Trackable QR Codes Help Generate ROI on QR Code Campaigns

If you haven't buzzed around to http://www.qreatebuzz.com/  then I suggest you do. Interested in running an in-store or in-restaurant QR campaign? Find out how many times your code was scanned and when. Tie it to Foursquare, Facebook, and Twitter as well as your web page. Social networking never looked so good.

Here are a few ideas:

1. Scan for a 10% discount coupon

2. Scan for a free dessert

3. Scan for a free gift

4. Scan for a chance to win a free dinner

5. Scan for a chance to win a $200.00 shopping spree.

And many many more.

Call today and let us show you how to tie it all together. We make sense out of all the confusion.
Call 309-310-7245

The Message is the Message - Dos and Don'ts of Digital Signage

We see a bright shiny sign and instantly look at it. It changes right before our eyes...very cool! We might even touch it and interact with it. Even cooler!

But, for those of us in the electronic communications biz, the technologies we have available to deploy these solutions for our customers are as diverse in cost and complexity as the messages our clients want to get across.

If your clients are asking you for digital signage, be sure you know what they, and you, are talking about.

Do sit down and evaluate their existing signage and traditional communications strategy.
Don't start selling them on all the new gadgets.

Do spend some time educating your clients about the options for replacing or adding to their strategies and what it should deliver in terms of things like employee retention, satisfaction, loyalty, morale, customer service, and the bottom line in reductions in returns, increases in value-added sales, and in more sales during new campaigns.
Don't make wild promises. Adding digital signage is just part of an overall change in culture. Be sure that you lay out what's required of everyone in order for it to be a success.

Do see the "FUN" in visual communications. Signage can open new doors for engagement, competitions, contests, karaoke, and social networking.
Don't just set it and leave it. Messages need to be dynamic and change often.

Do be prepared to produce all the graphics and videos.
Don't assume your client will have the skills to produce their own.

Can Salesforce Save Your Business?

You have tons of information, right? Outlook contact lists, emails from vendors and clients, faxes, contracts, orders, FedEx receipts, and so much more!

If you are overwhelmed by the thought of getting organized, don't worry - Think SALESFORCE.com.

This is one powerful and expensive Customer Relationship Management platform. Nothing less than Enterprise will do for a small business planning on growing. And, get Premier Support with Admin; it is worth every penny.

Give us a call if you already have Salesforce.com Sales Cloud or are thinking about getting it. We can help you understand how Sugar, ZoHo, and Oracle/PeopleSoft compare with Salesforce. And we can help you add applications that can speed things up, eliminate double entry, and improve productivity.

The Business of BPM (Business Process Management)

Do you manage you business processes? Do you even know what they are?

If you are like most businesses, you have an idea how to run your business. You know where the keys are, the code for the alarm, the bank account numbers, the phone number for the IT guy, and you know how to take orders, place an ad, and maybe a few more things. But, most business owners and managers keep these things in their heads.

That's a bad idea.

A business is like an orchestra. If everyone just played what they wanted it wouldn't sound very nice. The orchestra needs music, instructions that tells each member what to play and when. The orchestra needs a conductor, making sure that the players manage their time wisely and are all on the same page.

Are you a player or a conductor? You can't be both at the same time.

Isn't it time you started to map out your business processes?

Where do you start?
At the beginning! Start with how you answer the phone, then move to how calls are transferred, what is said before putting a call on hold, and what are the rules about taking messages or transferring to voice mail?

Next, take a look at how you are managing your customer and prospect information? If you brought up a contact right now, could you tell when they ordered last and what it was?

Now how about your marketing campaigns? Sales practices? Order fulfillment?

Now might be a good time to engage a business process engineer.

That's what we have been doing for over 30 years - call us at 309-310-7245 to see how we can document and streamline your processes to help your bottom line.

Of Apps, Images, and eLearning

Are you still designing and developing "Please click NEXT to continue" eLearning? Why? With all the tools out there to design and develop eLearning that has better uptake numbers and delivers a better result, why are you stuck in the linear rut?

