December 2009 - Survey: 46 percent of Consumers Trimmed Grocery Spending in 2009
Consumers may be looking a bit thinner these days — or at least their grocery bags are. According to new research from Digital Research and ThinkVine that was presented in a recent webinar, 46 percent of U.S. consumers have cut back on grocery purchases this year, and 45 percent expect to make additional cutbacks to their overall spending over the next six months.
November 2009 - Reintroduce The Consumer Into The Mix
By Jeffrey D. Mills, VP of Marketing for ThinkVine Corporation. Jeff has held VP/GM, Director and Manager?level positions at Net Perceptions, 3M and most recently at Bluespring Software where he was selected to the U.S. National Board of Directors for the International Association of Microsoft Certified Partners.
October 2009 - Adaptive Brand Marketing
Shift to metrics that predict future outcomes. Brand managers traditionally rely on market
mix and media mix models: history rich tools that require years of data to build and don’t
accommodate new channels or market conditions easily. More flexible modeling techniques
from companies like M-Factor or marketing simulation and planning platforms from
companies like ThinkVine give marketers greater ability to understand how new channels
contribute and how channels work across the media mix to complement each other.
September 2009 - Executive Q&A: Marketing Mix Modeling
Take an inventory of internal core competencies. Decide whether you have the econometric
modeling skills in-house or whether you need to acquire these skills from outside the firm.
Outside firms range from modeling specialists like the Hudson River Group and Marketing
Management Analytics (MMA) to agencies like Epsilon and Merkle and up-and-coming
technology players like M-Factor and ThinkVine. These vendors provide deep analytic and
modeling experience to help you make sense of your channel-specific data, product and brand
portfolio, and campaign timing. Forrester will create a landscape report chronicling the vendors’
capabilities in the near future.
September 2009 - The Curtain Rises—Meet the Recession Generation
Welcome to the new normal. In a recent survey by ThinkVine and Digital Research, we see that shoppers are doing three things: stocking up on sale items, reducing spending on non-essentials, and using more coupons. The channel behavior has also changed. They are shopping more at dollar stores, visiting stores closer to where they buy gas, and shopping more at warehouse club stores. In the research, these changes are happening the most frequently in the categories of snack, cereal, juice drinks, salad dressing, and paper towels. The impact appears to have affected 90% of shoppers, with even more cost cutting is planned in the next six months.
September 2009 - Five Questions for: Damon Ragusa, CEO of Thinkvine
Damon Ragusa, CEO and Founder of ThinkVine, sat down with Contributing Editor Sara Holoubek at ad:tech Chicago last week to discuss the state of marketing mix modeling and why it is important to put the consumer back into the equation.
July 2009 - Study Sheds Light On Grocery Behavior Shifts
A new study offers insights on changing grocery shopping behaviors as a result of the recession, including which food and beverage categories are proving most and least susceptible to brand abandonment and which consumer segments have been most and least affected. Overall, about 40% of grocery shoppers report trading down to store brands since the recession hit, and just 29% say that they prefer name brands even if they cost more than store brands, according to the research from DRI and analytics services provider ThinkVine.
July 2009 - Economic Conditions Create a New Grocery Customer
“The economic downturn has reached all the way to people's stomachs, according to the 2009 Grocery Shopper Insights Study conducted by marketing analysis firm ThinkVine and Digital Research. Grocery store shoppers have changed the way they eat because of financial concerns, and supermarkets need to understand how consumers now approach grocery shopping.
June 2009 - What Happens If You Cut Media Spending?
Predictive Modeling by ThinkVine Indicates One Brand Would Never Close Sales Gap
“In the short term, marketers can get away with cutting media spending without much real harm. But that term is as short as a quarter, and the harm, once it begins, can last long after the media switch gets turned back on. Those are recent findings of ThinkVine, a Cincinnati analytics firm that does predictive media modeling for marketers such as PepsiCo, MillerCoors and Colgate-Palmolive Co. ThinkVine CEO Damon Ragusa said lately he's been getting a lot of inquiries about the potential impact of going dark altogether for a quarter or more. “
June 2009 - Not Sure? Ask Everyone
“One issue for the two companies is how to handle intellectual property (IP) rights. At NineSigma, solvers negotiate their IP rights directly with the seeker. At InnoCentive, solvers sometimes transfer their IP rights when they accept the award money. Melcarek doesn’t have a problem with that. “I would much sooner have the cash in the bank than a piece of paper saying that I own property rights,” he says. “[Then] you have to find somebody that’s in that field to buy the patent from you.” But Parker says she might not want to sign away her IP rights if it kept her from patenting future work in her own field. “I would never want to sign away the rights to something that I am interested in pursuing,” she says.”
