Latest News from Web 2.0 Journal

Get HD Videos to FLV with Fancy Player for Online Sharing

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 14:45:00 EST

Do you have digital camera? Do you record special events around you? Publish them on your website with the fast conversion without duration limit. Flash Video MX Std has been updated with better support to HD videos like AVCHD (MTS, M2TS), MOD, TOD formats.

Mobile Smart Phones for Work & Play

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 11:45:00 EST

I am consulting now days and my iPhone is used for both personal and professional purposes. Several weeks ago I complained in an article about having to use my personal phone number and voice mail for business. A kind reader suggested that I try the new Google Voice service. I did and am still learning it but it has some interesting feature that I find handy for mobile workers.

Rules of Engagement

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 16:00:00 EST

Most CPA firms have yet to establish a social media policy, as they are likely considering the best approach to bring social media into the marketing mix. Truth be told, there is no hard and fast rule on how companies should approach this. The accounting industry is no exception, and faces particular challenges in creating social media plans, such as whether to include client references, and giving tax or other consulting advice in a public forum and later being held responsible for it.

Moyea Video4Web Converter V2.1 Released

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 13:15:00 EST

The new Moyea Video4Web Converter V2.1 with optimized menu display pattern, fast video codec encoding speed and perfect bug-fixings, makes video to flash video conversion the easiest and quickest ever.

Long Lines, No Parking: A Good Sign?

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 11:15:00 EST

Day One of the Cloud Computing Conference and Expo is in full swing. First off, it took me nearly 30 minutes to find parking. For some reason the top level of the parking structure of the Santa Clara Convention Center was closed off. Not sure why. Then I walked through the San Jose Hyatt. At that point, I ran into the lines. The lines for registration were 50-100 people deep. And there was no special “press” registration. I waited 42 minutes to get my badge, and so did everybody else.

Cloud Computing Expo 2010 East to Attract More Than 5,000 Delegates in New York City

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 23:30:00 EST

SYS-CON Events announced today that the 5th International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo will take place April 19-21, 2010, at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York City. The three-day event will offer a rich array of sessions led by exceptional speakers about the business and technical value of cloud computing with more than 80 sponsors and exhibitors on the 70,000 sq. ft. show floor and over 5,000 estimated delegates from well over 48 different countries.

Control Your Brand and Reputation, Even When You’re Not Around

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 06:04:00 EST

In his October 2009 Newsletter, James Bowles, Washington DC’s leading Executive Business Coach and career transition consultant, outlines the facets of your personal “brand” and reputation – that stand to scrutiny when you’re not around. What do people say about you when you aren't around? Or more importantly, what does your boss, current (or future) client, or other key stakeholders and partners say about you when you aren't around? For example, in a compensation review meeting (when promotions to key positions are being discussed) or simply when your work and additional opportunities to hire (or fire) you are being considered?

The things that people say about you when you are not around is usually called your reputation. A better way to think about it is that it's your personal "brand" – and this is one of the biggest factors in your ultimate success on the job, with clients and around your community. Here's the good news: for the most part, YOU completely control it! Here’s the challenge – to control it appropriately, you may need some essential business coaching, to learn some essential facets of personal brand marketing, reputation management and talent management (a.k.a. “human resource management”).

Three things make up your brand – your skills (i.e. what you know), your experience (i.e. what you’ve done well), and your attitude (i.e. how you act). These are the things that others remember and discuss when the conversation becomes about you, without you. However, having a great brand may not be enough by itself – like any developing brand, marketing yourself is required. Key stakeholders need to know your skills, experiences, and attitudes…so check around. Who needs to know, who do you need to influence? It's wise to make your brand known to everyone, but it's crucial to know who will be making the decisions you care about. Also, it's important to know who influences the decision makers.

Once you know them make a list - then determine the following:

Have they heard of you?
Do they know you?
Have they seen your work?
Have they been positively impacted by your work?
Do they know what you want to do?

Work through this list, thinking of how you can have an impact on the decision makers. Turn the answer to these questions to “yes, absolutely!”. Find ways to work on projects that they care about, or be on teams that work on their projects. The key thing here is that the relationship needs to be give-and-take. Do something positive for them to establish your brand, and maybe they will respond by helping you down the road. Quite literally, the most powerful force for successful career change and accomplishment for executives and business leaders is active personal marketing and partnership with stakeholders to obtain feedback, reflect, and act upon it.

