What am I Missy? Episode 6

Meliza Solan Surdi · December 13, 2008 · Short URL: https://vator.tv/n/5dc

Layoffs and opportunities; Price tags save money; Be one with your team

For a while now, thousands of Yahoo employees have been on pins and needles about who'd be receiving pink slips. As expected, 1500 employees were recently let go. Among those sacked was George Oates, who was Flickr's chief designer, and a high-profile member of the popular photo-sharing site. Now where will all these good people go?

Well, just a week ago, Microsoft poached a top Yahoo executive to be president of its Internet services business. This may be an opportunity for Microsoft to snag some more.

See: Yahoo layoffs, live on Twitter

Supermarkets may have found a solution to slash costs. On what? Price tags! According to Sunit Saxena, CEO of Altierre Digital Retail, one national chain wastes 90 million sheets of paper on price tags. That's a lot of trees.

Altierre plans to resolve this problem by swapping paper with electronic price tags. That's good news for supermarkets that want to save on paper and labor costs. But I kind of like those workers tagging the food. Now who am I going to ask where the random grocery item is?

See: Digital price tags save energy and costs

This week, we featured "Lessons Learned" by Tony Fish of AMF Ventures. He says be "telepathic" with your team, which doesn't mean stare at your colleagues and assume you know what they are thinking. He means take out the pain, drama, and of course all the politics and just be one.

Sounds like something I heard in a yoga class. Great for team building. Sign me up.

See: Take the pain early

Meliza Solan Surdi

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Altierre Corporation

Startup/Business

Joined Vator on December 4, 2008

Altierre Corp., a leading provider of wireless dynamic pricing solutions for retailers, is revolutionizing the world of price change and signage as it brings brick-and-mortar stores into the digital age. Currently focusing on the grocery-store subsector, Altierre provides single-platform hardware, software and other IT solutions that enable chain-wide dynamic pricing, improve price accuracy, sharply reduce costs and paper waste, and improve communication with consumers from the onset of the shopping experience to the point-of-purchase. Current price-change processes are unable to keep up with the explosion of information required to serve the diverse needs of retailers and consumers. By addressing a major pain point within the $3 trillion US retail industry, Altierre's digital network solution marks the "next big thing" in retail. Incorporated in 2003, Altierre is headquartered in San Jose, Calif.