Christine

Moore's Law Rescued: Stanford, Toshiba Create Fast Nanotube Chip

Fresh and cool from today's inbox: Electrical engineers from Stanford and Toshiba are the first to use nanotubes to wire a silicon chip that can run at commercial processing speeds of 800 megahertz. (For comparison, the typical iPhone runs at 700 megahertz, while PCs run at 2 to 3 gigahertz.) Some signals going through the integrated circuit reached speeds of 1 Ghz.

While there's still more work to do before creating commercial products, this breakthrough provides a way for Moore's Law of ever-doubling processing power to continue, despite our reaching the physical limits of how thin we can slice a copper conduit. Star Trek, here we come.

More geeky details are available in the Stanford article. If you're really geeky, the research paper was published today in Nano Letters.

Help Us Name Our New Dog!

I wrote to my family today with some surprising news: we have a new dog! (This is surprising because no one knew that we were *looking* for a dog.)

Shannon and I have talked idly about getting a dog for a few years, but thanks to Pedigree's adoption campaign we decided to take it seriously this year. It was important to us to rescue an older dog – any breed, male and neutered, who was a right temperament fit. Based on the shelter/rescue group-standard list of dog personalities, we wanted a dog somewhere between a "teacher's pet" (me) and a "goofball" (Shannon). I'd also read that black dogs/cats were often left unadopted, but we didn't limit ourselves to black dogs.

Yahoo! Live Beta Launches - Get Your Own Video Channel

Yahoo! opened up the beta of Live, its new personal broadcast video service, on Thursday night. I haven't yet run a live test of the Christine channel, but I'm looking forward to trying it out after a day on the Tahoe slopes today. I'm a huge fan of Seesmic's conversational video community, so I'm happy to see that Yahoo! appears to be going for a broadcast approach rather than competing directly. (Essentially, Yahoo! is providing Justin.tv in a box.) Go ahead and get your own name before someone else nabs it.

Top 5 Tips for Hosting a Customer Community

Brian Oberkirch of Small Good Thing moderated a wide-ranging exploration of customer service communities at yesterday's Customer Service is the New Marketing summit. (Flickr photo by dougfl07.) Matt Mullenweg of Automattic  summed up the panel's threads well with a single metaphor: If everyone showed up to your house for a party, would you stay away? Probably not. You'd stay at home, make sure that everyone had a drink, keep weirdos from doing strange things off in the corner, and herd guests into the right room given their numbers and general mood.

How does this simple concept apply to hosting a customer community? Based on the panel discussion, I've brought together these 5 key success factors:

Alex Frankel on How Employees Create Brand

How are brands defined by their internal culture? How are customer-facing employees defining and marketing their company's brand? Alex Frankel, author of Punching In, came to Customer Service is the New Marketing to share his undercover experiences as a corporate culture chameleon.

 

Virgin: 200 Businesses, One Culture and One Brand

As the company lore goes, Virgin started in the 1970's as a student newspaper. As Richard Branson decided to also mail out records, he quickly moved into retail after seeing how easy it was to break 33" LPs in the post. Then? Producing records. And then? The airline business. Today? Communications, money, health, renewables, and charity, with over 200 companies and 48,500 employees. Michael Murphy came to Customer Service is the New Marketing to talk about how to provide the same Virgin customer experience across all of them.

Have You Heard of the Col-Pop?

Received this from Lane Becker today, and it's utterly hilarious...the latest in fast-food technology is a soda cup that also contains an insert with your meal:

Col-Pop: The Future of Fast-Food Technology from Adam Kuban on Vimeo.

Google, Flickr, Rackspace, and Socialtext Agree: Community is Key to Scaling Customer Service

An impressive lineup of mission- and consumer-critical online services discussed scalability today at Customer Service is the New Marketing. Marc Hedlund of Wesabe encouraged these market leaders to trot out their own best practices and practical suggestions for handling success. The conversation boiled down to two recommendations: #1: Get your community involved. #2: Integrate your community's voice into your internal operations.

How The Geek Squad Propagates a Service Culture

The mercurial Robert Stephens is not only a two-time college dropout, he's also the founder of The Geek Squad. Stephens flew out to Customer Service is the New Marketing this week to discuss how his company's culture dictates not just customer service, but the entire customer experience.

Zappos Shares Secrets of 75% Repeat Business

Zappos was started in 1999 when the founder saw that there wasn't anything as easy as Amazon.com for buying shoes. But how did it survive the bubble? And why does it continue to enjoy steady growth? Tony Hsieh, Zappos CEO, shared some company secrets at today's Customer Service is the New Marketing summit.

Leading Brands Demonstrate Best Practices in Customer Service

The emerging top topic for customer service professionals is how technology enables genuine, two-way conversations between companies and customers. Customer Service is the New Marketing (streaming live today) is an important catalyst for this industry-wide conversation.

Company-Customer Pact Needs Your Support

We all need to trust the people with whom we do business. Unfortunately, most of us don’t – and since this is so frustrating, I was happy to work with Get Satisfaction this month to draft a provisional “Company-Customer Pact.” Our intention was to create a simple, usable framework for company-customer interaction. Ideally, one that could be recommended and adopted by consumers and companies alike.

The provisional draft will be publicly announced today at Customer Service is the New Marketing, and has been posted at CCPact.com. We're actively seeking community support, as well as public comments. Support and comments can be voiced right on the wiki pages. Having your voice included would be terrific.

Please do forward this post to folks that you’d like to hear in the conversation, or that you think would be interested in building better company-customer relationships. With time and shared good intentions, we can together change how business is done.