Archive for June, 2008

eDynamic Announces Completion of Website Design & Development Project for Allianz Insurance

Monday, June 16th, 2008

It did not take long before they recognized limitations in their existing Website. Allianz’s original site had to service clients from all sectors. Every effort was made to make all services available in one place, but things were just not working. Many customers were not able to find what they were looking for. Unfortunately, later attempts to organize the information only made matters worse: Every section of the Web site ended up with its own unique ‘look and feel’, and with inconsistent branding.

The key challenges, therefore, were not just to re-design & develop the website, but also to mirror Bajaj Allianz’s strong offline brand imagery on the Web along with all the ingredients of a Web 2.0 online Insurance Web presence for customers & sales channels alike. So that customers could renew their policies online along with paying their premiums, prospects could search, compare & find the best policy/plan for their families & agents could drive account management all under one interactive roof. eDynamic immediately identified these problems, proposing, designing and implementing a comprehensive solution.

Subir Singh, VP, Sales, eDynamic, credits the success of eDynamic’s efforts to the company’s established expertise in the Insurance industry. “Our deep understanding in insurance..and strategic approach to business help us maintain a strong and comfortable relationship….” eDynamic brought to the table additional experience in financial services, such as lending and loans, credit cards, real estate, and financial services.

By creating a generic, easily customizable template to provide a framework for the design, the information architecture is kept simple, easy to understand and navigate. Simplicity is also key to its versatility –remaining consistent when customized for each service segment. The design has proven so adaptable that, as the online services of Bajaj Allianz have continued to expand, the same recognizable branding and navigational controls have remained.

Says Vishal Karki, Head of Marketing for Bajaj Allianz Insurance, India, “It has been a pleasure to do business with eDynamic. The team at eDynamic holds its customer’s satisfaction as highest priority. They understood our business requirements and have delivered high-quality results on time.”

About eDynamic: eDynamic is a Global IT services, Interactive Marketing Services, Website Design & Development and Consulting Firm focused on delivering integrated business solutions. eDynamic is a rapidly growing, privately held company that delivers on the technology, creativity & marketing needs of enterprises. Through its offices in New York, Portland, Toronto, London, Dubai, and New Delhi, eDynamic is serving customers such as Suncor Energy, UPS, PepsiCo, New York Life, General Electric, Advance America, Preferred Commerce, Intercontinental Hotels, Jet Airways, Samsung, Sony, among many others.

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IBM Provides Free Online Training in Hot Technologies

Monday, June 16th, 2008

Announced it is helping to prepare the next generation of business and IT experts at no charge with online resources designed to educate students about hot technologies. Six offerings are now available, providing students access to tutorials, forums, games and other resources, and helping them develop marketable skills in hot job areas such as enterprise computing, Web 2.0 programming and database management.

Additionally, through the Student Portal on the IBM Academic Initiative web site, students can access a three-step tutorial on Service Science Management and Engineering (SSME), a new academic discipline that brings together ongoing work in the fields of science, engineering, and business management, combined with the study of social and legal sciences. The SSME resources prepare students to take advantage of a growing field of “hybrid” technology jobs that require multi-disciplinary backgrounds, such as environmental engineering, information analysis and urban architect planning.

Companies today are increasingly going global and looking for employees that offer deep technical knowledge and a broad understanding of business dynamics to help them expand into new markets. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that more than 4.6 million jobs will be created in the services sector between 2004 and 2014, and IT will continue to be one of the fastest growing sectors. In addition, new global employment opportunities are expected to emerge based on the demand for integrated business and technology skills.

Universities such as Brandeis in Waltham, Massachusetts have focused their efforts to help students use open standards technologies to address real world challenges such as resource planning and carbon output. One tool used at Brandeis is Innov8, an educational video game developed by IBM that teaches students to apply technologies and business strategies to make companies more efficient and increase customer satisfaction. More than 100 colleges and universities have already incorporated the game into their curricula and thousands more can download the game from the IBM Academic Initiative website at no charge.

“Our relationship with IBM is critical to bridging the gap between IT and business skills,” said Preeta Banerjee, Assistant Professor of Strategy at Brandeis International Business School. “Through the IBM Academic Initiative, we are able to harness valuable resources in the classroom, such as Innov8, a video game that is representative of what a career at IBM might entail.”

“Colleges and universities worldwide are being challenged to develop a curriculum that offers students a practical combination of business and technical skills to meet industry demands,” said Kevin Faughnan, Director of IBM’s Academic Initiative. “This is why we’re making available the largest collection of learning resources specifically on the key skill areas our customers are looking for. We anticipate that thousands of students this year alone will take the opportunity to become technically proficient on leading-edge technologies and increase their skills portfolio.”

