Managing sales people strategically when promoting new products: Incorporating market orientation into a sales management control framework

Salespeople play a pivotal role in promoting new products. Therefore, managers need to know what control mechanism (i.e., output-based control, behavior-based control, or knowledge-based control) can improve their salespeople's new product sales performance. Furthermore, managers may be able to assist salespeople in performing better by having a strong market orientation. The literature has been inconsistent regarding the effects of sales management control mechanisms and has not yet incorporated market orientation into a sales management control framework. The current study surveyed 315 Taiwanese salespeople from publicly traded electronics companies with the aim of contributing to the sales management literature. The results show that sales management controls can directly affect salespeople's innovativeness, which, in turn, affects new product sales performance. However, sales management controls cannot affect performance directly. Furthermore, market orientation can positively moderate the relationship between salespeople's innovativeness and new product sales performance.

Mem Tri: Memory Forensics Triage Tool

This work explores the development of MemTri. A memory forensics triage tool that can assess the likelihood of criminal activity in a memory image, based on evidence data artefacts generated by several applications. Fictitious illegal suspect activity scenarios were performed on virtual machines to generate 60 test memory images for input into MemTri. Four categories of applications (i.e. Internet Browsers, Instant Messengers, FTP Client and Document Processors) are examined for data artefacts located through the use of regular expressions. These identified data artefacts are then analysed using a Bayesian Network, to assess the likelihood that a seized memory image contained evidence of illegal activity. Currently, MemTri is under development and this paper introduces only the basic concept as well as the components that the application is built on. A complete description of MemTri coupled with extensive experimental results is expected to be published in the first semester of 2017.

Reduced-Reference Image Quality Assessment Based on Edge Preservation

Assessing the subjective quality of processed images through an objective quality metric is a key issue in multimedia processing and transmission. In some scenarios, it is also important to evaluate the quality of the received images with minimal reference to the transmitted ones. For instance, for closed-loop optimisation of image and video transmission, the quality measure can be evaluated at the receiver and provided as feedback information to the system controller. The original images - prior to compression and transmission - are not usually available at the receiver side, and it is important to rely at the receiver side on an objective quality metric that does not need reference or needs minimal reference to the original images. The observation that the human eye is very sensitive to edge and contour information of an image underpins the proposal of our reduced reference (RR) quality metric, which compares edge information between the distorted and the original image. Results highlight that the metric correlates well with subjective observations, also in comparison with commonly used full-reference metrics and with a state-of-the-art reduced reference metric. © 2012 ICST Institute for Computer Science, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.