The biggest excuse we hear is, "My customer doesn't have the budget." But, that's an excuse. What isn't being discussed is the lack of understanding among the ISD community on how to sell alternatives to linear eLearning.

There is a plethora (I love that word, my 10th grade English teacher would be so proud!) of bad eLearning. It just keeps coming. And, more than likely, it's you, yes I mean you, that's the culprit.

Have you begun to learn how to turn a lesson into an App on an iPhone or Android? Have you even thought about the way technology has changed the old pedagogy? Could you write a storyboard that incorporates social networking, YouTube, Wikis, simulations, polls, surveys, chats, webinars, mobile apps, and more?

One thing we need to understand - we are no longer in charge of the way students learn. They are using all the resources now available and crafting their own "playlists." They are writing their own learning apps with uploaded files, downloaded files, web pages, Facebook pages, shared presentations, YouTube videos and sharing these among their peers.

Can we, as ISDs help educators regain control of the curriculum? Yes, we can.

Here are a few ideas:

1. Learn about Articulate's new Storyline. An updated version of Studio '09 that publishes HTML5, and eliminates the Flash roadblock on iPads and iPhones.
2. Try out Appbuilder. you will be amazed how easy it is to create an App for any mobile device.
3. Pay attention to the following design rules:
• The Box Rule - Anything in a box will be read.
• The Red Rule - If you want it read, make it red.
• The Clean & Bright Rule - With images, iconic high-contrast designs get the most attention.
• The Spaghetti Rule - Too many words and images on the screen is like throwing spaghetti on the wall, a mess! Be concise and pay attention to the use of blank space.
• The Play Me Rule - If you want an interaction, make it relevant with a reward at completion.
• The Triplet Rule - The mind absorbs ideas when presented in triplets: 1, 2, 3; A, B, C; Good, Better, Best; Red, Blue, Green; etc...
• The Spelling Counts Rule - Yes, even in this era of texting, spelling still counts. Make sure you don't look like a fool to your client. Do you know when to use their, there, and they're?
• The Consistency Rule - It really makes a difference. Maintain a style guide to manage things such as: the serial comma, colons and semicolons, capitalization, words found in the glossary, and other common elements.
• The End It Now Rule - Make sure your lesson has a beginning, middle, and an end. Make sure that all objectives have matching content and that expected outcomes are clearly stated.

That's all for now, folks.

The Next Big Thing for Video

It's the carrier's dirty little secret. More demand means more program flows. Problem is that there's only so much bandwidth. Something suffers. Can you think of what it is? It's video quality. It will get worse before it gets better. And the problem is that everyone, MSOs, TELCOs, CDNs, OTTs, and IPTVs will all suffer. What's worse is that we will be paying for intermittently degraded TV for a while.

At this point we can measure and analyze real-time video quality as it leaves the programmer and as it leaves the headend. There's talk about including a quality probe in every set-top box, but the messages that will flow back in the upstream will bring it to its knees. There's a cost for measuring too much.

So, where does that leave us? How about spatial analysis and reconstruction? It's a technique that seems a bit out of Roswell. It can  rebuild an SD image into an HD, even a super HD image. If you're a member of the IPTV and OTT groups on Linkedin, you've seen samples. They are quite impressive. It is a game changer coupled with MPEG-4. This new compression technique actually improves quality and it's only going to get better.

But, with such a large embedded base of only MPEG-2 decoders, it may be a while before we see any real improvement. So, as we see more and more badly constructed compression, we better get used to more macroblocking, jerkiness, mosquito noise, and smearing.

Next, a look at the biggest contributor to poor video quality - Customer premise.

The Myth of Bandwidth

TV is dead. Actually, the TV we knew as kids is dead. We no longer rush home to catch the latest episode of this or that. We've programmed it on our TiVo or DVR or better yet, we take out our tablet or smartphone and watch it wherever we happen to be at the time.

With all these video packets flying about, what is happening to our cable TV? Simple - Overcompression. Why? Because with more and more demand for high-speed access to the Internet, there's less and less bandwidth for MPEG-2 TV.

