slamboard

My daughters have ferrets. Exotic pets like these require careful management and proper housing. If they are not managed properly the ferrets aren’t happy and the people aren’t happy. I guess this is probably true of cats and dogs as well, it is just that looking after dogs and cats is so endemic to our culture that we take it for granted.

One of the best non-essentials that I ever bought from a pet store was a slingshot that fired tennis balls. You could fire them incredibly far. I had a Black Lab that was full of energy. I would take him to the beach at low tide and play fetch using the slingshot. the great advantage to this was that you could carry on a conversation with the person that you brought to the beach in between shots.

Online stores like PETsMART are not only a great retail source for supplies, but they allow you to do lots of research into the available products at your leisure. KouponKathy has some valuable petsmart coupons. Whether you use them for essentials or non essentials is up to you. I noticed that one of the deals ends in December. Petsmart is a great source for specialty nutrition for your pet. If you have an overweight pet, you should seriously consider buying a special reduced calorie ration. Careful limit feeding is another option. Some particular breeds of cats and dogs are at increased risk for metabolic diseases. The risks can be reduced with careful nutrition.

KouponKathy also has
petcare rx coupons. Pet Care RX is a site that is focused on veterinary medicines, but they also carry other pet supplies. As with every type of purchase, I would suggest that you shop around for the best deals and take into account any coupns that may be applicable to your desired items.

Oil is the number one commodity in terms of value. People make the argument that a war is being fought largely over the control of this indispensable stuff.

The number two commodity is coffee. Why aren’t wars fought over coffee? I guess it is because possession and control of the land that grows coffee does not provide wealth. In fact, coffee growing regions include some of the poorest places on the planet. In many cases, there may be a small battle of wills when the coffee is taken from the farmers by unscrupulous middlemen. The middlemen are armed with guns, and a little bit of money. The coffee farmer has some beans.

Maybe the economics and the politics of oil would be more like those of coffee if impoverished men, women and children could pick barrels of it out of the jungles and the mountains and carry it out on their backs.

The original oil painting of these bedraggled looking sunflowers cost a Japanese businessman $39,921,750 several years ago. The digital image was public domain, so we can all enjoy it for free.

They say it’s the thought that counts, but I don’t think you would impress anybody by sending them a jpeg of some flowers as an email attachment. People still like to get the real thing.

Proflowers.com has a nice Halloween themed bouquet of flowers for approximately one millionth of the price of that Van Gogh…and the sunflowers are a brighter shade of yellow. The bouquet also features a relative of the eggplant that bears fruit that resemble miniature pumpkins.

To date this site has delivered over 20 million flower bouquets.

This disturbing bit of ‘information’ was left in a comment today. The link was to what appeared from the title to be a Malaysian blogspot splog.

I have managed to increase the traffic on this blog by a factor of ten over the past few months, thanks largely to one very big story. The amount of spam comments that I look at has increased infinitely. Now that the discussion of that particular story has, for the most part, left this particular arena I think I will install Akismet so I don’t have look through all the spam. This very effective spam filter rarely catches real people and I won’t be double checking.

SaaS is a term that may be unfamiliar to many people reading this post. The concept of Software as a Service is a growing trend as developers are seeking business relationships as opposed to just sales.

ProActive Software is one of these software companies. They have some business management tools that are designed to assist a company executive with work flow management. Obviously, stellar customer service in this sector will earn word of mouth business and loyal customers. I was actually surprised to read that that typical response to a request or question is between 15 and 60 minutes. I perform some customer service on a daily basis and I have surprised some customers with 15 minute response. It is not what people expect these days. I manage that about 0.02% of the time. 24-48 hours is what I promise.

The core software products actually had their genesis as in house solutions to workflow management. I think that is cool. It seems like inspiration often comes more freely when you are solving you own problems.

There is nothing like walking out of a shop, satisfied with your purchase, product in hand knowing that you have a face behind the sale.

The Internet in some ways has taken that assurance away from the customer and with the masses of choice only a mouse click away the thought of purchasing a product or service online can be quite daunting.

However, the software as a service (SaaS) industry in New Zealand is fast moving from futuristic idea to current day reality and companies offering SaaS are looking for ways to maintain the personal service which has been a big part of historical software sales.
ProActive Software has found great and personal service to be a key part in their success on the global stage.

CEO Julian Stone says customers have said they’re surprised to get such personal service when dealing with ProActive.

He says “Don’t make sales, build relationships. This is a necessary part of the SaaS business model. Look after your customers as they are the foundation of the business. It’s important to keep customers happy month after month to retain their business.”

Customers of their core product www.proworkflow.com, have told Stone that their dealings with people at other software companies, often based in the US, have been rude, lacked callbacks, with slow email responses, making many customers wary of using SaaS where they had little ability to have personal contact with their supplier.

However, Stone says when customers come across a company with good service, they tell people.

Stone has attributed ProActive’s excellent response time with sales and support enquiries to their customers satisfaction. When customers build their business on our servers and use our code they must know we will be there if something needs attention.

An average enquiry for ProActive, from point of contact, to response is typically 15-60 minutes, where most of ProActive’s customers had said average response times for other software companies was usually measured in days, not minutes or hours.

“If you want to make a sale, sell a good product. If you want to grow a business, sell good service. We’ve found that most referral sales now come in as a result of ProActive Software’s service,” Stone says.

