“ He MySpaced me.” – Mary – He’s Just Not That Into You (2009)
 
Not long ago we read that back in the late 1800s when electricity was first demonstrated people fell to their knees in amazement.   The individuals who demonstrated it probably felt omnipotent. No one questioned or challenged them.   Today you’ve got to do something really spectacular to get more than a few lines in someone’s blog.   Technology permeates everything today.   It is an integral part of almost every movie.  Even girlie girl movies (we go to keep peace in the household)!  Tech toys have become integral parts of our homes/offices.  They’re indispensible. Our kids feel lost if they don’t have them … all. 
 
Staying Connected
You know:

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We see the value in Earth Day.  We recognize the importance of World Peace Day. In deference to our wife we think even Mother’s Day is OK. But Twitter Day?  Somehow Oprah coming online and saying “Hello Twitter World.” (or whatever) is not quite up there with the wizard of Menlo Park (Edison) calling one of his assistants for help! For the most part, we don’t really care that Oprah, Shaq,  Parris, Kutcher and a lot of other folks are thinking about or talking about.   Yet a million +/- folks have signed up and track their every 140 character utterance. Our son  - who has an account but is too busy instant messaging with his smartphone and Skyping on his notebook – made the observation that if you Twittered in the real world instead of on the Internet you’d be arrested for stalking! Heck we have people following our updates and all we have is a Twitter account…and we thought we didn’t have a life! But there is a growing Twitter population.  In just a couple of years it has grown to well more than 10 million according to ComScore. As Domino Pizza, Amazon and other firms are quickly realize the mob mentality can be a force to be reckoned with. In the old days you used email, the phone and if you wanted to use the wayback machine you sent a letter.

Hum of Noise

Today people young and old can’t stand the vacuum of silence and we rush to take advantage of every personal and social networking tool that is available.  Twitter and other microblogging tools caught the attention of people everywhere when terrorists attacked the hotel in India and when the US Air plane went down in the Hudson River.  Instantly people around the globe could see the news first hand.  News media incorporated the citizen journalists’ inputs with their coverage seamlessly.

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Web design used to be strictly in HTML formatting and very few people were trained to create web pages.  Software was primarily used by businesses and companies to run more efficiently.  Today the industry for web design and for software development has grown by leaps and bounds.  It continues to be an industry that is ever changing.  Finding a software business for sale or even a web design business for sale is not very difficult at all.

Stages of Software Development
Most business people do not realize that software development follows a life cycle for the software.  There are different phases that software development includes before a piece of software is ever put onto the market.  Traditionally, one company will not handle every single aspect of the software development.  For example, testing and software development change requests are typically handled by one company.  Once the product is ready to hit the market, another company could handle the marketing, packaging and advertising aspects of the software development as the final stage.

When you find a software business for sale it is important to find out which phase of software development that the company specializes in.  Do they handle the final stage of marketing, packaging and advertising?  Do they design software ideas that are sold to other companies to actually produce?  Does the company specialize in the actual programming and testing of the software?

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Steve Jobs is not really a household name, unlike his counterparts in the Information Technology industry. However, that is not to say that one cannot learn entrepreneurial skills from scrutinising his work because it is entirely possible to do so. In fact, despite his relative lack of fame, the achievements and investments that this entrepreneur has in his portfolio are nothing short of amazing.

Who Is Steve Jobs?

Steve Jobs was born in San Francisco in 1955 and had a pretty unspectacular early life. He did fairly well at school but only lasted one semester at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. He had no interest in studying, only in computers. His love of computer technology came from the Hewlett-Packard Company headquarters in Palo Alto, literally! He attended lectures after school there on a regular basis, even working there in the summer with friend Steve Wozniak.

In 1974, Jobs began to work for Atari before backpacking in India for some time. When he returned to Atari, Jobs was asked to create a circuit board. He asked Steve Wozniak to help out and a great partnership was born.

The Apple Years

The first years after the creation of Apple in 1976, were a little rough for the entrepreneur. Wozniak largely took care of the internal components of the Apple computer but Jobs was responsible for the business side of the operation. The entrepreneur’s business sense was amazing considering his lack of experience. This was to become invaluable when Apple introduced the Macintosh in 1984. It was a huge success but Jobs was forced to leave the company two years later by CEO John Sculley after a series of rows that left Apple going in the wrong direction.

Steve Jobs branched out on his own and formed NeXT Computer.

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Twitter, it seems is everywhere at the moment. You can’t listen to a radio show or turn on the TV without hearing something about it - and you’d be forgiven for believing that everyone is using it at the moment. 

But in the world of small businesses, it seems that people are falling into three camps – those that are using Twitter and other social networking sites to promote their business; those that have heard about Twitter, haven’t used it yet, but feel under pressure to do so and those who haven’t heard of it, have no intention of using it and think it’s a waste of time.

So, just what is Twitter and should you be using it to promote your business?

