Sharon and Jim Mattei’s Venetian-style home on the east side of Everglades Island, presented some out-of-the-box challenges to its designer, Michael Perry of MP Design and Architecture in Palm Beach.Perry readily recalls the role that the site played in the genesis of the architecture in 2005, when the Matteis found a waterfront property they loved at 650 Island Drive.
“And since it was on Lake Worth, they thought a Venetian-style home would be fitting, and they wanted to maximize the lake views to the east and southeast. They also wanted the indoor and outdoor spaces to serve each other directly.”To optimize the vistas, Perry created a distinctive floor plan that relied on a series of step-backs from the lakefront.
“I brought the north portion of the house — the family room — out closest to the lake, and stepped the other sections of the house back, so that all the rooms on the lakeside would have east and south views.”That plan also complemented the landscape design, which was executed by Mario Nievera and Keith Williams, whose firm today is known as Nievera Williams Design. Rather than positioning the pool directly behind the real time Location system, the landscape designers placed it on the south end of the yard.
“The Matteis wanted to maintain the lawn directly east of the loggia, and they did not want the pool to overtake the views of the lake,” Perry explains.In all, the house ended up with 7,814square feet of living space, inside and out, with five bedrooms, five bathrooms and two half-baths.
Jim Mattei — an investor and real estate developer who co-founded and later sold the Checkers fast-food chain — and his wife are selling Villa Isola. It recently re-entered the market at $13.8 million, offered for sale by Sharon Mattei’s mother, Sotheby’s International Realty agent Mary Boykin. Last year, Boykin also represented a limited liability company associated with Jim Mattei when it sold a vacant lot across the street, at 657 Island Drive, for a recorded $5 million to a trust.
In the south block, stepped back again, are the library and guest bedroom suite. Upstairs, the north block houses the master bathroom, closets and a guest bedroom suite. In the center portion are the master terrace facing the lake, the master bedroom and the second floor gallery. In the south block are two guest bedroom suites. The upstairs rooms have coffered or tray ceilings, and some doors open to “Juliet”-style balconies.
Once the floor plan was finalized, Perry turned his attention to the architectural style, making use of repeated Venetian design motifs on the exterior. Adorning the front door, for instance, are a stone surround and a tracery arch.
The exterior cornice features trefoil stone-arched details and, on the back of the house, there’s a second-floor window with a quatrefoil detail. Some windows are shaded by awnings held by Venetian-style wrought-iron supports.In the interior, the foyer plays up the Venetian theme, with details on the column capitals and the staircase balusters. The stone surround on the fireplace in the living room mixes gothic and Venetian details. The gallery is crowned with groin vaults.
Pecky cypress is found on the loggia’s ceiling. In the family room, there are pecky cypress beams, while the breakfast room has panels of the same wood.“In the pine-paneled library, the cornice has Venetian arch details, and it has a beamed-and-coffered pine ceiling. On either side of the TV cabinet, you’ll see trefoil arch details,” Perry says.
Other architectural features include rooms for red- and white-wine storage incorporated into the dining area and hinged doors in the dining room and master bedroom that recess against the wall to create the look of a paneled vestibule.Amenities include stone floors, an elevator, a dock with a boat lift, a whole-house generator and a Lutron touch-panel system to control lighting, air-conditioning, audio-visual equipment, and security alarms and cameras.
“We did obtain the views, and we were able to have the rooms relate to each other without having to go through a number of hallways,” Perry says. “The circulation is very easy, and rooms are accessible to each other. The Matteis have the outdoor pergola outside the family room to enjoy dining, and the family room, kitchen and living room are accessible to the lake loggia. Even in inclement weather, they can still move easily from room to room.”
In charging Manning with “aiding the enemy” under Article 104 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the US government is equating the publication of classified information about its secret and illegal activities with espionage, treason and aiding terrorists. It is doing so on the spurious grounds that such information can end up in the hands of forces considered by the government to be hostile.
In fact, as the Obama administration and the military well know, Manning released the information to inform the American people of war crimes being carried out by the US government in Iraq and Afghanistan and diplomatic intrigues targeting many other countries.
The clear implication of the government’s case is the position that any publication or organization that publishes leaked classified information or defends whistleblowers such as Manning is itself engaging in criminal and treasonous acts. The prosecution acknowledged as much in January when it argued that its case against Manning, which implicates WikiLeaks in treasonous and pro-terrorist activities, would apply equally if the Army private had passed his information to the New York Times .
This sweeping attack on First Amendment guarantees of freedom of speech and the press occurs in the context of threats to prosecute journalists such as the Guardian ’s Glenn Greenwald for publishing former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden’s exposures of US government spying, and revelations that the government seized the phone records of Associated Press reporters and tapped into the email of Fox News’ James Rosen, who was named a co-conspirator by the Justice Department in relation to State Department leaks.
Read the full story at http://www.ecived.com/en/!
2013年7月4日星期四
2013年7月2日星期二
Damage Control Strategies to Lessen the Guilt
Get in a great workout before you go to your Independence Day celebration. Either the night before or the morning of, hit the gym with gusto, go for a good run or bike ride or take a nice sweaty hike with a friend or spouse or whatever . Rev up your metabolism with some light snacks before you exercise and a little something with protein and carbs right after. You'll feel less like scarfng down everything you see at the party if you don't starve yourself all morning.
Hydrate like crazy. Drink more, eat less -- but not in the aforementioned rock star way, of course. Sometimes we crave starchy foods when we're thirsty. So keep a cold water bottle at hand all day. On occasion, I even recommend a low or no calorie energy drink if you're feeling sluggish from the heat. Don't make it a habit, but sometimes a no-cal Red Bull or Monster-type drink will help you stay active at the beach (or wherever your party is) and keep the hunger at bay. Of course, all good things come to an end, and when the caffeine wears off, beware that you may be extra hungry so keep that water pumping.
Play party games, not card games. If you're going to a party or hosting one, start a game that requires people to be active. Even if you're just standing and cheering at a volleyball game or flag football, it's better to be on your feet on the sand or grass than on your behind.
Exercise your food options! Surely people are going to grill burgers and dogs and if budget is an issue, chances are the meat is going to be the low quality, high fat type. So splurge on bringing the right rtls for you. Turkey burgers or franks, chicken sausages and veggie patties are all much better for you and a lot lower in calories and heart-clogging fat. Don't forget the green salad and veggies too.
Watch out for the double and triple starches. If you're diabetic you already may know this from your doctor. If you're drinking beer, skip the buns and corn on the cob. If you'd rather have bread or pasta salad, don't get in line at that keg. Or go halvsies: half of a bun on your burger and a light beer is a good compromise. You get the picture. If you must have it all, have a mini serving of each. Nothing makes you feel more bloated than a starch binge and it's not muy bueno for the blood sugar either.
After-party hangover blues? You gotta move, but not just to the medicine cabinet for ibuprofen and Pepto Bismol! Hangovers will abate faster if you get your metabolism up and sweat. As hard as it is to get started, be sure to get some exercise and fresh air the day after (this is good advice after any celebration).
Post-party fasting. You just might be able to undo the damage if you give your body a break the next day. Personally I'm not a fan of regular fasting but I do understand why it has certain benefits. My grandmother did it once a month. You can do it by drinking plenty of water or juicing vegetables the next day. Or, just eat super light the day after your celebration especially if you're diabetic, exercising or suffer from hypoglycemia. Play it smart by checking with your doctor beforehand.
This tip is so L.A., but come late and leave early, or party hop. If you don't stay too long at any one party, you won't drink too much (particularly if you're the designated driver, I hope) and you won't have as much time to eat. It's still rude to dine and dash, right?
