Tech Talks Daily

Neil C. Hughes

Episodes

Mentioned books

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Apr 7, 2022 • 30min

1937: Mass Personalization for Business Communications

Gianna Scorsone, General Manager and Head of North America at global technology company Aircall ($1B valuation), joins me on The Tech Talks Daily Podcast. We discuss the importance of mass personalization for business communications and how cloud-based, digital-first companies face fierce competition for customer loyalty. Potential and existing customer interactions with a company's sales and customer service team must be personalized and positive to distinguish a brand from similar products and services and continue driving sales growth. In the day and age of the Great Resignation and labor shortages, businesses are reassessing what's needed to retain and recruit employees. Gianna firmly believes employee retention is directly tied to the culture companies create in the workplace. As a GM, she believes in prioritizing people first, then sales. Finally, she offers advice to future sales leaders and women working in tech.
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Apr 6, 2022 • 24min

1936: Meet CyrusOne, The Global Data Center Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT)

Matt Pullen, EVP, Managing Director, CyrusOne, joins me on Tech Talks Daily. The premier global data center real estate investment trust (REIT) has over 50 data centers worldwide, including a range of facilities in London, Dublin, and Frankfurt, and some exciting expansion plans in Europe. We discuss what the future data center will look like and how increased regulation and legislation will impact the landscape. Matt also shares his predictions for the future and explores sustainability in the industry, and I learn more about the founding of the Climate Neutral Data Centre Pact. About CyrusOne CyrusOne (NASDAQ: CONE) is a premier global REIT specializing in design, construction and operation of more than 50 high-performance data centers worldwide. The Company provides mission-critical facilities that ensure the continued operation of IT infrastructure for approximately 1,000 customers, including approximately 200 Fortune 1000 companies. A leader in hybrid-cloud and multi-cloud deployments, CyrusOne offers colocation, hyperscale, and build-to-suit environments that help customers enhance the strategic connection of their essential data infrastructure and support achievement of sustainability goals. CyrusOne data centers offer world-class flexibility, enabling clients to modernize, simplify, and rapidly respond to changing demand. Combining exceptional financial strength with a broad global footprint, CyrusOne provides customers with long-term stability and strategic advantage at scale.
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Apr 5, 2022 • 37min

1935: Meeting Lifecycle Automation Technology

In April, Chili Piper, the leading inbound conversion platform for sales and marketing teams, announced a Series B of $33M led by marquee VC, Tiger Global and includes Google's Gradient Ventures as an investor. After the ongoing onset of the pandemic, Chili Piper's co-founder and CEO, Nicolas Vandenberghe, was able to win over investors in just 20 minutes. Nicolas shares his origin story which includes a great anecdote of a conversation he had with Steve Jobs and his journey to ChiliPiper. I learn more about their playbook for success how customers can increase conversion and drive more leads with a "speed-to-lead" approach.
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Apr 4, 2022 • 27min

1934: Fujitsu ServiceNow - How to Tackle Organisational Debt

No matter who you are and what kind of organisations you've worked for, everyone knows the pressure to just get it done. It can be for the sake of stakeholders, the cause, or the bottom line, but the consequences are the same: eventually you amass organisational debt. Like technical debt, this has accelerated amid recent disruption, where the need to keep things moving, at any cost, was greater than ever. But if this isn't addressed, the knock-on effect on your culture, people and all-round effectiveness can be severe. Ultimately, everyone knows organisational debt is there, but no one wants to talk about it. However, this needs to change – and fast – if businesses are to rid themselves of complexity and inefficiency. So, herein lies the purpose of this podcast episode, where our experts will be exploring some of the key things to look out for to fathom if your organisation is suffering from this debt. Complete with a deep dive into the power of IT workflows and other ways to free yourself from these shackles, to empower your people and drive growth in the remainder of the year (and beyond). Jason Fowler, VP of HR for Fujitsu in Northern and Western Europe joins me on Tech Talks Daily to tackle the topic of Organisational Debt. With twenty years' experience in the technology sector, Jason has seen first-hand the impact that digitalisation has had, and continues to have, in disrupting organisations and their employees. He believes that in the era of total tech, the people capability of an organisation becomes the principal point of commercial differentiation – and it is the role of HR to create this.
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Apr 3, 2022 • 27min

1933: Enhancing UX and Doubling Ecommerce Acquisitions by Optimizing Your Superfans

Today's guest, Jay Gibb, is a former software engineer and the Founder and CEO of B2B SaaS company, CloudSponge. Together with his team, Jay has helped thousands of e-commerce store owners optimize their word-of-mouth sales since 2010. With a unique blend of tech expertise and soft skills, Jay is an expert at helping e-commerce stores build the right features to reduce customer acquisition costs and increase sales Jay joins me on Tech Talks Daily to share his story and the critical role that their products have played in the growth stories of household name tech companies like Airbnb, Nextdoor, GoFundMe, Morning Brew and Yelp.
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Apr 3, 2022 • 17min

