Room 237 (Movie)

Posted on October 15 by admin

I was just going to ignore this commentary of Stanley Kubrick’s films called “Room 237” but I just can’t. For your sake!

Don’t ever watch this garbage unless you are the type into far-reaching conspiracy theories that have no, or very little, basis for facts.

I am a huge fan of Stanley including The Shining, and much of his work, but this dude that made this commentary puts him on a pedestal like he could do no wrong. Truth-is that Stanley was a great movie writer and creative (no doubt), but this commentary-dude goes severely overboard. This whole movie is so dramatically overboard on the ‘meanings’ of the movie when in reality the narrator offers few facts (only opinion).

What is pretty cool about this narration is that it has a lot of good movie footage from many of Kubrick’s films overall, not just The Shining. And while many of the far-out suggestions were way too radical, I must admit a few were worthy of a consideration.

Bottom-line, if you like Kubrick you will hate this narration, or if you don’t like Kubrick you will be confused and most likely hate it worst so my advice is adhere to my low Steelers-Star ranking advice of two stars and avoid this Stanley “2001 Space Odyssey” Space Junk of a film.

Stanford football 10/5/13

Posted on October 6 by admin

Another year of successful Stanford football is in the books!

Yesterday the guys and I packed the supplies, met at our usual rendezvous point and then caravanned on up to “The Farm” (a.k.a. Stanford Stadium) for our annual event. I’m not sure exactly how many years I have been personally attending but it’s quite a few (between 6-7 is my guess) and overall this group, or various renditions of the group, have been attending for even longer.

Each year brings its own unique, as well as, unexpected surprises. One thing for certain is that we seem to always create fond memories. It’s really a wonderful time where we get together once per year to attend a Stanford football home game. The game itself is somewhat of an after-thought (although we do pay attention and follow the game) because the highlight is always the pre-game tailgate.

The tailgate event is exactly what you might expect where we eat, drink and talk smack, eerrr I mean ‘debate’, such topics as sports, movies/TV shows, politics and generally catch-up on everyone’s lives. So let me detail some of this year’s tailgate highlights with the understanding that my website is a PG-13 rated site so I have to withhold some of the best details.

The Food

The assortment of delicious eats at our annual Stanford games never disappoints. Bob, our fearless leader/organizer, and his father, Chuck (a.k.a. “Chilli King”) always do an outstanding job to get the right mixture of traditional foods, as well as introduce new varieties of items yearly. For the traditional part of this Smörgåsbord, Bob brings a heated crock-pot of scrumptious franks and sauerkraut. This year he also surprised us with a homemade jar of pickles canned from his personal garden. I had every intention of trying one, or two, but I got a little ‘chatty’ and forgot so I’ll have to get a jar next time I see him.

Another great food tradition is Chuck’s infamous chilli! He makes a great big pot of chilli which is always well-received among the tailgaters. And while there is always a wide assortment of toppings for the chilli, I generally leave my bowl rather basic with maybe a dollop of sour cream and a little cheese so that I can enjoy the true flavor of the spicy greatness.

For my contribution to the feast I get to, fortunately, take all the credit for Brandee’s love of cooking and baking. In the weeks leading up to our gathering Brandee and Bob decide upon some dish to bring. This year’s choice was a variety of chip and cookie dips. She created four flavors including Pumpkin-Pie Cookie Dip with homemade Scottish Shortbread, Brandee’s personal ‘Camping’ Dip, Garden Salsa and French Onion Dip. Additional food gluttony this year included bbq ribs, several bags of chips, grapes and a 3 foot ToGo’s sandwich (thanks Dave!).

The chatty

This year’s event was a bit unusual in that our tailgate was an extended affair. Typically the game is in the afternoon so we tailgate for an hour or two; however this year’s game started at night so we had four solid hours of fun festivities and, therefore, the discussions were wide-ranging on topics and quality in nature. There were a total of eight of us that attended this game so some of discussions were group discussions and sometimes we would split off into separate discussions. A particularly special discussion revolved around the TV series Breaking Bad and our various opinions of the characters and the plot/story line. Some of the ‘gaters hadn’t seen the series and couldn’t appreciate the details of our chat but since I had just recently finished watching the entire series, I was emotionally involved in the discussion without revealing too many specifics so that those others can enjoy the drama themselves should they choose to experience it for themselves sometime in the future.

