Three New Features of BlackBerry 10: Launch Events on Jan 30th

On January 30th, 2013, BlackBerry will hold launch events around the world showcasing the new BlackBerry 10.

BlackBerry and all smartphone vendors stumbled in not quickly innovating and creating newer and more compelling offers to match or beat Apple's iPhone.

Having said this, there are millions (my guess) of BlackBerry users globally and a loyal following of BlackBerry users in the USA.

While there's a huge push to “Bring Your Own Devices (BYOD)”, wherein corporations are not dictating that their employees use BlackBerry's and furthermore even offering corporate provided alternative devices, BlackBerry has an opportunity, with BB10 to stem the tide and possibly regain it's footing.

At the Small Business Influencer Awards we saw a preview of BB 10 â€" looks very slick and elicited several ooohs and ahhs.

Here's three new features you'll find in BlackBerry 10…

BlackBerry Flow and BlackBerry Hub

BlackBerry® Flow is a new user experience that allows seamless navigation across open applications and the BlackBerry® Hub. All messages, notifications, feeds, and calendar events come into the BlackBerry Hub and no matter what the user is doing with the device, with a simple gesture, they can peek into the Hub at any time.

 

BlackBerry Keyboard

The BlackBerry Keyboard learns how you write and adapts to how you type so you can write faster and more accurately, giving you the kind of legendary typing experience that only BlackBerry can deliver.

 

BlackBerry Balance

BlackBerry® Balance™ offers the most elegant way to satisfy both customer and corporate needs without compromising on either. With BlackBerry Balance, personal apps and information are kept separate from work data, and the customer can switch from their personal to work profile with a simple gesture.  The work profile is fully encrypted and secure, enabling organizations to protect their content and applications, while at the same time letting customers get the most out of their smartphone for their personal use.

Details about BlackBerry 10 can be found at: www.blackberry.com/blackberry10

Socially Fresh – 4 Social Tools For Digital Publishers (That\'s You) – from Greg Tirico, Sage\'s Digital Ninja

[I'm happy to have Greg Tirico, Social Media Manager for Sage North America, contribute to Smallbiztechnology.com. He's definitely a guru of content, social media and tech - Ramon]

“Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”
- Ferris Bueller

While I wouldn't necessarily advocate the slacker attitude embodied by Ferris Bueller, I do think there is some truth in the quote above.   As a small business, sometimes you simply can't stop and look around.  Don't worry, I'm here to help.  I have compiled the best resources, news, and tips from the social media space over the last month for you below.  Let's get started…

Social Collaboration:
What is social collaboration, exactly?  That's an easy one.  We have seen the benefits of social media when talking with our customers but what happens when you apply the concept of a real time stream to vendor or employee communications?  That's social collaboration (at a very basic level).  And it's a hot space.  Some of the best examples of social collaboration are staring at us and we may not even notice.  Have you used Google Drive (formerly Google Docs) lately?  It has built in chat and live updating all in the document itself.  Have you heard of or tried Yammer.com?  Recently purchased by Microsoft for $1BN (cue Dr. Evil), Yammer is a social network for the enterprise.  In effect, it is a social stream of information that is restricted to employees of a company only.  Social collaboration is getting so big it is predicted that by 2013 over 75% of businesses will be using these tools.

Social Media Measurement:
OK…you've setup a Facebook page and a Twitter account for your business.  You're connecting with customers and prospects and have had a few really encouraging conversations lately.  People like your product or service and the positive feedback is bubbling its way up via the social networks.  Now what?  Are these just casual conversations or is this activity having an actual impact on the top line?  You're not the only one asking this question.  A full 82% of PR pros surveyed recently stated that they want a standard measurement tool for social media because one does not exist today.  I spotted a particularly interesting tool in this space recently called WeLovROI.com.  This tool walks you through a basic setup process and then forces you to define how you measure success.  From there, the reporting engine will measure you against your goals and let you know how things are going.  It definitely sounds like we are getting closer to a standard measurement tool.  Sign up on the WeLovROI site to receive an invitation and tell them I sent you.  On second thought, that might actually hurt your chances of getting an invitation.

Ooooohhh…Pretty Pictures:
Here's another $1BN acquisition that is poised to make an impact on the social media space in short order.  Instagram is certainly not a newcomer but they seem to have recently hit an even higher mode of growth partially bolstered by the fact that they are now owned by Facebook (technically, the purchase price depends on the value of Facebook stock which has been a bit…ahem…volatile lately).  Are your products photogenic?  Can't keep them away from the camera?  Instagram was made for you!  The biggest draw to this social media tool is two-fold.  It's really easy to push Instagram pictures to Twitter or Facebook and the tool itself features a series of filters which can turn any amateur iPhone photographer into a professional with the swipe of a finger.  Dunkin' Doughnuts recently got into the Instragram craze and made quite a mark decorating their coffee cups for Halloween.  Just don't try to sign up for an account on the Instag ram website.  Average desktop users need not apply as the sign up process is mobile only (available for both iOS and Android).

