This morning I read an article about sensitive documents leaked from various government sources through peer to peer (P2P) networks. In this circumstance the culprit was LimeWire, but it could have been any of them. Details on a safe house for the first family in the event of a national emergency was 
just the latest in a string of leaks. Previously the routes of the President’s limo were leaked. In January sensitive details about the President’s helicopter were leaked through a P2P network.
This prompted Representative Edolphus Towns (D-NY) to call for a ban of P2P software on all government and contractor computers. Others are calling for investigations of the makers of P2P software as enabling illegal activity and unfair trading practices. Read the rest of this entry »
Like everyone today I am on LinkedIn. I wanted to use LinkedIn to sign up people to become resellers for our Encompass IT Managed Services. So Bill Blake, the president of eDocument Sciences, and I crafted a little message and posted it on a few LinkedIn groups. We also put it on our status. We asked if out of work IT professionals were interested in getting into the Managed Services business with no upfront investment. The link in the message went to a simple landing page on our website that talked about the value of becoming an Encompass reseller; what’s in it for them, not us. People completed a form asking for more information and we set up calls with those who were interested. Pretty simple really. Read the rest of this entry »
Sounds like a simple enough question, but many of us are not sure. Some companies think that everyone breathing and with some cash is their customer. In the consulting business you need to know what you can do and for whom. Sales people hate walking away from any potential deal, but better to be honest with the customer and tell them you can’t do something, then lose your shirt and reputation later on. Read the rest of this entry »
I recently read Chris Anderson’s book The Long Tail. For those who have not read it, the long tail is a mathematics term that helps describe how a business can maximize their sales by catering to niches rather than focusing only on hits, or popular items. By selling smaller amounts of more items, you generate larger sales because you can meet more people’s needs. Doing business on the Internet makes this easy because it lets you lower inventory and distribution costs, allows 24/7 shopping, provides a very large inventory and enables differential pricing; all items Chris discusses in his book that are key for the long tail. Companies like Amazon and NetFlix embody this principal by offering millions of items online rather than the thousands available in their brick and mortar competitors. Since product information is just an entry in a database, customers can tag and sort items as they see fit and find exactly what they want. It’s easy to slice and dice an inventory into limitless categories and present that to customers in a way that makes sense to them. This helps make sense of the limitless quantity and fuels the sale of niche items. Read the rest of this entry »
My kids and I were sitting around talking about the new Harry Potter movie (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince) coming out and how we couldn’t wait to see it. My daughter wanted to refresh herself with some of the details, so she started rereading the book . My son started rereading the 7th book (Deathly Hallows), just because he wanted to. I started thinking about the phenomenon that is Harry Potter and how social media fits in the mix. Read the rest of this entry »
