There is no best marketing or best strategy without a good planning

"What is the best car?"
"It depends on who is using it. It depends on what it's being used for. It depends on the budget."
Managers who think that it is enough to deliver good services, beat the competition with low prices without caring for their own good management, organizing their staff’s schedule, managing their clientele, and keeping track of their business, are setting themselves up for destructive competition.
How can they deliver a unique value of services and make their customers happy?
There is just one way: being happy and relaxed as much as they want their customers to be.
They need need to develop a clear strategy around their company's unique place in the market and for doing so they need the help of a good Spa Management Software, that can relieve them of the daily boring duties of operational effectiveness.
A good Appointment Scheduling Software, for example can help a good Spa Manger to deal with all the appointments and tasks of a daily routine, without stress, or fear to forget or not being able to meet all goals.
Even a Hair Salon Management Softwarecan make life easier for a hair dresser, handling all the small details of every customer, helping to make him or her happy, remembering every particular need of every aspect of his service.
There is no best product as there is no best marketing or best strategy.
But there is the need to choose to do what you can and the best you can.

Good companies do well also in bad times

Google (GOOG) defied skeptics—and the economic downturn—with a surprisingly strong showing that sent the stock soaring 20% the next day. More than anything, Google's continued prosperity is a testament to its ability to keep innovating, both in search and advertising operations and in new lines such as online office-productivity software.

Many companies, says Chief Executive Eric Schmidt, can skirt downturns entirely by coming up with innovations that change the game in their industries—or create new ones. (When asked if Google's strategy would change as the economy heads into a likely recession, he replied: "What recession?") In a recent interview in a tiny meeting room next to his Mountain View (Calif.) office, Schmidt told BusinessWeek Silicon Valley Bureau Chief Robert D. Hof how Google manages the tricky process of innovation.

A hot product will sell just as well in a recession as it will in a nonrecession. Let's imagine that we invented a better advertising product for television. What would our revenue growth be for that? Well, you're into a $50 billion market, so it will be driven not by whether there's a television ad recession but by what degree we can get people to substitute [our product] for the other. The strong companies understand this, and during a recession, they invest.

Can other companies emulate Google's famous model of letting engineers spend about 20% of their time on projects outside their main job?

The story of innovation has not changed. It has always been a small team of people who have a new idea, typically not understood by people around them and their executives. [This is] a systematic way of making sure a middle manager does not eliminate that innovation. If you're the employee and I'm the manager, and I sit down and say, "Our product's late, and you screwed up, and you gotta work on this really hard," you can legally say to me, "I will give you everything I've got, 80% of [my time]."

It means the managers can't screw around with the employees beyond some limit. I believe that this innovation escape-valve model is applicable to essentially every business that has technology as a component.

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30 years old, but it doesn't look it

THIS week, the world marks an anniversary that has changed the face — and other anatomical regions — of email inboxes everywhere: the first known spam email was sent 30 years ago on Saturday.
But the message sent on May 3, 1978 by a marketer for the now defunct DEC computer company to around 400 people on the west coast of the United States wasn't called spam, and the sender dispatched it without ill intent.

How things have changed.

Spam got its name from a skit by the television show Monty Python's Flying Circus, in which a group of Vikings in a restaurant that serves all of its food with Spam tinned meat sing a song repeating the word ad nauseum, says Brad Templeton, who has thoroughly researched the subject.

"Thus, the meaning of the term at least: something that keeps repeating and repeating to great annoyance," said Mr Templeton, who was dabbling in the internet in the 1970s — when it was still the US government-run Arpanet.


These days spamming is a sophisticated operation that affects millions and jams ill-prepared email inboxes.

The percentage of spam sent to account holders on Gmail - the email service offered by Google - quadrupled between 2004 and 2008, climbing from 20 percent to around 80 per cent.

"To give you some sense of scale, we have tens of millions of users worldwide," Gmail's Jason Freidenfelds said, adding that only about one per cent of spam gets through Gmail's spam-filtering system, according to user feedback.

Spam methodology has also changed in the past 30 years.

Whereas the sender of the first spam had to type in each recipient's address individually, today the job is often done remotely using cyber-monsters called botnets.

Botnets have hijacked around 30 per cent of personal and office computers with inadequate security features and use them to dispatch thousands of spams each day, Mr Templeton said.

"The recruited computers wait for commands that come through anonymous channels and tell them to send spam email to 1,000 people, all unbeknownst to their owners. The people who do this control millions of computers around the world," Mr Templeton said.

"Don't look to the guy to your left, don't look to the guy to your right. It's you," he said ominously.

Spam content and motives have also evolved since the 1978 message, which was an invitation to a product launch.

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A small business opportunity

Do you want to begin a home based business?
Nothing better than a Franchise.
Of course the best franchise to own is the one in which you are an expert or that you like to do.
Once you decide for it, there is a great website where you can find the best Franchise Opportunity, the one that better suits your needs and your experience.
You can decide for a high Capital franchising, where you can invest something from $500,000 to well over $2,000,000 depending on the type of franchise business you choose.
For example you can decide for a Restaurant or a Hotel franchise, and here you can really choose among the world's largest lodging franchisors.
It's much easier and you can get good revenues much sooner, taking advantage of an already launched brand, enjoying the experience and the marketing skills of the ones who began many years ago.
In this way the road to success is much faster and surer.
And the good thing is that you can select the brand you like and that is tailored on your goals.
If your possibilities are not so big, you can find also a lot of low cost franchises
that can be purchased for less than $100,000.
For example you can find a good selection among child education opportunities, or dry cleaning franchises, vending machine businesses, Cosmetic, Spa, Beauty.
In this case you can comfortably work from home in your spare time and decide how much time you are going to dedicate to your new job.
Or if you still do not have an idea, you can browse among any Franchise Opportunity listed on the website.
You can request information’s and then decide what you want to do.
Well, if you plan to begin a new business it pays to visit this website.

What's the Wireless next step?

If it's wireless, it's trendy.

There's grand talk throughout the tech world about a wave of new networks and wireless innovation that will provide better Internet access, deliver streaming video and foster an array of consumer-friendly features. Although it's too early to be sure which companies or networks will be most successful, the optimists dominate the skeptics.

Moreover, the federal government's recent auction of desirable radio spectrum - significant portions of which were won by AT&T and Verizon Wireless - is considered a major catalyst for improved mobile services.

As constantly proclaimed by industry experts at "The Mobile Future" conference in Santa Clara last week, the wireless industry is supposed to revolutionize our lives. So, just how will that happen?

• Consider the prospect of two-way video on handheld devices. For instance, parents may be able to use cell phones to talk face to face with a son or daughter at college.

• Imagine using your cell phone as a checkbook, said Pradeep Khosla, dean of the College of Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. You would send a secure payment authorization from your phone to someone else's, and the bank would confirm the transaction electronically.

• Think about a cell phone that would download your latest travel information as you entered an airport, said Ted Selker, an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab. It would confirm your boarding pass, alert you to a flight delay and give you a map that shows a Starbucks next to your gate.
• Or think about using the cameras in cell phones to search the Internet, suggested Bob Iannucci, senior vice president and chief technology officer at Nokia. People could snap a picture of the Eiffel Tower and then use the photo as a search prompt to get information. When the photo is recognized, you could receive tips from online guidebooks. Or think in terms of shopping: You could take a photo of shoes in a store window and download product details from the retailer's Web site.

Is there a realistic chance that these ideas, gathered by the Mercury News at the conference and in other interviews, could be deployed over the next several years?

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