Podcasts about onedrive

On today's episode, we dig into a slew of announcements with Jeff Teper (President of Collaborative Apps and Platforms at Microsoft). We spoke to Jeff onsite in Vegas shortly after he and his team delivered a 90-minute whirlwind opening keynote – one that covered the value of community, tech Copilot, Teams, SharePoint - including Copilot in SharePoint, OneDrive, Lists, and goodness for IT with recent admin and security innovation. There were a ton of new announcements, plus the culmination of what Jeff coined "The wave of AI" - meaning the past few weeks have been a surge of AI news across Microsoft 365, Teams, Viva, Security, Loop – the big reveal being the notion of bringing that same AI service value into our beloved SharePoint. Read this episode's corresponding blog post. Plus, click here for transcript of this episode. 00:00 Intro with Chris and Mark 07:25 Conversation with Jeff Teper 50:40 Upcoming Events Jeff Teper | LinkedIn | Twitter [guest] Mark Kashman |@mkashman [co-host] Chris McNulty |@cmcnulty2000 [co-host] SharePoint | Facebook | @SharePoint | SharePoint Community Blog | Feedback  “Welcome to the new era of SharePoint and OneDrive in Microsoft 365” by Jeff Teper. “SharePoint in the AI Era: Introducing 'Copilot in SharePoint' and 10 more innovations for creators” by Adam Harmetz. “Experience the New OneDrive: Fast, Organized, and Personalized” by Jason Moore. “Microsoft Lists: Easier, Better, Faster, Stronger” by Lincoln DeMaris. “Enhanced Video in Microsoft 365” by Owen Paulus. “New era in content management and security in SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams” by Sesha Mani. Microsoft Docs - The home for Microsoft documentation for end users, developers, and IT professionals.  Microsoft Tech Community Home Stay on top of Office 365 changes Upcoming events: CollabDays Poland | May.13.2023 Warsaw, Poland - formerly known as SPS Warsaw. Power Automate & Power Apps Developer Bootcamp Automation Summit 2023 | May.19-20.2023 London, Paddington CollabDays Italy | May.20.2023 in Milan European Collaboration Summit | May.22-24.2023 Düsseldorf Fair, Germany Microsoft Build 2023 |May 23-25, 2023 build.microsoft.com | Hybrid Global Digital and in-person in Seattle. Register now. Document Strategy Forum 2023 | May 22-24 in Charlotte, NC, USA (Le Méridien Charlotte) CollabDays Netherlands | June.10.2023 Vianen, Utrecht 365 EduCon - DC | June.12-16 Washington D.C. - USA   Discover and follow other Microsoft podcasts at aka.ms/microsoft/podcasts. Follow the Intrazone at aka.ms/TheIntrazone.

Topics: -Sam saw an unexpected message on his iPhone, instructing him to share his screen with AppleCare. -A client reached out to Joe about their Synology beeping. The story went south quickly but hats off to RAID recovery from Synology. -MSP customers don't reach out even when network or ISP changes occur. -As a customer deleted 365 users, it was learned that they were sharing data from OneDrive and this data was suddenly not accessible to users that did not know its origin. -Some changes to Dropbox storage locations can cause unexpected issues, especially working with third party apps. -BitDefender had issues with MDM profiles and having to re-approve extensions. -Joe references some of our recent Patreon only content. -We take a moment to pay our respects to Bill Keogh, owner of NovaWorks in New York. Bill was involved in the Apple community for years and many colleagues had the opportunity to meet him as they trained at his facility over the years. Bill was a kind soul and will be missed.  

Jeremy Thake talks to Ahmad Mozaffar about his hackathon winning project called Magic Note.  Magic Note is an AI-powered application that allows your to plan your day smoothly and quickly without the need to open different apps like the calendar and the To-Do app and insert each of your items one by one. The app will have a simple text input where you can write all what you want to do for the next day (event, task, or a meeting with someone), after you submit your note, Magic Note with the help of AI and Microsoft Graph will understand the content and build a plan for you to review and make sure it aligns with what in your mind. Once you feel good and make the edits, submit the plan and Magic Note will add all the resources (events, meetings, and to-do tasks) and add them for you with one click. https://github.com/aksoftware98/hack-together23 (Hackathon project) https://ahmadmozaffar.net (Official Website)  https://twitter.com/AhmadMozaffar99 (Twitter) https://github.com/aksoftware98 (GitHub)    Show notes   Microsoft Build   Introducing Copilot in SharePoint and new OneDrive experiences | Microsoft 365 Blog   SharePoint in the AI Era: Introducing Copilot in SharePoint & 10 more innovations for creators - Microsoft Community Hub   Experience the New OneDrive: Fast, Organized, and Personalized - Microsoft Community Hub   Microsoft Lists: Easier, Better, Faster, Stronger - Microsoft Community Hub   Enhanced Video in Microsoft 365 - Microsoft Community Hub   New era in content management and security in SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams - Microsoft Community Hub   https://www.nango.dev/blog/why-is-oauth-still-hard

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Windows 11 LTSC, PC peripheral consolidation, CFRs WE GOT ROADMAPS Microsoft updated the Windows roadmap. And there are two takeaways Windows 11 LTSC will finally arrive in the second half of 2024 Windows 10 version 22H2 is the final version of Windows 10, and it will be supported with only security updates until October 14, 2025 Windows 11 Last week, we talked about Week D monthly preview updates. This week, we need to talk about Controlled Feature Rollouts (CFRs). This is what happened with that Search "pill" late last year, not that Microsoft ever announced that, and it's all about testing new features first in stable. Is the Insider Program in trouble? Microsoft is adding Rust to the Windows kernel Insider Program: Microsoft is testing new Widget board improvements Web usage statistics show us how Edge has failed where Safari has succeeded Oops! A stupid new feature in Edge is causing Microsoft to report all your web browsing to Bing Intel revenues are circling the drain, but it promises a brighter future. And AMD fell hard too, with the same guidance Microsoft 365 One domain to rule them all and in the darkness bind them Microsoft Loop Preview now supports personal accounts Microsoft Designer arrives in open preview, offers DALL-E-powered AI graphics designs Links in Teams and (the new) Outlook will soon open in Edge no matter which browser you chose Microsoft is overhauling OneDrive for work and school on the web. You know, eventually Microsoft brings payments to SMBs in Teams with PayPal, Stripe, and... GoDaddy? Surface Is Surface Duo dead? Was it ever not dead? Microsoft consolidates all of its keyboards and other PC peripherals under the Surface brand Xbox Microsoft signs yet another 10-year Xbox deal, this time with an EU cloud streaming company Microsoft "fixes" the Xbox Dashboard. Again Here are the (two) Games with Gold titles for May Redfall and other titles are heading to Xbox Game Pass in May Xbox launches a Game Pass friend referral program Sony has now sold 38.5 PlayStation 5 consoles Tips and Picks Tip of the week: Afraid of command lines? Use WingetUI App pick of the week: Brave Search RunAs this week: Large Language Models and Windows with Paul Thurrott Brown liquor pick of the week: Redbreast 12 Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Sponsor: Melissa.com/twit

Windows 11 LTSC, PC peripheral consolidation, CFRs WE GOT ROADMAPS Microsoft updated the Windows roadmap. And there are two takeaways Windows 11 LTSC will finally arrive in the second half of 2024 Windows 10 version 22H2 is the final version of Windows 10, and it will be supported with only security updates until October 14, 2025 Windows 11 Last week, we talked about Week D monthly preview updates. This week, we need to talk about Controlled Feature Rollouts (CFRs). This is what happened with that Search "pill" late last year, not that Microsoft ever announced that, and it's all about testing new features first in stable. Is the Insider Program in trouble? Microsoft is adding Rust to the Windows kernel Insider Program: Microsoft is testing new Widget board improvements Web usage statistics show us how Edge has failed where Safari has succeeded Oops! A stupid new feature in Edge is causing Microsoft to report all your web browsing to Bing Intel revenues are circling the drain, but it promises a brighter future. And AMD fell hard too, with the same guidance Microsoft 365 One domain to rule them all and in the darkness bind them Microsoft Loop Preview now supports personal accounts Microsoft Designer arrives in open preview, offers DALL-E-powered AI graphics designs Links in Teams and (the new) Outlook will soon open in Edge no matter which browser you chose Microsoft is overhauling OneDrive for work and school on the web. You know, eventually Microsoft brings payments to SMBs in Teams with PayPal, Stripe, and... GoDaddy? Surface Is Surface Duo dead? Was it ever not dead? Microsoft consolidates all of its keyboards and other PC peripherals under the Surface brand Xbox Microsoft signs yet another 10-year Xbox deal, this time with an EU cloud streaming company Microsoft "fixes" the Xbox Dashboard. Again Here are the (two) Games with Gold titles for May Redfall and other titles are heading to Xbox Game Pass in May Xbox launches a Game Pass friend referral program Sony has now sold 38.5 PlayStation 5 consoles Tips and Picks Tip of the week: Afraid of command lines? Use WingetUI App pick of the week: Brave Search RunAs this week: Large Language Models and Windows with Paul Thurrott Brown liquor pick of the week: Redbreast 12 Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Sponsor: Melissa.com/twit

Windows 11 LTSC, PC peripheral consolidation, CFRs WE GOT ROADMAPS Microsoft updated the Windows roadmap. And there are two takeaways Windows 11 LTSC will finally arrive in the second half of 2024 Windows 10 version 22H2 is the final version of Windows 10, and it will be supported with only security updates until October 14, 2025 Windows 11 Last week, we talked about Week D monthly preview updates. This week, we need to talk about Controlled Feature Rollouts (CFRs). This is what happened with that Search "pill" late last year, not that Microsoft ever announced that, and it's all about testing new features first in stable. Is the Insider Program in trouble? Microsoft is adding Rust to the Windows kernel Insider Program: Microsoft is testing new Widget board improvements Web usage statistics show us how Edge has failed where Safari has succeeded Oops! A stupid new feature in Edge is causing Microsoft to report all your web browsing to Bing Intel revenues are circling the drain, but it promises a brighter future. And AMD fell hard too, with the same guidance Microsoft 365 One domain to rule them all and in the darkness bind them Microsoft Loop Preview now supports personal accounts Microsoft Designer arrives in open preview, offers DALL-E-powered AI graphics designs Links in Teams and (the new) Outlook will soon open in Edge no matter which browser you chose Microsoft is overhauling OneDrive for work and school on the web. You know, eventually Microsoft brings payments to SMBs in Teams with PayPal, Stripe, and... GoDaddy? Surface Is Surface Duo dead? Was it ever not dead? Microsoft consolidates all of its keyboards and other PC peripherals under the Surface brand Xbox Microsoft signs yet another 10-year Xbox deal, this time with an EU cloud streaming company Microsoft "fixes" the Xbox Dashboard. Again Here are the (two) Games with Gold titles for May Redfall and other titles are heading to Xbox Game Pass in May Xbox launches a Game Pass friend referral program Sony has now sold 38.5 PlayStation 5 consoles Tips and Picks Tip of the week: Afraid of command lines? Use WingetUI App pick of the week: Brave Search RunAs this week: Large Language Models and Windows with Paul Thurrott Brown liquor pick of the week: Redbreast 12 Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Sponsor: Melissa.com/twit

Windows 11 LTSC, PC peripheral consolidation, CFRs WE GOT ROADMAPS Microsoft updated the Windows roadmap. And there are two takeaways Windows 11 LTSC will finally arrive in the second half of 2024 Windows 10 version 22H2 is the final version of Windows 10, and it will be supported with only security updates until October 14, 2025 Windows 11 Last week, we talked about Week D monthly preview updates. This week, we need to talk about Controlled Feature Rollouts (CFRs). This is what happened with that Search "pill" late last year, not that Microsoft ever announced that, and it's all about testing new features first in stable. Is the Insider Program in trouble? Microsoft is adding Rust to the Windows kernel Insider Program: Microsoft is testing new Widget board improvements Web usage statistics show us how Edge has failed where Safari has succeeded Oops! A stupid new feature in Edge is causing Microsoft to report all your web browsing to Bing Intel revenues are circling the drain, but it promises a brighter future. And AMD fell hard too, with the same guidance Microsoft 365 One domain to rule them all and in the darkness bind them Microsoft Loop Preview now supports personal accounts Microsoft Designer arrives in open preview, offers DALL-E-powered AI graphics designs Links in Teams and (the new) Outlook will soon open in Edge no matter which browser you chose Microsoft is overhauling OneDrive for work and school on the web. You know, eventually Microsoft brings payments to SMBs in Teams with PayPal, Stripe, and... GoDaddy? Surface Is Surface Duo dead? Was it ever not dead? Microsoft consolidates all of its keyboards and other PC peripherals under the Surface brand Xbox Microsoft signs yet another 10-year Xbox deal, this time with an EU cloud streaming company Microsoft "fixes" the Xbox Dashboard. Again Here are the (two) Games with Gold titles for May Redfall and other titles are heading to Xbox Game Pass in May Xbox launches a Game Pass friend referral program Sony has now sold 38.5 PlayStation 5 consoles Tips and Picks Tip of the week: Afraid of command lines? Use WingetUI App pick of the week: Brave Search RunAs this week: Large Language Models and Windows with Paul Thurrott Brown liquor pick of the week: Redbreast 12 Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Sponsor: Melissa.com/twit

