Enter your “User name and Password”, what an annoying thing to ask

How many times happened to you while reading an interesting article on a website and when you reached to the bottom of the page and clicked on “more” you were directed to the membership page where you were asked to enter your “User name and Password”? What a turn off!!!!!!

This evening I was really enjoying doing an online assessment for “What it takes to be a good IT manager”, after I answered all the questions and clicked on “submit” I was directed to enter your “User name and Password” page, it was such a turn off. The site’s administrators must know that a busy IT manager who took few minutes of his time to sit for an online assessment will not have much more time to fill out a membership form and wait for a new username and password e-mailed him so he can log on and get his assessment results.

This what exactly happened to me this evening, but I still wanted to explore the site, so I clicked on some “videos” link and again I was taking to “User name and Password” page, at that point I closed my browser and now I even don’t recall the name of the site.

I know our own tech target requires username and password, but the online community must come up with better ways to keep users coming back to visit their sites. Something better than asking them to fill out memberships forms, people just don’t have the time nor the desire to keep remembering tens of usernames and passwords.

Freelancers and the Wealth of Skills Available online

I have posted a small project on one of the freelancers’ site, the project was to work on a 10 pages static website to give it more professional look; within an hour, I got more then 10 bid for my project and most within my budget.

This wealth of skills available on the net makes it very attractive for businesses, especially small businesses, and individuals to find professionals who are ready to work for less but provide superior quality of work.

Having a local company design my website would have cost me 5 times more than if I gave it to one of the freelancers online.

You will not only get a great bargain but you will discover talents in the most unexpected places in the world.

Next time you have a need for any type of skills; do not look further than your computer screen.

Windows 7 Cheaper and better

I still remember the early days of Window Vista, I used to do onsite tech support, the first impression of most clients was “I like XP better”, most client were frustrated by their new hardware “especially printers” not fully compatible with Windows Vista.

As per Microsoft, the new Windows 7 requires less “minimum hardware configuration” to run than Windows Vista. I asked a tech at computer shop “what do you like about Windows 7”? He said, “It is faster and feel much more like Win XP.”

Will Windows 7 make up for all the frustrating years of Windows Vista? Windows XP is one of the most successful OS Microsoft released and if Windows 7 will give the users the great experience they had with XP then Windows 7 will be the OS of choice for many years to come and for millions of users.

Customers Service, US still has the lead

As manager, one of the things that I always miss about the US is the quality of customer service you can get in the US. In my daily work as a manager here in this side of the world, I constantly need to call various vendors to order services for my company, 90% of the time, vendors cannot deliver on schedule.

Working in the US, on-time performance was on top of my priorities as consultant and it understood by both vendors and clients that on-time performance was something taken for granted.

Unfortunately, on-time performance is something you cannot be taken for granted in many parts of the world nor even call back cannot be taken for granted.

Here are some real life examples of customer service issues I had to deal with in the past:

My company: Hello, I am calling you regarding our car that you fixed; we are still waiting on you to send us the final bill.
The vendor: Oh, I am sorry, I was on vacation for the last 3 weeks, and I forgot to call you and send you the bill.
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Our company: Hello, I am calling you regarding the service appointment we had with you for today to come and look at our printer.
The Tech: oh really? Yes yes, now I remember you called me yesterday to set the appointment. I am sorry; can I come today at 12.30PM?
Our company: Yes, you can (and we never hear from the tech again)
————————————————————————————————-
Our company: (calling major auto dealer in town) Hello, I called your cell phone number that you gave me to let you know if we want to fix our car or not, but you did not answer although I called you few times.
The customer service tech at the dealer: oh but I don’t answer calls from un-known numbers (this has to be classis)
————————————————————————————————

These are only a small list of a huge problem with customer service issues you face here. Many people in the US complain about the quality of customer service in the US, but the US still lead the world in the quality of customer service provided and the world still has a lot to learn from the US in this matter.

The end of Latin Characters dominance of website addresses

I cannot think of the types of security risks and implications this new change of website address naming scheme would bring but the challenge is great.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) said it would declare an end to the exclusive use of Latin characters for website addresses on Friday — the final day of its six-day conference in Seoul.

