Michael J. Stromberg - Tech Blog

The truth about business!

Well the summer is almost over and I haven’t been blogging at all.  So you might think I would have a lot to say, but no!  Our business has grown by leaps and bounds of the past couple of months thanks to a couple of key referrals from associates.  And we are now at the point of no return!  Several of our major competitors are in financial ruin along with the rest who cannot scale back quick enough.  It is our turn to grow and when I thought we were prepared for this I was wrong.

More money more problems!  Trying to handle all of those large monthly invoices and vendor bills has forced us to change the way we do business.  We have to be thorough and complete, no more mind over matter.  Document Everything!  Our 14 hour workdays and endless projects are a blessing and a curse.

I just finished coding the last few lines of our very own integrated billing, inventory, support ticket and monitoring software.  If I could just get my new I-phone to sync my sql database (just had to do a hard reset) I could get some sleep.  We now have the tools even our largest competitors can only dream about!

I don’t like meetings, I like doing!  I have had more meetings in the past year than my prior 28.  Much to my dismay this has gotten in the way of my doing, but people like to meet!  I guess maybe there is a social aspect or something, but I feel at home behind my keyboard and monitors.

Vacation!  Now that we have “almost” made it through the summer I am going on vacation in September, 7 days with no computers or internet.  Just me and my wife relaxing in the sun!  Okay, maybe there will be some internet but only on the beach…

-mike

Google Insult…

Wow, either Google forgot what today is (not really just a day off work) or they are just insulting the American public on some level again. I have been waiting for the Memorial Day logo and still nothing… If you are not familiar with what I am talking about, Google typically dresses up their logo for holidays and places them on their homepage for the day.

Some of you might say Google didn’t do this last year either, which is true! I had attributed that to the fact that they have not been doing the dressed up logo’s for very long, but look at what they have been celebrating:

http://www.google.com/intl/en/holidaylogos.html

You will notice the most recent logo celebrating the 125th Birthday of Walter Gropius - May 18, 2008.

I can only guess this because of Google’s stance on “war” and so they can give us some insight to their agenda. It’s their company and they can do what they want, but I think it should be all or nothing!   So if they decide to put one up on Friday (the real memorial day) it’s just because of all the heat from the bloggers.

-mike

Now I have to learn German

I just found this little German TV show named “Stromberg”. Apparently it is a offshoot of the British/US sitcom The Office. Anyway, it looks pretty stupid but that might have something to do with the fact that I don’t know what they are saying.

Check out their website and if you know any German please translate it for me:

http://www.prosieben.de/show_comedy/stromberg/

-mike

The end of an era…

This past weekend my wife returned from one of her extravagant shopping adventures with a gift. A new watch! Apparently this was a hint… Anyone who knows me can attest to the fact that I have been rocking the Casio CA-53W-1Z for quite some time now.  But she says it’s time for retirement!

The calculator watch is one of the finest pieces of technology ever developed and not to mention a major fashion statement. Since the early 80’s Casio has been a market leader in providing wearable computers to nerds allowing them to function in everyday life. So what does the future hold for these marvelous devices? Not much, but it was fun while it lasted!

So if reading this post has made you a bit nostalgic for the 80’s. Fear not, I may break it out from time to time just to prove a point…

-mike

The onslaught of malware!

On a typical weekday I usually get about 300 legitimate emails from customers, vendors and friends. Lately many of these emails have referenced malware on home computers. The problem is that the typical home computer is not very immune to these infections. Good virus protection costs money and most of you would rather live with a few popups than pay the $50 to update. But the truth is if you are running Windows on your home computer you do “need” protection.

So if you are unwilling to pay, here are a few free tools that work pretty well:

AVG Free Antivirus: http://free.grisoft.com/
Ad-Aware malware protection: http://lavasoft.com/
Spybot Search and Destroy:  http://www.safer-networking.org/

These tools are a decent substitute for the pay versions but are a little more manual so make sure you read the instructions carefully! 

It is always better to be proactive rather than reactive when it comes to security, but if you think you are infected BACK UP YOUR DATA…

-mike

Windows XP SP 3

It’s finally here, the service pack to end all service packs. No, not really but it will add some needed security enhancements. Windows XP service pack 3 will be available for download to your computer next Tuesday and available through windows update in June. The update doesn’t contain any new features that you will find in Vista (some say this is good).

Their 70 MB update contains fixes for security, compatibility and performance. Another primary enhancement is for server 2008 compliance when using PC health detection to protect your network. The service pack will be available for XP Home, XP MCE and XP Professional 32 bit versions, there is no update planned for the 64 bit versions of XP.

If you can’t wait till June you can download the “full” 580 MB service pack here on the 29th:

Microsoft Download Center

-mike

Making small business BIG!