IBM customer MIB is moving toward a Services-Oriented Architecture extended with Web 2.0 to better serve its 500 member life and health insurance companies. Therefore, it is looking to attract emerging talent in Massachusetts who can continue development of Web 2.0 capabilities and Rich Internet Applications to assure secure data exchanges.

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Helpstream Announces Summer 2008 Release

Monday, June 16th, 2008

Helpstream, a leading provider of on-demand collaborative customer service solutions, today announced the general availability of the Helpstream Summer 2008 release, which contains over 130 enhancements to help companies understand customer attitudes, tap into community knowledge, and build winning relationships. By further integrating case management, knowledge management, and community collaboration, companies can leverage the power and familiarity of the Web to engage their customers in a rich, collaborative self service experience.

“Many companies turn to call deflection as a way to deal with increasing service demand, but in doing so they fail to engage the customer at a point where their attitudes and needs are conspicuously obvious,” said Anthony Nemelka, CEO of Helpstream. “By placing Community at the forefront of customer service, Helpstream enables anyone in a company or its community to be an effective customer service agent. This truly modern approach significantly expands the pool of knowledge available to each user by leveraging the Internet for what it does best connecting people to information quickly and effectively.”

The challenge for many companies is that their interaction with customers is too often one dimensional centered on resolving issues and ending the interaction. Consumer familiarity with Web 2.0 tools has led to higher expectations. Helpstream provides a convenient and affordable alternative to this one-size-fits-all service approach and helps companies embrace the web-enabled world to build customer loyalty through relationships.

Helpstream is an approachable application designed to engage users in a company’s customer community with an easy to learn and use interface, while offering internal service organizations the same benefits combined with ease of administration and a low cost deployment model.

The Helpstream Summer 2008 release continues to build on this idea by leveraging end-user familiarity with common office productivity tools, such as email and calendaring software.

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Salesforce Rolls Out Big Summer ‘08 Update

Monday, June 16th, 2008

Salesforce.com today introduced the summer upgrade to its on-demand CRM software, called Salesforce Summer ‘08, featuring enhancements on both the client and server-sides of the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform.

Force.com, the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) that allows developers to build their own applications to run along side the ones provided by Salesforce, has been expanded out to allow for developing any kind of application the users want with Apex, Salesforce’s Java-like programming language.

Also, Visualforce is now live in every edition of Salesforce, enabling developers to create their own custom interfaces based on Web 2.0 UI items that will work on any device. So it’s possible to make your Force.com applications run on a PC, laptop, BlackBerry or iPhone.

“Visualforce really completed the whole stack for how developers can use Force.com to create applications,” Al Falcion, senior director of product marketing for Salesforce, told InternetNews.com.

“Any client with a browser is covered. There’s definitely a need for different UIs, even if they use the same app.” As such, Visualforce lets developers create an application that presents data one way on a desktop, and in a different way on a notebook or smartphone.

One of the knocks on Web 2.0 is the performance of Ajax, which requires a lot of JavaScript to run on the client. “The key is having the right frequency of refreshes so they don’t drag the client down,” said Falcione.

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MySpace gets makeover for mass appeal

Monday, June 16th, 2008

THIS week MySpace will unveil the biggest website redesign the company has ever undertaken.

After a year of development and planning, the social network will roll out a series of new features designed to simplify the user experience, starting this Wednesday.

Rebekah Horne, vice president of Fox Interactive Media and MySpace in Australia and New Zealand, said a lot of the changes were based on user messages sent to MySpace founder and first friend of every new user Tom Anderson.

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Obama Campaign Hopes for Better Web Security

Wednesday, June 11th, 2008

Two months after their Web site was hacked, the organizers of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign are looking for a network security expert to help lock down their Web site.

“Obama for America is looking for a network security expert who wants to play a key role in a historic political campaign,” reads the ad, posted to the Barackobama.com Web site.

Successful candidates will join Obama’s Boston team and should expect to find a new job come November.

Obama’s Web site, built by Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes, has been the model of Web 2.0 campaigning, using social-networking techniques to raise funds and build a broad base of active, Internet-savvy supporters.

But security experts have long warned that powerful Web site features also open new avenues for attack.

With the Internet driving the majority of the campaign’s contributions, Web security is probably more important to Obama than it has been to any other presidential candidate. A Web outage could cost his campaign millions of dollars, and a widely publicized privacy breach could put the brakes on his most important source of cash.

In April, a programming error allowed a Hillary Clinton supporter to redirect part of Obama’s Web site to Clinton’s, but today’s Web attack techniques could lead to much more serious consequences.

“Attacks like SQL injection would be far more of a concern,” said Oliver Friedrichs, a director with Symantec Security Response who has written about computer security and the 2008 presidential election. “If I was able to get access to the database that houses their donor information, that would be very concerning.”

