMM short of falling in love.

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  • Silverlight Cream for April 26, 2010 -- #848

    - by Dave Campbell
    In this Issue: Viktor Larsson, Mike Snow(-2-), Jeff Brand, Marlon Grech(-2-, -3-), Jonathan van de Veen, Phil Middlemiss. Shoutout: Justin Angel wants everyone to know he is Joining the Vertigo Team!... congratulations, Justin! From SilverlightCream.com: Learning Silverlight – Advanced Color Animations Viktor Larsson is demonstrating small pieces of Silverlight he's picked upon in the course of his work project. This first one is on ColorAnimations using KeyFrames Silverlight Tip of the Day #4 – Enabling Out of Browser Applications Mike Snow has Tip #4 up and it's all about OOB... from what you have to do to what your user sees, including how to check to see if you're running OOB... source project included. Silverlight Tip of the Day #5 – Debugging Out of Browser Applications Following a fine tradition he started with his first series, Mike Snow is putting out more than one Tip per day :) ... Number 5 is up and is all about debugging OOB apps. Simplifying Page Transitions in Windows Phone 7 Silverlight Applications Jeff Brand has a WP7 post up discussing Page Transitions. He first discusses the most common brute-force method, then moves into the TransitioningContentControl from the Toolkit. An introduction to MEFedMVVM – PART 1 Marlon Grech, Peter O’Hanlon, and Glenn Block worked together to produce an MEF and MVVM library that works for WPF and Silverlight and allows Design-time goodness and a loosely-coupled bridge between the View and ViewModel ... and it's on CodePlex ... they're also looking for comments/additions, so check it out. Leveraging MEFedMVVM ExportViewModel – MEFedMVVM Part 2 In Part 2, Marlon Grech demonstrates using MEFedMVVM and shows off some of the basics such as Importing services, Design-Time data and DataContextAware ViewModels IContextAware services to bridge the gap between the View and the ViewModel – MEFedMVVM Part 3 Marlon Grech's 3rd post about MEFedMVVM is about IContextAwareService -- bridging the gap betwen the View and ViewModel -- a service that knows about it's context. Building a Web Setup that configures your Silverlight application Jonathan van de Veen has a post up at SilverlightShow on using a Web Setup Project to configure your Silverlight when things startup... if you're not familiar with doing this... take note! A Chrome and Glass Theme - Part 4 Phil Middlemiss has part 4 of his great tutorial series up on creating a theme in Expression Blend ... this time tackling the listbox. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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  • Windows Embedded Compact 7 Online Training

    - by Valter Minute
    If you want to increase your knowledge about Windows Embedded Compact and want to hear my voice, you can go to the brand new Windows Embedded Compact 7 Online Training website and check all the videos (many of them recorded by me, so be prepared for a funny accent!) showing many of the features and tools of this real time embedded OS from Microsoft. So, buy the pop-corn, sit on your most confortable chair and enjoy the show!

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  • The other Ubuntu Linux distributions

    <b>Cyber Cynic:</b> "I like the brand spanking new Ubuntu 10.04 a lot. But while I like its GNOME 2.30 interface, I also like other interfaces such as KDE. It would be nice if Ubuntu could also play MP3s, common video formats and Flash from the get-go."

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  • How to utilise a newly acquired keyword domain to contribute to an already existing healthy website?

    - by vDog
    My client's website has just reached spot 1 for the most valuable keyword. We acquired the domain that was at #1 spot. It's a keyword domain (targetkeyword.tld). Just wondering what would be the best way to make use of it. A permanent redirect or a single page that hyperlinks to the brand website? Should I be concerned about anything negative associated to this keyword domain (poor backlinks and the fact that this website was down for about one month)?

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  • Supercharging the Performance of Your Front-Office Applications @ OOW'12

    - by Sanjeev Sharma
    You can increase customer satisfaction, brand equity, and ultimately top-line revenue by deploying  Oracle ATG Web Commerce, Oracle WebCenter Sites, Oracle Endeca applications, Oracle’s  Siebel applications, and other front-office applications on Oracle Exalogic, Oracle’s combination  of hardware and software for applications and middleware. Join me (Sanjeev Sharma) and my colleague, Kelly Goetsch, at the following conference session at Oracle Open World to find out how Customer Experience can be transformed with Oracle Exalogic: Session:  CON9421 - Supercharging the Performance of Your Front-Office Applications with Oracle ExalogicDate: Wednesday, 3 Oct, 2012Time: 10:15 am - 11:15 am (PST)Venue: Moscone South (309)

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  • 10 tape technology features that make you go hmm.

