Tagged: technology RSS

  • Bill Rice 6:19 am on September 28, 2007 Permalink | Reply
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    Mint the New Proactive Lead Generation 

    In case you missed it, Mint won the TechCrunch40 Top Tech Company Award. Mint is a new simple way for you to manage your money online.

    At first glance, it seems to be a more intuitive and user-friendly personal accounting replacement for Intuit’s Quicken. However, as you begin using Mint you begin to note how effectively it is proactively generating lucrative leads for various financial services companies from your financial data. As it scrubs for opportunities for you to save on expenditures and improve returns on your money it is spitting out opportunities for you to proactively engage companies with a better deal.

    This is not just personal accounting software it is a lead generation platform (also note Sy Fahimi, CEO of Adteractive is an investor).

    This platform raises two important innovative opportunities:

    1. Can the companies that are receiving these lucrative leads have the analytic capability to effective improve their retention and win rates?
    2. Once you receive a win can you effectively manage that lead into a conversion?

    This is a true example of a marketing (yes, I see Mint as marketing and lead generation) company learning to stock the pond with consumers that self-organize, target, and initiate. Lead generation continues it evolutionary march.

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  • Bill Rice 1:08 pm on September 10, 2007 Permalink | Reply
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    IBM gets approval for mortgage operations 

    The announcement that IBM has received approval for mortgage originations could be bigger news than many might first imagine. This could be the entrance of mortgage as a service (MaaS) taken from the lessons of SaaS.

    IBM Lender Business Process Services, or LBPS, received clearance to provide mortgage origination services for federally insured Federal Housing Administration (FHA) loans.

    When it announced the unit’s launch in March, IBM said the unit would fill a void in the lending space, particularly for small and midsize lenders.

    The Charlotte-based unit will allow mortgage lenders to replace the fixed costs that are associated with typical loan fulfillment operations with a variable-cost framework. This in turn will free up lenders to provide better service and support to consumers, IBM says.

    LBPS will offer a variety of lending services, including loan application, underwriting, processing, vendor management, document preparations, and loan closing.

    In a market where lenders are looking for operational efficiency, outsourcing the enormous overhead and disjointedness of a technology division in a 30-60 day cyclical mortgage business model may make sense beyond the small and medium size operations.

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  • Bill Rice 7:46 am on June 13, 2007 Permalink | Reply
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    Ignore the word Facebook and focus on Software Platform 

    First, if you have not begun reading Marc Andreessen’s blog, put it in your feed reader and start.

    Now, turn your attention to Marc’s analysis of Facebook and ignore any reference to “Facebook.”

    I often find that Web 2.0 labeled technologies’ infrastructure and philosophical value is lost in the immaturity of current users implementation. That is not to say that lowering the bar to users being able to use technology for trivia purposes is bad. It does mean that we often look at a technologies current implementation and reduce it to myopic categorizations like MySpace is for teenagers, Facebook is for college kids, LinkedIN is for business adults, and Twitter is just lunacy.

    The key point to be observed in this post:

    Veterans of the software industry have, hardcoded into their DNA, the assumption that in any fight between a platform and an application, the platform will always win.

    Definitionally, a “platform” is a system that can be reprogrammed and therefore customized by outside developers — users — and in that way, adapted to countless needs and niches that the platform’s original developers could not have possibly contemplated, much less had time to accommodate.

    In contrast, an “application” is a system that cannot be reprogrammed by outside developers. It is a closed environment that does whatever its original developers intended it to do, and nothing more.

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  • Bill Rice 9:37 am on May 25, 2007 Permalink | Reply
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    Getting Higher Productivity is Breaking the 9 to 5 Paradigm 

    Sage words on productivity, as Pick the Brain predicts the end of the 9 to 5 Office Worker. Driving to goals and team objectives, with routine checkpoints (to drive out procrastination), not “office hours” has always been an effective formula for me.

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  • Bill Rice 9:12 am on April 4, 2007 Permalink | Reply
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    Business Intelligence Web 2.0 Style 

    Ian Landsman shows us what we can learn about our own businesses with a little Web 2.0 mashup. Mapping your customer base.

     

  • Bill Rice 4:37 pm on March 9, 2007 Permalink | Reply
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    Scripting News: Preserving ideas 

    Dave Winer has once again seeded the Internet with a critical thought question that needs an answer. How do we preserve ideas that are increasingly created and reside only digitally on the Internet?

     

  • Bill Rice 10:35 pm on January 13, 2007 Permalink | Reply
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    A VC: A Feed Subscription Marketing Ecosystem 

    It is stuff like this–“A Feed Subscription Marketing Ecosystem”–that makes me love this guy. He tries things that makes him understand the market that he is involved in better.

    He is an entrepreneurial VC. It has to make him a better investor and certainly a better “partner” if you are in his portfolio.

    Great stuff!

     

  • Bill Rice 10:20 pm on January 8, 2007 Permalink | Reply
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    Is this the next gen blogging platform? 

    Bringing the website and the blog closer together–Terapad.com – Beyond Blogging. Isn’t a blogging platform just an efficient content management system.

    (Via Seth’s Blog.)

     

  • Bill Rice 9:46 pm on January 2, 2007 Permalink | Reply
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    Cool Useful Stuff Isn’t Always Invented 

    Sometimes great technology or innovations aren’t invented.

    Maybe we should consider Dave Winer’s point more closely. If we stop trying to claim inventions all the time and try to promote, evangelize, and create useful user apps would we have better innovations and user experiences?

    Yes.

     

  • Bill Rice 7:18 am on November 30, 2006 Permalink | Reply
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    10 Reasons Your Sales Management Should be SaaS 

    Software-as-a-Service has been quietly gaining market share in the enterprise, where control once was the rule. Nowhere has this been more evident than with CRM applications like Salesforce.com declaring, “no software.” So, why should you consider SaaS when you select your sales management solution?

    1. Immediate deployment and therefore return
    2. Easier for vendors to commit to and met service level agreements
    3. Flexibility in choosing and switching to best in class over time
    4. You get to focus on your core business–your product or service–and get out of the software development business

    Nicholas Carr’s SaaS adoption set to explode triggered my thoughts to extend his article specifically to Sales Management.

     

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