Copyright © 2010 Miss604. Visit the original article at http://www.miss604.com/2010/03/yes-vancouver-philanthropy-workshop.html.Y.E.S! Vancouver (Young Executives for Success) is hosting a workshop March 23rd featuring panelists that will discuss how philanthropy fits into their lives.
Stand Up! Leveraging Business Knowledge & Personal Passions
Panelists include Chris Breikss of 6S Marketing Inc., Heather White of 2020 Communications, Judy Brooks of Blo, and philanthropic leader Matt Hill of Run for One Planet. The moderator will be Katrina Carroll-Foster, Co-Founder of Y.E.S! Vancouver and owner of WiseWinston.
I’ve had the opportunity to speak at a Y.E.S! event before so I can say that this networking group is inspiring, motivated, and probably some of the friendliest...
Not so many years ago, even as I was filled with
fear and loathing of
the
hideous misconduct of the US Patent & Trademark Office, I retained
some respect for the notion of patents. I even wrote what I think is
an unusually easy-to-read introduction to
Patent Theory.
But no more. The whole thing is too broken to be fixed. Maybe it worked once,
but it doesn’t any more. The patent system needs to be torn down and thrown
out.
I offer the following evidence, just a few random things that came across
the radar in recent weeks. Some of these are long but they’re all
worth reading:
RIM
hit with more patent woes. Sample quote: “A black cloud of litigation is
nothing new for RIM, as lawsuits are commonplace in the competitive technology
sector.”
Sawyer Weighs In On Intellectual...
It’s like this: If you send data to someone over the Net, you can’t
control what they do with it. At least cost-effectively. Or, if you want a
good outcome.
This applies to Internet Standards. Any standard that tries to
constrain the way in which data, once received, is processed, is broken.
Similarly, to business. Any use of legislation or technology that tries to
control what people can do with digital media objects, once they’ve been
transmitted, is broken. Also any business model that relies on such control.
For supporting arguments, check the last five years of this blog. I offer
as further supporting evidence the fact that the Internet works and that it’s
a good place to learn, have fun, and make money.
This is true irrespective of value judgments. If it were a bad...
Young men’s fancy turns to thoughts of, well, it depends.
It’s been well into the Celsius teens in recent days, with splashes of
sun. Certain public-spirited young women leap at the chance to celebrate by
way of a short skirt. I’m young enough to appreciate that, but old enough to
be a gardener.
After all, the short skirts and these vibrant colors are closely related
in their intended function.
For the younger men, specifically my own 10½-year-old, the season’s thoughts
are of videogames. I succumbed Sunday morning to intense lobbying and took
him and his friend off to the mall to visit the local
EB Games AKA GameStop for some
swapping and shopping. The secondary market for games has a liquidity that
approaches foreign-exchange trading, and on this particular Sunday morning...
Something about my
Current Status post
the other day touched a nerve, and a substantial number of people wanted me to
pass on the fact that they’re hiring and might well be interested in Sun
alumni. (Hmm... now this piece is provoking “us too” notices. I’ll
update, for a while anyhow.)
Of course, I should mention that at the recent Oracle/Sun media event, all
the executives we’re wearing “We’re Hiring!” buttons; probably not Sun alumni
right now, but lots of people aren’t and we get to be
at the top of the list. Here are the rest:
The Googlers were well-represented; I heard from
Denton Gentry
(“There are many Sun alumni at Google, and many reqs open. To me Google feels similar to Sun in 1990s”),
John Panzer, and a couple
others whose tweets I can’t find...
It’s been a hairy few days, starting with Amazon firing a broadside at
Macmillan (I like
Charlie
Stross’ summary the best) then, within 72 hours,
backing
down. The ensuing conversation (mostly on Twitter) has been very
interesting.
Early on I remarked “The 21st-century
marketplace is being reinvented in real time right now” which I think is
obviously true. A lot of the crowd was expressing fury that anyone would
charge $14.99 for a bag of bits and yes, that does seem a little steep.
Later on I followed up with “The actual price isn't important. What matters is
how it's set. $14.99 seems high, but pricing being an Amazon fiat is WRONG”
and that got surprising push-back.
So here’s what I think. In a sanely-functioning market for books, the
following should all be true:...