To wrap this column up, here's the stat to remember.  One billion.  In this case, I'm not talking about the purchase price of Yammer or Instagram but rather the total number of active (that's important) users on Facebook across the world.  One billion proudly served.

About Greg Tirico
Greg Tirico is Senior Social Media Manager for Sage North America â€" providers of business management software and services to over 3 million small and mid-sized businesses in North America.  In this role, Tirico stays current with social media trends and works across the Sage Business Units to help set strategy and success metrics for social media marketing programs.  Greg can be found through his blog (www.tirico.net), on Twitter (@gregt12), and LinkedIn.

Freshdesk Introduces MobiHelp: A Help Desk for Mobile Apps

Mobile app developers have to put in a lot of work to not only create apps, but also to maintain and fix any problems along the way. The problem for many is finding a way to receive customer feedback without negatively impacting the app's public reputation. That's why help desk provider Freshdesk developed its new in-app solution, MobiHelp.

Said Girish Mathrubootham, Freshdesk's CEO:

“Today, the most common mechanism to leave feedback is in the App Store. Very few people seek out the app maker to reach out for questions or concerns. They just delete the application and leave a bad rating. Because stars don't give you much to work from as a developer, we came up with a way to provide users with the ability to offer actionable feedback instead of judgmental feedback.”

MobiHelp serves as an in-app help desk, offering app users an easy way to get in touch with the developer if they have any questions about the app or run into any problems they'd like to report. In addition to giving users a way to reach developers with feedback, MobiHelp also monitors the app for crashes and then sends reports directly to the developer so that they can fix code at the first sign of problems.

The idea for MobiHelp came to the team at Freshdesk about six months ago. The product did go through some beta testing with Freshdesk users who develop apps.

From that testing, Mathrubootham said that users wanted the interface to be simple and uncluttered, focused on having a conversation rather than offering different support tickets, statuses and closing issues.

In the above photo, the left side shows what an app customer might see when reporting an issue to the developer, while the right side shows what the developer's Freshdesk dashboard might look like when sorting through tickets and requests.

Freshdesk is based out of Chennai, India and also has offices in Walnut, California. The company also has products aimed at helping companies manage help desk applications and providing customer support online.

MobiHelp is currently free for developers. Setting it up requires adding one line of code that links the app to your Freshdesk account.

5 Ways To Secure Your Retail Store\'s Credit Card Transactions

Barnes and Noble was hacked with hackers breaking into the credit card swipe machines of its stores around the country. It's customers credit cards were stolen but more important B&N's trust with it's customers was broken.

There are a number of ways to hack into credit card terminals, according to Wired magazine.

Sage Payment solutions offers these tips to help keep you safe. Don Weary, VP of product management, is their resident guru on these things and shares his thoughts below. Although some of the tips are a bit geeky, read through them and consult with your tech consultant â€" who you hopefully trust and have done a background check on.

Here's Don's tips:

1. Make certain your payment processing software security is up to date and is PA-DSS (Payment Application Data Security Standard)-certified, and that your business receives their PCI-DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) certification.

PCI certification is extremely important because it provides a level of confidence and assurance that a processor has followed and passed a robust set of best practices for securing the information being processed when credit card payments are made. There's no silver bullet here. You have a responsibility to protect your customer's credit card information just like you should be protecting all of your customer data. A full PCI audit will offer a scorecard across a business's payments environment, including all connected back-office applications, allowing them to make critical changes before security holes are exposed by thieves.

2. Ensure your employees visually assess PIN pads regularly to ensure there is no physical evidence of tampering.

Also, train employees to spot commonly used methods for siphoning credit card information. Thieves often attach small devices to the PIN pad itself in an effort to lift credit card information from the customer. These devices can be disguised to look like a part of the apparatus, but a vigilant employee should be able to easily identify extraneous equipment.

3. Monitor all transactions and maintain detailed records of all credit card sales.

If a theft occurs, it is imperative you can retrace your steps in order to assess where the breach occurred. Doing so may lead to catching the criminal(s) and will undoubtedly help shed light on any holes in security needing to be addressed. Identifying where a breach occurred will also minimize the number of customers affected, since steps can be taken to ensure the business is protected from further theft.

