If you were holding off on making the switch to Windows 8 because it was just too different, you won’t have that excuse for much longer. Windows 8.1, which is a free update to Windows 8, will have a traditional Start button. You will also be able to boot directly to the desktop if you want to, bypassing the new tablet-oriented Metro user interface. This will make Windows 8 work a lot more like the Windows versions of the past.
The Start menu will still be full-screen, and not an overlay on the desktop. There will still be a bit of a learning curve. But Microsoft has added some of their tried and true functionality back into the operating system, which in my book tips the balance towards finally adopting the latest version.
You’re not a coder – we get it. But sometimes you need to make some quick changes to your website and your developer isn’t around. In this post we’re going to talk about why you should never use Microsoft Word to work on your websites files. At the end we’ll present two alternatives.
Word uses its own special format for how it displays text. This format, or “character encoding” is different from the standard types of character encoding you find on the web. When you copy and paste material from a Word document directly into your website files, you’ll copy that special formatting right along with it. This can result in some unusual behavior, such as ““” and “— being displayed instead of quotation marks.
If you’re running into this problem, you can fix it by opening up your website files in a plain text editor and replacing the special characters with what you really want. And, of course, if you use a plain text editor in the first place, you won’t ever run into this problem! Here are my two favorite free text editors:
When your team starts to grow beyond the number of employees you can count on one hand, it becomes harder and yet, at the same time, more important to coordinate deadlines and tasks between everyone so that everything gets done in a proper and timely manner. And, like most things these days, coordination comes easier with the right software. Today we’re going to look at one program that works for team coordination, called Basecamp. Basecamp has been around for a while – 2004, to be exact – but it’s still a very popular piece of software for project management.
Basecamp
Basecamp lets you set up projects, to-do lists, and to-dos. To-dos are individual tasks with checkboxes that can be crossed off when they’re done. Tasks can be assigned to a specific person and given a due date, but anyone who’s invited to the project can see its progress, add comments, and upload files. Basically, it’s a way to coordinate all the people, tasks, discussions, and files related to a particular project into one place, while granting visibility to everyone who needs it.
Basecamp is more of a coordination tool than a reporting tool – if you’re looking to generate productivity reports, you might be better served somewhere else. It’s built for the people working through the tasks and their immediate project coordinators, and not necessarily the people who need an org-chart level view.
You can try Basecamp for free. If you like it, their smallest subscription is $20.00 a month, which limits you to 10 open projects, but you can add an unlimited number of people.
Think about all the information you rely on for your business. You have emails from your coworkers and clients, sales records, contracts and proposals, client profiles, your website, form templates, and more. You really don’t want to lose all that – or any of it.
Backing up all of your digital information is your best form of insurance against data loss. Data loss can occur for a number of reasons:
Hardware failure
Hacking
Data corruption
Accidental deletion
Software changes
With all those threats to your data out there, a backup is definitely a good thing to have around. In fact, I’m going to argue that you want to have at least two backups on hand: an older one and a newer one. The reason is this: the newer one will have all your recent changes, while the older one is more likely to be free of whatever problem caused your data loss. If you got hacked a week ago, having only yesterday’s backup is unhelpful.
The details of how to make your backup and where to store it are things you can discuss with your IT provider. For example, Janus Networks can set you up with automatic backups to a secure data center. Here are a few questions you might want to consider: Do you want to back up to an external server, a dedicated server in your office, or even a desktop computer or portable hard drive? How often does your data change? You might need a new backup once a month, once a week, once a day, or once an hour. If you’re backing up frequently, you might want to set up an automatic backup so you don’t have to remember to do it manually. Finally, make sure that the format you’re using for the backup is easy to use when it comes time for a restoration.
In the end, whichever method you choose, just make sure you have a backup.
Today we’re going to talk about Big Data, and what to do with it. Basically, Big Data is all the thousands or millions of facts and figures about your business that you’re starting to collect. Clicks on ads, retweets, the fact that the blue socks sell better on Tuesday evenings – all those factoids add up.
Hadoop is a software framework for dealing with all of that data. Hadoop is from Apache, and its original components were invented by Doug Cutting based on a 2004 paper about Google’s MapReduce data processing software.