If you're not hitting the gym or doing a workout the morning of and the morning after, sleep in. Research has shown that hunger hormones balance out in your favor when you get more sleep. In one well documented study, people who slept closer to eight hours a night had lower levels of the hunger hormone ghrelin and higher levels of leptin. That's what you want because higher ghrelin levels make you feel hungry and low levels of leptin signal your body to have a bigger appetite.
If none of these strategies work for you, it may time for professional help. If you continue to keep gaining weight all summer, there might be a deeper, underlying problem. It may be as simple as hiring a personal trainer or health coach to get you in the habit of eating better and exercising more or it could be something more serious like depression, hormonal changes, or a combination of things. Remember there's nothing wrong with asking for help!
The Colorado Department of Health and Environment is suspending all testing of blood-alcohol and blood-drug levels at its state toxicology lab pending an investigation to see if they are being done correctly.
An independent lab will take over testing any new or unprocessed samples in the meantime. And it will also retest as many as 800 blood-alcohol samples done by the state lab to ensure they were accurate.
The report found employees are not properly trained to conduct blood-alcohol tests, the linchpin of many drunk driving cases, and that they weren’t properly trained to teach new employees to do them.It also found that employees weren’t adequately trained to give expert testimony in court and that blood samples awaiting testing weren’t stored in a locked refrigerator.
And investigators found it “more than likely” that an unnamed supervisor made comments to suggest she was biased in favor of prosecutors. Employees reported overhearing the supervisor make statements like, “I really stuck it to the defendant today,” and “I’m sure he’s going to jail.”
That bias was also manifest in the supervisor’s habit of making “excessive accommodations for prosecutors and law enforcement agencies,” resulting in a greater workload.The report opened the door for legal challenges in hundreds of drunk driving cases and led to the resignation of the supervisor cited in the report.
Dr. Chris Urbina, the state’s chief medical officer, also resigned, saying in a press release that he’s stepping down to “explore other opportunities.”
In addition to suspending the blood tests, the lab will be audited by the Association of Public Health Laboratories and as many as 800 blood samples will be retested for accuracy by an independent lab, according to a story on Denver’s 7News.
“We will have an independent laboratory retest approximately 800 blood-alcohol samples to verify the state toxicology lab’s blood-alcohol test results,” Urbina told the station on his last day of work on Friday.
Read the full story at www.ecived.com/en/!
Hydrate like crazy. Drink more, eat less -- but not in the aforementioned rock star way, of course. Sometimes we crave starchy foods when we're thirsty. So keep a cold water bottle at hand all day. On occasion, I even recommend a low or no calorie energy drink if you're feeling sluggish from the heat. Don't make it a habit, but sometimes a no-cal Red Bull or Monster-type drink will help you stay active at the beach (or wherever your party is) and keep the hunger at bay. Of course, all good things come to an end, and when the caffeine wears off, beware that you may be extra hungry so keep that water pumping.
Play party games, not card games. If you're going to a party or hosting one, start a game that requires people to be active. Even if you're just standing and cheering at a volleyball game or flag football, it's better to be on your feet on the sand or grass than on your behind.
Exercise your food options! Surely people are going to grill burgers and dogs and if budget is an issue, chances are the meat is going to be the low quality, high fat type. So splurge on bringing the right rtls for you. Turkey burgers or franks, chicken sausages and veggie patties are all much better for you and a lot lower in calories and heart-clogging fat. Don't forget the green salad and veggies too.
Watch out for the double and triple starches. If you're diabetic you already may know this from your doctor. If you're drinking beer, skip the buns and corn on the cob. If you'd rather have bread or pasta salad, don't get in line at that keg. Or go halvsies: half of a bun on your burger and a light beer is a good compromise. You get the picture. If you must have it all, have a mini serving of each. Nothing makes you feel more bloated than a starch binge and it's not muy bueno for the blood sugar either.
After-party hangover blues? You gotta move, but not just to the medicine cabinet for ibuprofen and Pepto Bismol! Hangovers will abate faster if you get your metabolism up and sweat. As hard as it is to get started, be sure to get some exercise and fresh air the day after (this is good advice after any celebration).
Post-party fasting. You just might be able to undo the damage if you give your body a break the next day. Personally I'm not a fan of regular fasting but I do understand why it has certain benefits. My grandmother did it once a month. You can do it by drinking plenty of water or juicing vegetables the next day. Or, just eat super light the day after your celebration especially if you're diabetic, exercising or suffer from hypoglycemia. Play it smart by checking with your doctor beforehand.
This tip is so L.A., but come late and leave early, or party hop. If you don't stay too long at any one party, you won't drink too much (particularly if you're the designated driver, I hope) and you won't have as much time to eat. It's still rude to dine and dash, right?
If you're not hitting the gym or doing a workout the morning of and the morning after, sleep in. Research has shown that hunger hormones balance out in your favor when you get more sleep. In one well documented study, people who slept closer to eight hours a night had lower levels of the hunger hormone ghrelin and higher levels of leptin. That's what you want because higher ghrelin levels make you feel hungry and low levels of leptin signal your body to have a bigger appetite.
If none of these strategies work for you, it may time for professional help. If you continue to keep gaining weight all summer, there might be a deeper, underlying problem. It may be as simple as hiring a personal trainer or health coach to get you in the habit of eating better and exercising more or it could be something more serious like depression, hormonal changes, or a combination of things. Remember there's nothing wrong with asking for help!
The Colorado Department of Health and Environment is suspending all testing of blood-alcohol and blood-drug levels at its state toxicology lab pending an investigation to see if they are being done correctly.
An independent lab will take over testing any new or unprocessed samples in the meantime. And it will also retest as many as 800 blood-alcohol samples done by the state lab to ensure they were accurate.
The report found employees are not properly trained to conduct blood-alcohol tests, the linchpin of many drunk driving cases, and that they weren’t properly trained to teach new employees to do them.It also found that employees weren’t adequately trained to give expert testimony in court and that blood samples awaiting testing weren’t stored in a locked refrigerator.
And investigators found it “more than likely” that an unnamed supervisor made comments to suggest she was biased in favor of prosecutors. Employees reported overhearing the supervisor make statements like, “I really stuck it to the defendant today,” and “I’m sure he’s going to jail.”
That bias was also manifest in the supervisor’s habit of making “excessive accommodations for prosecutors and law enforcement agencies,” resulting in a greater workload.The report opened the door for legal challenges in hundreds of drunk driving cases and led to the resignation of the supervisor cited in the report.
Dr. Chris Urbina, the state’s chief medical officer, also resigned, saying in a press release that he’s stepping down to “explore other opportunities.”
In addition to suspending the blood tests, the lab will be audited by the Association of Public Health Laboratories and as many as 800 blood samples will be retested for accuracy by an independent lab, according to a story on Denver’s 7News.
“We will have an independent laboratory retest approximately 800 blood-alcohol samples to verify the state toxicology lab’s blood-alcohol test results,” Urbina told the station on his last day of work on Friday.
Read the full story at www.ecived.com/en/!
2013年6月30日星期日
The car that parks itself
CARS that need no driver are just around the corner according to Google, which has been testing vehicles bristling with aerials and cameras on public roads in America. But Google does not make cars (yet), so it will be up to firms that do to bring the technology to market. And carmakers are a conservative bunch. Still, slowly and steadily the autonomous car will arrive, with the help of an increasing number of automated driving aids. Volvo recently demonstrated one such feature: a car that really does park itself.
