I bought my wife a MacBook for Christmas this year and with it comes the embedded iSight web camera. Mac OS X comes with iChat which natively supports audio & video chatting with the built-in iSight camera. With our new arrivals of twin babies earlier this month, video chatting is becoming a hot commodity in our household between her and I as well as extended family who all live out of state.

Adium out, iChat in

Previously, I used Adium, which is a nice IM client for Mac OS X which allows you to log into virtually all IM platforms with a single application. The biggest downside with Adium is that it doesn’t support video. I always found myself having to quit Adium to use iChat when I wanted to video chat with friends/family. This was acceptable for me, but not as convenient to teach to my wife who is not as tech savvy and has multiple IM accounts on AIM, Yahoo!, and MobileMe.

I’d prefer to keep things like IM simple for her so she can worry about figuring out other things on her new computer — plus, the convenience of having one IM app that handles text, audio, and video chatting across all IM services is very convenient.

The Challenge: iChat doesn’t natively support Yahoo! Instant Messenger

iChat out-of-box supports AOL Instant Messenger, MobileMe, Mac.com, Bonjour, Google Talk, and Jabber Instant Messaging services:

Using a Jabber account, you can log into Yahoo! IM via iChat

Jabber is a free IM service and functions much like email service. You must find a Jabber provider and setup a Jabber account with them. Once you have a Jabber account, you can communicate with any other Jabber user.

The unique thing about Jabber is that it supports “transports.” Transports enable Jabber IM servers to communicate with other IM services such as Yahoo! IM, MSN, IM, AOL IM, Google Talk, etc.

The key, which was not obvious to me as I searched online for tutorials on how to do this, is to find a Jabber server that has Yahoo! IM transport capabilities. There are many Jabber servers out there which do not have Yahoo! IM transports.

Setting up a Jabber account to access Yahoo! IM via iChat: the definitive guide

1. Assuming you don’t already have a Jabber account, you must create one. To do so (on Mac OS X), download the Psi application at: http://psi-im.org (as of this writing, Psi version 0.12 is what I used).
2. Install and launch Psi
3. From the “General” menu, select “Account Setup”
4. Click “Add” to add a new account
5. The name of the account can be whatever you’d like — this is used for referencing the account in your account list.
6. Choose a Jabber server from the drop-down list. This server list will populate from Jabber.org’s service listing at http://www.jabber.org/web/Services.
   1. I used im.apinc.org as they were the only one of several which I tried with Yahoo! IM transport capabilities.
7. Choose any login and password you like for your Jabber account. This doesn’t need to match your Yahoo! screen name. Leave all other settings as-is. You may get a certificate validation message — just hit continue (this means that they have not purchased an SSL certificate and are using a free certificate).
8. After creating the account, it will show up in the Psi window. From the “Status” menu, choose “Online” to log into your Jabber account on im.apinc.org.
9. Right-click on your Jabber account name in Psi window and select “Service Directory” and click the “Browse” button on the window that appears. You will see the following window:
10. Right-click on the “Yahoo! IM Gateway” and select “add to roster”. This will add the Yahoo! IM Gateway (labeled as “im.apinc.org”) to your list in your Psi window.
11. Right-click on the newly-added item in your Psi window:
12. Select “Add/Authorize to contact list”
13. Right-click on the item again and select “Log on”.  This will prompt you for your Yahoo! ID and password. Enter them here.
14. You’re all set with the Psi application. You’ve now established your Jabber account and linked your Jabber account to the Yahoo! IM Gateway via the Jabber service. Quit Psi and launch iChat — we must now setup iChat to log into your new jabber account.
15. With iChat opened, select the “iChat” menu and choose “Preferences.” Click the “Accounts” tab.
16. Click the “+” button to create an account. Select “Jabber Account” from the Account Type drop-down menu.
17. Enter the Account name and Password you chose in step 5. Note that your account name will be in the format: username@im.apinc.org  (you must include the “@im.apinc.org” or whichever Jabber server you created your account on).
18. You must now add all of your Yahoo! IM buddies to your Jabber buddies list. Unfortunately, the Yahoo! IM buddies in your Yahoo! buddy list don’t automatically transfer over. To add a new Yahoo! IM buddy to your Jabber list, you MUST enter them in the following format: yahooid@yahoo. In other words, if your friend’s Yahoo! IM username is johndoe, you would enter this as johndoe@yahoo in your Jabber buddy list. The “@yahoo” tells the Jabber server to utilize the Yahoo! IM Gateway for routing instant messages to Yahoo! users.

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Congratulations go out to Foodzie.com for receiving $1M in seed financing to support the startup’s business in building an online marketplace for artisan food producers. This is very good news for the startup, particularly in this economy.

Back in April, I posted an entry about Foodzie before Rob and Emily (founders of Foodzie & friends of mine) headed off to Colorado to start the venture as part of the TechStars program.

Foodzie recently launched with 25 artisan producers and is offering 20% off all food products on orders placed by 12/31/2008. For the latest on Foodzie’s adventure, visit their blog at http://blog.foodzie.com.