This sort of internal “reputation brand marketing and management” is essential in your career, especially if you’re seeking a career change or in fact re-entering the workforce from a layoff, as a Mom returning to work, or establishing new independent career goals. If in fact your career change results, like so many of these do actually do, in reliance on decision makers and stakeholders you don’t actually know (for example future clients or employers learning about you on the Internet), your personal brand and reputation management actions require a degree of Internet Information Marketing and Management skills (and some social media coaching). This is to ensure you come across the way you desire when people search for you, or your services, on the Internet, in social media channels, or through business and information directories.

For more information regarding DC Business Coaching, Executive Leadership Training, and HR Talent Management, contact James Bowles, Washington DC Executive Coach and HR Consulting. For more information regarding Personal Online Marketing and Reputation Management, contact KME Internet Marketing.

Continue reading about “The Word on the Street (About You)”...

Social Media Simulation and Training Environments by an Internet Media Coach

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 10:00:00 EDT

All well-known systems engineering methodologies and enterprise system development programs leverage testing environments. Testing environments can be built and operated for very different purposes, ranging from prototyping and simulation, to pre-production load testing and usability or “Section 508 Accessibility” checks. Specialized SOA testing frameworks are sometimes required, for difficult infrastructure integration challenges. Most major systems that get deployed to large numbers of users also feature a training environment. This working copy of the “real” or “production” environment affords the user and company a lot of protection against mistakes, mis-operation of system functions, and basically allows you to test-drive a system, but reset and try again if something doesn’t work right or mistakes are made. Play around, learn and mess up - no harm, no foul, and the system assets, data and reputation of you, the system owner and others are all protected.

That’s one very difficult challenge to learning social media, for commercial or government employees. It’s nearly impossible to learn how to use social media tools and techniques in an environment that forgives all missteps, can be wholly reset and leaves no incriminating traces of your mistakes or potentially embarrassing, compromising communication skills after you’re done. The best way to learn how to post to Flickr, to learn the nuances of Twitter and engage in the myriad of online dialogue environments is to actually do it “in production”, as they say, which comes along with a lot of actual or perceived personal and organizational risk. That’s the reason most social media programs and users representing significant companies or governments are usually associated with the “Public Relations” or “Internet Marketing and Social Media” department – these folks are trained and expected to know how to engage in public dialogue, within the bounds of legal, regulatory and policy controls (when available).

Much is being written and discussed online currently regarding the state of Government 2.0, and how we’re quickly reaching an impasse where the ability to become a social media practitioner is simply neither supported nor available to employees working behind government firewalls and Internet usage policies. Social media simply isn’t very social or usable at all, to those for whom it would most benefit. As well, the public forum is missing out on a lot of really good insight and dialogue, because so many employers and employees simply can’t afford the risk, or don’t have the capability to learn, understand and test the risks, that come with posting material online.

I’ve written before on the need for “social media governance automation” – social media governance (and Internet media governance in general) is already a hot topic, as a style of content management and workflow decision-making. Before allowing employees to post a blog entry, tweeting or sending a photo through a series of RSS pipes, most larger organizations can certainly set up and enforce all kinds of content management procedures and controls to protect loss of sensitive information or damage to reputation and credibility. But there’s typically no standard method of enabling any and all employees to test this out…and by doing so, understanding better the risks to the organization and exposing the actual talents and capabilities of the employees. Harnessing the latent power of employee social media participation can’t be done, without an effective social media simulation and training environment.

Plenty of companies and consultants are available to provide “social media 101” training, and there’s no end to the social media tips and techniques available through self-style Social Media Evangelists. However, what’s a small business owner, a government employee looking to self-educate or a professional seeking to change careers to do, when faced with the task of learning social media but not having it impact their job, organization, personal or family reputation? I see all the time examples of “learning by doing”, from the very tentative “LinkedIn lurkers” and “Twitter Testers” (who’ve posted a profile, but don’t participate much) – to the “Facebook Flamers” and “Blogging Blowhards” who’ve simply crashed the party and left a trail of privacy exposure and digital embarrassment in their wake (to be forever indexed online).

