Office Max!

Alyssa Krinsky of TVNewser talked Tuesday with CNBC’s Carl Quintanilla, who is the co-anchor of the business news cable network’s Squawk Box show every morning.

I was never a big fan of the Wall Street Journal because of their highly partisan editorial pages but I still read it for the business news (and no, I don’t read Playboy for its articles). Then just about 2003, I completely gave up paper versions of newspapers and since then get all my news from a variety of online resources. In other words, I never felt the need to visit the WSJ website.

I was patient and finally received the good news I have been awaiting to get my groove back. We got some good business news which will sadly take Scott out of town for a few days, but he will be back to celebrate the 4th of July with us. In addition, I got good teaching news.

I usually listen to podcast when I commute or when I am out running. This way, I make full use of my time and learn something instead of doing nothing. I have listed my Top 10 Geek Business Podcast. These podcast will help you stay engaged in the tech sector and open up new business opportunities for you.

MORE ROONEY: You know, it’s so interesting. I was thinking about this, this week, also, because nobody used to cover business. That was — it was only in the last couple of decades that business news has become really in the forefront. And now it’s sort of in the same genre as sports, and that is that you really have to get close to your subjects in order to cover them, and then these cozy relationships develop.

She spearheaded the creation of the program in 1979, when she was serving as news director at the South Florida public television station, WPBT. When NBR launched for the first time in January 1979, she both managed the program and served as its co-anchor. The program, celebrating its 25th anniversary of its national syndication this year, was nationally syndicated in 1981 and remains the leading source of daily business news on television. NBR has been credited for spawning the genre of daily news programming broadcast and cable television.

CNBC announced this afternoon that Darren Rovell will join CNBC to cover sports business…

Just for those curious, the two companies from my original list that are exactly where I’d want to work are: Capgemini US and Computer Sciences Corporation. The other companies that caught my interest after the fact (and where I might still work, but probably not on a “life-long career” basis) are: The Lash Group and Wells Fargo. Other companies were there, but as I said, most were web design, or programming, or specifically financial programming. Then I thought, isn’t that what the guys on Office Space did?

Steve Diller, Nathan Shedroff, and Darrel Rhea have written a book - "Making Meaning: How Successful Businesses Deliver Meaningful Customer Experiences" - that really targets a deep issue in our lives - meaningful customer experience. How we experience our engagements with brands, and the business people delivering those brands, shape much of our daily lives. It can turn our day sour, or make our day smooth. We wish we could have more meaningful experiences when we come in contact with our suppliers and our providers of things we need or use. How often do you have a meaningful customer experience?

There is a deluge of media portals that have opened up recently. General news channels like NDTV and Zee News have also sprouted business channels like NDTV profit and Zee Business to compete in the business news space with CNBC-TV18. With all this activity in the TV space, radio and print are not far behind. With the recent legislation of allowing more private FM players into the market, maybe we will soon have a city based radio news channel as well. The print media has seen brand new papers like Mumbai Mirror and DNA in Mumbai and the entry of Hindustan Times into the Mumbai market. With the economy of Bangalore, Chennai and Hyderabad also booming, it won’t be long before many news papers start making a foray into these markets as well. Finally, the greatest revolution in news media is going to be in the internet space with the Blogosphere gaining popularity as in your face kind of journalism. The plethora of ideas and vastness of the coverage that the Blogosphere is made up of cannot be ignored. With the world moving towards a pod-casting, RSS- Really Simple Syndication and Push Button Publishing kind of a market, the content is not only going to get diverse, but also very customer specific.

Brent Simmons has confirmed that Newsgator has purchased NetNewsWire. One of the reasons Brent gave for the purchase is excerpted below

The first is that we get requests constantly about syncing—not just better syncing, not just between copies of NetNewsWire, but with Windows RSS readers, PDAs, Outlook, and so on. People even ask us to create a website version for when they’re away from their normal computers.

I made the decision to start a blog after I realized that many of my clients and friends were checking my pbase site to see what new images I was adding to my web albums. Since my pbase site has expired, I decided that it was important to develop a newsletter-style site where my current clients could see what I’ve been up to, brides and grooms could get a sneak peek at their wedding pictures, and my friends and family could check out my recent work. By incorporating some personal notes into my business, I believe that it will give current clients a chance to get to know me better and will give prospective clients some insight into my personality. I firmly believe that the better I know you and the better you know me, the better your photographs will be, so a blog is definitely in order! Also, since my business is so near and dear to my heart . . . it only seems natural to mix business news with personal news.

11. Co-worker commenting: "You were on vacation? Gee, I didn't notice." Does that mean I could have stayed on vacation another week? How long can one go without showing up for work before anyone notices? Sounds like a gag from Office Space.

