Brad Slavin » TechTalk

Google Announces +1

Brad Slavin — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 05:39:08 +0000

I wrote last time about Google Offers and today they have finally released it to the public. Floyd’s Coffee Shop in Portland is the first official Google offers location. As I was writing this the number of remaining went down from 425 to 395 in about 20 minutes…so congratulations to both of you.

Now I wanted to give you a few more updates from the big brains at Google that happened in May 2011. On the heels of Google Offers, Google has just announced another service called Google Wallet. This is their take on the next generation of smart phones with contactless smart card technology (sort of like the old Mobil gas station speed pass) that will make.

Basically you will wave your phone over an in store credit card reader and without using your credit card, you can make a credit card purchase. While Google is not the first to have this technology, they are the first to link it all together. They are linking payments with coupons and offers, online and offline redemption and location based promotions. These major retailers have already signed on to the service.

Not only will you be able to pay for your purchase but MOST importantly coupons and other special offers will be displayed on your phone and you will earn points for making purchases at Google affiliated retailers. Think about it, coupons and special offers based on your cell phone location linked to Google Places, and Google Offers. Who knows, maybe they will send you a coupon to Starbucks just before you step into your local coffee shops. In this play, the options are limitless and they have extended the coupon seamlessly from the computer to the phone.

They have also announced a line of laptops that are cloud based and you basically pay for them on a monthly basis called Chromebooks. Pricing will be about $28 per user for business and $20 per user for educational institutions per month.

There is another brand spanking new Google Service…. it is called Google +1 (pronouced as Plus One). It will be very similar to the Facebook Like button but instead up voting on Facebook you will be interacting with Google +1 everywhere on the web and it will keep track of your votes and display them to your friends. Getting started with the service as a website owner will be easy – you will simply insert some small code into your website and once installed people will be able to give you site an upvote or a “+1″ Think of it like a verb – I just +1′d that site or that product.

Google is positioning +1 as a recommendation system, where you can give you stamp of approval or up vote for a website. This information will be shared with your other friends to help make it easier for them to find relevant info on the search engine. Think of it as a way to share a tip or suggestion, rather than sending an email or a link to the product, service page. It is your annotation that your friends can use to see your input on a certain link.

Pretty soon you will be able to +1 everything from Coffee Makers, to attorneys, to restaurant links and even other websites in the search results. And once it is officially launched you will be able to go to the Google +1 Webmaster Central interface and get a +1 button for your site.

One of the prerequisites to using the new +1 service will be a public Google profile, you can claim yours at https://profiles.google.com/and this is where my interpretation comes in.

If Google is really trying to take some of the thunder from Facebook by suggesting that users +1 rather than clicking the like button then build a social network already…don’t just provide the features of a social networking site like chat (google chat), Photo Sharing (picassa), email (gmail), your contacts (google Contacts) get off your butts and actually build a competitive social networking site.

Migrating Email to Google Apps

Brad Slavin — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 21:17:27 +0000

I just helped a friend migrate her email to a Google Apps Hosted account. While there are a number of ways to migrate your existing email to a Google Apps account I have found that using the unix command line software called larch is the easiest way to do it.

This is for migrating email on a hosted domain so it was a FQDN – fully qualified domain name vs. shifting a user account to a domain.

After reading the larch man pages I came up with the following command line option to sync between a 1-and-1 account and Google Apps Hosted email account.

larch –from imaps://imap.1and1.com –to imaps://imap.gmail.com –all –from-user user@domain.com –from-pass password –to-pass password –to-user user@domain.com

It took about 20 minutes to run and migrate about 4000 email account and sub folders. There were some error messages about Net::IMAP::BadResponseError: Could not parse command (giving up) but I did not really worry about them. I saw the folders that were having problems and they were from some archived email that she had – so I was not going to worry about them

[Apr 18 15:53:38] [info] 0 message(s) copied, 40 failed, 4242 untouched out of 4282 total

After the migration I logged into my google apps hosted account and made sure that the mail was migrated. After checking I changed MX records for the Google SMTP servers and the entire migration process was completed.

