Category: Uncategorized
June 9th, 2014 by Elma Jane
To help cubicle workers be as productive as possible, here are some etiquette tips.
Be professional. When working in a cubicle, employees must recognize that they are expected to be professional at all times. That includes having incoming and outgoing personal telephone calls be the exception rather than the rule. That includes having too many personal knickknacks that look more like clutter than symbols of the professional you aspire to be.
Don’t assume a co-worker has time to talk. When visiting a peer’s cubicle, it’s important to tell the person in one or two sentences what you would like to talk about. Then ask the person if he or she has the amount of time you need to discuss it.
Hands to yourself. Employees need to respect their peers by not taking things from cubicles without asking first. Keep your hands off a cube dweller’s desk. Just because there’s no door doesn’t mean you can help yourself to their paper clips or stapler.
Inside voices. Since even the best cubicles are not completely soundproof, workers must be conscious of the volume of their voices, whether they are speaking to someone in their cubicle or on the phone. You do not want to share your conversation with the entire row of cubicles and you don’t want to disrupt their work. You also don’t want to be distracted by their conversations and calls.
Keep quiet. Since employees can hear what’s going on in the cubicles around them, workers should keep the sounds coming from their cubicle to a minimum. Using earbuds when listening to music, picking up the phone after one or two rings, tuning the ring volume on their phone to the lowest setting and avoiding screensaver sound effects. When away from your cubicle, set your phone to take voice messages. If leaving your cellphone behind while you go down the hall for coffee, place it on off or vibrate.
Minimize hallway conversations. While it can be convenient and productive to have a quick work conversation in the hallway with a colleague, they can be very distracting to employees working inside their cubicles. This has implications for confidentiality, but can also be disruptive to those trying to get some work done. Be mindful of the potential for disruption and step to a convenient conference room or to a general corridor away from the cubicles.
No confidential meetings. Employees should avoid discussing personal and confidential matters in their cubicles. Confidential matters are just that confidential.
No eavesdropping. Cubicle workers should avoid listening in on their peer’s conversations or checking out what’s on a co-worker’s computer while that person is gone. Never read someone’s computer screen or comment on conversations you’ve overheard. Resist answering a question you overheard asked in the cube next to you.
No personal grooming. Avoid grossing out those nearby, employees should find some place more appropriate than their cubicle to tend to their grooming needs. Use the restroom not your cubicle for personal grooming.
No pop-ins. Rather than just stepping inside a co-worker’s cubicle, employees should act like there’s an invisible door stopping them. If you are passing by another’s cubicle and would like to stop in for a moment, it is appropriate to do so either when the person makes eye contact with you, isn’t on the phone, talking with another or doesn’t look as though he or she is deep in thought.
No speakerphone. One of the biggest distractions for employees working in cubicles can be when a co-worker nearby uses their speakerphone to make or answer a call. Most conference rooms are set up with a phone in which conference calls can be placed.
Pleasant fragrances. Just as noise easily travels between cubicles, so do fragrances and odors, cubicle workers should avoid to wear a strong fragrance to work, as they can be very irritating to colleagues with allergies. Also avoid unpleasant odors in your lunch choices or save the stinky fish for the lunchroom, not your desk.
Working in a cubicle presents employees with challenges on a daily basis and can be a tough endeavor. One of the challenges is how co-workers with different personalities, working styles and preferences and from different cultures can work successfully in a cubicle environment. From a lack of privacy to noisy neighbors, getting your work accomplished in such cramped confines can sometimes be a difficult chore. In order to make the working environment productive for everyone involved, it is critical that employees be respectful of those around them. Bottom line, common courtesy and respect will go a long way in ensuring a peaceful coexistence with your fellow residents of cubicle land.
Posted in Uncategorized
June 4th, 2014 by Elma Jane
Zavers, the online coupon program that was launched through Google 17 months ago, is just going to be one of those things that didn’t work out. Google announced yesterday that it is pulling the program, due to lack of interest. Zavers allowed users to clip coupons online and use them in-store. It was intended to help merchants’ build more targeted and effective loyalty and reward programs.