    - by Karoly Vegh
    A week ago an Oracle/StorageTek Tape Specialist, Christian Vanden Balck, visited Vienna, and agreed to visit customers to do techtalks and update them about the technology boom going around tape. I had the privilege to attend some of his sessions and noted the information and features that took the customers by surprise and made them think. Allow me to share the top 10: I. StorageTek as a brand: StorageTek is one of he strongest names in the Tape field. The brand itself was valued so much by customers that even after Sun Microsystems acquiring StorageTek and the Oracle acquiring Sun the brand lives on with all the Oracle tapelibraries are officially branded StorageTek.See http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/storage/tape-storage/overview/index.html II. Disk information density limitations: Disk technology struggles with information density. You haven't seen the disk sizes exploding lately, have you? That's partly because there are physical limits on a disk platter. The size is given, the number of platters is limited, they just can't grow, and are running out of physical area to write to. Now, in a T10000C tape cartridge we have over 1000m long tape. There you go, you have got your physical space and don't need to stuff all that data crammed together. You can write in a reliable pattern, and have space to grow too. III. Oracle has a market share of 62% worldwide in recording head manufacturing. That's right. If you are running LTO drives, with a good chance you rely on StorageTek production. That's two out of three LTO recording heads produced worldwide.  IV. You can store 1 Exabyte data in a single tape library. Yes, an Exabyte. That is 1000 Petabytes. Or, a million Terabytes. A thousand million GigaBytes. You can store that in a stacked StorageTek SL8500 tapelibrary. In one SL8500 you can put 10.000 T10000C cartridges, that store 10TB data (compressed). You can stack 10 of these SL8500s together. Boom. 1000.000 TB.(n.b.: stacking means interconnecting the libraries. Yes, cartridges are moved between the stacked libraries automatically.)  V. EMC: 'Tape doesn't suck after all. We moved on.': Do you remember the infamous 'Tape sucks, move on' Datadomain slogan? Of course they had to put it that way, having only had disk products. But here's a fun fact: on the EMCWorld 2012 there was a major presence of a Tape-tech company - EMC, in a sudden burst of sanity is embracing tape again. VI. The miraculous T10000C: Oracle StorageTek has developed an enterprise-grade tapedrive and cartridge, the T10000C. With awesome numbers: The Cartridge: Native 5TB capacity, 10TB with compression Over a kilometer long tape within the cartridge. And it's locked when unmounted, no rattling of your data.  Replaced the metalparticles datalayer with BaFe (bariumferrite) - metalparticles lose around 7% of magnetism within 30 days. BaFe does not. Yes we employ solid-state physicists doing R&D on demagnetisation in our labs. Can be partitioned, storage tiering within the cartridge!  The Drive: 2GB Cache Encryption implemented in HW - no performance hit 252 MB/s native sustained data rate, beats disk technology by far. Not to mention peak throughput.  Leading the tape while never touching the data side of it, protecting your data physically too Data integritiy checking (CRC recalculation) on tape within the drive without having to read it back to the server reordering data from tape-order, delivering it back in application-order  writing 32 tracks at once, reading them back for CRC check at once VII. You only use 20% of your data on a regular basis. The rest 80% is just lying around for years. On continuously spinning disks. Doubly consuming energy (power+cooling), blocking diskstorage capacity. There is a solution called SAM (Storage Archive Manager) that provides you a filesystem unifying disk and tape, moving data on-demand and for clients transparently between the different storage tiers. You can share these filesystems with NFS or CIFS for clients, and enjoy the low TCO of tape. Tapes don't spin. They sit quietly in their slots, storing 10TB data, using no energy, producing no heat, automounted when a client accesses their data.See: http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/storage/storage-software/storage-archive-manager/overview/index.html VIII. HW supported for three decades: Did you know that the original PowderHorn library was released in '87 and has been only discontinued in 2010? That is over two decades of supported operation. Tape libraries are - just like the data carrying on tapecartridges - built for longevity. Oh, and the T10000C cartridge has 30-year archival life for long-term retention.  IX. Tape is easy to manage: Have you heard of Tape Storage Analytics? It is a central graphical tool to summarize, monitor, analyze dataflow, health and performance of drives and libraries, see: http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/storage/tape-storage/tape-analytics/overview/index.html X. The next generation: The T10000B drives were able to reuse the T10000A cartridges and write on them even more data. On the same cartridges. We call this investment protection, and this is very important for Oracle for the future too. We usually support two generations of cartridges together. The current drive is a T10000C. (...I know I promised to enlist 10, but I got still two more I really want to mention. Allow me to work around the problem: ) X++. The TallBots, the robots moving around the cartridges in the StorageTek library from tapeslots to the drives are cableless. Cables, belts, chains running to moving parts in a library cause maintenance downtimes. So StorageTek eliminated them. The TallBots get power, commands, even firmwareupgrades through the rails they are running on. Also, the TallBots don't just hook'n'pull the tapes out of their slots, they actually grip'n'lift them out. No friction, no scratches, no zillion little plastic particles floating around in the library, in the drives, on your data. (X++)++: Tape beats SSDs and Disks. In terms of throughput (252 MB/s), in terms of TCO: disks cause around 290x more power and cooling, in terms of capacity: 10TB on a single media and soon more.  So... do you need to store large amounts of data? Are you legally bound to archive it for dozens of years? Would you benefit from automatic storage tiering? Have you got large mediachunks to be streamed at times? Have you got power and cooling issues in the growing datacenters? Do you find EMC's 180° turn of tape attitude interesting, but appreciate it at the same time? With all that, you aren't alone. The most data on this planet is stored on tape. Tape is coming. Big time.