Google Voice Now For Cell Phones

Brad Slavin — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 04:56:00 +0000

My favorite Google Voice feature is the ability to have all of my voice-mails transcribed and emailed to me. Most of the time there is about an eighty percent accuracy, or when it stumbles I can listen to the audio directly. For me it is a huge time saver when I am on the road or at a conference.

One of my biggest failings with Google Voice is that it was just not able to handle the voice-mail of my most common phone…my cell phone. Well the folks at Google have done it again and that feature is now available your cell phone because of a a new Google Voice feature.

The way it works is that Google handles the call via the remote call forward feature, the person on the other end of the phone hears a short announcement that Google Voice is trying to locate you, then your phone greeting is played and Google intercepts the recording. I must admit that this is pretty slick! I used to use a service to transcribe my emails but having the power of Google – this tops my list of favorite new cloud services.

To activate, click on the settings button in your Google Voice account and if you have your cell phone defined there will be an option to activate the service on your account. You then have to identify your phone Carrier, mine is Sprint and then you enter in a string of numbers to enable remote call forwarding.

The entire process took about 45 seconds to complete, and now I get my voice-mail transcribed and emailed to my phone. You do loose the ability to call into your Sprint voice-mail and retrieve your messages – but I have not yet encountered an issue where I needed to worry about this.

Insuring your E-Business Success

Brad Slavin — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 20:46:44 +0000

I have a number of clients who have equipment colocated all over the country, these sites range from individual and corporate blogs, e-commerce websites and even a customer that does 50 million in product revenue from house hold items. On the surface it may not seem like these sites have anything in common, except that all demand that they websites are always availible.

As a technology consultant I have to plan for the unlikely or the unreasonable while balancing this against the possible and probable. A consultant needs to balance what is likely to happen but plan for the unlikely. Here is a perfect example from this weekend.

There is a HUGE colocation provider located in Texas called The Planet that has near 100% historical uptime. They are located in a part of the country that is not prone to flooding, fire, tornadoes, hurricanes or even earthquakes – they seem like an excellent choice for a safe, reliable and cost effective service provider. They have all of the industry standard redundancies for Internet, environmental controls and security. They also stated that they had best of breed power systems, well this weekend – this failed.

Their data center literally had an explosion! According to The Planet website a piece of electrical gear shorted out and created an explosion that knocked down three walls of their electrical equipment room.

No injuries were reported and no servers were damaged or lost. But about 9000 servers were powered down and inaccessible from Internet. This means that tens of thousands of businesses were affected.

With a down server you could be offline for hours or even days. I still trust the planet Sometimes bad things just happen I bet that more than 99% of you have no idea when your website goes down.

Here is a quick tip: I monitor all of my clients critical servers with an online service called Pingdom, there a a few of these services out there but this seems to be the most reliable that I have found. On Saturday I received about 60 SMS messages to my Blackberry – I got in touch with technical support and then notified the affected clients. From my standpoint, it is better to be informed proactively than reactively.

The lesson here is, make sure that you or a member of your team gets proactively notified every time there is an issue with your website AND your mail server!

Make sure this goes to email and to SMS
Have the contact information about the service provider
Have your contract or account number
Your IT company and Staff should not be the only people getting these alerts
Do you have current online backups of your critical business data.

If you have suggestions for other monitoring systems, colocation providers or ways that smaller businesses can handle these situations let me know.

Lifelock – Who To Trust? The Lawyers or the Company

Brad Slavin — Fri, 23 May 2008 01:35:58 +0000

It really makes it difficult to find a product that performs as advertised, when you do you hang on and advocate it whenever possible. As a happy lifelock.com subscriber for a few years now, I have felt protected, not only when I get the confirmations from the credit companies but also when I try to apply for new accounts and I get a call from a Lifelock representative that they are doing what they promised they would do.

Basically I am 100% satisfied with the service that they are providing to me.