June 2009 - Expert Viewpoint: Digital Signage Trends
“AV integrators will play a huge role in the next phase of digital signage expansion. The ability of integrators to understand the elements of a digital signage network and the choices that need to be made will increase their value to customers. With capital deployment costs falling, more organizations will launch digital signage projects. Those who can provide expertise and consultation services will find this portion of their business expanding rapidly. Reports Ken Goldberg, CEO of Real Digital Media, an expert in digital signage, retail technology, operations, and customer management.”
June 2009 - The Shift to SaaS
With respect to how one decides among many vendors, what I have told potential customers time and again is to evaluate architecture first, functionality second, the provider third, and price last, because price is the least likely to be a differentiating factor. The first three factors tell the whole story," said Ken Goldberg, CEO, Real Digital Media.
April 2009 - Packaging & Converting Essentials - New and Profitable Opportunities for the Toner Industry
Dr. Kevin P Andrews and Frank Evan of NineSigma will introduce a new cooperative approach called pre-competitive collaboration and open innovation.
March 2009 - 7th Annual Marketing Conference - Responsibility Unbound: Expanding the Corporation's Role
Featuring Matthew Heim: NineSigma’s Innovation Marketplace
March 2009 - In Hard Times, Freelancers Turn To The Web
Steve King, a partner at Emergent Research, a research and consulting firm in Lafayette, Calif., said he had also seen a rise in competitive sites serving narrower markets, like NineSigma and InnoCentive, tailored to the research and development field,
March 2009 - Open Innovation: A Xerox Case Study
Santokh Badesha, a Xerox fellow and the manager of open innovation for the Xerox Innovation Group, gives the inside story of how the company used NineSigma's open innovation to solve a long-standing problem in its printer business.
March 2009 - Healthcare: Next Frontier for Digital Signage
"Customized" digital signage for waiting and examination rooms/areas. In one new waiting room application, networked digital signage displays show some content in all locations and other content, in select locations. "It’s a customized playlist, essentially," explains Ken Goldberg, CEO, Real Digital Media. "For example, a hospital could show general messages in all of its waiting room areas and then 'insert' more customized messages — say, information about particular doctors — in others." Real Digital Media currently offers a solution called SpotSwap™ expressly for this purpose.
March 2009 - CS Techcast: An Information Technology Podcast for IT Pros
Measuring and Monitoring Real-time Transactions:
Once again, CSTechcast.com brings you another podcast for IT pros. This week we talk to Marc Borbas, Vice President at INETCO, about how the approach to measuring and monitoring real-time applications that often leave your sphere of control.
February 2009 - Real Digital Media introduces NEOCAST media player K-series
"The NEOCAST Media Player K-Series represents Real Digital Media’s continued efforts to provide network operators with the most stable, flexible and cost effective tools for building digital signage networks," said Michael Baron, president of Real Digital Media. "Combined with the NEOCAST Media Server management application and industry-unique functions such as On-Demand and SpotSwap, network operators have access to the most advanced features supporting networked digital signage.”
February 2009 - Open Innovation: Outside Help
According to Paul Stiros, CEO of NineSigma, the organization’s clients fall into two categories—technology buyers called innovation managers and technology suppliers called solution providers. Small businesses are often solution providers.
Januray 2009 - In Search of Innovation: More Companies Want Your Inventions
Using NineSigma, one of the growing number of online innovation brokers that match companies with inventors large and small, Xerox found what it was looking for in an unlikely place: the Michigan Molecular Institute in Midland, Mich.
January 2009 - Virgin Megastore Takes a Unique Look at the Customer Experience
To solve the transaction anomalies and ultimately avoid the long lines that form as a result of such slowdowns, in April 2008 Virgin deployed as solution from INETCO to monitor in real time the deviations in transactions like slowdowns or multiple card swipes.