Zavers was basically a coupon program tied with the merchant point-of-sale system. The integration process with the POS systems were proving to be challenging and retailers were not too keen on sharing their data with Google.
Google has said it will continue to work closely with users through the transition away from Zavers and that it continues to move forward with greater focused on more successful areas of their initial entrance into payments such as product listing ads, Google Shopping Express and Google Wallet.
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged with: (POS) systems, coupon program, data, google, Google Shopping Express, Google Wallet, integration, loyalty and reward programs, merchant point-of-sale system, Merchant's, online coupon program, payments, point of sale, POS, retailers
May 30th, 2014 by Elma Jane
The Challenge with Search and Identity
Search engines are working on making their results ever more personalized so that their search results will contain more content directly relevant to you, either based on location, past behavior, or from people you know or are likely to trust. Social media brings a wealth of identity and relationship data to the search engines’ algorithms. A good product can only be built where we understand who’s who and who is related to whom. Relationships are also important alongside content. To build a good product, we have to do all types of processing. But fundamentally, it’s not just about content. It’s about identity, relationships and content. Anything else trivializes a very hard product.
How Social Feeds SEO
By understanding that identity and relationships are important to search engines and therefore to SEO, we can begin to change our marketing behaviors so that we’re positioned to benefit as the tide swells.
But blasting Facebook posts out that link to your site won’t give you an ounce more link authority in the search algorithms. All reputable social networks strip the link authority from the links off to other sites by using 302 redirects or nofollow attributes. So where exactly is the value to organic search?
Indirect link earning – If no one sees your content, regardless of how amazingly awesome it may be, no one can link to it. Social media can be a powerful way to expose masses of customers to engaging content. The more people that see that content and enjoy it, the more likely it is to earn reshares that expose even more people to your messages. Increasing the number of exposures logically increases the number of people who are likely to link to the content on a blog or another site that does pass link authority back to your site.
Performance Data – Social listening data, including sentiment data and topical data, can inform keyword research for search marketing. Naturally, the benefit swings both ways. Keyword data can also inform social media strategy. These two data sources are both windows into customers’ desires, beliefs and needs. To analyze the data in silos makes zero sense.
Personalization – Social relationships also create opportunities for your content to show up in individual customers’ personalized search results. For example, If Alice uses Google+ to +1 an informative tips and tricks page on your site, and Alice is friends with Amy, the next time Amy searches for similar tips content she will likely see that Alice liked your tips and tricks page enough to share it. Your page may display in Amy’s search results purely because Alice shared it, when it wouldn’t have normally been displayed in search results. And the search result will be visually augmented with Alice’s picture and the notation that she shared it. That personalization benefits your ability to rank, your visual appeal to increase click through, and boosts trust based on the relationship between Alice and Amy. Multiply this interaction by 100, 1,000 or 10,000 and you can understand the widespread impact that personalization based on participation in the right social networks can have. For Google search results, the social network that matters most is Google+. Don’t roll your eyes, there are several very good reasons to participate in Google+. Bing has relationships with Facebook and Pinterest, and can use their APIs to adjust various elements of search results pages. The Pinterest integration primarily appears in Bing Image Search. Facebook’s data primarily displays in Bing’s Social Search and social bar to the right of the traditional web search results.
Keep in mind that building identity and relationships, while beneficial to SEO, is not a replacement for SEO. Social media is an amplifier of SEO. The fundamentals of search engine optimization still apply. If the search crawlers can’t access your site or if there’s no textual content on the site to index, there’s nothing to amplify and no signals with which to rank.
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged with: Bing, data, data sources, Facebook, google, keyword, Keyword data, pinterest, sentiment data, SEO, social media, topical data, web search
May 27th, 2014 by Elma Jane
The newest Tesco Extra store in Lincoln is offering customers a revolutionary new checkout alternative that improves the customer checkout experience by reducing the time spent in checkout queues.
The global leader in the development of automatic data capture (ADC) solutions for the retail industry, Datalogic, installed the world’s first bar code scanner in a supermarket. Today, their newest technology, allows the shopper to place their items on a checkout belt, in any orientation, and have them automatically scanned by the Jade X7 Automated Scanner. Items are then automatically directed to a bagging area just like traditional checkout lanes. This frees up staff to spend more time engaging with shoppers and delivering great customer service at the checkout, driving up satisfaction and loyalty.