Hadoop is good for storing and retrieving large amounts of data in parallel from disjointed (read: cloud) storage devices. So, it’s great for storing your customers’ non-sensitive profile information, all of your transaction histories, etc. It’s also great for cloud computing: it seamlessly handles data that’s sitting on multiple physical storage devices, and it’s designed to keep chugging along even if a significant portion of its servers are knocked out. It’s not so great for performing complex calculations on small amounts of data, and it’s definitely not great for things like financial transactions that can get messed up if executed in parallel. But it can store all the information related to those financial transactions, so you can do things like track spending patterns to identify fraudulant purchases.
So, good stuff! Venturing into the world of Big Data? Keep track of it all with Hadoop.
A few lucky technology companies seem to become “the next big thing” overnight. Remember when you were thinking that “tweet” was a stupid verb, and then the month after that, you had to add a “share on Twitter” button to your home page? Companies that can quickly capitalize on the next big thing piggyback off of the original prodigy’s success and even become buzz-worthy in their own right.
You’ve probably heard of Kred. It calculates people’s online “influence scores,” primarily based on data from Twitter. It’s been quite successful because it makes Twitter (Everyone’s using it! But what do I do with that?) useful to advertisers and marketing departments. I bet a lot of startups wish they had been able to capitalize on Twitter’s success the way Kred did. However, it’s a bit of a one-trick pony. Kred needs Twitter (plus a few other sites like Facebook and LinkedIn) in order for Kred to be Kred.
And right now Kred’s parent company PeopleBrowsr is in the middle of a nasty legal battle with Twitter over getting access to the data. It used to have a one-on-one contract with Twitter to gain access to its data, and Twitter just decided to let that contract expire.
No matter which way the lawsuit is resolved, I’m sure quite a few people over at Kred are looking at each other nervously.
It didn’t have to be a legal battle either – if Twitter ever went the way of MySpace, or was hit by a crippling cyber attack, or all its US servers went down because of coinciding hurricanes on the east coast and earthquakes on the west – Kred would be just as out of luck. Technology companies can spring up quickly and fade just as fast.
If your business relies heavily on just one other business, make sure you always have a Plan B.
Windows 8 was released earlier this month and if you haven’t upgraded already, you’re probably wondering what it’s like.
It’s different.
In fact, the very windows that gave the operating system its name have evolved in a major way for the first time since the days of the DOS prompt. Here’s what it looks like:
Windows 8 Start Screen
So, is it worth upgrading? What can you expect from the newest operating system from Microsoft?
The most noticeable thing about Windows 8 is the way you access your programs. In addition to the traditional desktop, it sports a brand new Start screen (pictured above), which is where you’ll begin your Windows 8 experience. Where older versions of Windows had a small Start button on the lower left, which brought up a few-inches-square menu of programs and utilities, Windows 8 brings up a full screen of tiled apps. It works a lot like the app menu on a smartphone. Programs from the new menu are always full screen, although programs accessed from the desktop can be windowed, resized, tabbed, and layered as before.
The first thing about Windows 8 that feels off, at least for traditional mouse-and-keyboard computers that lack touchscreens, is the poor compatibility between the traditional desktop and the smartphone-like Start screen. If you access a program from one, and then try to get to it from the other, they won’t necessarily be in sync. You may find yourself starting two instances of the program when you were just trying to get back to what you were doing earlier.
I don’t understand why they didn’t just merge the best features from the desktop and the Start screen. The snazzy app-icon layout thing is cool and could have replace the traditional “tiny rows of icons” on the old desktop, while keeping the old window functionality once you launched a program. The old windows worked really well. You could run them in full screen mode if you wanted to, but you also had the option to move them around, make them smaller, and stack them on top of each other. Obviously Microsoft still sees value in that experience, or they wouldn’t have included the traditional desktop, but taking that functionality away from half of the operating system experience just seems like a step backwards.
Well, if you don’t like the Start screen, you can just use the desktop, right? Wrong. You are required to use the new Start menu for certain tasks, like searching, uninstalling apps, or shutting down the computer, even if you were working from the desktop and didn’t want to switch modes.