We can’t all get it right the first time, and as business owners, managers or others entrusted with corporate or government information management and protection, we simply can’t just let everyone under our management or guidance loose to “play” with social media – without a reasonable degree of guidance, coaching, reputation management, training and possibly, social media simulation. It’s not much different than raising your own children – we shouldn’t let them open email accounts, use search engines and social media sites, and in general use the Internet at all (whether via computer, cellphone or gaming console), without methodical and consistent parental guidance in such things as Internet Safety, online etiquette and computer/digital asset protection. My own children are on the Internet, but walled off, anonymized and protected against the typical dangers of online activity – to the degree they’ve proven they need it, and to the degree I think our family and friends need it.

Establishing social media simulation and “real-world” training is achievable, but not yet widely available or possible across all social media tools. Some applications, like Facebook, are already evolving their ability to manage test accounts for developers. Some social media tools, like Twitter and Wordpress, currently allow a large degree of anonymity for user accounts, and no explicit policy for “test accounts” - though like most social media sites, you remain bound by user policies and simple good sense which include removing accounts when you’re done and no longer using them. On the other hand, most social media policies and terms of service are inherently vague and require practical experience to interpret – for example, Wordpress says that your blog should not be “named in a manner that misleads your readers into thinking that you are another person or company”. “Misleads” is the key term – I may create a Blog named “Green Flies”, but most rational folks wouldn’t come to the conclusion I’m actually the Human Fly, or work for “Green Flies Inc.” – so anonymity is preserved, with no explicit misleading going on. Basically, no harm - no foul.

You can effectively set up and manage simulation environment tools and processes, while making sure risks are minimized and participant activities remain clearly within the proper bounds (from the very loose to the legally explicit) of personal, professional, corporate or third-party policies. Since there do not exist common standards, practices or tools for end-user social media simulation and testing, it will be necessary to leverage knowledgeable Internet media consultants or firms (like those I work with) to help manage risks, apply common sense and practical experience, and basically provide the right set of “training wheels”.

What’s key to know, is that there are methods to get online, test and “try before you buy” in the social media environment…working with a new breed of trainers I’ll term “Internet Media Coaches”. An Internet Media Coach is similar to the rapidly developing profile of “Social Media Coaches” – but adds the experience in traditional Information and Content Management, Digital Asset Protection, and Computer Security and Privacy to the base knowledge of Public Discourse and Collaboration using social media tools.

Contact me for more information regarding hiring an Internet Media Coach, or setting up a Social Media Simulation and Training program or framework.

When to Automate the Order Management Process

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 08:16:00 EDT

Order entry and management is a particularly tricky automation challenge because it intersects and connects many different departments and cultures. Properly done, an order is generated directly from a quote, which was created with a tie to inventory. The order is then passed to a staging area or a work ticket is automatically generated. At any point, when a customer wants to know the status of his or her order, a customer-service representative needs to be able to access this information directly.

Sony Ericsson C905

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 16:00:00 EDT

Sony Ericsson has time and again come up with exciting and rather different looking gadgets. They have revolutionized the music phone segment with the Walkman series, created waves in the camera phone segment with Cyber shot series apart from introducing exciting touchscreen phones. The one such handset which has once again managed to stand apart from the crowd is indeed the Sony Ericsson C905. Within its bent edges and sleek design are incorporated a number of functions that would compete against any 3G enabled handset available today.

A Lot of Legacy Code Can Be Jettisoned

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 15:10:00 EDT

A widening cost and productivity division exists between older, hand-coded software assets and replacement technologies on newer, more efficient standards-based systems. Somewhere in the mix, there are also core legacy assets distinct from so-called contextal assets. There is legacy wheat and legacy chaff.

Now that's a Da Vinci!

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 10:15:00 EDT

Poor Leonardo. After losing out to Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni during his lifetime, he still doesn't get the credit or recognition his work deserves. Finally, someone trusted their intuition, and bought a sketch which looked to him like a Leonardo, and, lo - it was! His $19000 investment is now worth $150 million.

Use eMarketing to Change Your Marketing Game

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 10:15:00 EDT

Today's B2B marketers have more opportunity to positively impact sales revenue than ever before. Thanks to Web 2.0 we can attract prospects, begin our customer relationship, inform and entice qualified buyers - without ever directly engaging more expensive sales resources to nurture buyers along the way.

