Erich Stauffer

Blog

  • As the iDisk Dust Settles

    According to Computer World, iCloud is Apple’s replacement for MobileMe, but what is/was MobileMe?

    According to Wikipedia, “MobileMe is a subscription-based collection of online services and software offered by Apple Inc. Originally launched on January 5, 2000, as iTools, a free collection of Internet-based services for users of Mac OS 9, Apple relaunched it as .Mac on July 17, 2002, when it became a paid subscription service primarily designed for users of Mac OS X. Apple relaunched the service again as MobileMe at WWDC 2008 on July 9, 2008, now targeting Mac OS X, Windows, iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch users. On February 24, 2011, Apple discontinued offering MobileMe through its retail stores. The MobileMe retail boxes are also not offered through resellers anymore. Apple is also no longer accepting new subscribers for MobileMe. At the WWDC 2011, on June 6, Apple announced it will launch iCloud in the Northern Hemisphere Autumn 2011, which will replace MobileMe for new users. MobileMe itself will continue to function until June 30, 2012, at which point the service will no longer be available, although users are encouraged to migrate to iCloud before that date.”

    Since iDisk from MobileMe is dead, that leaves services like DropBox and Microsoft’s SkyDrive winners. How does DropBox and SkyDrive differ from Carbonite and Mozy back-up services?

    DropBox and SkyDrive are online storage services, but Carbonite and Mozy are online backups. So what is the difference between online storage and online backups? Automation and availability mostly. With DropBox and SkyDrive, you store files on a one-off basis, just as you would copying files to a flash drive, but with Carbonite and Mozy, you set up plans, syncs, and can file version – meaning you can save multiple versions of a file to capture older vs. later files. Essentially, you could use an online storage service as an online backup service, but it would be more work.

    Read more about Dropbox for business and how it compares to SkyDrive.

  • What is Cloud Computing?

    Is Google Docs Cloud Computing?

    Google Docs is a free (with paid service options): Web-based word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, form, and data storage service offered by Google. It allows users to create and edit documents online while collaborating in real-time with other users. Google Docs is Google’s “software as a service” office suite. Documents, spreadsheets, presentations can be created with Google Docs, imported through the web interface, or sent via email. Documents can be saved to a user’s local computer in a variety of formats including: (ODF, HTML, PDF, RTF, Text, Microsoft Word). Documents are automatically saved to Google’s servers to prevent data loss, and a revision history is automatically kept. Documents can be tagged and archived for organizational purposes.

    Google Docs serves as a collaborative tool for editing amongst users and non-users in real time. Documents can be shared, opened, and edited by multiple users at the same time. Users can be notified of changes to any specified regions via e-mail. The application supports two ISO standard document formats: OpenDocument (for both opening and exporting) and Office Open XML (for opening only). It also includes support for proprietary formats such as .doc and .xls. Google Docs is one of many cloud computing, document-sharing services like Microsoft Office Live. The majority of document-sharing services require user fees, but Google Docs is free (mostly). Its popularity amongst businesses is growing due to enhanced sharing features, accessibility, and stability (it’s no longer in beta). In addition, Google Docs has enjoyed a rapid rise in popularity among students and educational institutions.

    Is Windows Live Cloud Computing?

    Windows Live is the collective brand name for a set of services and software products from Microsoft, which is part of their “software plus services” platform. While a majority of these services are Web (cloud) applications, accessible from any browser, there are also client-side (binary) applications that require installation on a user’s PC.

    There are three ways in which Windows Live services are offered:

    1. Windows Live Essentials applications – Windows Live Messenger, Windows Mail, Windows Photo Gallery, Windows Movie Maker, and Windows Live Essentials
    2. Web services – Hotmail, SkyDrive, Windows Live Contacts, Windows Live Calendar, and Windows Live Devices
    3. Mobile services – Windows Phone Live

    Windows Live is different and separate from Xbox LIVE, which is a multiplayer gaming and content delivery system for Microsoft’s Xbox and Xbox 360 as well as the Games for Windows – LIVE multiplayer gaming service for Microsoft Windows. However, formerly separate, Office Live, (Microsoft Office cloud) services are now part of Windows Live services.

