One Plus One Phone

Finally the New Flagship Killer phone one plus one is out in the market. Great phone for a great price from a Chinese start up. Yes, it is a Chinese phone, but not one of the duplicate Chinese makes. A real smartphone, specs not comparable to the current Galaxy S5 or Nexus 5, but way above and beyond those high end phones. Looking around all over to find what would be the catch to sell such a high end phone for a low price, really could not find any. Yes, the starting price is only $299.

Coming to the specifications on the the phone it has got a very powerful Qualcom Snapdragon 801 processor with global LTE, coupled with an 5.5” and 1080 pixel display along with a most powerful 3100 mAh battery that could well last over a day even after a heavy use. A 13 mp rear camera and 5mp front camera are way above the industry standards for a smartphone at this price. A 16GB model with above specs costs only $249 USD and a 64 GB model costs $349 USD. At this time when this phone is getting launched there are no better Smartphones for this price, not even Nexus 5 or any Samsung phones for that matter.

Being a start-up company, coming up with this kind of specifications and at this price point without compromising the build quality is amazing. But there, definitely is going to be a backlog in meeting the market demands. Initially the company is planning out to sell the phones based out of invites. So, people who get invites from One plus one, alone can get this phone. And even future roll outs will be based on invites for some time to come based on the news sources from the company. The first roll out of invites was through and some people got their hands on the phone already with overwhelming reviews and responses. And the second roll out is due anytime the third week of May, while I am writing this post. To get an invite, one has to signup at one plus site and do a FaceBook likes, Twitter follow, Google plus share and do a post in their forum. And you get 8 points for that, which would place you in the invite queue.

The phone is little taller than the Galaxy Note 3, but is slightly less broader than the Note3. For big phone lovers it’s a boon. Again not everybody likes big phones, but for me more value for my money and larger real estate with higher pixel rates translates to better readability. A few setbacks, not really though, no SD card slot, which I don’t think is needed if you buy a 64GB phone, and a non-removable battery. I don’t think that these are any setbacks as noted by a couple of users that would stop anybody from buying this high end phone. But, being a new phone, I think people would be little apprehensive about buying it initially, but this phone definitely is going to be a big hit and trend setter in the smartphone industry.

In conclusion it’s a great smartphone for the price advertised. The company has a slogan claiming ‘Never Settle’ meaning not to settle for features with other phones while one can afford for all the features with this phone at a better price, which in my view is aptly said.

Reference:

Link to Podcast

An argument on raising the bar of happiness for children from the parents view

I recently had a chance to listen a video speech by Writer, Jennifer Senior in context to Kids happiness and parents view on it.

It was a 15 minute speech and she was all over the place missing the main context. There were quite a lot of interesting observations but again they all didn't fit well together to bring up the main point. More often than not, the speaker was jumping to conclusions and trying to be judgmental on certain topics.

Some places she was comparing children from different generations. Children being economically useful and useless is always there in different parts of the world and the conscious of raising them happy is as well. But she presents the scene as such gone are the times, when parents really wanted their children to be economically useful and today everybody wants to raise a happy kid which is not true. Even today kids go to work day in day out, in under-developed countries and in economically backward families, true to fact that parents were there in the gone by years who truly wanted their children to be happy. So that shows the speaker was getting to some conclusions with not enough supporting evidence.

Moreover, I am not sure of what’s wrong with studying books to raise a happy kid. Because our parents and their parents did not study a book to raise us, it doesn't mean that getting to know more about raising kids and improvising their lifestyles stands to a point of critics.  As the world is shrinking, technology is growing and information is within reach and we tend to do better things for our children in future. So raising the standard of bars for Happiness in parents view should not be seen indifferently.

The speaker never clearly defined what happiness meant for kids and how it was a blow for them by parents raising the bar of happiness for them. There were a few information points here and there, but they didn't really gel with the speech, rather looked aloof.  To top that the speaker really looked more stressed while delivering her speech. Ir respectively the props were nice and professional, were all set to stage and deliver a high profile note which lacked some gentle push and more organized and collective means of presentation. More so, the speech concluded with the message passed across as love your kids and never hurt them instead of parents raising the bar for happiness.

