Next week, Rob Stowell, Director of Strategic Solutions at ByteManagers, and Nina LoCicero, Director Digital Strategy at Brady Corporation, will be presenting:  The Data Whisperer: Product Data tells you how to drive value, are you listening? Attendees will learn: How to make your data SHOUT vs. whisper Implementing a product data MDM program: 5 Best Practices How to leverage clean ...
read more »

Optimizing product information on your website is no longer optional. It's essential if you want to keep up with behemoths like Amazon.  Accepting this new reality is easy, the difficult part comes when you reach for your wallet. For many, it's not a question of how MUCH do I budget, but simply how do I budget. Our answer is usually the same: Your data is an asset, so capitalize...
read more »

I'm often amazed how much working closely with product data affects one's brain and day-to-day thinking.  With my background as a librarian, I've always been comfortable knowing a little bit about a broad number of topics (and knowing how and where to find more information when needed).  However, it is certainly a different experience digging deep into product data to build an...
read more »

Boston here we come! In just over a week members of our BMi crew will be heading east for the 13th Bi-Annual Multi-Channel and Online Retail Conference. Whew, that's a mouthful! From August 13th-16th Hollis, Lisa and Joe will be calling Booth #30 in the Solution Zone home, rubbing elbows with our retail brethren, soaking up all the latest trends and of course doling ou...
read more »

In my days as Information Scientist in the making, I worked for one of the largest academic library systems in the U.S., in their Agricultural Sciences library - which in itself had one of the country's most impressive and comprehensive collections on agriculture and related sciences. We catered to everyone, from the nutritionist researching meal plans to the agriculturalist refining la...
read more »

If you've ever seen the TV show Mythbusters, you know that in their search for the great truths of life - whether mixing Pop Rocks and Soda will explode your stomach or whether a cell phone really can cause a plane to crash - they like to blow stuff up.  I love blowing stuff up too.  And today I'm gonna blow up the common myths about taxonomy that are holding many businesse...
read more »

I started my first job back in the "dark ages", before smart phones and the internet. You know, 1990? I worked for a mom and pop machine tool distributor. There I spent my days helping customers purchase replacement parts and tooling for large OEM operations. And, in my spare time, I would inventory "returned" parts that had been laying around for the better part of a decade without sup...
read more »

When you search with Google's web search engine, it looks for the terms in an index. This index was created from the pages that Google's robots have crawled in the past. A web search engine primarily looks for the following: If the document contains the query term (relevance) If the document is linked my many of its peers (authoritative) If it scores highly on lesser ...
read more »

There's a certain kind of person out there who reveres a moldy old dishwashing sponge as if it were the Holy Grail. It's the same kind of person whose walls are covered in a thrift store trove of velvet clown paintings. Whatever it is, what started as minor addictions and small bits of manageable clutter, soon becomes a mountain of every "Life" magazine ever printed that blocks your a...
read more »

How to best structure product data and metadata is a challenge facing many companies today. Take, for example, "Memory Organization," a complex attribute found in Memory ICs. Memory cells are organized into rows and columns and one chip can even have two different organizations of its cells. This makes it possible to have two values for the attribute. Memory Organization: 256 K x 16 b...
read more »