Windows 11 LTSC, PC peripheral consolidation, CFRs WE GOT ROADMAPS Microsoft updated the Windows roadmap. And there are two takeaways Windows 11 LTSC will finally arrive in the second half of 2024 Windows 10 version 22H2 is the final version of Windows 10, and it will be supported with only security updates until October 14, 2025 Windows 11 Last week, we talked about Week D monthly preview updates. This week, we need to talk about Controlled Feature Rollouts (CFRs). This is what happened with that Search "pill" late last year, not that Microsoft ever announced that, and it's all about testing new features first in stable. Is the Insider Program in trouble? Microsoft is adding Rust to the Windows kernel Insider Program: Microsoft is testing new Widget board improvements Web usage statistics show us how Edge has failed where Safari has succeeded Oops! A stupid new feature in Edge is causing Microsoft to report all your web browsing to Bing Intel revenues are circling the drain, but it promises a brighter future. And AMD fell hard too, with the same guidance Microsoft 365 One domain to rule them all and in the darkness bind them Microsoft Loop Preview now supports personal accounts Microsoft Designer arrives in open preview, offers DALL-E-powered AI graphics designs Links in Teams and (the new) Outlook will soon open in Edge no matter which browser you chose Microsoft is overhauling OneDrive for work and school on the web. You know, eventually Microsoft brings payments to SMBs in Teams with PayPal, Stripe, and... GoDaddy? Surface Is Surface Duo dead? Was it ever not dead? Microsoft consolidates all of its keyboards and other PC peripherals under the Surface brand Xbox Microsoft signs yet another 10-year Xbox deal, this time with an EU cloud streaming company Microsoft "fixes" the Xbox Dashboard. Again Here are the (two) Games with Gold titles for May Redfall and other titles are heading to Xbox Game Pass in May Xbox launches a Game Pass friend referral program Sony has now sold 38.5 PlayStation 5 consoles Tips and Picks Tip of the week: Afraid of command lines? Use WingetUI App pick of the week: Brave Search RunAs this week: Large Language Models and Windows with Paul Thurrott Brown liquor pick of the week: Redbreast 12 Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Sponsor: Melissa.com/twit

Taking the first module and outlining how Process, Governance and Policies, when brought together, ensure we present a practical approach to providing a well-governed M365 environment.  This podcast looks at some of the first module content from their latest training workshop, 'Practical Microsoft 365 Baseline Governance' First presentation is at...Techorama Belgium on May 15th https://techorama.be/workshops/practical-microsoft-365-baseline-governance/ The podcast explains all this and more,and this might be the funniest start yet...Steve and Marijn wonder if the Double Entendre is evident to the listener, and Steve struggles to say penis because it feels wrong to say it on the podcast.  The boys present the open content from their new governance course to be launched at As always, Steve's brain refuses to bring in names, so we want to say Sigourney Weaver, because he could not remember Dian Fossey, who worked with Gorilla until poachers killed her.  And then he forgot the name of the Guy who invented the WWW... whom we will call James from the Internet.Eventually, they get serious and explain how Microsoft, Harvard and Office365Distilled define governance... so GPT is to the rescue.Steve reads through the Office365Distilled definition of Governance and identifies the core model from this definition.Governance Office365Distilled style, covering 4 core areas as a DRDR  Defined, Resources, Drivers, Results...Defined by Policies, Procedures and Practices.Resources that are used, Managed and Protected.Drives the behaviour, Administrators, content and compliance.Results are to maximise the benefits whilst minimising the risks.We break down each of these areas and explain how, practically, these decisions and consequential definitions all bring a practical approach to Governance.  And if you want to hear more, join us on May 15th in Antwerp, Belgium. 

The latest In Touch With iOS with Dave he is joined by guest Brittany Smith, Jeff Gamet, and Ben Roethig. More press about iPhone thefts and Apple will not reset the locked out account. We talk about how to use alternate backup like iMazing, Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive so you don't lose your photos and files. Apple has released a new savings account option with Apple Card. tvOS 16.5 beta has multi view sports feature. We didn't know Netflix was still sending DVDs that service ends in the fall after 25 years. Apple Trade in upgrade Plus more great topics. The show notes are at InTouchwithiOS.com 
Direct Link to Audio  Links to our Show Click this link Buy me a Coffee to support the show we would really appreciate it. intouchwithios.com/coffee  Another way to support the show is to become a Patreon member patreon.com/intouchwithios Website: In Touch With iOS YouTube Channel In Touch with iOS Magazine on Flipboard Facebook Page Twitter Instagram News HomePod Can Now Alert You If Your Smoke Alarm Goes Off watchOS 10 Described as Apple Watch's Biggest Software Update Since 2015 - MacRumors Kroger Begins Accepting Apple Pay After Years of Holding Out Apple TV's Multi-View Sports Feature Available Starting Tonight on tvOS 16.5 Beta Dave tried it out these were live MLS games.  Netflix's password sharing crackdown is finally hitting the United States Netflix kills DVD-in-the-mail business, upgrades ad-supported plan from 720p - 9to5Mac Netflix Increases Streaming Quality of 'Basic With Ads' Plan to 1080p Apple launches all-new ‘Apple Trade In' website in time for Earth Day Here is Apple new Trade-In site Apple Trade In Topics Beta this week.iOS 16.5 Beta 2 is still out after 1 week. There has been more stories of stolen iPhones and losing access to your account as well as thieves stealing money from bank accounts. This simple tip provides added protection from changing passcodes by adding an additional one. Bar theft tactic sees iPhone owners permanently locked out of Apple accounts We discussed this and provide many ways you can protect yourself from hacks as well as the various ways of backup beyond just iCloud.    Add another layer of security by Using Screen Time In Settings, go to Screen Time and scroll down to set a passcode, if you haven't already. Then go to Content & Privacy Restrictions, and toggle on Content & Privacy Restrictions. Scroll down to Allow Changes, then tap on Account Changes and select Don't Allow. You of course need to ensure your Screen Time passcode is different to your phone passcode. This means that a thief would still be unable to make any changes to your Apple ID settings, including enabling the Recovery Key option. How to generate a recovery key - Apple Support Add a Recovery Contact Set up an account recovery contact - Apple Support Finally, you can add a Recovery Contact – a friend or family member whose devices are authorized to receive a recovery code for your devices. You can do this in Settings > Your name > Password & Security > Account Recovery > Add Recovery Contact. Backup your photos and settings using other services and apps.  iMazing will back up your devices completely.  Using Finder (formerly iTunes) to backup your iPhone. If you are syncing your photos in iCloud Photos you cannot use this method without turning off sync.   Backup with Dropbox How to back up your iPhone on a Mac - Dropbox You can backup Photos using OneDrive for iOS automatically Automatically save photos and videos with OneDrive on iOS - Microsoft Support Google One, Drive, Photos Backup Back up your device - iPhone & iPad - Google One Help Apple Savings Account debuted this week. You do need an Apple Card to open this account.  Apple Card's new high-yield Savings account is now available, offering a 4.15 percent APY Apple Card Savings Account Available Starting Today With 4.15% Interest Rate - MacRumors Apple Card Savings Account officially launches with an impressively high interest rate Lets review the Apple Card. Is the Apple Card worth it? Here's what you need to know https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213451 Luma Fusion released a huge update this week,  LumaFusion launches new, pro-level, multicam editing feature for iPhone and iPad Jeff is an avid user and has thoughts on the updates and should use this as your primary video editing tool.  Pixelmator Pro is now Photomator Pixelmator Blog and is released for iPhone and iPad Photomator - Photo Editor on the App Store . The Mac version is in beta and you can request Test Flight to try it out. https://www.pixelmator.com/photomator/ We discuss the changes and is it a worthwhile investment vs Photoshop. Macstock 7 is here! Tickets are now available and the speaker list is filling up as Dave again is speaking at the event with first time speaker Brittany Smith and returning speaker Jeff Gamet added to the speaker list. Please join in on all the fun July 22-23, 2023! Speakers Link. and Register | Macstock Conference & Expo Our Host Dave Ginsburg is an IT professional supporting Mac, iOS and Windows users and shares his wealth of knowledge of iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Apple TV and related technologies. Visit the YouTube channel https://youtube.com/intouchwithios follow him on Mastadon @daveg65,  Twitter @daveg65.and the show @intouchwithios   Our Regular Contributors Jeff Gamet is a podcaster, technology blogger, artist, and author. Previously, he was The Mac Observer's managing editor, and Smile's TextExpander Evangelist. You can find him on Mastadon @jgamet as well as Twitter and Instagram as @jgamet  His YouTube channel https://youtube.com/jgamet Ben Roethig Former Associate Editor of GeekBeat.TV and host of the Tech Hangout and Deconstruct with Patrice  Mac user since the mid 90s. Tech support specialist. Twitter @benroethig  Website: https://roethigtech.blogspot.com About our Guest Brittany Smith is a cognitive neuroscientist who provides a variety of consulting services through her business, Devise and Conquer that includes ADD/ADHD coaching, technology coaching, productivity consulting, and more. She is a self-designated “well-rounded geek”, and holds a M.S. degree in Cognitive Neuroscience. She can be found on Twitter as @addliberator. Find her on her YouTube channel of tech tips.

Microsoft made a confusing change to how storage is allocated between Outlook.com and OneDrive.

Marijn moves from Inspiration and Design to Empowering your organisation for Digital transformation.  Following the Microsoft IDEA framework for digital transformation.  E is for Empower and Marijn looks at how you can empower your audience through the development of a model either digital or Paper-based plan for awareness of your new digitally transformed organisation.This very much supports the idea of ensuring your organization sees the value in your business transformation story by viewing visual assets and immersive experiences—promoting buy-in and getting alignment on commitments.

Adam Engst of TidBITS joins me on Chit Chat Across the Pond Lite to talk about the changes Apple made recently to the File Provider Extension. These changes had a fairly significant effect on how cloud storage providers like Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, and Box work with macOS. Whether you realize it or not, you've very likely been upgraded to new versions of these services. While the new File Provider Extension improves several things about our interface with these cloud storage providers, there are also some serious "gotchas" that may affect you. For example, before talking to Adam, I didn't realize that the change caused us to have local copies of our entire Google Drive and anything added there isn't being synced to the could. Being Adam, he's written an extremely well-researched and well-explained article on [tidbits.com/...](https://tidbits.com/2023/03/10/apples-file-provider-forces-mac-cloud-storage-changes/) where you can follow along with our conversation. Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript: CCATP_2023_04_13 During the conversation, Adam referenced a couple of other articles: * Adam's TidBITS article from February 2022 predicting these problems: Cloud Storage Forecast Unsettled, with Possible Storms - TidBITS * LucidLink is a better alternative for people who used to use Dropbox as a cloud service provider for huge, shared video files LucidLink Offers Streaming Vision of Cloud-Based Storage * Adam and I said at the end of the conversation that the next time we'd talk it would be about doing clean installs of macOS. He sent me this link where he talks about three levels of clean installs: Level 2 Clean Install of Ventura Solves Deep-Rooted Problems

It's the beginning of spring here in Canada. And with spring comes a desire to put all the messes of winter behind us and clean things up as we prepare for summer. That's where the term Spring Cleaning comes from. However, today, I'm not talking about packing away your sweaters and pulling out your shorts. Nor am I referring to cleaning the yard or washing the grime off the windows. Although, it is time to do all of those things. No. I'm talking about doing some spring cleaning of your design business. More specifically: Cleaning Your Computer Cleaning Your Office Cleaning Your Business Cleaning Your Branding Cleaning Up Your Computer. Spring is an excellent time to review your computer and see what you can clean up. Clean up your Backups. The first thing I suggest is examining your backup strategy. Are you doing everything possible to ensure your important files are adequately backed up? Do you have a good in-house as well as an online backup strategy? The price of hard drives is one thing that doesn't seem to be affected by inflation. You can get large-capacity hard drives for great prices these days. Paired with Time Machine on Mac or an equivalent solution for Windows or Linux can ensure you always have your backups on hand. I recommend Backblaze, a much more reliable backup system for online backups than Dropbox, OneDrive or Google Drive. And priced as low as $65US per year makes peace of mind very affordable. Speaking of backups. When was the last time you double-checked to ensure your backup files were backing up? You'd hate to have something happen only to discover your most recent backup is months old. Whatever backup strategy you're using, take a few minutes to ensure the backups are functioning and are current. Clean up client files. Clients come and go. So do design projects. After a while, you tend to accumulate a lot of outdated and even redundant files on your computer. Take some time to review your client files and see if you can get rid of anything. Delete or move files off your computer for any client who isn't in business anymore. If you want to keep something for nostalgia, keep the finished files which are often smaller. There's no reason to keep large working files for something you'll never use again. The same is true for old projects from active clients. If you don't think you'll ever need them again, get them off your computer. And all those stock images files you accumulate. Did you know that once you acquire them from a stock image site, you can re-download them anytime without paying again? So there's no reason to keep them on your computer. Clean up your Client List. One thing that can get out of hand in our business is our client list, especially if you do a lot of one-off projects. Depending on the system you use to keep track of your clients, you may want to divide them into Active and Inactive categories. It makes managing it much easier if you don't have to scroll through dozens or hundreds of inactive clients to find the one you're looking for. Clean up your email mailboxes. You may not realize how much hard drive space email takes up, especially in our field, where attachments weigh in at multiple megabytes. Chances are you save any attachments you receive to their respective client folder. It's the smart thing to do. But that means you have two copies of that attachment on your computer. One is stored in the client folder, and one is still attached to the email message. The same goes for attachments you send to clients. On a Mac, a duplicate copy is stored in the Library folder for your mail client. You can easily clean this up by highlighting a group of emails and telling your email client to delete the attachments. Clean up your Mail Lists. Another thing you may want to clean up is the email lists you're subscribed to. It's gotten to the point where you can't enter your email anywhere online without being subscribed to some email list. Take a few minutes to see what's in your inbox that you don't need, and unsubscribe from them. If you want to make it easy, look at unroll.me. Sign up to quickly unsubscribe from email lists you're no longer interested in. And get an easily consumed digest of the ones you want to keep. Clean up your Fonts. The next thing you may want to do is clean up your fonts. As of last year, Adobe software no longer supports PostScript version fonts. If you've been in this business for a while, you've probably accumulated many PostScript fonts. Since they're no longer usable, either get rid of them or convert your old PostScript version fonts to OpenType fonts using TransType 4 from FontLab. Clean up the rest. You can clean so many other things this spring on your computer. Take a few minutes to review your applications folder and delete any you don't use. Remove seldom-used icons from your Dock. Cull down your bookmarks. And update any passwords that need updating. And although it's not your computer. When did you last take inventory of the apps on your phone? If you're anything like me, there are probably a few you can eliminate. Cleaning up your Office. This one is probably the easiest since it's mostly visible. Although, in my case, not necessarily the quickest. Look around your office space and see what you can clean. What do you have on your desk, shelves, and other exposed surfaces? Do you need all of it? There's a fine line between well-decorated and cluttered. I know. I cross it all the time. That's why one of my biggest spring cleaning projects this year is cleaning my office. But it's not just about what you can see. How well organized are your closets, cabinets and drawers? Do you toss things into them to get them out of sight? If so, now may be the time to go through and organize what you need to keep and get rid of what you don't. And, of course, once the clutter is taken care of. A good dusting and maybe washing of windows can help keep your office space as a place you enjoy being in. Man o man, just looking around my office. I have a lot of work to do this spring. Cleaning up your Business. There's no time like spring to look at your business and see where you can tidy up. Clean up your Resume. If working for yourself isn't your goal, then refreshing your resume is something you may want to look at. Clean up your Portfolio. What about your Portfolio? The one on your website, or perhaps Behance or some other online platform? Are the projects you're showcasing up to your current design skills? If not, take them out and replace them with newer work. Clean up your expenses. Is there anything you're paying for that you don't use? Now is a great time to look at your expenses and see if you can cut back on unneeded expenditures. Do you need to pay for all of Adobe Creative Suite if Photoshop is the only application you use? What about your web hosting? Are there better options out there you can move to? BTW, feel free to use my SiteGround affiliate link if you decide to move there. It's where I host mine and all my clients' websites. Look at what you're paying monthly or yearly and see where you can save money. Clean up your Branding. It's pretty standard for designers to neglect their branding. After all, you spend all day working on other people's projects. You don't always have the energy or desire to work on yours. But if you neglect your branding, you may lose out on potential clients. Take time to review things like your website. Besides the ordinary things like updating themes and plugins, you may want to check for broken links and ensure you've done everything you can for SEO. It's also an excellent time to review your content. Does the wording need refreshing? Read Building a Storybrand by Donald Miller. It's a great book to help you compose your brand story. Is your about page giving the proper impression? For more on creating a great about page, listen to episode 52 of the podcast. What about your social media profiles or profiles on Upwork, Fiverr or any other platform? Does your profile photo need updating? What about your description? Sometimes a minor tweak can make all the difference. You'll feel better after you clean. So there you have it—Spring Cleaning for Your Computer, Office, Business, and Branding. Of course, there are many more things you can clean. And everyone's environment is different. But you get the idea. Spring is in the air, and the desire for freshness comes with it. And that can start with a little bit of cleaning on your part. Ensuring your workspace is a clean and enjoyable place to work and go a long way in helping you succeed. So get cleaning.