25 Years After Escaping Iran

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 18:30:00 EDT

Its hard to imagine that its been almost 25 years since my parents secretly smuggled many of our family members out of Iran due to brutal religious persecution. Persecution that is unfortunately picking up once again in todays time. A reader asked me to provide more info about this portion of my background and so I offered this short post.

Real-Time Search and Five Reasons Why “We” Will Change the Web

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 18:15:00 EDT

If you don’t understand why the Real Time Web is huge, you will soon. Thanks to micro-blogging sites like Twitter, a constant stream of human-posted content has infiltrated the Web. This growing infiltration has created a bottoms up approach to content creation that via the progressive support of rapidly developing applications has and will continue [...]

My Cloud, Your Cloud, Our Cloud

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 13:45:00 EDT

To date, cloud computing has by and large been in the realm of public clouds such as Amazon EC2, but there has been a lot of talk about other kinds of clouds, including "private" and "hybrid" clouds. However, with these new choices comes added complexity. In his session at Cloud Computing Conference & Expo, Thorsten von Eicken, CTO and a founder of RightScale, will help answer any questions you may have about these new choices.

Amazon’s Answer to SQL Azure - Amazon Relational Database Service

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 10:30:00 EDT

Today Amazon released its answer to SQL Azure, the hosted cloud database offered by Microsoft. The newest service form Amazon, the Amazon Relational Database Service, or Amazon RDS for short, now in beta, makes it easier for you to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. You get direct database access without [...] Related posts:

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Amazon Announces Amazon Elastic Map Reduce Amazon announced today the public beta of Amazon Elastic MapReduce,...

LA City Cloud Computing Update

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 10:15:00 EDT

Since the July 24th entry, Cloud Concerns Over Los Angeles, I have continued to monitor closely LA City’s decision to migrate to a cloud computing environment. As myriad organizations (e.g., Cloud Security Alliance, NIST, etc.) race to understand cloud computing risks, I continue to be baffled by LA City’s “Damn the torpedoes!” approach.

Ex-AMD CEO, Like Top IBM Guy, Source of Insider Information: Reports

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 09:45:00 EDT

Hector Ruiz, then CEO of AMD, was the unidentified source of material information that the busted Galleon ring traded on, according to the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg. He’s even higher up the totem pole than Robert Moffat, the head of IBM servers and storage who was arrested and charged on October 16 along with five other co-conspirators in what the government called the biggest case of insider trading involving a hedge fund in history

Make the Most of Cloud Computing with SOA

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 07:00:00 EDT

While there are many attempts to fix the badly broken IT architectures within our enterprises, most ‘solutions’ just put another technology layer on top of the existing technologies in hopes that the technology will somehow fix the issues. As you may have guessed, it just makes things more complex. Few enterprises were willing to take the risk and address the core issues.

Take A Business Approach To Conferences

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 01:00:00 EDT

I've been here before. I remember my first time. I was happy to know the teacher wanted to work with me, but then I went to the meeting and it was horrible. I decided my child should be present, expecting we were ready for solutions. Instead, I sat stunned as she told me how horrible and terrible he was. She had only had him for a little over 6 weeks so how could she know this? I've had him for 11 years and I know he is a kind, caring child.

Jive Announces Jive Social Business Software 4.0

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 00:32:00 EDT

Jive, the Social Business Software provider, today announced the general availability of Jive Social Business Software (SBS) 4.0. The new offering is the largest, most ambitious release Jive Software has brought to market since the company first introduced its integrated SBS platform for enterprises.

Solving the Good Will Hunting Problem

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 00:15:00 EDT

I've seen the movie Good Will Hunting from 1997, starring Matt Damon in the role as a mathematical gifted janitor, twice. The first time I hadn’t taken a course in graph theory, the second time I had. Regarding the mathematical aspect of the movie, it makes all the difference. The second time I could actually understand the problem the professor posed when he threw down the gauntlet. In the movie the MIT professor stated a, supposedly, very tough problem that they had worked on intensely for almost two years before they were able to solve it. It reads:

Cisco Buys Cloud-Based Security Company

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 15:45:00 EDT

Cisco’s appetite needed feeding again so it’s buying ScanSafe Inc, the 10-year-old software-as-a-service (SaaS) web security house, for $183 million in cash and retention-based incentives. It’s already got on-premise content security provider IronPort and is supposed to bring together IronPort’s high-performance web security appliance and ScanSafe’s widgetry, which blocks malware and secures the use of the web and messaging.

