Raven Culture™ Blog

In our current web 2.0 world we have so many methods of communication at our disposal. Some could say it’s communication overload. And a new trend has formed called Unified Communications. Mostly this is a business tool. Streamlining your in office work with your out of office work, always being on call, blah blah blah.

But I would like to suggest that I could use some unified communications in my life. Google is making a great effort to try to provide this, but what about variety?
Awaiting a unified communications solution for the masses…

With the launch of Chromebooks, web apps have never been more important. If this is the future… wow.

Apple say “there’s an app for that” well I say, there is also a web app. What is great is that there are so many innovative applications out there on the internet that are truly unique and fantastic. And the more you look, the more you find.

If you don’t know what I am talking about… shame! Website developers are working hard to bring you beautiful, innovative and streamlined applications to your browser to make your life easier. If you have never seen a web app before, jump over the 37signals.com, the king daddy of the web app world.

I love e-commerce. Let me be clear. I do! And I have been watching the evolution of things like social media, marketing, cms systems etc, but I have not seen any evolution, or noticeable, evolution of e-commerce.

Now, I believe that e-commerce is terribly complicated. More so than is necessary, and for those few of you that have experience with the aging oscommerce, you will agree. And oscommerce used to be the benchmark of e-commerce. But it hasn’t evolved AT ALL! So what is the benchmark now? Nothing!

The evolution of e-commerce from a shoppers point of view is the same, the evolution of e-commerce from a store owners point of view is the same. So why then has there been no real push to innovate this clearly booming industry, for the benefit of shoppers and store owners? Just because something is working now, doesn’t mean that it will forever.

Food for thought…

As this year comes to a close I wanted to touch back on the goals you set yourself back in January last year. Chances are you had some kind of new year resolution, be it, personal or business oriented.

I wanted to focus on business oriented goals for a second. Each year we evaluate the position of the business and where it is going to go, the target market the we want to market ourselves to and the quality of our service and products. From that analysis we set some goals to achieve for the year, at this time of year we look at the goals we set during the year and see what was achieved and not achieved.

For example, one of the goals for this year was to update our website, we have not achieved that goal. However one of the major goals was to have a strategy, road map and infrastructure setup for Activcart for release next year. I am happy to say that we have achieved that goal, plus much more.

I would encourage you all to look at the goals you have set this year and see which ones you haven’t achieved and why. Growth requires a little forward and backward planning.

All the best for the holidays

RAVEN CULTURE

We have been using Facebook as a marketing tool for years, it is a very effective way to gather interest in your products or services. How successful this can be, however, is up to you. Read the rest of this entry »