GoalZero, part of NRG Energy, is a leading portable energy company which builds:

PORTABLE POWER SOLUTIONS DESIGNED TO IMPROVE THE HUMAN EXPERIENCE

GOAL ZERO ISN’T JUST A COMPANY, IT’S A BUSINESS CREATED BY PEOPLE WHO LIVE LIFE TO ITS FULLEST

Here’s an example of a commerce experience where the focus on customer TRUST and environmental IMPACT drives the customer experience and value proposition.

Trust and Continuous (Agile Mindset) Impactful Experiences For Customers.

Format:

Bio

Quick Wins

Creation and Innovation

Listen and Experiment

Management

#TrustGoalZero Together

The post Building Trusted And Continuously Impactful Brand and Commerce. -GoalZero first appeared on Innovation + Insight.

Recently, I had a quick call with a high school student who has become increasingly interested in blockchain technologies and cryptocurrency projects.

He has expressed a lot of enthusiasm around Nano particularly its speed and limited transaction costs.

https://nano.org/en/

This brief conversation was recorded for both including as podcast content but also utilizing the meeting notes transcribing platform.

https://www.otter.ai

Here’s the transcription:

Unknown Speaker 0:00
immunity is very active with on creating platforms kind of built on and around nano. Because so it’s completely distributed right now. And the way that in order to have adoption and defeat the purpose trying to get it from an exchange, where you have to pay fees, that defeats the purpose of having instant and Felix, they’re trying to just spread nano around through a bunch of small projects, like the one I mentioned, the Pokemon Go, like one gives out ridiculous amounts of the recent increase. And they haven’t added this yet, but what I suspect they’re going to do because they have a business variant of the app, is they’re going to act as like a medium and right now they’re just trying to spread it around and increase adoption.

Unknown Speaker 0:57
Interesting. Yeah, that’s, that’s interesting. Okay, okay. Um, okay. So I get the, the growth and the adoption strategy and get it sort of distributed and utilized or, or in in production, you know, more production. It seems like

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

As you can tell, the quality of the speech-to-text was limited. Here are the brief points that were discussed.

1. Why isn’t Nano listed on an Exchange?
2. Platforms built around Nano – “Ecosystem”
3. Fee-Less
4. Pokomon Go “Faucet” for currency
5. Increase adoption – Growth Strategy – Distributed

The post Discussing Cryptocurrency Nano with a high school student. first appeared on Innovation + Insight.

Here’s one the AR experience that I built while running product, customer success, data, and DevOps teams at Westfield/URW

A good example of AR design and delivery around brand identity, engagement and gamification.

Core idea: Use Brand identity as an anchor. The Westfield logo.

I. Design your customer’s journey

II. Provide unique center’s customization for marketing teams

III. Registrations – Mobile application specific

IV. User Profile Management

V. The Hunt

VI. Collecting Eggs

VII. Redeeming and Rewarding

VIII. Leaderboards and Sharing

IX. Technical Requirements – Engineering – ARKit – Unity

X. Enterprise integrations and MarTech Stack integration

The post Building Augmented Reality (AR) Experiences for Retail and Mall Environments – Gamification first appeared on Innovation + Insight.

Smith Optics is a leading eyewear and cycling/motorsports brand focused on activities that protect but also enhance the experience of the activity.

Here’s an example of a commerce experience where the focus on TRUST is central to the customer experience and brand proposition.

Trust and Continuous (Agile Mindset) Impactful Experiences For Customers.

Format:

Bio

Quick Wins

Creation and Innovation

Listen and Experiment

Management

#TrustSmith

The post Building A Commerce Experience for An Outdoor Brand – Smith Optics first appeared on Innovation + Insight.

Are you staying hydrated?

All media offloaded to Amazon S3 bucket. No image/video content stored within WordPress environment.

Distributed content assets.

Next test would be to use Contentful for Content API architecture.

Headless CMS provides scalability and distributed content architecture for the many channels (FB, YouTube, Twitch), landing pages, and deployments of our content.

The post Feed The Machine Video using Offload Media From Delicious Brains first appeared on Innovation + Insight.

The customer support landscape today is evolving. What used to be a mostly phone, website, email, and a little chat, is evolving quickly. Zendesk has emerged as a critical player in the customer-centric support delivery model. Due to their user-friendly system, the dawn of their next customer platform is emerging through its new customer engagement platform strategy.

Zendesk’s tomorrow is an integrated, real-time, and conversational commerce platform that works towards delivering Answers In The Moment. (Check out Chip and Dan Health’s The Power of Moments).

Channels – Channels – Channels

To be successful in support delivery you have to be able to: 1. Offer a wide range of channels for customer service. 2. Accommodate alternative service channels. 3. Coordinate customer service channels. 4. Be proactive.