I’m live-tweeting the session, but Twitter is in trouble, I don’t see
anyone’s tweets but my own, and I guess mine are going into a black hole for
most people who follow me. There is some news here, which you can see (I
believe) by keeping an eye on......
Copyright © 2010 Miss604. Visit the original article at http://www.miss604.com/2010/01/blogging-to-drive-business.html.
Amazon.com Widgets
Last year was a very busy year for me. It was the first full year of our business (sixty4media), I did a lot of traveling, and I also wrote a book with my co-author Eric Butow in California. Yes, I wrote a book which is now available in e-book and paperback format.
Blogging to Drive Business is a guide for businesses hoping to use or already using social media to enhance their online presence. We cover everything from getting started to addressing negative comments and who should then write the blog.
Eric has plenty of experience writing about using social networking tools as he’s published a few books before (such as How to Succeed in...
Last evening I
reviewed a
book by Charles Stross. Today, I’d like to encourage you to read his essay
The monetization paradox (or why Google is not my friend).
It’s got me thinking about how we can ensure that writers still write books.
And also measuring: I
discovered that, since 2003, I’ve written
1.22 million words in this space. Yow.
The problem of how we pay for journalism is hot stuff right now, as
current business models seem pretty well done for and we don’t have
replacements in sight. Stross broadens the question: How do we arrange to pay
writers to write? He drills down and does some numbers, with specific
reference to Google’s business model; I’m not sure I’m 100%
convinced by his analysis, but I’m glad I read it.
Among other things, he’s pretty unhappy...
Recently I presented at the Guelph Technology Economy Conference on the subject of recruitment. I put together the presentation built off of two posts I had written – The Future of Recruiting is Inbound and The Key to Startup Hiring: Build a Magnet. It went well (I think!) and was fun to do. Public speaking is always tough, but it’s worth doing. And it’s something you have to practice frequently to stay comfortable and successful.
The presentation is entitled: Turn Your Company into a Recruiting Magnet
The basic premise is that companies need to be much more present and build more buzz for themselves in a strategic, driven way in order to attract the right people. The presentation touches on key concepts of inbound recruiting, sales, marketing and social recruiting....
I’ve said before that great customer support has to be proactive. But what exactly does that mean?
The goal of proactive support is to identify and resolve issues before they become problems. In some cases you can be so successful with proactive customer service that you can solve problems before customers even realize they exist.
We’ve all had an experience where a small nuisance grows into a giant, destructive force. Think about the arguments you’ve had with a significant other; it starts with something small that’s irritating you, but you don’t say anything about it until it grows and grows and grows, eventually festering to the point that you explode and freak out. Your significant other can’t understand why you’re so upset, and you’ve...
When was the last time you played Red Rover? The game is quite simple. You create a chain of people who hold hands (roughly at arm’s length from each other) and the other team tries to break the chain of people. Breaking through the chain is usually quite easy. The connections just aren’t that strong. They could be stronger if you were able to lock forearms with the people on either side of you. That would make breaking the chain harder. Now imagine for a moment that each person in the chain has four arms so they can make two connections on either side. Suddenly, the chain gets much stronger. The chain would be almost impossible to break if everyone simply hugged. It’s quite the challenge to run through two people and split them up when they’re hugging, let alone...
Copyright © 2010 Miss604. Visit the original article at http://www.miss604.com/2010/01/dragons-den-sisters-secret-gourmet-foods.html.Tomorrow the CBC show Dragons’ Den will see contestants from BC take the floor to pitch their business idea to the Dragons.
Sisters Secret Gourmet Foods is a local company run by (you guessed it) sisters Marsha Simons, Salli Pateman and Joanna Spady. Their business produces all natural products such as granola, chili and sauces and although their products can be found in stores across Canada and the US, they are looking to expand.
The episode on which you’ll see Sisters Secret Gourmet Foods face the Dragons airs tomorrow on the CBC at 8:00pm and I’ve been offered a gift basket that I can give away to a reader.
The Sisters Secret...
Too many people look at customer service as a cost center, when it really should be a profit center.
I recently read B-A-M!: Delivering Customer Service in a Self-Service World and it’s an important refresher and reminder of the importance of great customer service. Customer support is something I’ve obsessed over for many years.