Naturally some of our chat arrived on the topic of the current Government Shutdown and I’ll just say that we were fairly passionate without going into other details. Other noteworthy topics included (as you might expect with a group of eight dudes) fantasy football, the proper techniques of a golf swing and the typical pointing fun-of-each-other type nonsense.

The game

Oh yes, as I mentioned in my opening we do sort-of pay attention to the game itself after all the great food and chatty. Some of the games of the past have been memories and others, well, just weren’t. This year was absolutely one for the ages. The game matched Stanford who was highly ranked at #5 in the nation against the Washington Huskies who were also highly ranked at #18 in the nation. So for the first time in a long time, this game mattered and to add even more drama, both teams came in with 4 wins and 0 lose records! Additionally, they are matched in the same division so you can see that this was a very important game for both teams.

Our seats were excellent – literally right on the 50-yard line. This way we could enjoy the action no matter which side of the field the ball happened to be. The game itself was ‘weird’ in my opinion. I’m still struggling to come-to-grips with the eventual outcome and how it came to be. Let me explain. You see, this was a game like I’ve never seen of ‘big plays’ making the difference. It’s so cliché to say such a thing but ‘big plays’ ultimately really did decide the end result. Let me present some of the final statistics from the game and choose for yourself who you think would have won?

	Washington	Stanford
First Downs	30	14
Total Yards	489	284
Net Yards Passing	350	105

Looking at those numbers you would think that Washington would have been a clear winner. Wrong. Stanford won the game 31-28. Again, big plays were the difference. Stanford returned the opening kick-off for a touchdown. Stanford also forced a key interception late in the game with the ball deep in their own territory as Washington was just about to score. While the Stanford defense gave up a lot of yards, they didn’t give up too many points and they came through when it counted most tadalafil generique.

For the game summary, I just attribute this to two quality teams playing a tough game. Special teams play made a big difference but this was not a sloppy game by any means. The play was crisp and quite professional. I was impressed with how good each team is. They are both worthy of their high national rankings and it should be interesting to see how they end-up at season end.

Event Summary

In the end, this was another spectacular event and I want to thank Bob and Chuck, again, for including me. It is always such a pleasure to get together with good people. The annual Stanford football gathering is an event that is a yearly highlight which I have gone to great lengths not to miss (if at all humanly possible).

My love for this event is evidenced by one year in which I was just returning from a two-week business trip both domestically in the U.S., as well as a week in Japan where I landed at 10am and was at the tailgate by noon! I was literally a walking-zombie from lack-of-sleep and jet-lag but there was no way I was going to miss this event.

I’m already counting down the days to next year where, once again, we can hear Bob’s infamous call of “FIRST DOWN! STANFERD!!!”

Washington D.C. (September 22-25, 2013)

Posted on October 4 by admin

Washington Memorial 9/24/13

“I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.” (10 December 1964, Oslo, Norway)

“We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” (31 March 1968, National Cathedral, Washington, D.C.)

“Make a career of humanity. Commit yourself to the noble struggle for equal rights. You will make a greater person of yourself, a greater nation of your country, and a finer world to live in.” (18 April 1959, Washington, D.C.)

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.” (1963, Strength to Love)

Lincoln Memorial 9/24/13

Optimized-Martin Luther King Memorial wall

Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial

Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial – Stone of Hope

“I oppose the war in Vietnam because I love America. I speak out against it not in anger but with anxiety and sorrow in my heart, and above all with a passionate desire to see our beloved country stand as a moral example of the world.” (25 February 1967, Los Angeles, California)

“If we are to have peace on earth, our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation; and this means we must develop a world perspective.” (24 December 1967, Atlanta, Georgia)

Steps leading up to Lincoln Memorial 9/24/13

MLK Jr. Memorial – A Stone of Hope

MLK Jr. Memorial – A Stone of Hope

Lincoln Memorial 9/24/13

A Stone of Hope

Lincoln Memorial

Capture begins with process

Posted on October 3 by Kevin

Capture begins with process

As a prelude to an upcoming series of blog posts I will be posting on the topic of “Building an effective capture solution” I wanted to preface these posts and focus on the question of ‘where do I start if I want to build an effective capture solution?’.