    So is Windows Live actually “cloud computing” like the commercial says? Some of it is and some of it isn’t. Find out more at Windows Cloud.

    Read more on cloud storage solutions from Dropbox, Google, and Microsoft.

  • 5 Ways to Compute Cloud Computing ROI

    The future of IT is in cloud computing, but how do you explain that to the “C” level executives? This model uses two specific business metrics and 5 ways that you can explain the ROI of cloud computing to your boss or to the board:

    • IT capacity – storage (GB or TB), CPU cycles (GHz or THz), network bandwidth (Mbs or Gbs), and/or memory capacity (RAM) a measure of performance.

    • IT utilization – uptime availability (% available per year) and volume of usage (# of requests) as indicators of activity and usability.

    Effective cost/performance ratios and levels of usage activity do not necessarily imply proportional business benefits. They are just indicators of business activity that are not in themselves more valuable than lower operating costs. What is needed instead is a set of business metrics that build on the cloud computing model.

    The following are business metrics that can help translate the indicators from the capacity-utilization curve to direct and indirect benefits to business and examples of how a CAPEX is different than an OPEX in cloud computing:

    1. The speed and rate of change – Cost reduction and cost of adoption/de-adoption is faster in the cloud. Cloud computing creates additional cost transformation benefits by reducing delays in decision costs by adopting pre-built services and a faster rate of transition to new capabilities. This is a common goal for business improvement programs that are lacking resources and skills and that are time sensitive.

    2. Total cost of ownership (TCO) optimization – In cloud computing, users-not just IT-can select, design, configure, and run infrastructure and applications that are best suited for their business needs. Traditionally this has often been strictly in the realm of IT even after projects are handed off to production services, but in cloud computing environments end users are more involved.

    3. Rapid, elastic provisioning for dynamic usage – Resources can be scaled up and down to follow business activity as it expands and grows or is redirected. Provisioning time compression can go from weeks to hours. This service management affects end users and business needs as the scope of functionality and services for users evolve and seek new solutions.

    4. Increased margin and cost control – Revenue growth and cost control opportunities allow companies to pursue new customers and markets for business growth and service improvement. And because it can scale, IT avoids over-and under-provisioning of IT services to allow for smarter business services. This is enhanced capacity utilization, the ability to add and use hardware on-demand without extra hardware or labor costs.

    5. Business process improvement – Cloud computing capabilities can be leveraged through shared services. Users can have access to business capabilities allowing improvement or development of new skills and solutions through cloud sourcing and on demand solutions like Amazon Web Services, Google Apps, IBM Cloud Computing, Microsoft Azure, and HP Cloud Assure.

    These five measures define a new set of business metrics that can be used to create a matrix and dashboard of your current and future operational business and IT service needs relating to your cloud computing potential return on investment.

  • Cloud Storage for Small Businesses

    There are three good options for small businesses wanting to store and share documents in on the Internet in the cloud: Dropbox, Google Apps, and Microsoft’s Office 365, Docs for Facebook, and Windows Live SkyDrive.

    Dropbox

    Simplify your business and boost productivity with the freedom to use the same tools you work with daily. This means you don’t have to switch the programs you use, you just have to switch where you save and open your documents.

    You can share Word documents, Powerpoint slides, and large files easily and securely with colleagues and/or clients. Collaborate across the hall or around the globe and get more work done on the go because your files are always available from Dropbox.

    Dropbox works with Windows, Mac, Linux, iPad, iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry. It even works when you’re offline. You always have your files, whether or not you have a connection. Watch your changes synced instantly across shared folders.

    With easy setup and control you can get started in minutes. Put Dropbox for your business on a single invoice for all of your employees and manage and migrate accounts with admin controls. If someone leaves, you can simply change their permissions online and if someone needs more space, use the admin panel to add more.