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Business Intelligence (BI) is going to evolve into a critical asset for businesses in the coming months as companies begin to hunker down and trim the fat while we all ride out this recession. Now more than ever we require business intelligence.

Many businesses fail to understand or are able to justify the value of an implementation of BI software. Instead, decisions are based off of “gut feel,” advertising and marketing decisions are made based on “how we’ve always done it,” and at the foundation of it all: inadequate intelligence.

Want to see Business Intelligence (BI) in action? Visit a hospital.

After spending 5 hours at the hospital this week for a “false alarm” (my wife is pregnant), I was fascinated by the uterine contraction machine that the hospital staff had hooked up to my wife’s stomach. Through a series of sensors, this machine was hooked up to a PC and displayed a real-time readout of fetal heart rate and contractions both on the monitor and via a continuous printout on paper.

As my wife would wince with the pain that each contraction brought with it, the machine readout was right-on. Occasionally, I would see the contraction monitor start moving up (indicating a contraction was building) before she would feel it. Furthermore, over time we could see the frequency in which contractions were happening which enabled the doctors to see important trends with the contractions. As we began to recognize the trends, we could predict the next contraction for my wife within a 20-second range.

At no point were we left wondering whether the contractions were consistent or not, or how long they were lasting. It made me realize that if this was not a hospital room and if we were at any random business, chances are we’d be making decisions based on little or no data.

The three pillars of Business Intelligence execution

Our hospital visit showed “business intelligence” at its finest. In this particular case, this was a basic implementation of intelligence gathering, but essentially BI breaks down into the following:

1. Establish Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) — in this case when we were at the hospital, there were 2: fetal heart rate & contractions
2. Implement a method of collecting data — the monitoring machine
3. Implement a reporting tool so you can analyze the data to base your decisions off of — by evaluating the printed graphs from the machine, the doctor could identify trends with the contractions and determine if she was progressing with labor (in our case, it was a false alarm)

Do you have KPIs set for your business, department, website, advertising, or social media initiatives?

If you haven’t identified KPIs for running your business, then collecting data and reporting against it do very little if you can’t convert the data to insights. For example, consider the following scenarios when viewed in isolation, they may sound like accomplishments. Often times, quantity/volume or completion is used as a universal KPI:

• You just sold 100,000 units of XYZ widget!
  • What if XYZ widget has a Gross Margin (GM) of only 5%? 10,000 units sold at 50% margin (at the same price) is just as profitable. Volume can often times be misleading because the effort that goes into selling 100,000 units can be far greater than 10,000 units.
• Your department just completed a critical project on time!
  • Great, the deadline has been met. Does that mean success? Not necessarily. If each member of your department has just spent the last 6 weeks working 80-hour weeks, this is not success — it’s burnout.
• Your website had 100,000 unique visitors to your website yesterday!
  • Unique visitors to your website mean nothing if you’re not measuring the “next step” in the conversion funnel of your site. What does your website exist to accomplish? Generate leads? Sell products? Provide product support? Unique visits that don’t convert to sales or brand advocates are just a waste of bandwidth.
• Your TV ad ran during the SuperBowl!
  • How much did you spend on the ad and how many sales can be attributed to the ad? Don’t know? Then running an ad during the SuperBowl is not a success.
• Your social media campaign generated 5,000,000 impressions!
  • Like your TV ad that ran during the SuperBowl, how much was invested in this campaign and what time frame are you using to measure the return on the impressions generated from the campaign? Impressions are NOT a KPI for social media unless you can equate an impression to revenue or another unit of measure that is of value to your organization.

Business Intelligence tools

This this is by no means comprehensive but is a start to discovering what’s available in the industry for business intelligence solutions (based on the “top of mind” companies). Rarely will you find a “one size fits all” approach — often times you’ll find yourself utilizing several niche tools, particularly as you get into advertising and marketing campaigns.

Pillar #1: KPI Tools

There’s no software that can tell you what your KPIs should be for your business. KPIs vary widely by industry, type of business, department, and ultimately boil down to what you’re being measured to produce.

Pillar #2: Data Warehousing Tools

This is an important pillar, and there are many options available for data warehousing. A simple Google search for the topic produces many vendors who play in this space. Visit the Wikipedia entry for this subject and check out these vendor offerings:

• Open Source
  • MySQL
  • Infobright
• Commercial
  • SAP Business Objects
  • Oracle

Pillar #3: Reporting & Analysis Tools

Once the data is collected, you must have the tools to report and analyze the data. It’s one thing to see your KPIs, but the real skill behind Business Intelligence is the ability to correlate this data, mine the data, and discover information and trends you otherwise might have never known.