As the shopper places items on the checkout conveyor they pass through scanning arches which automatically read bar codes and visually recognize items at a much higher speed than a traditional checkout configuration. The items are then directed to one of three bagging areas for bagging and payment and the next customer’s transaction can begin immediately.
Datalogic has invented the Jade X7 Automated Scanner using advanced high performance imaging and provides the technology as a key building block to key system integrators around the world who customize checkout installations to meet the specific needs of retailers and their customers. The new, high-speed retail checkout for Tesco was designed by NCR allowing up to three customers to pack and pay for their shopping simultaneously. The combined solution is capable of automatically scanning up to 60 items per minute.
Datalogic provides the building blocks for a completely re-invented checkout, enabling store associates to continue to deliver great customer service by reducing the time customers spend in the checkout lane. Datalogic continues their heritage of inventing, adapting, and applying technologies that aid retailers and system integrators in developing solutions that make the in-store shopping experience move valuable to customers.
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged with: Automated Scanner, automatic data capture, bagging and payment, bar code, bar code scanner, checkout configuration, checkout conveyor, checkout lanes, checkout queues, customer checkout, customer service, Datalogic, retail industry, scanner, system integrators
January 7th, 2014 by Elma Jane
Web traffic estimates from several trend analysis firms including comScore, predict that mobile Internet traffic will outpace traffic from desktop or large laptop devices in 2014, further demonstrating just how important mobile site optimization may be for online retailers. Mobile commerce accounts for as much as 23 percent of online sales as of the fourth quarter of 2013, and there is growing evidence that consumers prefer using tablets or other mobile devices to shop, according to reports compiled by conversion rate optimization firm Invesp.
Readying an ecommerce site for mobile traffic and mobile-device based sales includes addressing five key points:
Image optimization
Layout optimization via responsive design
Minimizing barriers to purchase and login
Site performance
Using a mobile device’s capabilities to provide a better shopping experience.
App-like Features
In 2014, mobile optimization should not be limited to having a website that functions or even that is easy to use on a mobile device. Rather, mobile optimization should involve using mobile devices to create great user experiences with application-like features.
Can you use the phone’s GPS to provide better product suggestions or show off what other shoppers in the area liked or purchased? Could you create an augmented reality feature that uses a mobile device’s camera to let shoppers see how they might look in a particular shirt or hat? What about services that allowed shoppers to send text messages to a customer service representative while browsing your site?
All of these are technically possible. What other things could you offer mobile shoppers that were useful? Figure this out, and you will have optimized your site for mobile sales.
Responsive Design
While there has been a fair amount of debate about whether it is better to use responsive design for mobile optimization or to create a separate mobile version of your site, in 2014 responsive design should emerge as the clear winner, especially in the face of Google’s desire for fast loading mobile site. The search engine firm, which by some estimates has nearly a 70 percent share of mobile search traffic, explicitly states that site owners should avoid too many redirects. Building a separate mobile website will require at least one of those time consuming redirects.
Responsive design may provide a better user experience as shoppers interact with a site across devices. Responsive design is also easier to manage, since you do not need to maintain separate websites with separate content.
Right Size Images
If the mobile web lacked images and graphics, it would not be providing the sort of rich user experience that shoppers are accustomed to on other devices and are likely to expect on mobile. So don’t try to rid your site of images and graphics, but rather manage those rich media assets in a way that makes them fast and easy to load on a smartphone or tablet.
For your 2014 mobile optimization plan, try two approaches to delivering right-sized images and graphics to mobile site visitors.
First, compress the image files. When creating product images or site graphics, try to get the smallest possible file size for the required image quality. Limiting the number of colors or selecting the best file type can have a significant impact on image file size. You may also want to use a service like Yahoo!’s Smash.it which will help to remove unneeded bytes from image.