Vertical Scalability Cloud Computing Style

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 08:15:00 EDT

Vertical scalability used to require optimizations inside the application, at the code level. Cloud computing changes the nature of vertical scalability and, one hopes, will lead to a new model of scalability based on the capabilities of Infrastructure 2.0 and increasingly granular resource management capabilities.

RightScale recently offered up its own analysis of Amazon Usage Estimates and while the details they provide on Amazon usage from their vantage point is very interesting I found one of their related observations even more fascinating:

In earlier days the predominant method of scaling was by launching more servers, but we are now seeing a lot more scaling by replacing smaller servers by larger ones.

The reason I find this fascinating has to do with not so much where cloud computing is today, but where (we hope at least) it is going.

Most people are aware of the difference between vertical and horizontal scalability. Remember “Cloud Computing: Vertical Scalability is Still Your Problem” where we talked about the differences?

Horizontal scalability is the ability of an application to be scaled up to meet demand through replication and the distribution of requests across a pool or farm of servers. It's the traditional load balanced model, and it's an integral component of cloud computing environments. Vertical scalability is the ability of an application to scale under load; to maintain performance levels as the number of concurrent requests increases. While load balancing solutions can certainly assist in optimizing the environment in which an application needs to scale by reducing overhead that can negatively impact performance (such as TCP session management, SSL operations, and compression/caching functionality) it can't solve core problems that prevent vertical scalability.

While this is still correct the observation by RightScale tells me that there is now another way to vertically scale in a cloud computing environment. It’s a hack, in the traditional workaround geek-cool sense, but an ingenious one nonetheless.

WHAT’S THAT GONNA COST YA?

When an application hits the top boundaries of CPU and memory on any machine – whether virtual or physical – the traditional response to ensure scalability is to use load balancing solutions to horizontally scale the application, thus increasing concurrent user and TCP connection limits while hopefully addressing the degrading performance problems associated with high utilization.

But what appears to be happening, at least in some cases,is that rather than horizontally scale by adding new instances is that people are simply “upgrading” the virtual machine and thus increasing the limitation on CPU and memory. It’s like buying bigger hardware, only it’s a lot easier and faster and doesn’t require nearly as much preparation before deployment. In essence people have found a way to vertically scale their application by simply provisioning more CPU and memory. Sort of.

This does not address the inherent performance degradation that occurs as higher utilization rates occur, and if you check Amazon’s pricing you’ll find that it’s quite a jump from a “small” to a “large” instance, regardless of operating system or whether it’s “standard” or “high-CPU” usage. In fact in both cases it’s 4x the cost to go from small to large/medium to extra-large, which makes sense given you 4x the EC2 compute units with each “upgrade”.

It seems, at least on the surface, that even with the costs of load balancing services from Amazon ($0.025/hour per Elastic Load balancer + $0.008/GB of data transferred through an Elastic Load Balancer) that it would be financially advantageous to simply launch a second instance and take advantage of load balancing, while also benefiting from the performance improvements typically associated with load balancing.

Now granted, the small servers are, by enterprise standards, pretty small and most organizations would never deploy an application into production running on a server with 1.7GB RAM and “the equivalent CPU capacity of a 1.0-1.2 GHz 2007 Opteron or 2007 Xeon processor.” I’m fairly certain my digital camera has more processing power than that, so what RightScale is seeing actually makes a great deal of sense to me. It might cost a bit more but it seems more apposite to provision higher performing instances despite the possibility of overprovisioning.

But I digress (yet again) and so now let’s get back to the point of this post which is not actually a comparison of vertical and horizontal scaling technology (although that’s interesting, too) but what this unique vertical scaling solution says about where the future of cloud computing (hopefully) lies.