The press, the attorneys and Lifelock corporate have been caught in a bit of a scandal. Some are claiming that the service does not perform as advertised and then there is the response.

From the Lawyers

Todd Davis has dared criminals for two years to try stealing his identity: Ads for his fraud-prevention company, LifeLock, even offer his Social Security number next to his smiling mug.

Now, Lifelock customers in Maryland, New Jersey and West Virginia are suing Davis, claiming his service didn’t work as promised and he knew it wouldn’t, because the service had failed even him.

Attorney David Paris said he found records of other people applying for or receiving driver’s licenses at least 20 times using Davis’ Social Security number, though some of the applications may have been rejected because data in them didn’t match what the Social Security Administration had on file.

Davis acknowledged in an interview with The Associated Press that his stunt has led to at least 87 instances in which people have tried to steal his identity, and one succeeded: a guy in Texas who duped an online payday loan operation last year into giving him $500 using Davis’ Social Security number.

Paris said the fact Davis’ records were compromised at all supports the claim that Tempe, Ariz.-based LifeLock doesn’t provide the comprehensive protection its advertisements say it does.

”It’s further evidence of the ineffectiveness of the services that LifeLock advertises,” said Paris, who is lead attorney on the three new lawsuits, the latest of which was filed this month…..

From the lifelock.com perspective:

“My identity has been completely protected by LifeLock and I am as confident as ever about the LifeLock service”, says Todd Davis, CEO of LifeLock. “It is shocking that completely untrue statements about our company, the protection we provide and my personal identity are being repeated from a lawyer looking to create a case that clearly is not in the best interest of consumers.”

According to the FTC, nearly 3% of Americans are victims of identity theft each year. With over one million LifeLock members, you could expect LifeLock to have 30,000 victims. But as clear evidence LifeLock really works, only 105 individuals have been the victim of identity theft. In fact, among the 105 who have reported an identity theft, every single one has been covered under the LifeLock service guarantee….

Recent claims have suggested that Davis’ social security number has been used at least 20 times to obtain drivers licenses and other credit. Davis explained, “These claims are completely untrue and reflect total inexperience and lack of understanding of how credit files and identities work. While there have been more than 100 attempts to use my identity information, none of these recorded in the credit files resulted in any loss for me. However, a check cashing company failed to properly follow procedures and verify the identity of a thief in 2007, resulting in a person being able to cash a check for $500. Let’s be clear, there is currently no form of identity protection that would prevent this from happening, but this is why LifeLock serves such an important protection for consumers. The LifeLock guarantee served me as it serves all LifeLock members, what identity theft LifeLock can’t prevent, it will fix at LifeLock’s expense up to one million dollars.”

“As of today, there have been only four individuals out of over one million LifeLock members who have alleged they are dissatisfied with LifeLock as part of class action lawsuits. However, none of these individuals appear dissatisfied enough to cancel their service or even ask for a refund. We have done an excellent job of serving all our members and even those four people must agree. In the some of the recent challenges to LifeLock, you have to ask yourself, what is the motivation behind the lawsuits?”

Not sure of which side to listen to? Me either, but I love the service and if you are looking for to try it out here is a Lifelock Coupon that gets you $21 off and the first 60 days free and here is a Lifelock Discount for 90 days free and $110 per year.

I am a user, I love the service. My folks are getting a little older and I got them both accounts, for $10 per month, it really is an extra level of protection.

So you’re LinkedIn – Who Cares!

Brad Slavin — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 05:31:53 +0000

A client of mine David called me just this week and said “Hey I have just joined LinkedIn.com, I have about a dozen new connections…now what?” And I had absolutely nothing to say to him. No guidance for his next steps, no reassurance that there are untold fortunes in each of those connections. As I though about my experience with the social networking site for business and realized that I have no idea on how to actually use it! So I went online and found a few tips about LinkedIn that all users should really know.

Guy Kawasaki wrote about giving your profile an extreme makeover read it to give yourself a head start on the process of actually using LinkedIn to build your business.

