rob woodbridge dot com

How do you celebrate new employees?

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 17:25:07 -0400

This morning I was explaining my personal view about how to integrate new employees into a company to a client I’m advising and it dawned on me this might actually be of interest to others.

First off, my philosophy is to focus on the new hire and celebrate the fact they have decided to come to work with us at our company. The decision to take a job at one company versus another is always a risk and you should always show your appreciation for that choice.

This is my process, refined over many years and many different companies:

The first day on the job, the new employee is greeted by their office, cubicle or desk completely set up. This includes (but not limited to):

1. A fully set up computer including email address and access to the intranet, ready to go, off the shelf, day one.

2. Business cards with name and title, phone number, extension, etc. Printed and ready to bring home to show everyone

3. A fully functioning smartphone with email and calendar hooked up and ready to send/receive

4. A company shirt/hat/whatever you give out

We then have a celebration lunch for the whole team, paid for by the company, ensuring the new employee is engaged in the conversation - I usually put them on the spot to fill in the blanks of their past by introducing themselves to everyone.

This really gets them embedded into the team. It is everyone’s responsibility to make sure their space is set up and forces us all to make sure we have a good process for bringing new people in.

One last touch that I stole from somewhere: I do a handwritten note welcoming them to the company, affix it to a bottle of wine and have it sent to their home the evening of their first day to enjoy with their significant other.

Celebrating the arrival is a great way to send the message that that person has made the right choice to come work with us.

How do you celebrate new employees?

How to Mobilize the Masses

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 21:36:00 -0400

Five years ago, I read a report about Nigerian grain farmers leveraging mobile networks and a Nokia feature phone to determine the best local market to sell their grain based on the asking price at each market.

The cost of each call was the equivalent to $2, instead of the travel investment of $20 to get their grain to market only to discover their chosen market was already saturated.

This created a price pull in the grain markets – farmers were going to sell product where they could get the best available price. What an incredibly simple and effective use of mobile, and it’s something that should inspire all of us to look at our business and see where mobile technology fits.

Quite simply, there is not a business in the developed world that can ignore mobile technology.

After all, if a simple grain farmer in the middle of a developing nation in turmoil can find value in mobile, certainly a business such as yours can as well.

I’m not saying every business entity needs to spend money on building an application, nor am I saying your company will go out of business as a result of non-participation in this industry – but you’re certainly leaving customers in a lurch.

How should you start?

This is going to sound trite, but you need to figure out where the natural extension to your existing business is – where you can add value by extending your offering into the mobile world. If you are a dry-cleaning business, you should look at how you can enhance your service to better serve customers. Youmay consider using a mobile coupon service to offer discounts, or you may offer your same-day-service customers an SMS notification to let them know when their clothes are ready for pickup.

Both alternatives are a fraction of the cost of building something yourself, and leverage both the existing technology inherent in the platform as well as the network effect of the application.

Leverage the network effect

The great thing about building a standalone application is the brand extension - and that’s about it. If you are trying to convince yourself that an app is what you need, ask these questions: am I doing this because I want it or because the business needs it; what are the expected outcomes of this initiative; and can I leverage some other technology to achieve my goals?

There are a lot of applications that are better off not being built, quite frankly. But ego and hype push common sense behind our judgement cloud. For example, how many independent news applications are there on AppWorld or AppStore? A quick search lists more than 5,000 applications focused on “news” – how do you compete in this mess? You can’t, unless you are the New York Times or Wall Street Journal. Determine what your goal is – your metric for success – and stick to it.

Be a convenience, not a nuisance

Restaurants have this nailed. If I’m hungry and have a hankering for Indian food, I can almost assuredly satisfy my requirement on the way home from the office Ð but how to extend this convenience onto mobile? Enter a company like Viriginia-based Blue Shoe Mobile.