Steve and Marijn are joined today by a Guest who brings many questions about UK financial compliance.  In this episode, we wanted Laura Madden to tell us what her customers need from their content management.  We investigate solutions for typical problems the UK small business financial industry needs from a cloud service.Marijn dives in immediately, talking about some cool solutions, but soon understands that small business needs their cloud solution to deliver good value... maybe best describe them as cheap... So, we work on solutions for auditing, controlling, and tracking content and information that are all out of the box.We take questions from Laura about distributing and managing compliance contact, mainly completed through emails to external parties for a small business.  So, the first question was about maintaining control of the document when it is moving around so many people, many of whom are outside your control.We then consider the ability to maintain the immunity of that content when agreements or decisions are made against the content.Audit soon raises its head and needs to ensure that evidence exists to confirm decisions made with compliance officers and regulators with minimal effort.  We touch on feedback loops, why external survey tools might not be the best solution, and where M365 forms could provide a safe way to collect feedback or decide on specific questions. Eventually, we get to taste 2 whiskies from the same distillery with 7 years of difference to understand if the extra time in the barrel adds tasty value when it adds so much cost.Steve announces a new Sponsorship with Cloudally, a company supporting businesses with Cloud backup solutions, more on that in future episodes and Marijn finishes off with a great ending and a request to complete Spotify comments as a Lady's Understanding or a Gentlemen's Agreement. 

March 2023 brought both new updates and big announcements. In this episode, we cover: File web part now: “File and Media”, Viva Connections on iPad, Microsoft Edge + Adobe Acrobat PDF Engine, Microsoft Lists + Approvals app in Teams, OneDrive: Favorite/Unfavorite, Suggested files in 1:1 chat, Microsoft Word: Send to Kindle, and more. Plus, we have two guests: 1) Matt McKenzie, Director of Microsoft 365 product marketing, shares insights about the upcoming Microsoft 365 Conference in Vegas (May 2-3), and 2) Sudha Narayanan explains how Microsoft Lists supports approval scenarios natively within info tracking incorporating the Approvals app in Teams. Our related tech segment highlights three big disclosures: 1) Microsoft 365 Copilot, 2) the Loop app (Public Preview), and the New Teams app (Public Preview); #Speed. Read this episode's corresponding blog post. Click here for transcript of this episode. 1:46 Conversation with Matt McKenzie 12:09 Employee engagement updates 18:43 Conversation with Sudha Narayanan 33:18 Teamwork updates 37:15 Related tech + Teasers   Matt McKenzie | LinkedIn | Twitter Sudha Narayanan | LinkedIn Microsoft 365 Conference (May 2-4, 2023) | Website | Twitter | Register SharePoint | Facebook | @SharePoint | SharePoint Community Blog | Feedback Mark Kashman |@mkashman [co-host] Chris McNulty |@cmcnulty2000 [co-host] Resources: Microsoft Docs - The home for Microsoft documentation for end users, developers, and IT professionals.  Microsoft Tech Community Home Stay on top of Office 365 changes Upcoming events: Adobe Summit 2023 (Past | keynote and breakout sessions now on-demand) Microsoft Viva Summit | April.20.2023 Online Microsoft 365 Conference | May.2-4.2023 Las Vegas, Nevada CollabDays Poland | May.13.2023 Warsaw, Poland Power Automate & Power Apps Developer Bootcamp Automation Summit 2023 | May.19-20.2023 London, Paddington European Collaboration Summit | May.22-24.2023 Düsseldorf Fair, Germany Microsoft Build 2023 | May 23-25, 2023. Register now. The AIIM Conference 2023 | May.25-27.2023 Hyatt Regency, New Orleans CollabDays Netherlands | June.10.2023 Vianen, Utrecht 365 EduCon - DC | June.12-16 Washington D.C. - USA   Listen and follow other Microsoft podcasts at aka.ms/microsoft/podcasts. Follow the Intrazone at aka.ms/TheIntrazone.

Like Facebook or One Drive attempts to do, considering the evil, misery, and sadness we all face in our lives, this story of Jesus entering Jerusalem is meant to bring hope through seven pictures, pictures that give us subtle, but important details of God's love for us.

Secure remote file access without OneDrive or VPNs? Richard chats with Ned Pyle about the power of SMB over QUIC. Ned talks about the ongoing battle to put older versions of SMB to bed and how QUIC is becoming the de facto standard for moving files around, both within the network and across the internet. While a lot of business files can be served effectively from OneDrive for Business, often, you have applications and infrastructure that depend on UNCs and other file mapping approaches. SMB for QUIC through Azure VMs and Azure Stack HCI allows the same UNC paths to work securely inside and outside your office network. Check it out!Links:SMB1 Product ClearinghouseWindows ServerSMB CompressionSMB SigningSMB over QUICAzure Stack HCILearn SMB over QUICSMB Insecure Guest AuthRecorded February 3, 2023

We are bringing you a special episode from Sync Up's sister podcast show, The Intrazone. This episode's guests include Gaia Carini and Katy Erlandson from the OneDrive engineering team. We dig into OneDrive to distinguish the value between the "Add to OneDrive" feature and general sync of team site document libraries - sometimes referred to as "Shared libraries". You'll hear more about what each capability does, the path forward by design to make it easy for you, plus guidance for today and going forward. The whole of this episode spawned from a Twitter thread request, and we think you'll like this audible response. Click here for this episode's corresponding blog post. Gaia Carini (Principal GPM) | Twitter | LinkedIn  Katy Erlandson (Senior product manager) | LinkedIn Mark Kashman |@mkashman [co-host] Chris McNulty |@cmcnulty2000 [co-host] OneDrive | Website | Help and learning | @OneDrive | OneDrive community blog | Feedback SharePoint Facebook | @SharePoint | SharePoint community blog | Feedback Resources: The @RippedOrange tweet thread that started it all: "Sync vs Add Shortcut to OneDrive" "Add shortcuts to shared folders in OneDrive for work or school" (support article) Microsoft Docs - The home for Microsoft documentation for end users, developers, and IT professionals.  Microsoft Tech Community Home Stay on top of Office 365 changes   Discover and follow other Microsoft podcasts at aka.ms/microsoft/podcasts Follow The Intrazone at aka.ms/TheIntrazone

AI was announced in everything, everywhere, all at once last week with Microsoft 365 Copilot. It will make a massive impact to how we search, create and organize our work. Teams green screen is set to improve our virtual background performance, and there's a new Teams Files app that looks a lot like OneDrive.     Daniel and Darrell cover:     - People in Viva for Microsoft Viva Suite      - Announcing Microsoft 365 Copilot      - Microsoft Teams: New Files app in Teams      - Microsoft Teams: Green screen feature in Teams Meetings      - New SharePoint site templates      - Microsoft Syntex: Split PDF Pages into new PDF files with the Extract action in OneDrive for iOS                  Join Daniel Glenn and Darrell as a Service Webster as they cover the latest messages in the Microsoft 365 Message Center.    Follow us!   Twitter - Facebook - LinkedIn Check out Daniel and Darrell's own YouTube channels at:     Daniel - https://DanielGlenn.com/YT Darrell - https://www.youtube.com/modernworkmentor   

Marijn and Steve lose about 20 minutes of this podcast covering search and how AI might help.  We accept that we can't help ourselves... We eventually started on document library Governance... but it took some time to pull away from the AI conversation.Steve is not sure how AI can add value to documents and other content, but we will wait patiently to find out.  The original subject is around document governance and, specifically, content architecture and the value it brings.To get started, we look at the components that make content architecture possible, like content types, metadata and taxonomy and the governance that will ensure it stays contextual.The discussion turns to who can make the decisions around creating libraries, columns etc. We move to cover the security model that makes it all possible.  Then Templates come forward, and a deep dive around DLP and Sensitivity Labels.Before drinking a completely new Whisky from Italy, yes, I said Italian we finish off with a quick insight into view formatting and migration...

On a drive back from an out-of-town show, Joe and fellow comic Paul Ollinger talk about taking different approaches to connecting with the audience, one of the dumbest thing a man has ever said, and the serious topics of fear, regret and the passage of time.

This is an extraordinary look at Innovation based on criteria around: Creativity, Vision, Risk-taking and Collaboration.  But maybe Governance has a place... or half a place in the definition.The Boys are back after the great episode 107, and this time they are talking about innovation with a quote that Innovation is in the Delta between your known limit and the place you push to.As we take some time to break down the pillars of Creativity, Vision, Risk and Collaboration, we identify that governance has a role in the innovation process. Still, we need to agree if this is something that restricts innovations or merely controls the scope of invention.  Let us know how YOU feel about it.We conclude by taking a Harvard quadrant with Innovation on the left and best practice on the right.  We put High Risk at the top and No risk at the bottom.  So Innovative High-risk items are in the top left quadrant... so where you would put OneDrive or MS teams etc.  Check out what Steve and Marijn did.The Whisky is very unusual and no. 870 from the first bottlings from the Maradsous Abbey in Belgium is a very interesting dram to taste if you can find a bottle outside of Belgium.We finish by referring to a few Wee Drams around Innovations, and these can be found here to support the content of this podcast:https://www.office365distilled.com/508 Innovate Everywhere

In this episode, we cover: Yammer > Engage rebrand, Viva Topics in Viva Engage, Stream Playlists, SharePoint Advanced Management, updated OneDrive Home and Shared, external file requests for SharePoint document libraries, export Microsoft Lists as datasets for Power BI, update to rules email notifications, and more. Plus, we talk with Sesha Mani, Principal group product manager on the SharePoint team focused on admin, security, and compliance. Sesha highlights the value of new SharePoint Advanced Management capabilities when working with proposals, contracts, invoices, and more - to help IT address sprawl and oversharing with a new set of advanced security and content management capabilities - broadly speaking advanced access policies for secure content collaboration AND advanced sites content lifecycle management. Read this episode's corresponding blog post. Click here for full transcript.  1:30 Employee Engagement 7:40 Conversation with Sesha Mani 21:10 Teamwork 28:25 Related Technology   Sesha Mani | LinkedIn | Twitter SharePoint | Facebook | @SharePoint | SharePoint Community Blog | Feedback Mark Kashman |@mkashman [co-host] Chris McNulty |@cmcnulty2000 [co-host]   "Microsoft Syntex – SharePoint Advanced Management (SAM) Add-on – Announcing General Availability" (blog post) Learn more about SharePoint Advanced Management (MS Learn) Microsoft Docs - The home for Microsoft documentation for end users, developers, and IT professionals.  Microsoft Tech Community Home Stay on top of Office 365 changes   Upcoming events: Modern Workplace Conference 2023 | March.27-29.2023 Paris, France Culturati | Apr.2-3.2023 Austin, Texas Microsoft 365 Conference | May.2-4.2023 Las Vegas, Nevada CollabDays Poland | May.13.2023 Warsaw, Poland Technorama Belgium - the Jungle Edition | May.15-17 Kinepolis Antwerp Power Automate & Power Apps Developer Bootcamp Automation Summit 2023 | May.19-20.2023 London, Paddington CollabDays Italy | May.20.2023 Milan, Italy European Collaboration Summit | May.22-24.2023 Dusseldorf, Germany   Listen and follow other Microsoft podcasts at aka.ms/microsoft/podcasts. Follow the Intrazone at aka.ms/TheIntrazone.