Mr. Kawasaki also posted his ten ways to use the network. My favorites are number 3 and 5, Improve your Google Pagerank and perform blind, “reverse,” and company reference checks.

Then I stumbled on Jill Konrath and her website http://www.SellingtoBigCompanies.com She has an amazing free ebook that really hits the heart of the LinkedIn craze called “Can LinkedIn Increase your sales?” In about fifteen minutes my whole outlook on social networking for business changed.

What I was able to distill is that LinkedIn is your online research library for real work connections. You have to take the conversation ‘off-line’ for it to be effective. Spot your target, hone your skills, master your approach and then strike. But when you strike, be like E.T. The Extra Terrestrial and phone home. Leverage the information to lessen the time it takes to get your foot in the door.

‘Increase your visibility. Don’t simply add people to your network. Ask or answer questions on LinkedIn. Make sure your public profile is complete. But most of all recommend people in your network and ask them to recommend YOU! Anytime you do any of the above, LinkedIn posts updates online or in weekly updates to everyone in your network.’

I also found the contrary 3 reasons that LinkedIn won’t help you sell What I have learned about life is that for every great idea there are always 3 good reasons why it won’t work.

Feel free to add me as a connection. Who knows, maybe I know someone that knows someone that you would really like to be introduced to. You never know.

Go Green in the Office for Earth Day

Brad Slavin — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 04:40:57 +0000

Happy Earth Day 2008 ! Here are some tips on saving energy in the workplace.

The average desktop computer uses about 120 Watts (the monitor uses 75 Watts, and the CPU uses 45 Watts.) Laptops use considerably less, around 30 Watts total.

A common misconception about power saving is the belief that computers and monitors purchased with the Energy Star logo are already energy efficient. What is really means is that they have built in energy conservation features but your computer cannot take full advantage of these built in energy saving mechanisms until the power management features are enabled and configured.

Here is my list of top computer energy savings tips:

1. Enable the power management of your monitor. Set your computer to power down your monitor after 15 minutes. Instead of setting up the screen saver to come on, have it shut down your monitor.
2. During lunch, shut your monitor off completely. Have a power lunch, without the power.
3. At the end of the night, shut down your computer, monitor, and personal printer or place them in a standby mode.

4. Unplug or power down idle computer peripherals like scanners or printers when they’re not in use.
5. Turn off your computer at night and when you are not using it for several hours.
6. New computer consume less power than machines that are just a few years old.
7. If you buy a new computer, consider a laptop. Laptops use only 1/4 the energy.
8. If you buy a new monitor, consider a flat screen. It uses only 1/3 the energy.

To enable power management for your computer check out http://www.climatesaverscomputing.org/learn/power-management-instructions/

In the Office

Turn off the lights in rooms that are not in use. Install occupancy sensors or turn off lights when not needed. Occupancy sensors have been shown to save up to 30 percent on lighting costs during normal working hours.
Wherever practical, use a task light instead of the overhead lighting.
Make sure the office copier is turned off at night.
Reprogram the thermostat. Each degree warmer you leave the thermostat in summer, and each degree cooler you set it in the winter can save 6 to 8 percent in energy costs.
Look into telecommuting. Every commute not taken saves on money, time and fossil fuel. Plus, studies have found that telecommuting boosts productivity too.

Chick It Up

Brad Slavin — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 17:45:01 +0000

As a technologist there is nothing that I hate more than technology when I am having a problem. Specifically I am talking about voice mail and auto-responders from help desk or other impersonal systems. Do you feel that impersonal voice mail and the instant response acknowledging that I have a problem is good enough? Does this really show that you value me as a customer?

Be ETDBW

Some businesses that I have consulted with feel that the instant gratification of these systems is actually disconnecting you from your customers. It is convenience at the expense of real connection. Bottom line, your bottom line will eventually suffer because your connection to the customer is impersonal and automated. Get back to personal and make sure that your company is Easy To Do Business With or ETDBW.

