Inventures Insights December 2019
Happy Holidays!
Inventures would like to wish you a wonderful holiday season and a prosperous New Year!
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The Thread Group Certifies Google Nest Hub Max as World's First Publicly-Available 'Built On Thread' Device
The Thread Group recently announced that the Google Nest Hub Max smart display successfully passed its rigorous specification compliance and interoperability testing to become the first certified and publicly available Built on Thread device. The Thread Group conducts tests against multiple vendor configurations to ensure that technology from different manufacturers can ultimately communicate, reliably and securely. The Nest Hub Max has proven its ability to do this, and joins the growing roster of Thread-certified solutions, which currently includes more than 20 components.
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An Answer to Quick-to-launch Collaborations
Let's review a few "QUICK" facts about the Inventures CollabForum:
Quickly get your project or alliance incubation launched with the CollabForum which also offers one of the lowest fee structures available.
Utilizes 25+ years of Inventures' experience and tested and proven best practices to set up success; start small and easily scale; and seamlessly transition to larger stand-alone organizations as needs and conditions dictate.
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The Value of Outsourcing Business Operations
Outsourcing delivers a turnkey solution to manage day-to-day operations. Managing membership and financial data is a core requirement for all member based organizations. While this may seem like a simple task, it requires investment and management of staff and IT systems to execute. This can take valuable time away from strategic issues at hand as volunteers work to deliver upon the business objectives of an organization.
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Books Every Executive Should Read
What are the best business books of 2019? Rhett Power, Forbes contributor and founder of Power Coaching and Consulting, recommends several titles that may provide association leaders with valuable insights from some of the thought leaders in the business world. The first is "Reboot: Leadership and the Art of Growing Up." Author Jerry Colonna takes a Jungian approach mixed with Buddhist philosophies to help decision-makers achieve the "real you." The second is "Unstoppable: A 90-Day Plan to Biohack Your Mind and Body for Success" by Ben Angel.
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The Thread Group Certifies Google Nest Hub Max as World's First Publicly-Available 'Built On Thread' Device
The Thread Group recently announced that the Google Nest Hub Max smart display successfully passed its rigorous specification compliance and interoperability testing to become the first certified and publicly available Built on Thread device. The Thread Group conducts tests against multiple vendor configurations to ensure that technology from different manufacturers can ultimately communicate, reliably and securely. The Nest Hub Max has proven its ability to do this, and joins the growing roster of Thread-certified solutions, which currently includes more than 20 components.
The Nest Hub Max can connect to more than 30,000 smart devices from more than 3,500 vendors with the Google Assistant and the Smart Home and Local Home SDKs. Nest Hub Max's Thread support brings the Internet and the rest of the Google Nest home directly and securely to small, power-constrained devices without expensive, proprietary gateways. For example, as a Built on Thread certified device, Nest Hub Max can pair with the Nest x Yale Lock and can extend the range of either Nest Secure or Nest Connect. In the future, Nest Hub Max will be compatible with other Built on Thread certified products, regardless of their manufacturer.
"As a founding board member of the Thread Group, Google has long understood the challenges of IoT, as well as the possibilities and user benefits unlocked by a technology like Thread," noted Grant Erickson, president of the Thread Group. "With that foresight, they've been committed to Thread for more than five years, supporting and driving its development and adoption across the IoT industry's biggest players."
Thread requires less power relative to comparable solutions, which improves the battery life of devices across its network. Thread's self-healing mesh network delivers a reliable and robust network that is complementary to Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), which is critical to delivering on the promise of true IoT for consumers.
Regardless of the specific connectivity technologies used, Thread helps devices talk to different clouds, while simultaneously running multiple application layers, such as Dotdot, OCF or Weave. It does all of this without any additional hardware or software, which saves developers time and money, and promises the end user a lower cost, less power-hungry solution.
Thread's future-proof technology means certified devices can easily migrate to the Thread 1.2 specification - announced in June 2019 - which improves the network's energy efficiency, latency and node density. Thread 1.2 offers optional support for Bluetooth Low Energy devices, such as smartphones, and standardizes Thread out-of-band commissioning over Bluetooth, making it possible for devices with only a Bluetooth Low Energy radio to be a native part of a Thread mesh network.
Nest Hub Max's Built on Thread certification implementation is based on OpenThread, a Thread-certified open-source implementation of the Thread networking protocol, released by Google and adopted by a number of Thread-certified components.
More information on ‘Built on Thread' and Google Nest Hub Max products can be found here.
