As if year-end wrap up lists weren’t enough fun by themselves, I thought I’d share another particularly good ‘list of lists’ specifically designed for small business owners. SmallBizBee compiles a list of their most popular published list, to create the Top 10 Small Business List Posts of 2009 master list. Ranging from topics such as [ Read More ]
One of the reasons that I have always loved being in the web business is because things constantly change. When I first got online in 1993, we used bulletin board systems and monochrome monitors. When I got my first tech job in 1996, everything was about corporate Windows networks and preparing for Y2K (remember that?). [ Read More ]
Personality tests are one of my favorite types of brain candy. I find something innately amusing about trying to discern something about someone’s psyche from how they answer a quiz or the way they seat themselves around a conference table during a meeting. Whether there is validity to them or not is always secondary to [ Read More ]
I grew up in a family-owned business. I remember, back in the early 1980′s, when my mother (the bookkeeper) got her first computer for the business: it was a Data General and it was bigger than our dishwasher. It had five-and-a-quarter floppy disks; it had virtually no RAM to speak of; and it came with [ Read More ]
I was reading an article this weekend, on Entrepreneur.com, and it actually made me a little snarky. In Health Insurance, a 401(k) and…Facebook?, author Justin Petruccelli discusses a new Junior Achievement/Deloitte Teen Ethics Survey in which 58% of teenage respondents stated that the ability to use social networks would be a factor in their decision-making [ Read More ]
Strategy is sexy. Operations is not. This is often a problem in the modern business world: everyone wants to be a strategist. Aside from being seen as the best place to get to experiment with the new, fun stuff, it’s also usually seen as the side of the business with all the perks — travel, [ Read More ]
I had an interesting conversation yesterday after I gave a presentation. I was talking about the necessary functions — particularly when it comes to communications, documentation, change management and entry/exit criteria — of project management in an Agile development process. The “interesting” conversation I had afterward was because one of the attendees (in a private [ Read More ]
What do FreshBooks, Shoeboxed, BatchBlue, MailChimp and Outright all have in common? Aside from being Web 2.0 businesses who serve the small business market, they are also the founding member organizations of The Small Business Web. An exciting initiative that launched earlier this year, The Small Business Web is a partnership of businesses dedicated to [ Read More ]
This week was the second annual Interactive Austin Conference. Focusing on the value of social media for business, AI09 convened a broad spectrum of experts, locals and practitioners to share, debate, network and learn about how to take advantage of social media for the benefit of business. Keynotes Starting off the day was industry leading [ Read More ]
The former CMO of Jive Software, Sam Lawrence, spoke to a crowded room at Interactive Austin this morning. His message was on the lessons needed to specifically apply in order to make social media work in your business. How We Say What We Say One of the challenges social media evangelists face is based on [ Read More ]
This is something I’ve been thinking about more and more recently. The fact that we started off as a services company is what allowed us to get started and to avoid having to rely on outside funding. But it was transitioning to a product company that allowed us to grow and scale, and to ultimately [ Read More ]
It’s been years since the evangelism for Agile development started truly gaining momentum. Super sexy buzzphrases phrases like “reduce time to market,” “improved ROI,” and “lower development costs” have all been invoked to support the case for adopting an Agile methodology over the old-school Waterfall approach. The fact is, most experienced professionals have lived through [ Read More ]