The Stairwell

Congratulations to Dr. James C. Anderson of Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management on the launch and recent multimedia upgrade for the web site jamescandersonllc.com.

Dr Anderson and his colleagues explain how companies in business markets can use customer value management techniques to estimate the value of their market offerings, create value propositions that resonate with their customers, and maximize the return they will get on the superior value that they deliver.

His latest publication, Value Merchants: Demonstrating and Documenting Superior Value in Business is available at Amazon here.

Our fair city, Chicago, is host on August 5-7 to what is billed as 'The event for digital marketing!'. ad-tech/chicago promises to cover a wide range of valuable topics for emerging digital agencies and traditional ad agencies looking to leverage their clients' brands to build lifetime relationships with customers. Some of the conference titles that caught my eye included: "Growth industry - Online Video", "Widgets and Applications" and "The Role of Email in a Web 3.0 World". Some of the speakers among a prominent list are Kevin Kells from Google, Abbey Klassen of AdAge and Pete Blackshaw of Nielsen Online. Most presentations and other activities will be held at Navy Pier.

Anyone can register for free for events taking place in main conference halls. Or, for a small fee (to some), you can access all conferences. For prices, try going to ad-tech.com/chicago.

Be sure to check out the winners showcase for this year's digital and traditional ad competition in several divisions.

See you there perhaps!

This one comes from Anton, our esteemed Project Manager --

One of the central concerns for each of BD's clients is that their projects be delivered on time, and within budget. There are plenty of reasons why client and design firm both seek to avoid delays and extensions to projects, but it is easily summarized by stating simply that everyone seeks to avoid the dreaded Scope Creep.

Anyone who has been involved with a larger-sized technology project will be familiar with...

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Hyatt Corporation has now launched their 30th customized Catering and Events web site for their individual properties from the original Flash/XML interface designed and executed by BD. Now Hyatt locations in Orlando, Sacramento, Washington, D.C., Irvine, Waikiki, Boston, New York, Denver, Seattle, Tampa, New Brunswick, Albuquerque (and many others) use this powerful online marketing tool to attract local clients, outsell local competitors and generate new business. We at Billups Design are very proud of this project's success and look forward to providing this application to more Hyatt properties throughout the U.S., Canada and the Caribbean in 2008-2009.

After using the very handy and well built Microsoft Remote Desktop for Mac Beta 2 for the past few months I was only left frustrated by one thing - the Beta expiration message every time you launched the app! Microsoft has finally released the full Microsoft Remote Desktop for Mac 2 on their Mactopia site. Thank you Microsoft for this great free software.

I've never used iChat much, mainly because it displays an error to the effect that I've tried to log into the AIM/AOL server too many times... A co-worker told me the solution today: go to iChat > Preferences > Server Settings and use port 443. It works for me!