It’s an open question if Ailes can replicate his Fox News success in business news. Fox News Channel succeeded because it easily and smartly defined itself in opposition to what its core audience perceived to be bias on the part of the other networks. But nobody regards CNBC and Bloomberg TV the way Fox viewers regarded CNN and MSNBC. And CNBC has solid right-wing credentials. Mark Haines, the host of Squawk Box, routinely greets his colleagues at CNBC Europe by asking what’s going on in Socialist Land. CNBC’s idea of a leftist is a Wall Street Democrat like Roger Altman. And the network has given over an entire show to supply-sider Larry Kudlow. The gang at CNBC bears some resemblance to the House Republican caucus—an all-white, overwhelmingly male group in which centrists are branded as liberals and marginalized.

If you follow business news, you probably know that New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer has made his reputation lately by prosecuting big corporations – especially financial corporations like banks and Wall Street firms – for all sorts of vicious corporate crimes. Except, he has not actually been prosecuting these firms in actual courtrooms. Apparently what he does is investigate a firm for a few months, driving them nuts with subpoenas for all sorts of financial records – then he calls a press conference and accuses them of fraud, or some other form of “greed” invariably involving making money for “insiders.” The company is worried about being sued, the officers are worried about going to jail – so they cut a deal. Eliot Spitzer then calls another conference, claims a victory for the “little guy” and brags about how big a fine he got the company to pay for whatever it was they admitted to to avoid prosecution. The company doesn’t get sued, and Eliot Spitzer gets lots of great publicity for his anticipated run for governor without having to actually prove his case in court.

I spoke with Laurence Haughton earlier today and he said something really interesting. (He always does). He said that business news isn't done right - that they should look to ESPN for guidance. I find it interesting because a lot of our discussion about that ties in with my Morespace essay, about why people don't get excited about business even though they should. Anyway, now I can't help but thinking how cool it would be to see a business version of PTI.

When Neil Cavuto opened his "business news" show today (May 27, 2005) claiming that stocks were up because "al Zarqawi could be down," and that Fox is "abreast" of some news about Hooters Air, I knew it was going to be one of those alternate-reality kind of days on Your World w/Neil Cavuto. Sure enough, I was right.

Next came an interview with one of the founders of JibJab, another news break, an interview with two pilots who are fighting the rule that pilots must retire at age 60, the "Biz Blast" segment in which Cavuto delivers 6 second business news clips, and then a segment with Charles Payne of Wall Street Strategies based on a USAToday article titled, States take in record $600B.

Comment: So, the main themes for today were sex, the false claim that the stock market rose because al Zarqawi seems to be injured or dying, sex, the false claim that something or someone is punishing France and Germany for not supporting our war, sex, the false claim that the economy's doing great, and sex. Sex, lies and video tape. This is what passes as "business news" on Your World w/Neil Cavuto.

I use quotes when using the word business here because the "business news" is scant compared to the propagandizing. For example, last Saturday on Forbes on Fox, one segment was titled, The Liberal Media: Enemy of America and Your Money? Another segment was titled, Stop North Korea's Nukes by Attacking China's Economy.

In less than a decade, China has emerged as a manufacturing powerhouse and an indispensable source of low-price goods - toys, furniture and electronics, among others. The expiration on Jan. 1 of global textile quotas has flooded world markets with Chinese apparel.

Forrester Research forecast the U.S. online advertising and marketing spending will increase 23 percent this year to reach $14.7 billion. In five years, the Cambridge, Mass., research firm expects Web marketing spending to rival cable TV and radio, accounting for $26 billion, 8 percent of total ad spending.

If you watched Neil Cavuto today, you'd think that the rate hike was due to a mentally ill Alan Greenspan. Here are some choice quotes from the anchor of the "most watched business news show on the planet," on the "fair and balanced news" channel:

I give the "Offshore Business Magazine" "Two Very BIG Thumbs Up! It's 36 colorful, well laid out pages, of well written articles, backed up with research and photos, tables, and charts. The index lists about two dozen articles and they're in diverse but relevant categories of offshore business, including; offshore business news, offshore banking, offshore gambling, offshore information (ie. laws, jurisdictions, products and prices) and offshore financial center (report/overview of a tax haven). In future issues of "Offshore Business Magazine", they'll...

And where the slump has come is particularly interesting. According to today's Wall Street Journal, "Excluding sales of autos and parts, which are volatile, and gasoline, which reflects rising pump prices, sales declined 0.1%, the first such drop in almost a year. Sales of clothing, electronics and furniture, and sales in general at department stores and restaurants all fell." If people aren't buying more stuff, it will get ugly fast.

