By Jill Pyle
According to the recent Earth to Tech blog entry Your Bad Code Is Killing My Planet, “virtualization and on-demand computing are giving companies new reasons to worry about code efficiency.”
Alistair Croll, vice president of product management and co-founder of Coradiant, writes about how applications with inefficient code require more processing power, storage and bandwidth. When deployed on a large scale, inefficient applications ultimately require more energy to run.
This makes me wonder, will more companies start coding for energy efficiency and promoting their applications as green?
By Linda Forrest
My Dad is what is called an “early adopter.” I’ve always given my parents jocular grief about the many “gadgets” that they have but their interest in cutting edge technologies has been prevalent throughout my entire life and provided me with an advantage in my education and later, my career.
A tremendous gift that my parents gave me was the introduction of computers to my life at a very young age. I literally do not remember a time before computers, which is rare amongst my peers in their late twenties and early thirties. I was typing before I could write longhand and have used a plethora of applications through the years, from word processing on up to audio engineering software.
An incredibly intelligent man with a technological mind, my father was always interested in computers and wrote programs for my brother and me when we were young. The family loves to tell stories about me, a toddler, being held upright by my brother so that I could type “run” on the keyboard to make the application do its thing.
As technology has advanced, my Dad has kept up and is without a doubt the most tech-savvy sixty-something that I know. He was a webmaster for the site of my parents’ business and his various social groups before most people knew what a web site was. He got involved with a messageboard that connects him with people he hasn’t seen in 50 years and uses Skype to talk with his old shipmates around the world.
Because of his interest in and willingness to learn about new technology, my parents have the whole world at their fingertips – emailing, surfing the web, online banking, VoIP and more are a snap for them. My friend’s mother communicates with her and her brother almost exclusively by text message. Family friends in their 70s who travel a lot keep us up to date on their journeys via email. In stark contrast, I know people in this age group who don’t have an answering machine and are still convinced that this “computer thing” shall pass.
As our population gets older and the huge numbers of baby boomers enter their senior years, which group do you think is more prevalent – those who embrace technology and are learning how to use it to enrich their lives? Or those who want no part of it and are convinced that the ATM is no substitute for going up to the teller? How will marketing to this age group change as time goes on?
By Danny Sullivan
It probably depends who you ask, doesn’t it? Still, at this week’s BioPartnering Europe conference in London, there were definitely some positive signs for those companies striving for success in this battered market.
The conference was thick with representatives from big pharma – many senior executives were present and there appeared to be a renewed appetite for the acquisition of new technology.
One pleasantly surprised delegate was Rainer Engelhardt, CEO of GangaGen, which develops bacteriophage-based treatments for infectious disease.
“I have definitely noticed a sense of optimism and enthusiasm for the future,” said Engelhardt.” The presence of big pharma is very encouraging, and there are signs that they are beginning to take an interest in infectious disease again, which is good news for GangaGen.”
It’s still early days, of course, and from a PR firm’s perspective, it’s a long way from being an ideal market. But there were enough positive rumblings from some of the executives we met to justify this company’s continued interest in the sector.
Many smaller biotech companies view PR as a non-essential function that can be handled by someone internally, as and when the need arises. And to a certain degree, this is probably true, but the benefit of taking a more strategic approach to the area of one’s business cannot be underestimated. Rather than simply making sporadic announcements about company and product developments, PR can also be an effective tool to help support the drive towards business goals such as financing, partnerships, licensing deals and so on, as well as simply helping to keep awareness up during the periods between news events.
Of course, strategic PR requires a budget, so here’s hoping this positive attitude at BioPartnering is a sign of what is still to come.
By Francis Moran
My colleague Danny last week highlighted the worthy achievement of Scotland’s Graham Technology in winning Best Product at Call Centre Expo for its customer interaction platform ciboodle. The award capped a year of focused marketing since ciboodle was first launched.
But the achievement was much more than a year in the making. Like many software product companies, Graham Technology had its genesis in consulting; in its case, first with big systems integration projects starting more than 20 years ago, and then with the development of business process-based contact centre solutions. But at some point, Graham Technology had to begin a conscious process of evolution from consultancy to software product company. When we first started talking with the company, it was still fully conscious that “we can do anything for anyone,” but it was committed to this new path that would see it eschew one-off bespoke application development in favour of seizing a specific market opportunity and seeking to be a global leader in its chosen space.
It’s an evolution we have seen many companies wrestle with, and at which some of them balk. It can’t be easy, after all, to leave the comfort of an assured revenue stream where your big computer brains are fully engaged on new and exciting client challenges every day. As a guy who’s been a consultant for his entire PR career, I completely understand the lure of this challenging dynamic.
But it’s a tough model to scale, and that’s why so many software consulting companies, recognising that they may have something that looks like a product, decide to go for it. Sort of.
Unlike Graham Technology and other software companies whose new products we have successfully launched into global markets, too many only sort of go for it. And I think it has to be one or the other. It’s not that a consulting company constitutes an inherently inferior business model; it’s just that I think you have to decide which you’re going to be — service, or product.
Bottom line: Graham Technology unreservedly made the leap, and is reaping the rewards for having done so.
By Linda Forrest
Sometimes, it can be challenging to draw the connection between technological advancements and one’s personal life. Such is definitely not the case with a recent media launch that we did for a new client.
Earlier this year, inmedia had the incredible experience of being responsible for the worldwide media launch of Touch Bionics’ i-LIMB Hand, the world’s first commercially available bionic hand. I completely understand the life-changing potential of this product because of personal experience.
My wonderful mother has always been able to do anything she put her mind to and has never let the fact that she was born with an abnormal left hand slow her down. Throughout my life, if people would ask about what happened to her hand, I would wonder why they were asking as she is so adept and resourceful that I would often forget that she had anything different about her hand.
At birth, her hand was misshapen due to a birth defect. As it was the early 1940s and medical science wasn’t nearly where it is today, the doctors made the poor decision to give her hand massive doses of radiation, resulting in severe radiation burns. Her parents were left with the choice between amputation and a “hook” to act as her hand or doctors could attempt to save her hand and lower arm with groundbreaking plastic surgery techniques developed on burn victims from WW2. They opted for the latter.
The many plastic surgeries and surgeons’ best efforts resulted in a patchwork of various skin grafts and immobile fingers that by her early 60s have poor circulation and have caused her near constant pain. At the onset of these problems, one of my mother’s great fears was that she would have to have her hand amputated. In fact, her situation had worsened in the past year and she had her baby finger amputated in February.
As I started to learn about Touch Bionics and the i-LIMB Hand, I kept her informed, sent her to the company’s web site and our whole family marveled at the technology and what it means not only to the prosthetics, science and medical communities at large and to amputees, but to us personally.
Although she does not currently have a requirement for the i-LIMB Hand, this development has truly made her feel more comfortable with the idea that should she need the remainder of her hand amputated at some point, there is a viable option for a replacement.
Near the launch, she said to me, “This is all so fantastic. I no longer need to be afraid I’ll lose my left hand as FINALLY a really amazing option is available. I’ve only waited my whole life for this!!!”
Thank you to Touch Bionics for the piece of mind that you’ve given my family and others like us. Your work is truly making an important difference.