4. Select a payments provider who is technically savvy.

Look for a partner that supports end-to-end encryption technology. End-to-end encryption starts with your payment capture devices, and goes all the way to the transaction being authorized. The technology prevents the card account data from being stolen electronically and lessens the cost and impact for your business to become PCI-certified You need to balance cost versus product and service. Using the low-cost provider could come at the expense of limited product functionality, potential security holes, and lower levels of customer service.

5. One of the biggest things you can do is do everything in your power to not be in a situation where you have to store credit cards numbers.

For example, Sage Payments offer what they call a “PCI Free Zone.” Their software is designed so credit card information is never stored at the customer's site or on the customer's business software. Once the credit card is swiped or its number manually entered, Sage Payments process the transaction and store the card information in their Sage Vault in the cloud and they send back an encrypted ID. When you want to do another transaction for that same customer, your software passes Sage Payments the encrypted ID so you NEVER come in contact with the stored credit card data. As a result, you avoid one of the biggest risks in PCI compliance.

New Blackberry to launch in new year

Research In Motion said it will hold an official launch event for its new BlackBerry 10 smartphones on January 30. The new phones are seen as critical to RIM's survival.

The Waterloo, Ontario-based company said details on the much-delayed smartphones and their availability will be announced at the event.

The announcement comes as the company struggles in North America to hold onto customers who are abandoning BlackBerrys for flashier iPhones and Android phones.

RIM's current software is still focused on email and messaging, and is less user-friendly, agile and robust than iPhone or Android. Its attempt at touch screens was a flop, and it lacks the apps that power other smartphones. RIM is hanging its hopes on the BlackBerry 10 software.

It is thoroughly redesigned for the touchscreen, internet browsing and apps experience that customers now expect. The Canadian company said the launch event will happen simultaneously in multiple countries.

Jefferies analyst Peter Misek called it a make-or-break product release and said the date of the launch event suggests a release date in mid- to late February or in March.

A full touchscreen device is expected to be released first followed shortly after by a physical keyboard version.

BGC Financial Partners analyst Colin Gillis said the new phones won't be dead on arrival as some analysts have said because RIM hasn't lost the corporate market completely.

"Is 10 going to be the solution to retain that marketplace? We'll have to wait and see," Gillis said. "It's great they set a date, but the challenges are still formidable. It's not an issue of initial demand. It's an issue of sustained demand."

Gillis noted that RIM's launch of a tablet initially went OK but then demand fell sharply. RIM's tablet, the Playbook, uses software on which the BlackBerry 10 will be based.

RIM said last month the new BlackBerrys are being tested by 50 wireless carriers around the world.

Thorsten Heins, who took over as CEO in January after the company lost tens of billions in market value, had vowed to do everything he could to release BlackBerry 10 this year but said in June that the timetable wasn't realistic. Heins says he can turn things around with BlackBerry 10.

The new BlackBerrys will be released after the holiday shopping season and well after Apple's launch of the iPhone 5, expected to be Apple's biggest product introduction yet.

RIM's platform transition is also happening under a new management team and as RIM lays off 5,000 employees as part of a bid to save $1 billion.

RIM was once Canada's most valuable company with a market value of more than $80 billion in 2008, but the stock has plummeted since, from over $140 per share to around $8. Its decline evokes memories of Nortel, another former Canadian tech giant, which declared bankruptcy in 2009.

Shares of RIM rose 20 cents, or 2.3 per cent, to $8.74 in midday trading in New York after rising as high as $9.07 earlier.

-AP

What Should You Expect to Pay for a Content Writing Service?

What does a content writing service cost? How much should you pay for a blog post? For small business owners, every penny counts. But, if you've done any research on writing services, you've probably noticed that prices are all over the map.

Let's look at five types of content writing services, the costs, pros and cons, and more.

The ‘Walmarts' of Copywriting

I'll begin with this category of copywriting services because they're probably the most popular. And, they're popular for a reason. I'm referring to sites like Writer Access, Text Broker, and Ecopywriters. These sites crank out millions of words at very reasonable rates. They're reliable and affordable.

Cost: Cheap! Textbroker will sell a 300-word “average” ranked piece for $5.10. That will be about $15 at Writer Access, and $15-$30 at Ecopywriters.

Pros: You can get some great deals. Plus, you can be confident that you wont be scammed. These sites have been vetted time and time again.

Cons: Even if writers are “guaranteed” to be native English speakers, you can never know for sure. I'm so careful about who I hire, but even I've been tricked by W-9 forms from overseas writers. Also, you're probably not going to get anything great â€" even if it is a bargain.

Remember, this is the ‘Walmart' class of services: affordable, basic, no flair.

Independent Freelancers

I can only make general claims about a group this big. Freelancers can be very hit or miss. But, with sites like Guru.com available as resources, you can play things pretty safe and hire a well-established, highly rated freelancer.

