Think about your small-medium business as a viking ship.
These amazing crafts were fast, nimble and could travel great distances to deliver the viking “brand”. They were capable in deep water but were particularly effective in shallow water – places larger ships could not venture (think lean economic times and niche).
The leader (CEO/MD) would steer the ship, navigate the waters, and perhaps beat the drum for motivation.
Unlike other ships with oarsman in the past, the crew were not slaves – they were warriors. They were all part of the clan. They were more or less equals. They drank when they were thirsty, ate when they were hungry and rested when they were tired (they never got tired).
And just like it should be in a small business, the viking ship had no passengers. Everyone rows.
If you run one site or manage a dozen or more, Google Analytics has become the dominant player in the web analytics market over the past five years. It has provides a comprehensive set of tools to analyze all aspects of your website – who is visiting, where they come from, and what they are doing when they get there. Best of all, this service is offered for free from Google.
But what about checking this activity when you are using your iPad? What are the best iPad apps for Google Analytics? I’ve purchased and downloaded the following apps to find out which are best.
I have always been a big fan of audiobooks.
Did you know that you can get the equivalent of a university education in terms of classroom time during your commute to work in just a few years? Most university students spend 10 hours or so per week in class and about 250 hours per year; the average commute is one hour (30 minutes each way) per day or 240 hours per year. So leveraging this time by listening to informative (i.e. non-fiction) audiobooks is incredibly productive and can make a real impact on your life.
I used to have a huge carry-case full of audiobooks and lectures on cassette tape (wikipedia reference for cassette tape for those of you who do not remember them). I then created an equally large library on CD when cassette’s went the way of the dodo. Not too long ago, I converted both libraries to MP3 and always had them available in my iPod.
Instagram is a new social network for sharing pictures – basically, it is like Twitter for photos but with Facebook’s like button. It launched in October 2010 and already has over 5 million users (in only nine months). It has had more than 100 million photos uploaded at a current rate of 860,000 per day. Instagram is very hot and so, so cool.
It primarily exists as a free app for your iPhone and is very simple to use. Take a photo or load one that you took earlier, apply a preset filter to give it a more stylized or retro look and then share it. All photos are uploaded to the Instagram network but it has full social integration allowing you to also post to Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Flickr, email, etc.
If you are building a business and are perhaps too busy to be manning TweetDeck 24×7, then augmenting your real social media activities with the help of a bot may be just what you need. Or perhaps you want to build a new twitter account that curates and auto-tweets specialist content. Either way, here’s how you can build your very own Twitter-bot.
I have tried a number of systems and techniques, but have found the following approach to be the most effective. On the surface, it appears to be overly complex – mainly because it uses three different sites to achieve its aim. But its not as complicated as it may appear.
Overview.
This week, Google launched its latest social media initiative – Google+.
If you wanted to describe it to someone, you would say – “it’s like Facebook, but from Google”. And that it seems is what the vast majority of blogs, tweets, articles and other reviews have been saying. Everyone is comparing Google+ to the power house that is Facebook.
Once upon a time, not so long ago.. you were able to keep your personal life and your work life completely separate. You could effectively be two different people or at least have two completely different personalities and no one would ever know. And then came social networking sites such as Facebook.
In a book called The Facebook Effect, Mark Zuckerburg is quoted as saying the following.
“You have one identity, the days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly.”
A lot of people have dismissed Zuckerburg’s comments as “crazy” and without merit. Primarily because our psychology allows for us to change identity and persona based on situations (research Jung, Goffman and others for more information).
Take your Apple TV on holiday with you! With so many vacation destinations offering free wi-fi internet access and with the Apple TV being so compact.. why not take it with you?
But if you do.. don’t forget your remote control. I wished I had remembered mine. My wife and I recently went on holiday and I was excited to try my Apple TV “on the road”. But dummy here forgot the remote the control.
Initially, I thought – no problem, I can control the Apple TV from my iPhone or iPad remote app. Except for one thing.. in order to use the remote app, your iPhone/iPad needs to be on the same wifi network as you Apple TV. With no keyboard.. the only way you can join a wifi network on the Apple TV is with a remote… I was stuck.
But then I discovered a solution that worked brilliantly. The Apple TV can learn how to respond to the signals from other – almost any – remote controls. It only needs six keys – left, right, up, down, select and back.
In order to use this solution, you need to be able to connect to a wired (ethernet) network – hopefully into the same box as your wifi (pretty standard with most vacation home internet services – standard ADSL modem/router) but it may be more tricky within a hotel or condominium block.
I just finished The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You by Eli Pariser.
This is an excellent book covering the issues involved with the increasing move towards personalisation (filtering) being implemented by Google, Facebook and many other companies (plenty of iPad apps that do this now too). This is something that I have frequently thought about myself – how an increasingly more narrow view of the world will effect our perspective and our behaviour.
My wife and I bought a holiday home in France 11 years ago as an investment “with benefits.” The idea was that we would purchase a property in a market with strong capital growth, rent it out for as many weeks of the year as possible, and visit every now and then when it wasn’t rented out for a “free” holiday.
It’s worked out pretty well for the most part – at least until the recent recession. When speaking with other second home owners, I think we did some things well. We also made a few mistakes. So here’s my advice if you are thinking about doing something similar.
Investment or Second Home
First, you need to decide what you want from this property. Is this a place for you to vacation regularly and then help support the costs by renting it out when you don’t need it? Or is this an investment first and if you get an extra holiday or two, then that would be a bonus? The difference between these two approaches are profound – and so start here and don’t search until you have made a decision.