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  • Are there still plans for a new sound theme?

    - by Ingo Gerth
    Let me quote from Mark's blog almost one year ago: March 5th, 2010 at 7:19 pm Mark, will there be an update to the sound theme to match the updated visual brand? Mark Shuttleworth: Gack, I completely forgot about that. A very good point. Would you see if you can rally a round of community submissions for a sound theme inspired by light? Lets keep it short and sweet: What are the current considerations for the Ubuntu default sound theme?

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  • Microphone not recognised on my TekNmotion Intruder headset?

    - by Mitch Gardner
    I own a TekNmotion Intruder headset and Ubuntu 12.04 doesn't seem to even notice that my mic exists. I just re-installed Ubuntu and that doesn't seem to help either. They are a bit of a no-name brand and I can't find drivers for them. The audio plays clearly through the head phones but my mic wont record using "Record my desktop", Works rarely with Skype, and doesn't even show up when I go to Sound Settings ---- Input. Help please!

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  • 5 Best Practices - Laying the Foundation for WebCenter Projects

    - by Kellsey Ruppel
    Today’s guest post comes from Oracle WebCenter expert John Brunswick. John specializes in enterprise portal and content management solutions and actively contributes to the enterprise software business community and has authored a series of articles about optimal business involvement in portal, business process management and SOA development, examining ways of helping organizations move away from monolithic application development. We’re happy to have John join us today! Maximizing success with Oracle WebCenter portal requires a strategic understanding of Oracle WebCenter capabilities.  The following best practices enable the creation of portal solutions with minimal resource overhead, while offering the greatest flexibility for progressive elaboration. They are inherently project agnostic, enabling a strong foundation for future growth and an expedient return on your investment in the platform.  If you are able to embrace even only a few of these practices, you will materially improve your deployment capability with WebCenter. 1. Segment Duties Around 3Cs - Content, Collaboration and Contextual Data "Agility" is one of the most common business benefits touted by modern web platforms.  It sounds good - who doesn't want to be Agile, right?  How exactly IT organizations go about supplying agility to their business counterparts often lacks definition - hamstrung by ambiguity. Ultimately, businesses want to benefit from reduced development time to deliver a solution to a particular constituent, which is augmented by as much self-service as possible to develop and manage the solution directly. All done in the absence of direct IT involvement. With Oracle WebCenter's depth in the areas of content management, pallet of native collaborative services, enterprise mashup capability and delegated administration, it is very possible to execute on this business vision at a technical level. To realize the benefits of the platform depth we can think of Oracle WebCenter's segmentation of duties along the lines of the 3 Cs - Content, Collaboration and Contextual Data.  All three of which can have their foundations developed by IT, then provisioned to the business on a per role basis. Content – Oracle WebCenter benefits from an extremely mature content repository.  Work flow, audit, notification, office integration and conversion capabilities for documents (HTML & PDF) make this a haven for business users to take control of content within external and internal portals, custom applications and web sites.  When deploying WebCenter portal take time to think of areas in which IT can provide the "harness" for content to reside, then allow the business to manage any content items within the site, using the content foundation to ensure compliance with business rules and process.  This frees IT to work on more mission critical challenges and allows the business to respond in short order to emerging market needs. Collaboration – Native collaborative services and WebCenter spaces are a perfect match for business users who are looking to enable document sharing, discussions and social networking.  The ability to deploy the services is granular and on the basis of roles scoped to given areas of the system - much like the first C “content”.  This enables business analysts to design the roles required and IT to provision with peace of mind that users leveraging the collaborative services are only able to do so in explicitly designated areas of a site. Bottom line - business will not need to wait for IT, but cannot go outside of the scope that has been defined based on their roles. Contextual Data – Collaborative capabilities are most powerful when included within the context of business data.  The ability to supply business users with decision shaping data that they can include in various parts of a portal or portals, just as they would with content items, is one of the most powerful aspects of Oracle WebCenter.  Imagine a discussion about new store selection for a retail chain that re-purposes existing information from business intelligence services about various potential locations and or custom backend systems - presenting it directly in the context of the discussion.  If there are some data sources that are preexisting in your enterprise take a look at how they can be made into discrete offerings within the portal, then scoped to given business user roles for inclusion within collaborative activities. 