WHERE COMPUTE RESOURCES, NOT VIRTUAL MACHINES, ARE PROVISIONED ON-DEMAND

Really, that’s it. That’s where cloud computing should be going and that’s where cloud computing hopefully is going. Someday you won’t need to launch a bigger instance because the environment will automatically, based on specified thresholds and business needs, allocate more CPU and/or memory on-demand to your “application”. How that happens isn’t important at the moment, but that it will happen and that it will take a combination of data derived from across the infrastructure is what is important and exciting. Because what RightScale is seeing is the first step toward someone deciding you shouldn’t have to launch a separate VM, you should just be able to grow the one you have until it can’t hold any more. Until you really are paying per clock-tick, per instructions executed and bytes in memory used instead of in chunks that may or may not be enough, or may be too much. Overpaying is not what cloud computing is supposed to be about either, but right now that very well may be the case.

But not in the future. No, in the future the infrastructure sees the requests, the users, the traffic patterns, and the performance of the application; it will process the needs of the application based on the context and capabilities of the infrastructure and the business needs and then determine when an application needs more compute resources. It will further be able to signal management systems or invoke the proper methods itself that will provision the resources needed to ensure the application scales. That same infrastructure should - and hopefully will - be able to determine at what point vertical scalability is no longer ensuring application performance meets business criteria (or has met some compute ceiling) and can then decide to provision resources using horizontal scaling techniques instead.

The intelligence to interpret the technical context and measure it against business needs. The ability to connect and integrate to gather and share that technical context. The flexibility to automatically determine whether horizontal or vertical scaling is necessary to meet those business criteria. That’s a dynamic infrastructure, that’s what we’re trying to enable via Infrastructure 2.0.

That’s the future of cloud computing. That’s where we’re going. And that’s why it’s so exciting to see the beginnings of it happening with virtual images; because it is just the beginning and people are starting to really flex the boundaries of cloud computing which will lead to even more innovation and change and shift into a higher gear so we can get where it is I hope we’re going a little bit faster.

Technorati Tags: MacVittie,F5,Infrastructure 2.0,dynamic infrastructure,cloud computing,RighScale,Amazon,ELB,EC2,AWS,vertical scalability,horizontal scalability,scalability,context,integration,load balancing

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Adobe & Salesforce Cut Cloud Deal

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 07:00:00 EDT

Adobe in a strategic deal with Salesforce.com has put out a jointly developed, Eclipse-based Flash Builder for Force.com IDE - well, at least a developer preview - integrating their two platforms in the name of greater developer productivity in creating what they claim will be a "new generation" of rich Internet applications (RIAs) in the cloud - and some mumble about bringing the richness of the consumer web to enterprise cloud apps. Final delivery isn't scheduled until sometime in the first half of 2010. Meantime, see http://developer.force.com/flashbuilder where it warns against using the widgetry, which includes a beta version of Flash Builder 4 Premium, to build for production applications. No notion of pricing yet.

Carlo's Bake Shop: A Jersey Institution

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 00:56:00 EDT

Option Greeks for Beginners

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 18:15:00 EDT

New equity option traders should familiarize themselves with 'the greeks' - like theta and delta - to maximize their potential trading gains. There are four primary option Greeks all option traders should become familiar with. Two of them generally need to be considered before choosing an option to trade. The other two may not be of great value for newcomers in terms of selecting an option. However, they should be understood all the same, even if only to be aware of potential influences on that option's price.

Philippine Coast Guard Auxiliary (PCGAUX) Continues Efforts After Typhoons Leave

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 18:15:00 EDT

After the storms have passed and the headlines with them, the hard work of recovery from major storms continues. The Philippine Coast Guard Auxiliary is among those organizations that continue their good work around the clock.

Mistakes People Make With Bankruptcy Attorney Fees and How to Avoid Them

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 18:00:00 EDT

There are different attorney fees for filing bankruptcy for chapter 7 and chapter 13, but they can be waived off completely if a financial hardship has been proven. The best advice in evaluating the attorney fee is to check upon the efficiency of the attorney or by getting an attorney by a favorable referral cause as this proves to be the best rule applied so far.

Discharge of Chapter 7 and 13

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 18:00:00 EDT

There are basically two types of bankruptcy that one can file-chapter 7 and chapter 13.It is very important to understand the after effects of bankruptcy before one files it. There is a means test that one has to qualify for, in order to file a chapter 7 bankruptcy, because this requires liquidation of debts. This is done mainly to avoid any type of fraud and abuse, and another most important thing is that there should be a bank attorney to fix out things in the right way. Following are certain points which are required to be kept in mind before filing bankruptcy.