This visualization isolates the root cause of network issues, expediting the time to repair, which Fort says affects the customer experience. "We can point to when we had a problem at the register because people dump the product," says Robert Fort, vice president of information technology and CIO at Virgin Entertainment Group. One employee once saw a customer walk away from a $500 purchase when the registers slowed down and lines got long.
January 2009 - Manage the Health of Your SOA with Transaction Monitoring
SOA Security: Manage the Health of Your SOA with Transaction Monitoring
By Stacy Gorkoff, Director of Strategic Marketing, INETCO
Supporting Your business case for SOA through transaction management:
Transaction management technologies can greatly improve the business value of your SOA environment by providing the visibility and information management capabilities that IT and operations teams need to proactively manage a whole new level of infrastructure complexity, end-to-end. Companies now have a way to guarantee the interoperability of SOA environments to help ensure that bottom-line profitability is sustained through greater agility, reduced infrastructure cost, and streamlined operational efficiency. The business benefits you will derive from your SOA environment are directly tied to your ability to properly manage the execution and delivery of the services themselves.
January 2009 - CRM Shopping Takes Preparation, Diligence
"You have to know exactly what you want to do with a CRM", said Julia Peter-Kerr, founder of Quotients Investments. "A lot of vendors say it is easy, and then when you realize the steps it takes to do the things you want to do, it is much more cumbersome than you would like." Quotient, which launced in late 2007, signed on to CRM provider Satuit Technologies when it opened its doors.
January 2009 - The Value of Open Innovation: NineSigma's Frank Evan on innovation ROI
NineSigma's Frank Evan helps big companies tap independent inventors, university researchers, and others outside their R&D departments. Evan talks about open innovation, how to know if it's working, and why you shouldn't just slash your innovation budget.
December 2008 - Aiding Overseas Business
As a successful network for connecting market needs to technology solutions, the Enterprise Europe Network is a merger of two successful, long-running networks: the Innovation Relay Centers and the European Information Centers. NineSigma, the leading provider of open innovation solutions for Global 1000 companies, will connect clients to more than 1 million members of the Enterprise Europe Network representing business, academia, and government.
November 2008 - Client-relationship management more important than ever
Multi-user access can be important if more than one person is dealing with a client, agrees Karen Maguire, CEO of Norwell, Mass.-based Satuit Technologies Inc.,which specifically targets financial services with its product.
“If your organization has made mistakes with clients and you’re not talking to clients daily,” Maguire says, “there may be conversations that you don’t know about that might affect this relationship.”
Regulation support is a big part of these packages when used in the financial services sector.
“You need to document every touch point with your client,” Maguire says. “If you send him or her any information, if you’ve had any conversation or send an e-mail — it all needs to be documented. If you are investigated, you need to show what you’ve done.”
The Satuit product tracks all conversations with your clients.
October 2008 - Evercore rolls out Satuit CRM
New York-based Evercore Asset undefinedManagement (EAM) has selected Satuit Technologies to satisfy its current and future sales and relationship management needs. EAM was seeking a Client Relationship Management (CRM) solution that was both robust and scalable.
October 2008 - Choosing Fit Over Fat
Increasing the nutrient density of foods and beverages often requires overcoming technical challenges. “We are seeing lots of encapsulation-related projects,” says Kevin Stark Sr., “engagement manager” at NineSigma Inc. an independent product development and consulting company based in Cleveland. “The issues of course are helping to improve the stability of ingredients, like probiotics (for yogurt), omega-3s, and vitamins, etc., to mask their taste and to target bioavailability, for example to the intestines. Additionally, there is lots of interest in reduced sodium, sugar and fat. One of the challenges, for example, is removal of fat from a chocolate system that would still have the right viscosity and performance, and also still retain the desired organoleptic qualities.”
September 2008 - Superfood or Monstor From the Deep
“People want their food to have the same organoleptic qualities, not be gritty or taste different or feel weird,” said Kevin Stark, head of the food technology division of NineSigma, a research company that helps put clients like General Mills and Procter & Gamble in touch with scientists and technologists around the world.
Institutional Investor Magazine
September 2008 - The Online Finance 40
Satuit Technologies, Inc.’s CEO, Karen Maguire, was recognized by iiMagazine as one of the leading innovators’ in Technology for the Financial Service Industry.
August 2008 - Functional Food Group Joins Innovation Network
The Functional Foods Center at D&A Inc, has signed up to NineSigma’s Innovation Alliance Program, which now has more than one million members, boasts of being the largest global network of scientists and technologists, representing a variety of countries, disciplines and industries.