Some cars already have systems that assist with parking, but these are not completely autonomous. They can identify an empty parallel-parking space and steer into it while the driver uses the brake. The Volvo system, however, lets the driver get out and use a smartphone application to instruct the vehicle to park. The car then trundles off, manoeuvres into a parking place and sends a message to the driver to inform him where it is. The driver can collect the car in person or use his phone to call it back to where he dropped it off. Autonomous parking could thus be provided at places like shopping centres and airports, which are controlled areas in which automated vehicles can be managed more easily than on open highways.
In the past, designs for doing this have relied on car parks being fitted with buried guide wires that a vehicle can follow to an empty bay. That, though, creates a chicken-and-egg problem: car-park operators will not invest in such infrastructure until there is a sufficient number of suitably equipped cars on the road. Drivers, conversely, will not want to buy self-parking cars if there is nowhere to use them.
This means, as Mikael Thor, a Volvo safety engineer working on the project, observes, that for autonomous parking to work most of the technology will have to be in the car itself. The Volvo test car, which looks like a normal car, therefore uses on-board GPS mapping, cameras with image-recognition software, and radar sensors to find its own way around a car park and avoid pedestrians and non-autonomous vehicles. Mr Thor says the system is five to ten years from commercial deployment. If it proves a success then infrastructure might adapt to it, for instance by packing cars into tighter spaces (with no one in them there is no need to make room for their doors to open), but would not need to anticipate it.
Driverless cars would also need to communicate with one another, to enhance safety. That, too, is coming. A number of carmakers are developing wireless networking systems through which vehicles can exchange data, such as their speed, their steering angle and even their real time Location system, to forewarn anti-collision systems and safety devices if an accident looks likely.
Ford, for example, recently tested a brake light that can provide an early warning to other motorists. If the brakes are applied hard in an emergency, a signal is broadcast. This illuminates a warning light in the dashboard of suitably equipped following vehicles, even if they are out of sight around a bend or not immediately behind the vehicle doing the braking.
Ford has been testing this system as part of a collaborative research project with several European carmakers. They have put a fleet of 150 experimental vehicles on the roads. When it tested a group of these, Ford found the technology let drivers brake much earlier, helping avoid collisions. A driverless car would be able to react even faster.
Another member of the research group, BMW, has been testing driverless cars on roads around Munich—including belting down some of Germany’s high-speed autobahns. The ordinary-looking BMW 5-series models use a variety of self-contained guidance systems. These include cameras mounted on the upper windscreen, which can identify road markings, signs and various obstacles likely to be encountered on roads.
The BMWs also use a radar, to gauge how far the vehicle is from other cars and potential obstacles, and a lidar, which works like a radar but at optical frequencies. The lidar employs laser beams to scan the road ahead and builds up from the reflections a three-dimensional image of what this looks like. The image is processed by a computer in the vehicle, which also collects and compares data from a high-accuracy GPS unit. A series of ultrasonic sonars similar to those used in vehicles to provide parking assistance are placed around the car to add to the virtual picture. And just to make sure, a set of accelerometers provide an inertial navigation system that double-checks the vehicle’s position on the road.
Although these cars can be switched to an autonomous driving mode, like Google’s vehicles they are still required to have someone in the driving seat who can take over in the event of any difficulty. The BMWs can steer themselves, slow down, brake and accelerate, even changing lanes to overtake slower vehicles. BMW, though, does not yet talk of when it might offer fully autonomous cars to customers; rather it says that it expects to see “highly automated” driving functions available in its models from around 2020.
The metric they are chasing is 40 HPV — hours per vehicle — by 2015. At the moment, the plant produces at 52.8 HPV, a 30% improvement on five years ago. Getting to 40 will take a massive effort.Next year, the W205 factory will move into continuous production using three eight-hour shifts. This will require an even higher level of consistency as there will be no down time which can be used to make up for slow production.
Mr van der Merwe is acutely aware that the South African operation faces growing global competition. The W205 will be produced in South Africa, the US, Germany and China.
"China is a fierce competitor. South Africa's future does not lie in competing on labour cost. It's much more important to develop the skills base."South Africa's advantage lies in the "tenacity" of its workforce and what he describes as "the general culture in the workplace".
It is a culture that must be built, and prospective employees attend intensive training sessions that plug the gaps in the education system and incubate a mindset of high productivity."You cannot just inform somebody about such a system. You have to learn it, you have to live in it, you have to believe in it," says Mr Zimmerman.
Exiting the plant onto East London's Settlers Way, you drive about 100m before turning left into an industrial area where Mercedes is preparing the new intake of workers for next year's new production line.
In a converted warehouse, human resources manager Stephen Goold presides over the training of 800 potential new recruits in the plant's Shop Floor Skills Centre. They are all school-leavers and about 600 of them will find jobs on the new production line.
Then comes a statistic that brings home the Eastern Cape's dire employment crisis: the 800 trainee workers were chosen from more than 23,000 applicants. If there is an invisible fuel powering their learning, it is hope. They may be entry-level factory workers, but in this blighted region, they are an elite, the few who have obtained a foothold in a precarious regional economy.
On the day I visit, trainees are testing their ability to follow complex sequences of mechanical instructions. In one corner, a team is taking apart and reassembling the doors of a C Class saloon, in another, they are undoing fastenings they cannot see behind a screen.
In yet another, students write notes furiously as a lecturer brings them up to speed before a whiteboard. Whittling the 23,000 down to 800 gives Mercedes the opportunity to select the very brightest.
"The assessment process means good quality in, good quality out," says Mr Goold.Further down the road is the East London Industrial Development Zone, where most of the plant's component suppliers are based.From its factories come seats, roof trim, door panels, bearings, exhaust systems, key chassis components, fuel tanks and the pressed "aluminium skin panels" that will be welded together into the body.
Between 45% and 50% of the new C Class will be local, but this includes parts supplied by local component manufacturers, who import some of their parts. The true figure is closer to 25%.Again, the competition is fierce. Mr Zimmerman points out that South African leather components used to be exported to other Mercedes plants, but more efficient Eastern European competitors have begun to take over.
Click on their website www.ecived.com/en/ for more information.
Some cars already have systems that assist with parking, but these are not completely autonomous. They can identify an empty parallel-parking space and steer into it while the driver uses the brake. The Volvo system, however, lets the driver get out and use a smartphone application to instruct the vehicle to park. The car then trundles off, manoeuvres into a parking place and sends a message to the driver to inform him where it is. The driver can collect the car in person or use his phone to call it back to where he dropped it off. Autonomous parking could thus be provided at places like shopping centres and airports, which are controlled areas in which automated vehicles can be managed more easily than on open highways.
In the past, designs for doing this have relied on car parks being fitted with buried guide wires that a vehicle can follow to an empty bay. That, though, creates a chicken-and-egg problem: car-park operators will not invest in such infrastructure until there is a sufficient number of suitably equipped cars on the road. Drivers, conversely, will not want to buy self-parking cars if there is nowhere to use them.
This means, as Mikael Thor, a Volvo safety engineer working on the project, observes, that for autonomous parking to work most of the technology will have to be in the car itself. The Volvo test car, which looks like a normal car, therefore uses on-board GPS mapping, cameras with image-recognition software, and radar sensors to find its own way around a car park and avoid pedestrians and non-autonomous vehicles. Mr Thor says the system is five to ten years from commercial deployment. If it proves a success then infrastructure might adapt to it, for instance by packing cars into tighter spaces (with no one in them there is no need to make room for their doors to open), but would not need to anticipate it.