Second, considering offering lower resolution images for mobile devices. Consider that the 4-inch touchscreen on an iPhone 5s is 1,136 pixels by 640 pixels, which is actually high for the size of device. In contrast, an Acer H233H 23-inch monitor, which sells for about $140, has a resolution of 1,920 pixels by 1,080 pixels, almost three times as many pixels as the iPhone. The point here is that a 1,000 pixel wide image on the Acer barely fills half of the horizontal space, while the same image on the iPhone would dominate the screen space. Relatively, lower resolution images also have smaller file sizes. Using JavaScript, change which image is served to a device based on screen resolution. This is different than changing the perceived size of an image with CSS. Here the goal is to actually serve a smaller version of the image.
Social Login and Alternative Payments
Social login services from Facebook, Twitter, or Google and so-called alternative payment solutions like PayPal can improve a shopper’s mobile ecommerce experience.
If mobile devices have weaknesses, it can be in the area of keyboard interactions. As an example, typing in an email address, username, password, or payment card number can take a fair amount of time on a smartphone. Voice commands will help too, but even voice recognition can be a barrier sometimes.
To help, consider using a social login that may make it easier for shoppers to register for your site or complete a shopping cart form. Similarly, offer checkout services like PayPal or Payments by Amazon that allow shoppers to use stored payment card information. These service can be more user friendly in the mobile shopping environment.
Under One Second Load Times for Some Content
Google wants your mobile page to load in less than one second. If the page takes longer to load, the leading search engine in the world could penalize your mobile site, making it invisible (or at least less visible) to mobile search users. For stores that depend on search engine traffic to help drive sales, such a penalty could significantly impact sales as greater and greater numbers of shoppers use mobile devices to make online purchases.
For several months, Google has been informing website owners, designers, and developers that it wants mobile page load times of one second or less. This is significantly faster than current average load times of about seven seconds per mobile web page. But the search engine firm is also making some suggestions like focusing on giving site visitors some content to look at and interact with almost immediately.
Research shows that users flow is interrupted if pages take longer than one second to load. To deliver the best experience and keep the visitor engaged, our guidelines focus on rendering some content, known as the above-the-fold content, to users in one second (or less) while the rest of the page continues to load and render in the background.
For mobile optimization in 2014, use Google’s advice for Optimizing the Critical Rendering Path for instant mobile websites and aim to give site visitors above-the-fold content almost immediately.
Posted in Uncategorized
Ron Klien, also known as the “Grandfather of Possibilities” is an exceptional entrepreneur, business consultant, mentor and inventor. “I solve situations by simplifying them”, says Klein. At 77, the Philadelphia native is the inventor of the magnetic strip found on nearly all of today’s credit cards. The “validity checking system” as his patent reads is a magnetic strip on the back of a plastic card that functions much like a cassette recorder. Rather than recording sounds the magnetic strip records characters that can be ‘played’ into a credit card swipe reader. Read more of this article »
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged with: credit card, electronic device, magnetic strip, MasterCard, merchant account, process, reader, swipe reader, terminal, Visa MasterCard American Express
Any business that acknowledges Credit Card payments should be compliant with the directions and guidelines set out by the Payment Card Industry or be what is called ‘PCI compliant’. This is not commonly understood but any merchant, despite of the number of transactions, which acknowledges or conveys any cardholder information, either by phone or electronically must be PCI compliant. It’s all about holding customer’s facts and figures safe and not leaving your business revealed to hackers. And with an ever expanding use of cards, be they debit or Credit Cards, this is evolving a very important theme. Read more of this article »
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged with: American Express, credit card processing, Data Security Standard, DSS, MasterCard, Microsoft Windows Server, Payment Card Industry, PCI, Visa MasterCard American Express, Workstation 2000
Lucrative charges to method card transactions are to be capped under a proposal by the European Union’s boss arm aspiring to draw a line under a decade-long assault with fee groups such as Visa Europe and MasterCard.
Under a preliminary European Commission plan, seen by the Financial Times, a ceiling would be introduced for allegations on all buyer debit and borrowing card transactions, scaling back a multibillion-euro revenue stream for EU banks. Read more of this article »
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged with: Borrowing Card Transactions, Card-Transaction Charges, Cross-Border Transaction Fees, Debit-Card Fees, MasterCard, Visa Europe