In this episode, Kasey explores the Notion application and how teachers and students can use it. The more she learns, the more she loves it! Notion is a great tool for teachers and secondary students. Create a hub for your day, your class, your tasks, and link everything on one wiki. Oh, and connect Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, and even IFTTT. This system will blow your mind! Access the full show notes and blog post here Visit Shake Up Learning on YouTube

EP303 - Amazon, Walmartand E-com Q4 Results  In this episode we cover: Amazon Q4 Earnings Walmart Q4 Earnings US Department of Commerce Q4 e-commerce data Discussion of Temu and other Social Commerce News Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes. Episode 303 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Thursday, February 23rd 2023. http://jasonandscot.com Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing. Transcript Jason: [0:23] Welcome to the Jason and Scot show this is episode 303 being recorded on Thursday February 23rd 20:23 that's a lot of three Scott I'm your host Jason retailgeek Goldberg and as usual I'm here with your co-host Scot Wingo. Scot: [0:40] Hey Jason welcome back Jason Scott sure listeners it could have been worse we could have done it on 22 to 23 so there'll be a lot of tooth so we broke up the to smooth some threes. Jason: [0:52] I believe that was episode 223 was on that yeah. Scot: [0:56] I had I am not a big sports ball person but I watched the Super Bowl every year for the commercials and I had, I know you're the grand poobah of all things advertising and I had an ad question for you. Jason: [1:12] Yeah awesome you've come to the right place hit me. Scot: [1:15] What is to EMU and why is it not the same thing as wish.com. Jason: [1:22] That's a great question I can only partially answer so Teemu is a e-commerce site. In as far as I know at this point only in the United States of America it's owned by pin duo duo in China which often is called a PDD and depending on how you count PD is the second or third largest e-commerce site in China in China it's a super interesting gamified model where like you get your friends to go in on the deal with you and it drives your deal cost. Down so everybody saves more when you all by together kind of thing so it's a. Scot: [1:58] Okay group buying used to be called back in the day. Jason: [2:00] Social shopping exactly and so it's super interesting and they're doing really well so they launched an e-commerce site in the u.s. it appears that it's primarily a catalog they built by aggregating a wide variety of different. Producers in China and it does have very much of a wish Vibe like it's a lot of. Extraordinarily inexpensive apparel and you know inexpensive tchotchkes that you probably didn't know you need but like if you start browsing the side it for a.m. on a Friday night you're. You're gonna end up making some ill-advised purchases and then it seems like everything drop ships from factories. In China via u.s. post so they if you remember back in the day wish was like very slow shipping like to 26 weeks. T mood typically quote six to eight days they launched in November I ordered a couple shirts and they promised me like a delivery and they actually arrived in like five days to the United States. Scot: [3:07] Wow. Jason: [3:08] Yeah so it was reason via US Post Office in the u.s. portion at least and you know there's this. International postal treaty that probably meant it was super inexpensive for Teemu to ship it via US Post Office to the US. But what was interesting to me is I give you an idea of how cheap this stuff is the I ordered a dollar shirt that was forty percent off with free shipping so. I literally have 60 Cent shirt delivered from China and five days. Scot: [3:40] Cool is it like wish were eighty percent of the businesses hair extensions. Jason: [3:44] Yeah so I don't have a break it is a lot of that like it's a lot of like USB accessories and stuff I do think it's more heavy on apparel and I have talked to people that are more hip and in the know than me that think there's like, that you know it's very short-term apparel it's kind of disposable apparel so they're all the usual caveats about being an ecological disaster probably apply. But I have been told that they have that they like have some interesting on-trend Styles and things on that that like for some demographics it's the, the apparel selection is appealing but what I do know is they launched in November and when I looked at the year in and it's mostly on a mobile app when I looked at the year in app downloads, it was the eighth most downloaded shopping app. On iTunes so more downloads than eBay for example over the year and Timmy was only in there for two months and and so it's kind of funny I'm a little embarrassed I. [4:52] Posted some stats on LinkedIn about mobile apps and I said and don't sleep on Teemu it looks like they're running fast and then a week later they ran that Super Bowl ad that you saw which is certainly going to Goose their downloads more and literally right before the game I found out that my company publicist actually produced that Super Bowl at so, it may have seemed like I was promoting a client but In fairness to me I didn't know they were to client when I when I mentioned it. Scot: [5:20] Cool shouldn't you know who your clients are as a chief digital retail strategy officer. Jason: [5:25] I should as a first a first world problem in your business is when you have too many clients to know. Scot: [5:33] You're forgiven. Jason: [5:34] Or maybe that's just a sign of a bad a bed, employing my case but yeah you know holding company like publicist were a Federation of agencies and most of the agencies do their own thing so this is you know a cool creative agency that we have Saatchi & Saatchi out of Los Angeles, um and sure enough they did reach out to me to say hey we have a Commerce client and we'd love for you to come talk to them. Check out their Super Bowl hour and the next they're Super Bowl add in the next hour and so that's how I how I found out there are client thank you guys. Scot: [6:05] You're like you're like I totally predicted these guys would shoot up the charts. Jason: [6:09] I did I did I tried to take credit but seemed like shockingly not everyone in my company follows me on LinkedIn I know. Scot: [6:16] Should be over should be like part of the onboarding. Jason: [6:21] Sometimes I think it should but then other times I think of how many times has probably saved my career that like important people at work Dan see something I like I said I'm going to so I think on the aggregate I'm going to stick with it how it is. Scot: [6:31] Call any other trip reports or anything to go into before we jump into some news I know you're chomping at the bit to talk about some data. Jason: [6:39] Yeah so it is obviously well I guess it's always trade show season but this feels like a special version of trade show season next week is e tell West, in Palm Springs which is usually a good Joe but for sure a good boondoggle if you're trying to get out of the Chicago winter in February Palm Springs is a good, a good place to go so I'll be going there and I have a lined up a couple guests for folks to listen to in the in the subsequent weeks and then the end so that's the end of February the end of March is shop talked and so I'll be giving a talk at shop talk and. And talking to some folks there too so so a couple cool industry events on the on the horizon. Scot: [7:25] Cops are gonna have a little Gap and then we'll have some a lot of show reports to go over I guess. Cooper one of the things we wanted to start today was finally got the last piece of data from 2022 from the US Department of Commerce walk us through what your magic Tableau Data machine is Tanya. Jason: [7:47] Yeah so mid-February US Department of Commerce publishes this quarterly report on e-commerce and so the Q4 data from last year came out in mid-February and so now that we have qu for we can see a whole year so in 2022 us e-commerce sales were 1 trillion, 33 billion in sales so the first time we've officially exceeded a trillion dollars so that's kind of cool. [8:20] What's I guess slightly less cool depending on where you stand is the growth rate so that trillion dollars is 7.4% more than 20 21 largely because 2021. Was a like pretty astronomical year but but to put things in perspective. Over the last 10 years than normal growth rate for e-commerce is 16.4% so 7.4 percent is less than half of what our traditional growth would be. And it's actually the slowest rate of growth. Basically since e-commerce happened so so 2022 is not a, a stellar year for e-commerce growth, now when you look at that three-year stack you say how much did e-commerce grow since before covid it's up a lot it's up 81 percent. [9:17] And you know a trillion dollars total retail sales are about 7 trillion so e-commerce ends up being 14.6 percent of all retail sales, a lot of people like to talk about what percentage of course sales it is because like people don't tend to buy gas. Via e-commerce and Tull spiffy start selling gas and until recently people really weren't buying cars online so a lot of, we could debate the merits of this but a lot of people still have this definition of core retail which doesn't have Auto or gas in it and so if you take Auto and gas out and you say that trillion dollars is 21.5 percent of core retail which. Makes the us about the third or fourth highest e-commerce penetration country in the world. [10:07] Obviously I get a lot of these e-commerce Spike during covid and then kind of regress to the mean but. You know if you look at the e-commerce dollars growth. Were 36 percent above what we would have forecasted. Before covid started and we've sold like 275 billion a year more than we would have expected to sell this year so over the three years e-commerce has, has grown quite a bit and remained high but what is true and worrisome about 20 22 it's the lowest rate of growth we've ever seen and for the first time since e-commerce started. Retail actually grew faster than e-commerce so that the total retail growth number for last year was 8.2 percent versus the e-commerce rate of 7.4 percent so that's an interesting backdrop as we start to get all these. Q4 earnings reports flowing in. Scot: [11:09] Yeah and that's really just you know it's a reversion to the mean right so we had a surge in e-commerce so you Commerce is more coming down more so than retail surgeon is that if we charted that out is that what would see. Jason: [11:23] Ecommerce has not surged as I mean retail is not surged as much as e-commerce has come down so. Yeah so like on the whole the three years of the pandemic were very good to retail and very good to e-commerce the, when they happen with slightly different e-commerce is biggest year was the first year of the pandemic and retails biggest year was 20 was the second year of the pandemic so when you're looking at year over year sales Ecommerce is comping against a big number on the numerator while the denominator suddenly got a lot bigger, for retail and so when you look at it as a percentage of retail it definitely looks like it regress to the mean but when you just look at, net dollars people spend an e-commerce before and after the pandemic. We both we spend a lot more money at retail than we used to and we spend a lot more money on e-commerce than we used to and so the spoiler where the fear is. Is that the new normal or did we just pull in a bunch of demand and that bodes poorly for 2023. Scot: [12:31] Yes go for some tea leaves to help us kind of parse through that we had some interesting earnings first of all we wanted to chat about Amazon's fourth quarter the way I would kind of we didn't do a show on this one because it was really not that much to talk about to be honest with you so they came in just their dramatically lowered over the last couple quarters they have dramatically lowered the the back half of 22 so they the Q4 of this slightly beat that that new Lowered Expectations, and then their q1 guidance was in line with a little bit lower than what Wall Street was expecting but not enough to be super material one thing I thought you would find interesting is they took about a 3 billion dollar charge on restructuring there was they announced they laid off 18,000 people I think most people saw that, and that was 640 million but part of the charge was 720 million to impairment at fresh and go stores I thought you would find that interesting and I guess they had I guess those are the ones they must have planned a bunch of openings and now they've got all this kind of like you know they're kind of half pregnant with this bunch of real estate bunch of stores they want to launch and then they pause that. [13:44] And then one that was interesting to me is we work a lot with these Amazon DSP companies and I've often wondered who insures them because they bang the heck out of them and Amazon increase their reserves for Self Insurance in their transportation Network by 1.3 billion which I thought was interesting given that we see these things just 90% chance if you see an Amazon Prime van it's got a fair number of Dents & Dings on the side of it. Jason: [14:12] Yeah that's yeah that's a hard gig for a van although there probably are no easy gigs for van. Scot: [14:19] Yeah would you think about the freshen go. Jason: [14:21] Yeah so the grocery story is interesting right longtime listeners will remember Amazon kind of retreated from most of their non grocery, retail Concepts I want to say a quarter ago so they kind of they closed all the bookstores they closed the five-star stores and and they kind of said hey we're we're we're revisiting our brick and mortar strategy the one, aspect of brick-and-mortar that they continue to operate where these grocery stores that are called Fresh and these. [14:53] Convenience stores or grab-and-go food stores that are the Amazon go stores that just walk out technology and, you know grocery super important I talk about it all the time it's like the second biggest category of consumer spending and Retail and it's one category where Amazon hasn't done very well arguably Whole Foods hasn't done very well since Amazon bought them, and you know the magic question was where they going to invent a more successful grocery Concept in Amazon Fresh and then this quarter they answered that question no now essentially said we haven't found anything differentiated enough in the Amazon Fresh stores to make us want to scale them, rapidly we haven't given up on Grocery and we're going to continue to work on it and roll something new out but we're for sure pulling back on, growth strategy for this current fresh concept, and so so you know it sounds like hey they definitely don't think they've got brick-and-mortar figured out between fresh and Whole Foods and on delivery, last year, you know they started charging even for Prime members they started charging for delivery at Whole Foods and. [16:06] That way I have a hypothesis that that dramatically put a crimp in there, they're grocery e-commerce sales although in a lot of places in the country groceries are delivered by fresh not by Whole Foods so this quarter they also announced that they're adding a delivery fee even if you're a Prime member. For fresh grocery delivery so there is no free grocery delivery option at Amazon, um you know which in my mind puts them at a pretty significant disadvantage vis-à-vis, instacart Walmart and Kroger that are all aggressively acquiring customers with offers right now. Scot: [16:44] Yep Anderson tough category. Jason: [16:45] So grocery seems like a place where like Amazon has put some serious effort in and it has not won yet has not figured it out. Scot: [16:56] One of the other things that's weighing heavily on the minds of Amazon shareholders is the AWS Computing platform saw its growth really dip below 20% all the cloud providers are feeling this