How to Extract Your Contacts from LinkedIn and Facebook

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 12:00:00 EDT

If you have spent any time online using social networks like LinkedIn or Facebook, you know they can be difficult to grow your network and add contacts. But even harder is the ability to extract your contacts once you have built up a reasonably sized network. None of the social networks makes it very easy to get this information.

Business Networking Sites See 18% Rise in Female Members

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 12:00:00 EDT

The largest growing economic force in the world is not China or India it is Women. The earning power of women globally is expected to reach $18 trillion by 2014, a $5 trillion rise according to World Bank estimates. That is more than twice the estimated 2014 GDP of China and India combined. Although the average women still earns only 77 cents for every dollar men do this is set to grow as more and more women are finding themselves in board rooms.

Introducing CloudBerry Explorer for Nirvanix

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 22:30:00 EDT

Basically Nirvanix is another cloud storage platform, featuring pay as you use model with no commitment and upfront costs. There are a few important differences however. First, Nirvanix guarantees up to 100% (!) availability and it is up to you to select the SLA that works for your business. One of the features that caught my eye in Nirvanix is the ability to create child accounts within your master storage account. Furthermore, you can set storage and transfer quotas to every child account effectively controlling who is using what in your organization.

Web 2.0 and the Mobile Internet

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 20:28:00 EDT

The Web 2.0 summit just wrapped up in SFCA this past week. There are some noteworthy observations and content on their web site and in particular Mary Meeker's annual overview of Internet trends . Take an moment to review her indepth presentaiton below. A huge surge in mobile access is about to, yet again, revolutionize businesses and the adoption of new technologies using cloud infrastructure and location centric applications will become another key influencer of shareholder value and produce and service niche differentiation. Among the conferences many revleaing presenters Mary put forth a revealing observations that platforms which combine social networking with mobility will drive "unprecedented change in communications + commerce." As Richard MacManus points out, that statement seems a little hyperbolic, but we have undeniably seen an uptick in usage this year of companies like Foursquare, Loopt and Brightkite. Later in the presentation, Meeker predicted that Facebook will be a major player in this market in the near future.
Hold onto your hats.

Mary Meeker at Web 2.0 Summit

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Kindle 2 vs Nook

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 03:00:00 EDT

Barnes & Noble just recently unveiled their upcoming eReader, the Nook. On the blog of my non-techy alter-ego I've posted a comparison of the two readers that is entirely based on my own personal feelings of what is cool and what isn't, so take it as opinion and certainly not as a technical review. Click here to check out the blog post.

Two Ways to Enhance Employee Happiness During a Recession

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 02:00:00 EDT

Here are two key actions companies can take during tough economic times like these to maintain or even increase employee happiness and wellbeing. We all know that without a happy and thriving team, there’s no growth, especially in a recession...

Conversation and Brand Evolution

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 15:00:00 EDT

Recently, I was interviewed by my friend Carol Ross, founder of Carol Ross & Associates, and prolific blogger at A Bigger Voice, and Ordinary Life, Extraordinary Living. The interview, done for members of her Networking Naturally community, focused on my...

Technology Direction – Forrester vs Gartner

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 07:45:00 EDT

Both Gartner and Forrester came up with their technology prediction this month. It is interesting to compare the two – here is a comparison. Topic Forrester: The Top 15 Technology Trends EA Should Watch (here) Gartner Identifies the Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2010 (here) Remarks Web 2.0 Social Computing In And Around The Enterprise Collaboration platforms become people-centric Customer community platforms integrate [...]

Yes, Your Brand Really Is About the Conversation

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 02:00:00 EDT

In my last post, I wrote about how my interview with my friend Carol Ross led to my insight that conversation drives brand evolution. My thinking in that post followed a certain logic; specifically: In uncovering our personal brands we...

Marketing Content for Next Steps

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 01:15:00 EDT

In response to the blog post I wrote about the Return on YES, I was asked on Twitter to give some examples of what I mean by "show your prospects the next steps." Think for a moment about the user experience at your website. You plan for how you'll get your website visitors to click on something to learn more...

The Ex-Factor, BLASTmedia Style

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 00:54:00 EDT

We love celebrating holidays at BLAST – whether it’s as obscure as College Colors Day or the kick-off of football season. Halloween is no exception at BLAST, and we started this year’s celebration a little early by digging up some really scary stuff – photos of ourselves from our teen ...

