Author Archive

Twitter to Start Charging for Business Accounts

Wednesday, August 26th, 2009

Twitter has confirmed that they will start charging businesses to use their services in an effort to collect revenue for their currently-free social networking site.

Paid accounts will also offer access to statistics and analytics that are not currently available through the regular Twitter service.

For more information on this topic – click to read “Twitter to Charge Businesses to Tweet” on Silicon.com

Looking for Your Share of the Bailout?

Friday, May 8th, 2009

As banks across the nation are being bailed out despite the lack of responsibility that got them into this position, have you ever thought “Hey, where is my bailout?”

Money Path has the answer! True, you won’t actually receive any monetary compensation for your economic troubles but it will allow you to take a second out of your day and daydream about it.

Visit: http://www.moneypath.com/Bailout.html. Enter your website/blog address or Twitter login to go through the formula.

Have a great weekend everyone!

BlackBerrys Outselling iPhones?

Tuesday, May 5th, 2009

Here is an interesting article about BlackBerrys outselling iPhones

The most interesting point is the last line – looks like we will have one exciting year ahead.

Sure is – the fact that this report talks about the top 5 smartphones, only means that email, calendar, contacts, pictures, videos, music are important to most people.  This is the critical personal data that we all cherish, so, we should be able to take it with us wherever we go.

It doesn’t matter if you have Cingular, TMobile, Verizon; it just matters that you have access to your personal data.

It’s no different that if you have an Apple, a Dell, HP or Gateway at home; it just matters that you can access your personal critical data – and be able to sync it to your smartphone, of course.

One important factor that I’d like to offer – backup your data.  Now that we are taking our data on the go, make sure that you back up your contacts, calendar, photos and music to some computer.  Most phones come with a cable and software that allow you to plug your phone into your computer to backup your settings.

If you are using Microsoft Exchange in your small business, and you have a Microsoft OS based phone (BlackJack, HTC Fuze, etc) then you can synchronize your email, calendar and contacts automatically – documents, music and photos will have to be tethered to your PC.

If you are a small business and you have Blackberry devices, RIM makes a Blackberry add-on for Microsoft Exchange, so that you can do the same thing as the Microsoft users.

We are mobile, 24/7 and we want our critical, personal data with us everywhere. Just make sure that when you drop your brand new iphone in the ‘water’, that you can recover from it.

Don’t Forget to Log Out

Wednesday, January 28th, 2009

I ran across a pretty funny article this week that shows the dangers of not logging out of your computer (email account, facebook account, etc). While this has been written in a comical manner, it is a very serious topic.

Many of our own users do not log off properly, some keep the same password for years while others have left their computers logged in so long, they have “forgotten” the password. These are dangerous behaviors as they can expose the actual computer, the employee or the entire business open to the evils that lurk when it comes to technology.

Read the article to see more… Why You Should Always Log Out” by Jeff Rosenberg

(this link is Safe for Work but other links on the website might not be. Please use your own discretion)

Tips for Going Wireless

Thursday, December 11th, 2008

Who hasn’t run into a problem or two with wireless connections – whether it be a wireless network, wireless keyboard, wireless mouse, Bluetooth, the list goes on.

While wireless access gives you the option of freedom – let’s be honest, nothing beats a wire.  If you are thinking about installing a wireless network into your office, please consider limiting the wireless to your conference room, or the break room, or some small area where you have control over it.

If you are going to outfit your entire office with wireless connectivity, please take this precautions:
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True Story

Monday, October 27th, 2008

A customer contacted our help desk line early one morning with a frantic message about their server’s hard drive, red lights and error message…

When we checked out their problem ’server’ (which wasn’t really a server at all, more on that later) there were two hard drives that were mirroring each other – so when someone saved a file, it was saved on both drives. The reason for this is if one drive fails, the other drive can take over.

In this case, the ‘mirror’ was broken – no one knew what the problem was, only that the problem existed. Unfortunately, this problem had been happening for days.

There were no notification messages, no proactive emails and no on on staff trained to look for this problem.

If they had subscribed to Now IT Works “PC Crash Protection” tool, an email would have been sent out the first time this error occurred so our help desk could have contacted them and dispatched a technician. Even after this warning event, the customer did not chose to sign up for PC Crash Protection. We are unable and unwilling to service customers who do not see the need for this valuable tool. It is even more unfortunate because this customer has 3 servers and 50 computers – without any protection or properly trained staff.

*** Tech Note: A server can mean two different things – a physical server or a software server. For instance, if you have a file server in your office, it’s a physical piece of computer that handles the file requests for all users. If you have your website hosted on a web server, it’s most likely a piece of software that handles the hosting of many websites, including yours.

True Story

Monday, October 20th, 2008

During the spring, I received a call from a new prospect that was interested in seeing how I could help them. After they explained the problem, my heart sank. This customer had been running their entire business on a Dell computer that was purchased in 1996.

This computer, in 1996, was top notch – it had plenty of memory and hard drive space. In 2007, however, Windows NT 3.51 and a Pentium 2 processor make this an old computer. A very old computer. For that matter, we don’t even support Windows 95 anymore – Windows NT 3.51 came out in 1993!

They did not want to upgrade because they had spent $4000 on this computer in 1996 – their reason for calling me was the hard drive crashed and needed to restore data from it.

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A Community Service from Google

Friday, October 17th, 2008

Boy, do I feel old. Apparently “drunk dialing” is a term of the past and has been replaced by the phenomenon called “drunk emailing”. But have no fear, Google has recently developed a tool to keep those embarrassing emails to a minimum.

It’s called Mail Goggles – a Gmail add-on that makes it difficult for you to send email during certain times (i.e. 3:00am on a Saturday). Located in the “Labs” tab in your Gmail account, you will be required to answer a series of math problems before the message can be sent. You also have the ability to determine how hard those math questions are. Don’t make them too easy or the system won’t work and don’t make them too hard or you won’t be able to answer them when you are sober.

Remember to set your time constraints and math problems when you are clear headed and in possession of the patience and temperament of a rational person.

So, take a moment to thank Google for preventing that email to be your boss about how under appreciated you are or to your ex just to let them know what they are missing. Have fun this weekend and remember if Google says “Water and bed for you”, it’s probably best to put down the calculator and follow that advice.

Q&A with Chris

Monday, September 15th, 2008

Q: “I have a remote sales force of 8 people, scattered throughout the United States. How can I protect their laptop computers, if they are lost or stolen?”

A:  Jim, great question – in fact, did you know that a laptop is stolen approximately every 12 seconds? The good news is that there is a software program that acts like a GPS for your computer. If your laptop is stolen, MyLaptopGPS is able to track it worldwide, via the internet, then silently removes your important files and returns them to you – without the thief ever knowing.

It’s always a good idea to protect your technology investment. For more information about MyLaptopGPS, click here to be .

Free 411 Services Provided by Google

Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008

Google is now offering a free 411 service for people that are looking for the phone number of a business or store location. The cost of calling 411-Information varies depending on your carrier but you can expect to pay anywhere from $1.00 to $2.50 per look-up.

Google now offers this service free by dialing 800-GOOG-411.

Features:

  • Voice activated, national phone directory
  • No annoying ads or charges
  • Once the automated system finds your listing, the call is automatically connected
  • You can receive the information via text message or get a map link via email

This service pertains to business and store locations only. Free services are available for residential listings but are not provided through Google.

Happy searching!