BlogSmall business, Marketing, Promotion and Web Design

Ever since the beginning this blog was about technology. Only recently did I change it to cover first marketing, then small business as a whole. But almost all the posts of past decade are one way or another are about technology and its applications. So here’s my own little list of technologies – tools, services and gadgets that I loved using in that past decade and still using to this day.

Gmail – beats everything I have been using so far. So much so that I am slowly abandoning Outlook and converting to 100% Gmail user. In fact, any work related e-mail I send from Outlook gets CC-ed to Gmail account.

WordPress – again, slowly but surely this becomes the platform of choice for blogs I write for, as well as web sites we are still building from time to time. One of the main reasons is the automatic upgrade feature – when you take care of number of web sites, manual upgrading is too cumbersome.

Joomla – an excellent choice for content management system for any medium to large size web sites. Was our platform of choice before WordPress. Still works the best when paired with VirtueMart e-Commerce system.

HTC – as a provider of smartphones’ hardware. I’ve been using HTC devices for almost 5 years now, if not more. Starting from HTC’s BlueAngel to TyTN every single piece of hardware was awesome.

IBM / Lenovo ThinkPad T series line – my first two laptops were from Compaq and they were both horrible. So horrible, that I stopped using laptops for some time. At some point later I tried IBM’s ThinkPad T line and never looked back. Lenovo, after IBM shrugged their laptop manufacturing off their shoulders, aren’t dropping the ball with T line either, so I am looking forward to my next purchase of their T510 that’s due some time in February.

iPhone – as an entertainment center that allows you to make and receive phone calls it beats anything else. The phone part is still stuck somewhere back in 90s, but with the help of either Google Voice or Ribbit I am sure one day I’ll be able to sort it out.

Google Reader – my first source of news. Honestly, I am subscribed to a bit more feeds than I have time to read, but still it does a great job of keeping me up with anything I might want to know.

Pandora – hands down the best online radio you could imagine. I remember how much I was upset when Pandora was only working on iPhone of all the AT&T handsets. I also remember how pleased my wife was when I showed her how it works and how she can listen to the music of her choice and never get bored again.

Firefox – remains my primary browser since version 1.0.3, if not earlier. I am using Chrome or Flock (which is also based on Firefox code) as secondary browsers when I need to be logged into two Gmail accounts simultaneously, but main tool always was the Firefox.

UltraEdit – the default text editor for anything text or web related. Syntax highlighting, tabbed windows and anything you might ever want. Been using it for way too many years, each time I tried to use some kind of alternative I just kept coming back to UE.

Photoshop – it’s the only tool that still makes me feel like I have no idea on what I am doing. The more I learn it the more I discover things that just seem alien to me. Yet, it’s the only image editing software that does all I need to do – from photo editing to overly complex 100+ layers PSD files with custom web design we give to our clients.

Trillian – the all-in-one messenger solution. I used Trillian since their version 2, then moved on to Miranda (which is like Lego for messengers), but once Astra was out I switched to it immediately. For some reason this piece of software is so pleasing aesthetically that it makes me want to work more.

Skype – I purchased phone number in my area code, and using it for any conversation that is longer than 15 minutes. Just a note – between 12:15am and 12:45am this New Year AT&T’s network wasn’t letting me place any calls at all (I actually had zero bars on my iPhone at that moment). At the same time, calls placed through Skype went through just fine. Simply indispensable tool for both business and personal use.

RoboForm – an excellent password keeping tool. Unfortunately since I am using too many computers, keeping RoboForm gets prohibitively expensive, so I moved on to LastPass recently. It’s a bit more annoying than RoboForm, but does the job and is free.

Nikon D70s – I own this camera since it was released and just can’t force myself to upgrade to anything else. It just feels right. As of right now I probably shot over hundred thousand images with it – and that is given the fact that I am not a professional photographer.

Canon A series cameras – the love started with Canon A95 and carried over to A720IS I currently own. It fits in any pocket perfectly and is pretty good for the cases when full DSLR is an overkill. I am yet to see a better camera line that’s both affordable, portable and gives results of such quality.

Netflix – I’ve been a member for a few years and it’s been another great source of entertainment. Their shipping times have greatly improved recently, sometimes I am able to fit two shipments within a week.

Google Docs – I was a slow adopter mainly due to other people not getting the concept. But once I started using Docs with internet savvy business owners, they proved to be one of the most valuable tools.

Let’s see how many of these will survive in 2010.

The topic of mobile computing in the cloud seems to occupy every tech blogger’s mind on the planet. The idea of storing all your data on the cloud (in the clouds?) is so fascinating that anyone who dares to say otherwise is considered almost a Luddite. Well, let me play a little bit of devil’s advocate here.

When we are talking about mobile in the cloud we essentially talking about two different things. One – being on the go and storing your data on some network storage so that such data is accessible from any computer. As long as you are able to log in to that storage – you’re good to go.

Second thing – is having all of the above at our fingertips on our smartphone or mobile internet device (iPhone, iTouch and so on). For some reason, still mostly invisible to me, most tech bloggers have decided that by the end of 2010 it will be hot to have all your data in the cloud and accessible from your smart phone.

I did a little experiment recently. I purchased plenty of space on Google’s Picasa and uploaded every single photo I have since I bought my first digital camera. That includes raw images and edited images, so there was approximately 30% overhead. Still, the overall volume hit 110 Gigabyte. Nothing much in terms of current disk space. It took me a week to realize that I don’t want to wait any longer for all these pictures to be uploaded, so I canceled the process. Of course, if I had a dedicated channel it would not have taken so long, but I don’t. My nightly backups have to run. I have work to do. VPN connections eat up a lot as well. So my personal photo collection failed to upload completely.