I recently interviewed Blue Shoe founder Eddie Peloke about the service, and his insight was spot-on when it came to convenience in the mobile world. His company creates mobile versions of restaurant menus, but with a twist. Mobile menus are, well, nice -but a real nuisance, for two reasons: They need to be maintained, and what good is a menu if I can’t order from it?

That’s the twist upon which Blue Shoe focuses. Eddie’s company brings mobile ordering through its application, and deposits the order at the restaurant in a form that works within the current system the restaurant uses – whether it arrives by fax, email or SMS, the restaurant doesn’t need to change the way they do business to accept yours. They also allow the restaurants to modify the menus at will giving them the power to control the experience.

As you can see, your business doesn’t need to be a technology company to leverage the power of the mobile world. If restaurateurs, dry cleaners, farmers in rural Africa and independent news creators can all incorporate mobile into their business, shouldn’t you be looking into it for yours?

That’s not a question.

This originally ran in the July 12, 2010 issue of Ottawa Business Journal

This is a sneak preview of the RebelVoice pilot. Still refining...

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 22:41:49 -0400

This is a sneak preview of the RebelVoice pilot. Still refining but excited about it! Thoughts?

Snap from the Ottawa Business Journal Forty under 40 award gala....

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 21:37:07 -0400

Snap from the Ottawa Business Journal Forty under 40 award gala. That’s me and good pal Doug Hewson #fb #li

An interview I did on CBC Morning about mobile/wireless and the...

Tue, 22 Jun 2010 07:38:56 -0400

An interview I did on CBC Morning about mobile/wireless and the Ottawa AppShow event I put on.

CTV Canada video of a few Ottawa mobile firms (GlitchSoft and...

Sun, 20 Jun 2010 21:46:57 -0400

[Flash 10 is required to watch video.]

CTV Canada video of a few Ottawa mobile firms (GlitchSoft and WickSoft) and a little bit of UNTETHER.tv

My convocation speech for the Algonquin College School of...

Fri, 18 Jun 2010 23:01:02 -0400

My convocation speech for the Algonquin College School of Business class of 2010.

My morning coffee view. Hate leaving Lake Placid.

Tue, 25 May 2010 08:28:01 -0400

My morning coffee view. Hate leaving Lake Placid.

Huh? Not sure if this is good or bad advertising. Got my...

Fri, 21 May 2010 17:31:50 -0400

Huh? Not sure if this is good or bad advertising. Got my attention…

I didn’t know we were “THE” Canada. This is...

Fri, 21 May 2010 07:05:35 -0400

I didn’t know we were “THE” Canada. This is from the Twitter site.

My “CEO” bookshelf #1. What does yours look like?

Mon, 17 May 2010 14:40:29 -0400

My “CEO” bookshelf #1. What does yours look like?

Is mobile a brand killer? The future of pricing in a mobile world

Sun, 16 May 2010 10:17:31 -0400

That’s a fairly dramatic title but if you look ever so close enough, you will see that we are entering a very volatile era in pricing that may eventually lead to the extinction of brand loyalty and a sharp change in the way prices are determined.

If you are a Star Trek fan — either the original Shatner version or the Next Generation Picard version — you know that the world in Gene Roddenberry’s mind has started to populate our daily existence. The personal communicator, the tablets, the voice recognition, the computers, the aliens…we are now living in his world and in his world, the act of exchanging currency for goods does not exist and there are no visible brands. Is that where we are heading?

Wal-Mart has spent a generation wringing efficiencies out of their channel and negotiating down the price they pay for their bulk buys so they can extend the same savings on to the consumer. The impact has been such a shift in the way we spend that, in case you didn’t know, Wal-Mart is now a gauge for consumer confidence in the United States. Price matters to us. While we want to spend money, good money, on certain things (cars, houses, subscriptions to UNTETHER.tv), things that were at one time prestigious (clothing, books, computers for example) are now commodities that we look for the best quality we can find for the lowest price.

It took three or four decades for Wal-Mart to disrupt the corner grocer, bookstore and clothing store and turn shopping into a generic chore — eons compared to what is about to happen when you inject the pure ingenuity of mobile into the fray.

