Briefings Direct

Listen as innovative retailers Alibris and QVC deal with huge demands on their systems and processes to meet the holiday peak season fulfillment. With the help of global shipping services providers like UPS, these retailers wrestle with a 3-times increase in orders despite rising customer expectations on fast and dependable holiday shipping. The feat of satisfying some 870,000 orders per day is nothing short of a modern miracle. Even Santa would be impressed. Join Mark Nason, vice president of operations at Alibris, and Andy Quay, vice president of outbound transportation at QVC, as we hear how the online peak season comes together in this sponsored podcast moderated by Dana Gardner, president and principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Read a full transcript of the discussion at: http://briefingsdirect.blogspot.com/2007/12/peak-season-for-retailers-like-alibris.html. Sponsor: UPS.

The Android open source mobile platform made a splash in October when Google announced it, along with the Open Handset Alliance (OHA). The impact of such a platform on cell phones has been debated, yet the implications for an entirely new class of mobile internet devices has received less attention. In this podcast, John Bruggeman, chief marketing officer of Wind River Systems, digs in to the technical, business model and open source implications of Android and OHA -- but he goes a step further. Android will lead, he says, to a new class of potentially free mobile internet devices (MIDs) that do everything a PC does, only smaller, cheaper and in tune with global mobile markets that favor phones over PCs for web connectivity. Listen as Interarbor Solutions Principal Analyst Dana Gardner interviews Bruggeman on the long-term disruptions that may emerge from the advent of Android. Read a full transcript of the discussion at: http://briefingsdirect.blogspot.com/2007/12/wind-rivers-john-bruggeman-on-google.html.