Please click on the following link to watch the video,

http://www.ted.com/talks/jennifer_senior_for_parents_happiness_is_a_very_high_bar

Social media report for Pepsi and Ford

Pepsi’s Social Media presence

Pepsi’s Social media presence has changed the way that they do business and engage with customers. It is all about the user generated content, directly relying on the reviews, comments and any sort of user inputs about their products makes a significant contribution to their product lines. Pepsi clearly understood this social media impact and have redesigned their home page with tiles that could really engage customers.

Pepsi’s homepage is more of a digital dashboard highlighted by user generated content from Facebook and Twitter. Pepsi also pays lot of attention to what their customers are interested in by using a social media tool called SocialFlow, which ranks the editorial contents in refined audience segments. Pepsi monitors their social media presence and assists their customers with real-time solution when they have any complaints or queries about their products.

Unlike Television and print media in yester years, today digital media provides a way to track their marketing reach via social media presence. It is also possible to market and create brand awareness in location specific regions using mobile media marketing.

Off the total number of employees, more than 300,000 of Pepsi’s employees have Facebook account with an average of 130 friends. That is some 70% of their total number of employees and more than 80% of these 300,000 are willing to talk about their employer which gives the company a scope to understand their employees better. The total number of Facebook ‘likes’ and ‘fans’ will give us a fair idea of Pepsi’s social media presence.

More than 45,000 people follow Pepsi’s Linkedin corporate profile and the company is mostly relying on Linkedin for their recruitments. They are picking up more than 5000 application in any given month for job applications through Linkedin.

By all means, Pepsi has a proper strategized social media plan and they are making best use of it via, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn which are few of the social media tools to list.

Ford’s Social media strategy

The main focus of Ford Motor Co. is to address the customers on their concerns using Social media tools. In an exclusive interview with Ford’s global manager Scott Monty, he wants to address or engage with a customer within hours after posting an issue and get it resolved. They are trying to bring it under 4 hours in his own words.

Ford’s dedicated customer service team has created a customized search engine tool which picks up keywords of concerns through Facebook, Twitter, message boards, forums and other social media tools and then assigns them to a customer service agent until it gets resolved. This practice has resulted in Ford, now responding to more than 2000 people per week via social media and the interactions continue to be on the rise.

Ford also has developed an Influencer relationship management tool called ConnectFord to work with bloggers and people who have their own set of digital audiences. The portal ConnectFord gives bloggers and influencers the first hand information instead of relying on the print media from where they can start blogging and sharing information from Ford.

More than 2.2 million likes on Ford’s Facebook page is a standing piece of evidence for their customers engagement with their employees. Twitter account is no less than their Facebook activity which has more than 400,000 followers with 12000 plus tweets. Ford is also actively encouraging their customers to tweet to resolve any of their concerns which is little challenging for the customers to describe an issue in less than 140 words.

To sum up, Social media is more of an effective way to engage with the customers and reach the customers with new brands and ideas, along with to address any of the concerns that your customer may have. There is no downside for Pepsi, or Ford or for any other company that proactively reaches out to consumers via social media.

References:

• www.pepsi.com
• https://www.facebook.com/PepsiUS?brand_redir=1
• http://money.usnews.com/money/business-economy/articles/2012/05/15/pepsi-measures-online-pulse-with-social-media-strategy
• http://socialmediatoday.com/synecoretech/509355/5-ways-pepsis-use-social-media-right
• http://www.forbes.com/sites/quentinhardy/2011/07/29/pepsicos-social-media-transformation/
• http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeanhalliday/2012/03/27/ford-taps-social-media-for-customer-service/
• https://www.facebook.com/ford
• http://socialmediatoday.com/Big_Brand_Theory/ford-motor-company-part-ii
• http://blogs.salesforce.com/company/2013/02/5-social-media-lessons-to-learn-from-ford.html