2. Think Generically, Execute Specifically Constructs.  Anyone who has spent much time around me knows that I am obsessed with this word.  Why? Because Constructs offer immense power - more than APIs, Web Services or other technical capability. Constructs offer organizations the ability to leverage a platform's native characteristics to offer substantial business functionality - without writing code.  This concept becomes more powerful with the additional understanding of the concepts from the platform that an organization learns over time.  Let's take a look at an example of where an Oracle WebCenter construct can substantially reduce the time to get a subscription-based site out the door and into the hands of the end consumer. Imagine a site that allows members to subscribe to specific disciplines to access information and application data around that various discipline.  A space is a collection of secured pages within Oracle WebCenter.  Spaces are not only secured, but also default content stored within it to be scoped automatically to that space. Taking this a step further, Oracle WebCenter’s Activity Stream surfaces events, discussions and other activities that are scoped to the given user on the basis of their space affiliations.  In order to have a portal that would allow users to "subscribe" to information around various disciplines - spaces could be used out of the box to achieve this capability and without using any APIs or low level technical work to achieve this. 3. Make Governance Work for You Imagine driving down the street without the painted lines on the road.  The rules of the road are so ingrained in our minds, we often do not think about the process, but seemingly mundane lane markers are critical enablers. Lane markers allow us to travel at speeds that would be impossible if not for the agreed upon direction of flow. Additionally and more importantly, it allows people to act autonomously - going where they please at any given time. The return on the investment for mobility is high enough for people to buy into globally agreed up governance processes. In Oracle WebCenter we can use similar enablers to lane markers.  Our goal should be to enable the flow of information and provide end users with the ability to arrive at business solutions as needed, not on the basis of cumbersome processes that cannot meet the business needs in a timely fashion. How do we do this? Just as with "Segmentation of Duties" Oracle WebCenter technologies offer the opportunity to compartmentalize various business initiatives from each other within the system due to constructs and security that are available to use within the platform. For instance, when a WebCenter space is created, any content added within that space by default will be secured to that particular space and inherits meta data that is associated with a folder created for the space. Oracle WebCenter content uses meta data to support a broad range of rich ECM functionality and can automatically impart retention, workflow and other policies automatically on the basis of what has been defaulted for that space. Depending on your business needs, this paradigm will also extend to sub sections of a space, offering some interesting possibilities to enable automated management around content. An example may be press releases within a particular area of an extranet that require a five year retention period and need to the reviewed by marketing and legal before release.  The underlying content system will transparently take care of this process on the basis of the above rules, enabling peace of mind over unstructured data - which could otherwise become overwhelming. 4. Make Your First Project Your Second Imagine if Michael Phelps was competing in a swimming championship, but told right before his race that he had to use a brand new stroke.  There is no doubt that Michael is an outstanding swimmer, but chances are that he would like to have some time to get acquainted with the new stroke. New technologies should not be treated any differently.  Before jumping into the deep end it helps to take time to get to know the new approach - even though you may have been swimming thousands of times before. To quickly get a handle on Oracle WebCenter capabilities it can be helpful to deploy a sandbox for the team to use to share project documents, discussions and announcements in an effort to help the actual deployment get under way, while increasing everyone’s knowledge of the platform and its functionality that may be helpful down the road. Oracle Technology Network has made a pre-configured virtual machine available for download that can be a great starting point for this exercise. 5. Get to Know the Community If you are reading this blog post you have most certainly faced a software decision or challenge that was solved on the basis of a small piece of missing critical information - which took substantial research to discover.  Chances were also good that somewhere, someone had already come across this information and would have been excited to share it. There is no denying the power of passionate, connected users, sharing key tips around technology.  The Oracle WebCenter brand has a rich heritage that includes industry-leading technology and practitioners.  With the new Oracle WebCenter brand, opportunities to connect with these experts has become easier. Oracle WebCenter Blog Oracle Social Enterprise LinkedIn WebCenter Group Oracle WebCenter Twitter Oracle WebCenter Facebook Oracle User Groups Additionally, there are various Oracle WebCenter related blogs by an excellent grouping of services partners.