More education, less self promotion

With information capture being such an obvious way to decrease operational costs, increase efficiency, reduce risk and assist with compliance, then it begs the question of why wouldn’t everyone be using capture? I think the answer lies in the fact that as an industry we have done a dis-service to our community. Every vendor’s product is the best *sarcasm*. Everyone can offer the complete solution *eyeroll*. Vendors compete for business on a list of features instead of a genuine desire to assist their customers become more productive *disgust*. Of course this is a generalization and not every vendor, or person, is so self-centered but my point is that a resource such as the AIIM community, which is rich in educational information and maintains a genuine vendor-neutral stance, are too few and far between. We need to breakdown the components of a capture solution to their lowest common denominator and share with others how to achieve an effective capture solution so that everyone can benefit from a technology that has a proven track record of success. Breaking down the components of a capture solution involves three basic parts: User Interface, Processing and Storage. It’s really that simple. Of course this is an oversimplification but those are the basic three components.

Eating my own dog food

Having spent nearly my entire professional career in the document capture/ECM industry you would think that someone like me might suggest that a ‘solution’ starts with consideration of capture hardware or capture software. Not true. An effective capture solution, to the contrary, does not start with capturing information from an image. Rather it starts with a well-defined process. Capture is an extension of a process that makes things more efficient.

To give some specific examples I would like to provide four different business processes and breakdown the ‘Activity’, as it might happen in a manual process, and the ‘Benefit’, which is the result of what we are trying to achieve. You will notice, while it’s pretty obvious, that the ‘Activity’ in each case can be slow, costly and inefficient yet many organizations continue to operate in this fashion because it’s the traditional way of doing business. However, if you truly consider the ‘Benefit’ and know that in each ‘Process’ example below there are well established document capture solutions that can drastically improve these processes then hopefully this will drive more adoption of such a fantastic technology:

Process	Activity	Benefit
Contact Management	Typing the information from a Business Card into Contact Relationship database	You want to be able to organize and retrieve contact details
Expense Management	Entering the information from a receipt into an Accounts Payable system	You want to get reimbursed for your expense
Invoice Management	Manual Data Entry of vendor, terms and total information into ERP application	The organization would like to realize pre-pay discounts
Inventory Management	Keying the line item details from a Packing List into inventory system	The business can be more efficient by making product available for sale quicker

Building an effective capture solution:

Part 1 of 3 (User Experience/Device/Interface)
Part 2 of 3 (Capture/Processing/Transformation)
Part 3 of 3 (Storage/Business Policy/Workflow)

Your killer SaaS app

Posted on September 20 by Kevin

Is your SaaS value proposition convincing enough without automatic data entry?

Imagine you’ve just created the next ‘killer’ Software as a Service (SaaS) app and you are absolutely convinced your new software service is going to revolutionize a particular industry or solve a significant pain point for organizations all over the world. You create some compelling sales and marketing materials with a heavy emphasis on Return on Investment. After all, you have conviction that your service is going to help businesses decrease operational costs, improve worker productivity and provide much better access to information which all translates to achieving tangible payback on your customer’s technology investment.

So you’ve done your research, you’ve developed the software application; you created awesome marketing materials, assembled a sales team and created a terrific support structure but for some reason your totally revolutionary SaaS application just isn’t selling as well as you had hoped. Do you think that you might be overlooking a feature or function that is so fundamental to providing tangible Return on Investment that customers simply cannot say “No” to immediately deploying your innovative solution?

Time is money

I might really be overstating the obvious but employers pay employees to work, not do data entry. Whether your core expertise is in accounting, customer service or mechanical, your employer pays you to spend a majority of your time focusing on your respective skills. However, organizations often overlook the total amount of time that is consumed with such tedious activities such as manually entering data from a bank statement into an accounting system. Or how many total hours field service technicians are spending collecting and entering work order data into an ERP system. These are real, tangible costs that the organization is paying. This directly relates to unrealized business productivity and effects the financial bottom-line significantly. Time is money and time utilized manually entering data into systems is, quite frankly, a waste.

Use cases for Information Capture

Let’s take a look at a few use case scenarios and focus on Mobile Information Capture, specifically, since there is a lot of interest in this area and there is an abundance of data to support that this is one of the greatest opportunities to achieve quick return on investment.

