Tag: Innovation

Types of Innovation

It is remarkable how many people are under the false assumption that companies are either innovative or not.   This is a very polarizing and simplistic perspective that does not take into account the different types of innovations that companies can and do pursue. For this post, let’s break down innovation into two dimensions:  Technology and […]

Open Platform Innovation Jam a Huge Success!

Constant Contact’s AppConnect and Mobile Application teams hosted an Open Platform-themed Innovation Jam July 10 and 11, 2014. It was open to any member of the Constant Contact team, and participants were encouraged to come up with cool new ideas by mashing up features, functionality, and coolness from different apps with open platforms. Read more […]

Innovation: Putting Your Money Where Your Mouth Is

Supporting and fostering innovation within a company is challenging and there are many ways that organizations try to foster innovation. I have worked for companies that: Tell employees they can dedicate 10 or 20 percent of their time to their own projects. Host “Innovation Weeks.” Form collaborative “Innovation Teams” to brainstorm innovative ideas. All of […]

Location-based Services

Constant Contact Labs is committed to the research of new technologies in support of our mission to bring innovative new services and products to our small business customers. To that end, we’ve been looking very closely at Location-based services and technology. Location-based services have their roots in local search but have recently begun to penetrate […]

Applying Data Mining Techniques to MapReduce

Here at the Labs, we have been playing around with the MapReduce programming model (namely the open-source Hadoop implementation) for a while, but have been relatively conservative up till now. Most of the jobs that we have done thus far have been relatively simplistic, being more or less basic aggregation functions, with the most difficult […]

Review of an Empty Canvas

(Since its launch a few weeks back, the iPad has been a hot topic at Constant Contact both internally and in questions and comments from customers. As part of its technology investigation charter, Labs has been coming to grips with what the iPad is all about. This is the first of two contrasting opinion pieces […]

Know What You Don’t Know

This past weekend, I attended No Fluff Just Stuff in Boston. It was, as usual, a great conference. One of the takeaways I’d like to reflect on is something Venkat Subramaniam said during Sunday’s speaker panel. (Update: Venkat was quoting another NFJS speaker, Mark Richards explaining the “Knowledge Pyramid”). I asked the question “how do […]