Birthday Automation

One of the simplest automated emails that any company can send out is a birthday (or anniversary) email. ING Direct embeds a nicely simple video ("What Matters Most", 189k YouTube views) in its birthday email sent to customers.

Sprint sprints ahead

This week I've been researching the US telecom market and had been looking into the merger between Deutsche Telekom (T-Mobile's parent company) and MetroPCS. While I was comparing stock performance of top telecom providers, I noticed something unusual... what is Sprint doing that the others are not. The attached chart is just a YTD look at stock price. It compares Deutsche Telecom, Sprint, Verizon, and AT&T. I think it's just a math thing, for Sprint's stock performance; which today trades for $5.47/sh while Deutsche Telekom trades at $10.61/sh, Verizon at $42.82/sh, and AT&T at $33.68/sh respectively.

And then, between Deutsche Telekom and MetroPCS:

This chart makes me wonder what happened in mid-2011. The drop happened 
on July 22, 2011 at a stock price of $17 and fell to $9.53 by Aug 5, 2011.

Bring Your Own Device Strategy

Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) is an interesting customer acquisition strategy that is currently in use by T-Mobile, whether it is regarding a tablet, a SIM card mobile device, or other portable device such as a next-gen handheld GPS, wifi-enabled A/V, etc. The BYOD concept emerged just a few years ago and is gaining more traction among security software providers, as well as corporate and government work environments. 

By 2016, Gartner predicts that more than 1.6 billion smart mobile devices will be sold, two-thirds of the workforce will own a smartphone, and 40 percent of the workforce will be mobile. Mobile will change applications and how they are delivered.  By the end of the decade, more than 30 billion devices will be permanently connected (to the internet) and 150 billion will be occasionally connected. It will soon cost more not to monitor devices than to monitor them.