Driverless cars would also need to communicate with one another, to enhance safety. That, too, is coming. A number of carmakers are developing wireless networking systems through which vehicles can exchange data, such as their speed, their steering angle and even their real time Location system, to forewarn anti-collision systems and safety devices if an accident looks likely.
Ford, for example, recently tested a brake light that can provide an early warning to other motorists. If the brakes are applied hard in an emergency, a signal is broadcast. This illuminates a warning light in the dashboard of suitably equipped following vehicles, even if they are out of sight around a bend or not immediately behind the vehicle doing the braking.
Ford has been testing this system as part of a collaborative research project with several European carmakers. They have put a fleet of 150 experimental vehicles on the roads. When it tested a group of these, Ford found the technology let drivers brake much earlier, helping avoid collisions. A driverless car would be able to react even faster.
Another member of the research group, BMW, has been testing driverless cars on roads around Munich—including belting down some of Germany’s high-speed autobahns. The ordinary-looking BMW 5-series models use a variety of self-contained guidance systems. These include cameras mounted on the upper windscreen, which can identify road markings, signs and various obstacles likely to be encountered on roads.
The BMWs also use a radar, to gauge how far the vehicle is from other cars and potential obstacles, and a lidar, which works like a radar but at optical frequencies. The lidar employs laser beams to scan the road ahead and builds up from the reflections a three-dimensional image of what this looks like. The image is processed by a computer in the vehicle, which also collects and compares data from a high-accuracy GPS unit. A series of ultrasonic sonars similar to those used in vehicles to provide parking assistance are placed around the car to add to the virtual picture. And just to make sure, a set of accelerometers provide an inertial navigation system that double-checks the vehicle’s position on the road.
Although these cars can be switched to an autonomous driving mode, like Google’s vehicles they are still required to have someone in the driving seat who can take over in the event of any difficulty. The BMWs can steer themselves, slow down, brake and accelerate, even changing lanes to overtake slower vehicles. BMW, though, does not yet talk of when it might offer fully autonomous cars to customers; rather it says that it expects to see “highly automated” driving functions available in its models from around 2020.
The metric they are chasing is 40 HPV — hours per vehicle — by 2015. At the moment, the plant produces at 52.8 HPV, a 30% improvement on five years ago. Getting to 40 will take a massive effort.Next year, the W205 factory will move into continuous production using three eight-hour shifts. This will require an even higher level of consistency as there will be no down time which can be used to make up for slow production.
Mr van der Merwe is acutely aware that the South African operation faces growing global competition. The W205 will be produced in South Africa, the US, Germany and China.
"China is a fierce competitor. South Africa's future does not lie in competing on labour cost. It's much more important to develop the skills base."South Africa's advantage lies in the "tenacity" of its workforce and what he describes as "the general culture in the workplace".
It is a culture that must be built, and prospective employees attend intensive training sessions that plug the gaps in the education system and incubate a mindset of high productivity."You cannot just inform somebody about such a system. You have to learn it, you have to live in it, you have to believe in it," says Mr Zimmerman.
Exiting the plant onto East London's Settlers Way, you drive about 100m before turning left into an industrial area where Mercedes is preparing the new intake of workers for next year's new production line.
In a converted warehouse, human resources manager Stephen Goold presides over the training of 800 potential new recruits in the plant's Shop Floor Skills Centre. They are all school-leavers and about 600 of them will find jobs on the new production line.
Then comes a statistic that brings home the Eastern Cape's dire employment crisis: the 800 trainee workers were chosen from more than 23,000 applicants. If there is an invisible fuel powering their learning, it is hope. They may be entry-level factory workers, but in this blighted region, they are an elite, the few who have obtained a foothold in a precarious regional economy.
On the day I visit, trainees are testing their ability to follow complex sequences of mechanical instructions. In one corner, a team is taking apart and reassembling the doors of a C Class saloon, in another, they are undoing fastenings they cannot see behind a screen.
In yet another, students write notes furiously as a lecturer brings them up to speed before a whiteboard. Whittling the 23,000 down to 800 gives Mercedes the opportunity to select the very brightest.
"The assessment process means good quality in, good quality out," says Mr Goold.Further down the road is the East London Industrial Development Zone, where most of the plant's component suppliers are based.From its factories come seats, roof trim, door panels, bearings, exhaust systems, key chassis components, fuel tanks and the pressed "aluminium skin panels" that will be welded together into the body.
Between 45% and 50% of the new C Class will be local, but this includes parts supplied by local component manufacturers, who import some of their parts. The true figure is closer to 25%.Again, the competition is fierce. Mr Zimmerman points out that South African leather components used to be exported to other Mercedes plants, but more efficient Eastern European competitors have begun to take over.
Click on their website www.ecived.com/en/ for more information.
2013年6月27日星期四
How to Solicit the Customer Feedback Your Startup Needs
What is the fuel that propels a startup from idea to launch to a sustainable success? Is it a killer idea? Funding? Revenue? Attracting the best talent? A visionary leader?The correct answer is customer feedback — lots and lots of customer feedback that you, as the founder of your startup, can leverage in order to develop a great product for which users will go crazy.
There are several distinct phases of a startup: the idea phase, pre-launch phase, early traction phase and (hopefully) a long period of growth and longevity. Customer feedback plays a central role in all of these.Feedback can and should be gathered in a number of ways. Most feedback will come through direct conversations with your customers in a variety of channels, but you can also gather feedback simply through observation.
It’s important that you don’t rely only on one method, such as email (although email can still be very effective). You’ll find that customers respond differently depending on which phase you’re in; pre-launch beta users tend to be more engaged than casual post-launch trial users. You might also find that some customers prefer email, others prefer chat and some people will give you better feedback over the phone or in person.
You’re probably so excited about this concept that you want to tell a few friends about it, and that’s a good start. See if this concept even remotely makes sense to anyone but yourself, but don’t spend too much time talking to friends. They’ll tend to give you positive feedback just because they’re your friends (even if you ask them to be critical). More importantly, your friends are not necessarily your target customers.
Your next step should be seek out between five and 10 people who you would consider to be your target customers and start some conversations. Don’t be shy. Have an idea to help clothing retail store owners sell more clothes? Walk into a mall and meet a few store owners. Want to build a tool to help programmers optimize their code? Introduce yourself on programming forums and local developer meetups.
Your goal at this stage is to identify the pain point, or the problem your product aims to solve. You might have this problem yourself, and that might have led to the idea in the first place, but it's important that you validate the fact that others have this same problem, or some variation of it.
Once you've validated the pain point with target customers, it's time to dig deeper. You need customer feedback to validate the concept of your product, and whether or not it's something worth customers' money.
At this stage, you should have some kind of landing page on your website to collect email addresses. There are a variety of ways to go about this: Some startups have a simple "coming soon" page, while others offer educational or otherwise valuable content in exchange for a visitor's email address.However you choose to build your pre-launch list, it is imperative that you reach out and personally contact each and every subscriber. Strike up a conversation over email and try to schedule a phone call.
Now your job is to conduct in-depth interviews to get an even clearer understanding of customer's pain points, values and how your product might benefit them. Unlike your first round of interviews, in which you reached out to potential target customers, you’re now having conversations with customers who expressed interest in what you’re doing. That makes this stage of customer feedback even more valuable.
A smart way to build an audience, both before and after your launch, is to put out a lot of valuable content. Start blogging, put out YouTube videos, send email newsletters or give away a free ebook.Your goal as you produce and release content should be twofold: It's a great way to build your list and drive traffic to your website, but more importantly, it's another vehicle for soliciting feedback.