    This is the same service trusted by tens of millions of personal users that’s now available for businesses. Enjoy dedicated phone support, bank grade AES-256 bit encryption, and unlimited version history for all your files. This means that you can view previous versions of your files if you need it.

    Plans start at $795 for 5 users, but before you balk at the price think about all of the other hardware and software this one service is replacing. There are no more USB flash drives, external USB backups, taking backups to an off-site location, managing grandfather schemes to keep revisions, or buying expensive file servers. There is one more login account that users will have to manage, but that’s a minor inconvenience for what you’re getting.

    Google Apps

    Google’s web-based messaging and collaboration apps are more than just cloud storage, but they can do that too.

    Google Apps requires no hardware or software and needs minimal administration, creating tremendous time and cost savings for businesses. Google allows email clients like Microsoft Outlook to have POP or IMAP access to email, contacts and calendar so the transition can even be seamless to your employees.

    Each employee gets 25 GB for email storage, so they can keep important messages and find them instantly with built-in Google search. This is higher than what personal Google Mail users get, which is hovering around 8 GB right now. Google Docs lets you store documents in the cloud in a Dropbox-like way, but only 1 GB of storage is included with the plan. More storage can be added as needed for a nominal fee.

    Gmail is designed so employees can spend less time managing their inboxes, and more time being productive. Time-saving features like message threading, message labels, fast message search and powerful spam filtering help employees work efficiently with high volumes of email. It’s spam protection is one of the primary reasons we recommend Google Apps for business.

    With several options for accessing their information while on the go, employees can be productive with Google Apps even when they’re not at their desks. At no extra charge, Google Apps supports over-the-air mobile access on BlackBerry devices, the iPhone, Windows Mobile, Android and many less powerful phones.

    With synchronous replication, your data and activity in Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Sites is simultaneously preserved in multiple secure data centers. If one data center is unable to serve your requests, the system is designed to instantly fall back to another data center that can serve your account with no interruption in service.

    Integration options let you connect Google Apps to your existing IT infrastructure if you’re business is already on a domain and support options include: phone support for critical issues, email support, and self-service online support. Plans start at $5 per user per month or $50 per user per year.

    Microsoft Office 365, Docs for Facebook, and Windows Live SkyDrive

    Office 365

    For those who want the familiar Microsoft Office collaboration and productivity tools delivered through the cloud, Office 365 is the ideal solution. Everyone can work together easily with anywhere access to email, web conferencing, documents, and calendars. It includes business-class security and is backed by Microsoft. Whether you are a small business or multinational enterprise, Office 365 offers plans designed to fit your organization’s unique needs.

    Microsoft Office 365 for professionals and small businesses is $6 per user per month subscription that lets your employees access email, documents, contacts, and calendar from virtually anywhere on almost any device. This plan is ideal for organizations with fewer than 25 employees that do not have IT staff or expertise. Compare Office 365 to Google Apps for Business.

    Docs for Facebook

    Built using Microsoft Office 2010, Docs for Facebook provides the best possible document service for the Facebook environment. Seamless integration with Facebook means that the service is all about sharing your documents. Docs enables Facebook users for the first time to create and share Microsoft Office documents directly with their Facebook friends, using the Office tools they already know. Docs uses the Facebook login and is intended for personal use, but can be used for business if it suits your needs.

    Windows Live SkyDrive

    Windows Live SkyDrive is a free cloud storage service that allows users to upload files to Internet file storage and then access them from a Web browser. It is part of Microsoft’s Windows Live range of online services, and uses Windows Live ID to control access to files, allowing users to keep the files private, share them with contacts, or make the files public. Publicly-shared files do not require a Windows Live ID to access. The service offers 25 GB of free personal storage, with individual files limited to 100 MB. Compare this service to Dropbox for Teams.

    Erich Stauffer Technology Consulting

    If you need help choosing or deploying any of these solutions at your business, contact Indianapolis Technology Consultants, Erich Stauffer, Inc. We serve the Greater Indianapolis area, but travel all over the state of Indiana helping small business owners get more out of their technology.

