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At Forrester, we define customer experience as how customers perceive their interactions with your company.

Over the past few years, my colleagues and I have written a lot about the perceptions piece of that definition. Here?s a quick overview: Customers? perceptions occur on three different levels, which we collectively refer to as the customer experience pyramid.? At the base of the pyramid is ?meets needs.? Do customers perceive that you?ve met their basic needs and provided value through the interaction? Then we layer on ?easy.? Do customers perceive that you?re easy to do business with, or that they have to jump through a bunch of hoops? At the top of the pyramid is ?enjoyable.? Do customers perceive that you?re enjoyable to do business with ? that you?re connecting with them on some personal, emotional level?

Now let?s talk about the interactions themselves. Customers interact with your company at all stages of the customer journey: discover, evaluate, buy, access, use, get support, leave, and re-engage. But it?s not enough to know that these interactions exist. If you want to shift your customers? perceptions, you have to examine those interactions on a deeper level. Specifically, you need to look at the types of interactions customers have and the qualities that those interactions embody. And that?s where your business model and your brand come into play.

Your business model determines the types of interactions customers will have. How can your customers interact with you? Can they buy your products and services directly from your mobile app ? or do they need to go to a brick-and-mortar third-party retailer?? Do you have self-service customer support on your website ? or do your customers call an outsourced call center when they need help?? The answers to these questions are deeply rooted in your company?s business model.

For example, Zipcar?s car sharing business model necessitated de-centralized, non-staffed access to vehicles, which in turn drove a need for keycard (and then mobile phone) vehicle entry ? a type of interaction never conceived of with business models based on vehicle ownership or centralized, staffed rental locations. And mobile operator giffgaff built its business model around social platforms and a tiny number of core employees. The result? When customers have questions, they speak to each other ? not to giffgaff.

While the connection between business model and customer experience might be obvious, I don?t find that many companies actively consider the two in tandem.

Brand values drive the qualities of those interactions.? What does your customer experience really feel like? ?Do your sales reps maintain an air of professional distance ? or do they chit chat with your customers about their plans for the upcoming weekend? ?Do you have generic stock photography on your Facebook page ? or custom imagery that evokes a particular emotion? The answers to these questions represent the more intangible attributes of your customer experience, and they?re deeply rooted in your brand. They?re what make any given interaction feel like it really belongs to your company ? and only your company.

For example, if you walk up to a check-in kiosk at an airport and the word ?Howdy!? scrolls across the screen in gigantic letters, you?re likely flying on JetBlue. ?Or walk into any Westin lobby, and you?ll surely be greeted with its signature white tea scent and tasteful floral displays, both of which reinforce the hotel?s calming, sophisticated brand.

Companies that want to differentiate their customer experience need to go beyond find-and-fix efforts that result in incremental improvements. They need to innovate the customer experience by refocusing on their business model and brand.

I’ll be speaking more about innovation, business models, and brand at?Forrester’s Customer Experience Forum East, June 25 & 26 in NYC. Hope to see you there!

Source: http://blogs.forrester.com/kerry_bodine/13-05-17-business_model_and_brand_keys_to_customer_experience_innovation

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The Defense Department has officially given the thumbs up to Apple devices running iOS 6 — paving the way for iPhones and iPads to become standard issue around the Pentagon. The move was hardly shocking. In fact, the Wall Street Journal had it on good authority weeks ago that the DoD was planning to give iOS its seal of approval. With Samsung devices running the Knox security suite and BlackBerry 10 already trickling into the hands of Pentagon employees, the decision sets the stage for a three-way bout for military market supremacy. And we’re sure the government drones can’t pick sides fast enough. After all, who wants to live under the tyranny of BlackBerry 7 any longer than necessary?

Filed under: Cellphones, Software, Mobile, Apple

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Source: Bloomberg

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/05/17/ios-6-approved-for-use-on-american-military-networks/?utm_medium=feed&utm_source=Feed_Classic&utm_campaign=Engadget

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So, Google’s new Hangouts app keeps all of your chats in sync across all of your devices. Cool, right? But what if you’re in a video call on your phone, and then open the same video call on your computer. Boop! Suddenly there’s two of you, as I just discovered when chatting with my friend Bay.

Read more…

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/QY-fOjMFabU/google-hangouts-has-a-fun-new-easter-egg-508504684

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By Kate Kelland

LONDON (Reuters) – British fertility experts have devised a new IVF technique that takes thousands of snapshots of a developing embryo that they say can help doctors pick those most likely to implant successfully and develop into healthy babies.

