The Blog of Hans Eisenman

Customer Satisfaction Survey Questions

Customer satisfaction survey questions are important.  You have to know what your customers want if you want your product or service lines to hit home.  Here's a great tool to convert those surveys to ACTIONable items within your organization.

Idea Management - Innovation Management - Crowdsourcing - Suggestion Box - Customer Feedback.

Enable Customer Engagement

Go beyond customer satisfaction to the next level: customer engagement. Interact with your customer community through an IdeaScale portal that puts your customer on a level playing field instead of second class citizens.

Tiny Fan Blows a Mighty Wind - US News and World Report

Link: Tiny Fan Blows a Mighty Wind - US News and World Report.

Cooling electronics in small devices such as laptop computers, PDAs and cell phones is a growing engineering concern as processors get more miniscule and more powerful. The combination of more power and less space makes it harder to dissipate heat the chips create; moving that heat has become an increasing challenge. Researchers have developed a new micro-fan only slightly larger than a dime. The new fan can generate winds on the same scale as a laptop computer fan, but uses far less energy and should require far less maintenance. Researchers have developed a new micro-fan only slightly larger than a dime. The new fan can generate winds on the same scale as a laptop computer fan, but uses far less energy and should require far less maintenance. (Dan Schlitz and Vishal Singhal, Thorrn Micro Technologies)

Feeeel The Love

My wife and I have sent out over 630 real, greeting cards to people since she joined forces with SendOutCards.com almost one year ago.  We're on our way to 1000 random acts of kindness!

The kicker is: we never even left our desk.  Every physical card was sent from our PC, printed in Utah and mailed for us.  No trips to card stores.  The wonders of on-demand printing at our fingertips, thanks to the web.

Seriously, though, how neat is that?  I absolutely LOVE this service and I regularly recommend it to clients, friends and just about anyone within a 20 foot radius at any given moment.  When was the last time you sent a real card (not talking e-cards here)  to someone? 
Probably the reason you haven't done it lately is it is a pain to do.  First you have to remember to pick one up.  Hopefully that happens when you're wandering the aisles at the grocery store or you happen to be near a Hallmark store or something, which usually when you do think of the person.

If that is when you think of them, though, you then have to fumble through cards which have already been pawed over, hoping to find just the right card.  This can take a while!

If that were how SendOutCards worked, there's no way we would have sent out this many cards.  It takes about 3 minutes (I timed it) to send out a card our way.  This allows me to invest more time toward what I want to say to the card recipient.

I haven't even touched on the responses we have been getting from friends.  These days people are just getting bills in the mail, so when they get a card and maybe a gift (we have included a lot of cookies with our cards for birthdays and so on), it really gets noticed.  This is particularly true if we send a spontaneous, just-because card. 

The optimist in me says this world could stand more of this kind of thing.  People are so consumed by their fast-pasted e-lives these days.   A little admiration goes a long way!

Featured: The Service I Wish Every American Would Use

Do you fret at all about one day waking up old and broke (or YOUNG and broke)?

Are you already broke? 

Mvelopes.com (see above graphic) is by far one of my most favorite-ist web programs right now.  Remember the olden days when you could budget because you came home with cash and put it in envelopes, thereby knowing exactly what you could spend on a given thing?  'MEMBER?

CEO (and manager), Free Thyself!

Let me ask you a question: can you, right now in 10 seconds or less, survey your organization with your own eyes and personally observe how productive your employees are being, regardless of their location?  Can you see in that time, whether you're getting more or less for the payroll you're spending?

Too often the heads of businesses don't know the work isn't getting done until it's too late--until they feel it tightening around their own neck.

How are you ever going to set up your business life so that you can one day step back, whether it's to retire, sell your business or invest yourself in some other activity (family, another business venture, etc.)? 

What if you could install a program across your business that would give you that freedom you seek?

Mvelopes.com: Budgeting The Right Way

Here's a new software discovery I'm very excited about.  Talk about "improving life through technology"!  This is all about that and I hope you'll take a moment to listen to the podcast I just created.  The audio is a little raw because I just whipped it up in about 10 minutes on my Macbook before heading out the door to a Halloween bash with the kids. 

Enjoy and don't forget to leave me some love!  (Comments--or even a tip if you feel that inspired! [see Tip Jar on right side of this blog]).

"Who loves ya, Baby?!" -Kojak

Download mvelope_podcast128kbps.m4a

PS: There's a Mac widget that will do, more or less I think, the same thing as what I describe in this podcast.  I've yet to try it, but I doubt it is as full-featured as Mvelopes.com.

2000 Frame Per Second Camera

This is really slick.  No doubt it will lead to all sorts of never seen before images and sequences.  Imagine some of the things we will be able to see are just too fast for the human eye and heretofore uncapturable by video--like the little gremlins that, in broad daylight,  steal one sock from each of my pairs. 

Seriously though, this is pretty cool.

A method to the iPhone madness?

ZDNET round up on the iPhone hysteria.  Pretty good.

Link: A method to the iPhone madness? | Tech News on ZDNet.

In a rarity for our coverage about Apple, most of the discussion accompanying iPhone stories was not the usual religious flame wars about security and Microsoft's antitrust sins. It was about what people really want in a mobile device. That's because this is about more than Apple. Even if it's a flop--perhaps even more so if it's a flop--the iPhone will change the way mobile devices are designed, whether that's closer to Apple's vision or further away. ...

More iPhone Madness

Here is that other line I mentioned below. Go Mac-ophiles!

iPhone Madness

 

Here I am at our local mall's Apple store thinking I might be able to get in and touch the new iPhone.  Ha!  And this photo you see isn't even the real line.  The rest of them are about 50 yards away, piling up behind a slightly bemused security guard. 

There is so much Geek Energy in the air, it is almost arcing off the overhead fixtures and gawking passersby. 

I don't remember seeing this much technological excitement since the first Star Wars movie release as a young boy!

Still, I think I will sit this early adopter round out and see how the reviews play out.