Include a call-to-action at the end of your blog articles, or at the end of your email newsletter, asking readers to respond with questions and comments. Monitor which articles are being shared and talked about the most.Gathering feedback on your content is a great way to learn what the most common questions, challenges and goals of your audience are. You can use this feedback to create and release even more valuable content. You can also use it to inform your copywriting and marketing messages — every bit helps.
Of course, the first feedback you're looking for is whether or not customers are pulling out their wallets and entering their credit card information. If this is not happening (within a reasonable timeframe), you might need to circle back to those conversations you had earlier. Ask for follow-up conversations with those early customers to see how their views might have changed since you launched.
Are you offering a free trial period? Use a tool like Intercom.io to monitor activity in your app and see which areas might be causing friction for customers. Reach out to those trial users to help with the onboarding process. Beyond helping them use your app, ask them questions, including.
Use this feedback to help you improve your sales funnel. Promote the benefits — as described by your customers — on your marketing website. Smooth out the onboarding process, based on what you learned by helping trial users. Make the necessary tweaks to overcome the biggest objections users have to upgrading.
Your cancellation form is one place where you should always gather feedback. Customer cancellations are a fact of life for every startup. No founder likes seeing customers leave, but cancellations present a valuable opportunity to learn what is causing dissatisfaction with your product. Add a required text input where customers must fill in their reason for canceling, and then look for patterns and plug those holes to lower your cancellation rate.
Customer support is another great place to process valuable feedback, and it's why founders should be the ones manning the customer support requests for as long as possible before outsourcing it.
Read the full story at www.ecived.com/en/!
There are several distinct phases of a startup: the idea phase, pre-launch phase, early traction phase and (hopefully) a long period of growth and longevity. Customer feedback plays a central role in all of these.Feedback can and should be gathered in a number of ways. Most feedback will come through direct conversations with your customers in a variety of channels, but you can also gather feedback simply through observation.
It’s important that you don’t rely only on one method, such as email (although email can still be very effective). You’ll find that customers respond differently depending on which phase you’re in; pre-launch beta users tend to be more engaged than casual post-launch trial users. You might also find that some customers prefer email, others prefer chat and some people will give you better feedback over the phone or in person.
You’re probably so excited about this concept that you want to tell a few friends about it, and that’s a good start. See if this concept even remotely makes sense to anyone but yourself, but don’t spend too much time talking to friends. They’ll tend to give you positive feedback just because they’re your friends (even if you ask them to be critical). More importantly, your friends are not necessarily your target customers.
Your next step should be seek out between five and 10 people who you would consider to be your target customers and start some conversations. Don’t be shy. Have an idea to help clothing retail store owners sell more clothes? Walk into a mall and meet a few store owners. Want to build a tool to help programmers optimize their code? Introduce yourself on programming forums and local developer meetups.
Your goal at this stage is to identify the pain point, or the problem your product aims to solve. You might have this problem yourself, and that might have led to the idea in the first place, but it's important that you validate the fact that others have this same problem, or some variation of it.
Once you've validated the pain point with target customers, it's time to dig deeper. You need customer feedback to validate the concept of your product, and whether or not it's something worth customers' money.
At this stage, you should have some kind of landing page on your website to collect email addresses. There are a variety of ways to go about this: Some startups have a simple "coming soon" page, while others offer educational or otherwise valuable content in exchange for a visitor's email address.However you choose to build your pre-launch list, it is imperative that you reach out and personally contact each and every subscriber. Strike up a conversation over email and try to schedule a phone call.
Now your job is to conduct in-depth interviews to get an even clearer understanding of customer's pain points, values and how your product might benefit them. Unlike your first round of interviews, in which you reached out to potential target customers, you’re now having conversations with customers who expressed interest in what you’re doing. That makes this stage of customer feedback even more valuable.
A smart way to build an audience, both before and after your launch, is to put out a lot of valuable content. Start blogging, put out YouTube videos, send email newsletters or give away a free ebook.Your goal as you produce and release content should be twofold: It's a great way to build your list and drive traffic to your website, but more importantly, it's another vehicle for soliciting feedback.
Include a call-to-action at the end of your blog articles, or at the end of your email newsletter, asking readers to respond with questions and comments. Monitor which articles are being shared and talked about the most.Gathering feedback on your content is a great way to learn what the most common questions, challenges and goals of your audience are. You can use this feedback to create and release even more valuable content. You can also use it to inform your copywriting and marketing messages — every bit helps.
Of course, the first feedback you're looking for is whether or not customers are pulling out their wallets and entering their credit card information. If this is not happening (within a reasonable timeframe), you might need to circle back to those conversations you had earlier. Ask for follow-up conversations with those early customers to see how their views might have changed since you launched.
Are you offering a free trial period? Use a tool like Intercom.io to monitor activity in your app and see which areas might be causing friction for customers. Reach out to those trial users to help with the onboarding process. Beyond helping them use your app, ask them questions, including.
Use this feedback to help you improve your sales funnel. Promote the benefits — as described by your customers — on your marketing website. Smooth out the onboarding process, based on what you learned by helping trial users. Make the necessary tweaks to overcome the biggest objections users have to upgrading.
Your cancellation form is one place where you should always gather feedback. Customer cancellations are a fact of life for every startup. No founder likes seeing customers leave, but cancellations present a valuable opportunity to learn what is causing dissatisfaction with your product. Add a required text input where customers must fill in their reason for canceling, and then look for patterns and plug those holes to lower your cancellation rate.
Customer support is another great place to process valuable feedback, and it's why founders should be the ones manning the customer support requests for as long as possible before outsourcing it.
Read the full story at www.ecived.com/en/!
How to Solicit the Customer Feedback Your Startup Needs
What is the fuel that propels a startup from idea to launch to a sustainable success? Is it a killer idea? Funding? Revenue? Attracting the best talent? A visionary leader?The correct answer is customer feedback — lots and lots of customer feedback that you, as the founder of your startup, can leverage in order to develop a great product for which users will go crazy.
There are several distinct phases of a startup: the idea phase, pre-launch phase, early traction phase and (hopefully) a long period of growth and longevity. Customer feedback plays a central role in all of these.Feedback can and should be gathered in a number of ways. Most feedback will come through direct conversations with your customers in a variety of channels, but you can also gather feedback simply through observation.
It’s important that you don’t rely only on one method, such as email (although email can still be very effective). You’ll find that customers respond differently depending on which phase you’re in; pre-launch beta users tend to be more engaged than casual post-launch trial users. You might also find that some customers prefer email, others prefer chat and some people will give you better feedback over the phone or in person.
You’re probably so excited about this concept that you want to tell a few friends about it, and that’s a good start. See if this concept even remotely makes sense to anyone but yourself, but don’t spend too much time talking to friends. They’ll tend to give you positive feedback just because they’re your friends (even if you ask them to be critical). More importantly, your friends are not necessarily your target customers.
Your next step should be seek out between five and 10 people who you would consider to be your target customers and start some conversations. Don’t be shy. Have an idea to help clothing retail store owners sell more clothes? Walk into a mall and meet a few store owners. Want to build a tool to help programmers optimize their code? Introduce yourself on programming forums and local developer meetups.
Your goal at this stage is to identify the pain point, or the problem your product aims to solve. You might have this problem yourself, and that might have led to the idea in the first place, but it's important that you validate the fact that others have this same problem, or some variation of it.
Once you've validated the pain point with target customers, it's time to dig deeper. You need customer feedback to validate the concept of your product, and whether or not it's something worth customers' money.
