I recently had the opportunity to upgrade to a new BlackBerry 8830. It has several bells and whistles (improved keyboard, GPS, voice activated dialing, etc.) but perhaps most importantly, I now have the ability to use my BlackBerry 8830 as a wireless modem on the Sprint wireless network with my laptop.

Internet access anywhere there’s a cell signal

No more having to pay $9.95 at each airport I sit in for Internet access. I’ll basically have Internet access wherever I have a cell phone signal!

Here’s how:

1. Install the BlackBerry 8800 modem scripts in Macintosh HD > Library > Modem Scripts
2. Pair your BlackBerry with your Mac (I have a MacBook Pro which has built-in Bluetooth functionality). To do this: Apple Menu > System Preferences > Network > Bluetooth and click the “Set Up Bluetooth Device…” button. Follow the prompts to pair your device.
3. For the Sprint wireless network, you need to enter the following configuration information in the Bluetooth settings for Modem connectivity:
   1. Telephone Number:  wap.sprint.com
   2. Account Name & Password fields can both be left blank

Apple just gets it. Today they announced the iPhone 3G, a thinner, faster, and more affordable iPhone. I continue to be fascinated by how they take difficult or time-consuming processes and make them easy. Take for example MobileMe.

How will Plaxo respond to MobileMe?

As a die-hard Plaxo user, MobileMe seems to be a fairly significant threat to Plaxo. In the wake of Comcast’s recent purchase of Plaxo, I would imagine Plaxo will be find itself in a difficult position to continue innovating as it works through the transition to Comcast ownership and business processes.

Apple has quite simply leap-frogged Plaxo in features and functionality that I currently pay $60/year for with Plaxo: Address book and calendar syncing. Plaxo also has other bells and whistles such as contact “networking” features (a la LinkedIn) and Plaxo Pulse (a la Friendster — essentially a “life stream” of your data)…neither of which I pay the yearly fee for. Calendar and contact syncing is where the value is for me.

MobileMe goes beyond address & calendar syncing

Most importantly, MobileMe will also sync email, photos, and files. As I hop between an enterprise BlackBerry, an iMac at home, and a MacBook Pro for work (running VMWare so I can play nicely in the Windows world), the MobileMe synchronization is really the best of everything. No matter which environment I’m in, I’ll have access to my most frequently-used data.

MobileMe could be the ticket

While I’m not about to switch email addresses, the photo and file syncing are very nice add-ons for the $99/year fee with 20GB of storage. Google’s Picasa photo hosting only provides 2GB of storage (it’s free, though) and DropBox (for file sharing) is still in its infancy. Is this enough to convince me to buy an iPhone? Only if it’ll work with Enterprise email. MobileMe however looks to be the ticket when it comes out (with or without an iPhone). I’ll be testing the 60-day trial for sure.

After many months of site development and many years of new product development, I’m very happy to announce that we’ve launched the new features & product on Levolor.com. Here are a few screen shots:

The updated homepage featuring new custom draperies and all of our product lines:

Preview of the inspirational pages:

Virtual Decoration: choose wall colors, trim colors, and drapery fabrics

Full product configurator: custom draperies at the convenience of your computer screen

Free samples. It doesn’t get any easier than this page.

And of course, drop-down menus for easier/quicker site navigation. What a concept!

And as with any major product or site re-launch, these few screen shots don’t come close to capturing the amount of “behind the scenes” work that went into the site — you know, the stuff that only the development team truly appreciates!

Now it’s time to start digging into the analytics to see how online visitors navigate this product category. It’s a much different process than custom blinds & shades, so the online insights will be interesting to learn from.

I came across IntenseDebate.com today and am extremely impressed as well as excited about this new service. The service provides blog owners the ability to install a plug-in on their blog which will centralize the storage of blog commenting, streamline comment threading, improve comment moderation, and encourage additional posting.

The problem I run into a lot when reading blogs is while I’d like to take the time to comment, I’m busy, and don’t often want to create a new account to post a simply reply. Plus, when posting in an established community and without “street cred”, it’s hard to feel like you’re adding value to a conversation if you’ve never posted before.

IntenseDebate.com changes this. As an end-user, I now have a centralized account and any blog that uses IntenseDebate.com for their commenting system, I can automatically comment and my profile on IntenseDebate.com will be shown, as well as other posts on other blogs I’ve made via my IntenseDebate.com account. It’s really quite impressive.

I’ll post a few quick comments below to display how it works.

In this post about “Why Gen Y Is Going to Change the Web” from ReadWriteWeb, the following comment was made:

Work Tools Need to Mirror Web Tools: Gen Y will drive adoption of “Enterprise 2.0” products and services. Gen Y in the workplace will not just want, but expect their company to provide them with tools that mirror those they use in their personal lives. If socializing on Facebook helps them get a sale, then they’re not going to understand why they can’t use it at work. For more buckled down companies, if workers aren’t provided with the tools they want, they’re going to be savvy enough to go around I.T.’s back and get their own.

I couldn’t agree more — this thinking (expecting a company to provide tools to mirror tools in personal lives) is already prevalent today in the enterprise and it’s not even specific to Gen-Y’ers.

When users find their own way…IS can’t add value

I have an interesting perspective starting on the marketing side of the business and building up a website from scratch all without the help of IT/IS. The autonomy and flexibility we had to spend on innovation against a marketing budget was considerably different than having to jump through the hoops of IT layers in the enterprise.