An Answer to Quick-to-launch Collaborations
Let's review a few "QUICK" facts about the Inventures CollabForum:
Quickly get your project or alliance incubation launched with the CollabForum which also offers one of the lowest fee structures available.
Utilizes 25+ years of Inventures' experience and tested and proven best practices to set up success; start small and easily scale; and seamlessly transition to larger stand-alone organizations as needs and conditions dictate.
Infrastructure and policies and procedures are already established allowing team collaboration to validate technology solution approaches; execute pilot projects; create specifications; develop reference implementations; facilitate interoperability testing/demonstrations; and transfer assets and intellectual property from existing collaborations looking to sunset or scale-back.
CollabForum is designed and built to handle all of your group's day-to-day operations so that you can apply your energy into achieving the goals and objectives of your collaboration.
Key benefits include a turn-key approach, a low-barrier to entry and ability to leverage Inventures' scalable, a-la-carte management services that enable cost effective operations.
Learn more about the CollabForum here or feel free to contact us at info@inventures.com.
The Value of Outsourcing Business Operations
Outsourcing delivers a turnkey solution to manage day-to-day operations. Managing membership and financial data is a core requirement for all member based organizations. While this may seem like a simple task, it requires investment and management of staff and IT systems to execute. This can take valuable time away from strategic issues at hand as volunteers work to deliver upon the business objectives of an organization.
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Turnkey Solution
Management of business operations requires staff to enter/update membership data, to respond to member inquiries, to perform overall accounting duties to include invoicing, collections, AP/AR processing, and monthly financial reporting.
Service administration requires a membership database, an invoicing system, an accounting application, email and distribution lists, and a help desk tracking system.
With outsourced services, volunteers receive the membership and financial data required to make important business decisions, without the day to day management of these underlying tasks.
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Scalability and Consistent Service Delivery
Alliances and associations tend to expand and contract during the lifecycle of the organization. By outsourcing Business Operations Services, resources can be easily scaled as organizations grow or diminish.- Services are built on best practices based on 20+years of experience.
- Client specific processes are fully documented.
- Staff are cross trained to ensure seamless delivery and coverage when staff are ill or on vacation.
- Automation is in place to support membership growth >10,000.
- Formalized training program is in place to ensure staff knowledge of best practices, client specific processes, and underlying support systems.
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Volunteers Can Focus on Strategic Initiatives
Why spend precious volunteer time on managing operational minutia? Volunteers should focus their valuable time on key decisions and initiatives that leverage their expertise in order to achieve the mission of the organization. Outsourced services provides membership and financial data to support decision making.
Outsourcing eliminates the need to worry about managing employees and payroll, rightsizing resources, coverage during absences….all the things that take away time from the important business at hand.
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Efficiency and Cost Effectiveness
The combination of best practices and automation/integration of systems enables our outsourced services to deliver efficient, cost effective solutions that provide seamless service quality. The cost of these systems are shared across all of our clients, minimizing overhead costs to any single organization.
When utilizing outsourced services, you pay for what you consume. As an organization grows or shrinks, outsourced resources can be easily right sized and allocated accordingly.
From our experience, Business Operations tends to be the first service most volunteer based organizations decide to outsource. There is little value, yet lots of headaches in having volunteers manage the day-to-day operations. In addition to Business Operations, Inventures offers a full suite of services and more information can be found here.
Books Every Executive Should Read
What are the best business books of 2019? Rhett Power, Forbes contributor and founder of Power Coaching and Consulting, recommends several titles that may provide association leaders with valuable insights from some of the thought leaders in the business world. The first is "Reboot: Leadership and the Art of Growing Up." Author Jerry Colonna takes a Jungian approach mixed with Buddhist philosophies to help decision-makers achieve the "real you." The second is "Unstoppable: A 90-Day Plan to Biohack Your Mind and Body for Success" by Ben Angel. If you are eager to learn if nootropics and supplements will give you more energy and improve your everyday output, Power believes you'll find this book an interesting read.
Third, there is "Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley's Bill Campbell." Written by three authors, it details Campbell's principles for producing high-performing teams and changing lives. A fourth Power recommendation is "Dare to Lead" by Brené Brown. Power describes Brown's book as "an honest look at what it takes to lead with unrepentant authority, bravery, and integrity." Finally, there is Robert Glazer's "Elevate: Push Beyond Your Limits and Unlock Success in Yourself and Others." This book is for any leader who has been feeling stuck in his/her role and routines. "Elevate" aims to help the executive shed those feelings by honing their emotional, spiritual, mental, and physical capacities.
Forbes (08/01/19) Power, Rhett
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