• Businesses & Department-Level Tools (See my BI links on delicious.com)
  • Open Source
    • JasperReports
    • Pentaho
  • Commercial
    • Cognos
    • iDashboards
    • SAP Business Objects
    • Omniture Discover OnPremise
• Website Tools (See my web analytics links on delicious.com)
  • Open Source / Free
    • Google Analytics
  • Commercial
    • Omniture SiteCatalyst
    • WebTrends
    • ClickTracks
    • ZoomRank for SEO
• Advertising, marketing campaign measurement tools
  • Google Adwords for TV
  • WebTrends AdDirector for SEM
  • Omniture SearchCenter for SEM
  • Visit the Dashboard Spy blog
• Social Media measurement tools
  • Nielson BuzzMetrics
  • BuzzLogic
  • Jeremiah Owyang (Forrester Analyst) has a string of blog posts on this topic covering the likes of twitter, blogging, and most other hot technologies struggling to prove their ROI to the business world

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The following excerpt from ReadWriteWeb shows a fantastic trend happening in retail environments today whereby consumers have instant access to pricing information on products via their mobile phone:

Stores Clueless About Mobile Barcode Scanning Applications?

With the rise of app-laden smartphones like the iPhone and Google’s Android OS, now on T-Mobile’s G1, many penny-pinching shoppers have downloaded barcode scanning applications onto their mobile devices. These apps allow consumers to compare the prices of merchandise on a store’s shelf to competing stores in the area just by taking pictures with their smartphone’s camera. The prices are instantly retrieved and displayed on the mobile phone so consumers can know before they buy if they’re getting a good deal.

via Stores Clueless About Mobile Barcode Scanning Applications? – ReadWriteWeb .

Mobile barcode scanning is like PriceGrabber; it puts the focus on service  and reasonable pricing from retailers, not only lowest possible price

The reason why I like mobile barcode scanning is because, as a consumer, this will put pressure on retailers to be competitively priced and (more importantly) focused on servicing the customer. If it mobile barcode scanning grows widespread, this will ultimately force retail channels to align with pricing in online channels.

Essentially, mobile barcode scanning acts as your own personal PriceGrabber.com. With PriceGrabber, you enter a product name and see competitive retailers, retailer rankings, and pricing:

With phones like the iPhones which blur the lines between internet device and mobile phone and have a built-in camera, barcode scanning becomes easy — snap a photo of the barcode, an iPhone application reads it, and then performs a web search for competitive pricing and availability much like PriceGrabber.

It’s difficult to find significant price savings across products and retailers on PriceGrabber — because the playing field has been leveled for retailers in the price game and forces them to focus on service. Price your products too high, and the masses will not buy from you. Price them low enough, well, you had better be able to support the service on the small profit margins you’ll be making.

If barcode scanning doesn’t enforce better service, then it will demand unique product assortments from suppliers at the retail level

A world where retailers all sell identical product assortments for virtually the same price is going to force retailers to differentiate in other ways. Sometimes this means the retailer will go private label with certain products. Or, retailers will demand a unique product selection from their supplier within a product category. Other times, retailers will negotiate exclusivity on products for a period of time. Larger retailers will do all three to be well diversified.

This burden/strain will ultimately land on the manufacturer’s/supplier’s shoulders; Brand names will win in this environment

Bar code scanning and the PriceGrabber’s of the world put added burden/strain on manufacturers/suppliers. The manufacturers will be forced to be creative in their go-to-market strategies as they launch new products across various retailers and channels. Well-recognized brands won’t fall victim (as much) to the bundling requirements, product assortment strategies, and channel-specific pricing.

Apple, for example, is represented identically across channels — with pricing being within single digits of each other between retailers. A barcode scan on an iPhone will show similar pricing across all channels of business and all retailers — thereby putting the emphasis back on the retailer to provide good service and support.

Consumers will win this battle

As much as retailers want to control the environment, at the end of the day, pricing shopping is what people will do, whether or not barcode scanning is banned. Ultimately, consumers will win this battle, and that’s a good thing.

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When calling the DMV today for questions about transferring the title of a vehicle, I was greeted with the following message once I navigated through the automated phone tree:

“May I have your attention. We are experiencing a higher than normal volume of calls. Your wait time may be excessive.”

Excessive? Did they really say that? On the heels of a similar post by Yabia, I couldn’t help but post my own reminder that viewing your business through the eyes of your customer or a consumer is critical to providing satisfying service.

“Excessive” implies an amount or degree too great to be reasonable or acceptable

My beef with the above recorded message is the use of the word “excessive.” Excessive is so often used in conjunction with something overly negative (excessive speeding, excessive drinking, etc.), why on earth would you use this language with your customers?

Now, granted, this is local government — generally an area where I rarely find customer service going above and beyond the call of duty. This automated message is either a complete stroke of genius by realistically acknowledging that the wait time is totally unacceptable…or a sobering realization of the lack of awareness. My vote is for the latter.

Soften the blow

If your phone system doesn’t support the ability to tell a caller how long they will wait, then don’t mention anything about the wait time being excessive. At the very least, choose different wording if transparency is your objective.

It makes me wonder: what would life be like if we lived in a world where there was only one supplier for each product we used in our day-to-day lives? Would you also have “excessive” wait times?

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