Derek Gallo

Donna Dowless came in and spoke to the NFi team on friday. Donna has lead an interesting and successful life in the entertainment industry. She has worked directly with The Beatles, James Brown, Prince and many other legendary people. She has served as the director of many top venues. She was also a Senior Vice President of Ticketmaster and helped build and grow it starting from working off of her kitchen table in the beginning. Donna Dowless has received a Lifetime Achievement Award in the Entertainment Industry and she is the only woman ever to receive one.

Donna told us the story of her life and the various lessons she has learned along the way. The basic moral was to work hard and don’t reject change. When it is challenging just know that you will figure it out. I usually don’t go for motivational speaking but I particularly enjoyed Donna’s story because it was just that, a story. She just told us about her experiences and the various setbacks she had along the way and how she persevered. I enjoyed her story because it made me remember more about how far I have come instead of where I am not. Listening to the problems she faced made me remember similar problems I have faced and how I have figured it out.

Thank you Donna. I enjoyed meeting you and hope to see more of you in the future.

The Lehman Associates have released a study on the use and satisfaction of AMS systems among large associations in North America. iMis ranked at the top among the available solutions out there. iMis holds a 37 percent market share and ranked at the top in implementation experience and product satisfaction. The study was done using national and international associations in North America with budgets greater than $2 million. iMis rated higher than others in stability/reliability, cost and ease of implementation, time, upgrade path options and performance.

Personally, from a developer’s point of view, I think iMis has plenty of room for improvement but I am probably inserting opinions based on areas I view as more important being a developer (like structure, simplicity, etc.) and not on how it is actually used by an association. All in all, it actually provides a pretty strong back-end to a CMS for an association’s website. Since it contains all the data for an association’s events, members, products and finances, and it provides a decent COM API into that data we can setup websites to be administered directly from iMis for the most part. We are actually in the process of integrating the ACTE Website directly into their iMis system. Integrated features include, membership management and registrations as well as registration for events and conferences. Check out more that NFi can do with iMIS

Everyone else is posting in response to Alex’s Spirit Airlines nightmare so I figured I would too. The truth is that airlines just don’t seem to care. Its like they know you have to get where your going so they can do a crappy job and you will still be forced to use them.

Recently, I have had to travel up to the Pittsburgh Steelers stadium to install a kiosk we had developed for them. We flew U.S. Airways. They lost our baggage on the way up which happen to have our hardware to perform the install. Great, no big deal, this thing happens from time to time and luckily we were arriving a day early so we still had time to perform the install. The real problem came with the airline’s customer service in helping us retrieve our baggage.

After going into the lost baggage office and reporting our claim they discovered that our baggage didn’t make the layover. They couldn’t figure out where it ended up however. They refused to accommodate us and told us to be on our way and they would call when they located the baggage. Hours went by and no response. We called back and nobody there had any idea about our situation at all. They looked into it and it appeared our baggage was still in D.C. where our layover was. They let us know that it would be put on the next flight up to Pittsburgh and would arrive in a few hours. A few hours went by with no baggage. We called and again, they had no idea of our situation. This time it appeared that our baggage had been shipped all the way back to Orlando! Anyway, we were told they would sort it out and call us back. What do you know, no callback. We called back again and what do you know, THEY HAD NO IDEA OF OUR SITUATION! Now the customer service people were getting frustrated with us and just trying to get us off of the phone. At one point we called and got immediately sent to the hold queue. We had another person call while we were on hold and they immediately got through, what the hell. After a day and a half of getting a different answer as to where our baggage was every time we called, we finally received our baggage. U.S. Airways would not do anything to accommodate our misfortunes. Sterling even had to reschedule return his return flight to stay late and finish the install because they delayed us starting and they continued to be difficult even while charging ridiculous fees to switch flights.