FFC, a research and development center in Richardson, Texas, is joined by two other new recruits; The Center for Food Innovation at Penn State University, a cooperative research venture between the food industry and academia, and the Food Technology Center at the Ministry of Trade & Industry in Egypt.
October 2007 – Satuit Adds Training Programs to Expand Asset Manager CRM Best Practices
“As the Project Manager primarily responsible for implementing SatuitCRM in our firm, my objectives in attending this course were to gain a more in-depth understanding of the features of SatuitCRM and to get a perspective on how to present those features to my users,” said Deb Bailey, business systems analyst for Gresham Partners in Chicago. “The class did a great job of meeting both of these expectations. Beyond enhancing our current way of using SatuitCRM, the all-encompassing scope of the course gave me an opportunity to become familiar with aspects of SatuitCRM that we currently don’t use, but may in the future. I am very happy to have attended the session.”
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September 2007 – Introducing the Inc. 5000
“We've expanded our list of the nation's fastest-growing private companies, to create the first-ever Inc. 5,000.
Out of the 5,000 companies on the list, Satuit is one of only:
* 276 software companies
· * 198 companies from Massachusetts, and
· * 18 software companies from Massachusetts.
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August 2007 - Cautious Managers Warm to Software as Service
“Karen Maguire, CEO of Satuit Technologies, which builds CRM systems tailored to institutional managers, says SaaS is a no-brainer for business professionals. “The industry is becoming increasingly comfortable with this,” she says. “And for a smaller institutional asset manager, they now have access to disaster recovery and backup facilities that would be out of reach within their budget.”
Maguire says Satuit has often been a first-step for firms into SaaS, although several CRM vendors now offer products hosted on the Web. When the firm first moved to a Internet-based model in early 2003, 60% of new clients still opted for the on-premise installation of the CRM software. “Last year, of the new clients, I think one was on-premise, and 25 were software as a service,” she says. Satuit’s clients include Oppenheimer and Dwight Asset Management.”
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August 2007 - Satuit Introduces Conference Attendees to CRM 10.6
“Satuit, a vendor of sales force automation (SFA) and client relationship management (CRM) products for the professional investment market, introduced attendees at its latest client conference to SatuitCRM version 10.6, as well as to new partnerships with Akamai Technologies and Pyxis Mobile. More than 60 asset managers as well as two pension consulting firms participated in this year's conference.”
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June 2007 - Managers Wrestle With Evolving CRMs
“Norwell, Mass.-based Satuit reported 228% three-year revenue growth in February, with 60% of its
more than 100 clients serving the institutional market. “I would say that our bread-and-butter is really
the institutional asset management space,” says Njal Larson, senior v.p. of product strategy. Satuit’s
clients range from managers with $3 billion in assets under management to over $200 billion,
including Oppenheimer and Dwight Asset Management.
Historically, institutional managers have struggled with products designed for retail managers, says
Larson. “Institutional investment managers really need much more depth, rather than breadth, of
information,” he says. Rather than 1,000 relationships per managers, institutional managers deal witha much tighter net of clients and prospects with a much longer sales cycle.”
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May 2007 – Akamai Gains Traction with Web App Acceleration Service
“The service overall is working out extremely well for us," said Njal Larson, senior vice president of product strategy for Satuit Technologies, a Norwell, Mass., Software-as-as-Service company offering Customer Relationship Management and sales force automation. Satuit has "seen a drop off in calls to its call center about performance issues. We've also seen performance improvements on the server side. We've offloaded 65 percent of traffic from our origin servers," said Larson.”
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April 2007 - Satuit Technologies Hires Financial Services Veteran to Head Strategic Relations
“Gillette comes to Satuit from Wellington Management Company's Information Services Division, where he served as a systems manager supporting the information technology needs of the Institutional Relationship Management, Marketing, and Business Development teams in 3 U.S. offices and 5 global offices. Prior to Wellington Management Company, Gillette's experience included management roles with Putnam Investments, Bankers Trust, Chase Manhattan Bank, Security Pacific National Bank, and State Street Bank.“
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April 2007 - G&M Oil Implementing Video at the Pump Program
Chevron approves PumpMedia to power digital signage
"PumpMedia's Pump Top Media system combines proven and reliable components including Real Digital Media's NEOCAST digital signage platform, and Avocent's Emerge MPX1000 HD multipoint extender solution."