At a briefing in London before publishing their results, the researchers said they are already using the technique to select “low risk” embryos that are the least likely to have chromosomal abnormalities that could hamper their development.

In their study, published in the journal Reproductive BioMedicine Online, the team’s chances of producing a successful live birth after in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) were increased by 56 percent using the new technique compared to the standard method of selecting embryos that look best through a microscope.

“In the 35 years I have been in this field, this is probably the most exciting and significant development that can be of value to all patients seeking IVF,” said Simon Fishel, a leading fertility doctor and director at the IVF clinic operator CARE Fertility where the technique is being developed.

Independent scientists not involved in the work welcomed it as a significant advance but said full randomised controlled trials – the gold standard in medicine – should be conducted before it is adopted as mainstream practice.

“This paper is interesting because we really do need to make advances in selecting the best embryos created during IVF,” said Allan Pacey of Sheffield University, chair of the British Fertility Society.

“The idea of monitoring embryo development more closely is being used increasingly in clinics around the world and so it is good to see the science involved submitted to peer review and publication,” he added. “All too often, developments in IVF are trumpeted as advances when they remain unproven.”

Experts say that today, as many as 1 to 2 percent of babies in the Western world are conceived through IVF. The standard methods of selecting embryos are based largely on what they look like through a microscope, and many IVF cycles fail because the embryo chosen and transferred to the womb fails to develop.

The scientists who led this study said that using time-lapse images, they had found that developmental delays in the embryo at crucial stages are good indicators of likely chromosomal abnormalities that could result in a failed pregnancy.

VIEWING FAR MORE IMAGES

“In conventional IVF laboratories, embryo development will be checked up to six times over a 5-day period,” said Alison Campbell, Care Fertility’s embryology director and the lead researcher on the study being published.

“With time-lapse we have the ability to view more than 5,000 images over the same time period to observe and measure more closely each stage of division and growth.”

Using this new knowledge, the team developed what they call morphokinetic algorithms to predict success (MAPS). By applying these MAPS to the selection of embryos, they predict they could reach a live birth rate for patients undergoing IVF of 78 percent – about three times the national average.

Fishel, whose CARE Fertility clinics are Britain’s largest independent provider of assisted conception cycles, with around 3,500 a year, said he is charging around 750 pounds ($1,100) for IVF using the MAPS technique – compared to several thousand pounds for a standard IVF cycle.

But Sue Avery, head of the Women’s Fertility Centre in Birmingham, said it was too soon for all clinics to adopt it.

“Until the new technique is compared to current practice we cannot know whether different embryos are being chosen,” she said. “The IVF community needs a prospective randomised controlled trial to prove that the new approach delivers better results before it can be recommended to patients.”

($1 = 0.6533 British pounds)

(Editing by Philip Barbara)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/british-team-hails-embryo-selection-method-ivf-success-232325649.html

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Last week, we traveled to Las Vegas to sit down with the Wolfpack to talk “The Hangover” for one last time before the trilogy ends next week. We’ll have more about that movie closer to the release date, but we took some time out of our interview to ask a few questions about Bradley Cooper’s [...]

Source: http://moviesblog.mtv.com/2013/05/16/hangover-vacation-reboot-american-sniper/

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O.J. Simpson?s current appeal for a new trial has the potential to shed light on an issue that affects countless lesser-known defendants in the US court system: bad lawyering. Along the way, he might get a helping hand from the US Supreme Court.

Mr. Simpson is seeking a ruling overturning his conviction of armed robbery and kidnapping of sports memorabilia dealers in 2007. He says his counsel was inadequate and that his lawyer misled co-counsel.

“I had never sold any of my personal memorabilia, ever,” he testified Wednesday, dressed in prison blues.

RECOMMENDED: 10 weird criminal sentences

Squabbles between lawyers and their clients and co-counsels are not uncommon, says Robert Pugsley, a professor at Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles.

?Most clients in this situation are so poor or low on the economic scale that their bad lawyering doesn?t get much attention, and so the issue remains largely unnoticed,? he adds. ?Whether Simpson prevails or not, this proceeding has a great chance to put the spotlight on this widespread problem.?

Yet appeals like the one Simpson is bringing only rarely meet with success.

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?He actually has a case with merits, but these are extreme, uphill battles because you are asking a court to substitute its own judgment, years later with faded memories, for that of the judge at the time,? says Rene Sandler, of Sandler Law LLC in Rockville, Md., who has two decades of experience in such cases.

