January, 2012 | Answer My Query

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Jan/12

SharePoint 2010 Ratings and Custom Content Types

by AskSharePoint.com - A blog by C5 Insight under - Database, Sharepoint, SqlServer

There are numerous cool new features in SharePoint 2010, and I’ve found that integrating them into custom solutions are not always straightforward. I found this to be true with ratings as well. Ratings are one of the new social tagging features that gives...(read more)

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31

Jan/12

Pricing Strategy for Creatives

by nospam@example.com under - Miscelleneous

Strategic pricing helps your brand and helps you to make more money. Issuing a price is like handing out a business card—it’s a great branding tool, but be careful about what it says to your market. Beginning relationships with customers at a high price makes the statement: “we’re good at what we do and we know it.” Fighting with a competitor over a low price says “I’m uncertain about my abilities, so I’ll take what I can get.” Failing to use a considered pricing policy will leave you treading water in a sea of design mediocrity, allowing you to just stay afloat while you sell commodities. Jason Blumer explains how to become strategic about your pricing—including three things you can do immediately to kick-start your journey toward strategic pricing.

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31

Jan/12

Responsive Images: How they Almost Worked and What We Need

by nospam@example.com under - Miscelleneous

With a mobile-first responsive design approach, if any part of the process breaks down, your user can still receive a representative image and avoid an unnecessarily large request on a device that may have limited bandwidth. But with several newer browsers implementing an “image prefetching” feature that allows images to be fetched before parsing the document’s body, some of the web's brightest developers are abandoning responsive images in favor of user agent detection, at least as a temporary solution. For us standardistas, UA detection leaves a bad taste in the mouth. More importantly, as the number and kinds of devices continue to grow, UA detection will quickly become untenable—just as browser detection did back in the bad old days before web standards. What's really needed, argues Mat Marquis, is a new markup element that works the way the HTML5 video element works. Sound crazy? So crazy it just might work.

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31

Jan/12

ICT is well represented among the most sustainable corporations in the world

by Pete Foster under - Miscelleneous

In a ranking of the most sustainable corporations in the world the ICT sector is well represented, with at least 13 companies in the top 100 list. (Possibly more, depending who you include). Heading the ICT companies is Nordic telecoms company TeliaSonera, in 13th place, followed by Intel (18), but with IBM in a relatively lowly 69th place.

Corporate Knights, a Toronto-based media, research and financial products company, formed the Global Responsible Investment Network to create the 2012 Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations in the World (the Global 100) list. According to the company, The Global 100 is the most extensive data-driven corporate sustainability assessment in existence.

The rankings are determined through a two-stage research process. Firstly the ‘Global 400 Sustainability leaders’ were selected based on their ratings from The Global Sustainability Research Alliance (GSRA) and on their performance on a financial stress test administered by Global Currents. Then the Global 400 companies were ranked against their industry peers on 11 KPIs used in the Corporate Knights research model.

Looking through the rankings, ICT companies in the top 50 (with ranking) include:

TeliaSonera (13)
Intel (18)
Swisscom (20)
Schneider Electric (26)
SAP(27)
Dassault Systemes (32)
BT Group (33)
Siemens (41)
Logica (46)

Also included in the top 100 are Vodafone (65), IBM, in (69), Ricoh (72) and Samsung (73). (Of course it’s not always clear cut as to who is an ICT company and who isn’t – Schneider Electric might not be considered mainstream ICT, but is a major supplier of power and cooling products and services for data centres).

It’s noticeable how relatively poorly US companies do in this rankings, given the country’s leading position in the global ICT industry. Europe is much more strongly represented, and its good to see three UK companies in the top 100 (there aren’t very many UK ICT companies big enough to get into these rankings!).

Corporate Knights says that its aim is ‘to mainstream sustainability in the business community’. It wants to create a virtuous cycle where the most sustainable companies attract the most capital and earn the best returns. It also points out that these companies are models for the art of the possible, ‘living proof of how billion dollar entities can squeeze more wealth from less material resources while honouring the social contract.’