First, consider the industry of Field Service technicians. According to a November 2011 study by Dave Wood of Harvey Spencer Associates (HSA) entitled “A Study of the Mobile Capture Marketing in the United States”, he cites DF Blumberg Associates as sizing the Field Service market at $225 billion in 2011 and growing to $500 billion by 2018 with nearly half of the 3 million workers using mobile productivity solutions by then. Since a good majority of these mobile devices will most likely be equipped with a camera this translates directly into a great opportunity to provide these workers with the ability to nearly effortlessly snap pictures of objects such as work order signatures, checks for payment, assessment photos or even invoices and then automatically have the data extracted from these images to populate database fields in a Field Service SaaS application. Just to name a few of the Field Service benefits for Mobile Capture could be enhanced customer service, the ability to realize the payments quicker and, of course, improve overall worker efficiency.

In a second use case scenario, also taking data from the same Mobile Capture Market survey, consider the Transportation industry. For the survey, they focused on Long Haul Trucking. They found that this particular market featured 1.9 million trucks and 1.7 million deliveries daily. The research showed that each delivery generated a packet of documents that must be captured for invoicing, with an average of 5 pages per packet. This translated into a total capture volume of this market of 8.5 million documents PER business day. The types of items that needed to be captured will slightly vary depending on the particular trucking organization, yet generally documents such as Bills of Lading, Trip Sheets, Scale Tickets and Vehicle Expense Receipts were common amongst most organizations. After some calculation of the projected number of drivers that will have access to dedicated scanners or multifunction devices, the survey predicted that approximately 400,000 drivers will have only smart phones as their primary capture device. This presents a terrific opportunity to capture all these documents DURING the trip instead of waiting until the trip is complete which could be days, or even weeks later.

The last use case scenario shared by the HSA survey was general Capture to Cloud. This was predicted to be, by-far, the largest growth opportunity for Mobile Capture and anyone would be hard pressed to argue this prediction. With the prediction of 2 billion smart phones by 2018 and cloud storage vendors competing like crazy for market share, it only stands to reason that these factors are going to contribute to huge growth for Capture to Cloud applications using mobile devices.

Bringing easy to use, yet highly-effective Ubiquitous Information Capture into the mix

Now that you have your killer SaaS app ready for prime-time. Your story is polished and you are earning business because your SaaS application is addressing customer pain points such as decreasing operational costs, improving worker productivity and providing better access to information. You can prove, without a doubt, a tangible Return on Investment with reduced labor costs associated with manual data entry and you recognize the unbelievable potential in the Mobile Capture market, so the question begs, ‘what do you do to make your SaaS application even more appealing to potential customers?’

‘Add Data Capture to you SaaS’ is the answer. It’s really that simple. The technology has evolved over the past couple years so that the technology offers extremely advanced features and functions that are completely transparent to the users themselves. This helps achieve a pleasant user experience which helps drive adoption of the solution among users. Additionally, the behind-the-scenes technology is performing tasks traditionally done by humans so the processing is highly effective from an automation standpoint. The user simply snaps a picture and this technology can automatic recognize the type of document and will intelligently extract all the information from the image.

With this new Data Capture capability not only will your SaaS application provide a much more elegant user experience but you can absolutely guarantee cost savings to your customers with the quantifiable amount of time that is recouped by not having users do manual data entry. The benefits of your SaaS can be incrementally increased with this new Data Capture capability. Overall you can offer a truly appealing ROI story before you even being to discuss all the wonderful capabilities of your particular application. The additional features are just like icing on the cake to solidify the sale.

Total Hours x Dollars per Hour = Tangible Cost Savings

This helps achieve a few things in your favor as the preferred software vendor of choice:

* Encourages your customers to make a quicker decision on purchase and implementation of your solution because every day they choose not to make a decision they are squandering money and resources
* Helps differentiate your application from competitors with valuable business functionality that makes the user experience much more enjoyable and helps drive higher adoption rates
* The likelihood of selling more subscriptions to your customers is higher because they can justify adding more licenses due to the fact that they have proven ROI

So, are you ready to take your killer SaaS app to the next level with Ubiquitous Information Capture?

Kevin's Barnhouse

Technology, Movies, Life and Family!

Room 237 (Movie)

Stanford football 10/5/13

Washington D.C. (September 22-25, 2013)

Capture begins with process