Cost: Again, cost can be all over the map. Writers may charge by the word, project, or hours.  Always get an estimate before you begin. You might pay anywhere from 2 cents to 30 cents per word, which would make a 300-word blog post $6-$90. Or more.

Pros: Talk about personalized service. When you work with a freelancer, there are no go-betweens. You get exactly what you want and develop a relationship with another person â€" not a faceless ‘Walmart' copywriting service.

Cons: Freelancers don't always have editors. Also, they go through “feast or famine” stages (I know because I used to be one). And, when they're swamped with work, you might have to wait.

Oversea Services

I've yet to find a good reason for using these services. These services are largely based in India and southeast Asia. You see them advertised all the time by AdWords or on less reputable business sites.

Cost: Dirt cheap. Blog posts come at $5-$10 or less. They look like it, too.

Pros: You pay next to nothing.

Cons: You get next to nothing. Also, frustrating communication, time zone difficulties, international transaction fees, and fly-by-night business strategies plague these services with issues.

*I will point out that there are plenty of fluent English speaking writers overseas. The issue is finding them among the sea of options.

Marketing Agencies

If you're already using a marketing agency, you might want to see if they can provide you with copywriting services, too. Most marketing agencies do. You've already gone through all of the getting-to-know-you work. Why do that all over again?

Cost: High. Marketing agencies usually charge top dollar for their content. Also, your marketing agency might be outsourcing your content to a boutique writing service (covered next), which means you pay a high price plus markup.

Pros: Typically very high quality. Your content gets rolled in with your regular bill. No need for a new account.

Cons: High pricing is definitely a drawback. Also, you don't know exactly who is writing your content (the marketing agency could be outsourcing it).

Boutique Writing Services

These writing services usually have about 7-20 writers, each with their own niches, and crank out 25-30 thousand words per day. Add a couple of editors, an SEO guru, and someone to run it all, and you're in business.  These companies are great to work for if you need top-quality content.  (Disclosure: I operate this type of business.)

Cost: Again, cost ranges, but is generally in the middle to high range.

Pros: You get one-on-one attention, and fast turn-around. Also, you get to work with one writer for all of your needs. Expect competitive pricing and freebies.

Cons: Boutique writing services don't necessarily have the most knowledge about your industry (compared to you, that is), but they are great researchers.

What kind of writing service do you use or are you still writing your own content?

Writer Photo via Shutterstock

Three Questions To Help You Spot A Fake Online Marketing Guru

It's so hard to know a true “professional” from the fake ones. However, you can surely know who is who based on their results. Unfortunately, you only know these results after you've spent a lot of money on their services â€" hopefully you're happy with the results. If not you've been burned or had!

In the world of social media, digital marketing, online advertising (or whatever you want to call it) it's even harder to tell the professionals from the wannabees.

There are people who are REALLY, REALLY good and will deliver results and then there are those who are “full of it” and don't deliver the results you expected or the results they promised.

Overall check references and ensure CLEAR communication when working with any hired professional.

Susie Hall is President of Vitamin T and gives the following insight, 3 questions to ask every digital marketer to know if they're the person for you.

In small business, marketing involves a wide array of tasks, ranging from developing websites and apps to sending out tailored emails to different customer segments.  While larger companies often have the resources to hire specialized teams of marketers, small businesses rarely have that luxury. Small business owners are faced with the challenge of hiring someone with a broad skill set, who is able to accomplish the specific and unique goals of the organization.

How do you find someone with the right expertise? Finding a well-rounded marketer for your small business often comes down to asking the right questions during the interview. Here are three questions that will help you find the best candidates for your business.

How do you stay up to date with the latest marketing technology trends?

Technology is changing at lightning speed. As soon as we master a new piece of software or coding language, a new one has emerged. This is true in the universe of marketing technology as well as the hyper-connected world your customers enjoy. As such, it is not enough to hire a candidate who is merely knowledgeable about current tech trends. You want to hire someone who is always on the lookout for new developments. More than this, you want to hire someone who is intellectually curious and is personally invested in keeping up with the trends. This is an indicator that the candidate will have a sustained passion for the job and add immediate and long-term value.

Describe a fully integrated marketing campaign that you initiated.

The term “marketing” has become a catch-all for “connecting with customers”, which these days requires carrying a campaign through all customer channels. Asking about a fully integrated campaign is a good way for you to assess the breadth of a candidate's skill without sounding aggressive or intimidating. The sign of a strong candidate is an individual who can provide a detailed description of the entire life cycle of a marketing program, including interactive and social media aspects.  If the candidate lacks detail, don't assume that they don't have the experience. Instead, ask follow-up questions that will give you the answers you need, such as, “What kind of messaging did you communicate via Twitter and Facebook?” or “Describe the online projects completed as part of your campaign.”