Simpson?s claim of ineffective assistance of counsel ?will predictably devolve into a ?he said, he said,? conflicting, fact-based narrative by Simpson and his former attorney,? says Professor Pugsley. Simpson’s counsel in the robbery case that went to trial in 2008, Yale Galanter, has refused to comment publicly but is scheduled to testify Friday.

Potentially working in Simpson?s favor is a US Supreme Court ruling last session (Missouri v. Frye) that held that the guarantee of ?effective assistance of counsel? extends to the consideration and negotiation of pleas ? Simpson?s key complaint.

Co-counsel in the 2008 trial, Gabriel Grasso, said on the stand this week that while Mr. Galanter told him he’d talk with Simpson about a proposed plea deal, Galanter never told Mr. Grasso why he rejected it. Grasso said he didn’t know if Simpson was even told.

?O.J. might have the good luck to rely on the Supreme Court?s decision last term in Missouri v. Frye. Timing is everything,? says Laurie Levenson, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.

Although the decision is to be made by a single judge rather than a jury, the perceived veracity of Simpson is important. How did he do?

This is the first time Simpson has testified at any of his trials, going back to 1995?s so-called ?trial of the century,? in which he was acquitted of murdering his ex-wife, Nicole Simpson, and her friend Ron Goldman. He was later convicted in a civil trial and ordered to pay more than $35 million to the two families, but again, never testified.

Though this trial is unrelated, “He’s been wanting to tell his story. He’s excited about telling his story,” Simpson’s current attorney, Ozzie Fumo, told the Associated Press.

Simpson maintains that advice from Galanter not to testify in 2008 is, in fact, part of the reason for this week?s appeal.

?While prison has had a major effect on his physical appearance, with weight gain, puffiness, and graying hair, O.J. Simpson did not show any signals of deception as he testified,” writes Lillian Glass, author of “Toxic People: 10 Ways Of Dealing With People Who Make Your Life Miserable,? in an e-mail. ?He is fluent and doesn’t hesitate and appears plausible. O.J also sounds and shows plausible signs with regards to his not using weapons.?

?He appeared forthcoming, especially about his drinking and his drinking at breakfast and throughout the morning. O.J.?s explanation of security makes sense,? she says.

The appeal is taking place in Las Vegas, and this is Simpson’s last chance under Nevada law to prove that he was wrongly convicted. A federal court appeal is still possible.

However, the standard of proof is so high that Simpson is unlikely to meet it, even if the judge believes everything he says, says Norman Garland, a professor at Southwestern Law School.

?Simpson has to prove not only that the advice given to him was deficient, but that he was prejudiced by that deficiency,? says Professor Garland. ?The requirements for demonstrating ineffective assistance of counsel are demanding, and the defendant must overcome a strong presumption that counsel?s performance was within the range of competent representation in order to prevail.?

RECOMMENDED: 10 weird criminal sentences

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Source: http://news.yahoo.com/why-o-j-simpson-eager-stand-trial-220821997.html

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May 15, 2013 ? Physicists at the Ruhr-Universit?t Bochum (RUB) have found out how tiny islands of magnetic material align themselves when sorted on a regular lattice — by measurements at BESSY II. Contrary to expectations, the north and south poles of the magnetic islands did not arrange themselves in a zigzag pattern, but in chains. “The understanding of the driving interactions is of great technological interest for future hard disk drives, which are composed of small magnetic islands,” says Prof. Dr. Hartmut Zabel of the Chair of Experimental Physics / Solid State Physics at the RUB.

Together with colleagues from the Helmholtz-Zentrum in Berlin, Bochum’s researchers report in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Complete chaos in the normal state

Many atoms behave like compass needles, that is, like little magnetic dipoles with a north and a south pole. If you put them close together in a crystal, all the dipoles should align themselves to each other, making the material magnetic. However, this is not the case. A magnetic material is only created when specific quantum mechanical forces are at work. Normally, the forces between the atomic dipoles are by far too weak to cause magnetic order. Moreover, even at low temperatures, the thermal energy causes so much movement of the dipoles that complete chaos is the result. “However, the fundamental question remains of how magnetic dipoles would align themselves if the force between them was big enough,” Prof. Zabel explains the research project.

Square lattice of magnetic islands

To investigate this, the researchers used lithographic methods to cut circular islands of a mere 150 nanometers in diameter from a thin magnetic layer. They arranged these in a regular square lattice. Each island contained about a million atomic dipoles. The forces between two islands were thus stronger by a factor of a million than that between two single atoms. If you leave these dipoles to their own resources, at low temperatures you can observe the arrangement that results exclusively from the interaction between the dipoles. They assume the most favourable pattern in terms of energy, the so-called ground state. The islands serve as a model for the behaviour of atomic dipoles.