1932: The Tech Reimagining Your Business Phone

Mahyar Raissi, co-founder and CEO of OpenPhone, an app-based phone service that is disrupting the antiquated and clunky business telecommunications market, joins me on Tech Talks Daily. OpenPhone replaces traditional business phones designed primarily for voice communication with intuitive and full-featured mobile and desktop applications. In the last five years, there has been an explosion in collaboration technologies, such as Slack and Zoom. However, there has been little innovation in phone services, particularly for startups and small businesses for which the phone remains the center of communications. As a result, SMBs typically have to choose between basic mobile services or expensive and complicated enterprise technologies until now. OpenPhone includes features such as messaging and collaborative tools to meet business needs and integrates with other productivity applications and tools on which businesses rely, such as HubSpot, Slack, email, and Zapier. Mahyar shares his inspiring origin story where he emigrated from Iran with his family and started OpenPhone three years ago through the Y Combinator program.
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Apr 2, 2022 • 26min

1931: LGBTQ+ Technology - The Equal Hiring Index by Mathison

Arthur Woods is a social entrepreneur, LGBTQ+ advocate working at the intersection of equity and technology. He is the author of the nationwide best-selling book Hiring for Diversity and most recently co-founded Mathison, a venture-backed technological platform equipping employers with all they need to manage their diversity hiring efforts. He has delivered over 300 keynote speeches and is a three-time TEDx speaker. He has advised multiple brands over his career including Disney, Sonos, the Smithsonian, and many more. Arthur was named to Forbes 30 Under 30 and 40 Under 40 by BEQ. He is a World Economic Forum Global Shaper, GCT Entrepreneur in Residence, and many more! He was the lead of Google's Education and Schools division. Since then he has been at the forefront of developing platforms such as Imperative, Out in Tech & Social Impact 360, a collegiate social enterprise education program. Arthur joins me in a discussion about how technology can help companies reduce bias in hiring and the biggest problems in most companies' diversity hiring efforts. We also explore some helpful tools (free or paid) and strategies that HR teams can use to make better hiring decisions. I also learn more about the Equal Hiring Index® and how tech can help assess your full hiring and retention process to ensure equity and access.
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Apr 1, 2022 • 17min

1930: The Tech Changing How We Are Charging the World.

ZapBatt started with a simple experience that we have all been through, being stuck with a dead battery and having no time to charge it. Their story is centered around people who want to improve how we use energy, and how that impacts our planet. From backgrounds in waste energy regeneration, batteries for wildlife, e-bikes, and more, their team has helped shape the technology they have built and their impact on the world for both consumers and companies. Charlie Welch, founder, and CEO of ZapBatt joins me on Tech Talks Daily in a conversation about how they are creating a new kind of battery system to power a wide range of electrical products for both businesses and consumers. In addition to its software technology, I learn more about ZapBatt's utilizing unique battery chemistry with a nano-structured crystal compound called lithium-titanate. Compared to other batteries, a lithium-titanate battery charges faster lasts longer, and is better for the environment and the bottom line. Until now, this chemistry has mostly been used in large-scale infrastructure oil and gas projects and industrial applications.
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Mar 31, 2022 • 29min

1929: Zellis - How Hybrid Working is Changing the Business Landscape

Whether physical or digital, a good onboarding process should reflect and understand the needs, expectations, and – indeed – frustrations that come with being a fresh face. This is especially important for the key HR processes that accompany many of the critical first interactions a new hire has with their employer. George Dunnett from Zellis joins me on Tech Talks Daily about tech's role in transforming these processes. Zellis provides payroll, HR and managed services to UK and Ireland-based companies with over 500 employees. They are the largest business of this nature in the UK counting a third of the FTSE 100 as customers, serving over 5 million of our customers'​ employees and processing in excess of 60 million payslips a year. We discuss how hybrid working is positively changing the business landscape, but how many things are still missed that could be tweaked with good tech initiatives. We also explore where tech investments should go next.
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Mar 30, 2022 • 30min

1928: EDR is Not Enough. Stop Responding. Start Preventing Zero-Day Attacks.

To many organizations, endpoint detection and response (EDR) is seen as the latest cybersecurity innovation and the tool to keep their network safe. However, with attacks now only needing 60 seconds after executing to cause significant damage to an organization's network, EDR solutions give an organisation a false sense of security. With attackers now looking to cause as much damage as possible in the shortest time possible, security teams can no longer react to a cyberattack but must start preventing them altogether. So how can organizations start preventing cyberattacks and protecting themselves? Deep Instinct is the first company to apply deep learning to cybersecurity. Deep learning is inspired by the brain's ability to learn. Once a brain learns to identify an object, its identification becomes second nature. Similarly, as Deep Instinct's artificial brain learns to detect any type of cyber threat, its prediction capabilities become instinctive. As a result, zero-day and APT attacks are detected and prevented in real-time with unmatched accuracy. Chuck Everette joins me on Tech Talks Daily to discuss why EDR solutions are not secure enough to stop cyberattacks which have a low dwell time. and why prevention-first solutions will be the next layer in an organisation's security stack. Finally, we discuss how deep learning, a subset of AI, will shift an organisation's mindset from detecting and responding to cyberattacks to actually predicting and preventing them.

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