Thanks for the Memory Sticks – Accessorizing the Working Day!

funny memory stickNow here’s the thing – memory sticks!  Is there anyone else out there who, like me, actually has more of these than lipsticks in their handbag? I’m not excluding men here; this is not a sexist comment: I’m sure you corporate business men always have an emergency lipstick in your laptop briefcase! Seriously, since the growth of laptops and portable hardware, it was only a matter of time before our laptop bags overtook our working girls’ handbags as the kitchen-sink carry-all*.  This is why suppliers now offer laptop bags in such a variety of styles and colours and why some designer outlets can charge as much as they do for them – it’s because they know that we’ll (a) love them (b) buy them (c) use them wherever we go!

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4 Steps to Ask Your Customers to Switch to Paperless Billing

att logoThis blog is well known for criticizing the folks at AT&T for their coverage problems for the iPhone. However, this time I’m going to write about AT&T in a better light.

Here’s the situation:

at&t paperless billing

AT&T (as thousands of retailers in the U.S.) tries to convince its customers to switch to paperless billing. AT&T summarizes the benefits of paperless billing with the tagline: “Save time, money, and trees”.

Often, customers fail to make the switch to paperless billing because while it is easy to save how paperless billing saves tree, they cannot see exactly how this saves both time and money.

On November 18, 2010 I received an email from AT&T that effectively shows how customers can save both time and money with paperless billing in 3 simple steps.

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Why Online Banking on Mobiles Will Soar

Since 2008, consumers have been moving from brick-and-mortar banking to online banking at an impressive rate. This trend is welcomed not only by consumers who like the convenience of anytime banking, but also by financial institutions that like to streamline operations and cut down costs.

Several forecasts predict that by 2015, 50% or more of US mobile users will be conducting transactions from their mobile devices (e.g. opening an online savings account).

mobile financial services penetration among us mobile phone users

There are many critics that point out that will not happen. According to a survey commissioned by identity protection services firm Kindsight, nearly two-thirds of respondents worried that banking, credit card or other personal info could be stolen from their computers. Bloomberg Businessweek joins the pack of critics with a July 2010 report claiming that “Gen Y lacks confidence about making financial decisions”. As an example, Bloomberg Businessweek cites that fewer than 4,000 Facebook users have clicked the “like” button for Fidelity’s Page and about 9,000 have done so for Vanguard’s. Meanwhile 4.2 million people say they like Apple iTunes on Facebook. As another example, Schwab, which began sending Twitter feeds in mid-June 2010, has 277 followers. The WholeFoods Twitter account has 1.8 million followers.

What Bloomberg Businessweek and other critics fail to understand is that social media activity is not a proper way to measure whether members of Generation X and Y are accessing their bank accounts mostly online. You need to look at the bigger picture, which is formed mainly by 2 factors: 1) preferred banking method of Generation X and Generation Y, and 2) activities least likely to give up for a week by Generation X and Y.

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How Conference Calling Helps Your Business

conference calling skype
Photo Credit: Skype

Conference calling can be beneficial to your business instead of a face to face meeting for several reasons. The most obvious reasons are savings in time and money which are often the main costs when organizing and arranging face to face meetings. Meetings may not be attended, they may be deferred for months in advance or they may not even be scheduled. Travel costs are incurred, as are the external venue costs including the costs and availability of hotel accommodation, subsistence allowance, refreshments at conference and the conferencing facilities themselves.

Conference calling works by allowing your clients or employees who are spatially and temporally dislocated from the conference venue to take part in the meeting or other event, such as a presentation, via the telephone. Businesses operate at both the local and global level and for large businesses operations are essentially global in focus and scale with clients and employees located around the world in continents within different time zones. As conference calling can allow international dial-in at an agreed time, this allows the potential for meetings to be held at any given time with a large amount of callers communicating simultaneously. Conference calling reduces the need for employees or clients to travel to meetings, resulting in savings in money and time for them and your business.

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The Gen Y and Baby Boomer Generation Gap

On the October 18 – 24, 2010 edition of Bloomberg Businessweek, there was an article entitled Etiquette School for Dummies, later on titled Why Etiquette Schools Are Thriving at Businessweek’s website.

bloomberg businessweek business magnate comparison lee iacoca mark zuckerberg
What about some context about when the pictures were taken?

After reading this article and seeing the comparison above (which I wonder why does not include any mention of the context of when the picture was taken), I was wondering one thing: “Why do the Baby Boomers are so angry at Gen Y and the Millenials?”

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Top 3 Tips To Make Your E-Newsletter A Success

If you want people to actually read your e-newsletter instead of deleting it from their inbox, you need to make it worth their time. You need to provide a valuable and useful gift.  That means NO “free” white papers on “how to make make your Twitter account reach 10,000 followers”. Make good use of the law of reciprocity and provide something really useful and free to your e-mail recipients.

What kind of rewards can you give? Shutterfly’s Wink is the king of e-mail newsletters that include a freebie. Wink offers readers 2 free photo strip credits on most of its email newsletters. Although Shutterfly is a for-profit business, nonprofits can easily follow their lead. Provide a product or service that your customers, clients and volunteers would find interesting. Provide a carrot that is truly valuable and reinforce to your readers how much they can achieve through your gift.

Here are the top 3 tips to make your e-newsletter a success:

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3 Image Based Search Engines

Double DatingWhenever information is needed, it seems that the first outlets most people turn to are search engines. As such, search engines are constantly evolving to keep up with the latest user demands. One of the latest developments that is rapidly expanding in popularity is the idea of image based search engines rather than keyword based searches.

When using a traditional search engine to locate specific information, you have undoubtedly become frustrated at one time or another from keywords producing irrelevant results. When searching for specific images online, the keyword based search options are nearly useless.


Yahoo! Flickr - 468x60

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Why Become a Web Hosting Reseller?

ResellingWeb hosting reselling entails renting a server from another web hosting company and leasing out bandwidth, hard disk space, and processing power to other customers at a lower rate. For example, if you need a private server to host your website yet you do not want to pay the price for one, you can lease out partitions of the hard drive and divisions of the bandwidth to other people and divide the cost of the whole server between them. As a business, the idea is to make a profit by leasing out the entire server to multiple clients until the cost is exceeded by the income.

An Alternative to Paying Clients

You don’t necessarily need your clients to pay you directly for their space. I’m sure you’re familiar with seeing advertisements on websites, and you’re most likely aware that those ads can be the primary source of income for a website or at least a significant source. In turn, you can place ads on the websites of people you host on your private server. Of course, no one would want to pay for space on a hosting reseller’s server when their page will have ads on it. Instead, you can offer a limited amount of space and bandwidth to your clients for free, and all of the traffic they receive to their websites will generate revenue for you, possibly more than if the clients were paying you!

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