Google Microsoft I think Google has laid off a bunch of the people leading their Cloud effort Microsoft Azure is under a bunch of pressure as well and what's happening is as we hit some economic headwinds the users of these Cloud infrastructures are lots of startups that have venture capital and VC rounds are getting few and far between so they are reducing their loads and their trading down you know one of the things you can do on these platforms is have a machine with a certain computer, horsepower you can kind of say you know maybe I'll go down a couple rungs on the ladder of compute horsepower there and save a little bit and. So it's an area where companies are looking to save money very quickly because you're not locked into certainty or anything like that like you would, be with some software as a service platforms. Jason: [17:58] Yeah I think I'm not to give you credit but I think you were one of the first people I saw, talking about that phenomenon and then it became a big thing I think I like Twitter announced that they were slashing 75% of their salesforce.com seats and it just seemed like in the same way that like, you know Middle America when when budgets get tight you know everybody looks at their recurring spending and cuts all these you know apps they accidentally signed up for On the App Store and in the same way it feels like every company in America is like. Going on a SAS diet right now. Scot: [18:31] Yeah I you know I like to coin phrases we famously coined ship again on the show I call it's a split so when you wake up one day and you look around your company and you've got 200 different stats platforms that you're paying it's only $30 a seat a month but there's 1,000 employees using it and you got 200 of them that I can't do the math on that but it adds up very quickly, so a lot of companies are right-sizing, their SAS budgets one of the interesting beneficiaries of this was the Microsoft Azure platform had pressure but the the Office 365 has done amazing because what happens is people say well I'm using slack Dropbox. And you know maybe maybe one of the Google platforms and you know and I also have Office 365 will if you start to reconcile this you can drop drop box for OneNote and. OneNote Drive. Jason: [19:32] Know what you're right one drive. Scot: [19:35] OneDrive yeah and I can drop you no slack for, they have their own teams and then Zoom for teams and then so so Microsoft because they've got one of the most fullest sweets and almost everyone has Microsoft because of office kind of packed in there their they're a huge beneficiary of that SAS Bluett interestingly I think it was enough to offset the this the downgrades they saw it and measure. Jason: [20:04] Yeah that's super interesting. Scot: [20:06] Yeah one of the you know one of the interesting things that when you're in these weird Economic Times when these companies released their numbers it's late enough into the next quarter so this all came out kind of mid-February that they can give a little color and one of the on the current color. [20:23] Quarter, so they're talking about Q4 results but then sometimes they will drop a little bit what we're already we're seeing kind of right now so they did they did talk about AWS had kind of bottomed out at a 17 percent growth rate or something like that mid-teens, so Wall Street took that positively they also said you know they said we're seeing really improved efficiencies and the retail business which I think Wall Street took to mean they feel like they're at this right balance now of, Transportation warehouses and all those things that they had to shed if feels the feels like they're done based on kind of like what they're seeing, there's always this caveat that that's they've only seen 45 days of the corridor so who knows what the back after that looks like. [21:09] The real bright spot and this is interesting because there's this theme going on the economy where services are are kind of growing much faster than Goods and, at Amazon DE Prime Service Group re dramatically grew 17 percent over a year and acceleration from last quarter's 14% so so Wall Street found that really interesting and I think, you know it's hard to it's hard to know why people are picking Prime I think some consumers are going through a reconciliation with their streaming platforms and they're kind of just like that Microsoft example they're saying well if I go to Prime I get Prime video and I can get access my Yellowstone through there and some other things and that's probably good enough maybe I'll turn off. [21:55] I don't know there's this design of these things now so in any case Wall Street was really pleased with this because there's been a lot of talk at Windows Amazon hit Prime saturation, well you don't hit saturation if you have an acceleration of growth like that so so that was you know a couple the positives in the quarter there but interesting enough and you probably know the ads part I think it had yet another Blockbuster business because they're they continue to benefit from that first party you know all this, effectively the biggest retail media Network out there and I know you think a lot about these retail media networks but that was a gift from our friends at Apple to Amazon so that continues to be the gift that keeps on giving. Jason: [22:37] Yeah yeah it the rate of growth did slow ride so they were in the like 30s and forty percent a year that it was growing and I want to say it only grew, 20% in Q4 your over here which again faster than AWS and still quite fast but for 12 months that means they sold thirty two point seven billion dollars worth of ads and if you assume, that ads are about 75 percent gross margin that means that the ad business contributed 25 billion dollars in earned income, um and ews last year contributed 22 billion dollars in earned income so, you're you know you basically end up with. Retail media networks contributing more to the bottom line at Amazon even than a WS which they're both great businesses. Scot: [23:31] You know I think the 75% is aggressive I think I don't understand why it's like almost not a hundred percent. Jason: [23:39] I agree I used to use a higher number and then I saw some like industry guys the. Like felt like there's more overhead in there and there are a lot of salespeople you know which don't don't you know scale model linearly so so in, I kind of fell in line with some other analysts and dropped it down to that 75%. Scot: [23:59] Yep. Jason: [24:03] However you size it like I'm pretty confident it's the most profitable business at Amazon and still like although it's slowing down slightly it's still still certainly growing, so that was interesting one that I haven't got my head around yet and I feel like you used to do this math yourself but I'm working on a couple of different models for what. Total us gmv did for Amazon and it's not completely trivial because we know what the first party sales were we know what the, the the units were but you know you have to make some assumptions to kind of convert those units into a GM V and the and the mix of third party is different than the mix of first party. But there but the reason that's interesting is liked by most models you know it it was not a huge, growth year for gmv for Amazon and so again I don't have a official estimate yet but like let's assume. They grew by 10% the. [25:16] Fees that they charge third-party sellers Drew 14%. Um so that the fees they're being able to get out of the third party Marketplace is almost certainly growing faster. Then the third party Marketplace and that's because they're able to raise a bunch of rates and our friends at Marketplace pulse did some math and they feel that on average the average 3rd party seller on Amazon when you add up all the selling cost between F ba and and advertising that the average take rate is now 50%. [25:55] So Well I always remind I mean Amazon is a good place to sell like I'm not saying anyone that they shouldn't use Amazon as part of their mix but I get asked all the time if I should just skip it, any other channel in just exclusively rely on Amazon and to me that's a huge mistake because Amazons. Rightly so going to optimize the profit for them and they're very good at that and so they're you know they're taking a lot of margin out of third party selling because there's a long line of people waiting behind every 3rd party seller that want to sell that same stuff. Scot: [26:27] Yeah you going to have a blended approach and kind of Leverage it to sell the right thing at the right time in the right Channel someone should start a company that does that but we'll talk about that another podcast. [26:42] He's busy car washing right now cool that's the Amazon report anything any other earnings you found in arson. Jason: [26:51] Yeah so Amazon reported pretty early this year I don't know if that was strategic or just have a calendar fell but now we are starting to get all of the more traditional retailers and so I want to say we recording this on Thursday Tuesday Walmart and Home Depot reported tomorrow morning targets going to report so we're starting to get all the the cue for sales data from the big retailers, a bunch of specialty Brands like a lot of the apparel Vans VF and folks have already reported and there is emerging and pretty. Clear picture so maybe before we do the Crip picture I'll just recap Walmart Q4 and I tried to channel my inner Scott because. [27:36] Scot and I are the perfect yin and yang Scott is a you know former public company CEO and Savvy investor and he cares a lot about how these companies perform against expectations and what happens to their, their evaluations and I just care how much stuff they sold all right and so I feel it's funny we both look at like all these earnings through different lenses so through your lens I feel like Walmart was mix I think you'd call it a beat and lower because earnings exceeded analysts expectations they came in at 1.71, per share and the in the analyst Target was 1.51 so that's a pretty good beat Revenue came in and 164 billion for the quarter and the expectation was unearned 59 billion so another good, um but on the bad news I think analysts were hoping for. Guidance of like five or six percent growth for the year and Walmart gave a two to two and a half percent guidance for the year. [28:42] And so basically the story was, we had a solid Q4 and a solid 20 22 but we're expecting things to get more difficult and more lean, in 2023 and they you know overtly said we saw spending slow down in the fourth quarter we saw a shift in the mix that they were consumers were trading down, to lower-cost products they were shifting from wants to needs and in Walmart's mix those needs are a lot less profitable so they're selling more Grocery and less, electronics and toys and home goods and stuff like that, and so the both of the guidance for revenue and especially the guidance for profit at Walmart were where lower and that, to me exactly Echoes a lot of the other earnings we heard like the Peril guys their guidance was awful and they're starting their stocks just Tanked, Home Depot actually had like a really soft Q4 because they said spending slow down at the beginning of Q4 so they cut they missed their. Their earnings expectations for Q4 and they had a little guidance but almost every retailer I've seen report earnings has reported lower than anticipated or has made a lower than hope for guidance, for 2023 so retailers are not super bullish on 2023. [30:05] From a pure sales standpoint it's kind of interesting I try to just to compare apples to apples Walmart's an international company, you know with two big retail Concepts in the US and a bunch of other countries I try to pull out like just Walmart sales in the US, and their same-store sales the three years of the pandemic 20 20 21 and 22 they grew 8.6% 6.4% and 6.6%. Average retail growth is 4.1 percent so they, significantly exceeded the industry average for all three of those years but the industry also did much better for the all three of those years so the industry grew at 7.8 14.4 and 6.9 so, basically Walmart slightly out performed the retail industry and two of the three years and underperformed retailing 2021, but solid growth across all three years and then Walmart is one of the nice retailers that breakout their e-commerce growth separately which. I suspect it's because it's usually pretty robust a lot of other companies have stopped reporting e-commerce and you can. [31:11] Speculate why that is this is they don't report it but Walmart eCommerce growth has been very robust during the pandemic so they grew 69 percent in 2020 11 percent in, 21 and 12 percent in 22 and that is you know their 69% was against an industry growth of 42 percent. And then you know this year they drew 12 percent against a e-commerce industry growth of 7.4 percent so. [31:38] Like pretty good e-commerce growth all the way across on a three-year stack that means Walmart Drew or Walmart Drew 100% over those three years their e-commerce business in the US, the the e-commerce industry grew 81% so Walmart Psych the second largest e-commerce site in the United States and they outperformed, the industry on growth Amazon probably did not outperform the industry like like the the best forecast is Amazon probably Drew 56% over those three years, so Walmart not surprising they're much more than Amazon and e-commerce but they grew much faster than Amazon, eBay ends up being the big loser over the three years they only Group 17 percent so kind of the underperformer and then just for sake of comparison Etsy grew 150 percent over the pandemic Shopify drew two hundred and twenty nine percent. And then this apparel company I talk a lot about, is crazy Chien Drew nine hundred percent during the pandemic and some of their financial data week to last month, and their internal forecast for their us Revenue in 2025 exceeds eBay's forecast for all revenue so that's enough, and apparel retailer that's going to sell more stuff online than all of eBay. Scot: [32:54] Wow that's crazy. Jason: [32:56] Yeah the world changes any of that. Scot: [32:58] Do they have infrastructure in the US like to do shipping and stuffers at all come straight from China. Jason: [33:04] The for Sheehan. I believe that they may have announced that they acquired some some sorting centers or some fulfillment center space in the US but I don't think it's come online yet so I think at the moment it's all being shipped abroad but I'm not certain on that. Scot: [33:21] Wow that's crazy it's a lot of international shipments. Jason: [33:26] Yeah yeah but it sounds like it's moving and then the speculation is you know she in in a lot of markets is a Marketplace and they are not a Marketplace in the US yet but a lot of people are speculating, that they're going to launch a Marketplace this year and especially if you if you think there are bigger overall than eBay. You know they're the biggest apparels reseller in the u.s. online or offline like they're on a on a tear it's pretty interesting and what covered on a different show but like their model about what I think is most interesting about Sheehan is there no Merchants they're literally getting their product ideas from tick-tock. Scot: [34:05] Yeah yeah and having a Marketplace will be good will be another piece of data to feed into this kind of viral Crazy Fast fashion engine that they've created. Jason: [34:15] 100% And it's interesting you know. Scot: [34:18] Third party seller would be scary. Jason: [34:18] Accused of doing that in a in a non-competitive way but and they may or may not be doing that but if they are doing it they're doing it with people like you know Sheehan is doing it with Skynet. Scot: [34:30] Yeah cool any other news on the e-commerce front. Jason: [34:37] Well so those are the big earnings I again there's you know we're going to see a bunch of the other big box retailers report over the next couple weeks so we'll put together a more