Mobile is insanely distributed: 4.5 billion mobile subscriptions worldwide which is a massive mesh network that covers much of the globe and not a single one of us would turn down a deal on product if we had the chance, it is part of who we are!

It is early days but bear with me as I walk through what is unfolding right in front of those little screens we carry around with us everywhere. We have, at our fingertips or on our hips or belts, a gateway to always-on knowledge that makes price liquid and weakens brand-loyalty.

There are a number of mobile companies facilitating this today, right now. Services like YOWZA! and Clip Mobile offer location-based coupons, ShopSavvy from Big In Japan allows you to compare the price of any good against websites and other stores nearby. Combine that technology with services from location-based marketing companies such as Foursquare and Gowalla and opt-in SMS technology from Adenyo and you have the beginning of the perfect pricing storm.

In the not-so-distant future, this scenario could play out:

You will walk into any store anywhere in the world and, upon entering, stick your location with Foursquare or Gowalla or Google or Facebook. Instantly a coupon pops up for that location or a similar location nearby. You then find a product that you are interested in purchasing, scan the barcode with your phone and wait while it triangulates your location, searches the inventory of similar stores nearby and checks online for prices and availability. In a flash, you have a pricing landscape for that product which includes key trending analytics showing a demand curve with the optimum time to buy giving you much more power to make the best buy decision you can and choice of where to buy it.

The power of pricing shifts to you, the consumer, and you then dictate to the store how much you are willing to purchase the product for. Take it or leave it.

Can’t see it happening this way? Well, it’s already begun. How long did you take to make the agonizing decision to buy that $0.99 app on AppStore or AppWorld? How long did you debate the purchase price against the value you thought you would receive? My guess is far longer and at greater cost than giving of the buck. We are all price-aware and our viewpoint has shifted to a point where we seem to forget that we would have spent $20 on a PC application that did the very same thing.

And that only took one year…

Future computing. IPad, Bluetooth keyboard. Productive.

Tue, 11 May 2010 16:21:05 -0400

Future computing. IPad, Bluetooth keyboard. Productive.

This is a great shot for an article that was written about...

Thu, 29 Apr 2010 10:22:33 -0400

This is a great shot for an article that was written about UNTETHER.tv for 24hrs.ca. You can see the full article on page 4 of the April 29th digital edition here.

Goodbye winter, hellooooo Woodbridge.

Tue, 20 Apr 2010 08:52:11 -0400

Goodbye winter, hellooooo Woodbridge.

Looking for the President…

Thu, 15 Apr 2010 22:02:08 -0400

Looking for the President…

This is an actual “promo” at my gym. Huh? Clarity of...

Mon, 12 Apr 2010 18:40:17 -0400

This is an actual “promo” at my gym. Huh? Clarity of purpose is so important. Without it you get this mess. #li

Why mobile is an unsolvable Rubik’s Cube — and that’s a good...

Sat, 10 Apr 2010 10:00:44 -0400

Why mobile is an unsolvable Rubik’s Cube — and that’s a good thing for entrepreneurs — according to Adenyo’s Kevin McGuire

Best use of my iPad! #MLB #fb #li

Fri, 09 Apr 2010 16:57:31 -0400

Best use of my iPad! #MLB #fb #li

What’s cool in BlackBerry w/ BlackBerryCool —...

Sat, 03 Apr 2010 22:57:08 -0400

What’s cool in BlackBerry w/ BlackBerryCool — Episode 2

Episode 2 is in the can. This week, Kyle and I discuss the app-enings around some BlackBerry releases — including the new LinkedIn for BlackBerry and Tristan Interactive’s BlackBerry launch (I interviewed CEO Chris MacLaren about Tristan a while ago. It can be found here).

The core of the conversation is focused on the need for App stores and what a good strategy is for BlackBerry App developers around the bevy of channels here.

Enjoy and remember to send feedback and questions!