So-called SQL injection attacks take advantage of programming errors and allow attackers to get unauthorized access to parts of a Web site. They can be used to install malicious software or gain access to sensitive information.

Obama’s site isn’t the only one to suffer from Web security bugs. A similar flaw popped up in Mitt Romney’s site in January, and Hillary Clinton’s name was used in a spam campaign that delivered messages laced with malicious Trojan Horse software programs, Friedrichs said.

While Web defacements and denial of service attacks may be the most common security problems, a Web privacy breach could quickly become a major campaign issue, Poole said. “For a big office, things like the reputation of the candidate are really important,” he said.

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The CIA Gets Social With Web 2.0 Collaboration Tools

Wednesday, June 11th, 2008

Call them the spies who came in from the cold. Two CIA employees discussed to a point the government agency’s Web 2.0 project, Intellipedia, at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston this week.

While you wouldn’t think that the CIA has evangelists, that’s how Sean Dennehy, chief of the CIA’s Intellipedia Development and Don Burke from the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology, described themselves. Both talked about how they went about creating a secure Web 2.0 environment for the intelligence community.

In a video interview with new media consultant David Spark of N.Y.-based Spark Media Solutions, Dennehy described Intellipedia as a Wiki available on three networks a top secret network, a secret network and a sensitive but unclassified network available to the intelligence community.

“Something that’s very important to make clear is that these are intelligence community tools and not necessarily CIA tools,” Dennehy said. “We are encouraging the adoption of these tools but they are community-based and provided by what’s known as the DNI or director of national intelligence.”

“He laid the philosophical groundwork for how the world is changing under our feet and what we need to do to adapt to that reality,” said Dennehy. “We wanted to know how to improve communications within the CIA and disparate intelligence organizations.”

Of course, there are differences between Wikipedia and Intellipedia. All edits are attributable and are not limited to being an encyclopedia. And also unlike Wikipedia, there are also many contributors from different agencies with attributable points of view.

The evangelists said Intellipedia is still in the nascent stage and initially met with resistance from a lot of naysayers in the intelligence community. Dennehy described these hesitant users as having “Wikipause.”

“A person has to go through that process of taking the courage to hit “return,” to submit their information to the platform and then see the benefit later,” he said. “It’s an act of faith actually to start publishing to the platform.”

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Google courts Web developers

Wednesday, June 11th, 2008

Google has been courting software developers to entice them into a money-making relationship built on turning its array of online widgets into a global infrastructure.

At a conference in San Francisco, said to be the biggest yet for net developers, the search giant made clear that the Web is the future for application development.

It wants its own bit of web infrastructure the Google Cloud to be more accessible to developers and spent two days wooing them to build and run applications on it.

To encourage them aboard, Google invited the 3,000 developers to mash-up Google’s online services, like Gmail, Docs, Maps and Search, with their own applications.

To show client-cloud connectivity, it showed off Google Gears, a browser add-on in the Adobe Flash mould that allows for richer browser experiences, to improve search in MySpace email.

It then showcased the new Google Web Toolkit, so rich net applications can be Java-built, and the hosting of new Ajax libraries, which enhances applications via JavaScript tagging.

Top of its agenda, Google wants the web browser the enabler of its cloud to have more functionality, interaction and to evolve so it becomes as powerful as its desktop counterpart.

“These diverse tools and technologies might seem loosely unintegrated and targeted at different areas,” said Ovum analyst Madan Sheina.

“In fact they’re all cogs and wheels of a more meaningfully connected web that hosts Google web services powered by the Google App Engine. Importantly some of these web services and applications aren’t written just by Google, but by an entire market of independent developers.”

The analyst believes most of these third-party developers no longer build ‘cool’ web applications just for the sake of it; rather they want a slice of Google as a lucrative advertising business.

“Google likes to separate its web development technologies from its advertising. But the two are inextricably linked,” Ms Sheina said.

“Google’s monetisation strategy is simple. Invest in advancement of the web by allowing users to do more on the internet. That makes the Web a much bigger market for Google to monetise services like search.”

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Seattle could take a cue from Salt Lake planners

Wednesday, June 11th, 2008

Brigham Young famously wanted streets wide enough to turn a team of horses and wagon in, and the superblocks were designed to be neatly divided into plots that would give the settlers enough land to grow crops, have an orchard and sustain themselves.

Few wagon trains are pulling U-turns in downtown Salt Lake these days, and the office buildings and parking lots don’t leave much room for fruit trees. And even the most meticulously planned community loses its luster over time and needs some modernizing especially if the alternative for new investment is not unsettled wilderness but the growing suburbs and towns strung along the Wasatch front.

So Salt Lake is embarking on a major redevelopment effort under an umbrella plan called Downtown Rising in which nearly $2 billion will be invested in new offices, residential and retail buildings, arts, culture and governmental facilities and transit projects.

