CorraoGroup Blog

Just about anyone with a cell phone knows exactly what Bluetooth is. It’s that wireless thing that lets you hang a headset on your ear that makes you look either incredibly cool or like a cheap imitation of those Star Trek characters.

Bluetooth is a wireless standard, named for the 10th century Danish king who unified Denmark. It was originally intended as a replace for computer connections, but rapidly found a home in cell phones.

We’re now seeing the latest evolution in Bluetooth wireless technology, called “Low Energy.”   Bluetooth LE will enable a plethora of new applications – some not even possible or imagined today – in many markets including healthcare, sports and fitness, security, and home entertainment.

A conference featuring Bluetooth LE will be held at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Santa Clara, CA on March 2nd,  providing developers and press the latest updates and product announcements.  It’s a must for anyone in the wireless market wanting to expand their customer reach.  We’ll be there:  will you?

Tags : bluetooth, business-development, business-lifecycle-management, strategic-alliances, wireless
Categories: Engineering, Marketing

While traveling in Europe this past December, I spent time meeting with government agencies involved with stimulating economic growth in their regions. The consistent message that I observed was how to do more with less. This shouldn’t be too surprising for anyone who hasn’t live in a cave for the last 18 months; it’s how most European countries have operated and taxed small to mid-size companies for many decades.

Understanding what your business core competency is and what can be outsourced continues to drive all companies on a global basis. As more business disciplines are outsourced, the critical requirement to communicate unified goals and the management of outside resources is creating many a sleepless nights for department heads and HR managers. It is important to evaluate your complete Business Lifecycle Management approach when developing strategic planning for the next decade. If not properly managed, this can be equated to having one master contractor for a project vs. managing multiple sub-contractors. Having department heads or HR managers chasing down these sub-contractors is like herding kittens; it’s a lose-lose proposition.

Unless you like herding kittens.

Tags :
Categories: Business Management

As companies continue to evaluate their business model for the next decade many are spending time digging deeper into their organizations related to their basic business processes. The days of reacting to a business symptom, i.e., “we don’t have enough sales,” are long gone as finding the underlying problem has become more critical than ever. In recent years, businesses provided several layers of bandages to these symptoms as profit margins could be overlooked or dropped to lower priority compared with driving top-line revenue numbers or keeping your firm competitive with the lastest and greatest product.  That’s changed, however;  by spending time with your staff and customers, you will gather valuable information that enables you to understand, document and provide corrective actions related to any symptom you may be encountering.

In order for any business to effectively operate, all business disciplines must have a clear unified direction with goals clearly defined to all internal stakeholders. By documenting and communicating these milestones and discussing your current business symptoms you will be able to identify root challenges for business discipline. What was once perceived as a “sales problem” can be diagnosed as:

• non-competitive product offering
• incomplete product literature and positioning
• outdated website and corporate presentation
• poor customer service
• no social media strategy
• poor product and sales training for internal and channel partners

In this economy, the need for effective operation and communication is more important than ever.  As outlined above, though, you’d better know what it is you want to communicate as a strategy of knowing what it is you want to achieve.

Tags : business-lifecycle-management
Categories: Business Management

The University of California-San Diego has just published the annual “How Much Information” report, which details how much data that we consumed in 2008.  A full copy of the report is available here.

The sheer numbers never fail to surprise me, although I guess I shouldn’t be.  The report says we, as Americans, went through an average of about 34 gigabytes of data every day, ranging from “old” media (like newspapers and books) to “new” media (like satellite or Internet radio and web-based games).  And the report doesn’t even include data that we consume at work.

So where is the data coming from?  Almost 55% of the data comes from Americans playing streaming computer games, according to the report.  TV accounts for another 35%, with everything else accounting for the remaining 10% or so.  In all, the UCSD report says about 3.6 zettabytes of data was consumed last year, 12 times the amount estimated in an IDC report two years ago.  Put into perspective, a zettabyte is a million million gigabytes.   Put another way, if you took every home computer in the state of Minnesota, multiplied that amount 1,000 times, then multiplied that number by another 3.5…you’d get some idea of the amount of information and storage we’re talking about.

As professionals, we need to pay careful attention to these numbers:  customers are increasingly demanding information that’s delivered to them via the Internet, and delivered real-time with no interruption.  And when they want to save that information, they want a reliable place to save it.  (We are, you know, saving everything:  it wasn’t too long ago that terabytes were spoken of in hushed, reverential terms.  Now, you can buy a 1TB external drive for less than $100.)

The lessons are pretty clear.  The concept of Moore’s Law is alive and well in terms of escalating data usage.  Those companies that fail to understand this, and plan for it, risk being left behind in short order.  Storage hardware and software companies need to plan, of course, but so do networking companies, and Internet providers, and content providers like TV stations and newspapers (yes, newspapers), and customers who’ll ultimately consume all this information.

Tags :
Categories: Uncategorized

Any startup or established company with a unique technology should focus immediately on beginning the patenting process.  The importance is significant, as a patent gives your company the right to stop others from copying, manufacturing, selling, and importing your invention without permission. The existence of a patent may be enough on its own to stop others from trying to exploit your invention. If it does not, it gives you the right to take legal action to stop them from exploiting your invention and to claim damages.

Patents are also valuable for generating interest and investment in new and growing businesses. This is particularly important for companies attempting to establish themselves in high-tech industries. Start-up companies are often based on the development of a specific new, sometimes potentially ground-breaking, technology. Without securing rights for our technology, we may find ourselves unable to obtain sufficient resources to bring that technology to market.

Patents may also be licensed to other parties allowing these parties to exploit the invention in exchange for royalty payments.

Finally, a patent serves as a readily accessible public record of the innovative developments made and owned by the patent owner. The existence of a patent may serve as a warning to competitors to stay clear of a protected technology. In addition, a patent stakes out a patentee’s technological territory, precluding others who develop technology at a later stage from attempting to claim or patent that technology as their own.

Well I hope I didn’t bore you with my “Benefits of Patent Protection” analogy but it is a critical step in the evolution of any company. That’s it for this week kids—-this is the CFO signing out.

Frank

Tags : advice, blm, blog, business-lifecycle-management, cfo, frank-asaro, legal-issues, patent, patent-protection, patents, startup
Categories: Uncategorized