Now that I have transitioned to a new role in the IS department, things are slightly different as I find myself combatting the very actions I was deploying when I was in the marketing department — employees working around IT’s back.

You aren’t issued a company cell phone from the model year 2001, so why should the web applications be any different?

I think the Enterprise 2.0 movement will be an important one. As consumers become more web-savvy, so will employees. Enterprise applications and development will need to quickly catch up to the speed of consumer applications and development.

After all, when we get a company-issued cell phones, we don’t expect to have a phone that’s representative of something from 2001. Why should web applications be any different? One may argue that you “don’t fix what’s broken.” While I love that principle, at the same time, a cell phone model from the year 2001 may not be broken, but there’s certainly a more efficient way of doing things today.

Put up roadblocks and employees will work around you

Frustrated employees will find their own ways of doing things and bypassing applications and processes in favor of a more pleasant and easy experience…or they just won’t use the technology at all. IT/IS departments will have a revolt on their hands in the coming years if they don’t begin to adopt consumer-oriented technology and applications.

This blog has a new URL as of 5/15/08. In an effort to have a web address that better aligns with the content of this blog, the new URL is: www.ebusinessblog.org

All old posts and links will automatically forward to the new blog URL. The RSS feed remains unchanged!

-Eric

Sigh. This post claims that branding is irrelevant/dead thanks to search engines and how search is transforming the way in which people research and buy products.

Huh?

I couldn’t disagree more. You can’t honestly tell me that Lamborghini, BMW, Lincoln, and Hyundai (just to name a few random automotive brands) are all on equal playing fields when a consumer searches for “car” on Google. 

The post goes on to talk about the power of SEO and why SEO is not dead. SEO is most certainly not dead and should make for a critical component in your online strategy. His point in trying to prove why SEO is not dead is muddied by the claims of “branding being dead.” Brands don’t matter in certain categories (probably because there’s no clear category leader), but certainly not across the board.

Proper SEO can elevate your brand to the top of the listing for non-branded searches.

They key is creating brand awareness (through advertising, promotion, PR, etc. outside of search engines) and dominating on branded AND non-branded searches for your category. This is done by juggling your SEO work with your SEM campaigns to find the “sweet spot” so SEM can pick up the slack where you lag behind in SEO. Branding then goes onto heavily influence clicks on search engine results.

This type of tunnel-vision thinking is why “online” is still broadly viewed as an IT function.

Flat-out comments like this show the still “techy” and misguided view of some Internet strategists and how marketing and “tech” still quite aren’t aligned — even on established sites such as searchenginewatch.com. Any marketer worth their salt should understand that brands can drive search results. When industry publications and commentary throw out claims like this, it’s difficult to create alignment with a marketing department — especially when marketing should “own” (or at least have visibility to) SEO and SEM strategy.

It’s fairly easy to cost-effectively monitor your brand names and trademarked terms (and anything else you’d like to keep tabs on) using Google’s Blog search RSS feeds (and several other aggregator service RSS feeds). When you don’t have the funds (or a low volume of online/blog conversations pertaining to your brand) for a service like BuzzLogic or BuzzMetrics, it’s about as “grass roots” as you can get.

But what if you want to automatically monitor changes to your competitors’ websites that don’t have feeds built into them?

Page2RSS is the answer.

Page2RSS is a free service which creates an RSS feed out of any URL you enter into the site. Their free service creates a cached version of the page every 4 hours. Simply subscribe to the RSS feed and off you go — be the first to know when your competitors update their homepage, product pages within their sites, and so on.

I had an opportunity to catch up with a friend of mine this evening over drinks/dinner before he and his fiance move off to Colorado to continue building their online startup: foodzie.com. Foodzie is one of 10 very fortunate and well-deserving startups that will receive seed money and mentoring from some of the industry’s finest all thanks to TechStars.

The premise behind foodzie is to provide artisan food producers with the means for selling their products online with minimal investment. On top of that, foodzie will build a community of “foodies” who will have an opportunity for “one stop shopping” online. Their site will be launching soon (presumably in beta after they settle into their new digs in Colorado) and I’m very excited to see how it will take off.

Not being a die-hard “foodie” myself, my wife and I are certainly more of a “mass consumer” at heart as we purchase based on ease and convenience due to our busy schedules. That being said, foodzie presents an opportunity for even non-foodies like us to indulge in the latest in greatest without having to be die-hard foodies. Whenever business models like these come to fruition and take a complex process, make it simple, and bring it to the masses, it is a recipe for success.

It was a great change of pace to talk entrepreneurial strategy — which is a completely different type of discussion than the day-to-day enterprise strategy discussion.

Good luck to Rob and Emily on their venture!

I’m a frequent reader of CIO.com articles — such an invaluable source for eBusiness managers and directors. I’m a big proponent of open source and am finding it to be such a taboo subject within the enterprise. In the article The Challenge of Open Source Presents to CIOs, open source is almost presented as a “problem.” So much of a problem in fact that certain enterprises ban it entirely.

Quick question: Since when it is a bad thing to save money?

Now, I understand it can present challenges from governing the use of open source as it pertains to compliancy issues. However, this is no different than governing the proper licensing of Microsoft products, too. The fact that it’s open source doesn’t make open source a “problem.” If you have problem governing open source utilization, then you have a larger software/infrastructure governance problem.