At this stage, you should have some kind of landing page on your website to collect email addresses. There are a variety of ways to go about this: Some startups have a simple "coming soon" page, while others offer educational or otherwise valuable content in exchange for a visitor's email address.However you choose to build your pre-launch list, it is imperative that you reach out and personally contact each and every subscriber. Strike up a conversation over email and try to schedule a phone call.
Now your job is to conduct in-depth interviews to get an even clearer understanding of customer's pain points, values and how your product might benefit them. Unlike your first round of interviews, in which you reached out to potential target customers, you’re now having conversations with customers who expressed interest in what you’re doing. That makes this stage of customer feedback even more valuable.
A smart way to build an audience, both before and after your launch, is to put out a lot of valuable content. Start blogging, put out YouTube videos, send email newsletters or give away a free ebook.Your goal as you produce and release content should be twofold: It's a great way to build your list and drive traffic to your website, but more importantly, it's another vehicle for soliciting feedback.
Include a call-to-action at the end of your blog articles, or at the end of your email newsletter, asking readers to respond with questions and comments. Monitor which articles are being shared and talked about the most.Gathering feedback on your content is a great way to learn what the most common questions, challenges and goals of your audience are. You can use this feedback to create and release even more valuable content. You can also use it to inform your copywriting and marketing messages — every bit helps.
Of course, the first feedback you're looking for is whether or not customers are pulling out their wallets and entering their credit card information. If this is not happening (within a reasonable timeframe), you might need to circle back to those conversations you had earlier. Ask for follow-up conversations with those early customers to see how their views might have changed since you launched.
Are you offering a free trial period? Use a tool like Intercom.io to monitor activity in your app and see which areas might be causing friction for customers. Reach out to those trial users to help with the onboarding process. Beyond helping them use your app, ask them questions, including.
Use this feedback to help you improve your sales funnel. Promote the benefits — as described by your customers — on your marketing website. Smooth out the onboarding process, based on what you learned by helping trial users. Make the necessary tweaks to overcome the biggest objections users have to upgrading.
Your cancellation form is one place where you should always gather feedback. Customer cancellations are a fact of life for every startup. No founder likes seeing customers leave, but cancellations present a valuable opportunity to learn what is causing dissatisfaction with your product. Add a required text input where customers must fill in their reason for canceling, and then look for patterns and plug those holes to lower your cancellation rate.
Customer support is another great place to process valuable feedback, and it's why founders should be the ones manning the customer support requests for as long as possible before outsourcing it.
Read the full story at www.ecived.com/en/!
There are several distinct phases of a startup: the idea phase, pre-launch phase, early traction phase and (hopefully) a long period of growth and longevity. Customer feedback plays a central role in all of these.Feedback can and should be gathered in a number of ways. Most feedback will come through direct conversations with your customers in a variety of channels, but you can also gather feedback simply through observation.
It’s important that you don’t rely only on one method, such as email (although email can still be very effective). You’ll find that customers respond differently depending on which phase you’re in; pre-launch beta users tend to be more engaged than casual post-launch trial users. You might also find that some customers prefer email, others prefer chat and some people will give you better feedback over the phone or in person.
You’re probably so excited about this concept that you want to tell a few friends about it, and that’s a good start. See if this concept even remotely makes sense to anyone but yourself, but don’t spend too much time talking to friends. They’ll tend to give you positive feedback just because they’re your friends (even if you ask them to be critical). More importantly, your friends are not necessarily your target customers.
Your next step should be seek out between five and 10 people who you would consider to be your target customers and start some conversations. Don’t be shy. Have an idea to help clothing retail store owners sell more clothes? Walk into a mall and meet a few store owners. Want to build a tool to help programmers optimize their code? Introduce yourself on programming forums and local developer meetups.
Your goal at this stage is to identify the pain point, or the problem your product aims to solve. You might have this problem yourself, and that might have led to the idea in the first place, but it's important that you validate the fact that others have this same problem, or some variation of it.
Once you've validated the pain point with target customers, it's time to dig deeper. You need customer feedback to validate the concept of your product, and whether or not it's something worth customers' money.
At this stage, you should have some kind of landing page on your website to collect email addresses. There are a variety of ways to go about this: Some startups have a simple "coming soon" page, while others offer educational or otherwise valuable content in exchange for a visitor's email address.However you choose to build your pre-launch list, it is imperative that you reach out and personally contact each and every subscriber. Strike up a conversation over email and try to schedule a phone call.
Now your job is to conduct in-depth interviews to get an even clearer understanding of customer's pain points, values and how your product might benefit them. Unlike your first round of interviews, in which you reached out to potential target customers, you’re now having conversations with customers who expressed interest in what you’re doing. That makes this stage of customer feedback even more valuable.
A smart way to build an audience, both before and after your launch, is to put out a lot of valuable content. Start blogging, put out YouTube videos, send email newsletters or give away a free ebook.Your goal as you produce and release content should be twofold: It's a great way to build your list and drive traffic to your website, but more importantly, it's another vehicle for soliciting feedback.
Include a call-to-action at the end of your blog articles, or at the end of your email newsletter, asking readers to respond with questions and comments. Monitor which articles are being shared and talked about the most.Gathering feedback on your content is a great way to learn what the most common questions, challenges and goals of your audience are. You can use this feedback to create and release even more valuable content. You can also use it to inform your copywriting and marketing messages — every bit helps.
Of course, the first feedback you're looking for is whether or not customers are pulling out their wallets and entering their credit card information. If this is not happening (within a reasonable timeframe), you might need to circle back to those conversations you had earlier. Ask for follow-up conversations with those early customers to see how their views might have changed since you launched.
Are you offering a free trial period? Use a tool like Intercom.io to monitor activity in your app and see which areas might be causing friction for customers. Reach out to those trial users to help with the onboarding process. Beyond helping them use your app, ask them questions, including.
Use this feedback to help you improve your sales funnel. Promote the benefits — as described by your customers — on your marketing website. Smooth out the onboarding process, based on what you learned by helping trial users. Make the necessary tweaks to overcome the biggest objections users have to upgrading.
Your cancellation form is one place where you should always gather feedback. Customer cancellations are a fact of life for every startup. No founder likes seeing customers leave, but cancellations present a valuable opportunity to learn what is causing dissatisfaction with your product. Add a required text input where customers must fill in their reason for canceling, and then look for patterns and plug those holes to lower your cancellation rate.
Customer support is another great place to process valuable feedback, and it's why founders should be the ones manning the customer support requests for as long as possible before outsourcing it.
Read the full story at www.ecived.com/en/!
How to Solicit the Customer Feedback Your Startup Needs
What is the fuel that propels a startup from idea to launch to a sustainable success? Is it a killer idea? Funding? Revenue? Attracting the best talent? A visionary leader?The correct answer is customer feedback — lots and lots of customer feedback that you, as the founder of your startup, can leverage in order to develop a great product for which users will go crazy.
There are several distinct phases of a startup: the idea phase, pre-launch phase, early traction phase and (hopefully) a long period of growth and longevity. Customer feedback plays a central role in all of these.Feedback can and should be gathered in a number of ways. Most feedback will come through direct conversations with your customers in a variety of channels, but you can also gather feedback simply through observation.
It’s important that you don’t rely only on one method, such as email (although email can still be very effective). You’ll find that customers respond differently depending on which phase you’re in; pre-launch beta users tend to be more engaged than casual post-launch trial users. You might also find that some customers prefer email, others prefer chat and some people will give you better feedback over the phone or in person.
You’re probably so excited about this concept that you want to tell a few friends about it, and that’s a good start. See if this concept even remotely makes sense to anyone but yourself, but don’t spend too much time talking to friends. They’ll tend to give you positive feedback just because they’re your friends (even if you ask them to be critical). More importantly, your friends are not necessarily your target customers.