  • How to Get More Customers

    We did a small test to see what were some of the biggest problems business owners had and what we found was the biggest problem was “How to Get More Customers“

    We know that in order to get more customers you must first figure out what your customers pain points are – find out what are the things they are complaining about that you can fix – and then determine if they are both able and willing to pay for them. The first part of that question is called a customer interview.

    Here’s an example: a business owner complains of having too much spam in their email. You respond by creating or finding a product that helps the client reduce their spam and then asking the customer if they would be willing to pay to have their spam reduced. This is called a solution interview.

    Customer and Solution Interviews are part of the Lean Startup methodology, which combines Customer Development and Agile Development to create a more sound Business Model that values learning. Agile and Lean both use iterative processes and the Scientific Method to hypothesize, test, and learn in order to create a product that customers actually want before building it. Once they have this “product/market fit” they built it as fast as possible. Erich Stauffer talks more about this cycle here.

    If you’re solving clients problems you won’t have to do much marketing at all – the customers will seek you out. If they aren’t seeking you out, you might not be solving their problems.

    How do you identify what your customers pain points are?

    The simplest answer is to ask your target client or existing client base what things are bothering them most and when you start to see a trend, you can start to ask if they’d be willing to pay for it to get fixed.

    A less effective, but quicker route is to find out where your customers are complaining or seeking out solutions online. A good way to do this is by using Google Discussion Search to search for problems people are sharing on forums and other discussion groups.

    We did a test search with the term “my business” and this is what we found:

    • My business keeps disappearing from Google Places
    • I need a slogan for my business
    • I need a logo for my Business and possibly a website
    • I need help getting payments to my business
    • What is the best CRM software for my business?
    • Anyone using Dropbox for business file storage?
    • I need a really good name for my business
    • I need help with my business card
    • A client owes my business money… what to do?
    • Can I request to remove my business from Yelp / Qype?
    • I need help getting my business off the ground
    • How to promote a new site?
    • How many of you have tried Offline Marketing ?
    • What’s your most effective marketing method?
    • What is the most important points of business?
    • How to get more customers?

    Once we started noticing a trend, we started recording things we could blog about, solutions for problems like which CRM is best, how to use Dropbox for your business, and how to promote a new website. Our first post is this post, which addresses the last question

    How to Get More Customers?

    1. Identify a need by asking or searching.
    2. Find a solution for that need.
    3. Ask potential clients if they would pay for that solution.
    4. If so, write about it. If not, find a different problem or solution.
    5. Once you’ve written about it, promote it using SEO.

    Essentially you start out with Lean methodologies, then do content marketing, then finish with SEO. So the key to getting more customers is not SEO, it’s knowing you have a product that solves a problem AND people are willing and able to pay for and then writing up content about it on your “home base” and only then doing search engine optimization.

  • Trends

    We’re only 3 weeks into 2012 and we’re already seeing these 7 Marketing Trends of 2012:

    1. Noise Reduction – Being more mindful of what we share to reduce the numbness oversharing can create
    2. Commitment – “Commit” is a word you’ll hear a lot more going forward and you’ll be expected to do so
    3. High Value Content – This ties into Noise Reduction and Content Marketing, but means that what you create must have value
    4. Humanization – This is not ‘corporations are people’, but a realization that corporations are not monolithic, but run by people
    5. Case Studies – Showing how your company or product overcame obstacles and solved a problem is both High Value Content and Humanization
    6. Stories – Storytelling has been around a long time, but the art of weaving it into everything from your About page to your office decor is a new trend
    7. Do Something Great – Similar to High Value Content and a cousin to Committment, this is a push to use 2012 as a moment to make something great

    Noise Reduction – I wrote about noise last week, but now that Social Media and Internet access has become somewhat ubiquitous a new rule has emerged: As the ease of sharing increases, the value of sharing decreases. Let’s call this Stauffer’s Law. You probably are already aware of this law even if you didn’t know what to call it because the people who post the most, often get read the least or blocked completely. It’s not enough to be creating great content, you also have to temper when you share it. This applies to your personal Facebook wall/newsfeed/timeline, your Twitter feed, or your company newsletter. Decrease what you share and increase the value of what you are sharing to keep your content from being filtered out like noise.

