Avaya put out another PR that I was featured in today. I can’t say more than I love this piece of technology. It fits SMB market better than the Nortel BCM and a lot cheaper than the Cisco solution. It allows our employees to do more without costing us a ton of money.
Avaya Helps Financial Services Firms Use Intelligent Communications to Succeed in a Shifting Marketplace

I was featured in a Press Release for Avaya’s new version of IP Office 3.2. I really enjoy working with the IP Office and think it is a great solution for SMB customers. It offers the flexibility to use Digital phones, IP based phones, or a combination of them. It also has great features like the new Mobile Twinning and the conferencing system. The free sofware updates top it off, although some new features are license-based, but that means you don’t pay for features you don’t use.

Here is a quote from the release: Small and Medium Businesses Worldwide Improve Operations with Intelligent Communications from Avaya

Companies Use IP Office to Improve Operations and Customer Service

For Cascadia Capital, Avaya IP Office is an important tool for keeping the company’s highly skilled investment bankers connected to clients, colleagues and critical company information.

“The new mobile twinning feature of IP Office 3.2 is extremely important to us,” said Christopher Bettin, director of information technology for Cascadia Capital. “That means we can give our clients one number to reach our investment bankers; whether they are in the office or visiting a client. The new management capabilities also allow us to deploy new policies and features to groups of users.”

By integrating IP Office with the company’s Microsoft Exchange email application, investment bankers at Cascadia are able to use their Blackberry handheld wireless devices to access Avaya voicemail from a single, integrated email and voicemail inbox.

Bettin said the built-in conferencing features of Avaya IP Office are also heavily utilized by the Cascadia team.

“Meeting with clients is a huge part of our business,” he said. “IP Office makes it simple for them to quickly establish a meeting and collaborate. In addition, we’ve saved enough money by eliminating outside conferencing services to pay for the Avaya system within 18 months.”

Okay so lets take this whole web 2.0 thing to a new level, how about open source business plans? I have created a backpack page for us to work on a brainstorming for healthy business ideas. I propose we focus on two key tasks to start, first what are the principals a “healthy lifestyle” business should abide by? See my initial thoughts and add your own in the main body section.

Second who are possible customers, what are the key segments that we could target with a business?

By combining these two areas I hope that we can combine principals with target customers to find a unique opportunity that will launch a ground breaking business.

Clearly business terms are also needed to govern this space, here is my proposal:

1) All are welcome to use the thinking to establish a business on their own, if you do post ideas to this page they are available for any member of the group to use.

2) Any business’ that do start using these ideas must credit extra8 as an inspiration and must always include extra8 promotion on their site and in any physical location.

3) Revenue and Profits, the real reason to start a business, in my view these are the property of the crediting organization and owners of the business, with risk comes the reward. If we do find some good ideas we may want to create a sub group to actually work on launching the business and then this group would share the revenue in some yet to be determined fashion.

Thoughts? Interested?

Check out Business Plan 2.0

Check out Jamie Oliver every Monday night on TLC. In Jamie’s School Lunch Project Jamie Oliver is out to improve the school lunches for kids across the UK. In one amazing bit, Jamie asks the kids to identify a number of veggies. They struggle and can hardly name one. He then holds up a Domino’s Pizza logo and every kid in the room jumps out of their seat yelling Domino’s. It gets even worse when he holds up and McDonalds’s golden arch logo. This all has me thinking: America is FAT, not just overweight but FAT, orca fat and hardly anything is being done to fix the problem. For the first time kids born today are expected to live a shorter life than their parents. This is simply one of the largest, most important problems facing America today. Do you know anyone who has had a Gastric Bypass? Know anyone who has had a heart attack? How about anyone who is constantly dieting? Clearly we need to change the way we eat, exercise and live. Jamie Oliver is on to something, and in his show (TLC 7pm EST) he explores the idea that if we are going to change our eating habits we have to start with our children. Watch as he struggles to get kids to eat veggies, and works even harder to get their parents to stop feeding them crap.

Click below to watch the trailor from the original series in the UK, and join me in thinking about how we change America. Now I am certainly a business man, and I smell a HUGE opportunity in here somehow. The question is how do you improve peoples’ lives while still making money. Much like Whole Foods or your Local Gym, I believe that you can help people live a healthy life and make money doing it. Got any ideas on how to launch a business? I do and I will share them in an upcomming post.