Describe the roles of each of the members on your last (or largest) team.

You can't expect your candidate to have experience across every dimension of marketing. However, it would be helpful if your digital marketer has worked as part of a larger marketing team and understands a wide variety of marketing, technical and creative roles. Should your digital marketer need to take on an unfamiliar project, even second-hand knowledge of the tasks involved would be an asset.

It's even more impressive if the candidate can speak analytically about their teammates' roles. For instance, if your candidate needed to outsource part of a project to a creative freelancer, would he or she know where to find the right person for the job, how to set expectations and guide that resource to deliver your marketing projects on time and under budget? Asking for examples of where and how your candidate has done this in their experience will help you gauge their likely performance within your team.

Small business owners are particularly aware of how much a bad hire can truly cost. Not only does it involve paying someone's salary, but the costs add up in terms of lost clients and lost business opportunities, lost time in the search process, lower team morale, and potentially, severance.

On the other hand, hiring a great digital marketer can take your business to new heights. Marketing is a crucial part of small business. The right marketer can make your brand stand out by leveraging both creative and technical knowledge to get effective

Report highlighting SCADA insecurities alarmist, says ICS expert

A new report that attempts to quantify the risks to Industrial Control Systems (ICS) contends that more software flaws are being detected in the sensitive systems since the 2010 discovery of Stuxnet, but the report may be based on some faulty assumptions, according to one ICS expert.

any mention of vulnerability in a component should be evaluated against the system in which it resides and blended with a basic risk analysis matrix in order to properly prioritize the actual risk.

Joel Langill, ICS security expert

The report, SCADA Safety In Numbers, (.pdf) was produced by Russian vulnerability management vendor Positive Technologies Security. The analysis is based on data collected from an array of vulnerability databases and exploit packs. It found that more than 40% of SCADA systems connected to the Internet are vulnerable and can be hacked by less savvy cybercriminals.

The study also found that 64 vulnerabilities were discovered and reported in industrial-control system products by the end of 2011. And nearly 100 coding errors were reported already this year. The authors contend that for each of the bugs disclosed over the last two years, they “searched for generally available methods of exploiting the [vulnerabilities] and provided an expert evaluation of the related risks.”

Joel Langill, a recognized expert on ICS security issues, said the methods the authors used to assess risk levels in industrial environments resulted in conclusions that are misleading. Some of the conclusions on overall risk outlined in the report are not as widely applicable as the study's authors are seeking to portray them as being, Langill said, adding that it could be characterized as unnecessarily alarmist in nature.

“The fact that this paper attempts to identify and classify vulnerabilities based on risk level is inappropriate,” said Langill, who is also known throughout the industry by his handle SCADAhacker.

Just because a device in an ICS system is potentially vulnerable and accessible via the Internet does not necessarily mean it poses any risk to the end-user, Langill said. An end-user may have followed recommended practices and placed a device in special “zones” that offer “hidden” security controls to protect against compromise, he said.

A claim in the report that 39% of the ICS systems in North America are vulnerable to compromise is suspect and based on faulty analysis, Langill said. In order for an attacker to capitalize on a specific vulnerability, they would also have to be able to overcome all of the existing layers of security that are in place, Langill said, turning a seemingly simple exploit of a vulnerability with a high CVSS score into a very sophisticated attack that would be difficult to execute and realistically classified with a very low "effective" CVSS score.

“It is important not to confuse a ‘component' vulnerability with a ‘system' vulnerability," Langill said. "It is possible, and not uncommon, for vulnerable components to be installed within an ICS network that is equipped to provide a barrier against various threats. Therefore, the system compensates for these known and unknown vulnerabilities by creating isolation within the ICS architecture."

Langill said many of the vulnerable components listed in the report are from companies that do not represent any significant market share, potentially skewing the results against the actual number of vulnerable systems. He also noted that most ICS architectures contain far more embedded devices than they do Windows-based hosts, yet nearly all disclosed vulnerabilities in the report are designed to specifically target a Windows environment.

One of the reasons that Langill said he works closely with other experts in evaluating the true impact of ICS-related security vulnerabilities is to better understand if many of the published vulnerabilities that the report cites can actually be exploited when implemented in a real-world ICS environment.

“Sure, any one could stick an engineering workstation on a network and download rogue programs or faulty firmware to controllers, but is this representative of a reasonable threat? Of course not,” Langill said. “So any mention of vulnerability in a component should be evaluated against the system in which it resides and blended with a basic risk analysis matrix in order to properly prioritize the actual risk.”