complete picture of of who the winners and losers were like it's mapping if you look at the US Department of Commerce data and you see the categories that won and lost. By shockingly and I would have gone these predictions wrong at the beginning of the pandemic but you know what category like was about the best specialty category to be in over the last three years it was Sporting Goods. Scot: [35:05] Sporting Goods. Jason: [35:07] Yeah which I would not have thought right and Dix's you know had a like Dick's Sporting Goods has had a particularly good run and in fact they bought Moose Jaw from from Walmart today. The and the worst category to be in in the last three years by far is consumer electronics and so, spoiler alert Best Buy hasn't reported this quarter yet but all indications are that it's not going to be a Rosie. Quarter for Best Buy. Scot: [35:38] You know saw Home Depot had theater announcer pre-warned that things were getting kind of soft and so they've had a tremendous run since 2020 said some point people had to run out of money for upgrading their houses looks like we may be at a Tipping Point there too. Jason: [35:53] Yeah and I would categorize them as kind of one of these middle ones they had a phenomenal first half of the pandemic and now it appears to be slowing down and I you know some of the furniture guys are in that same boat and so that the you know it'll be interesting to see where they net out over the three years like I think they're going to net out to have done better than average but not but not amazingly right and in the middle of the pandemic we were all saying like oh man these are. You know Home Depot might be the biggest winner of the pandemic because everybody redid their backyard. So the that's all the earnings stuff I had the other like kind of pool of interesting news that I'm going to ask a lot about right now all centers around social commerce and what's interesting is, there's like news and diametrically different directions so Tik-Tok which, it's not the biggest social network but it's certainly the fastest growing social network and it's it's you know it has prodigious engagement at this point Tick-Tock launched they've had some native shopping before but they launched a native shops feature and it I would characterize it as the most robust. [37:09] Feature set for shopping on a social platform that I've seen yet so stores can have their own shop they can aggregate their own catalog and it's everything is not just a buy now which is normally how social networks do it they have a persistent cart and you you can add multiple items to a cart um you can change all the attributes of those items which is often a problem with other native checkouts you can get a delivery forecast you get tax calculate promo code you get all these things that like historically social networks Skip and then a feature I would have never expected, it's a multi-vendor universal cart so you can actually buy from multiple Tik-Tok shops, in a single transaction and they take PayPal and Apple pay so I would characterize that as a surprisingly robust, native feature to get people buying on tick-tock, and so if you just saw that news you'd say oh that's the future is you know people are discovering stuff on Tik-Tok instead of in the Shelf in the aisle at a store and now they're just going to buy it right on Tick-Tock but in the the same month, our friends at meta turned off their shopping tab on both Facebook and Instagram and said, hey we tried it and we don't we don't think that's how people want to shop and then I guess one other. [38:37] Selfish piece of. Of content in this whole genre a lot of the hype in the u.s. when I get clients asking me about like the Buzzy thing in social commerce it's a live streaming Commerce then there now 100 live streaming vendors I get pitches every single day from someone that like has reinvented shopping and it's all this wise Freeman Commerce which is huge in China but has not. [39:04] Taking off in the US and so I got tired of repeating my same concerns so I wrote a Forbes article that got pretty popular you know talking about how I felt like live streaming Commerce in particular. Was wildly overhyped and it got a lot of them reactions some people violently disagree most of those were live streaming vendors and a lot of, lives a lot of veterans in the space including like brands that sell abroad we're live streaming is big and in the u.s. like chimed in and said yeah what Jason saying is exactly what we're seeing. And what it boils down to is there's there some genres we're live-streaming makes a lot of sense and I think some of those are genres you shop in a lot like Collectibles and unique items and things like that but like if there's not huge product scarcity, the other main reason people shop in livestreams is for deep discounts and so like you can almost replace the word live stream with flash sale. Um for kind of a similar kind of reach like all of this live stream in Commerce in China is and it's 40% off for the next 20 minutes. And so you know that those that kind of extreme deal-making like hasn't, you know how to legs in the US and so it's not surprising that live-streaming hasn't taken off to the same level but I'd be curious our view. [40:31] Like so when I could talk to clients it's an open question right now like what's the future of social commerce is it important is it not important and that is important like is it going to happen on, the social platforms like Tik-Tok their native check out like does Target need to have their own Tick-Tock shop or. Is social a great tool for Discovery and there's lots of ways to connect that that social discovery with traditional e-commerce experiences and you know I. I don't think there's a clear answer yet in the US but it's a super interesting question. Scot: [41:14] Then that's where it would be driven from like if the Kardashians you know had had some kind of a platform of some kind. They have a big enough audience they could direct that audience to the platform and do things it just doesn't really exist in an integrated fashion right you're in you can't really do it on Instagram because you don't have the check out and it just hasn't come together. Amazon can't do it it's like kind of complicated to bring the influence over there and they may not have liked the right thing the influencer wants to sell. Jason: [41:46] Yeah and I do think it is a different story if you're if you're a mega influencer that has a huge audience and you have a relatively limited catalog right so Kylie Jenner is a perfect example like, I think she could do a lot of business on Instagram and Tik-Tok but like that's a wildly different problem than a wholesaler that has. 5 million 10 million 80 million skus in their catalog and what they should be doing on on social networks. Scot: [42:17] I think it can work for it works for Collectibles because you have this kind of like high Affinity audience it works for beauty and apparel and I think that's kind of it. Jason: [42:26] Yeah what I guess and you know. Fair enough for retailers to have broad Ambitions but if you look at China a lot of this like social commerce and e-commerce like a bunch of it happens on social networks like Dao Yuan which is Tick-Tock there and WeChat which. I guess Loosely similar to Twitter. But a lot of it does happen on platforms owned by the retailer right so towel live which is you know essentially a site owned by by you know the the Amazon of China. Is a big social platform where a lot of people go just to watch short-form videos and buy a lot of stuff. Um and so you know of course if you're a retailer that's what you'd want like you don't want to be disintermediated by the social platform and have to pay a fee and not know who the customer is you you want the customer to come to you. But it. [43:23] It seems like recreating that model in the US would be super hard and the I would argue the retailer that stride the hardest to do it is Amazon and Amazon has all the features like they they have a. They had Amazon live for a while now they have Amazon Inspire and they have a lot of influencers creating unique short form video content with shoppable ads in it. On the Amazon platform but I would say the early indications are that. It's not organically working like you know it's not drying a bunch of people that just want to Doom stroll on Amazon instead of tick-tock and creators aren't going there because they're making a bunch of money, in the normal economic model what what it seems like is happening is Amazon is paying like extra bounties to get creators to try the platform. And they the Creator goes to that platform as long as that Bounty exist but as soon as that Bounty expires and they fall into the normal economic model the Creator's returning to tick tock because they can make more money on Tick Tock than they can on on inspire. Scot: [44:25] Yeah the whatnot platform is pretty fascinating because it has like yes it's got a persistent store on one side of the screen and then you're watching the talent and then you know they can do they can sell things like a variety of different ways that can run an auction they can they can do a limited almost like a QVC I've got 10 of these and when they're gone they're gone and on the screen it does a countdown they can do a. Did you like a markdown I think you would probably call it a filene's basement kind of thing you know that wear it the longer it's there the more discount there is so it's kind of counterintuitive lie you're kind of like. You're kind of like waiting waiting and then you see it. Jumping yet game a discount chicken and then you know it's really fascinating how they you know they give the the. Seller who is largely you know an influencer of so many tools to sell and they're all integrated so once you have your your payment information in there you know you get really sucked into the game and I think that's really what it's going to take like that's what you're missing on you know any of these Tick-Tock may have it I haven't seen their platform but you know certainly Instagram or Facebook reels or YouTube they don't have that level of integration even the Amazon stuff I've seen has been kind of. Not super Innovative from is like a Lincoln you know feels affiliate e it's not like an integrated into the video thing. Jason: [45:55] Yeah no I hundred percent agree I think some of those knit your experiences are a lot more interesting at the moment than any of the super mainstream ones but what not is certainly interesting to look at I do think like Network without any vowels in it is like interesting, flavor of live shopping which seems like it works in some genres so yeah I think some of those the sites are interesting one thing I would point out about all of those is, their definition of influencer is maybe a little different than like the traditional like when we say influencer I think a lot of people think of Mega influencers right in the think of these. These superstars with millions of followers but. Like on most of those these platforms that the influencer is someone with a much smaller following so it's much more of a long tail influencer or a micro influencer. Scot: [46:46] Cool. Jason: [46:49] Yeah so I feel like this is going to be an interesting space to follow throughout all of 2023 but I do think. It's going to be an interesting year in retail and 2023 because I think a lot of retailers are worried at least at the first half is not going to be robust and so you're seeing a lot of shift in investment on retailers from. Kind of like you know mega growth and customer acquisition activities to like. Operational efficiencies and improve our our profit and our short-term returns type activities. Scot: [47:23] Yeah in the I guess used to continue to get pictures from the live stream guys are they on to you now. Jason: [47:30] Yeah no so again you know you can totally pan them on in an article and you know the internet has a short memory so I still get. Get lots of pictures and you know. One of them will be amazing right so it's hard like you want to listen to all these pictures because someone will there's some entrepreneur out there that will have some amazing new idea and odds are like all get jaded and cynical and ignore him and miss it. But the signal noise ratio is pretty tough because you you will have to list you know listen to a lot of like you know poorly articulated pitches to get to that one good one. Sure I'm sure you get that from an investment perspective all the time. Scot: [48:10] I do yeah it's it's hard to pick the if I've learned anything it's very humbling trying to pick winners and losers so I have given up on them. Everyone's a winner everyone gets a trophy Jason. Jason: [48:25] I love it participation that's the modern. Scot: [48:26] Yeah yeah. Jason: [48:38] And I feel like it's both overhyped and legitimate at the same time is all this generative Ai and its use cases, in Commerce right you know so obviously the most Buzzy one of the moment is chat gbt but GPT Beth. There's actually a lot of super interesting tools that are that retailers are starting to legitimately used to get more operationally efficient and I think that might be an interesting topic for a deep dive of Europe for. Scot: [49:10] Yeah yeah guilty pleasure confession I am addicted to mid-journey I love playing with the generative visual a is that there are a lot of fun. Jason: [49:20] Yeah I think they are super interesting and I will tease the Deep dive. So the interesting thing about the she and apparel model is they identify a trend and they have a fast turn Factory that can make literally like a first run of that apparel item in a day. So a day after they see a trend on Tick Tock they've got 100 up for sale and if those hundreds L then they make 10,000 right and so it's this like super fast iteration. You know you're not trying to show for she and because there's a lot of challenges with the model to but that I have heard that she and launches about 10,000 skus a day. So a day to put that in perspective fast fashion like H&M launched 20,000 skews a year and slow fashion like the Gap launch for thousands of years a year so 10,000 a day is. Is game changing but it's super hard to do and so. You know what super interesting about the generative AI for images is. If you're really just doing a one-day test to see if there's demand for some new apparel like. You can generate amazing images of apparel Styles without making the apparel you can put it up on an e-commerce site you can collect a pre-order and then you can make it tomorrow if it gets the enough demand. [50:43] And so you're starting to see people like skip the photography all together and use generative AI to do concept testing and for sure if you're on a parasite in your shopping for. An outfit that's coming from multiple vendors you can use the generative image AI image generation. Render all three of those apparel items from different providers on the same mannequin or increasingly, on a virtual Avatar of the Shopper right so it Walmart you can see all that apparel like on your own body which no apparel looks better on my body than it does on the mannequin so in my case it doesn't work but. I can see the appeal for others. Scot: [51:25] Yeah it's a good inventory turns to not make something and then sell it. Jason: [51:30] Yes exactly it's like moving One Step close yeah so, and in the apparel where they make a lot of that clothes and can never sell it and then it goes into the landfill like you know it helps with the Ecology of the industry so so super interesting stuff the progress is happening super fast so it's exciting, but Scott that's probably a good place to leave it for today because once again we've used up our allotted time as always if this show is helpful we sure would love it if you jump on iTunes and give us that five star review and you know get ready to say hi to me at a couple of these upcoming shows. [52:18] Happy Commercing.