That leads to my second complaint about Windows 8. It makes the controls for everything harder to find. While this makes computing a more seamless experience if all you want to do is turn on the computer and hit one button to start listening to music, it also makes it much more annoying any time you need to do something on a slightly deeper level. For me, the most grievous problem is the right click. Instead of bringing up a menu right next to your mouse, it brings it up at the bottom of the screen. It might look prettier down there, but it’s much less useful.
Windows also hides some commonly-used utilities in a popup bar on the right side of the Start menu. That’s where you go to shut down or reboot the computer. If you’re already in the Start screen, it’s not much more trouble to hover over the “Charm” bar, open the Settings, and shut down, but adding that extra step from the desktop is annoying. In fact, all the utilities are hidden until you hover in the right spot (usually a corner or edge of the screen). It’s not hard to get used to, but you may miss the visual cues when you’re starting out with the software.
Also, if you’re like me, you like using the search feature to find utilities you don’t use every day. Maybe you need to uninstall a program or troubleshoot a printer. In Windows 7, you could just type “uninstall” or “printer” in the Start menu search bar. No more. In Windows 8, you can start a search just by typing (yay, fewer clicks!) but it only searches apps and programs (boo, those were easy to find anyway).
There are a few nice things in Windows 8 to balance out the bad.
The Task Manager is easier to understand and got a “startup programs” tab added to it (yay for not having to mess around with msconfig).
Multiple monitors can now each have a taskbar with active programs.
The bigger Start screen is a more visually friendly way to access your favorite programs.
You can sync up your computer experiences on any device by using a Microsoft account (formerly Windows Live) login.
However, all things considered, the benefits seem more peripheral, and the flaws very central, to the Windows 8 experience. On smaller touchscreen devices like phones and tablets the benefits of a clean layout, full-screen apps, and hidden controls are more obvious, but you may want to hold off on Windows 8 for now for your desktops and laptops. Or if you are going to upgrade, make sure everyone has a chance to get used to it. This one’s different.
This video from lifehacker is a good introduction to the system’s flaws, benefits, and overall feel:
Having a business means having expenses – and having expenses means saving receipts and filling out expense reports.
I don’t know about you, but I’m not that rare breed of person who just naturally loves to keep track of purchases and enter expense details into spreadsheets. Receipts have been known to accumulate in a desk drawer for weeks, fall out of my wallet on the way to the office, or just miraculously disappear. And when I finally get around to filling out an expense report, everything is scattered and it’s a hassle just to straighten and organize it all before I can start the menial task of entering my receipts by hand.
Maybe you’ve never lost a receipt, never forgotten where that stub was from, or what you were doing at that lunch. Or maybe you have the resources to hire someone to follow you around full-time and take care of this hassle for you.
ExpenseMagic is a service that brings the power of the cloud – and the experience of full-time bookkeepers – to your expenses. It provides a quick and hassle-free way to get a handle on your receipts and your expenses, bringing order to an area normally ruled by chaos.
Their iPhone app lets you take a picture of any receipt anywhere, and immediately log it in their system while on the go. They also accept digital receipts via email, or through a number of integrated services. The receipt will then live in the cloud until a set of actual human eyes looks at it, parses out the relevant information, and logs it into a database of your expenses. Their trained bookkeepers will collate and organize all of your expenses for you, and at the end of the month, you’ll get a full expense report without any of the stress or wasted time on your part.
That’s it. You can buy lunch for a business meeting, take a picture of the receipt before you leave the restaurant, and then promptly forget about it. All you have to worry about is sending the receipts with your smartphone, and they’ll do the rest.
The service has a bunch of useful features, such as support for Evernote, Dropbox, OfficeDrop, and a handful of other services, so it can slip right into the workflow and note-sharing applications you already use. They have a simple and quick mileage system to log the amount of business-related driving expenses, as well as automatic currency conversion for international expenses. There’s even calendar integration that allows you to assign each expense to a specific event in your calendar, so you’ll never have to remember exactly what you were doing and who you were with when you bought that coffee.
ExpenseMagic has a couple different pricing plans based on how often you incur expenses. You can download the app for free and start uploading receipts immediately. From there you can pay-as-you go for the price of $4.99 for 20 of what they call “Magical Uploads” – their name for their bookkeeper service. If you find the service useful, you can upgrade to an unlimited plan for $11.99/month or $20.99/90 days.
