Don’t think about your future based on the past.
Think about your future based on what you are expecting.
Archive for category Insights
Healthy Coca Cola Drinks
Feb 8
I was at a meeting late last year where VP here in Japan said, “All Coca Cola products are healthy.” I couldn’t believe he could say that with a straight face.
Maybe he considered cancer a healthy condition?
Being A Great Speaker
Jan 13
My desire is to be an amazing communicator and challenging people to do the right thing.
In 2009, we saw some pretty great examples of good and bad communications. I will never forget the Miss America winner on Larry King. Although she was clearly shafted for standing up for what she believed in, her performance on Larry King’s show was very awkward and strange. I will not forget that. There are a lot of other great memories from 2009. Check out the Ten Best (and Worst) Communicators of 2009 on the Decker blog here.
What do you think? Spot on or completely off?
IT work In Japan.. Amazing!
Dec 28
Special thanks to our partners! 2009 was amazing.
In 2009 we saw the continued decline of the market. The US government continued to mess up their currency and the dollar has tanked. That hurts for those with savings in USD (c’mon guys, remember the strength of the republic is small government and little involvement in our lives) . More importantly it makes it difficult for American companies with USD-based capital to do as much.
I am sitting here on one of the last days of the office for 2009 and looking at the performance of AINEO. We have had a great year. As one of our sales team told a partner on a recent phone call, “They keep talking about the ‘financial downturn’, but I have not experienced any downturn this year. It has been a great year”.
Technically, we should have seen a downturn as everyone around us seems to have. The number of recruiters decreased. For recruiters, we saw Hudson close their Tokyo office, Access Technology shut down, and Ingenium sell themselves to an IT company. Countless other small recruiters just closed up. The big boys like Robert Walters and Robert Half also had to weather the storm.
In 2009 it wasn’t just recruiters, manufacturers were getting fewer orders, advertising companies lost deals to the crunch, and even the Japanese SME’s were holding off on ordering new equipment. It has been a tough year.
Despite all this, AINEO has had a great year. The reason we had a good year is due to our great partners. If you work with AINEO, I am convinced your business is going to prosper. I think there are two reasons why AINEO is such a great team of professionals.
1) People like AINEO Networks because we do what we say and we are transparent.
2) Working with AINEO brings corporate rewards and our partners expand their businesses.
Special thanks to everyone who has partnered with AINEO in 2009! We will do everything we can to make sure your business can grow.
We are looking forward being a strategic part of your business expansion in 2010!
How To Live Long And Strong
Nov 16
Living, caring for others, challenging yourself, could these be the secrets to life?
Check out this article.
In the book, The Millionaire Next Door, by Thomas Stanley and William Danko, 1,115 millionaires were surveyed around the country. They came up with seven common denominators among those who successfully build wealth:
They live well below their means.
They allocate their time, energy and money efficiently, in ways conducive to building wealth.
They believe that financial independence is more important than displaying high social status.
Their parents did not provide economic outpatient care.
Their adult children are economically self-sufficient.
They are proficient in targeting market opportunities.
They chose the right occupations.
Wow! This article in the Washington Post is really sad. I hate to see people lose data.
T-Mobile is a great company owned by Deutsche Telecom. A solid company. I suppose the point to the matter is their back-end was a Microsoft subsidiary called Danger Inc. Clearly they weren’t doing their job.
I found a company that is a very cost effective host. For $4.95 a month you can get unlimited Hosting on one domain. Amazingly cheap! The problem I found out (before switching to AINEO Secure) was that they don’t really back up everything. If your account is ‘too large’ you can’t even initiate a back up from your control panel.
I am very proud of all the sweat and blood we put into AINEO Secure. Running a hosting business is not for the faint-hearted.
We have been supporting mail services since 1997 so have solid communications is second nature to us. For example, our mail servers are clustered. That means that even if one of the mail servers goes down (pretty difficult with duplicate power, processors, and RAID disks), then then another server will pick up the slack.
All of the data is backed up and stored locally and in our Saitama center. I can’t imagine this type of Danger Inc problem happening to us. The last thing I want to do it let it happen to our partners.
Give us a try. AINEO Secure Hosting is great!
Alexander Kinmont of Morgan Stanley gave some interesting advice to the new Japanese prime minister today. Some very good insights-
1) Rescind the Bank of Japan law, and bring it under government control.
2) Fiscal Policy- Get away from politically motivated fiscal policy and move to economically motivated policy. Stop playing with interest rates and print money a bit.
3) Abolish the Inheritance Tax. This holds ups a lot of capital from going into the market.
Interesting thoughts to consider for Mr. Hatoyama.
Thank God for Softbank Mobile. Mr. Son has yet brought competition to the market. Ten years ago, Softbank invested in broadband and spent oodles on getting users signed up on Yahoo BB here in Japan. They were very successful and brought the pricing of NTT and KDDI into the competitive arena. Very effective strategy that I believe directly contributed to making Japan the fastest and cheapest internet in the world. Only South Korea comes close to the speed and cost we have in Japan.
Mr. Son initiated a similiar program after purchasing Vodafone’s Japan operation. Rumor is that he went into heavy debt doing that. He rolled out very cheap calling plans trying to mass up subscribers. The famous White Plan is advertised at 980 yen/month with free calls to any other Softbank users (Great marketing idea!). In actuality, they have a number of other fees that take it to over 2,000 yen and put you on a two year contract and tie you into a phone terminal.
From what I understand, SBM only has two operation centers for their mobile network. NTT Docomo has some 50 network centers throughout Japan. Can you imagine the difference in operational costs in staffing those centers? That would definitely give SBM the ability to pass on those savings to their clients.
I think the Softbank strategy is working. To make sure we can support our partners and their IT, I have three mobile phones. I have noticed the connection time on my softbank is lagging. There is a connection delay from yesterday.
Beginning to wonder if they may have oversold their network capacity… If you are in Japan and using Softbank, have you noticed?
“With individuals, you can really see what people are made of when they get pressed or upset. On the corporate level, you can really see what a company is made of by their CS (Customer Service).”