Now that the large companies are jumping into blogging, how can you, the small business owner compete with them? While you might not have the staff or the resources these companies might have, you can still create a professional blog, in which you can share your business news, ask for feedback on your products, and have your happy customers post testimonials for you. Your business blog is an excellent tool to toot your own horn and tell your target customers why they should do business with you, rather than your competitor.

I hadn't picked up this publication in years, but needed something to replace my subscription to the Wall Street Journal. I am impressed beyond works with the quality of this publications. Not only does it give me basic business news, but there are a lot of marketing related articles and profiles of business executives I respect.

Business Buzz will be providing information on business news, company news releases, new technology and trade show news.

We will look forward to your comments and business news imput.

Jeff Nemcher, the producer and host of the site, appears to have just started the venture. Jeff owns? works for? Van Gogh Communications, so this could be a marketing tool for his business or a revenue generator, I can't tell. But so far, it's an interesting mix of daily blogging and podcasts featuring interviews with local business folks. To me it looks like an interactive chamber of commerce combined with a cool local radio show and daily business news updates. ...

Does The Wall Street Journal Risk Becoming Irrelevant? Predictions Contributed by Mike on Thursday, February 24th, 2005 @ 03:04AM from the learn-to-play-online dept. Last year, Adam Penenberg knocked the NY Times for becoming increasingly irrelevant in an online world. By locking up their archives, they made it difficult to be found in Google -- and in an online world, if you're not found on Google, you barely exist. If that was bad, things may be much worse for the Wall Street Journal, according to Penenberg. We've covered this issue before. Many...

Rupert Murdoch, the CEO of News Corp., the parent company of Fox News, is trying to decide whether or not to launch a 24-hour cable business news channel. Rumor has it that if he decides to do so, the channel would debut sometime this fall.

While business news isn't particularly interesting to many of us, we thought it important to monitor Fox's weekday "premier business news" program, Your World w/Neil Cavuto, in an effort to show that Your World isn't a "business news" program at all. Your World airs weekdays at 4:00 p.m. ET and again at 1:00 a.m. ET and it spews forth the same right wing propaganda heard on other Fox News shows, under cover of being a "business news" show. When we learned that News Corp. was considering launching a business channel, we were alarmed because should...

To give you an example of what "business news" means to Rupert Murdoch, News Corp. and Fox News, here is what took place today on Your World w/Neil Cavuto, "the most watched business news show on the planet," anchored by Neil Cavuto, who Fox News advertises as the "king of business news" (today Brenda Buttner was the substitute host):

There wasn't one speck of business news. Literally. Nothing. The closing numbers on Wall Street weren't even mentioned.

Comment: If the shows on the new "business news" channel Rupert Murdoch envisions are anything like this "business news" show, we'll end up with two 24-hour cable networks spewing right wing propaganda instead of one.

And Wes still seems unaware of the MNW 1973 photo shoot I'm digitizing. That would be Faux business news.

A 24-7 Faux Business News Network? So, their gonna dedicate every hour of everyday to selling the products of their Faux propaganda broadcasters. Faux QVC. Oh goodie. Selling products that improves their profits is the only business the Faux people care about.

Blogs and other on-line tools that enable companies to speak directly to consumers are pushing the news media out of their central role in public relations, says the head of the world's largest independent PR firm.

Richard Edelman, president and chief executive officer of Edelman Public Relations Worldwide, said that as PR practitioners rely less on the media to get messages out, they need to act more like journalists.

The SEC has again gone after customers of a company for allegedly helping to perpetrate the company's securities fraud by "round-tripping," i.e., creating fictitious transactions that were reported as revenue. As part of the settlement, the customers' principals, as well as the company insiders who were involved, were barred from serving as an officer or director of a publicly-held company.

The SEC announced today that it had reached a settlement with the former controller, former operations manager, and several former customers and vendors of Suprema Specialties, Inc., a now-defunct cheese manufacturer based in Paterson, N.J. customers in question.

Prices may be good at Best Buy but most stores will honor the price when shown documentation.

I actually went there and asked to copy the card in front of the merchandise and took it to Office Max...where I paid the Best Buy price. Takes a bit more time but Best Buy doesn't get the $$.

Office Depot offers to recycle electronics for free: This is a Very Good Thing. I'm not an Earth-muffin or anything, but old electronics do some really crappy things to the environment.

Don't be so quick to toss out your old PCs, fax machines or digital cameras — office supply retailer Office Depot is offering to recycle one electronic product a day for free all through the summer, according to a published report Tuesday. [...]

The offer includes all brands of electronics, and products including computer monitors, digital cameras, copiers, fax machines, cellphones, personal digital assistants (PDAs) and TVs that are 27 inches or smaller, the report said.