Your next step should be seek out between five and 10 people who you would consider to be your target customers and start some conversations. Don’t be shy. Have an idea to help clothing retail store owners sell more clothes? Walk into a mall and meet a few store owners. Want to build a tool to help programmers optimize their code? Introduce yourself on programming forums and local developer meetups.
Your goal at this stage is to identify the pain point, or the problem your product aims to solve. You might have this problem yourself, and that might have led to the idea in the first place, but it's important that you validate the fact that others have this same problem, or some variation of it.
Once you've validated the pain point with target customers, it's time to dig deeper. You need customer feedback to validate the concept of your product, and whether or not it's something worth customers' money.
At this stage, you should have some kind of landing page on your website to collect email addresses. There are a variety of ways to go about this: Some startups have a simple "coming soon" page, while others offer educational or otherwise valuable content in exchange for a visitor's email address.However you choose to build your pre-launch list, it is imperative that you reach out and personally contact each and every subscriber. Strike up a conversation over email and try to schedule a phone call.
Now your job is to conduct in-depth interviews to get an even clearer understanding of customer's pain points, values and how your product might benefit them. Unlike your first round of interviews, in which you reached out to potential target customers, you’re now having conversations with customers who expressed interest in what you’re doing. That makes this stage of customer feedback even more valuable.
A smart way to build an audience, both before and after your launch, is to put out a lot of valuable content. Start blogging, put out YouTube videos, send email newsletters or give away a free ebook.Your goal as you produce and release content should be twofold: It's a great way to build your list and drive traffic to your website, but more importantly, it's another vehicle for soliciting feedback.
Include a call-to-action at the end of your blog articles, or at the end of your email newsletter, asking readers to respond with questions and comments. Monitor which articles are being shared and talked about the most.Gathering feedback on your content is a great way to learn what the most common questions, challenges and goals of your audience are. You can use this feedback to create and release even more valuable content. You can also use it to inform your copywriting and marketing messages — every bit helps.
Of course, the first feedback you're looking for is whether or not customers are pulling out their wallets and entering their credit card information. If this is not happening (within a reasonable timeframe), you might need to circle back to those conversations you had earlier. Ask for follow-up conversations with those early customers to see how their views might have changed since you launched.
Are you offering a free trial period? Use a tool like Intercom.io to monitor activity in your app and see which areas might be causing friction for customers. Reach out to those trial users to help with the onboarding process. Beyond helping them use your app, ask them questions, including.
Use this feedback to help you improve your sales funnel. Promote the benefits — as described by your customers — on your marketing website. Smooth out the onboarding process, based on what you learned by helping trial users. Make the necessary tweaks to overcome the biggest objections users have to upgrading.
Your cancellation form is one place where you should always gather feedback. Customer cancellations are a fact of life for every startup. No founder likes seeing customers leave, but cancellations present a valuable opportunity to learn what is causing dissatisfaction with your product. Add a required text input where customers must fill in their reason for canceling, and then look for patterns and plug those holes to lower your cancellation rate.
Customer support is another great place to process valuable feedback, and it's why founders should be the ones manning the customer support requests for as long as possible before outsourcing it.
Read the full story at www.ecived.com/en/!
There are several distinct phases of a startup: the idea phase, pre-launch phase, early traction phase and (hopefully) a long period of growth and longevity. Customer feedback plays a central role in all of these.Feedback can and should be gathered in a number of ways. Most feedback will come through direct conversations with your customers in a variety of channels, but you can also gather feedback simply through observation.
It’s important that you don’t rely only on one method, such as email (although email can still be very effective). You’ll find that customers respond differently depending on which phase you’re in; pre-launch beta users tend to be more engaged than casual post-launch trial users. You might also find that some customers prefer email, others prefer chat and some people will give you better feedback over the phone or in person.
You’re probably so excited about this concept that you want to tell a few friends about it, and that’s a good start. See if this concept even remotely makes sense to anyone but yourself, but don’t spend too much time talking to friends. They’ll tend to give you positive feedback just because they’re your friends (even if you ask them to be critical). More importantly, your friends are not necessarily your target customers.
Your next step should be seek out between five and 10 people who you would consider to be your target customers and start some conversations. Don’t be shy. Have an idea to help clothing retail store owners sell more clothes? Walk into a mall and meet a few store owners. Want to build a tool to help programmers optimize their code? Introduce yourself on programming forums and local developer meetups.
Your goal at this stage is to identify the pain point, or the problem your product aims to solve. You might have this problem yourself, and that might have led to the idea in the first place, but it's important that you validate the fact that others have this same problem, or some variation of it.
Once you've validated the pain point with target customers, it's time to dig deeper. You need customer feedback to validate the concept of your product, and whether or not it's something worth customers' money.
At this stage, you should have some kind of landing page on your website to collect email addresses. There are a variety of ways to go about this: Some startups have a simple "coming soon" page, while others offer educational or otherwise valuable content in exchange for a visitor's email address.However you choose to build your pre-launch list, it is imperative that you reach out and personally contact each and every subscriber. Strike up a conversation over email and try to schedule a phone call.
Now your job is to conduct in-depth interviews to get an even clearer understanding of customer's pain points, values and how your product might benefit them. Unlike your first round of interviews, in which you reached out to potential target customers, you’re now having conversations with customers who expressed interest in what you’re doing. That makes this stage of customer feedback even more valuable.
A smart way to build an audience, both before and after your launch, is to put out a lot of valuable content. Start blogging, put out YouTube videos, send email newsletters or give away a free ebook.Your goal as you produce and release content should be twofold: It's a great way to build your list and drive traffic to your website, but more importantly, it's another vehicle for soliciting feedback.
Include a call-to-action at the end of your blog articles, or at the end of your email newsletter, asking readers to respond with questions and comments. Monitor which articles are being shared and talked about the most.Gathering feedback on your content is a great way to learn what the most common questions, challenges and goals of your audience are. You can use this feedback to create and release even more valuable content. You can also use it to inform your copywriting and marketing messages — every bit helps.
Of course, the first feedback you're looking for is whether or not customers are pulling out their wallets and entering their credit card information. If this is not happening (within a reasonable timeframe), you might need to circle back to those conversations you had earlier. Ask for follow-up conversations with those early customers to see how their views might have changed since you launched.
Are you offering a free trial period? Use a tool like Intercom.io to monitor activity in your app and see which areas might be causing friction for customers. Reach out to those trial users to help with the onboarding process. Beyond helping them use your app, ask them questions, including.
Use this feedback to help you improve your sales funnel. Promote the benefits — as described by your customers — on your marketing website. Smooth out the onboarding process, based on what you learned by helping trial users. Make the necessary tweaks to overcome the biggest objections users have to upgrading.
Your cancellation form is one place where you should always gather feedback. Customer cancellations are a fact of life for every startup. No founder likes seeing customers leave, but cancellations present a valuable opportunity to learn what is causing dissatisfaction with your product. Add a required text input where customers must fill in their reason for canceling, and then look for patterns and plug those holes to lower your cancellation rate.
Customer support is another great place to process valuable feedback, and it's why founders should be the ones manning the customer support requests for as long as possible before outsourcing it.
Read the full story at www.ecived.com/en/!
2013年6月25日星期二
Austria cleaning industry makes real progress
In the Austrian cleaning sector there are currently 8,100 companies, employing a total of 52,000 people. The proportion of female employees is high, at 85 per cent and there is a distinct preference for workers who are over 45. Otherwise, employees range from 15 to 65. Manual workers account for 90 per cent of sector employees, with clerical staff making up the remaining 10 per cent.