What about small business use? Will small business owner upload all his documents, data (whatever that may be) or images if it will take away his time? I don’t think so. A few Word documents are fine, but once you start talking hundreds of megabytes, anywhere outside of the corporate networks that might be a problem. Just recently as we have finalized one of the projects, we needed to upload about 100 Megs of files – already compressed – to the client’s representative. It took other party in South Carolina full 15 minutes from receiving a download link to getting a complete download. Sure, storing on the cloud sounds like fun, but until whatever you have stored is half an hour away from you – it’s not a working solution, it’s a storage room out of town.

Next stop – mobile phone use. I know people who live and breath their Blackberry, but I also know people who don’t. And I know more people who don’t want to exhaust their eyes reading things on Blackberry screen than those that would. iPhone is a great entertainment device, but I can’t – for the life of me – type anything long there. Same is with BlackJack, Tilt or Droid. I just don’t see a particular reason to do it, if I can always get back to my X61s which at least has a decent size keyboard. Another issue with doing some kinds of work on a smart phone is the limited screen real estate. I am yet to see one client who can grasp an idea of a regular web site mock up, a desktop software GUI draft or even an income statement from the cell phone screen. Of course, a CPA with 20 years of experience under his belt might pull this off with income statement, but not a regular small business owner.

Overall, having your data available both on the cloud and off is a great idea. However, until we will be able to use a real high-speed connection to that data, nothing major is going to happen. Storage rooms are a great business, but having storage room doesn’t mean your car gets to move faster.

What is Google Wave?

The more you read about it the more confusing it gets. Is it an e-mail? Or is it a messenger service, like AIM or MSN Messenger? Maybe it is some sort of sharing thing, like Flickr or YouTube?

Well – it’s none of the above, or rather, all of the above – with a twist. What you need to understand about Google Wave is that it is a new – and more effective – way of communication. Something like Twitter on so many steroids that it has mutated above and beyond any imagination.

If you think about how you (or your parents) used to use calculators for complex formulas. Doing step by step computations, writing temporary values on a piece of paper to plug them into next formula a few seconds later. I am talking about times before even Calc or Excel came along.

Or you can think of making payments in old days – you tear a check off from your checkbook. Then you find the bill and fill out amounts, dates, who is this check made to, maybe a note. Then you put both return portion of your bill and a check into the envelope, place a stamp on it and then run to the post office to make sure it has a slightly less chance of being lost.

These examples are what we are living with now, that’s the way we communicate. Slow, elaborate, multiple step manual and often painful process. That, in turn, is dependent on other processes, that are also manual and elaborate (think – getting a right calculator, a sharpened pencil and paper, or buying stamps and envelopes). Pain in the neck and other places.

Think of how you schedule a meeting. Think how you keep track of your group activities. Think of how you keep track of your own projects. Think of any daily activity that has any continuity to it.

So What’s In It For Small Business Owners?

Being a small business owner has one, most notorious yet unavoidable disadvantage to it. That is having only 24 hours for any given day. No matter what you do, you can’t make it 25, even if you hire enough muscle to turn mountains upside down. Google Wave can make that time count, save you time on multiple hassles and create more opportunities by just being there.

To show you how small business owners can benefit, I will cite an example of one of my clients who runs a successful business but still finds himself being totally lost in regards to what activities are current, what are done and what are pending, who works on what, which projects are complete and which are still open.

My communication with him is primarily through e-mail. He is using Yahoo mail, I am using GMail. He needs about 15 minutes to sit down and think what he wants to ask. Then he opens up last e-mail that I have sent him and replies with his new request. Which totally screws history of each issue and request as well as messes up threading in my GMail. Few hours later he decides to inquire about the status of another issue and the previous request gets buried under the previous one. So is the history of each of request on client’s side, because he fires off these e-mails randomly, without any regard to the previous contents. Issues get overlooked and lost. Important notifications get missed. Status reports and requests get looked at late. Mess is running the place.

Now let’s fast forward couple of years and imagine Google Wave is already open for business and I have actually succeeded moving my client from old and clunky Yahoo Mail to Google Wave. I create a Wave for each project I am working on or possibly will be working on. Or client can do it himself – doesn’t matter. Each Wave represents a stream of communications in regard to this specific project. Emails, images, videos, documents, requests and responses – everything is ordered by project. If something gets orphaned or request gets into foreign territory – we can move it into right stream, unlike e-mail of which we have no control over once it sent. The whole history is visible to both me and my client. We can refer to it and it is much clearer than a heap of e-mails without any order. We can invite participants to discuss certain issues, we can create sub-discussions to branch off discussions or to separate certain issues if we need to prioritize them or if we don’t want new participants to see the whole thing. I actually have submitted this to Google Wave ideas – should be somewhere among New Ideas now, feel free to vote. So if you are discussing something with your internet marketing guy, your accountant and your store manager in the other part of town – you don’t get confused, you can easily follow the stream and see what is going on with that particular project. Less time wasted, more money earned.

This example incorporates the following activities most of us are doing manually on a daily (and some on an hourly) basis:

• e-mail sorting (is designer asking about the banner he sent us Monday last week or this week?)
• assets sorting / file management (where the hell are those banners anyway?)
• issue prioritizing (should we tell him to fix product image on a front page while we are searching for the damn banner?)
• branching off the discussion (when did we say the money will be ready? Let’s ask bookkeeper if she sent the check already)
• including other participants in the discussion (let’s ask what our marketing guy thinks about these banners)
• having a meeting on the fly (alright, if everybody likes this banner, it’s a winner, case closed, move on).

As you can see, it may sound a bit convoluted. Indeed, it does – mainly because we are so used to doing the computation on calculator and piece of paper we cannot imagine having a computer with most of the solutions built in.