Microsoft to Data-Mine Facebook & Twitter

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 19:30:00 EDT

Microsoft has cut non-exclusive deals with both Facebook and Twitter for Bing to search their real-time data feeds. Google has followed suit at least with Twitter, but Facebook is the prize because it has like 40 million updates a day from its 300 million users. Not all Facebook updates will be searched by Bing, however, only the ones made available to the wider public. Facebook, where Microsoft has an equity stake, will apparently provide users with a numbers of new tools to do so.

Carl Icahn Resigns From the Board of Yahoo!

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 19:00:00 EDT

Carl Icahn announced today that he had informed the Board of Directors of Yahoo! Inc. that he was resigning as a director of Yahoo!. Mr. Icahn told the Board that in his view there was not a need at this time for an activist director at Yahoo! Mr. Icahn indicated that there are a number of other companies on which he is currently focused and therefore would not have the time to give to the business and affairs of Yahoo! required of a Board member properly fulfilling his duties. Mr. Icahn stated that he commended Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz on the job she is doing. Mr. Icahn thanked everyone on the Board for acting so responsibly, especially in connection with the search transaction with Microsoft which he strongly advocated and participated in bringing about. Finally, Mr. Icahn indicated that he hoped to continue his relationship with Carol Bartz and the other members of the Yahoo! Board.

How to Aggregate the Best Content in B2B Marketing

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 13:00:00 EDT

The pace at which content is being added to the web has increased dramatically and so has the value of aggregating the best. How will the content aggregation landscape change in the next few years? What will the impact on content aggregation be as the semantic web starts to really take off? Read on to get answers for these questions and more from Tony Karrer, CEO/CTO of TechEmpower.

How Much Freedom Should They Have?

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 10:00:00 EDT

My 16-year-old granddaughter has been fairly conscientious about grades and homework up until this year. She got her driver’s license back in January and we watched as her A’s and B’s dropped to B’s and C’s by the time she finished the tenth grade. Now she’s a junior and she’s bringing home even lower grades. For example, she brought home a D on an English test and a C- on a Math test (Math is her best subject). I was already worried but then the next day, she brought home an F on a U.S. History quiz! We’ve given her freedom because we know she’s a young adult but I think she’s shirking her responsibilities and is not devoting enough time to her school and homework. What advice can you give us on how to handle this situation?

Eric Wolf and Stephanie Frost Unmask Marketing / Join Me and VITO

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 09:30:00 EDT

OK. Now let me give you the details. Eric Wolf and Stephanie Frost have written an important book: Marketing:Unmasked – insider’s tips & tricks for small business marketing. It’s a very clear, very thorough romp (filled with activities, ‘to-do’ stuff, etc.) through social media offering high-level information on necessary topics that business owners need to know to be successful in this market and economy. It is meticulous and simply written – one of those rare books that says exactly what it needs to say without fillers, yet playful enough to be enjoyable. As an author myself, I was touched by the elegance of the writing. It will teach you how to make informed decisions to market strategically with truly honest, real-world, wise advice, learned from being in the field with clients.

New Moyea Web Player Released with Enhanced Plug-in Complementaries

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 15:15:00 EDT

Applications support plug-ins for many reasons: could be to extend an application, to support features yet unforeseen, to reduce the size of an application or could be others. All in all, to make the product itself more powerful and easier to use. That’s the reason Moyea Software released the new Web Player V2.1.1.0 with extremely-enhanced plug-in functions.

B2B Lead Generation Tip #2: Build a Strong Roster of Stakeholders

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 15:15:00 EDT

In last week’s post, we discussed the first step in the creation and execution of a lead generation program: establishing the right mindset. This week, we’ll cover an equally important step: building your roster of stakeholders in the lead generation program. Unfortunately, it’s far too common that this step looks a lot like the following within small or mid-sized organizations:

Blog Post + Network Effects = NY Times Article

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 08:45:00 EDT

About 3 weeks ago, I wrote this article about the Kindle, and mentioned how I thought that for various reasons attached to the Kindle, I was actually going to be reading more. Shortly thereafter, I got a ping on Facebook from someone I didn’t know. His name is Brad Stone, and he identified himself as a journalist and he had some questions about my blog post. I rang him up, and we spoke for a while. In today’s NY Times is the article he was writing.