NowITWorks.net

We are pleased to announce the first winner of our quarterly Customer Survey drawing. The winner of a new Amazon Kindle is: Walt Perron from Benhaven School. Congratulations!

We appreciate all of the feedback we have received thus far. We hope our customers will continue to fill out these surveys to be entered into the next drawing, which will take place on December 1st, 2010.

Have a great weekend everyone!

Facebook has introduced a new feature that allows users to use the GPS on their phone to let their friends know where they are. Facebook Places is the new app, available for smart-phones that works similar to FourSquare. The user can use this app to meet up with friends or find out if they are in the area.

While social media can be useful to stay in touch with friends & family, would you want everyone to know where you are, at all times?

It’s going to make avoiding annoying friends and ditching family picnics a whole lot tougher!

After a lengthy break from the web, the Now IT Works team is back and ready to put our blog back on the map!

Here is what we’ve been up to:

• Our new employee Dale, the “man behind the scenes”, has been with us for a few months now, working on proactive monitoring and the execution of large-scale customer projects.

• Dispatch Manager Amie recently became a CompTIA Certified Project + Manager. She has been assisting with the planning phases of customer projects and utilizing these skills in her dispatch world as well.

• Our Now IT Works website is under construction! The new and improved site is set to roll out early this Fall. Be sure to visit us at www.nowitworks.com

• We have started sending Client Surveys after the completion of service tickets. If you are a customer and receive one of these surveys, be sure to fill it out and you’ll be in the running to win an iPod Shuffle!

A special thank you to all of our readers for sticking with us. Have a great weekend everyone!

• After complaining via Twitter about his lack of playing time against the New England Patriots, David Clowney of the New York Jets was benched for the game against the Tennessee Titans (Bloomberg)

• Twitter is being banned (and how!) by Texas Tech after a linebacker from the team “tweeted” that the coach was late to a Sunday meeting after their loss to Houston (AP)

• The Milwaukee Bucks are taking it one step further by banning Twitter by any player at the practice facility, at the Bradley Center or any road arena (USA Today)

This is the perfect story to stumble on for a Monday…

A young man of 19 years old, broke into a house in West Virginia recently and stole two diamond rings worth about $3500. This wouldn’t seem like a big news story except before this young criminal left the home, he checked into his Facebook account… and then left the computer screen on and signed into his account, before fleeing.

Needless to say, he was not hard to find and now faces 1 to 10 years in prison.

An important note to our readers, while this story is comical – there are some safety precautions you should take with your Facebook page. The young criminal in this story knew the victim (and their information) through another Facebook friend.

Be careful with what you post on your social networking sites, especially if you will be out of town.

In a telling sign of the swine-flu times, iPhone has released an application that will let a user know if there are disease-outbreaks lurking in their neighborhood.

Named “Outbreaks Near Me” – the app is designed to alert users of disease information. The mobile version even allows participation; for example, if a clinic is noticing a high number of similar cases or something unusual, they can submit that information to the system via this app.

The creators, Clark Freifeld and his HealthMap partner, John Brownstein aren’t sure exactly what will happen with this app but figure it’s best to “just put it out there” and let the users decide.

For more information – read the complete article at Wired.com

That’s right – back to school is right around the corner and PC World has released a “Back to School Gift Guide” – sure to be a hit with students of all ages!

Check it out at PC World – Back to School Gift Guide

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

Here’s a post that’s on the lighter side and close to my heart – I think the quilt might just be my favorite…

Take a few minutes this afternoon to enjoy:

Wednesday Geeky Pics – Geeky Arts & Crafts from Geeks Are Sexy

And I feel it’s only right to include a link to these felt Star Wars Finger Puppets. Say it with me “aww!”

Towards the end of last week, Twitter began experimenting outages and that were revealed to be the work of a blogger in the former Soviet of Georgia. Twitter users were panicked with the disruption of service, which also slowed down Facebook and LiveJournal.

This attack will undoubtedly raise more questions about the lack of security on social networking sites. Currently, Twitter has implemented technology to protect against the denial of service attacks but it is slowing down access to the site.

For more about this story, click on this story from MSNBC: “Who Knocked Out Twitter?“