The industry in Austria is still enjoying growth, despite the economic difficulties facing most European countries. In 2005 against 2000 it was 66 per cent; in 2008 against 2005, 75 per cent; and 2013 against 2008, 50 per cent. Contracts are often outsourced to third parties in the field of house cleaning and maintenance services. Where memorial, fa?ade and external building cleaning are concerned, however, outsourcing occurs only in the case of specialist cleaning. The greatest opportunities for growth are considered to be in the health and care sectors.
There are three large companies in the contract cleaning market - ISS Facility Services, Simacek and Dussmann-Service. Together they account for around 30 per cent of market share.
The largest challenge facing cleaning companies currently is finding motivated workers – there is a significant skills shortage in the sector. To counteract this there has been massive expansion of training schemes in recent years, and there is now a recognised standard for cleaning
training schemes. Another positive development has been the Austria-wide standardisation of requirements for final apprenticeship examination and master craftsman’s diploma.
This issues of sick leave, maternity rights and parental leave are also very challenging ones for employers. However relations between cleaning workers and their employers are generally very good because of the opportunities for staff from a migrant background to engage in German courses of more than four hours.
A new collective framework agreement was also finalised this year after more than 20 years of negotiation, and that includes much improved regulations covering the whole of real time Location system.
Despite the significant progress made by the industry in recent years, cleaning is still in principle a necessary evil in the eyes of many clients – its image and profile are still a long way from where they should be. There is much room for improvement in terms of results-oriented cleaning and also daytime cleaning.
Clients do have a very positive attitude towards paying a fair price for the services they receive when all the staff are properly trained. But there is still a great tendency to opt for the lowest tender both in the public and private sectors.
Initiatives by the industry association and cleaning companies have resulted in a number of successful public relations and advertising campaigns in the mission to improve the image of cleaning. Still the regulatory environment presents real obstacles, along with the issue of company taxation. Companies are also now expected to react proactively to the increasing awareness of environmental issues – the ‘greening’ of the industry.
The cleaning business can also not escape the fact that both public and private clients are being forced to economise, in which case it is not always possible to provide the best service. In these cases, the service has to be adapted accordingly.
When people in the Midtown neighborhood look to the east, they see the oceanfront being resurrected with new rides, Joe's Crab Shack and major condo hotel projects.When they gaze west, they see International Speedway Corp. positioning for a massive reinvention of the track's frontstretch grandstands and hundreds of surrounding acres.When residents in the city's center focus on their own streets, they have a few new signs of hope to grab onto, also.
There's the state-of-the art Midtown Cultural and Education Center that opened a year ago. A new cafe and ice cream shop have sprouted on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, and a historic bar on that street has just started a new life as a renovated church.
Within the next few months, Daytona Toyota will start building its new $4.5 million body shop and used car center on a vacant car dealership site at the bustling corner of International Speedway Boulevard and Nova Road. Just behind that Toyota development, the first building in a new affordable housing complex on Keech Street is under construction.
Rodney Peters is with Because We Care, a company that has been providing in-home private duty home care to the senior community since April 2004. Their services include personal and companion care. Because We Care meets the client’s needs with the right caregiver so that the family’s loved one can remain at home for as long as possible. According to Peters, "Our caregivers assist a family member with the activities of daily living such as bathing, dressing, transferring, feeding, grooming and toileting." They also prepare meals, provide light housekeeping, medication reminders and run errands.
Ana Marie Roesch is with George & Schwartz, an Atlanta-based contracting company that provides many services in demand by the commericial and property management industry as well as single family homes. Explained Roesch, "We have a Commercial Division that is highly skilled in the pressure cleaning of parking decks, garages and high rise office buildings and industrial buildings." Additionally they have a full service Residential Division that caters to apartment communities, condominium associations and subdivisions.
The industry in Austria is still enjoying growth, despite the economic difficulties facing most European countries. In 2005 against 2000 it was 66 per cent; in 2008 against 2005, 75 per cent; and 2013 against 2008, 50 per cent. Contracts are often outsourced to third parties in the field of house cleaning and maintenance services. Where memorial, fa?ade and external building cleaning are concerned, however, outsourcing occurs only in the case of specialist cleaning. The greatest opportunities for growth are considered to be in the health and care sectors.
There are three large companies in the contract cleaning market - ISS Facility Services, Simacek and Dussmann-Service. Together they account for around 30 per cent of market share.
The largest challenge facing cleaning companies currently is finding motivated workers – there is a significant skills shortage in the sector. To counteract this there has been massive expansion of training schemes in recent years, and there is now a recognised standard for cleaning
training schemes. Another positive development has been the Austria-wide standardisation of requirements for final apprenticeship examination and master craftsman’s diploma.
This issues of sick leave, maternity rights and parental leave are also very challenging ones for employers. However relations between cleaning workers and their employers are generally very good because of the opportunities for staff from a migrant background to engage in German courses of more than four hours.
A new collective framework agreement was also finalised this year after more than 20 years of negotiation, and that includes much improved regulations covering the whole of real time Location system.
Despite the significant progress made by the industry in recent years, cleaning is still in principle a necessary evil in the eyes of many clients – its image and profile are still a long way from where they should be. There is much room for improvement in terms of results-oriented cleaning and also daytime cleaning.
Clients do have a very positive attitude towards paying a fair price for the services they receive when all the staff are properly trained. But there is still a great tendency to opt for the lowest tender both in the public and private sectors.
Initiatives by the industry association and cleaning companies have resulted in a number of successful public relations and advertising campaigns in the mission to improve the image of cleaning. Still the regulatory environment presents real obstacles, along with the issue of company taxation. Companies are also now expected to react proactively to the increasing awareness of environmental issues – the ‘greening’ of the industry.
The cleaning business can also not escape the fact that both public and private clients are being forced to economise, in which case it is not always possible to provide the best service. In these cases, the service has to be adapted accordingly.
When people in the Midtown neighborhood look to the east, they see the oceanfront being resurrected with new rides, Joe's Crab Shack and major condo hotel projects.When they gaze west, they see International Speedway Corp. positioning for a massive reinvention of the track's frontstretch grandstands and hundreds of surrounding acres.When residents in the city's center focus on their own streets, they have a few new signs of hope to grab onto, also.
There's the state-of-the art Midtown Cultural and Education Center that opened a year ago. A new cafe and ice cream shop have sprouted on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, and a historic bar on that street has just started a new life as a renovated church.
Within the next few months, Daytona Toyota will start building its new $4.5 million body shop and used car center on a vacant car dealership site at the bustling corner of International Speedway Boulevard and Nova Road. Just behind that Toyota development, the first building in a new affordable housing complex on Keech Street is under construction.
Rodney Peters is with Because We Care, a company that has been providing in-home private duty home care to the senior community since April 2004. Their services include personal and companion care. Because We Care meets the client’s needs with the right caregiver so that the family’s loved one can remain at home for as long as possible. According to Peters, "Our caregivers assist a family member with the activities of daily living such as bathing, dressing, transferring, feeding, grooming and toileting." They also prepare meals, provide light housekeeping, medication reminders and run errands.
Ana Marie Roesch is with George & Schwartz, an Atlanta-based contracting company that provides many services in demand by the commericial and property management industry as well as single family homes. Explained Roesch, "We have a Commercial Division that is highly skilled in the pressure cleaning of parking decks, garages and high rise office buildings and industrial buildings." Additionally they have a full service Residential Division that caters to apartment communities, condominium associations and subdivisions.
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