The drive to be more intimate can benefit your business. If you have a tighter circle of customers, you will establish yourself as a channel for consumption. This will make your next sale easier compared to the first. November 17, 2010 was declared by Jimmy Kimmel during his television show as “National Unfriend Day”, the opportunity for all Facebook users to declutter their Facebook pages by “unfriending” people in their friends’ lists. He claims that Facebook has been “cheapening” the idea of friendship. To many the idea was hilarious, but others are seriously considering the wisdom of unfriending. Is Kimmel on to something here? Can unfriending benefit your online business? Research shows that as social media gets bigger, we’re getting smaller. Brian Wong, a network marketer says it simply: “With the growth of social networking, I am finding it increasingly difficult to separate business connections and personal connections.” He says that having almost 1,000 friends on Facebook has made it difficult for him to see the feeds and updates of his “real” friends and important business partners. Lately there is a growing trend of de-scaling on the internet. People have started “pruning” their social lives online. For example, the popular Farmville app lost 30 million players this year, and people are beginning to realize that conversations and comments are more important than a huge number of blog hits. So how can de-scaling and unfriending help your business? The drive to be more intimate can benefit your business by allowing you to form a tighter circle of customers, more successfully establishing you as a preferred channel for consumption. Luckily, there are tools that can help you descale your social networks: Path – Offers small-scale communities where people feel more comfortable sharing personal information. It controls who can view your information and does not include features that make your content viral. Letter.ly – A subscription-based newsletter for bloggers who feel that public posts decrease the quality of conversations. This newsletter opens discussion only to people who pay, or who are privately invited to read a blog post. GroupMe – A texting app which limits your group text participants to only 14, to ensure that meaningful dialogues take place. What about the flip side of unfriending and descaling? While you’re considering who to eliminate from your social circles, your contacts are likely doing the same. Here are some tips to help you make their cuts: 1.       Be selective in your communications. Of course, your product is important – to you. But not every little detail is as important to your audience. Be sure to focus on key features and benefits from your audience’s perspective. 2.       Stay on topic. Always give relevant communications to your customers, and never rant or badmouth competitors. This is a sure way to lose customers. 3.       Provide value. In addition to talking about your product or service, find ways to provide value to your circle of friends. Understand topics and pain points important to them, and provide valuable information and advice to help them succeed. You’ll soon come to be considered as a valuable resource to your contacts – one that they want to keep in their online social groups. One thing is clear: quality is still more important than quantity, especially in the current economic downturn when people are downsizing everything. Start “pruning” your social network – and take steps to avoid being pruned – and you’ll reap the benefits of having a tight circle of loyal friends and customers.

A lot of press has been given to green computing lately, much of it talking about green data centers. While you may applaud the fact that Dell, Google, HP and others are putting plans into action to reduce energy consumption, you may have a lot of trouble identifying with the whole ‘data center’ discussion.

Open Wi-Fi networks are indispensable, especially for people who need to work on the go. But without the proper security, you may find that they can prove to be troublesome as well. These days, more and more people are on the go, and many of them bring their work with them. And in this day and age, it’s ideal if you’re working – or playing for that matter – while connected to the internet, which is often through public Wi-Fi hotspots. While connecting to public and open-access Wi-Fi hotspots is indeed convenient, using open networks also poses risks that endanger your security. The open nature that allows anyone to use the connection also enables unscrupulous people to gain access to your private information. The whole act of stealing information from people who are using public Wi-Fi networks is called ‘sidejacking’. There are applications such as Firesheep, for example, that provide an easy-to-use platform that others can exploit to spy and harvest personal, sensitive information from you. And since Firesheep is a Mozilla Firefox plug in, virtually anyone can download and use it to sidejack people on the same network. You can’t be too cautious with your personal and business data these days, so you always need to have the proper laptop configuration and security infrastructure to protect your system, especially when you frequently avail of open and public networks. To know more about this, please feel free to give us a call and we’ll be happy to draw up some security options that meet your specific needs.

The full-time corporate office where everyone is in the same building all day, every day, is clearly a thing of the past. IT Service Providers are fully engaged with supporting mobile work and, in many respects, is leading the way in helping the organization to increase productivity, enable more effective customer support, attract and retain talent and increase corporate agility.

We couldn’t agree more with this reprint of a recent TechNewsDaily report

The success of Apple’s iPad has made consumers keen for tablet computers in general, and worldwide shipments of these devices will jump six times by 2014, according to recent analyst reports.

This may be the year when “Cloud Computing” takes off – fueled by millions of intelligent and light weight mobile devices, securely interacting with others over a ubiquitous and always-on network.

At the moment, a much more profound change is taking place – where knowledge, formerly stored in document silos, is now shared, revised and published by designated trusted communities connected to the internet.

A well thought out Datamation article entitled, “Top Five Thin Client Hardware Vendors“,  by Jeff Vance, resonates with our thinking, more specifically in the last paragraph of the last page, “Finally, while Apple has never claimed to be a thin client vendor, the iPad could well be the pioneering thin client for consumers.

As CEOs begin to spend again on IT, they’re also looking for offerings to keep their costs down, which is creating opportunities for desktop virtualization vendors, according to analysts.

We think the timing for this important release couldn’t be better.

Channel Insider published an excellent article on zero client, thin client, desktop virtualization options here…

“After 2009’s recession delays, zero-client, thin-client and desktop-virtualization technologies are poised to infiltrate companies, from the enterprise to the midsized organization to small business.

Further fueling the interest in zero-client solutions is the escalating costs of deploying and managing PCs, now estimated to be in the range of $4,000 to $6,000 per year, according to Gartner and IDC. Those same research companies estimate that a VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure) can save upwards of 70 percent over the support and maintenance costs of desktop PCs. Those are numbers that are sure to attract the attention of C-suite executives.