Magnetic microscopy

The electron synchrotron BESSY II at the Helmholtz-Zentrum in Berlin is home to a special microscope, the photon emission electron microscope, with which the RUB physicists made the arrangement of the magnetic dipole islands visible. Using circularly polarised synchrotron light (X-ray photons), the photons stimulate specific electrons. These provide information on the orientation of the dipoles in the islands. The experiments were carried out at low temperatures so that the thermal movement could not interfere with the orientation of the dipoles.

Dipoles arrange themselves in chains

The magnetic dipoles formed chains, i.e. the north pole of one island pointed to the south pole of the next island. “This result was surprising,” says Zabel. In the lattice, each dipole island has four neighbours to which it could align itself. You cannot tell in advance in which direction the north pole will ultimately point. “In fact, you would expect a zigzag arrangement,” says the Bochum physicist. Based on the chain pattern observed in the experiment, the researchers showed that higher order interactions determine how the magnetisation was oriented. Not only dipolar, but also quadrupolar and octopolar interactions play a role. This means that a magnetic island exerts forces on four or eight neighbours at the same time.

Magnetic islands in the hard drives of the future

In future, hard disks will be made up of tiny magnetic islands (bit pattern). Each magnetic island will form a storage unit which can represent the bit states “0″ and “1″ — encoded through the orientation of the dipole. For a functioning computer, you need a configuration in which the dipole islands interact as little as possible and can thus assume the states “0″ and “1″independently of each other. For the technical application, a precise understanding of the driving interactions between magnetic islands is therefore crucial.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/~3/eDi6oMUZQ3s/130515151548.htm

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May 15, 2013 ? These days, phylogeneticists — experts who painstakingly map the complex branches of the tree of life — suffer from an embarrassment of riches. The genomics revolution has given them mountains of DNA data that they can sift through to reconstruct the evolutionary history that connects all living beings. But the unprecedented quantity has also caused a serious problem: The trees produced by a number of well-supported studies have come to contradictory conclusions.

“It has become common for top-notch studies to report genealogies that strongly contradict each other in where certain organisms sprang from, such as the place of sponges on the animal tree or of snails on the tree of mollusks,” said Antonis Rokas, Cornelius Vanderbilt Chair in Biological Sciences at Vanderbilt University.

In a study published online May 8 by the journal Nature, Rokas and graduate student Leonidas Salichos analyze the reasons for these differences and propose a suite of novel techniques that can resolve the contradictions and provide greater accuracy in deciphering the deep branches of life’s tree.

“The study by Salichos and Rokas comes at a critical time when scientists are grappling with how best to detect the signature of evolutionary history from a deluge of genetic data. These authors provide intriguing insights into our standard analytical toolbox, and suggest it may be time to abandon some of our most trusted tools when it comes to the analysis of big data sets. This significant work will certainly challenge the community of evolutionary biologists to rethink how best to reconstruct phylogeny,” said Michael F. Whiting, program director of systematics and biodiversity science at the National Science Foundation, which funded the study.

To gain insight into this paradox, Salichos assembled and analyzed more than 1,000 genes — approximately 20 percent of the entire yeast genome — from each of 23 yeast species. He quickly realized that the histories of the 1,000-plus genes were all slightly different from each other as well as different from the genealogy constructed from a simultaneous analysis of all the genes.

“I was quite surprised by this result,” Salichos pointed out.

By adapting an algorithm from information theory, the researchers found that they could use these distinct gene genealogies to quantify the conflict and focus on those parts of the tree that are problematic.

In broad terms, Rokas and Salichos found that genetic data is less reliable during periods of rapid radiation, when new species were formed rapidly. A case in point is the Cambrian explosion, the sudden appearance about 540 million years ago of a remarkable diversity of animal species, without apparent predecessors. Before about 580 million years ago, most organisms were very simple, consisting of single cells occasionally organized into colonies.

“A lot of the debate on the differences in the trees has been between studies concerning the ‘bushy’ branches that took place in these ‘radiations’,” Rokas said.

The researchers also found that the further back in time they went the less reliable the genetic data becomes. “Radioactive dating methods are only accurate over a certain time span,” said Rokas. “We think that the value of DNA data might have a similar limit, posing considerable challenges to existing algorithms to resolve radiations that took place in deep time.”

The research was supported by National Science Foundation CAREER award DEB-0844968.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_environment/~3/9F2MAVdoBWs/130515094809.htm

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