Jamie’s School Lunch Project on TLC

Is America finally becomming more health aware? I have been thinking alot about food trends in our country and granted I get a very skewed view of our country but I believe we may be on the brink of a revolution. The move to organic produce, locally raised meats and fresh seafood is an important one that we should all be following. Customers are flocking to Whole Foods, PCC, Farmers Markets and anywhere else that they can find fresh produce, meats and cheese. This all got me thinking, is this a cultural shift or a trend confined to the upper class, or those in tune with healthy eating? Are things like home cooked meals, wine and organic produce something that most people care about or a couple of thousand yuppies on each coast? I love Whole Foods even though I know it is more expensive, I love shopping there, and I generally feel that anything I buy will be of the highest quality and freshness. I also love buying from farmers markets, these give the the chance to interact with local farmers directly and also provide the chance to buy fresh local ingredients that are in season.

All of this got me to thinking, outside of Whole Foods how could you start a business to take advantage of this growing trend? A couple of ideas come to mind, cooking lessons, take out lunch spot, farm, wine shop, restaurant, etc. Clearly billions are made each year off of weight loss and dieting however this is a bit different. If people truly are focused on eating less processed foods, and eating more local fresh ingredients how do you create a business that takes advantage of this shift in customer buying habits? Which once again brings us back to my original question, is there really a shift or are there just a bunch of yuppies on each coast who have taken up cooking and wine because it is seen somehow as trendy?

Trying to be a good industry banker in the investment banking community means getting out to meeting with a lot of companies and working with your relationships to get better information about small private companies, financial investors (which invest in the small private companies), and large public companies (which acquire the small private companies).  My most recent trip down to the valley was spent with Juniper Networks and Google.

Needless to say, Google has an amazing campus in Mountain View.  We toured the facilities, which have a beach volleyball court at the center, tons of toys and scooters all over campus, and (best of all) three meals a day in the cafeterias around campus - all at no cost to the employees. 

For the hour and a half I was on the campus, I honestly felt like I’d been transported back to Colby.  As we were walking, skateboards would go rolling by, you’d see people working out in state-of-the-art gyms and swimming in the current pools.  You then walk into the cafeteria and select just about anything you might want to eat.  After the tour, I was wishing that Mountain View was commutable from Seattle, as it is the type of place where you could just see innovation thriving.

Woot! is a company that sells junk to ‘computer geeks’.  From home appliances to computer equipment to kitchenware to electronic gear.  That’s no different than Best Buy or Fry’s, right?  Wrong.  Their sales are entirely web based, so they are like Amazon.com, right?  Wrong.  The key difference is they sell only 1 item at a time, and look for a target market.  That’s right, they typically hock 1 item on the website every 24 hours.  If it sells out in 30 minutes, great!  If not, then the left over stock sits in the wearhouse waiting for another chance.  Sales start at midnight central time (they are based in Texas), and they tend to sell out quickly.  They are selling ‘cool stuff’ that typically is end-of-life or is being replaced by another item.  They don’t provide support and recommend you contact the manufacturer for all issues.  The idea is to lower their costs, and push all issues back to the engineers that make the stuff.

So Woot! has a ‘Woot!-off’, which is like a massive sale of items.  Read the rest of the article to check out the revenue for the 24hr period of the current Woot!-off that is going on now.
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Here’s another great ad… kind of. Reported over on Coolz0r, it’s an ad for something running/exercise/energy related. Too bad they didn’t make the logo bigger on the ad. My guess is that it is for Nike. Whatever company or product it is advertising, this is great because instead of big flashy lights to divert your attention away from the natural surroundings (like much of Time Square), the optical illusion that this advertisement creates in conjunction with its surroundings grabs you and makes you pause for a moment to think about it.

Could that really happen? You’d have to be strong. Maybe a super hero could do that… These were all the thoughts (yes childish) that flew through my head when I first saw this picture. What do you think of first?

Chevy has launched a new “viral” online advertising campaign that lets you create your own video advertising the Chevy Tahoe. This is both a great idea and a bad idea. It is a great idea because it turns the brand over to the public and not only draws on the creative talent of… anyone, but also gets people engaged with the brand.

To see why this is possibly a bad idea, check out the ad I made.

And here is another one among many others on YouTube.

Chevy has taken a big risk in doing this, but I think in the end it will be a good thing. Either way, it has already created TONS of buzz for them.