Vince Thompson is a digital revenue consultant, author, speaker, host of the popular BNET show Dog and Pony and is the managing partner of Middleshift LLC.
Just today, Vince posted an interview at Smart Planet, conducted with me from last week where we discussed what MeetingMade is, what it does, how it saves people time as well as a general discussion about meetings, busienss, and entrepreneurship.
Check it out, it’s entitled, “Does scheduling meetings feel like herding cats?”
Although Ben Franklin was right about many things, he was wrong when he said that time was money. Our scarcest resource, time, is actually more valuable than that. Yet we’re more careful about spending our money than our time. [1]
So, how much is your time worth?
I get asked that question a lot, especially when speaking to others who have or have had successful consulting practices. As a culture, we even like to break down large sums of money into ‘hourly wages’ just to try and make them more tangible. Kevin Garnett, the highest paid player in the NBA earns about $129,000 an hour. Putting a huge number, like his annual salary of $27,500,000, into smaller bits can make it easier for us to comprehend.
I can’t claim to make as much as KG but in my world, I can say that an hour or two of my time is worth more than a fancy meal, a night at a nice hotel, or even a quick flight to Las Vegas.
MeetingMade personally saves me between two and three hours a month. I have heard claims [from our competition] of ‘hundreds of hours saved a year’ which is very hard to believe. I actually tracked the time I spent scheduling meetings from January 1, 2007 through to December 31, 2007 and spent a total of 32.25 hours scheduling meetings the traditional way. In 2008, I used MeetingMade, and saw that number get reduced down to about eight. Since my time is worth considerable more per hour than what we will charge for this application, we feel that the value proposition is pretty strong.
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[1] 2008 The New Psychology of Time That Will Change Your Life By Philip Zimbardo and John Boyd
Since our last post, Red Wolf Online has attended the Canadian Reinsurance Conference (CRC), the American Home Office Underwriter’s (AHOU) annual conference, and the annual general meeting of the Canadian Institute of Underwriting (CIU). All three of the venues were excellent for showcasing our work and we want to thank all of the companies and individuals that made this spring a truly fantastic one for Red Wolf Online. We’re still following up with the people that we met from those conferences and there are many exciting prospects and initiatives that are coming out of those meetings.
MeetingMade has recently received some quality press from Simon Mackie at WebWorkerDaily. Simon wrote a fine review of MeetingMade that was picked up by CNN. Take a moment to check out the latest buzz about MeetingMade.
• MeetingMade at WebWorkerDaily
• MeetingMade at CNN
If you haven’t had an opportunity to try MeetingMade, have a look at a screencast put together by Simon Mackie demonstrating just how easy it is to schedule a meeting with MeetingMade.
SaaS is a software delivery model, whereas Cloud is a hosting model. SaaS is an approach to software architecture that supports scale. SaaS still needs the hardware to enable scale; this can come in the form of “traditional” hosting models (i.e. achieving high availability & scale via clustering, load-balancing, mirroring, redundancies and other hardware-based solutions) or via the Cloud (a software solution to scalability that is answered through server virtualization).
Server virtualization is in its infancy. I think it is perfectly appropriate and, in fact, desirous of large enterprise to not only be wary at this point, but to adopt a wait and see approach.
It is certain difficult to sell the cloud to large E. However, SaaS and Cloud are apples and oranges; you can eat an apple, each an orange, or make yourself a fruit bowl.
Against the odds and industry naysayers, Red Wolf Online has been very successful selling our SaaS solutions (the ‘OnDex Knowledge Management System’ in particular) into the highly regulated insurance and financial services sectors.
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