Research still valuable, says expert

Officials at Positive Technologies Security did not return an email request seeking comment. Even in light of the weaknesses identified in the Positive Technologies report, there is still value in the research in regards to drawing more attention to the problem of sensitive ICS systems that are exposed by way of the Internet, said Chris Blask, chair of the Industrial Control System Information Sharing and Analysis Center (ICS-ISAC).

“While Joel is exactly correct as to the consequences of vulnerable devices being harder to define than the act of simply finding vulnerable devices themselves, the research itself does provide value by providing additional evidence for the existence of exposed systems,” Blask said.

Blask points out that the Positive Technologies report was published roughly the same timeframe as the Project Shine (short for Shodan Intelligence Extraction ) work done by Bob Radvanovsky and Jake Brodsky in which roughly half a million ICS devices with Internet connections were enumerated.

“These findings add weight to the supposition that it is diligent at this point to assume that various parties - including those with negative intent - have compiled data sets including large numbers of exposed systems. The likelihood of threat actors using these data sets in combination with either the type of brute-force effort, or with the intelligence Joel indicates, to successfully execute high-impact attacks increases as a function of time,” Blask said.

The Publicly Accessible Control System (PACS) working group established by the ICS-ISAC in association with Energysec and a broad spectrum of private sector organizations is an example of the coordination necessary to address the risks implicit in research such as Project Shine and Positive Technology's paper.

“It is effectively beyond question that a large number of industrial systems are Internet-connected and that many of these bear risks of compromise. All parties involved need to focus on practical reduction of the existing risks that can be implemented within the timeframes available, and on reducing the growth of the overall risk as the connectivity of industrial systems continues to increase,” Blask concluded.

Compassion Impacts Small Business Success

Howard Behar, former President of Starbucks International and author of, “It's Not About the Coffee:

“It's impossible to lead in business â€" or in life â€" unless you genuinely care about people. That's what matters. Period.”

It's not about the coffee. Business leading with caring about it's people not the product. A very smart, sound and profound business model  for any business. How much coffee do you think Starbucks has sold as a result of this philosophy?

Benefits of Running a Small Business

Owning a small business and being the chief everything officer most of the time means having more flexibility to take action quickly and make decisions without a lot of red tape and flagpoles. Small businesses have the ability to react and respond quickly to opportunities for showing compassion in action.

Showing The Power of Kindness and Compassion

Your personal branding is the way to present and market yourself, stand out and get noticed. You are your business and your business is an extension of you. Being an out front leader allows customers and community to get more personal with you and your business via everything that you do in social marketing, blogging, video and community involvement.

Nothing Brands, Bonds and Sells Better Than Compassion

There are amazing examples of how kindness and compassion build trust, credibility and authenticity. These are the magnets that attract repeat business, referrals and new customers.

Check out compassionate businesses and their leaders in action from the Compassionate Action Network. The CAN dedicates itself to:

“Nurturing compassion and compassionate action in our children, ourselves, and our world, and engage in compassionate action locally and globally.”

How Human Brands Thrive

Trendwatching highlighted RAK, random acts of kindness, and how kind, human brands thrive in our connected economy:

“For brands, increasingly open communications both with and between consumers (especially online), means that it's never been easier to surprise and delight audiences by sending gifts, responding to publicly expressed moods or just showing that they care.”

Compassionate businesses have a few simple and powerful things in common:

• They care about and put people first.
• They care about community.
• They care about the greater good.
• They care about serving others.
• Their leaders are out front leaders.

Author, spiritual icon and peace activist, Deepok Chopra, talks about the:

“. . .lack of engagement and compassion in business costing U.S. businesses 358 billion a year.”

“Compassionate careerist“, mom and family blogger Stacey Hawley says:

“Compassionate careerists avoid complaining and criticism. They don't whine or walk away from problems.  They want to be part of the solution; not part of the problem.  They strive for meaning in their work.  They treat others as they want to be treated.  They want their opinions to be heard â€" all the way to the top.”

There is a renewed enthusiasm, priority and need for meaning in life. We want to be happy, make a difference, be a part of the solution and it begins with showing compassion.

Any business that makes compassion an integral part of their business model, will succeed, thrive and build a lasting legacy.

How are you showing compassion in action in your life and business?

10 Tips Using Animated Videos To Deliver A Clear and Entertaining Message

I'm sure you've seen and watched with wrapped attention, one of the many videos that many tech companies use to showcase their product or service.

The cartoon like character illustrates some point, sprinkled with punches of graphics and smooth voice overs.

This video animation is the result of companies such as GoAnimate.

Using their do it yourself service, you don't have to pay for the services of a video editor or worry about video taping your own possibly un-talented self.