Let’s start with the “what is it?” question which is hard enough in itself to answer. Twitter is a new social networking site (like Facebook, Myspace etc) that was launched a while ago. However, in the last three months or so, it has really picked up in popularity to the extent that celebrities have a Twitter page as do most radio stations etc. The press are also now monitoring Twitter to pick up interesting trends and news stories – it seems that the media has gone Twitter mad.

You can set up an account for free at www.twitter.com and the aim of it is to quickly update people on what you’re up to. So, you could tell them you’ve just visited an interesting site; been out to lunch with friends; are involved in a new project and so on. The space you get is very short – just 140 characters, so it really will be a quick post. Someone recently for instance used Twitter to tell everyone he was in Paris and asked where the best places to eat were – he got over 100 replies in 10 minutes telling him where to go.

OK, you are forgiven for asking “what’s the point of that?” and “does anyone really want to know what I had for lunch today?” And, yes these are really good questions.

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Larry Page and Sergey Brin are famous entrepreneurs that fulfilled the lifelong dream of many individuals all over the world by creating something from scratch that effectively made them billionaires. In fact, they did not just create any old thing but the company that revolutionized our use of the Internet. They founded Google Inc and the Google search engine. Both Page and Brin are still in their thirties and are worth around $18.7 billion each as of February 2008. Their entrepreneurial skills are an inspiration to millions, who all dream of doing the same thing.

Google Founders - The Early Years

Both Larry Page and Sergey Brin come from an extremely academic background. Larry Page, who was born on March 26, 1973, is the son of an influential and esteemed computer science professor, Doctor Carl Page. His mother also taught computer science at Michigan State University. As such, it was perhaps inevitable that he would also dedicate his academic career and his life to the sciences. He achieved a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Michigan before moving on to Stanford University, which is where he met Sergey Brin.

Sergey Brin, on the other hand, serves as a different sort of inspiration. Larry Page proved that anything was possible in the entrepreneurial world with a good education, but Sergey Brin became an entrepreneur despite extremely humble beginnings. He was born in the Soviet Union in August 21, 1973 to a mother and father that were both mathematicians. Feeling that they could not give their children the life they deserved, Michael and Evgenia Brin moved to the United States in 1979. He followed the same academic path as his family but moved into computer science at the University of Maryland before enrolling in Stanford University.

The Making Of Google

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If you are looking for an entrepreneur to aspire to be like or an individual with a lifestyle that you would absolutely love to lead then you now need to look no further. Larry Ellison fills all the criteria as laid out above. Not only is he one of the most powerful and richest men in the world but he has also got to where he wanted to go the hard way. In fact, sheer hard work enabled him to overcome his poor early start in life.

Larry Ellison’s Early Life

Lawrence Joseph Ellison was born in New York on August 17, 1944. At the time, his father had abandoned his mother, who was herself an unmarried Jew. Larry Ellison did not actually meet her until the age of 48 though because an aunt and uncle adopted him at birth. They lived in Chicago, which is where the entrepreneur grew up. His adoptive parents were not poor but they lost their fortune in the Depression. As he grew up, this made sure that Ellison was determined not to follow in their footsteps.

Larry Ellison was always a gifted student when he put his mind to it but, unless a subject interested him, he paid little attention. As such, he managed to get to the University of Illinois but left after just two years. A year later, he enrolled in the University of Chicago but quit after having his first taste of computer programming. He was hooked and knew exactly what he wanted to do for a living.

The Entrepreneurial Path

Larry Ellison moved to California shortly after dropping out of university and worked hard at several companies in order to eventually get a job at the Ampex Corporation in the early 1970s. It was there that he first designed the program that would ultimately make him a billionaire. He worked on a project that aimed to complete a comprehensive database for the CIA and during the process, the entrepreneur invented Oracle.

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With so much talk about social media these days, everyone is jumping on board and trying it out.  We are seeing some common mistakes out there and I thought it was important to address these mistakes to help eradicate them in the future.

Don’t get me wrong, there will be a learning curve – we all went through it (and I met some great people that helped me, and that I helped along the way) but the key is to learn up front to minimize errors!

So, here we go…

Mistake One: Completely Ignoring Social Media

Believe it or not there are still some people out there that are ignoring social media.  They may be unsure of how to participate or maybe they just don’t have time to get involved.  No matter what the reason, this is a big mistake.  Social media continues to grow in popularity and in importance to internet users - the exact users you are trying to reach.
                    

Mistake Two: Bare Profiles

If you don’t bother completing your profile people won’t be able to get to know you.  It is also a sign to other users that you aren’t serious about participating on that site.  Many spammers don’t bother to complete their profile and a blank profile has become a red flag.

Your profile should include a custom background when possible, a photo, contact information, and a list of interests to help people get to know you better.

Don’t be afraid to show some personality and let people really get to know you and your company and what you stand for.
                   

Mistake Three: Faking It

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