The day has come for the small business owner “who wants” to compete with the big boys.  We now have the knowledge and the tools that before were only attainable with big money.  No, I don’t mean that I have a single solution that can magically take you to the top.  What I mean is that your business with the right combination of tools can create a “presence” in your industry.

“You are surrounded by simple, obvious solutions that can dramatically increase your income, power, influence and success. The problem is, you just don’t see them.”

- Jay Abraham

Let’s tackle the big question first.  “What do I know?”  The fact is we have more knowledge available to us than most of you believe and learning how to find it is the first step.  There are plenty of books and websites pertaining to just about every aspect of every business and a quick Google search can prove that.   So with the right combination of information and motivation you can know everything or at least figure it out quickly.   To sum it up if you ever have to tell a customer you don’t know something you are not trying very hard!

For those of you who still don’t get that part I will have a future post on searching the web…

Back to the “presence”, as most small business owners know it is hard to be everything to everyone.  Taking advantage of readily available resources can make the transition from overwhelmed to managing a simple one.  Knowledge management!  For a successful business we need to share our information and make it available company wide, for us this is our Microsoft Exchange server combined with our fabulous service ticketing software.  Your business may be different but the concept is still the same.  Where is Mike today, what is he working on?  Just check my calendar or shoot me an email becuase I am  fully mobile…

There are a lot of great tools for knowledge managment, some are even free.  In the last couple of weeks we have transitioned many clients to “Google Apps” it has shared calendars, shared contacts, document management and email.  Oh yeah, it’s also free!  Does it worry me that something I would have previously sold is now available for free?  No, this service is very helpful for small clients and it can help them to grow into big clients which will need our services.

Marketing, the biggest time waster for most small business owners has also gotten a little easier.  The problem is most of us cannot afford a $25K marketing campaign bill but we still need to reach those clients.  With a quality website, email marketing and the personal phone call we can cut those costs to dollars.  When it comes to the website I have found it is better to have a simple concise point, packing in more information than necessary will just cause potential clients to lose interest and fast.  Products like Constant Contact have allowed us to reach more people than ever with a minimal effort, a simple advertisement email can be sent to thousands with the click of the mouse.

As a major decision maker in our company I have spent many hours researching, trying to get organized and making us more efficient in the parts of our business that do not deal with technology.  Life would be great if I could hire employees to fill these positions but I can’t, so I need to make these tasks as effortless as possible.

-mike

Working with smartphones

Now more than ever we are getting requests for mobility solutions, this creates some interesting challanges from a support standpoint. Firstly we are not only talking about accessing your office network from home. We are talking about having all of your information everywhere! Yes everywhere, certainly there must be a magic piece of software that just works…

When a customer tells us they just got a new smartphone and want it connected to their email, calendars and contacts we have to hope they bought the right one. The problem is that there are hundreds of phones with hundreds of interfaces and they all work a little different. For example the day after the iphone was released we got one of those calls. In this instance we had already done our homework on the iphone and concluded there was no way to sync everything. We were able to setup a rudimentary email interface for the phone but no contacts or calendars. What were they thinking?

I personally use a Treo 700wx smartphone with direct push email from our Microsoft Exchange Server, this is probably the most common and reliable way to go mobile. In the next couple of years I suspect our clients to demand more and better mobility solutions, I just hope the hardware developers can keep up.

-mike

Whats your page rank?

I get asked by people all the time “why does my website come up on page 5 when i do a Google search”.  The answer is a simple one, you don’t have the right stuff.  But what is the right stuff?  Google uses several factors to determine your “page rank”, which basically is how important they think your page is. 

The Google Bot focuses on:

• Inbound links - Sites that link to your site, this can hurt you if they are a link farm so be careful
• Keywords - But not meta keywords they don’t do anything for Google
• Page title - The line in the upper left corner of your browser
• Image tags - When you hold your mouse over an image it should read something relevant

As there are probably a few other secrets on how Google determines their page rank we can take a step in improving placement with the above items.  Another key is to change your content frequently!  Anyway you look at it most end users don’t have the skills to get this done but hopefully their webmaster does.

-mike

Just install it already!

If you have never been asked to install the Google toolbar before then you have not spent much time on the web.  Just today I was asked by 5 different programs if I would like to install the Google toolbar.  Granted they have a nice way of asking with their little uncheck here box, but if I wanted it, I would of had it 300 installs ago…

Google is by far not the worst.  There are a lot of spy-ware toolbars that are hard to get rid of and install without your knowledge.  To better understand why we need toolbars just try disabling (right click on the toolbar and uncheck it by name) and see if your life is changed at all.  The truth is that FireFox, IE7 or any other respectable browser has a pop-up blocker and search field built in.  So if you want to get some of your valuable browser real-estate back disable or uninstall your toolbar.

-mike