Marketing automation has been around for some time now, but it’s becoming increasingly popular as many of the marketing and campaign management tools available to both agencies and technology savvy marketers now provide the ability for end-users, such as marketing managers, to create their own complex automated programs. Marketing automation is the initiation of marketing programs based on a pre-defined set of rules or a trigger resulting from a customer action and it’s a great hands-off way to reach a consumer at a potentially critical purchasing decision time...

Politics get in the way again and the USPS suffers!

Not being able to get phone reception in the Chicago metropolis on a recent trip reminded me of one simple fact: not enough foresight and planning went in to the development of the current mobile phone data networks to be able to handle the onslaught of data requests originating from all the smartphones that have saturated the market in recent years...

Technology is for the old, the young and everyone between; we just use it differently. For Christmas 2010, my 75 year old mother bought me an iPad because she loves gadgets and thought, "These Apple things are cool." So cool that she had to get one for herself, and she now uses it for email and Facebook. Of course she hasn’t spoken to many of her Facebook friends in years, but she feels she is in touch with them by "liking" or commenting on their pictures. For her, the iPad is a hobby and a new way to communicate to people half way around the world...