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  • Beyond the Hype of Skype

    There are many brand names that have become synonymous with products. Everything from Kleenex. Band-Aids, and Scotch Tape to Post-its, Legos, and Jell-O have been etched into the colloquialisms that ... [Author: Albert Smith - Computers and Internet - April 12, 2010]

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  • Intel Server Strategy Shift with Sandy Bridge EN & EP

    - by jchang
    The arrival of the Sandy Bridge EN and EP processors, expected in early 2012, will mark the completion of a significant shift in Intel server strategy. For the longest time 1995-2009, the strategy had been to focus on producing a premium processor designed for 4-way systems that might also be used in 8-way systems and higher. The objective for 2-way systems was use the desktop processor that later had a separate brand and different package & socket to leverage the low cost structure in driving...(read more)

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  • How to trick apt dependencies?

    - by FUZxxl
    I want to use Frescobaldi (an editor for Lilypond), but the packaged release of lilypond (2.12.3; lilypond is like TeX for scoresheets) in the official repos is a bit old, since I want to use some brand-new features. So I just cloned their git repo and installed it from there. Now my question is, how can I tell apt, that I satisfied the dependency on lilypond manually, so that it doesn't tries to install another copy?

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  • separate domains vs subdomains [duplicate]

    - by Sharon
    This question already has an answer here: Registering multiple domains vs. subdomains 5 answers We manufacture a very versatile product used in a wide variety of products using multiple brands. In order to market these brands, should we create a separate domain for each brand/market or use subdomains from our well established main domain? What would be best for SEO without breaking the bank?

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  • Solving security issue in PowerPivot for SharePoint and Power View

    - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)
    I just installed a brand new server (well, a virtual machine) with SharePoint 2010 SP1 and SQL Server 2012 RC0, including PowerPivot and Reporting Services / Power View. The server is joined to the domain I use in our development environment. I published a workbook in the PowerPivot Gallery and my user was immediately able to connect, browse and navigate data of the Excel workbook published by SharePoint. Moreover, I was able to open it in Power View. However, other users failed the connection. After...(read more)

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  • 6 Ways to Modernize Your Customer Experience

    - by Mike Stiles
    If customers have changed, if the way they research and shop have changed, if their expectations have changed, if their ability to act on dissatisfaction has changed, but your customer experience has NOT changed, what was once “good enough” may now be crippling. Well, the customer has changed, and why wouldn’t they? You’ve probably changed too in your role as consumer. There’s more info available, it’s easier to get, there’s more choice, you’re more mobile, you’re more connected, it’s easier to buy, and yes, it’s easier to switch brands if experiences don’t meet your now higher expectations. Thanks to technological advances, we as marketers can increasingly work borderline miracles. But if we’re still not adamantly adopting customer centricity, and if we aren’t making the customer experience paramount amongst business goals, the tech is wasted. A far more modern customer experience is called for. Here are 6 ways to get there: 1. Modern Marketing: Marketing data is aggregated and targeted to the right customers, who are getting personal, relevant communications. In return, you’re getting insight that finally properly attributes revenue to your marketing efforts. 2. Modern Selling: Demand is being driven across all channels with modern selling tools. Productivity is up thanks to coordinated communication and selling, and performance is ever optimized using powerful analytics. 3. Modern CPQ: You’re cross-selling and upselling more effectively since reps and channel partners have been empowered with the ability to quickly, automatically generate 100% accurate, customer-friendly quotes complete with price controls and automated approvals. 4. Modern Commerce: You’re leveraging data and delivering personalized, targeted digital experiences to everyone. You’re attracting more visitors, and you’re able to scale and keep up with the market and control the experience. 5. Modern Service: You’re better serving your customers by making it easier for them to engage with your brand, plus you’re lowering your costs by increasing agent and tech support efficiencies. 6. Modern Social: You’re getting faster, deeper, more accurate insights from social and turning content around faster, which then goes out to the right people at the right time in the right place. You’ve also gotten proactive in your service, and customers love that. For far too many brands, the buying journey of Need, Research, Select, Buy, Use, Recommend across the multiple connect points of Social, Mobile, Store, Call Center, Site, Ecommerce is a disconnected mess. Oracle’s approach to CX is to connect every interaction your customer has with your brand, avoiding the revenue losses lousy customer experiences bring. How important is the experience to customers? 94% are willing to pay more of their hard-earned money to have better ones, while a meager 1% say they get the good, consistent experiences they expect. Brands, your words aren’t as loud anymore, so your actions as they relate to customer experience are going to have to do the talking. @mikestiles @oraclesocialPhoto: Julien Tromeur, freeimages.com