You can use your mouse, keyboard and microphone to select characters and develop a compelling story of your product or service or just to get across an important message.

Keep in mind, everything has it's place for you maybe you SHOULD do some “real” videos, like I do at http://www.youtube.com/smallbiztechnology but you now have two video options.

Here's some tips to best use video animation in your business â€" this is insight from me â€" and do not â€" I am NOT a video animation expert:

1. Know your audience
2. Understand what you want to convey
3. Develop an outline
4. Write a script
5. Visualize how the characters, location and props fit in
6. Don't do TOO MUCH (and add clutter)
7. Be simple
8. Use sound bites, to a degree, not very long sentences
9. Look at video animations you like for inspiration (not plagiarism)
10. Have 1 or 2 others look at your video animation and critique it

The Battered Incomes of the Self Employed

Self-employed people have more variable income than those who work for others, economic theory explains. When times are good, their earnings often rise more than the incomes of those receiving a paycheck. But when times are bad, their pay takes a bigger hit.

The 2010 Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances â€" a triennial survey of a random sample of American households conducted for the Fed by a University of Chicago-based survey research group â€" shows the large drop in self-employment income that occurred during the recent economic downturn.

According to analysis conducted by Federal Reserve economists Jesse Bricker, Arthur Kennickell, Kevin Moore, and John Sabelhaus, median income declined nearly 6 percent in real terms between 2007 and 2010 for families headed by a wage or salary worker, but nearly 19 percent for those headed by a self-employed person.

Average income was little better. For households headed by a wage employed person, mean income in 2010 was 97 percent of what it was in 2007, when measured in inflation-adjusted terms. But for households with a self-employed head, it was only 74 percent of its level three years earlier.

Median Household Income in Thousands of 2010 Dollars

Source: Created from data from the Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances

The figure above shows the median income for the two types of households in the last four FRSCFs. As you can clearly see, the income of households with a self-employed head contracted severely between 2007 and 2010 and more than erased the gains made between 2004 and 2007. Moreover, the gap in median income between self-employed households and households employed by others shrank considerably between 2007 and 2010.

The economics here are straightforward. It's not easy for companies to cut salaries. Not only are the size of paychecks sometimes governed by contracts, but companies don't like risking the hit to worker performance that comes when people see their wages contract.

The self-employed, however, take their compensation in the form of profits â€" the difference between their revenues and their costs. If their revenues shrink and they can't cut costs by an equivalent amount, their incomes fall.

One effect of the Great Recession is a decline in the fraction of income that American households receive from running their own businesses. As the Fed economists who analyzed the 2010 FRSCF explain, the fraction of household income that comes from ownership of businesses and farms and self-employment dropped to 12.2 percent in 2010 from 13.6 percent in 2007.

While the fraction coming from interest and dividends remained constant, the share coming from wages and salaries, social security, pension, other retirement income and other transfer of income increased.

Microsoft to patch IE9 tomorrow and releases six bulletins

Microsoft has announced that it is to release six bulletins tomorrow on its penultimate Patch Tuesday of 2012.

Covering 19 vulnerabilities, four of the patches are rated as critical and will address 13 vulnerabilities in Microsoft Windows, Internet Explorer and the .NET Framework. One bulletin will be rated as important and will address four vulnerabilities in Microsoft Office, while one moderate update will address two issues in Microsoft Windows.

Andrew Storms, director of security operations for nCircle, said: “In spite of the relatively low number of bulletins this month and in keeping with the trend for this year, November's patch includes 19 CVEs.

“As usual, the patch at the top of the ‘suspect' list this month is for Internet Explorer. Unfortunately for Microsoft and their customers, it affects IE9. Of course, we knew that IE9 would have some bugs, but it's got to be demoralising for Microsoft to have to patch their newer, more secure browser again so quickly.”

Ziv Mador, director of security research at Trustwave SpiderLabs, said: “The good news is that there are only six bulletins this month; the bad news is that four of those are rated as critical and five of them result in Remote Code Execution (RCE).

“The RCEs all seem to be at the operating system level affecting everything from XP SP3 up to and including Server 2008 R2. The one bulletin with RCE that is only labelled important and not critical is part of MS Office 2003, 2007 and 2010, including 2008 and 2011 for Mac. The sixth bulletin, rated as moderate, results in information disclosure and impacts Vista SP2, Windows 7 32- and 64-bit, as well as multiple flavours of Server 2008.”

Sophos launches UTM appliance

Sophos has announced the launch of a unified threat management (UTM) appliance and software package exclusively for small businesses.

Sophos UTM 100 Basic Guard offers a combination of network, email, web and wireless protection for small businesses. According to the company, it includes many of the capabilities typically reserved for enterprise solutions, such as web application control, network firewall and intrusion prevention, and remote access and VPN.

