Infotrade

Ask any sales leader how selling has changed in the past decade, and you'll hear a lot of answers but only one recurring theme: It's a lot harder. Yet even in these difficult times, every sales organization has a few stellar performers. Who are these people? How can we bottle their magic? To understand what sets apart this special group of sales reps, the Sales Executive Council launched a global study of sales rep productivity three years ago involving more than 6,000 reps across nearly 100 companies in multiple industries. We now have an answer, which we've captured in the following three insights: 1. Every sales professional falls into one of five distinct profiles . Quantitatively speaking, just about every B2B sales rep in the world is one of the following types, characterized by a specific set of skills and behaviors that defines the rep's primary mode of interacting with customers: Relationship Builders   focus on developing strong personal and profe...

It’s inevitable, right? With cameras becoming ever smaller and storage becoming ever cheaper, there will come a day when all of our life’s memories are digitally preserved. Memoto , a Stockholm-based startup inspired by the Quantified Self movement, is taking a stab at this opportunity with a postage-sized camera that wearers will carry around with them constantly. It snaps a photo every 30 seconds, keeping a visual trail of your everyday life. A companion online service will store everything, catalog it by time, date and place and even help you pick out the most visually interesting moments. The company’s launching a campaign on Kickstarter to draw interest. They’re hoping to retail the camera for $279 next year in three colors of graphite grey, white and bright orange. Early backers will get the camera and a one-year web subscription for $199. So questions: Isn’t that creepy? Maybe, but actually the company behind Memoto thought about voyeuristic or awkward social...

Worldwide spending on information technology will break through the $3.7 trillion level in 2013, propelled in large part by an increase in spending on big-data technology and on cloud computing, according to the latest prediction by the research firm Gartner. Gartner made its  latest prediction  at its annual Symposium and ITxpo in Orlando today. If that number feels a little familiar, it’s not your imagination. It was just this April when Gartner said IT spending in 2012 would be  exactly that same figure: $3.7 trillion . Turns out it was $3.6 trillion. So what’s a $100 billion between friends? Anyway . Here’s another prediction: By 2015, there will be 4.4 million jobs worldwide devoted to the support of big data, of which 1.9 million will materialize in the U.S., says Peter Sondergaard, Gartner’s global head of research. Even better, he predicts that each job created by big data will generate three more outside of IT, working out to a grand total of about six mil...

City dwellers have more contacts and accumulate them at a faster rate than those who live in smaller conurbations, say network scientists. You don't have to spend long in a metropolis like New York, London, or Tokyo to sense the dramatic pace at which the locals live their lives. If you already live in one of these places, you'll get the sense by heading out into the countryside where life slows down. But while this pace is easy to sense, it is notoriously difficult to quantify because of the practical difficulties in making the huge number of necessary measurements. Consequently, nobody has pinned down the nature of this "pace of life" or why it accelerates in cities.  Today, Markus Schläpfer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and a few buddies take a big step towards a better understanding of this phenomenon. These guys have found the first evidence that humans in cities interact more often and with a greater number of other people t...

3D printers are being used to produce insoles and splints which could help millions of people with disabling foot and ankle conditions. A team at Glasgow Caledonian University is "printing" devices which are more supportive and quicker to make. Normally, making foot and ankle splints is a long and laborious process - a model of the foot is made, often from plaster, then plastic is moulded around it by hand. This process can take anywhere up to six weeks, with patients waiting in considerable pain. Prof Jim Woodburn, a specialist in foot problems at Glasgow Caledonian University, said: "Our goal is based on, for example, the Specsavers model so what we would like to do is ideally provide the patient with the device on the day." The 3D printers can produce a range of devices to help patients, including splints The team are using 3D printers to build foot and ankle supports with a new degree of precision. This new manufacturing technology builds up l...