    Commitment – Have you noticed feelings of drift? People saying they feel lost? Do you know people who can’t make up their mind or make a decision about what to do next? We hate it when politicians waffle back and forth, but most people and companies are no different. HP dropped computers, picked them back up again, and changed CEOs in 2011. 2012 will be looking for HP to commit to a goal – long term dedication to a cause beyond the next quarter’s estimates. And 2012 wants to see you commit to making something work, not looking for excuses for why it failed. This doesn’t mean you can’t pivot, but you must commit to something.

    High Value Content – I recently wrote about writing what matters which talked about writing about solutions for your customer’s problems versus writing about your products. Very few companies can make a product that people care enough to buy for the products sake – even companies like Apple originally had to solve a customer’s problem by allowing them to carry all of their songs in their pocket. We used to call this type of writing a “white paper” and in 2011 we may have called it “content marketing”, but in 2012 it’s not enough to write content, you have to write what matters to people. Be impactful or risk irrelevance.

    Humanization – Unless you’re using a computer to write your content, you need to show your human-ness. Humans make mistakes. Even the mistakes computers make are actually mistakes made by the humans who programmed them. In 2012 people are going to be looking to do business with other people like them – a.k.a. humans who have made similar mistakes. If 2011 was about being transparent about who you were, 2012 is taking that a step further by admitting your mistake and what you’ve done or are going to do to fix it.

    Case Studies – Showing the customer how you’ve solved a problem like theirs in the past is a great way to “sell the hole”. It’s also a great way to show your human-ness by admitting your mistakes and how you overcame them. No one expects you to be perfect and those who think they are risk losing business. People like to root for the underdog and if you sell yourself in that light, it can help. There is a whole other piece of case studies that include customer interviews and solution interviews, which is a great way to write what matters, but that’s a separate topic for another day.

    Stories – If you’ve ever had someone explain what a song means to you, you know the power of a story. Every time you hear that song you’ll remember what that person said and think of that moment. I’ve heard advice on how to tell a great story like, “Make the listener the hero”, but this is harder than it sounds. I’ve been trying to do it for the last 6 months. What I’ve found is that by practicing telling stories in non-marketing settings like blogs and emails to friends and family, you can practice the storytelling arts so that when you do pitch to a client, you can turn their use of your product into a story that makes them the hero in 2012.

    Do Something Great – It’s never been easier to start something than it is right now. You have more resources at your fingertips than ever before. So why is it that the best we came up with in 2011 was a new timeline for Facebook and a new way to stream music (Spotify)? Sure, there are people in France trying to get fusion to work and others trying to find the Higgs Boson particle. And Bill Gates is both trying to eradicate malaria and create ways to reduce nuclear waste by reusing it in a new type of reactor in China, but what about the rest of us? Some would argue that the low-hanging fruit is already picked. We can’t just sit down and invent a paperclip before our benefactor comes back from lunch, but there are still big problems to solve – like how to replace Middle-Eastern oil, how to improve energy distribution and creation, how to standardize and distribute medical records, and of course, flying cars.

    In searching for a way to close this article, I ran across this quote from Catchers in the Rye:

    “Among other things, you’ll find that you’re not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You’re by no means alone on that score, you’ll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You’ll learn from them – if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It’s a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn’t education. It’s history. It’s poetry.”
    – J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

  • Service Scheduling Online Software

    WordPress Scheduling and Online Estimators

    Our Noblesville carpet cleaning client wanted a way to keep track of appointments and allow clients to schedule and possibly even pay on his website. His site runs on WordPress so we looked into a WordPress plugin for a calendar that we’ve used before successfully, however it has to be updated manually and doesn’t interact with other estimator scripts or even with Google Calendar. The All-in-One Event Calendar allows you to import a Google Calendar, but it didn’t meet all of his needs. The Appointy Scheduler said that it can 2-way sync with Google Calendar (meaning that if someone makes an appointment online, it can sync to your phone); allows someone to book an appointment; will send them an SMS alert prior to the appointment; and allows you to accept pre-payments. That sounded like what he was looking for, but it didn’t have an estimator. The WebReserv plugin and Booking Bug are other options similar to the Appointy Scheduler.