Web-Services and Social Media Recruiting

 

Difference between web service and social media site as a tool for finding a job 

 

From traditional newspaper job posting to social media recruitment companies have a come a long way in the recruiting process not without some advantages and disadvantages. There are a handful of popular web services like dice, monster, careerbuilder, etc., wherein recruiters get to post their job requirements apart from the traditional methods. For a large multi-national corporate that recruits hundreds of people everyday web services are better fit than a social media posting for a good candidate. Also social media highly helps in recruiting high profile candidates who have an open social media history than for other regular mid-level job requirements. 

 

Web services offer a wide variety of job in a particular industry at different levels.  Candidates get an option to choose from a few listings and narrow down the job that they want to apply. Prospective job applicants could get to search jobs pertaining to defined geographical locations and at desired salary range. In contrast to web-services, social media sites like LinkedIn, Twitter, or FaceBook also have job listings from large corporate or from small and medium businesses. But these openings are rather limited or totally outnumbered when compared to web-services openings. 

Advantages and Disadvantages 

 

• Most social media openings will give us an opportunity to initiate contact with the recruiting authority
• The chances for the candidates to get recommended are more, if he is a good fit for the position and also enables the candidate to provide more relevant data to the employer about his previous employment
• Social media recruitment provides the human touch to recruiting when compared to the keyword filtering offered by web-services, which is considered to be a relationship driven connection
• In contrast to the above advantages for somebody who have posted drug usages, obscene or grammatically incorrect words in their social media updates that is sure going to stop them from landing in their dream job

When and why would a position not be made available Online

• A position that needs lot of creative talent should not be advertised online that restricts the applicant’s creative nature with keyword filtering concept.
• For positions that need high level management skills, has to be sourced through referrals and networks. It need not be advertised online which enables thousands of applications being submitted which again limits the human screening potential
• Any position that needs human interventions from first level to final level of recruitment need not be advertised online

Online references: 

 

1)      http://www.businessnewsdaily.com/4113-social-media-hiring-tips.html

2)      http://theundercoverrecruiter.com/social-recruiting-traditional/

Digital resumes and keywords - Pitfall or Panacea

An increasing number of companies only accept digital resumes. This allows them to scan resumes for keywords. How does this work? What are the advantages and disadvantages of the use of keywords for employers and applicants? Is this fair treatment?

Gone are the days posting a job requirement in a newspaper and applying for the position through a paper resume over postal mail. In the modern era and technology bound world everything is through digital media announcements. Applicants could well to get to know about the requirements through job portals or directly from the employer’s website. Now both employers and prospective applicants have a wide pool to choose from. But there are both advantages and disadvantages in this medium.

Because of the reach of announcement about a job requirement there is a humongous amount of resume that pile up for that particular position. It is not humanly possible to go through every single resume and shortlist a bunch of them. There comes the option to shortlist the resume using keywords. When employers or job portals use keywords, they might get the resumes using the most or repetitive keywords, but definitely not the best of the available lot. Somebody who is more technologically inclined can create a best resume for any available job using keywords, whereas somebody who is not so technologically inclined but really skilled to suit the job requirement might not get a chance. The other scenario is that keyword filtering saves lot of cost and time associated with short-listing the result. It makes the task easier for prospective employers and job portals to narrow down the matching applicants in a lesser time. So there are both pros and cons associated with keyword filters for employers and prospective job applicants.



It becomes highly imperative that the prospective candidate should well be able to market himself with the right mix of keywords. In most cases, it forces the applicants to tailor make resume when they apply for different jobs through employers websites. By doing this originality of the applicants gets compromised due to the nature of keyword filtering.

It is evenly fair and unfair to both employers and applicants by all means as it being played in a level field. So there is no question of who gets most of it, as both employers and applicants are mutually benefitted by digital resumes and keyword concepts, hence it is fair to be called a fair treatment.