Archive for October 2, 2024

Sage appoints Cinzia Bazzo as Managing Director for Canada

Posted in Commentary with tags on October 2, 2024 by itnerd

Sage, the leader in accounting, financial, HR, and payroll technology for small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs), today announces Cinzia Bazzo as its Managing Director for Canada. This strategic hire underlines Sage’s commitment to its growing Canadian market, which is a cornerstone of the company’s North American success.

In her new role, Bazzo will oversee Sage’s Canadian business, a critical region for growth. She will focus on accelerating sales and revenue by attracting new customers and strengthening relationships with existing ones. Bazzo will also play a key role in enhancing the customer experience, advancing Sage’s position as the most trusted and thriving network for SMBs. Additionally, she will manage the region’s performance, making strategic decisions to capitalize on strong results, address challenges, and provide leadership to over 250 employees across Canada. She will lead the implementation of global and local colleague programs, including engagement, performance management, DEI, and talent development, while fostering Sage’s culture and values.

Bazzo brings a wealth of experience to Sage, with an impressive track record of driving sales growth and delivering exceptional customer experiences. In her most recent role as Country Leader for Workday in Canada, she led her team to achieve record-breaking sales. Prior to that, she held various leadership positions at Oracle, Salesforce and SAP. Bazzo is also an active member of the Business Council of Canada, a network of enterprise executives focused on strengthening the country’s economic fabric by supporting small business and entrepreneurs in communities of all sizes.

Bazzo is based in Toronto and will play a key role on Sage’s North America Leadership Team, reporting into Mark Hickman, Managing Director of North America as Sage.

TikTok Launches STEM feed in Canada

Posted in Commentary with tags on October 2, 2024 by itnerd

TikTok is home to a community of curious minds. From discovering new stories on #BookTok to exploring new cultures and finding new life hacks,#LearnonTikTok encourages our community to continue their journey of joyful discovery. Millions of Canadians come to TikTok each month to express themselves authentically, be entertained and learn new things.

Today, TikTok is thrilled to announce the launch of TikTok’s dedicated STEM feed in Canada. This feed offers a viewing experience exclusive to STEM – science, technology, engineering and mathematics – and comes to Canada to empower continued discovery on TikTok and connect a dynamic community of individuals over their shared passion for learning. Canadian users will be able to click into the STEM feed, which will be turned on by default for all Canadian users, to open up a dedicated world of knowledge and education.

The STEM feed will feature Canadian creators and organizations that share enriching educational content, such as @AsapSCIENCE@cheggbiology,@drrachelbarr@justin_agustin@nileredextra@onlinekyne@ROMtoronto@science.bae@sciencenorth and @wildkrattstv. These creators and many more, are creating a range of content that bridges the world of entertaining, engaging creativity and educational content with their unique styles.

To help ensure high-quality STEM content for our community, TikTok continues to partner with Common Sense Networks and Poynter. Common Sense reviews all content and ensures it’s appropriate for the STEM feed. And Poynter continues to partner to assess the reliability of information presented. If content does not pass both checkpoints, it will not be eligible for the STEM feed.

Foxit Announces PDF Editor and Editor Pro with AI Assistant, Now Natively Supported on PCs powered by Snapdragon

Posted in Commentary with tags on October 2, 2024 by itnerd

Foxit today announced that its Foxit PDF Editor and Editor Pro with AI Assistant are now natively supported on PCs powered by Snapdragon® processors. This integration will provide commercial and consumer PC customers with greatly enhanced performance and capabilities – such as those customers working with PDF files on Dell Technologies’ latest devices powered by Snapdragon.

Native Snapdragon support refers to software that is developed and optimized to run directly on Snapdragon processors, without the need for emulation or translation layers. This allows the software to take full advantage of Snapdragon’s capabilities – resulting in improved performance, compatibility, and battery life, as well as decreased complexity and maintenance demands – compared to running the software in an emulated environment.

Foxit solutions revolutionize PDF document management by leveraging AI innovation and the power of ChatGPT to enhance productivity and the user experience. Foxit has developed its software to natively support the Snapdragon processors used in PCs, such as those offered by Dell Technologies. This means the Foxit PDF solutions can run directly on the Snapdragon hardware – without the performance overhead of emulation. Moreover, users will benefit from intelligent automation, natural language processing, and advanced document management tools to streamline workflows, increase productivity, and unlock the full potential of their PDF documents.

Foxit’s industry-leading solutions empower PC users to create, edit, collaborate and secure PDF documents with ease. By combining the advanced capabilities of Foxit’s PDF Editor with the AI-driven natural language processing of ChatGPT, PCs powered by Snapdragon allow users to interact with PDFs more intuitively and efficiently. The integration of ChatGPT provides intelligent automation and enhances the user experience by enabling intelligent interactions for tasks such as redaction, document annotation, and form filling.

Foxit has sold to over 485,000 customers, ranging from SMBs to global enterprises, located in more than 200 countries. The company has offices all over the world, including locations in the U.S., Europe, Australia, and Asia. For more information, please visit https://foxit.com.

Sonos Is In Deep Trouble With No End To Their Problems In Sight

Posted in Commentary with tags on October 2, 2024 by itnerd

Since spring of this year, audio gear manufacturer Sonos has been a train wreck next to a dumpster fire. The company put out a new app that was rewritten from the ground up. But it was also a buggy mess with features that users loved removed. That in turn led to customers being very vocal about how bad the app was. The company downplayed all of this but was eventually forced to admit that things were broken and they needed to address these issues.

Fast forward to the present day and the company has put up a blog post along with a YouTube video saying that they are going to focus on seven items to win back the trust of the customers they angered:

  • Unwavering Focus on Customer Experience
  • Increasing the Stringency of Pre-Launch Testing
  • Approaching Change with Humility
  • Appointing a Quality Ombudsperson
  • Extending Our Home Speaker Warranties
  • Relentless App Improvement
  • Establishing a Customer Advisory Board

All that sounds nice. But it’s the YouTube video that really shows what Sonos customers think. Here’s the YouTube video below featuring Sonos CEO Patrick Spence:

This video isn’t going over well with Sonos customers based on the comments:

I could go on but you get the point. It’s pretty clear that Sonos customers don’t trust the company or Patrick Spence to get things back on track. Which also means that these people won’t be spending money on their gear and look elsewhere for their audio needs. That’s not surprising because Sonos used to be extremely good audio gear that “just worked.” Now it’s not anything near that. And when people ask me for my recommendation on home audio gear, Sonos isn’t on the list. The reason being that I won’t stake my reputation to a product that is subpar. Which Sonos is absolutely subpar at the moment. And that’s their challenge. They have to fix the reputational damage that they inflicted upon themselves, and I don’t at this point see a clear path to them doing that. And they don’t have a lot of time to do it as their competition such as Bluesound, Audio Pro, and even Apple with the HomePod lineup are going to be sensing an opportunity to take out Sonos. If they haven’t already.

Sucks to be you Sonos.