    When we looked into a WordPress price estimator we only found the Thickthumb Price Calc, but it’s not very built out. To get a custom estimator script built, it meant hiring a programmer to make it for him as that’s not something we do, but we expected to pay around $200 for this based on what we saw at Freelancer. However, there is a estimator script that can be bought for $30 and customized here. Knowing all of this, it makes the WordPress Calculator plugin look quite reasonable and maybe the best bet.

    Other Online Service Scheduling Software

    The simple ability to schedule online is a something you can get for free from  Schedulicity. CEO, Jerry Nettuno, said “We learned it’s not really the calendar. Anybody can have an online calendar. For a service-based business, the relationship with customers is much different than in other types of businesses. Giving them the tools to manage that relationship is where things get interesting.”

    Marc Woodward, vice president of marketing for GenBook, concurs. “The sophistication of the average small business user demands a rich feature base,” he says. For example, “It has to be real-time. Can a customer schedule an appointment and get instant confirmation? They don’t want to wait to hear back or be presented with three choices. We’ve heard anecdotes of customers standing in front of the salon, wondering, ‘Can I get my hair cut now? Can I get a massage now?’”

    In fact, Melody McCloskey, CEO of StyleSeat, says her service for beauty and wellness professionals is “a platform for people to run their entire business on, from maintaining a website to building word of mouth and retaining clients.”

    For web design service and WordPress setup and configuration in the Indianapolis area, consider Erich Stauffer Web Design and Technology Consulting where we make the web work better for you.

  • New Logo Defines What is a Water Shawl

    You may or may not have noticed that we updated our logo recently. This is partly because Erich Stauffer has never had a logo other than his name, which was done with both Telablue and Watershawl. But the primary reason for changing the logo was in order to define, “What is a water shawl?”

    I often get asked, “What is a water shawl?” It could mean ‘a water-filled shawl you wear around your head’ or it might not mean anything at all. It actually started as an Internet ‘handle’ or username for Erich Stauffer that he named after his stay at “Waters Hall” at Kentucky Christian University. But people never really seemed to like that truth of that answer so we set out to create a new story for the name and this is what we discovered. It also means a type of Pashmina shawl.

    The water shawl that surrounds us all

    If you define a water shawl as a ‘water-filled shawl that you wear around your head’ then some poetic license could be taken to both move that “shawl” inside our body and outside of our earth. There are actually two water ‘shawls’ that surround each and every one of us. There is the fluid that surrounds our brains that protects us from shogs and there is the water that surrounds the earth that provides us with rain (why do they hate you?).

    How the logo portrays a water shawl

    The blue ring symbolizes the water surrounding the inside of the circle where your mind might see a head, face, or the earth. The bottom section is cut to represent the slope of a persons shoulders and sometimes looks like a a person smiling, which we liked. We like to think of our clients being inside that circle and being happy with us.

    Some design trouble we ran into and how we overcame it

    I liked that I was able to keep the colors consistent with the web site theme, but I ran into trouble with the choice of color for the bottom part of the ring. It was originally white, but when placed on a white background, it didn’t have the effect I wanted. I experimented with adding an outline, but settled on changing the bottom color to gray when on a light background and back to white when on a dark background. We think this works well, but I look forward to your feedback.

  • History of Indianapolis Web Design

    Erich Stauffer originally began doing web design in Indianapolis under the name Telablue back in 2007, but in 2011 we merged the brands. Recently, while working on our new Industries pages, we ran across some snap shots of earlier Telablue designs that are near and dear to our heart that we wanted to share.

    A lot has changed over the years, but one thing remains the same: we still want our clients to be happy.