CNET (www.cnet.com), the trusted, unbiased resource for people interested in enhancing their life with personal technology and a property of CNET Networks, Inc. (Nasdaq: CNET), today announced its new "At Work" section (http://work.cnet.com). Edited by technology journalist Rafe Needleman, CNET At Work is a comprehensive collection of editorial and community features designed to help small business owners and individuals discover the technologies that can best improve their productivity.

Research by the Business Continuity Institute reveals that 20% of businesses still do not have disaster recovery plans, despite respondents believing that terrorism, fire and flood present significant threats to their business operations.

Andy Tomkinson of the BCI described the results of a new survey to be released to the public during the upcoming Business Continuity Awareness Week, saying, "The BCI awareness survey provides a timely reminder that more needs to be done to help business prepare for disruption. It is a wake up call for Government and business to come together and highlight what needs to be done, to prepare for better disaster recovery and business continuity planning."

"The national roll out of Vonage's broadband telephony product at Office Depot presents a great opportunity, which will allow us to prove the value of our products on retail shelves," said Daniel Elwell, director of New Business Development for Vonage. "We are looking forward to transform the telecommunications industry with successful sales margins with one of the nation's top retailers, as Office Depot's market savvy and educated sales representatives demonstrate the value of broadband phone service to an untapped market segment."

To compete with Office Max more effectively, Office Depot introduced a new invoice procssing capability for its customers. This article goes into detail on the decision to implement this new capability and its payback for Office Depot and its customers.

With over $12 billion in annual revenues and more than 50,000 employees, Office Depot is one of the world's largest providers of office products. The company operates nearly a thousand stores in 23 countries, supported by 22 delivery centers, more than 60 local sales offices and 13 regional call centers. With over $2.6 billion in annual sales, Office Depot is also the world's second largest online retailer.

Challenge

With equally large and highly aggressive competitors in Staples and Office Max, Office Depot knew that they could not compete on price or assortment alone and needed its own advantage in the marketplace. And as the number of Office Depot customers has grown dramatically over the past several years, the cost, complexity and manpower to service this customer base, especially the business clients, had increased as well. These business customers (mom n' pop operations to Fortune 500 companies) represent a highly profitable and vital segment for Office Depot.

Office Depot established there BSDnet B-to-B online network to enable business customers to shop, order, and manage shipments online. While these customers were able to buy online, they were unable to view account activity, parse and distribute invoices at the department or cost center level, route invoices for approval or pay for supplies via the Internet. By addressing the "back-office workflow needs" of their online business customers, Office Depot knew they would have a competitive advantage in the market. For this service to be successful, it had to meet three key criteria:

You will soon be able to use Amazon to buy your Office Depot products. OfficeMax users, take note!

Under the deal announced Friday, Office Depot will offer office supplies, furniture, and technology products through a special store on Amazon.com's office products section.

Here's a part of UPS you don't know about. UPS is aggressively pursuing this new business area, as Joe Hill reports.

This is a little-known subsidiary of the giant delivery company. It goes by the unwieldy name of UPS Supply Chain Solutions, and it performs what are, for UPS, some very peculiar functions--everything from fixing busted electronics to answering customer phone calls to issuing corporate credit cards.

Take a look at this entire blog dedicated to Eddie Steeples, an actor who does commercials for OfficeMax:

I started this blog because I was intrigued by the public's extraordinary affection for OfficeMax's Rubberband Man and the actor who portrays him, Eddie Steeples.

Christine Halvorson is the company blogger for Stonyfield Farm, which actually maintains four different blogs. She answered some questions about why her company maintains a blog. The most interesting answer to me was the first one below. For the rest, click above.

1) What kind of traffic are you getting to your blogs (individually and/or collectively)?

Since we began the five blogs on April 1, 2004, we've had a total of 160,000 visitors. (That number combines all five blogs. We actually didn't begin measuring until June 6.) We have discontinued one of the blogs, so now there are four. Of those remaining four, the most recent per month visits are:

Strong Women Daily News: 15,603
The Daily Scoop: 4,049
Creating Healthy Kids: 9,659
The Bovine Bugle: 28,237

These have been growing steadily each month.

Staples is boycotting Sinclari News. Maybe that means more business for Office Max.

Staples agreed to withdrawl advertising buys from Sinclair News. (via National Center's blog)

In a letter from National Center to the spokesman for Staples:

I read in today's Washington Post that Staples, Inc. pulled its advertising from Sinclair Broadcast news programming after it received complaints about perceived "right-wing" bias in Sinclair's programs. You are quoted in the article.

In related news, I have spent the last three years boycotting snotty, barely-sentient Staples clerks. The service was so consistiently bad across two stores that I concluded that blank stares and shoulder-shrugs must be in the training manual.

Helpful tip; if you are near a Staples pick up a stone and throw it. Odds are that you will hit an Office Depot or Office Max. Go there instead.