Are SLAs just Secrets, Lies and Assumptions?  Do we fudge the KPIs to show we have excellent delivery?  It's possible, but XLA's are more difficult to fool.  The boys are talking about experience and happiness on this podcast that defines and describes XLA's, eXperience Levels Agreements and how they fit into the picture of SLA and OLA.Valentine's day caused some delays as it fell on a regular recording night, so Steve and Marijn had to delay swapping Vantine gifts, but we did that on this podcast.  But the delay revives some magic, and the Boys dig deep into some great tools to improve the end user experiences for delivering your Cloud and Microsoft 365 services to your users.We know what SLA OLA supports eXperience Level Agreements, and if you don't, you can learn something from Steve and Marijn as they talk about how this can improve the delivery, the change process and improve the tracking of Ability in the ADKAR process.All this and a Very different WHISKY FROM Finland as we return to the KYRO distillery for this episode's wee dram, maybe, just maybe, we have found a distillery that is just NOT to the taste of Marijn.This year we take on the road our Governance workshop and the key to that is understanding XLA's and much of today's learning you can drill down and catch in our Governance workshops through 2023.  https://techorama.be/workshops/practical-microsoft-365-baseline-governance/ 

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The winner will be contacted via Twitter. Show references: https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/https://culturalenterprises.org.uk/https://www.linkedin.com/in/kingston-myles-080088118/ Kingston Myles is Head of Commercial Development at English Heritage. He describes his role as “seeking out and executing opportunities to generate new income for the charity and improve on processes to reduce expenditure”. Kingston is responsible for a number of growing and emerging businesses that intersect the Charity and its assets (sites, collections and brand) with commercial businesses (Venue Hire, Licensing, Holidays and Compliance). Kingston has a varied background and prior to joining the heritage sector in 2017 worked in numerous venues and across several high profile events including Glastonbury Festival. Kingston has a passion for both sustainability and equality, he describes this passion as being a positive culture amplifier. He plays an active part of driving change from within – currently sitting on the Organisations EDI Steering Group and is the founding member and chairperson of English Heritage's BAME Staff & Volunteer Network. Kingston is driven by wanting to see more senior leaders that are representative of society across the arts, heritage and cultural sector. Kingston is also a Trustee for the Association of Cultural Enterprises – a sector supporting organisation focused on the advancement of commerce in the cultural sector. Transcriptions: Kelly Molson: Welcome to Skip the Queue, a podcast for people working in or working with visitor attractions. I'm your host, Kelly Molson. Each episode, I speak with industry experts from the attractions world.  In today's episode, I speak with Kingston Myles, Head of Commercial Development at English Heritage. Kingston shares his insight into where the biggest opportunities lie for diversifying income streams and his top three tips on how attractions of any size can utilise these strategies. If you like what you hear, you can subscribe on itunes, Spotify and all the usual channels by searching to Skip the Queue. Kelly Molson: Kingston, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today. I'm very excited to have you here. Kingston Myles: More than welcome. Kelly Molson: Hopefully you'll feel as excited after I've asked you the icebreaker question. Who knows. But let's go. Right, this is quite topical for today, so I want to know, what are you most likely to buy when you exit through the gift shop. Kingston Myles: Me personally, probably a bottle of gin or alcohol. That's probably my go to when I leave through the gift shop. Kelly Molson: Good choice. A gin man. A man of my dreams. Not going to lie. Okay. All right, well, this is another one that leads on from that, actually. Do you have or have you ever had a collection of anything? Kingston Myles: Yes, when I was growing up, I had a collection of the James Bond videos and used to put them all together on the shelf and they used to paint a picture and that one was missing. My nan used to buy them for me when I was a kid and, like, only one of them was missing right up until videos kind of got killed by DVD and DVDs got killed by Netflix. So, yeah, I guess that was probably the one thing I can remember having, like, a proper collection of. Kelly Molson: Did you ever get the missing one? Kingston Myles: No, it was like number 13, I think, from memory. Not that it's bugged me for all these years. Kelly Molson: Look, someone listening to this is going to send you that now. They're going to hunt it down on ebay and be like, “Look what I found you”. Kingston Myles: And I'll be in the loft digging out the videos and then trying to find a video player. Kelly Molson: Have you still got them? Kingston Myles: I think they're still at my parents house and they're lost. Yeah, we don't throw stuff away easily. Kelly Molson: No, we're hoarders as well. It's really sad, though, isn't it. Because my mum did this when I was younger with Disney videos. So every new Disney film that came out on video, she bought, and I think she was thinking, “Oh, this is lovely. You know, one day I'll have grandchildren as well and they can watch them”. Kingston Myles: Yeah. And then streaming came along and now we've kind of just got everything at the click of a button. Kelly Molson: Disney+ mum, taken over. Right, good. I like this. Okay, last ice breaker question. What's the best attraction event that you've ever experienced? Kingston Myles: I went to the Ally Pally fireworks last year, which is the big fireworks show for London. And I'm not a Londoner, so you've got to imagine, first of all, I was in South London and I told friends I'll pop up and see them. There's no popping from South London to Ally Pally, as I found out the hard way. But I've just never seen a pop up one night fireworks show on the scale of that with like, the infrastructure and all the different bits that kind of make it what it was. I really underestimated it. I thought, I will turn up, there'll be like, a few burger vans and like, a bit of music and a bar. No, it's this just incredible pop up experience that takes over Ally Pally. Kingston Myles: So that was probably the one that surprised me most because I went thinking it would be like every other sort of local firework display and it was huge. Kelly Molson: Everybody rates this. I've never been to this. I can remember years ago, ice skating at Ally Pally, and I used to have to get three buses to get to Ally Pally to actually do that. But everybody speaks so highly of this fireworks attraction. Fireworks night. Kingston Myles: Never been. It's phenomenal. It's huge and there's literally tens of thousands of people go to see it. So it's definitely worthwhile going to. I think also it's one of those once you've been to it, you want to go and find something else because the magic will probably fade potentially relatively quickly and there's lots of other incredible displays around London, but it's definitely a worthwhile experience. Kelly Molson: Excellent. Good choice. Wasn't expecting that. Okay, right, your unpopular opinion. What have you prepared for us?Kingston Myles: I think my really unpopular opinion is that actually we over-index our focus, especially in the culture and heritage sector, on gift shops, on catering and on membership. And actually the future is way beyond that. So that's probably my unpopular opinion. We over-index on shops and cafes and forget that there are dozens of other ways that you can generate income. Kelly Molson: Oh, I like this. And very topical for the things that we're going to talk about today as well. It's an excellent lead into the conversation. Okay, well, we are going to talk about diversifying income streams today. Your role. When we spoke pre interview, we had a brilliant chat and I just found your role so interesting and so diverse. Can you just share a little bit of what you do with our audience and kind of what your tasks are with achieving?Kingston Myles: Yeah, sure. So my official title is head of commercial development, which is best summarised as being responsible for this kind of incubator of business growth and efficiency. So I'm responsible for four business areas within English Heritage: our brand licensing program, our portfolio of holiday cottages, and our venue hire business. And those are all income generating parts of this sort of incubator and then also responsible for managing a suite of national contracts. So the provision of services to all of our site operations teams and that's really about looking at efficiency opportunities, the chance to rationalise contracts and reduce perhaps the supplier debt that we have in terms of the number of suppliers we're working with so we can get better value for the charity. Kingston Myles: But all of those business areas are kind of unique in that they've got such scope to grow at a point they will eventually have their own, hopefully their own allocated head of department when they sort of graduate my care and then something else will fall into, I'm sure, my sort of pool. Kelly Molson: It feels quite entrepreneurial, your role, is it quite a unique role for English Heritage or is this something that you've kind of defined for yourself within the organisation?Kingston Myles: Yes, I'm the first head of commercial development. The role was created back in 2020 with an initial focus on looking at brand licensing and contracts and compliance and then there was sort of an opportunity to pull the holiday cottage piece in as well. And then various sort of personnel and structure changes meant that I inherited the venue hire business, which is exciting because it's kind of the closest thing to sort of my previous job roles, sort of pre culture and heritage, but yeah, it's definitely unique in a sense of various business areas rather than sort of one specific focus, that traditional focus of having either like ahead of retail or ahead of catering, which we do have all head food and beverage, but within the cultural sector, sort of heads of business development, heads of business innovation, change, transformation. Kingston Myles: I mean, they all sound very buzzworthy, but there are definitely more and more roles emerging as institutions say, well, actually, how do we diversify our income streams. Strike up more partnerships. We kind of need somebody who is almost like a paid entrepreneur and I'm so privileged in that. That kind of really is my job. I'm paid to be entrepreneurial without the risk of having to invest all my own cash and capital into an idea, Kelly Molson: It's the perfect role. Kingston Myles: Yeah, definitely. Especially because when it's successful and when we do great things, they contribute towards this sort of wider charitable purpose. So you get this real benefit of creating a business, but that business has this incredible sort of halo effect of doing good because we all work for a charity. Kelly Molson: Yeah. So it's the warm and fuzzy feeling as well. You mentioned just briefly there that your roles previously outside of the sector, what were those roles and how have they helped you with this role? That's quite an interesting thing to understand. Kingston Myles: So I used to work in bars and nightclubs, hospitality and events, sort of a real event and hospitality sort of butterfly as that industry kind of is. You kind of chase progression, opportunities, new openings, there's always something sort of shiny and new moving in the hospitality space and managers move around a lot. But I think the transferable skills from that, it's everything from just general business operations and financial acumen which especially if you're in an independent operator, you're really close to both the PNL but also the balance sheet and cash flow. And then also kind of innovation and that entrepreneurial spirit that sort of need to be able to grow a business, whether that's more people through a door, a higher transaction value or a more efficient control of your suppliers and contractors, kind of it's all transferable into the sector. Kingston Myles: And there's this kind of really interesting change in the sector at the moment in that more and more people are transitioning into the sector. Rather than kind of perhaps growing through the sector, it's becoming more attractive as a sector to work in, which is exciting because it used to really be a case of sort of join and you had to work your way up, whereas actually the sector is recognising those transferable skills, add value, especially in this current climate. Kelly Molson: Yeah, I like that take on it, actually, because we have a lot of guests that come on that work within the attraction sector that would start at quite a low level entry point and then work their way up. You're probably the first guest that's come in from a completely different perspective. It hasn't been your beer or endo. You haven't had this huge desire to work in it from the minute that you came out of school. You've transitioned from something that's completely different but really transferable. So I'm excited to hear where today takes us. All right, well, let's start. What I'd like to understand is how attractions start that process of diversifying its income streams. You talked a little bit at the beginning about we're quite tied to admission fees and membership and retail. How do they start to look beyond that?Kingston Myles: Yeah, I think part of it is taking stock of what you have. If you've got big open green spaces, then great. You could focus on large third party events, working with production companies and clients and promoters. If you've got this really interesting design Led collection, or if you've got a really interesting story to tell, then perhaps it's more around sort of brand licensing and leveraging the intellectual property. So I guess step one is asking, what do I have beyond my shop, beyond my Cafe, beyond admissions. What product could I create? Kingston Myles: And what product is going to be the easiest to create is probably the best place to start because I speak to a lot of colleagues within the sector or a lot of sort of commercial managers within heritage and culture institutions that are like, right, well, we want to do everything that your job does. And I'm like, well, you don't have a portfolio of properties that could be transformed into high quality lets or accommodation. Never going to have a holiday business. So don't try and squeeze glamping into this really small corner of your estate. Focus on something else. So, yeah, I guess it's taking stock is key. Kelly Molson: That's really good advice, isn't it. And I guess it's looking at what you already have and making the most of it, which is a message that is quite key at the moment, where we're seeing budgets being marketing departments all over. You don't have to necessarily start from scratch. It's just about making the most of what you already have and developing that into something that you've already got quite a captive audience for. Kingston Myles: Yes, definitely, 100%. Kelly Molson: Great. Okay, so what are the areas that look quite exciting at the moment. If we're an attraction. Where can you see some of the biggest opportunities?Kingston Myles: Yeah, I mean, so filming location hire. We've seen this huge boom in domestic filming location hire. Domestic film shoots, domestic productions, regional screen tourism offices are popping up. There are some incredible partners within the film sector. Film London, Creative England, Screen Yorkshire, sort of all these bodies that really drive trying to connect people with great spaces to production companies that want to film domestically. And I think as we see the kind of challenges of the cost of global travel and the strength of the pound in the sort of wider economic world, although I'm not an economist, sort of change, there's a real opportunity to capitalise on productions that say, actually, we can unit base. We can produce here, we can shoot here. We can shoot on location. We've got this tiny little island, the UK. Kingston Myles: And I predominantly focus, obviously, on England because of my role, but we've got this tiny little island. But there's so much in it, so much to see, so much diversity. So I definitely think there's an opportunity to unlock more spaces for filming a location hire, for sure. Kelly Molson: Yeah, that's a great one. I guess that's relevant. If you have a stately home, for example, it's a perfect opportunity. But it kind of doesn't matter what your attraction is, right. Because we've seen TV shows be filmed at places like Bembom. I call it Bembom Brothers. But Dreamland in Margate. We've just seen a film that's been released very recently that's been shot as part of that. And I guess so there's opportunities regardless of what the size of your attraction is and what it actually is as well. Kingston Myles: Completely. And I think it's about for each attraction, they'll have unique challenges. If you're a high footfall visitor attraction, sort of a theme park, for example, then yeah, you're going to have the conflicting challenge of foregoing admissions revenue to potentially reduce your operating capacity to shoot a film. If you're the custodian of a collection of national significance or an indemnified collection of art, then you're going to have all of the unique challenges of working in a space with all of the environmental controls required to protect pieces of artwork and historic collections. And if you're an independent stately home, you're potentially going to have the challenges of the knowledge base required to execute a filming location hire, sort of safely, efficiently. So I think each part of the attraction sector is sort of a whole when you sort of that really broad spectrum of attractions. Kingston Myles: Each will have their own unique challenges. There's a real benefit in networking and learning and working with those within sort of business specific areas that already do it and do it well. So, yeah, hopefully that helps. Kelly Molson: Definitely helps. We'll talk a little bit about sector collaboration later as well. So I've got a few questions around that. What does English heritage do. Can you share some of the examples of the diversity that you've been able to develop within the organisation?Kingston Myles: Yeah, so staying on the subject of filming location higher, as an example of an income stream that isn't purely based on what people might perceive, which is we've got historic properties, so they must just do period dramas. Actually, we make our properties available for blockbuster films. Obviously, I can't disclose what those are, but there are some that are in post production, which I'm really excited to see how they bring our properties to life in these really incredibly creative and thought through worlds and spaces. But it doesn't just have to be big major film shoots. We work with fashion houses, brands and editorial magazines to provide spaces for photo shoots. Kingston Myles: And then of course, within that same genre, we work with individuals, couples who might have a real affinity to a property that want to shoot an engagement shoot, or a wedding shoot, or a celebration of life shoot. So there's a real broad spectrum in that you don't have to suddenly close everything and have these massive film crews turn up with all these incredibly ginormous, almost intimidating pieces of equipment. It could just be a really lovely local couple that met at a property that are getting married down the road and on the day of their wedding, what they'd really like to do is jump in their wedding car, pop up, take some photos for a couple of hours and leave again. So it's that real spectrum of like two people in their camera person to two to 500 person strong film crew. Kelly Molson: I love that as well because that it means that regardless, again, of size of attraction, there's still something that you can offer in some way. And I think that's really important to point out is that these strategies, they aren't just for English Heritage is a very large attraction organisation, but it's not just for those. There's plenty that the smaller attractions can take from this as well. What other things does English Heritage do? Because I know that you've got partnerships. I know you mentioned holiday lets.Kingston Myles: Yeah. So we've got an incredible portfolio of holiday lets. So we're really unique in all of our holiday lets are situated within sort of the boundary of our properties and then when the properties close in the evening to guests that are staying overnight, so day guests leave and our overnight guests can sort of explore the exterior spaces and gardens and landscapes overnight. So they're really popular. We're really lucky to welcome sort of just over 1300 holidays a year across our portfolio, which is exciting, and that's an expanding portfolio. So we're imminently about to open a new holiday at the Head Gardeners House at Audley End in Essex, and that's been through a renovation process. So that was sort of bringing the property out back into use. Kingston Myles: And we opened a property at Rest Park, which is not too far from Audley End End in 2021. But it's not just sort of holiday lets and filming. You know, we've got the brand and licensing program. So it's really about rather than sort of doing something at our site, if you kind of, you know, generalise the holiday business and the venue hire and filming business as sort of something that's happening at site, there's an activity at one of our properties. Our branded intellectual property licensing business is all about unlocking the assets that we have in the collection to tell the story of England we're really uniquely placed as English Heritage. Our CEO, Kate May referred to us once as the sort of the Museum of England, which is a really nice way of looking at the stories that we can tell. Kingston Myles: So our brand licensing program will do the things that one would expect. We'll use an incredible archive of wallpapers captured from properties over the years in sort of design led work. But we also try to work with a range of licensing partners or licensees that adopt some of our core values. Are they established English business manufacturing in England with some really incredible conservation and stewardship credentials? Are they celebrating sort of traditional ways of working. Because we're not only this sort of steward of nearly 400 historic monuments and the blue plaque scheme in London, but we're really here trying to preserve the sort of art, the craft, sort of the true vibe of Englishness. So we get this real opportunity to play from sort of design led work right through to sort of culture, craft and Englishness as a brand itself. Kelly Molson: Oh, my goodness. I have so many questions on these, but also a statement. I live like five minutes from Audley End and I had no idea that you were opening the Gardener's Cutters as a holiday let. I actually had no idea that English Heritage had a holiday let side to its organisation. So this was all quite new to me when we first spoke. What I really love about it is it really drives into the message that we're hearing more and more frequently now as we come through into 2023, that people are willing to