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March 2007 - Nucleus Research Reports on SatuitCRM
“According to the results of independent research conducted by Nucleus Research , Satuit Technologies "differentiates itself by its deep vertical process knowledge and fixed-cost implementations." Satuit offers a SaaS (software as a service) solution bundled with industry best practices in its out-of-the box configurations. Clients can implement Satuit's custom software solution in as little as 2 weeks.”
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March 2007 - Ready, Set, Launch!
"Alternatively, partners can use SharePoint tools from the likes of Bluespring Software Inc., itself a Gold Certified Partner in Cincinnati. The ISV makes tools that automatically implement business process management applications in SharePoint; in fact, Bluespring was featured in the Office 2007 press kit. "We run into partners all the time who, when they look at our technology, say they've been hard-coding processes around MOSS and creating from scratch all the activities associated with it," says Jeffrey Mills, the company's vice president of channel development and partner enrichment. "Our product comes out of the box pre-integrated with virtually everything customers would ever ask you to do."
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March 2007 - Oppenheimer unit live on Satuit CRM platform
"OIM opted for the product after vetting six third-party CRM offerings, finding the Satuit system to have a better fit out-of-the-box with requirements specific to asset managers, as well as more comprehensive reporting functionality and easier implementation requirements."
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March 2007 - Signage that Sells
Though executives at The UPS Store in Canada are just beginning to tabulate results of a digital signage rollout, they already know it has been a success. “The stores that have installed the signs all appear to be extremely happy with the installation,” says Malcolm Houser, executive vice president and COO. One particular franchise owner, he says, was able to upsell a regular customer who viewed a digital promotion for business cards. The customer had come to the store just to pick up a print order and purchased a full set of business cards."
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February 2007 - OUTLOOK 2007: The Sky Isn't Falling
"Quality assurance is also important when it comes to ensuring deliverability. One of the early adopters in the Outlook 2007 migration is Njal Larson, SVP of product strategy at Satuit Technologies, which offers client relationship management (CRM) and sales force automation (SFA) solutions for investment professionals."
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February 2007 - Bluespring Is Looking For A Few Good Partners
"BPM is hot right now as companies look for ways to overhaul their business processes to make them more efficient and nimble and better align those processes with their IT infrastructures. BPM also is a critical element of risk-management and compliance efforts. And as more businesses implement service-oriented architectures, BPM provides the tools for designing and managing the processes that use Web services.
Cincinnati-based Bluespring is a relatively small fish in a rapidly growing pond, competing against big vendors such as IBM and BEA Systems and smaller companies like Lombardi Software, Pegasystems and Savvion. (But it's a fast-growing fish: Revenue surged 277 percent in the fourth quarter of 2006, although the privately held company doesn't disclose actual sales figures.) Bluespring specializes in providing tools for modeling, managing and tracking "human-centric" business processes--the people-intensive tasks that can't be fully automated."
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February 2007 - PumpMedia unveils new digital signage offering for forecourts
"This first-of-its-kind offering combines Real Digital Media's Neocast digital signage platform and Avocent's Emerge MPX1000 HD multipoint extender solution with PumpMedia's pump top video enclosure, enabling fuel retailers to implement digital signage at the pump through an architecture capable of delivering high impact video and audio content to refueling motorists."
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Janurary 2007 - Bluespring Hopes To Ride SharePoint Coattails to Further Growth
BPM software specialist Bluespring Software this month reported 277 percent revenue growth for the fourth quarter of 2006, and company officials predict a strong 2007 in part from the coattails of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007.
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January 2007 - Oppenheimer Investment Management Selects SatuitCRM
“SatuitCRM” said Tim Daley, Assistant Vice President for has everything we were looking for in a CRM package without any modifications,Oppenheimer Investment Management. “It will also help us concentrate our marketing and sales efforts in areas that make the most sense and deliver the best results,” Daley continued.
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January 2007 - Avocent, PumpMedia, And RDM Ally On Gas-Station System
Real Digital Media (RDM) is to partner with PumpMedia and Avocent to provide digital-signage systems for gas stations. The trio say they are aiming to help petroleum retailers increase sales, improve brand loyalty and benefit from ad revenue.
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