There’s a Seattle component to this. Seattle-based architecture firm Callison is a participant in one of downtown Salt Lake’s biggest projects, City Creek, a 20-acre mixed-use project across the street from Temple Square.

Seattle-based retailer Nordstrom was one of the drivers behind the redevelopment effort generally and City Creek in particular.

“Frankly, the heart of downtown has for the last 20 years been slipping into a worse state of repair,” says Callison principal Stan Laegreid. “It was turning into quite a liability. Everyone agreed something needed to be done.” As a downtown tenant with a lease nearing its end, Nordstrom was “watching the value of a downtown and a commercial market just steadily slip away.” The retailer was reluctant to stay unless “there was a larger commitment to turn downtown around.”

Beyond those specifics, Salt Lake’s efforts to rejuvenate its downtown have some interesting parallels and contrasts for Seattle as it considers its own redevelopment efforts in places such as South Lake Union, south downtown and Sodo.

Salt Lake and Seattle are hardly alone among western U.S. cities considering large-scale redevelopments that involve millions of dollars in investment and years of planning and wrangling. Some cities get a blank canvas to work with in the form of abandoned rail yards that cover acres of potentially prime developable real estate. Sacramento, Calif.; Santa Fe, N.M.; and Spokane are in varying stages of rail-yard redevelopment projects. Renton is working with former Boeing property near Lake Washington. Yakima is looking at what it can do with a former sawmill.

Salt Lake differs somewhat in that it’s trying to work a somewhat coordinated plan into and around an existing downtown, although Laegreid says there’s actually considerable open property in the downtown core.

But the biggest difference between Salt Lake and Seattle is the influence and participation of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Temple Square is at the physical heart of downtown, drawing visitors as both a religious center and tourist destination.

“They have deliberately spearheaded this effort,” Laegreid says. “That introduces a dynamic and a patronage in the process that very few cities have. That was a big trigger in allowing this to happen.”

Contrast that with development efforts in Seattle. One striking feature about Downtown Rising is the breadth of business sector and governmental participation in a shared plan for downtown. With Seattle’s fractious political scene, very little gets done in a coordinated fashion unless, of course, a private developer such as Paul Allen’s Vulcan in South Lake Union has the size and drive to come up with a large-scale redevelopment plan on its own and push it to reality.

Not that having such an influential partner meant immediate unanimity in Salt Lake. “There still were a lot of vested parties that collectively had to share a vision,” Laegreid says. Once the first ideas were floated, human nature took over. “Everyone’s got opinions,” he says. “There was a certain amount of compromising, everyone getting their voices heard.” Although Salt Lake isn’t as consensus-crazy as Seattle, “given the high profile of the project, it started to feel much more like a Seattle” process.

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Microsoft’s Own Social Network Under Development

Wednesday, June 11th, 2008

As an avid Apple afficianado and advocate of all things open source, my stance on Microsoft is usually clear-cut: I don’t care for it.  Everything about Microsoft’s business practices rubs me wrong.  With that said, I was surprised to learn that Microsoft has been toying with its own little pet social network since the beginning of the year.

Well “social” might not be quite the right term for Microsoft’s baby network, which is called TownSquare.  Consider it a more elite community of Microsoft nerds.  Perhaps a better term would be the anti-social network.  Townsquare is an intranet-based social network currently open to all Microsoft employees, and shares many similarities with Facebook.

All the normal social goodies - pictures, bios, updates, feed are included on TownSquare for each user and shared with the Microsoft community.  Additionally, Microsoft employees can see when documents and files on the intranet have been updated  or modified.  The whole thing is designed on enterprise newsfeeds to compile various public information about employees on the network.

Microsoft is also sharing TownSquare with a group of select consumers who are responsible for testing Townsquare.  All the testing and restructuring can’t possibly be for Microsoft’s own good time, though; it wouldn’t surprise me if Microsoft did a revision or two and marketed the intranetwork social structure to businesses.  As one of the main features is updating users on document and data revision on the intranet, many businesses could, no doubt, benefit from such advances.

Which brings me back to my original issue with Microsoft.  What could be a fantastic tool developed by some no-name third party developer will undoubtedly be marketed for sale by Microsoft to small business owners who will buy into the product simply because it has Microsoft’s stamp of approval.  If anything, I would be delighted to see a third party developer replicate the social structure for viewing profiles and updating intranet-public documents as open-source freeware, available to all.

The entire reason I believe that Microsoft will continue to spiral downward is because the who’s who in Microsoft’s management will never be able to adapt to the new, very open style of program sharing and development, and leave behind the monopoly mindset. In the end, Microsoft will have to buy into a little Darwinian theory and adapt and evolve, or go the way of the dinosaurs.

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