Cost Cutting

I have heard the arguments, the complaints that costs are rising for employees and ‘automation really should be able to handle’ the basic needs of routing calls and auto-responding to customer emails. I agree costs are rising, and so is competition. When times get tougher people want to cut back, my feelings mirror those of Former CEO Jack Miller who founded Quill (Worlds largest stationary store – sold to Staples) who said that he would cut costs as long as it did not impact the quality of his product or his customers experience. So the message is do cut so deep that it impacts who you are to your customers. Turn off lights, stop providing free coffee, do anything before you impact your customers.

Frustration Sets In

Just think of the last time you send an email, got the auto-responder saying that your issue would be handled and a few days later you had not heard a thing?! You then pick up the phone and wind up in voice mail routing hell, and you never really get to speak to someone that can answer your questions!
YOUR CUSTOMER ARE LOOKING FOR BUSINESSES that are ETDBW and voice mails, impersonal invoices and blind auto-responders are a sure sign that there is trouble looming. Next time try pressing ’0′ to see if you actually get a live person.

Get Some Curve Appeal

Fix these issues with a trend that I affectionately call chick it up to give your company some curve appeal. Studies have shown that customers relate well to real people or even the perception of a REAL person helping them who can be accountable is a huge booster in confidence and satisfaction. In your business it does not have to really be an individual but it can be a team, but for heavens sake don’t have your trouble tickets, or invoices signed off:

Thank you,
Support Department or Customer Care or Accounting Group
1-800-555-1212

Think of how much more appealing the same auto-responder would be if it were signed:

Thanks,
Heather
Customer Advocate
Call me at: 800.555.1212 if you need personal attention.

Looking for Heather

When someone calls looking for Heather, tell them that she is on the other line but you would be HAPPY TO PERSONALLY HELP THEM OUT WITH THE ISSUE. At this point reconnect with the customer and find out how you can HELP! Think Customer focus, customer satisfaction. Oh and by the way, customers are more likely to be respond appropriately when they feel that there is a PERSON on the other end of the email and not just some huge company robot that grinds up their requests. Make it personal, chick it up

It’s the phone. Stupid.

My other suggestion for voicemail hell is a real live receptionist. Someone that picks up the phone in one or two rings, says hello and asks the customer who they would like to speak with. I know we have moved away from this and no company really wants the overhead of call routing. Having a live person taking that initial call from a customer is priceless in terms of value and costs less than $2.00 per minute to have it handled professionally. A dynamic company called Ruby Receptionistshandles your incoming call routing professionally and with a script that you provide on how to greet and handle your customers as well as how to route your calls.

Better than Machines

Ruby works with organizations to answer and route their phone calls with a live receptionist that picks up in about two rings. You provide a script and an escalation tree heck even if the call gets routed to your support queue or to voicemail, at lease it was picked up by a real live person, who cares.

I have three clients who could not be happier with Ruby, it gives them an edge on the competitors and MOST importantly it gives their customers a friendly voice and a bit of curve appeal.

Give it to me Baby

Give your customers what they want. Your company provides an excellent product with a good value and NOW you can provide that extra personal attention. Start updating your impersonal and automated emails like billing notices, support requests, product auto-responders to have an individual appeal. Then take a look at your voice mail system and make sure that you are ETDBW.

Your iPhones Sucks

Brad Slavin — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 04:13:08 +0000

Despite what some clients believe I do not work for Blackberry nor for Microsoft! I do however have some pretty strong opinions about the iPhone and their rapid adoption as the ‘must have CEO’ device. It is a real love / hate relationship; One the one hand they are the most elegant, powerful and purpose build devices that exist in the marketplace. The iPhone is the number one consumer electronic device.

The phone is masterful at web browsing, turning heads and having extensibility for third party applications. It is really the most potent pocket computer and it has changed the expectations that we have of a phone and a rich media device. However it is not ready for Corporate prime time!