The service is currently only available for iPhone and as a webapp, although there is an Android version in the works.
If you’re like me and hate having to worry about expenses and whether you’re doing them right, Expense Magic might just be your ticket. You still have the responsibility to upload all your receipts, but that’s nothing compared to the old way of doing things. You could end up saving yourself hassle and time, and maybe even some money in the process.
If your typical day is anything like mine, you spend most of your time at work inside an email application.
It doesn’t matter whether you are responding to incoming emails on your phone, sending out hundreds of almost-identical emails directly to clients, or just obsessively checking your inbox to see if your boss has responded to that important message yet; the never-ending avalanche of email can often seem too much to handle.
That’s where ToutApp comes in.
ToutApp is a great email tool that helps to streamline your email tasks, freeing up your time and energy to spend on other aspects of your business.
It offers easy and reliable email tracking, giving you detailed, real-time stats on who has viewed your emails and whether or not they clicked on the links inside. This takes a lot of the guesswork (and stress) out of email—you won’t have to wait for confirmation emails anymore, and it erases any lingering worries about whether the email went where it was intended.
Other features include Tout templates, which save time by automatically filling in the information you would normally enter over and over again. It can auto-attach files, automatically CC and BCC people, and even fill in custom text templates—allowing you to focus on only the important details of each individual email.
You can also schedule your emails to be sent at a particular time, so you’ll never again need to remember to send that email out right after lunch. Outlook doesn’t even need to be open for this to work—you can compose an email on Friday afternoon, and make sure it’s sent out first thing Monday morning… even if you’re not in the office.
If you use Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, ToutApp makes things a lot easier by integrating directly into Salesforce and a number of other supported CRM apps. It synchronizes your contacts and automatically updates your email activity, right when you send the email. No more alt-tabbing between programs, or forgetting to update the CRM—ToutApp takes care of all of that automatically.
If you find yourself spending an inordinate amount of your time worrying about email and constantly updating your CRM, this app could free up your time (and mental real estate) to run the other parts of your business.
ToutApp is available as a web-based application, as well as a plugin for Gmail and Outlook. A mobile version is available for the iPhone. An Android version is currently in development, as is support for Apple Mail on OSX. The service has an introductory free trial period, and plans start at $30/month, going up from there depending on what features your business needs. There’s also an “always-free plan” ideal for personal use, which limits the amount of templates and time-shifted emails allowed per month.
For more information, visit their site, or watch their introductory video, embedded below.
If your business is like a lot of others I know, your need for computing power swings up and down and all over the place. Maybe you have a Christmas rush to get orders through on your website. Maybe your traffic spikes every time you post a new update to your webcomic or online game. Maybe your company got mentioned on TV and you suddenly have 100 times your normal visitors.
Traditionally, your server administrators would caution you to buy a big enough server to handle spikes. After all, you can’t afford to miss out on your best sales and popularity peaks, even though you only use the full capacity once a year.
Cloud computing offers something a little different. It treats computer power the same way the power company treats your electricity – they provide more than you could ever use, they offer the power to a wide base of people, and you pay only for what you actually consume. If you think about it, this is a much more efficient (and cheaper) way to get the computing power that you need.
There are a few big players in cloud computing right now, and Amazon is at the forefront with their proprietary Amazon Cloud and related products. But cloud computing is about to bust wide open, because of OpenStack.
OpenStack is a new operating system designed to manage cloud computing, and it’s open source. Free. Available to everyone. It’s trying to do for cloud computing what Linux did for traditional servers. It’s been around for a couple of years, but recently it’s left the realm of “something some nerds are working on for fun” to become a really viable platform with, for example, a graphical dashboard that can be used by someone with basic computer knowhow.
To give you an idea of the OpenStack user experience, I suggest you check out their demo video.
In practical terms, what this means is that soon everybody and their great-aunt will be offering cloud hosting. Companies can even use it in-house, although that kind of defeats the whole “sharing” concept unless you have a large enough in-company user base.
So keep your eye out for some great deals and innovation in the area of cloud computing. And expect it to be powered by OpenStack.