The full article:

SEOUL, Oct 26, 2009 (AFP) - The Internet is about to get more accessible for millions worldwide with the imminent approval of a new multilingual address system that uses Asian and Arabic scripts, a global regulator said Monday.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) said it would declare an end to the exclusive use of Latin characters for website addresses on Friday — the final day of its six-day conference in Seoul.
“This is the biggest change technically to the Internet since it was invented 40 years ago,” Peter Dengate Thrush, chairman of the ICANN board in charge of reviewing the change, told a press conference.
Thrush said he expected ICANN’s full board to grant approval on Friday — a day after the 40th anniversary of the Internet’s birth in a computer experiment by researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles.
When the change comes into force, it will be possible to use characters from other languages — such as Chinese, Arabic, Korean and Japanese — for a full Internet address, instead of just part of the address as now.
ICANN president Rod Beckstrom said the change — designed to serve the growing number of non-English-speaking Internet users — would come into effect in the middle of 2010. ICANN aims to start receiving applications next month.
“It will take some period of time to process the applications and then introduce the successful applications,” Beckstrom told the news conference.
“Of the 1.6 billion Internet users today worldwide, more than half use languages that have scripts that are not Latin-based,” Beckstrom said.
“So this change is very much necessary for not only half the world’s Internet users today but more than half, probably, of the future users as the Internet continues to spread.”
He said Internet addresses would no longer use limited “Generic Top-Level Domains” such as .com or .org, and instead use more flexible “Internationalised Domain Names” such as .post or .bank.
Beckstrom said the change would also allow Internet users to type fewer keystrokes to access a website which will “give companies a quicker way to get directly to their customers”.
He said the world would be able to “save roughly 60 to 100 billion human keystrokes a day” by getting rid of keystrokes that are currently needed to find Web addresses ending, for example, in individual country codes.
Thrush said that under the new system, all Web addresses ending .bank would only be available to “authorised” banks.
“Consumer confidence can be greatly enhanced,” he said.
The Seoul meeting will also debate cyber-security threats.
ICANN said in a statement the “threat to the domain name system is always increasing, as the world saw several months ago with the threat from the Conficker worm”.
It said this prompted an unprecedented collaboration between ICANN and top security experts from Microsoft, Symantec and dozens of other companies, software vendors and organisations.
Malicious code such as Conficker can be triggered to steal data or turn control of infected computers over to hackers amassing “zombie” machines for criminal ends.
ICANN, formed in 1998 by the US government, was recently given more autonomy after Washington relaxed its control over how the Internet is run.

http://www.zawya.com/story.cfm/sidANA20091026T112400ZIOP73/lok112415091026?weeklynewsletter&zawyaemailmarketing

Della, Have a man product color it pink and offer to women, no DELL

In my daily reading of the local newspapers, I came across an interesting article on the purchasing power of women in countries like China and India. The article focuses on the growing purchasing power of women in these countries, but also brought up an interesting point on how companies target female buyers. They either take a man product and color it pink and offer it to women (Michael Silverstine, of Boston Consulting group) or assume that women are not tech savvy as men. Both of these examples can be applied to dell computers website for women buyers “Della.”

I did search on dell website for “Della” but was not successful in reaching the main page for Della, the URL: www.della.com would take you to some wedding website.

This is an interesting subject. Women in general gave negative feedbacks on Della, women liked to be treated as tech savvy as men but companies focus more on color and styles when designing products for women rather than focusing on the actual needs for women.

Don’t Return my phone calls and you will lose my business

Today, I decided to call off a new business deal with an old supplier why? Basically, their marketing and sales manager doesn’t return my phone calls. Some businesses, in their think pursuit for new clients forget about their old clients. A business relation is just like a personal relation, if each partner doesn’t not give enough attention to the relationship, there is always an alternative out there.

The market is filled with competitors who are working hard to steal your customers, if you don’t have enough time to return your customer call, there is a competitor out there who will only return calls but will take the new customer to lunch.

The hardest part of running any business is to win loyal customers, it may take years to have solid relation with your customers, but it will very little to break this relation.

Employee Suicides at French Telecom and IT job Stress

It is a sad thing when a job stress gets so sever that an employee had to take his or her own life to direct attention to the issue, it is beyond me to understand how the French Government and the company’s officials let the number of employees committing suicide reach to 25 without taking any drastic measures to address the issue.