If you own one you already know it’s the best browser, not the best business PDA.

Your IT people already know this, but tens of thousands of CEO’s are creating havoc on your mail servers, your corporate security policies and their good nature. The one thing the phone has going for it is that your IT people love Apple so they are willing (but not happy) to put up with it. Oh yea, they also want one when it finally syncs with the corporate mail server.

The technology that the phone is lacking is called direct “Exchange Server Push” this means that your phone gets email pushed to it as soon as it comes in within a few seconds. The way that the phone currently works is that the phone connects every few minutes to the server and then checks to see if there is any new email. Not as efficient nor as fast as the push technology. Apple wants it, and so does everyone else.

You must be wondering why I am making such a big deal about this? Well it because most businesses are needing to adjust their firewall / spam filtering policies to allow access to the iPhone for IMAP and SMTP connections. The iPhone also does not have a sophisticated anti-spam feature like most modern email clients so phone inboxes are getting plagued with spam. Nothing like 1,000 new Viagra and Trouser Snake emails on your phone when you wake up!

Security is also a huge concern, with phones like the Blackberry or Windows Mobile your handset can be remotely erased if it gets lost. Not so with the iPhone. Think about it most desired phone on the market, and with a $500 price point mainly executives are going to own them; and there is a lot of sensitive information on them.

As dedicated and caring IT people we know that the phone is amazing, we know that you just have to have it.. but understand that there are limitations. Using iTunes to sync contacts and calendars is taking a step backwards and it becomes another one off software application that we have to support.

I know of a number of execs that are running iPhones as their personal phones / browsers but still keep Blackberries on their hips to keep in touch with the office. Do I believe that the trend will continue? I know that Apple will be releasing the software in the next major version to support syncing with Microsoft Exchange Server.

My advice if you have to have the have to have phone; go ahead and get it but remember your poor IT staff along the way. For the Enterprise the security issues and the lack of push email would keep me from endorsing it whole-heartedly. The other issue is that the phone is tied only to the ATT network. The phone is not perfect, it is getting there but it is not the best PDA on the market for corporate users.

Wait a few months, get the latest software revision pre-installed and keep an eye on your phone. Or get a Blackberry

50 Muse Ideas for the 4 Hour Work Week

Brad Slavin — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 06:22:29 +0000

Muse Ideas
1. private label rights
2. 4HWW template
3. website MCAT and LSAT
4. online scuba diving log
5. sell your house DVD
6. yoga for [niche]
7. fitness bootcamp
8. how to buy a motorcycle
9. cancer fighting
10. home valet butler
11. outsource brokerage for virtual assistants
12. hangover helper – hangover water
13. selling supplements
14. chart of weight loss – wireless scale
15. party kits
16. recipes to cell phones at dinner time
17. fridge inventory keeper
18. projects like guru.com
19. workout log book
20. 4HWW t-shirts
21. 4HWW travel agency
22. 4HWW concierge – new rich concierge
23. eating healthy DVD
24. affirmation jewelry
25. 4HWW affirmation cards
26. Business Magnets of beautiful art
27. synchronize IE and FF
28. vitamin water
29. cars – anything
30. pets exerciser
31. 4HWW meets New Earth
32. marriage restoration kit
33. 4HWW wiki
34. calorie counter – bar code checker
35. new rich book club
36. 4HWW mashup
37. 4HWW calendar (concept of 4HWW hydra came up)
38. digital birthday reminder for perpetual calendar
39. upload photos
40. 4HWW online survey for your muse
41. digital/physical birthday reminders and ideas
42. digital photo frame with pre-loaded photos/categories
43. interactive coaching sessions
44. SMS digital messages – personal daily horoscopes
45. anti-spam for iphone – software
46. hats – hot pants – yoga wear – babies “made in America” items
47. gas prices SMS to phone for closest cheapest stations
48. 4HWW live the lifestyle weekends
49. yoga for the bedroom
50. 4HWW brainstorming – MUSE makers kit – brainstorming facilitation