The authors say it very clearly, and I’ve said it in the past as well, “Customer service is generally so bad that even a slight improvement can be a huge competitive advantage.” Customer service is critical for client retention as well.
Here are 9 important reminders + revelations from B-A-M!:
Tie customer service to revenue & profits. Barry Moltz and Mary Jane Grinstead (authors of the book) make it very clear that the nice,...
What happened was, someone wanted to buy a print of one of
the photos here,
and doing that turned out to be fun and have fringe benefits, so now
anyone can.
We have a nice Canon i9900 printer and I find
that I actually enjoy setting up prints and holding them in my hands. Plus
when I give them away as Christmas or birthday or soccer-coach presents,
people seem happy to get them. The trouble is, we have only so many walls to
fill, and only so many coaches and relatives to pester with presents, so the
printer goes idle for months at a time.
Recently, there was a comment on a piece here saying “Nice pic; you sell
prints?” I sort of snickered at that because I’m a computer programmer dammit,
but then he followed up with an email. So I named a price and he said “sure”
and this...
Enterprise Systems, I mean. And not just a little bit,
either. Orders of magnitude wrong. Billions and billions of dollars worth of
wrong.
Hang-our-heads-in-shame wrong. It’s time to stop the madness.
These last five years at Sun, I’ve been lucky: I live in the Open-Source
and “Web 2.0” communities, and at the same time I’ve been given
significant quality
time with senior IT people among our Enterprise customers.
What I’m writing here is the single most important take-away from my Sun
years, and it fits in a sentence: The community of developers whose work you
see on the Web, who probably don’t know what ADO or UML or JPA even stand
for, deploy better systems at less cost in less
time at lower risk then we see in the Enterprise. This is true even
when you factor in the...
Copyright © 2010 Miss604. Visit the original article at http://www.miss604.com/2010/01/disclosure-statements-for-bloggers.html.Unless properly disclosed, motivation for reviews on blogs has sometimes been a mystery to the unfamiliar reader. Was the author paid? Did they simply feel moved to write based on their enjoyment a restaurant or product? Thanks to the CMP.ly service, bloggers and Tweeters now have an instant and easy-to-share way to add a disclosure statement to a post or tweet.
“CMP.ly provides bloggers and advertisers with a simple disclosure solution. We have created a set of easily identifiable disclosures and codes that can be used to identify any material connections in your blog posts, tweets or other communications. These disclosures give you flexible options...
My eye was caught by Scoble’s recent
2010: the year SEO isn’t important anymore?
I thought most of what he said made sense, but the fact is that they’re still
out there and what they’re selling is mostly bogus.
I was impressed enough with Scoble’s argument that I watched the video,
in which a couple of SEO types tried to talk about the future. It was
completely disconnected, pretty well the same-old same-old, near as I can
tell. I think that for most people who are trying to get a Web presence on
the air, SEO is part of the problem, not part of the solution.
In fact, up at the top of the article, I said “bogus” and, rather than
defend that position, I’ll refer you to Derek Powazek’s
Spammers, Evildoers, and
Opportunists. He oversimplifies Google’s approach...
Firing people is extremely difficult, especially if you’ve never done it before. But it’s made infinitely harder and causes significantly more damage if you delay it. When you know someone isn’t working out (for whatever reason), you need to let them go. For startups it’s a very difficult pill to swallow. Each person on a small team is insanely important and has to pull a huge amount of weight. If one person isn’t pulling their weight it can drag the entire team, project and business down the toilet.
So the best thing you can do is act quickly.
Firing people is emotional and stressful. You worry about how they’ll respond and what they’ll do next. You worry about whether they’ll come back to poison the team against you. And you worry about...
Most retail experiences suck. They just do. It’s rare that I go into a store and leave feeling amazed. I might be happy with what I bought, but beyond that, the experience is usually “Meh.” And some retail experiences are so bad that you leave the store angry, even if you did buy something that you went in wanting.
Chris Brogan recently complained about a particular retail experience and the discussion is heated to say the least. For that reason alone I think it’s worthwhile; it’s good for these sorts of things to get aired publicly on a popular site like Chris’ blog.
I haven’t had any atrocious retail experiences recently, but it’s bound to happen with the Holiday Season upon us. But while on a recent shopping excursion with my wife, I...