As Stone says “ProActive have built their SaaS company they have always kept service as a top priority, knowing their focus would continually be tested and be drawn onto product development and administration.

ProActive Software knows it is extremely important to keep the level of service constant and high “Customers don’t care that we have ten times as many customer to look after, they don’t care we are on someone else’s problem, they want the high service level maintained - so as we grow we automate, simplify, and when necessary bring in additional resource a bit before it is really needed. It takes a while to build a reputation of not letting down customers, it does not take anywhere near as long to lose it,” Stone Says

I got sidetracked yet again while researching an unrelated topic and I was struck by how defensive and political the language is on WhiteHouse.gov. I have been there before and I seem to remember is being more statesmanlike and less political. Here are a couple of snippets of text that appear on the landing page:

Just the Facts: Top Five Reasons the Democrats’ “New” SCHIP Bill Is Actually More of the Same

Setting The Record Straight: Speaker Pelosi Misleads on SCHIP

House FISA Legislation the Wrong Direction for Our National Security

I guess it makes sense that an embattled administration would use its most relevant internet presence to further it’s goals. I still have to go back to the Wayback and see if the tone and layout was different before 2006…

I was mistaken, I looked at a page from September 1999 and there is one headline that is critical of the GOP…

GOP Tax and Budget Plan Could Force Drastic Cuts in Key Programs

I guess the goals consequent tone of this website is very dependent on the political landscape and also where they are in the election cycle.

…an unrelated item

Looking at the military shopping website LutherSales.com got me thinking about what purchases might be very important to a military family. The first thing that I thought of was a digital camera. Many servicemen leave young families at home and rely on digital media for the documentation and communication of important milestones that they would otherwise miss. I am talking about things like the progress of a pregnancy, a babies first steps, Halloween costumes, Christmas concerts and more. One of my favorite videos on the Internet is a series of still photos and movie clips documenting the lives of a soldier and his wife and child over the course of his first deployment in Iraq. It makes me cry even though I don’t personally know them. I can hardly imagine how affected he must have to see videos of his daughter graduating from primary school. The clips of him reading his child a book over video chat was very special, too.

Luther Sales has a credit program that caters to government employees including military personnel. The business model pre-dates the Internet by a generation. Luther Sales has been offering a wide range of household and personal items at competitive prices since 1967. More importantly, they have payment options that are specifically tailored to the financial situations of military families. ‘No money down’ is an option in many cases.

They also have a program running now where they donate a iPod to a serviceman when you make a purchase totaling $2,000.

I would guess that every multi-national company has someone, somewhere promoting a boycott of their products. There is an individual on a forum that I frequent advocating the boycott of Google. Not because of their dealings with the totalitarian State of China, but rather in response to the punitive nature of their page ranking system on bloggers.

I have an aunt who is an environmentalist from way back before it was cool. When I was visiting her in Toronto as a child in the mid 80s, she was boycotting EXXON. Boycotting huge companies that have a wide range of products can be a personal hardship. My aunt would drive past Exxon stations when she was close to empty and look around for an alternative. In the small community where I grew up, there is no alternative to Exxon.

Kraft is a great case study for boycotts. This is a huge company with almost countless different brand names. There have been boycotts against them for a wide variety of reasons, from their advertising of cigarettes aimed at children to their sponsorship of the Gay Games. If you are a consumer of processed foods, boycotting Kraft is very complicated. Oh, I should say that I think the AFA call for a Kraft Boycott in response to their sponsorship of the Gay Games is deplorable and ridiculous. A search on this subject reveals that criticism of the boycott and support of the Gay Games totally swamped the call for a boycott. Maybe the AFA should call for a boycott of Google for placing GoodAsYou.org higher in the search than the AGAPE Press. Why does the Christian website name sound gayer than the gay one?

One boycott that I support in principle, but probably fall well short of in practice is against the humongous food company Nestlé. The main thrust of this started in 1977 and the company has abandoned SOME egregious policies and practices in SOME regions and spent much money on defensive rebranding in various sectors of its enterprise in the interim. This is a very big issue and I encourage everyone to read about Nestlé.

The problem with boycotts is that the mass market is not as responsive to complicated messages as it is to simplistic advertising. Lobbying governments to impose restrictions on advertising can have a much larger effect. I read that Brazil has an outright ban on advertising of baby formula. One major issue that people have had with Nestlé is its aggressive marketing of formula to poor people who would be much better off breastfeeding. Brazil and other countries have also imposed labeling restrictions on baby formula.

I write for more than one blog and I almost always put my more personal or humorous items in my general blog. I have noticed that lots of A-list bloggers who focus on technology and/or business throw in the occasional whimsical aside. It makes the blog seem more human. I have decided to to this as well. If I run out of other stuff to do tonight, I may come back and edit this post so it includes some kind of business metaphor. Don’t count on it though.

Opportunity only knocks once. If an ‘opportunity’ is knocking incessantly, take a wet rag to the door with you to throw on the flaming bag that it left on your porch.

Sometimes a business opportunity requires some fast funding. EZUnsecured.com can deliver Business Loans in as little as one week. Unsecured means that you do not need to put up collateral. A typical unsecured loan has non-repayment insurance rolled into the fees and/or payments. This website appears to have an easy process and great customer service. It takes money to make money and EZ Unsecured is in the business of getting funds for business ventures quickly.