I still remember my first IT job as a tech support representative, on our job orientation, the director, in his efforts to make the job attractive to us said “this is the job where you can leave office and there is still sunlight outside”, he was talking about the many years he worked in IT fields and he seldom left office while the sun is still up.
No doubt, that IT related jobs are demanding and stressful. The fact that IT is one of the most dynamic industries, IT personnel must continuously update their skills. Look how, in a very short time, the world had to move from WinXP to WinVista and now Window7.

In my own journey in IT world, I started as tech support representative in 1995, where we were told that “you will leave work each day while the sun is still up”, to working as application tester where we never left office at 5PM, there was no compensation for over-time and some of us had to work on weekends. The pay was good, but the stress level was high but on those years, we were young and were looking for job security and experience so most of us did not mind long hours.

Sometimes in the middle of 2001, I decided to make a career shift to management, I realized the importance of having a balanced life, a life which is not centered around my job, then again in 2002, I left the corporate world entirely and started my own small IT consulting firm where my focus was and still on small business owners, I work less hours and make less money, but I spend more time with family and friends and I still do the work that I love to do.
So yes, IT-related Jobs are demanding, it is the nature of the industry that is continuously evolving and penetrating every aspect of our lives.

My advice to any new comer to IT would be “Spend few years working on hard-core IT jobs then move to management or consulting where you can have more free time to spend away from job.”

Indian and Chinese Students are returning home from US in Larger numbers

Silicon Valley was and still the tech heaven for technology workers, either for inspiring entrepreneurs or for the young and talented but in recent years, many reports came out on reverse brain drain to new hot destinations such as India and China.

Several factors are adding to this reverse brain drain out of the US:

• Complicated and lengthy visa process in US, it could take years for a foreign worker to get his/her permanent residency status.

• Besides India and China, there are few other hot destinations are emerging for IT workers, such as (Chile, Brazil, and parts of South America and Southern Europe.) This new destinations are on direct competitions with the US on talents.

• The on going campaign on “foreign workers are taking American jobs,” this campaign is being going on for years and resulted in many anti-immigration laws. I personally know an IT company’s owner who had to leave the US because he could not get his visa extended and he had to let go of two of his American workers.

There is a recent and very interesting article on this subject here: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/17/beware-the-reverse-brain-drain-to-india-and-china/

GLORIAD (Global Ring Network for Advanced Application Development)

Linking Scientists in US, Russia, China, Korea, Canada, Netherlands and the Nordic Countries with Advanced Cyberinfrastructure
GLORIAD is built on a fiber-optic ring of networks around the northern hemisphere of the earth, providing scientists, educators and students with advanced networking tools that improve communications and data exchange, enabling active, daily collaboration on common problems. With GLORIAD, the scientific community can move unprecedented volumes of valuable data effortlessly, stream video and communicate through quality audio- and video-conferencing.
GLORIAD exists today due to the shared commitment of the US, Russia, China, Korea, Canada, the Netherlands and the five Nordic countries of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden, to promote increased engagement and cooperation between their countries, beginning with their scientists, educators and young people. The benefits of this advanced network are shared with Science & Education (S&E) communities throughout Europe, Asia and the Americas.
GLORIAD provides more than a network; it provides a stable, persistent, non-threatening means of facilitating dialog and increased cooperation between nations that often have been at odds through the past century. This new era of cooperation will provide benefits not only to the S&E communities but to every citizen in the partner countries through:
• Improved weather forecasting and atmospheric modeling through live sharing of monitoring data;
• New discoveries into the basic nature and structure of the universe through advanced network connections between high energy physicists and astronomers - and the expensive facilities GLORIAD makes it possible to share;
• Support of the global community building the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), creating a technology which will someday provide a practically limitless supply of energy;
• Advancing joint geological sciences related to seismic monitoring and earthquake prediction;
• Enabling new joint telemedical applications and practices;
• Strengthening current programs in nuclear weapons disposal, nuclear materials protection, accounting and control and active discussions on combating terrorist threats.
• Increasing classroom-to-classroom cooperation to accessible scientists and students in other countries through the 24/7 EduCultural Channel, the “Virtual Science Museum of China,” the Russia-developed “Simple Words ” global essay contest, and a special partnership with International Junior Achievement.
Reference: http://www.gloriad.org/gloriad/index.html