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  • Social media measurement tools [on hold]

    - by user29187
    I work for a non-profit and we are currently trying to develop a system to measure and evaluate our social media platforms (Facebook and Twitter). We would liek to tarck a variety of social metrics, including, but not limited to: Twitter: # of followers, # of mentions, # of retweets Facebook: # of likes, # people talking about, # of page views We are currently using a paid platform for this. I wondered if there is a way to configure Google Analytics to do this or if there are any other free/clever or smart ways to track social engagement with our brand?

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  • New Amazon EC2 image for Oracle SOA (and BPM) Suite

    - by Demed L'Her
    Want to test-drive the Oracle SOA Suite, including the brand new BPMN capabilities, without having to install anything? Check out our new image on Amazon EC2 for Oracle SOA (and BPM) Suite 11gR1 PS2. The full instructions are here: BPM 11gR1 now available on Amazon EC2 Thanks Prasen for posting that new image!

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  • Impatient Customers Make Flawless Service Mission Critical for Midsize Companies

    - by Richard Lefebvre
    At times, I can be an impatient customer. But I’m not alone. Research by The Social Habit shows that among customers who contact a brand, product, or company through social media for support, 32% expect a response within 30 minutes and 42% expect a response within 60 minutes! 70% of respondents to another study expected their complaints to be addressed within 24 hours, irrespective of how they contacted the company. I was intrigued when I read a recent blog post by David Vap, Group Vice President of Product Development for Oracle Service Cloud. It’s about “Three Secrets to Innovation” in customer service. In David’s words: 1) Focus on making what’s hard simple 2) Solve real problems for real people 3) Don’t just spin a good vision. Do something about it  I believe midsize companies have a leg up in delivering on these three points, mainly because they have no other choice. How can you grow a business without listening to your customers and providing flawless service? Big companies are often weighed down by customer service practices that have been churning in bureaucracy for years or even decades. When the all-in-one printer/fax/scanner I bought my wife for Christmas (call me a romantic) failed after sixty days, I wasted hours of my time navigating the big brand manufacturer’s complex support and contact policies only to be offered a refurbished replacement after I shipped mine back to them. There was not a happy ending. Let's just say my wife still doesn't have a printer.  Young midsize companies need to innovate to grow. Established midsize company brands need to innovate to survive and reach the next level. Midsize Customer Case Study: The Boston Globe The Boston Globe, established in 1872 and the winner of 22 Pulitzer Prizes, is fighting the prevailing decline in the newspaper industry. Businessman John Henry invested in the Globe in 2013 because he, “…believes deeply in the future of this great community, and the Globe should play a vital role in determining that future”. How well the paper executes on its bold new strategy is truly mission critical—a matter of life or death for an industry icon. This customer case study tells how Oracle’s Service Cloud is helping The Boston Globe “do something about” and not just “spin” it’s strategy and vision via improved customer service. For example, Oracle RightNow Chat Cloud Service is now the preferred support channel for its online environments. The average e-mail or phone call can take three to four minutes to complete while the average chat is only 30 to 40 seconds. It’s a great example of one company leveraging technology to make things simpler to solve real problems for real people. Related: Oracle Cloud Service a leader in The Forrester Wave™: Customer Service Solutions For Small And Midsize Teams, Q2 2014

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