Zendesk is going beyond just support, tickets and website chat to an ecosystem of social engagement and a customer data platform that integrates with commerce using headless-CRM capabilities. Salesforce has been building out a similar stack for years but customer support (ServiceCloud) hasn’t been Salesforce’s strength. Hence, Zendesk is coming at the stack from the customer support relationship side. In addition, they are coming to the opportunity from the help center/knowledge base side. They are integrating messaging tools/channels including WhatsApp – Instagram – WeChat – Apple Business Chat.

The goal for either Amazon, Salesforce or Zendesk is to help your business “meet the customer where they are at” and personalize their experience.

https://tech.co/crm-software/zendesk-sunshine-launches-crm-compete-salesforce

Quickly establishing trust and a relationship based on referenceable knowledge allows for meeting the confidence requirement within the customer. Platforms and tools that support customer experience convergence between offline/online, bits and atoms, IRL, and URL along with tighter integrations via the API economy are ultimately going to be faster, more efficient, and scalable. Zendesk’s Sunshine CRM platform is attempting to build seamless customer experiences with a service-first integrated support/customer relationship tool.

Existing Zendesk customers are already diving into their new Sunshine platform capabilities due to its simplicity. They include Logitech – FourSeasons – Netflix among many others.

Example use cases from Sunshine are: customer engagement profiles with complete owned product portfolios or the managing assets and their devices, product orders, past interactions/history, and product troubleshooting.

For personalized experiences, the customer engagement platform competition continues to grow (Amazon, Salesforce, etc). These solutions hopefully will lead to open interoperability and integrations where the CUSTOMER wins through valuable and impactful conversations.

Zendesk has launched its new tomorrow to deliver on this mission.

Here’s an interview recently with Zendesk’s CEO presented the concept of a headless CRM.

Let’s continue the conversation on Twitter @benmorris . Thank you for reading.

The post Zendesk – Today and Tomorrow first appeared on Innovation + Insight.

Here’s my first post to embed my GoodReads review.

Stillness Is the Key by Ryan Holiday
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Another great Ryan Holiday work where he continues to demonstrate his understanding of philosophical history. This work is probably his broadest approach to the idea of taking ownership of our minds. He references the Stotics, as he has done in previous books, but dives into the value of maintaining “Stillness” as a superpower that allows one to not be drowned by the river of emotions and immediate chaos. A good work that brings “mindfulness” practice into more of a mainstream value proposition for the Type A crowd looking to achieve and conquer life.

View all my reviewsThe post STILLNESS IS THE KEY – REVIEW- GOODREADS-EMBED first appeared on Innovation + Insight.

What are team services? With Agile evolution, the notion of Squads, Guilds, and Tribes has sparked the development of operational models that support the cross-functional aspects of work today.

Squads, tribes and guilds: Is agile management the future of the workplace?

Inside of enterprises, global technology teams are asked to significantly add efforts to innovate, grow and operate all consumer and customer touchpoints technologies in Web, Mobile, Retail, Franchising, Partner Commerce, Wholesale and ultimately every customer. It takes a Team and hence Team Services is born. As Agile evangelists, they provide the DevOps expertise to accelerate the models and processes along with providing necessarily engineering.

By having a Team Services approach to the technology piece along you to support the structure of the business and utilize DevOps principles like continuous improvement (CI/CD) to bring a software/iterative approach to the delivery of various touchpoints.

Goal: “Get ideas and innovation from your teams into the hands of your customers”

This requires speed to develop complex, cross-functionality and converging efforts to deliver a product or service at scale. Microservices and API allow for the ability to scale internally but also have the flexibility to grow on-demand. Often Team Service has the technical background of the library of APIs/Keys/Tokens along with the necessary integration efforts.

By engaging stakeholders to assist their goals with Team Services, the value of rapidly integrating and converging global efforts builds a strategic marketplace advantage. High-Energy performance is a signature quality of Team Services. There are often many roles involved with the operation of a race car but Team Services provides the coordination and collaboration to deliver replacement wheels, gas and monitor in real-time to proactively address problems. No one loves Pager Duty SRE efforts and reactive mindset but stress testing and chaos engineering go a long way.

Lastly, high-quality teams succeed through tight communication. Team Services are built with layers of communication that foster the ability to quickly locate SMEs (Subject Matter Experts) to rapidly engage with their efforts. They develop flow.

Do you have Team Services in your organization?

The post The Power and Value of Team Services first appeared on Innovation + Insight.

Quick huddle covering the future of frontend development.

1. Performance Touchpoints and Frontend -Loading and Delivering.
2. Data – Metrics.
3. AI/Machine Learning.
4. Augmented Reality – Conversational and Voice Interfaces.
5. Personalization.
6. React/Vue/WebAssemby/HTML code frameworks.