pay more for something that is a really unique experience. And when you mentioned there about the holiday lets and people can then walk around the gardens at night and get a completely different I just thought, “Oh my goodness, I had no idea that you could actually do that”. Kingston Myles: Of course. So there's like an added reason to go and stay book somewhere. That's beautiful. Obviously it's going to beautiful, it's an English Heritage property, but you have this unique opportunity to explore the place that you're in when nobody else is there at a time that you would never, ever be able to be in it. And I just think that's amazing. Kingston Myles: Yeah, they're phenomenal and we've been really lucky. We've worked really hard tirelessly to drive up the quality of our offer. So we started a refurbishment program of our holiday estate towards the end of 2020, 2021. We're sort of now sort of at phase three of what will probably be five phases of bringing all of those holiday lets up to standard. So at the moment we've got a suite that are being refurbished as we speak. When the Head Gardener's House opens up Audley End, that will be sort of kitted out with I mean, the kitchen is beautiful, but so is the interior. And it's not just a case of, well, actually if we just thrown a load of stuff in there, we work really closely with the business that won the tender for the refurbishment. Kingston Myles: So we're working with John Lewis on that property and we work with their interior designers. We're trying to create and I know we'll touch on it later, but we're trying to create these experiences where actually, if you really enjoy being in one of our holiday cottages, you can go away and you can buy pretty much anything you see inside. And as much as possible, as the licensing program evolves, those products will be English Heritage products. So you'll be sat below a wallpaper that's inspired by a clipping from a collections archive down the road that actually was in a building on. So we have this incredible piece of wallpaper from Great Ormond Street. Kingston Myles: So the same road as the famous hospital that's used on product, and you'll be able to go and buy that, but you also might be able to buy it on a cushion or on home furnishings or on a bed spread, but you get to experience the quality of it first and then you've really got this sort of continued storytelling. Like guests don't just leave because they've checked out, they kind of take a little bit of us with them, which is the aspiration, and I think it's what the Premier ended this years ago. They had this whole campaign where you could buy the hypnos bed that you slept on in a Premier inn. And they were one of the first brands to sort of say, all we are as a Premier inn right. Kingston Myles: But if you had a great night's sleep, have this great night's sleep at home, because you can buy the same bed that we have. So, yeah, it's just kind of trying to perfect that wheel, if you like. Kelly Molson: You described it as experiential shopping, which I think is a great term. And I just love how many facets are waving into this in that you're celebrating artifacts, artwork, craft that has come from, you know, all these incredible places, and you're allowing people to now stay in a beautiful holiday cottage, purchase part of that experience to take home with them. If that's not diversifying countries, I don't know what describes it any better, to be honest. Kingston Myles: Yeah, and I mean, you know, as a charity, we're on this incredible mission to be financially self sufficient. So, you know, we are an independent charity from 2015, so and then this financial year is the last year that we received sort of government tapering relief. So we're really out there to become much loved to connect with our members, our visitors and our audience. And what better way to do that than not only offer them a great day out. Because that's like a core part of what we do. Offer them a great day out that really tells the story of England, offer them this opportunity for a great stay out that tells the story of England, and then an opportunity to sort of take a piece of that. Experience home with them or to go and shop for that experience. Kingston Myles: Because we'll never be able to put a three piece sofa or a kitchen in one of our retail spaces. They're gift shops. They're exit through the gift shops. They're incredibly well run by my colleagues in our retail team. So how can we do that? How can we showcase those other products through our holiday laps, et cetera.Kelly Molson: Yeah, it's brilliant. If I can ask you a little bit about partnerships, I just think that this is so relevant to this part of the conversation. But what I'd love to understand is how you define what a good partnership looks like. How do you choose the products and how do you choose the organisations that you do partners with? Kingston Myles: Yeah, I guess the first thing to say is, and I can touch specifically on products because we have a real robust roadmap for how we choose who we're going to work with when it comes to sort of licensees. And partners to create product with in that aspect, but broader than that sort of partnerships for us. Touch on. Especially for me, on all of our business areas. So we've just closed a 30 night Christmas light trail at Kenwood in northwest London, which we run in partnership with Kilimanjaro Live Christmas at Kenwood. And we are hosting again Gardener's World Autumn Affair, and Audley End in Essex, that will be there for the second year this year. And we run that in partnership with the team behind Autumn Fair. Kingston Myles: I guess I bring those up because it really symbolises how partnerships work best for us, which is that there's an equal contribution where both parties are adding value. It could be really easy to mistake working with a charity or working with an attraction as potentially very one sided. We need, they have, or they have and we need, but actually it's not. We've got this real opportunity to grow combined audiences, add combined and shared value and celebrate sort of everything that stands true in both camps from a value perspective. With products, it's a slightly more robust roadmap because we are manufacturing something, we're creating something that's going to carry our trademark, our logo. So we have five core values that I apply to our licensing business. So we look for products of quality, we look for products which carry hallmarks of authenticity. Kingston Myles: Are they telling a story accurately? Because we are the storytellers of England, it has to be, right. Are they responsibly sourced? Is the organisation a responsible organisation. Is it fun? Because ultimately fun is one of our core values and it can sound really cheesy when you say one of our corporate values is fun with a capital F. But no, we are fun. We're ultimately a day out for lots of people, for nearly sort of pre pandemic, 10 million visitors a year and our 1. 2 million members. And then with products, we look at sort of, is there something imaginative here. Are we doing something different. Are we going to tell a really cool story of England in a way that people might not expect. Kingston Myles: Or is English Heritage as a brand going to appear somewhere that you might not expect but are sort of surprised and delighted by. And you could, I guess, engineer those values back over all the other partnerships that we have as well, because actually they're all of quality, they're all authentic. Everyone that we work with is respectful and responsible and lots of the stuff that we do, especially the events, are really fun and imaginative. So, yeah, I'm going to go away and add that into my own strategy now. Kelly Molson: I'm glad that you've been inspired by this conversation. What I really liked about that is that the way that you describe the products is that they're very unique to your values and very unique to your organisations. And that's what people are looking for, isn't it. They don't just want another cushion with something on it. They don't just want another thing that they can buy. They want something that they can only get when they visit your organisation. They can only get it if they go to Audley End. They can only get it if they go to it wherever else they go to. That's what's really important to people at the moment. That uniqueness completely. Kingston Myles: And I think one of the cool things about our brand licensing program is that we are loosely making products. We make the products available on site as much as we can and off site with retail partners, but you'd never normally expect to walk into. So I walked into Sainsbury. So I used my very first ever job, when I was like 18. I was on like I took a gap year and I guess a big regret. I should have just gone traveling it's in the world, right. But instead I was like, no, I'm going to work, I'm going to save, I'm going to go to university, I'm going to be really responsible. So my first average job was in Sainsbury's, and I went back to that Sainsbury store in Barnwood in Gloucester and I walked into the Beers, Wines and Spirits aisle. Shock. Kingston Myles: People are going to get a real perception of me here and they're hanging there on a Clip strip. I mean, I knew they were going to be there. Their hanging there was this chip shop, Scraps and Fries, a crisp product that we made with our partner, Made for Drink. So, you know, here I am, sort of twelve years on stood, you know, the shop still feels the same. You still recognise some of the colleagues stood in the Beers, Wines and Spirits are looking at this product that is made in partnership, crafted in partnership with Made for Drink. They're carbon neutral when they're produced, they're in recyclable packaging and they celebrate sort of flavors and stories of England through food. And it's an English Heritage product in a Sainsbury. Kingston Myles: It's not necessarily the type of product that people might expect to see our brand on, but actually when they learn about the story and then they learn about the partner that we've partnered with, they're surprised and delighted, and I always like to share. We had several different reach outs from prospective partners to create snacking products, crisps, et cetera. And we chose to go with Dan at Made For Drink because they best matched all of those values. I spoke about sort of quality, authenticity, respect, imagination and fun, rather than perhaps maybe a global snack manufacturer that, yes, we could have made tens of thousands of packs, but it would have been just our logo on just another bag. There wouldn't have been the depth of storytelling. Kingston Myles: And then when you look back to us being that sort of Museum of England with our sort of ambition of telling England's story, you kind of have to really stay true to those values to create a quality product and to create lasting partnerships and relationships. We don't want to feel like we have something. Our logo, they want it, great, have it. And then what do we get beyond that. Very little. Whereas with the partnership with Made For Drink, there's been lots of innovation. We're getting to work with lots of domestic food producers and flavor houses. So it's really exciting and it really kind of embodies everything that partnerships should for an attraction or a cultural organisation. Kelly Molson: A great story. So did you feel secretly pleased when you were stood in that same Sainsburys that you didn't go on that gap year and that you did save up and go to university to do all these wonderful things. Kingston Myles: Yeah, I felt a bit smug because I was like, from the shop floor to the shelf, this guy. So I had a little moment in the aisle and I took a little selfie and did that thing that everyone doesn't post it on LinkedIn, sort of with all of the sort of faux pas of the average LinkedIn post ending on a rhetorical question. But yeah, so it was a little moment of joy as I took it and I went through the self gang check out and bought it. And I was like, yeah, here we go. And I've got the receipt somewhere. It's nostalgic. It was fun. Kelly Molson: That's brilliant. And well deserved as well. Congratulations. Great story. Okay, what I'd love to do, we talked a little bit about how a lot of the strategies that you've worked through are they're not just for huge organisations. There are things that any size attraction can do. How can they utilise these strategies. Is there any way that you could summarise kind of like a top three tips for us. Kingston Myles: Yeah, so I have, like, I'm really a staunch believer in the working methodology, “Know, do and review”. So that'd be my first tip. Right. Know what you can't do. Because all the way back to sort of our first part of the conversation, like, know what you can't do, know what you can do. So take the time to look at, take stock, understand what you have, what you don't have, what you might need to be successful, then get on and do it. Because I'd say all managers at some point have definitely written or all leaders have definitely written a strategy that they've then done absolutely nothing with other than PDF it and shove it in a OneDrive or a folder somewhere. So get on with the doing, which is so important. And that means rolling up sleeves. Kingston Myles: You can't be a bedroom leader. You have to get out. Get out on the ground, stand there and really understand if, “Did I know everything or do I need to know more?”. So you're constantly learning through the due process and then review, right. Like, stop and wrap it up or think about it, perfect it, tweak it, don't let it just roll downhill, out of control. And equally, don't hold it at the top. Sort of afraid to let go, but yeah. So no do and review would be my first tip. My second tip, especially for smaller organisations, so the institution I worked in prior to English Heritage, so I worked for the University of Oxford in two different museums. One very big museum and one very small museum. My second tip really comes from there. Which is one meeting, one topic, one focus. Kingston Myles: When you're in a smaller institution stakeholders often have really wide reaching job remits and they're covering operations, commercial planning, health and safety, finance. You could be talking to the same person for all of those things. So don't sit down with that person and have a million different conversations. Really focus your time and energy one meeting, one topic, one focus. And I still use that to this day. I'm a real believer in like let's just talk about just this and then let's have a separate meeting to talk about something else. And then my final tip would be like the Power of no. I sound like I'm about to release three books, don't I. First book, know, do, review with Kingston. Second book, one meeting, one topic. Kelly Molson: And I would read these books. I would buy these books and read them. Kingston Myles: I'll brand license them and I'll put them in the holiday cottages. But yeah. The power of no. Right. It's okay to say no to things like if in the no process when you're doing all the research and all the groundwork does it not feel right. Do the numbers not stack up. We have human instinct and we've almost been programmed out of that. And there's lots of different analogies people run down and different avenues. Is it because actually we've got this hustle culture and we have to give everything a go. No, you don't have to give everything a go. If your expertise and skills and knowledge are telling you this is not going to work then just say no. And that's sometimes a really difficult decision. Kingston Myles: And I have lots of conversations with people recently I really want to do this but and I'm like if that butlist is factual and it's going to create a great amount of risk and don't do it. So yeah, the Power of no would be my third top tip. Kelly Molson: That is a great top tip for life in general, I think at Kingston. Weirdly. So every year I kind of set a word that I try to use as a guide for my year and this year's is reflect because I'm a bit of a people pleaser. So I say yes to many things and then run out of time and then end up not being able to do those things or just do them as badly. I do them to a level of degree that I could do better. So learning to say no I think is the most powerful tip that you've shared in that process and I'm going. Kingston Myles: To remember that and I've used it and I'm proud of the fact that we've said no to potential partnerships, we've said no to potential events. We've said no to certain activity types at certain types. Because when we take stock of everything we're trying to do there's already so much we say yes to that actually it's okay to say no because we can do really well over here. You know, the sort of the middle area. You know, sometimes the entrepreneurial spirit in you pushes the yes through. But a lot of time that sort of, “hold up, wait a minute”. Actually, no. It is so important and it saved us from going down in so many of my job roles.Kingston Myles: It saved me from going down like the rabbit hole of sort of you convince yourself that then you have to put all your energy and time into something and actually it doesn't yield the result that time could have yielded if you'd have focused somewhere else. Kelly Molson: Yeah, it's really important advice that everybody should listen to. Thank you. Brilliant tips. Thank you for sharing. You just touched on something there that I'd like to talk about because you talked about entrepreneurial spirit and I think there always is that element of wanting to do more and wanting to get stuck into doing the excited things. We talked a little bit about sector support at the beginning and you did mention that this role is quite relatively unique. Where do you go to find your kind of support network for the role that you have. Kingston Myles: So I'm really lucky in that I'm a trustee for the Association of Cultural Enterprises, so I sit on their board of trustees. I'm also a director of the trading company that we have. And the best way to summarise the association is that it's all about advancing commerce and business innovation in the cultural sector. So I appreciate that for sort of the wider attraction sector sort of culture and heritage is a swim lane sort of in the pool that is attractions. But that's incredible because all of the organisations that are members and nearly 400 cultural organisations are members sort of across the country, all of those organisations have got an appetite to do more. Kingston Myles: So you end up finding that actually this commercial manager in this really small museum somewhere has got this really incredible idea and we can help them with that, or I can help them with that, or one of my fellow trustees can help them with that, or this massive organisation wants to turn to a small organisation because they send something incredible. And I always think back to and I referenced the marketing of this, but there was the Museum of English Rural Life had this incredible Twitter explosion with some of their content, and suddenly everyone turned to their monsoor. How do you go viral? How has Murray gone viral? How can we go viral? And I guess the association is the best place to go and find the person likely to behind something commercially innovative. Kingston Myles: If you want to see something incredible that's happened at English Heritage, I mean, I'll shamelessly promote myself, but I'm probably likely to be able to point you in the direction of the commercial leader responsible for that. And everyone's really up for networking there. It's kind of the backbone of how it works is that willingness to share and support one another. And I think the culture and heritage sector within the attraction space is really good at that because we're quite comfortable with the fact that there's enough success there for everyone. I appreciate that. When you've got a competitor potentially down the road and you're a purely commercial attraction that's a little bit of a difficult conversation to have in the first instance. But actually it opens up doors and access to resources and also access to people's mistakes. Right. Kingston Myles: Like, what if people said no to. Or would they have said no to. Now that you can learn from and say no to yourself. Kelly Molson: Yeah. Again, brilliant advice. And it's so good that there are organisations out there that offer this level of support. What we'll do is everything that we've talked about today we'll pop links to in the show notes so you can access information about English Heritage. You can see some of the products and we'll pop the link to the ACE organisation as well. And if that is useful to any of our listeners you'll know where to go and find it. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing. Kingston. This has been a brilliant chat. I'm so grateful for your time, for your insight into this. We always like to ask our guests to share a book that they love at the end of the podcast. So what have you prepared for us today? Kingston Myles: Yeah, so I'm waxed lyrical about this book. It's called First Break All The Rules. It's a gallup study of what successful managers do differently. So First Break All the Rules is probably one of the most powerful leadership books I've read for a couple of reasons. One, it's backed by this phenomenal global study of businesses, their leaders, their people, their results. So there are some great books out there but they're theoretical, they're someone's opinion. This book is etched in statistical facts. So I quite like that. That pleases the inner nerd in me. And secondly, it really does force you to think differently about especially if you're leaders or a leader of a team. Really forces you to think slightly differently about how you can get the best out of your best people, how you can recruit for the best people. Kingston Myles: And at first read, it can read quite controversially because what's called First Break All the Rules so you would expect it but it can read quite controversially. It will force you to really think about Do Leaders Play Favorites. Is a really great chapter in that book and the difference between skills, knowledge and talent and coming to terms with the fact that you can teach people skills and knowledge but their talent, their behaviours. You can do your best to bring out what somebody has but you can never add to that in the book. So I would definitely recommend especially leaders of teams and leaders of leaders to read that book or listen to them. Kelly Molson: Great book choice. So that has not come up on the podcast in, what, 60 odd episodes. So that is a really good one to go on the list. And as ever, listeners, if you head over to our Twitter account and you retweet this episode announcement with the words I want Kingston's book, you'll be in with the chance of winning a copy as well. Amazing. Thank you so much again for coming on. It's been a really interesting chat. I am sure that at some point we'll get to meet each other at Audley End maybe as well. One of the next events that you're running there.Kingston Myles:  100%. We should do like an ad hoc episode live from  Audley End. Kelly Molson: Okay. Let's talk about how we can make that happen. Excellent. Thanks again. Kingston Myles: You're welcome.Kelly Molson: Thanks for listening to Skip the Queue. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review. It really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned. Skip The Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. You can find show notes and transcriptions from this episode and more over on our website, rubbercheese.com/podcast.