Software & Technology by MarketScale

The new FASB standard is having a drastic effect on lease accounting. Though what you pay isn't changing, how you pay and categorize your leases is seeing a major shift. Under the FASB standard, lessees must use their balance sheet to recognize operating lease assets and liabilities, not just capital leases, which puts a new strain on CFOs and their teams to adjust.

How should companies prepare for these new standards, considering they go into effect for public companies in December, and for private companies a year after that? On today's podcast, we get insight from Weaver's Jody Allred, Partner for Risk Advisory Services, and Colby Horn, Director of Real Estate and Hospitality accounting. Allred and Horn walk us through the exciting changes and the most common pitfalls to avoid under the FASB lease accounting standards, detailing which industries will be affected the most, how the standards have an impact beyond financial reporting, and more simply, defining what will now be considered a lease.

Data, data, and more data. It’s what allows businesses to make informed decisions and optimize the customer experience. To expand on this, we sat down again with Kevin Levi, Vice President of Marketing for OrecX, a call recording company. You’ve heard him on the Software & Technology Podcast before; we discussed the overall value of call recording and which positions, from customer service to CEOs, could find value in consistent call recording. This time around, we go into greater detail about the value it can provide in the worlds of sales and marketing.

“I think we’ve entered into a new era. This technology isn’t necessarily brand new, but the adoption rate continues to grow, so companies are starting to really see the value in analyzing their customer interactions,” Levi said. He not only explains the benefits it provides in both sales and marketing, but how to maximize and follow through on the best practices for each. In addition, he also breaks down why some companies are still feeling trepidations when it comes to gathering and analyzing this kind of data.

The 20th century was the century of the electron, but that's old news. The 21st century is the century of the photon, and photonics technology is revolutionizing every industry from Pro AV to IoT to AEC, powering fiber-optics, improved homeland security and topographical scanning. The evolution of the products themselves has also been tremendous. Where as previously, photonics were used more for inspection of products, photonics are now the core components powering those products, creating a chain reaction that goes all the way up to internet services, cloud storage, e-commerce, and even deep space exploration. How and why exactly has the technology grown so much, and how do manufacturers stay ahead of the diverse and expanding markets that photonics serve?

Here to give us his insight is Glenn Jackling, President of Applied Image. "The diversity of photonics technology is what's staggering to me," Jackling said. He breaks down the latest and greatest in photonics, from 3D imaging to augmented reality. With these innovations, however, have come challenges in production; projects reaching into microscopic and monstrous sizes are pushing the envelope of Applied Image's and other photonics companies' capabilities. "Light is being used in instrumentation and devices in so many different ways, and what we find is a lot of those devices need to be calibrated, and standardized to the point where they can be compared lab to lab," Jackling said.

Fresh off a meeting with the Rochester Regional Photonics Cluster, Jackling clues us in to the dramatic local growth of the New York photonics industry as well, and how it's a positive representation of where the global industry is headed down the road.