The post 2-Minute Warning Podcast: Episode 1 – Future of Frontend Engineering first appeared on Innovation + Insight.

Let’s start with the basics.

What’s Frontend engineering?

Without the “In a galaxy far far away…” it started as HTML/XML to be interpreted by a browser. However, over time Brenden Eich (Now with Brave Software) developed Javascript and it has become an ingredient across the entire technology stack (i.e. Node.js). Hence the word “FullStack” was developed. A FullStack developer could code the front-end, back-end, API, and database but not always visual design, interaction design, and CSS. Instead of discussing the entire stack we’ll focus on the notion of Frontend engineering. With customer-centric models, this “Frontend” becomes more about devices and interaction methods than “browsers”.

Development teams already have frameworks that address code efficiencies between their desktop and mobile browser efforts. Responsive sites most solved this with CSS and Javascript but React entered as a way to unite mobile app (iOS/Android) around the same codebase as web.

Essentially we are managing documents in browsers and this requires an understanding of the DOM. What’s a DOM? Simply stated,  the DOM is a cross-platform and language-independent interface that treats an XML or HTML document as a tree structure wherein each node is an object representing a part of the document. But as a Frontend developer, you have to THINK BEYOND THE DOM.

Touchpoints: The NEW Frontend

Conversational interfaces – Chat, Voice(AMZ -Alexa, Apple-SIRI)

Why Frontend Matters? The value of Frontend lies in the speed of engagement by the customer/user. Optimization and efficiency are increasing the focus of developers and designers of experiences.

Evolutionary Forces On The Frontend

Code Performance (speed) – DevOps – Data/Analytics – Focusing the rise of data lakes and data on itself, the Frontend efforts will work towards ways to make the application lighter and more intelligent in showing, grouping and filtering the right information without overloading the hardware, browser, etc.

Welcome the rise of machine learning and AI in the Frontend development framework. With many devices now including AI/ML optimized chips and SDKs in their devices, Frontend developers need to include this into their toolkits. Using AI-supported in-app & on website behavior analysis of end consumers. We will have insight into the deep psychology of real-time experiences. What color triggers more excitement, what button animation triggers more dopamine, etc. The Frontend world will definitely become more fine-tuned to our psychological “needs” in our to manipulate the end consumer to … consume. “Affective” (Affectiva) computing will adapt the Frontend to the viewer or customer’s mood.

Frontend in VR & AR

Frontend engineering will play a crucial role in AR and VR. This area brings a whole new set of challenges with itself. The user does not use a mouse or a keyboard. Like voice, the interaction is “screen-based”. React VR (e.g. React 360) or something like that. Which would allow you do design 360 User Interfaces consistent with React used in other touchpoints? “Device-Awareness” is critical to the optimal Frontend experience. Development teams could create transparent overlay User Interfaces to allow the user to use your app while they are interacting with their environment (AR).

CODE FUTURES

Today, with the continuing evolution of responsive design and convergence of code for all touchpoints across web/mobile/kiosks, React along with GraphQL (API) continues to be the largest wave. However, with the rise of Web 3.0, WebAssemby is making waves as decentralized apps and blockchain technologies continue to develop. Don’t forget smart contract languages too like Ethereum’s Solidity.

Let’s look at the general architecture of Frontend web development frameworks, databases, state management, relationships between frameworks, reception and ease of use, languages that compile to JavaScript, mobile frameworks, build tools, JavaScript testing tools, and a whole lot more. Monitoring and testing these Frontend frameworks has become better. Frontend application monitoring solution lets you replay problems as if they happened in your own browser logging Redux actions and state. An example of a tool like this is: LogRocket. LogRocket records console logs, JavaScript errors, stacktraces, network requests/responses with headers + bodies, browser metadata, and custom logs. It also instruments the DOM to record the HTML and CSS on the page, recreating pixel-perfect videos of even the most complex single-page apps.

The Road Ahead – PERSONALIZED Frontends

The key takeaways from the future of Frontend engineering is that it’s moving fast and going beyond website and mobile/phone apps. We are seeing rapid developments in conversational (Chat) interfaces that are driven through Instagram or Social platforms. Coupled with voice, a Frontend engineer needs to learn NLP and Machine Learning in order to adapt their toolkit to address the requirements in the moment of interaction. They need to understand how to customize and personalize in real-time the engagement of the user/customer. Watch React and other code frameworks like WebAssemby that build stand-alone applications for Web 3.0 but keep measuring the performance of your solution to the problem of engagement.

The post The Future Of Frontend Engineering first appeared on Innovation + Insight.