Now, you might ask, why don't the cable operators deliver all their programming over IP? IPTV has many advantages, and many MSOs (multiple systems operators, an acronym for the cable operators)have rebuilt their core networks to carry almost all their programming IP. It's the set-top-box that's the problem; over 65 million of them. These dinosaurs require video and audio in the form of MPEG-2 packets. Newer STBs, as they are called, can decode both MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 packets. It's the MPEG-4 technology that uses less bandwidth and delivers a better quality picture.

It's MPEG-4 and other innovative coder/decoders that let us watch high definition TV on our PCs, Smartphones, tablets, and web-enabled HDTVs. MPEG-2? Well, let's just say it's like last month's milk - turning sour and it's killing the cable business.

Now, if MPEG-4 (MPEG-4, Part 10, to be specific) is so wonderful, why aren't we seeing more of it? We are...in Europe, Asia, Brazil...places where the existing MPEG-2 networks are few and far between.

But, let's get back to the original issue - worsening video and audio quality on regular cable TV.

Some basics:

Before IP networks, TV channels were carried within a six megahertz bandwidth. On a scope, this bandwidth resembled a haystack with evenly sloping sides and a flat top. remember, one channel occupied one six-megahertz "Haystack."

As demand for more and more channels hit the MSOs, they pushed the upper range of the broadband spectrum out from 550MHz to 750MHz to 860MHz and now past 1GHz. But, the cost of expanding the upper range, somewhat like adding lanes to a highway, is very expensive.

Adding the Internet to the cable system was even more challenging. How were we supposed to carry ones and zeros? Well, we knew how to carry Ethernet over coaxial cable; we modulated an analog carrier. ones and zeros in...which were used to rapidly change the analog characteristics of the carrier and then, at the other end were decoded back into ones and zeros.

This haystack was an analog carrier. We figured out what characteristics we could change using a stream of ones and zeros and discovered that we could generate a pretty high data rate. One problem - bit errors; the signals were getting corrupted because of the poor quality of the cable system. Like a poorly maintained hotel, the windows were drafty, the roof leaked, and we were always blowing fuses. If we wanted to rent out our rooms for a high price, we needed a renovation. It kept a lot of us employed for a decade.

OK, so most of the cable operators have upgraded and fixed physical sytems and improved the culture of quality. Sure, there will be spots in any system that need rebuilding, but all-in-all, the MSOs run pretty tight ships.

In a frustrating turn of events, just as the cable industry got its act together, the wireless industry developed WiMax and LTE, over-the-air two-way, high-speed technologies that rival cable modem speeds. And, the Telcos rolled out Fiber to the Home (FTTH).

OK, OK...what about all this overcompression?

So, you're a cable operator. Your sources of capital have dried up. Your cities and states are regulating you like mad, requiring you to do things that use up valuable bandwidth for no additional revenue. Your customers are demanding more HDTV programming and faster Internet access speeds.

What gives in this scenario? Video and audio quality.

Remember the haystack; that 6MHz "channel?" We can modulate that carrier and decode a bit rate of 38.8Mbps. A good standard television program can be digitized so that a rate of about 3.8 Mbps will be enough to run the decoder and regenerate the video and audio. This means that we should be able to fit 10 programs into the space of one. Many operators stuff eight, but some stuff twelve programs into that 6MHz carrier.

So, "big deal" you might say. "Cool!" Not so cool.

MPEG-2 has a few quirks. It requires very precise timing so the packets can be reassembled in order. Funny thing about MPEG-2, some packets carry the information that tells the decoder when pixels on the screen are supposed to move. If we lose that "motion vector" packet, the pixels, in the form of 8X8 blocks, just stay on the screen while the rest of the screen changes.

MPEG-2 is sensitive to timing and to data corruption caused by noise. Artifacts caused by overcompression become more observable as the effective data rate falls below 3.8Mbps.

Is there a solution? Yes.

I'll cover that in my next article.