Chris Kraft, vice president of product management at Sophos, said: “Today's small businesses want a reliable set of core capabilities with full flexibility to expand features as their needs and budgets grow. Complete security shouldn't be out of reach for small businesses.

“We believe they shouldn't have to compromise between security and budgets, which is why we developed the UTM 100 with enterprise features and the ability to upgrade.”

Chevron confirms that it was hit by Stuxnet in 2010

Energy giant Chevron has become the first US company to confirm a network hit by the Stuxnet virus.

According to CIO Journal, Mark Koelmel, general manager of the earth sciences department at Chevron, said that the incident occurred in 2010 when the malware was discovered.

“I don't think the US government even realised how far it spread,” Koelmel said.

Amid claims that Stuxnet had been developed by the US and Israeli governments, it is believed that Chevron's encounter with the worm was accidental â€" a case of the sophisticated malware running loose beyond its intended targets.

A Chevron spokeswoman told CIO Journal that the company wasn't negatively impacted by the virus.

Aviv Raff, CTO of Seculert, which specialises in cloud-based threat detection, told SC Magazine US that it is likely that other US companies have been impacted by Stuxnet and said he was not surprised that they had not come forward.

“I do think there are other companies that are keeping quiet and this is normal behaviour,” Raff said. He added that a company the size of Chevron would be a ‘reasonable' mistake given its operations, which fit the category of the malware's destructive aims.

Youngest Funded Entrepreneur Raises $1 Million by Age 16

If you think your business startup can never get off the ground or that you need years of experience and a lifetime of connections to get others to pay attention to you, the story of 16-year-old Nick D'Alosio will change your mind. The London-based teenager has received funding from the likes of Zynga founder Marc Pincus, actor Ashton Kutcher, and artist and Beatle widow Yoko Ono totaling $1 million in startup capital so far. But you don't need to get endorsements from celebrities to launch your next great business. Our roundup looks at D'Alosio's success and then gives tips on how other entrepreneurs can find it too.

Getting the Ball Rolling

Boy wonder. To be accurate, D'Alosio was even younger, just 15, when he received his first $300,000 from Horizons Ventures, also an investor in companies like Facebook and Spotify. D'Alosio got these investments, of course, not just because of connections but because these investors and others were interested in an application he had created called Trimit and later Summly that summarizes online news on mobile devices. The best takeaway for any investor: Create a product or service in demand first. Yahoo! Small Business Advisor

Book smarts. Some entrepreneurs take plenty of training courses and read lots of books to learn how to start and run their business better…and to learn how to be a better entrepreneur. While education is important, it may be unwise to rely on those books and courses for everything you need to know to get a business started, warns online entrepreneur Steve Chou. Brave words for a guy who sells his own training course for starting an online business, but check out more of what Steve has to say.   My Wife Quit Her Job

The curiosity key. The real key to entrepreneurial success maybe something completely different than the level of knowledge you possess, blogs businesswoman and writer Catarina Alexon. In this post, she shares thoughts from Steve Blank, serial entrepreneur and Stanford consulting associate professor, about the characteristic that is most important to entrepreneurs. Catarina's World

Watching for Obstacles Ahead

Bad vibes. Conversely, there are some things that can clearly hamper your startup success, and your success as an entrepreneur for that matter. Pay close attention to this simple list of “5 Reasons Why You Will Never Startup.” Some of these items may take you by surprise, since they are often the opposite of the qualities we normally associate with success. If you find some of these in your own startup preparations, don't stress. Use this list as a road map for change. Rahul Varshneya

Startup chasm. No, you won't find this landmark on any map, but you will discover it in any graph reflecting the growth curve of a startup. As startup adviser Martin Zwilling explains, these chasms are waiting for entrepreneurs in every area of their company's growth, including product development, marketing, sales, and customer support. Here are some thoughts on crossing the chasms that appear with every new startup challenge. Startup Professionals Musings

Keeping Track of Costs

Low cost launch. Of course, you don't need Nick D'Alosio's $1 million in investment capital to start a profitable business. Heck, even Nick didn't have that when he started out. In this post, Deborah R. Humphrey gives us some thoughts on keeping costs low when launching a business. It's a must read for entrepreneurs who want to get started but don't have much money to spend. Expert Advice

Lean and mean. Any business can operate on a tight budget and reign in costs, even if it's got plenty of capital to start with. But possibly the best time to be frugal is during the startup phase when you remain uncertain about the demand for your products and services and thus unsure of the revenue you can ultimately count on for your operations. Here are six tips that should help you keep costs under control, giving you more maneuverability as your business grows. SBA.gov